Meta 'most reluctant' to work with government: Home Affairs

I base my opinion on the policies that come out of governments, not communications.

I could have been more specific by saying elected officials. These are the people whoring themselves out, and I'd assume those working closely with them. The rest of the staff are probably there on the hopes they might parlay the experience into their own candidacy one day, but I do know there are people that are "answering the call" of public service. Sadly, they don't have enough of a voice to sway.

There's also the non-political gov't employees that do the actual work. There's plenty of stereotypes about them too, but for the most part, I'd agree they're just people with a job living their life.

I particularly like The Juice Media from Australia to keep track of Oz politics.

In spite of me living in Romania, I love their Honest Government Ads.

Honest Government Ad | Hung Parliament - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnzaiYrvvrw

It's followed US policy for many years, and the only reason it's worse than the US is that the US has robust constitutional protections against unreasonable surveillance.

I don't believe this is realistic, but what if the policy could reduce online child grooming to near-zero? Would it be worth outlawing secure communication?

I think that it would not.

> I can’t find a con to protecting the children. But what’s doubtful is whether you actually are protecting the children with this policy.

This is the result of government taking over the protection of specific children:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/special-reports/article23820...

If the government has any intention to protect children, and intention at all, this is where they'd start. These kids really need it, and the government has all the control they could possibly want or need to do it. They not only utterly fail, they regularly cut funding to what little efforts exist to help these children.

So no, government does the opposite. Therefore their intention cannot be to protect children.

So what OTHER effects does this have? Well it greatly increases the government's ability to directly interfere in the lives of citizens. Which they, not seeing any irony, use to send more kids to their foster care -> juvie -> prison carrousel. In fact that this enables them to do more of that, is one of the main reasons to do this. Seriously.

When there are studies that show that, as a kid (on average, discarding extremes), you're better off abused at home than "taken care of" by the state. On average, you're better off without government help. For example:

https://sci-hub.se/10.1257/aer.97.5.1583

(I do not deny that there are situations where state help is necessary. However, anyone that knows anything about the foster system knows that they don't help in such situations. These situations are too difficult/too much violence to deal with/no expected positive result/... and explicitly target kids with small or nonexistent problems because they're paid per child, based on the care provided. So 24/7 care for a problem-free toddler is where the financial incentives are for them. This even applies to medical problems: child has cancer? You're entirely safe from youth services. Why? Because caring for that child is too expensive ... the EXACT opposite you'd want to see them do, but, of course, financially it makes total sense. Ironically this means effectively random (poor) kids go to foster care, then juvie, then back home, because it's a financial disaster for foster care, institutional or otherwise, to take them back, so suddenly there's "no more need" for care. It's a financial disaster for the parents too, of course)

In fact there are studies that show that social workers REFUSING help to children (in reality to parents and schools) works very therapeutically, and actually fixes problems, by (amongst other things) creating a great need for the problem to get solved, rather than taking away the child, which of course takes away the problem without solving it, doing incredible permanent damage to kids in the process.

So, in THEORY they do this to protect children.

In PRACTICE they do this to damage children, and to do more damage to more children.

The bootlicking side. There is only two options: a) encrypted communication that cannot be read by anyone except the software client and the peers communicating enforced by cryptography, and b) cleartext, cops and death squads.

Stop making consolations. Math doesn't care about warrants. There is no higher oversight than 256-bit symmetric ciphers.

The problem is that we don't really have any good ways to do that. If it's encrypted in flight but not end-to-end encrypted, for example, it's open to information being stolen, or people being stalked, or information gathered to groom minors (and later even evidence being deleted) by bad actors at the messaging platform's companies (such as sysadmins who have access - these kind of things have actually happened!). Further, all the private (and sometimes intimate) information that has been messaged is open to hackers if the security of that messaging platform is breached.

So the trade-off is that law enforcement have to look for other ways to enforce the laws - like they need to find one side of the message conversation and get a warrant to access the data stored on their phone to view the communications. Technology has actually given them far, far more scope for access into people's lives for surveillance than they've ever had! They are exaggerating the problems with things like end-to-end encryption because it's taking away a very effortless source of surveillance - something that they probably shouldn't have ever had (the ability to easily snoop on everybody's phone calls and messages, which we know in the US and other places that they did warrantlessly for many years).

Well, if they want to ban the communication of certain numbers and collapse their online economy that’s their problem.

But what these idiots frequently ask for is a backdoor key to encryption that only the government can use. It’s frustrating to see weapons-grade technical ignorance in our leaders when we have an increasingly technical society.

Speak for yourself, I'm moving somewhere with a higher refractive index so my kids can play in the street more safely.

I was indeed.