Hacker News Reader

> "Gentlemen do not read each others' mail."

Lovely thought, but there are no gentlemen in positions to stop it. Stimson's quote is notable because he may be the only person in history who was.

> Privacy laws are good for society

They are good for the internal wellbeing of healthy, open societies. I fear those qualifications are dooming.

As the article you quote says right afterwards, "Stimson's ethical reservations about cryptanalysis focused on the targeting of diplomats from America's close allies, not on spying in general."

"Gentlemen do not read each others' mail" is essentially about respect to your in-group peers. That notion did not and does not apply to mass surveillance - gentlemen of the time would not consider the "common rabble" as gentlemen. Your point about mutual respect is quite touching; perhaps it should be phrased as "some people will, in fact, read others mail" (without each others') because the key point is a lack of mutuality, an asymmetric expectation of unequal involvement in decisions - it's less about people reading each others' mail but more about one tribe choosing to read the other tribe's mail for Proper Reasons, decided and approved by the tribe who's doing the reading.

The problem with privacy laws is that it's too hard to detect violations. It took Snowden to reveal what he did because privacy violations can themselves be kept secret.

If a black box AI learns that you got a raise and uses that to suggest to every landlord that they raise your rent, you don't know why that's happening. Neither do the landlords. All they know is that the black box told them to and when they listen to the black box they make more money at your expense.

The only way it works is for the information to be unavailable to the perpetrators of the surveillance. It has to be end to end encrypted and not stored unencrypted on any third party servers. Encryption works. And then you have a guarantee from the math instead of a promise from a liar that you have no way to verify.

Which isn't to say that laws are irrelevant. But the laws we need are the ones that promote rather than impair the technological measures that protect against surveillance.

What about people who disagree about what is "right"?

I don't want somebody to read my mail without my permission, but I do want the ability to give my mail to a service that reads it and digitizes it for me. If the USPS did this for me automatically, that would be cool too. If I am doing something very sensitive, I'll use encryption.

People will "disagree" and, IMO, that is why we have laws. To resolve the "moral ambiguity" that some folks have. A system of laws is not a perfect, mind you, but, IMO, its better than nothing. When there are debates on HN about tax avoidance/minimisation, people often claim the problem is with the legislature. Any suggestion of ethics is insufficient; they want laws before they will agree there is any reason for tax avoiders to change their behaviour. In the absence of "moral clarity", laws are helpful.

If one does not want persons other than the recipient(s) to read their mail without permission, is it a good idea to let a third party hold your mail for you such that it can be obtained through legal process by a fourth party without your knowledge. "Tech" companies providing "email storage" would never tell you not to use their "service" as it is against their interest.

I'm totally fine with a third party holding my mail. I allow it all the time with USPS. :)

I'd like to be able to give my mail to people in exchange for free services. What I'd like are more standard data usage agreements that control what kinds of metadata can be sold or given to third parties. If such agreements were common, standard, and enforceable, I'd happily enter into them all the time.

AFAIK, it neiher was nor is common to serve the USPS with subpoenas or warrants in order to read someone's snail mail. In fact, I am not even sure there is an analogy with snail mail. How many people expected their mail to be read before the internet. Whereas it is well-known that third parties holding email routinely receive such requests.

We have no control over what "tech" companies do with the data they collect. As you point out, this is not part of any enforceable agreement. "Tech" companies make statements in marketing and "privacy policies", which they are free to violate unbeknownst to their users, but they generally do not enter into agreements that limit what they can do. It should not matter that the price is "free" because in the agreements they provide ("ToS") you are almost always promising to do (or not do) something.

The whole arrangement, the foundation on which the "tech industry" rests, is incredibly one-sided and I am not sure how much longer we can continue down this path with a straight face. IMO, we are living in a "reality distortion field" as Jobs would call it. However there are still some intelligent people around who (let's hope) are not on the take. Check out Lina Khan and Tim Wu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu