Woman sentenced to death in Pakistan over ‘blasphemous’ WhatsApp activity | Hacker News Reader

Woman sentenced to death in Pakistan over ‘blasphemous’ WhatsApp activity

theguardian.com

34 pointsawb26 comments

906 Million in foreign aid to Pakistan by the US. Giving taxpayer money to an oppressive regime that believes it is okay to order a woman to her death for a cartoon seems inappropriate.

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Aneeqa Ateeq shouldn't be murdered over a cartoon.

Do you think the good done with the 900 million is outweighed by this death?

Do you think Pakistan would overturn blasphemy law if it were threatened or the funds taken away?

Do you think a more liberal and prosperous government would form were the current regime overthrown?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass...

They need 0 US tax payer dollars.

are you suggesting they threaten israel for funding?

I'm not seeing the connection.

WMDs are expensive. They wouldn't need aid if they would have used that money instead.

Thanks, I never would have gathered that was their point from the article.

> Do you think Pakistan would overturn blasphemy law if it were threatened or the funds taken away?

Yes

Per the article, many of those accused of blasphemy don’t even make it to the courthouse before vigilante justice happens, and if they do judges are pressured to convict and impose harsh sentences, as in this case. So, it’s not just the government, it’s the culture as well which can’t be easily be changed with funding threats.

Also, the funding probably won’t just disappear. Another world power (or powers) would likely step in to fill that influence vacuum. Plenty of rich countries out there that already severely punish people for their speech and happy to defend the power of the state over the people.

Still, it does puzzle me how much money we give to countries with drastically different values.

> Giving taxpayer money to an oppressive regime that believes it is okay to order a woman to her death for a cartoon seems inappropriate.

Hundreds of men rotting in Pakistani jails on false blasphemy charges waiting execution, and the aid should be stopped because a woman was sentenced?

We should have stopped giving them aid for that too. I don't see your point.

I do.

The aid is not gor these "criminals". The aid is for the Pakistani government to help spread the "democracy".

It's not intended for them, sure, but they invariably end up getting their hands on it anyway.

A good reminder to the UK government why end-to-end encryption is absolutely necessary.

WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, which doesn't help when one of the ends forwards the messages to the police.

Or when you get the good old "give us your phone and unlock it or we beat you with a wrench" treatment, which bypasses any sort of encryption altogether.

Off-the-Record Messaging uses deniable authentication to fix this problem. Instead of proving that a message could only have come from the real sender, it proves that it must have come from either the sender or the recipient. If you are the recipient, you know you didn't write it, but you have no way to prove that to anyone else.

Any apps using that currently?

Yes, a bunch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Clien...

And Signal also has deniable authentication, although its protocol is a bit different than Off-the-Record Messaging.

How civilized.

i assume you are being sarcastic, but whose definition of civilized are you relying on where threatening the very core of social order is permitted?

He is saying it's bad what they are doing to the woman.

I suspect the reply is saying a western notion of civility is irrelevant because the woman in question, and those like her, are acting against 'the core of civilization' as they know it.

They have nuclear weapons

Ah yes, the good old religion of peace.

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