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Comment by arthur_sav | Hacker News Reader

Nothing any company can do about that. Spying programs and laws will only worsen unless people really voice their concerns and elect the right people.

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I think general public doesn't have anything against being spied. They are already convinced that it is for their own good and for catching the bad guys. They are sure they have nothing to fear.

> Spying programs and laws will only worsen unless people really voice their concerns and elect the right people.

I very much suspect that who is elected has nearly zero effect on spying programs.

I'm not sure which was intended, but I think this is much more accurate as a cynical comment on human nature than some comment on "shadow government/deep state" type stuff.

As defines so much of society and what people claim is "human nature", there is no need for shadow governments or deep states when you have power structures and incentives. Those scale, conspiracies don't.

This is definitely not true. Dianne Feinstein for instance has been instrumental in almost all of these efforts. As a senator from California, she could be replaced with someone nearly politically identical that didn't support government surveillance.

What they're saying is that those who get elected are forced to support government surveillance.

who you are before you get elected and after are not the same. never forget that.

Remember, the intelligence community has six ways from Sunday to get back at you.

- Senator Chuck Schumer

For lots of reasons. There are 100 Epsteins you dont know the name of still at large, and their main purpose is blackmail of top politicians and businessmen on behalf of whatever intel agency or mafia runs them. Trumps mentor Roy Cohn was one of these.

And blackmail is only one tool in the toolbelt. Bribery comes long before that. Anybody with too much integrity is quickly removed from office or worse.

Ive tried to explain to some progressives why AOC and the squad have turned their backs on them with this, but for many their schoolhouse rock propagandized brains refuse to admit its as bad as it is.

It only gets worse the more we aquiesce to increases in censorship and surveillance (which I like to remind people is in the hands of the executive branch, further eroding the checks and balances system).

From what I've read, Senator Ron Wyden is a relatively vocal opponent of surveillance. Hopefully he's not an outlier forever.

It's pretty crazy that people still think elections do anything and aren't just a sham while the rulers plug in the choices from above.

Don't let people tell you not to vote, because it won't make a difference. Not voting is a sure way not to have a voice.

The thing is, your voice can also add to the din of noise that drowns out the signal. Not every vote adds signal.

Here the problem is when you go down the ballot and reach the judges, schoolboard, and other offices where most people have no idea who the candidates are and many just vote randomly.

In Arizona there was a campaign that unseated an incumbent schoolboard member by a rival candidate whose last name, if some letters were transposed, was a famous local figure. The funny last name guy won.

So go ahead and vote, but please leave blank or skip over any of the candidates that you haven't researched. Don't vote randomly - some people are trying to have a real election.

I'm pretty sure many voters are voting based on colors. They researched which team they like the most and now they vote for that team each time. And likely true for more than just the USA.

Indeed, as closest coalition is most likely to result in closest policies desired.

It leads to abominations of platform planks, but in our race to the bottom as least you get close to what you think you want.

I advocate joining a revolutionary political party instead. If you have a big enough constituency that can cause problems, they will eventually have to acquiesce to demands as opposed to simply controlling the choices or ignoring the results of a vote (which I would point out happens routinely, even in presidential elections such as the 2000 election theft or the attempted theft and coup of 2020).

If they have to go to the trouble of such an elaborate sham I support participating so they have to keep doing it successfully

Except Apple is making a direct attempt at solving the issue as it relates to CSAM (and easily expanded to other data) and facing a huge backlash. I wonder if there’s no solution because we’re (myself included) are just stubbornly unwilling to consider any solution that isn’t absolute privacy. I’m not willing to sacrifice my privacy to a nosy government, but willing to consider solutions that might allow the government to pursue its goals. Apple seems to think it’s possible that we can have the best of both worlds, even if they clearly haven’t figured it out just yet.

Has Apple announced that they're making iCloud end-to-end encrypted? It seems like people see the on-device scanning as a road to an "obvious" next step, but I'm not sure that Apple has announced that that's the next step. They might scan your device locally, and mine everything in the cloud for advertising purposes. They haven't said anything to the contrary, and their current terms of service allows it.

I could be missing something, but I did a quick search and all I see is news about them scrapping their once-encrypted backups at the request of the FBI.

Apple is not a solution, it's a stop gap. They will still want a copy of the messages after it, and all your other data.

And the reason for the huge backlack, is that this stop gap will actually make it easier for them to request more afterwards, because the infrastructure, the proof of concept, will already be there and running. And it will cross to other providers: "see Apple does it, so clearly it's Signal that's being protective of criminals, we should impose them to do the same thing Apple did with no issue".

Agreed. The general sentiment I perceived from HN at the time was that almost nobody was willing to accept Apple's CSAM scanning, even though CSAM had been confronted as an issue before the internet was widely available. I perceived a lot less room for opinions in favor of sacrificing a limited amount of privacy for greater public good, or similar. After the media finished its reporting on the subject, it seemed like there wasn't much more discussion about it, and Apple now seems poised to go forward with releasing its implementation of the scanning anyway at some unknown future date.

The arguments about slippery slopes and potential surveillance weren't as interesting to me as the opposing argument: that a very high level of privacy (not even an absolute level) carries consequences for a specific segment of society by the intrinsic nature of what is kept private, and in the name of protecting that segment of society, the tradeoff is not worth it.

There is also the idea that data on a hard drive can be as damaging to human livelihood as physical contraband, to the point that the vast majority of the world's legal systems, not just those of the U.S., have decided that the data should not exist under any circumstances. CSAM is one of the few classes of digital data that compels the creation of scanning systems for such data on a scale that isn't driven by political ideology, propaganda or similar. It's difficult to imagine how Apple would be obliged and driven enough to implement such a system out in the open and in the name of the public good if the publicly announced reasoning was to scan any other class of data (assuming that Apple can be trusted, at least).

It is driven by a moral panic - that the panic in question is about a very real issue doesn't change its underlying nature. So whatever measures are put in place this time, they'll be normalized and deployed when the next one happens.

Who is this government that is not you and I and why should we cede any kind of goal to them in that case?

I simply disagree with the notion that I should be controlled and monitored by a third party just because someone else might do something evil.

We should always remember that power corrupts and definitions of evil change almost on a whim.

This is like having a camera in your house, that does image recognition, and once it thinks it saw something illegal, sends the "something is happening at XY street" to the police. Does it help the government solve crimes? Sure. Is it creepy and intrusive, and not something anyone sane would accept? Yes.

I don't know why we accept the same things when we're talking about digital privacy.

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