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Comment by garbagetime | Hacker News Reader

Here's an important question: would it be a good thing or a bad thing if it was very difficult to make plans involving violence on the internet?

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How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with?

How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?

> How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with?

Isn't it already the case that it is simple to coordinate violent acts against people one doesn't agree with?

>How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?

Why wouldn't we be able to?

> How would any government exist if it were simple to coordinate violent acts against people you don't agree with? How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?

exactly the same point that China was making when the US politicians were supporting the Hong Kong protestors.

and similar point Fidel Castro was making when he let the Cubans escape into Florida.

Can you make it difficult to make an illegitimate, illegal or violent plan on the internet while also not suppressing legitimate activism, or protests or even normal plans?

Remember that the people in charge of deciding what is and is not legitimate may have their own agenda and interests that will not always align with yours, and will change over time, even capriciously

Except everything is a trade off and the cost of saying it’s a “good thing” is sacrificing liberty for security. PATRIOT Act 2.0

Depends on the price.

We could prevent humans from using communications technology to plan violence by banning all such technology. That would be an unacceptable price imho.

There is _always_ collateral damage. You can’t ban all the bad content and only the bad content. There’s a wide range of mitigation strategies. If we discussed specifics it might possible to establish some first principles.

If end-to-end encryption were banned and the US government had full access to all private communication they might be able to stop some violence. On the other hand many governments, the US included, would likely use that power to commit violence. I would not support this particular strategy.

> Here's an important question: would it be a good thing or a bad thing if it was very difficult to make plans involving violence on the internet?

These sort of simplistic quips reveal that either: not much thought has gone into what your saying, or what your saying is a propagandizing effort to conceal ulterior motives.

Does it elude you that this heightened concern in quashing all discussions of violence seems to be rather targeted at a certain segment of the population? Are they the only ones that "plan violence"? Or the only ones where violence originates from?

If your goal is saying nobody "should be able to make plans involving violence," then you're saying nobody should be able to make plans of any sort without being surveiled, so that a determination can be made as to whether those plans involve violence. Who's doing the determining? What if the violence is ostensibly to an end the determiner believes is righteous?

The issues at hand are not so simple as your comment suggests, and it creates a feeling that you're trying to pull one over on people.

There are issues here that needs addressing, the events at the capitol yes, but an equally if not more important issue of how do we map old notions of private property and public property/infrastructure onto socio-techno society where these notions are converging? How do we bring the rights and norms of a healthy, functional, non-repressive society from the pre-internet world to the post internet world?

Violence pre-internet did not elicit calls of "ban all telephones," or "ban them from the telephone network," or "confiscate their printer."

We've barely begun to form the language to talk about these things, and to take in the scope and complexity of the issues arising from the way society and technology have evolved. Glib comments of "violence is bad," make it harder to discuss in a productive way.

Violence is bad. The violence at the capitol was bad. And the violence that rocked American cities all summer was bad. Great concern about quashing all discussion of violence was curiously absent this past summer? Well, discussions of it were jeered, quashed and censored unless you were praising it.

Is that a conversation you'd like to have?

I made my comment in good faith. I wasn't "trying to say" anything in favour of censorship, or against censorship. According to the guidelines of this site you're meant to assume good faith (not that I really care that much).

My personal view happens to be that it is a good thing if people can plan violence on the internet. The alternative is to move further in the direction of state monopolisation of violence, which I view to be a move further away from democracy (and I view democracy to be a disarable thing).

Good thing, of course. The internet has the power to amplify a small message into a massive one and can trivially be used for evil. There is an argument that forcing people to use private chats prevents this stuff from getting out in the open, but come on, the NSA has a back door in everything. There is more harm done letting those messages out into the public space where there is a chance of radicalizing more people, or at the very least making that sort of abhorrent speech more normalized.

Would it be a good thing or a bad thing if pedophiles couldn't use encrypted messengers to exchange child pornography on the internet?

As always the means need to be weighed against the end.

There are plenty of reasons to use encryption that have nothing to do with kiddie porn. What are the good reasons to allow calls for violence? Or to keep carrying content which supports it? What is YouTube, or society, losing by blocking it?

Of course if you can be pinpoint, objectively accurate with your censorship of "calls for violence" then that's great (not being sarcastic). But the world doesn't really work that way.

There is always a line between black and white that some human has to look at and decide "yeah this is ban-worthy" or not. Sometimes it's obvious - sometimes it's not so much.

One example: remember that "documentary" "Loose Change" that came out after 9/11 and questioned if it was an inside job? I watched it out of curiosity at the time. It was later debunked - but if it had been just immediately removed from every site and nearly impossible to watch I think that could have had a reverse effect. Instead I was able to evaluate the details (or "misinformation", in some cases) from both sides.

So, I believe the previous poster is implying there are always going to be subjective, biased, and sometimes morally questionable issues that arise when censoring information across multiple major platforms - similar to the issue of allowing encryption vs banning it. If you could ban encryption only for child pornography distribution purposes then yes that would be great, but unfortunately that comes at a cost (and it's not like people/politicians haven't tried to do just that).

I don't think we have stepped into full great firewall of China level censorship or anything, but this is a step in that direction - for better or for worse.

The problem is of course, who gets to decide what a call for violence is? I have seen people use "Come on down, it will be wild" as an example of a call for violence. On the other hand, you have people on this site arguing that "Defund the Police" does not infact mean remove all funding. Even when there is a NY Times published opinion with the title "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police" ant eh second to last paragraph starts with "People like me who want to abolish prisons and police"

For a long time "Learn to code" was a statement made by journalist to the working class about how they need to better themselves and adapt to the changing work requirements. Now it is considered harassment because it was being thrown back at the same journalists when they started losing their jobs.

Do you think that the people pushing for these laws and restrictions are doing so because they want to help your side or because they want power? And once they get the power they seek, do you think they will allow for the change you wish to enact to come to fruition, especially if it runs the risk of diminishing their power?

Hmm, well, is it possible that a corrupt fascist could ever take control of our government? If yes, it seems like it would be prudent to make sure we had avenues of free speech protected even from monopolies or duopolies that may provide platforms.

So then a government telling companies how to moderate their platforms would stifle free speech?

I don't think companies would save us from a fascist government; if the government falls, everything falls. So, in the meantime, trust the government more than companies (which gives you a higher stake in seeing it and Constitutional protections don't fall) by tax-funding public platforms/news delivery networks that have to abide by the First Amendment. That seems like the only way to cut this knot.

Besides federated dark web anarchy, which is a nice thing to try in parallel.

Can you picture Congress funding any sort of public platform that would be used for porn and spam, and extreme politics of all kinds? That seems very unlikely to ever happen.

>> The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997.[18][19][20][21][22][23] The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson[16] and then called The Onion Routing project (which later simply became "Tor", as an acronym for the former name), launched on 20 September 2002.[1][24] The first public release occurred a year later.[25] In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[16] In 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.[26] The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.[27][28][29][30][31] Prior to 2014, the majority of funding sources came from the U.S. government.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)

In the same way designating certain market actors (whether they are private or not) as utilities would stifle their free speech. The best examples would be the telcos, water, electricity and post offices. Regardless of criminal past or ideological stance, these entities must serve all members of society, with the only caveat being on the condition of nominal payment.

This is the turning point where as a society, we need to decide where the new line for utilities needs to be, and what parts of the internet and financial systems are fundamental to maintaining the fabric of society.

What ever we decide at this crossroads, may end up haunting us for a very long time.

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