I understand the desire of people in gov agencies to have more access to backdoors than they currently have, but think for a moment the risks that such powers pose to the public when the government itself turns authoritarian.
Unthinkable in our current climate, maybe. To the left and right of you -- at the NSA or FBI -- everyone is a non-partisan patriot who wants a color blind utopia of freedom and democracy.
I would argue two points: (1) That an apparratus has already been built that is beyond the wildest dreams of prior authoritarian states. (2) Democracies are historically rare and notoriously short lived. They do not last.
With points (1) & (2), we can conclude thus that the powers of such government agencies WILL one day be used by an authoritarian regime. It is a question of when, not if. Let us not build the authoritarian tools so as to not tempt a future would-be tyrant.
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance...
I am affected by the damage caused in the present reality, not by hypothetical damage in an highly unlikely reality, as such, I base my political opinion on facts that happen in the present, factual reality.
In the United States presently, I am concerned about the health of democracy itself. I assume authoritarian forces from abroad (RU / NK / CN / Iran / others) are abusing our open social media networks to radicalize the public. The infection here is to a point where a very small minority of people even understand there is an infection -- most people don't look at problems from this sort of meta perspective, and they instead hail from either side of the divide, and are begging for a one-party takeover of the system.
I do not see the 1337 folks doing much to fix this. Going to hack some routers, spoof some DNS, send people firmware viruses, break their servers, collect information? That doesn't fix it. Authoritarian attacks on the American mind are mostly succeeding and this is blatantly evidenced by the radicalism that is becoming so popular in our politics.
If it can happen here, it can happen in France. I'm wondering if the only remedy is a government firewall of social media / comment sections / etc to keep conversations limited to real citizens, rather than foreign information warriors.
But hey, what do I know?
It is happening here in France, the woke totalitarism has penetrated our universities, we're removing statues too, and soon will also be burning books just like on the other side of the Atlantic ... Unless next elections put a stop to that.
Our 1337 have been, on the whole, too arrogant to acknowledge that the status quo of how they operate to preserve democracy has failed in that it is not enough and Democracy is currently receding and morale is at an all-time low.
If the civilization we were born to love and defend is to survive, then it must adapt to the current threats and quickly. Our adversaries are back and more powerful than they ever were. It is time we end the drunken holiday of the 1990s and bring back the creativity of McCarthyism and such.
The current threat here is a rise of criminality, having more evidence would secure more people, this bill was actually a try to "adapt to the current threats".
But, I wouldn't construct my answer about "one thing specifically", instead, on a whole context of things, such as: evolution, experience, education...
It's a vague but extremely interesting question, I'm sorry I'm too tired to disgress as much as I'd love to but I suppose my answer would boil down to "we've made a long road since McCarthyism, we've learned to appreciate confronting ideas", it would be constructed about exactly why it's important to study history, keep a memory, and keep debating so that every single argument can be studied and refutated by anyone.
Again, I'm not fearing hypothetical realities that look like scifi, but instead, I'm trying to solve problems we actually have right here in our shared present reality, such as criminality. It's fine if you don't want to help me, that doesn't make you a criminal, but it would be great if someone like you with your talent would like to help.
I meant to say we should be creative in dealing with the ways in which totalitarian systems infiltrate our society and weaponize our public.
Currently, we do not seemingly have a strong defense against what is happening.
I know a bit about what our side does, and I also know what their side does and how they do it.
1337 folks are not enough and they only know half of what is going on.
After all, why wouldn't it be the case here: making our own states weaker because "we the public will not negociate our privacy!" ? Is the public in question, strongly expressing their opinion here, really going to benefit from having a weaker state ? Is there no limit about how weak we want our state ? At what point does it starts benefiting forces which are hostile to our civilisation ? Has it even started already ? I think I figured your answer to that last one!
What makes our state weaker is not this public, it's whatever forces weaponizing this public against our states, and indeed I'm aware about them, but the public is in the middle, we must win with arguments, by talking about reality, I beleive that's how we can wake up and face reality and actually debate solutions instead of hiding behind distopian scifi scenarios like we are doing here.
Vive la France! Vive la liberté!
Long live Canada! Or Quebec whatever side you're on xD
> ... it is prohibited to provide a device or service that hinders the following: ... eavesdropping and recording of non-public communications.e2e encryption with a gov decryption key is not e2e.
Why not push this energy into making your government agencies more efficient with what resources they have? The UK has tons of CC TVs in public -- still seems to have a high issue with shoplifting, pickpocketing, and other crime in public places.
Doesn't it alarm you to keep giving an inefficient potentially malicious actor more tools it can abuse?
When a 15 years old dealer does not take it down on his own:
https://www.letelegramme.fr/bretagne/a-vannes-le-dealer-de-1...
Then it's the mafia taking them all down:
https://www.leparisien.fr/seine-et-marne-77/chelles-77500/ch...
But it's actually pretty common:
https://twitter.com/alliancepolice/status/145008668020403814...
https://www.lyonmag.com/article/118297/bron-ils-scient-le-ma...
https://www.francebleu.fr/infos/faits-divers-justice/dijon-i...
But that's fine because they are "defending our privacy" ?
Or, do you want to try to make another suggestion ?
Meanwhile, criminality is thriving and we are powerless against it. Maybe we should try planting more trees and developing more socio cultural activities ?
Anyway, shouldn't you be against CCTVs because "if the state can see them streams then it means a hacker can see them too" ? I mean, I think that's the whole point being made here against this bill.
But a state that can't defend the majority because of an open letter signed by a hundred crypto anarchists seems pretty bad to have indeed!
Despite that * They often don't do what the majority wants or is best for them.
* In most european states the government doesn't actually have >50% of the votes.
* There are things that are moral that the majority wants to be illegal (such as homosexual relationships until a few years ago).
* The retraction of this requirement actually serves the interests of the majority.
"The majority" doesn't want exactly the same things, they agreed on some thing or two that was prioritary and deserved the vote.
> * In most european states the government doesn't actually have >50% of the votes.
Really? How is that?
> There are things that are moral that the majority wants to be illegal (such as homosexual relationships until a few years ago).
That is simply not true, the majority just wants that puberty blockers don't be provided to children.
Didn't understand your last point sorry (non native)
I agree, so I presume that you retract the following?: "A democratic state is elected by the majority, as such, the state should share the same definition as the majority."
"Really? How is that?"
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electoral_systems_by...
Often only a relative majority (higher than any other party but can still be <50%) is needed.
"That is simply not true, the majority just wants that puberty blockers don't be provided to children."
Are you claiming that 100 years ago (and even now in some countries) there wasn't/isn't a majority of people that desires this or other immoral things?
"Didn't understand your last point sorry (non native)"
No worries. I am saying that this law being removed benefits the majority as their communications will be safer.
Relative majority is still majority, >50% of casted votes gets you elected.
50 years ago, the left was all over the place advocating for pedophilia, and here they are today, advocating for privacy of pedophiles and other criminals because they are scared to compromise their own.
My communications will be safer but my streets won't, and I don't only live online.
This is trivially falsifiable. Weed is still a federal felony, despite 60% support for recreational & medical use, and another 31% support for medical alone[0]. In fact opposition for legalization is now a trivial 8% of the population, which is basically nobody. There isn't even a party with majority support for keeping weed illegal anymore.
If democratically elected states were guaranteed to eventually share the same definition as the majority, weed would have been legalized years ago for medical use. And yet, here we are.
0 - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/16/americans-o...
Should we allow the imprisonment of these people merely because the laws say so?
One of the hot topics currently is Anti-money laundering laws, AML. This is why large transactions are reported to government agencies, why you need proof of identity to do banking, etc.
The flip side is that this makes it hard for refugees to get bank accounts. It means large donations to activists are recorded by the government. It means the government knows in great detail how you spend your money and that data is shared widely.
Yet money laundering still persists. It is still a major problem. We have paid a great price and the problem is no better for it.
Should we continue giving up more? Should we surrender even more to try and stop it?
What if money laundering can't be solved? Money laundering has existed from ancient cultures to now. It has never been crushed. Some crimes are intractable - we can reduce but never prevent them.
We can't go whole hog on security. Nobody can make you safe. Danger is an innate part of life that can only be partially controlled.
> We can't go whole hog on security. Nobody can make you safe. Danger is an innate part of life that can only be partially controlled.
We can improve our security, the state has to make us safer, it is possible because danger can be partially controlled, which is exactly what you say.
You also that laundering has never been crushed, and can only be reduced. I also agree with that, and because we can reduce it: it is our moral duty to do what we can to reduce it, giving up "because we can't crush it" is not an option for a person of honor.
If this was just a quick trick to get me to tell my opinion about refugees in general, let me cut it short: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640944 And let me add to that: we can't keep on taking 400k a year in our little 67m inhabitants country, we already have enough troubble with those we have here (please don't ask me for solid evidence, or if you do, please do so in a dedicated comment)
Anyway, very interesting comment indeed, I'll gladly discuss off-topic as I already have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29640299
Of course, I could just burry it by calling it a syllogism, "cheese has holes, holes are air and not cheese, as such, the more cheese you have the less cheese you have", but as you have figured, I'd rather face the game and risk myself than hide, in the worst case I will have learned something which is positive for my own development, more than whatever shame it can bring on me: it's a basic cost/benefit analysis.
As a matter of fact, I found your comment so interesting that I've been discussing it with left leaning friends I met back when I was into AML, who are still active in it, the discussion being over I'm back to reply (an hour ago, I'm proof reading myself for once).
First things first: AML's impact is transversal, it has a lot more impact than you might think. It's the basic tool we have against corruption. And because it prevents crimes, "I will not take this shady deal because it won't bring me useful money", it's impossible to prove that crimes would have happened without it. While you can still measure it's impact on corruption, you'll say it's very hard to measure corruption, fine, that's true.
But it turns out there is actually a lot of documentation about crimes that AML targets, the O'Mecanismo series describes what enormous corruption systems it fights, but you can read about how useful it is against THB (Trafficking in Human Beings) in the OSCE paper https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/5/8/121125.pdf or the Arachnys case study if you're more into videos https://www.arachnys.com/webinar-identifying-human-trafficki...
Mind you, there's more I want to disagree on in your comment. You're saying it "makes it hard for refugees to get bank accounts", I don't see this, at least, not in France which takes 400k so-called "refugees" per year, which is the equivalent of a city like Paris every 5 years, which corresponds to the president mandate.
I will just quote the law here: "Every person living in France, without a bank account, has the right to the opening of such an account in the bank of his choice or in our service", this is article L.312-1 of the Monetary and financial code of law. Even they can't, indeed, open a "normal" bank account, because they have burnt their own papers, say, because they are wanted by the police and want to go incognito, they can still open a "Livret A" where the minimal deposit and withdrawal is 1.5€ https://www.ouest-france.fr/monde/migrants/demandeurs-d-asil...
Then, the state (we, tax payers) even gives them 426€/month, or, ~850€/month if they are old enough, as stated by left leaning media: https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2019/12/01/est-il-vrai-q...
I'd like to conclude by "sorry", I'm sorry that it's a problem for your friends making "large donations" to be inspected by the state, but that's how it's going to be because we know now for a fact that it does happen that "activists" turn out to actually be human traffickers, a traffik that is worth ~10 billion USD per year, well, not all of them of course, there are also true activists, but these are in bed with the traffickers who tell them exactly when a boat leaves the coast, who knows if they don't get their share ? https://www.cnews.fr/monde/2021-03-15/migrants-un-rapport-po...
And of course ... perdon my french! And thank you for the respectful discussion, always appreciated!