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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Some HN users are stuck in an interesting privacy paradox. Most of the time when a company or government tries to undermine privacy or encryption they jump at the throat and point out the need for both.

However, it seems when we actually accomplish those goals and create systems that are truly anonymous, private and/or encrypted they basically say it's only for criminals and child abuse.

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There is a feature in English to call the same thing different words depending on one's moral judgement towards them. Shooting a person dead is a "kill" if a homeowner has defended himself from a burglar, but a "murder" if the burglar has fired first. My language for comparison only uses a single word, regardless of circumstances.

That's where the paradox has to be coming from. When they say "end censorship" they mean "prevent filtering that we don't want to happen" (like whistleblowing). But at the same time they absolutely totally want NOT to prevent filtering they want to happen (like drugs, child porn, terrorism, etc). It's only censorship if they don't want it, if they want it that's not censorship that's a different word.

It's like saying it's a candy if it's intended to be eaten, but a toy if it's intended to be had, and then expecting to eat the candy and have the toy.

I think when most people talk about "ending censorship" they are talking very specifically about speech. Any link between the idea of speech and the sharing of child abuse material or drug marketplaces is extremely tenuous. Most non-anarchists agree that there are reasonable limits that must be placed on behaviors and enforced by governments. Trying to claim "not letting me buy drugs online is censorship" feels like little more than mental gymnastics.

How do you allow government to enforce one thing (block illegal drug sales) while simultaneously preventing it from enforcing another (censorship)?

> at the same time they absolutely totally want NOT to prevent filtering they want to happen

I'm sure there's a lot of this about, but the situation with freenet is more complex than that. When you run a freenet node, you are storing data on behalf of others, and you don't have access to that data so you don't know what it is.

It's one thing believing that speech should be free, but that's a different thing to believing that individuals should be forced into storing and sharing speech they disagree with.

It's that extra level of potential complicity in speech you find objectionable that makes freenet more problematic, and that makes accusations of hypocrisy a little unfair.

There's another side here. Some don't like companies and governments chipping away at privacy. At the same time, they don't trust Shiny New Privacy Startup 2021 to not expose them to illegal material as a result of being overrun by bad actors. I would personally rather an established organization to respect my privacy, rather than move to a new platform that does not have the resources to protect me from liability.

Freenet has been in development for 21 years.

Time really is irrelevant if you lack the resources to deal with issues quickly and effectively.

Like most things in the world there needs to be a middle ground/balance between allowing the government and corps to invade your privacy and allowing individuals to share child porn/etc with one another. I do not believe it is either or.

The balance has been that the cops can take you into custody when there is suspicion against you, but if you’re not suspected of a heinous crime, they are not allowed to read your diary.

In the past decade that has been shifting more and more towards “the cops can break open every device you have just in case you may someday do something illegal”.

But if they can install physical surveillance, all security is already moot. That is the balance that works.

But that is no longer enough. They want to have cheaper surveillance of everyone instead. Surveillance that is cheap enough to be used on everyone.

And they promise they will totally not abuse that. Or send your address to violent extremist groups that are pissed at you because you exposed their activities. As happened to more than one journalist in Germany who investigated Nazis.

Are you sure those are the same people?

One problem is that the privacy invading and censorous systems work 99% of the time ... sucking away most of the market, which is boring usage, and leave the alternatives concentrated in "other stuff", much of which is undesirable.

This is a good point. Censorship-resistance sounds good in theory, but when you actually think about it there is certain stuff that everybody would agree needs to be censored.

A lot of people? Sure.

Everybody? Not really, some people are really vocal about how "data wants to be free".

If everyone agrees that it needs to be censored, then who is posting it?

When you actually think of it, it's impossible to design systems that are capable of such "good" censorship without also being open to all the other kind. Experience has also shown that, when such capacity exists, its use expands over time. And some of us have decided that the long-term social damage from that far exceeds the damage from any information that could be effectively censored.

There is no privacy paradox. HN types aren't actually opposed to censorship and surveillance. They just think they should be the ones doing it.

It's a good thing that the legacy tech scene that the loud, high-karma moral busybodies on this site represent is becoming hated, bypassed, and ultimately irrelevant.

Can you give some examples of individual HN users who've said both things?

That’s what happens when a problem isn’t black and white.

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