The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever | Hacker News Reader

The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

1,363 pointsgrappler482 comments

While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully. The pretext is, of course, "protect the children" and more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of "stop those awful social media giants." While these justifications are (hopefully) obvious misdirection to most, I'd like to see more mainstream discussion about who this bill benefits and why. The legislation 'coincidentally' achieves exactly the agenda proposed by the "surveillance state" (ie CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, law enforcement lobby, state prosecutors, etc). While it doesn't specifically prohibit public access to encryption, it seeks to create nearly the same effect by making it legally risky for large social media and platform companies to offer end-to-end encryption as a default to law-abiding citizens. It's no accident that almost every version of the bill creates this exposure to essentially bottomless legal liability for platforms offering secure communications.

Frankly, this scares the crap out of me. These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts. While not explicitly outlawing untappable communications, it's much easier to identify who is choosing to use end-to-end encryption when it's not the typical default. This will ultimately put all of us who care about secure communications under default suspicion, whether our interest in private comms is a moral ideal, political principle or simply proper technical architecture and data hygiene. In today's multi-national environment of nation-state, criminal and privateer (NSO etc) threat actors, insecure communications over Internet infrastructure should only be seen as an ill-advised risky behavior or a technical bug.

> While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF,

It's worth noting that the companies destroying democracy that this bill regulates (Google, Facebook, etc.) are major donors to all of these organizations.

"See, we donate to these organizations, we're not that bad, promise!"

Seems the world isn’t all black and white.

It’s not like those companies have “destroy democracy” as their mission.

And Mozilla Corporation’s entire business model is built on Google’s financial support. Does that make Mozilla’s (or the ACLU etc.) work inherently suspect or anti-democratic?

MZLA is building tbird for profit

Yes it does. One rotten apple spoils the bunch.

That's not to say guilt by association, but yes it is suspect.

None of those companies are destroying democracy, that's needless hyperbole...

I disagree. Social media has played a huge part in the radicalization of various groups and allowed anti-democratic views to spread. The companies mentioned here have an outsized part in that because they prioritize engagement at all costs, which pushes people down rabbit holes of increasingly extreme views.

No, the companies mentioned here are often targets of the abuse you're giving because they're very effective community builders.

Your real problem is with the people using those platforms, but I guess it's harder to complain about democracy being ruined if it's literally the people participating in it who are ruining it.

Never heard of Cambridge Analytica?

E2EE is offered to all users, whether or not they are law-abiding. More precise is to say that E2EE is offered to users who are primarily law-abiding.

Your points are well-heard, even by those in the IC. What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior. I strongly believe that fighting this issue with a hard-line no compromise response will result in an undesirable outcome for your agenda.

I am not a fan of kneecapped cybersecurity in consumer endpoints, which is the elephant in the room. It's a compromise borne of the E2EE entropy problem, intentional or not. I don't support unchecked recoverable encryption in any centralized fashion, nor do I support covert backdoors or skeleton keys.

Unfortunately, too many folks defend their position from libertarian ideals, a position which does have a technical justification. It just misses the bigger picture - that most folks in govt are just doing their job. A compromise will seek to enable those doing their job correctly while preventing abuses with technological means.

Telling the govt "too bad, you can't stop math" will backfire. The law can be used to force tech companies to literally stop doing math at scale.

> What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC

Public policy orgs like EFF etc have proposed modifications to limit the most disastrous elements of this proposal but to the extent those proposals fix or limit the 'accidental' limitless liability for communications platforms, they are met only with disingenuous cries of "think of the children." I think it's pretty clear the lack of "good-faith discussion" lies with the people who've never openly acknowledged what all this is really about.

> even by those in the IC.

Hopefully the intelligence community, as opposed to the domestic law enforcement agencies, already understands how dangerous this legislation could be for U.S. national interests. The unintended consequences won't stop at social media. Platforms of all kinds will react to the liability exposure or merely the possibility of it. With other nations imposing their own in-country data requirements on trans-national platforms how many platforms (or their upstream technology providers) will maintain a separate insecure version for domestic tapping and a robustly secure version for international use? Just like our own backdoors being used against us, we've already seen how this kind of thing has a way of undermining our own security. Short-sighted bureaucrats are playing with fire here.

> too many folks defend their position from libertarian ideals

I don't see how this is tied to uniquely libertarian ideals. The 4th amendment prohibition on government search of citizen's "papers and property" isn't some aspirational ideal or partisan political viewpoint - it's always been at the very core of the nation. It's also been continuously endorsed by both liberal and conservative supreme courts for hundreds of years.

> that most folks in govt are just doing their job.

To the extent their actions undermine the constitution, it's no longer "law enforcement". Sadly, quite the opposite. If the law is the 'operating system', then the constitution is the 'secure kernel' - the last line of defense against both external AND internal threats capable of undermining the integrity of the entire system. Law enforcement has privileged accounts which are THE primary internal threat the secure kernel was designed to stop. From day one in the 1700s, the constitution has always made the job of law enforcement MUCH harder. That's not a bug. It's "As Designed" and perma-marked by the original designers (and the maintainers in SCOTUS) as "Won't Fix". Hell, it goes beyond just a feature - limiting the power of the government is the explicitly stated purpose of the thing - to the extent it puts a big fence around the few powers granted to government (with the barbs pointed inward) and grants everything else, mentioned or not, as powers granted to citizens.

It's always been well understood, as well as taught in elementary school, that the unique freedoms the country was founded on came with a cost - and sometimes that cost would be high, but... preserving these freedoms, including making things harder on law enforcement (and potentially easier on criminals), was worth the cost. I suspect congress is going to be surprised by how non-partisan (and non-negotiable) the fundamental integrity of the system is for most users.

> Telling the govt "too bad, you can't stop math" will backfire. The law can be used to force tech companies to literally stop doing math at scale.

There is no practical scenario where those who want to use e2e will not have that capability. Even if technology companies are totally banned from producing it domestically, it's trivial for foreign companies to provide the e2e software and supply it over the internet.

Until that becomes illegal. After all, torrent indexes are illegal, and they aren't directly pirating anything.

Thus, supporting an end around, can be attacked as well..

Torrent indexes are illegal, and yet a lot of them exist very publicly. Pushing e2e encryption into the same category as them does not seem very effective.

The goal is to reduce common usage ; to make all which use encryption a criminal.

Law enforcement and IC are starting with the assumption that they are entitled to the best access they’ve ever had. Yes, things are going dark that they had access to 20 years ago, but 20 years before that they didn’t have access because most of the conversations were happening face to face. At that point they needed to rely on traditional boots on the ground police/intelligence work instead of electronic backdoors. Why is it impossible for them to go back to doing things that way?

they have more funding, power, and technology to perform their jobs than at any point in history, but cry about it because they can't spy on the entire planet by default. never compromise because the demands will never end.

> Why is it impossible for them to go back to doing things that way?

Because symmetry. Criminals using e2ee are not going back.

Not to support the act, but your comment doesn't really address the issue.

Why does that matter? Cops weren’t listening to those old face to face communications. That was practically impossible which is analogous to the technical impossibility of listening in on E2EE connections. Instead they were cracking cases in other ways (physical evidence, confidential sources, etc.)

To play Devil's Advocate: people had to meet up for face-to-face communications, but they don't have to meet up for remote communication.

Does the devil need an advocate?

The Catholic Church seems to think so, and they've got a notorious anti-Devil bias. It's useful to put forward arguments against things, even if you don't agree with them, because it helps to put into words why you don't agree with them.

That’s a true fact but why does it make traditional policing impossible?

What is "traditional policing" in your view?

Whatever it is, it isn’t a dragnet.

I don't think it does. We've had encrypted communications for centuries; cases have been cracked before without decoding those messages.

Law enforcement issues don't override all other concerns. If life is difficult for them, good. That's the point. It should be difficult in order to prevent abuse of power. Encryption is a perfectly reasonable reaction to governments that give themselves the right to surveil the entire planet. Nobody really cares that it makes their life harder. That's exactly what it's supposed to do. It should be incredibly hard if not impossible for the NSA employee to spy on his spouse.

If they want to investigate stuff, they should have to get warrants and literally send out operatives to physically compromise the targeted equipment. This puts a limit on the scale of government operations. This is how it's supposed to be.

> This is how it's supposed to be.

According to you, which is OPs point exactly. The discussion needs to be framed in a way that stakeholders are walking in common ground, not yelling at each other at a distance from their respective ideological ivory towers.

FWIW I happen to agree with you, but IMO “this is how it’s supposed to be” is not a productive argument.

But we shouldn't be having this argument over and over because some people didn't like the way it turned out the first time. We need, as a society, to find a way to limit the ability of lawmakers to turn around a scant two years later with some new approach to pushing their shot down proposal through.

It's a devious exhaustion tactic and it's unethical (without commenting on the bill itself, which I find abhorrent to a free and just society)

Why isn't it a productive argument? This is a question about what goals society should optimize towards. There's no amount of objective measurements that can determine the relative worth of cheaper policing compared with decreased privacy.

The only way for such an argument to proceed is to convince enough people that such a trade results in a world not being how it is supposed to be.

TL;DR: This argument lies on the "ought" side of Hume's is-ought distinction [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

I wasn’t familiar with the is-ought problem, thanks! I think in this case, I was commenting on the parents presumption that the their “ought” was a universally shared (or even widely shared) axiom. In that sense stating one’s belief without defending it is not really an argument at all (in that it’s not persuasive), and therefore (in my opinion) not as productive as starting from a more universally held common ground.

No problem, and I'm glad that it helped! It's a useful distinction for determining what type of arguments will be useful to make. If two people agree on goals, but differ on the ways to reach those goals, then "is" arguments are useful. If two people disagree on goals, then there isn't yet any common ground on which to have that conversation, and the first step is to have an "ought" conversation to find common ground.

(This is also simplifying a bit, as there are cases where differing goals can have the same next steps. An apolitical example would be a temporary alliance in a board game, where you and I team up to stop a third player from winning. Our long-term goals differ, as each of us wants to win for ourselves, but our short-term goals align at stopping the third player.)

Why should we give an inch to these people when they have been shown to violate the publics’ trust many many times?

Nobody should have to walk common ground with the likes of the CIA and NSA. They should have to walk common ground with us. Whatever people decide, they should obey unquestioningly and without complaint. We don't want to hear about how encryption makes their job harder. They need to deal with it and stop trying to undermine our freedoms. It's honestly offensive that they're trying to regulate this stuff for the nth time despite public resistance.

We owe no apology to anyone. They're the ones trying to undermine the whole world's security and freedom. They've grown addicted to total access and want to maintain their power which they frequently abuse. Nothing will ever justify it, certainly not their constant "but it makes our job harder" sob story.

You're exactly wrong.

The Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in unswervingly-- was written at a time when privacy was the DEFAULT. Any person could walk into any building or any field and speak, anonymously to another person. It cost quite a bit to spy on someone and that was a natural limit to how much spying could be done.

The argument from the other side is always-- the framers didn't imagine a world where everyone is carrying around a device that spies on them and they didn't happen to imagine a dystopian future where people are paying corporations to spy on them with unimaginable devices, so, we should be allowed to do that.

Politely, fudge that.

I think you misunderstand my position as well as who you need to convince. It’s not angry people who vehemently believe that we need more surveillance. It’s apathy. Why should I care?

(I do care, and like I mentioned in my original comment, I agree with the parent).

> Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in unswervingly

What does that mean?

Meanwhile, I don't really feel like there was much privacy back when the constitution was written. What makes you think there was?

there wasn't even .uch in the way of federal law enforcement.

Any type of eavesdroppi g would have to be done via tge post, which to this day has better confidentiality guarantees because USPS is one of the only service providers to which Third Party Doctrine does not apply for auto-negating expectations of privacy.

if you were investigated, it would have to be by a local law enforcement official. There was no cross-referencing of biometrics, fingerprints, or driver's licenses across state lines.

There were no license plates to track. When they were eventuallu implemented, it would be decades before data stores were implemented that allowed real-time tracking via ALPR.

It was, in fact, not a given or even remotely a given that it was considered technically possible to localize or pin down an individual without one or more individuals being engaged in the act of tailing.

There is no question that at the timeof the signing of the Constitution, the world had a much higher degree of privacy by default.

>this is how it’s supposed to be” is not a productive argument

It is nevertheless, the correct argument that is at the heart of the issue.

It needs to be had over and over again until it finally gets through the bureaucrats heads that no; your convenience does not outweigh fundamental freedom from panoptic surveillance.

Perhaps not, but the parent did say that one purpose is to prevent the abuse of power.

And sure, someone might follow up with "but I trust my elected officials/police/FBI/etc. not to abuse power". But then you can provide examples of times when that trust was misplaced. Or point out that elected officials are elected in and out and law enforcement officers quit/retire and are hired all the time, and the incoming people might not be so trustworthy.

So yeah, "this is how it's supposed to be in order to prevent the abuse of power" may not be a complete, ironclad argument, but it's a good jumping-off point to further discussion.

> If they want to investigate stuff, they should have to get warrants and literally send out operatives to physically compromise the targeted equipment. This puts a limit on the scale of government operations. This is how it's supposed to be.

i think that's mostly right. i also take the controversial view that consumer encryption should have a front door for law enforcement. there should be a mechanism where if they are in possession of a valid warrant, and said warrant is validated by third party watchdogs, then they can enter into decryption protocol that will immutably log that the protocol took place in a public, yet cryptographically time embargoed location.

i don't agree with the idea of mass-surveillance data mining dragnets, i think they're constitutionally problematic, but on the same token, if a valid warrant has been issued, investigators need to be able to do their jobs and we as citizens need to be able to audit that said powers are not being abused.

but i will admit, this thinking is immature. the prevalence of information systems in our lives has resulted in the most detailed and rich records of human activity that have ever existed. this is new. on the flip side, advancements in communication have enabled all sort of new paradigms in crime that weren't really possible before. i suspect that getting all of this right will be quite difficult as we don't even fully understand how much the game has changed with these new technologies pervading our lives.

Skeleton keys are impossible to secure.

i don't believe that it would be impossible to develop a multiparty scheme for deriving decryption keys as needed.

maybe there'd be some key at the root, but it doesn't have to be known.

Creating it is the easy part. Securing it afterwards is the hard part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

>What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior.

I think that the tech community has extended entirely too much "good faith" towards a law enforcement and intelligence community who feel entitled to review and record all communication at their own sole discretion. I know you think that you're the "good guys", trying to keep us safe from "adversaries", but you have to understand that after the Snowden leaks, many people in the tech. industry don't see you that way. They see you as the diet-Coke version of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and feel that if you were able to slip your legal bonds, you'd attack free speech just harshly as the Chinese Communist Party does.

Of course, from your perspective, it's not cracking down on free speech. It's "preserving democracy" by "suppressing misinformation" planted by "hostile adversaries" and "non-state actors".

> What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior.

How about a good faith discussion of the fact that crime rates are at historic lows, or the fact that many crimes (burglary, car theft) are never investigated, or the fact that surveillance is never going to solve, let alone prevent the real issues that people care about, like domestic violence, gun violence, or the epidemic of prescription pain killer addiction.

Focus on crime prevention, not more law enforcement empire building.

> It just misses the bigger picture - that most folks in govt are just doing their job.

Any office with excessive power will be a magnet for assholes. Excessive power will be abused.

> E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior

You cannot really engage in criminal behavior exclusively via E2EE communication. Victim would use the communication as evidence. All the crimes you are talking about have an essential component outside E2EE communication, which means that detection and evidence gathering is possible without breaking E2EE.

You'd just have deniable encryption.

Aren't there criminal acts which consist solely of communicating information to a willing third party? Eg sharing classified information with a foreign agent?

How secure is E2EE anyway when, like WhatsApp, it's implemented such that you blindly trust a 3rd party to distribute the public keys and instruct your client who it should be encrypting and sending your messages to? How do you know your mobile app isn't also sending encrypted copies of your messages to a ghost user you have no visibility of? A ghost user that could be WhatsApp, law enforcement or anyone.

> What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks

What would a "solution" for the IC allow them to do, and what would be the limits on it? Would the IC stop asking to weaken encryption after it was granted?

"Meet us halfway" is meaningless if we don't know what halfway is or what the extent is of what you're asking for, and proponents of these bills never give an answer to that question because they don't have an answer to that question. Is "meet us halfway" on CSAM zero CSAM, because I've people advocate for that -- and if that's the position and any time that encryption gets in the way of that we need to compromise, then you are effectively asking to abolish encryption. Is it that there should never be any information that law enforcement can't access -- because if so, you're asking to ban encryption.

Others have pointed out (correctly) that law enforcement today has unprecedented tools to monitor civilians and catch criminals, everything from facial recognition (which has largely not been banned across America) to digital dragnets to public social media to cooperation with companies that hoover up tons of PII. We carry devices that allow law enforcement with a warrant to ask cell companies for the name and location of everyone inside of a radius. That is a frankly wild amount of power.

You have already been met hecking way more than halfway on the issue of privacy vs law enforcement, and it's just utterly dishonest to claim otherwise. What we're seeing is that on the one issue where law enforcement has less access than they used to have, that's suddenly an existential problem. And my takeaway from that is that what law enforcement is asking for is not to be met halfway, law enforcement is asking to weaken and disrupt literally any tool that makes their job harder in any way at all. Any technology that weakens their level of access to anything is an existential problem to them.

It is not Libertarian to ask for end to end encryption, that is a normal, moderate position for people across all political spectrums to take. The characterization of "maybe police shouldn't be able to access everything about me at time, including my location and every single one of my conversations" as a Libertarian view is just so utterly disingenuous and dishonest. So what is a halfway position where people in the government will stop calling to weaken encryption? I do not believe that position exists, and I have never heard anyone try to articulate it using measurable criteria that don't boil down to "we'll constantly balance and use the courts". I have never seen law enforcement as a unified group argue, "you know what, we have too much access here and maybe we should have less, and it's good that this technology makes our job harder." It doesn't happen.

There is not a solution to this problem that law enforcement will ever be satisfied with other than complete surveillance of everyone in the United States. And these are the people that whine that privacy advocates are "absolutists." I carry a hecking cell phone already; you have monitoring tools, stop acting like you don't. Stop pretending that an era of unprecedented surveillance at a level that has never before been seen in all of human history is actually super awful and hard for you because you can't also read every single text message I've ever sent across all of time.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.

The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect.

They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which means letting criminals and terrorists run free. They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys.

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. That requires the people in the government to identify more strongly with the people living under the government than with the government itself. This is precarious at the best of times. Why would the governing party want to make it easy to organize dissenting political parties and alternative centers of power? Power might fall into the wrong hands.

I know that sounds sarcastic, but try to see it from their perspective, even if you don't agree with it.

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

There were many attempts by the same people to monitor phone and mail communications.

The international standards do just fine for enabling spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller ID.

Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23

This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting!

I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that.

So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms?

I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons!

The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.

> reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.

Obviously I'm not going to be making copies of it to report because then I can get done for making illegal porn, that is the way the laws are written. Here is an example using whatsapp. https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_convict...

Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal porn and because they were part of the group they got convicted of downloading.

I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to report it.

Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the world in plain sight masquerading as good guys!

The laws are not fit for purpose.

Ok but whatsapp and reddit are very very different. It is very easy to see how people can dissemnimate kiddie porn in an unmoderated WhatsApp group. But for a post to make it to the global reddit front page (not your personalized homepage) it would have to make it past the eyes of probably millions of people. Short of botting or hacking I can't see how it would even be possible.

I do think there is an element of "botting" as you would put it.

Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.

Yes, intermediating so much of our society through the internet has made it extremely vulnerable. The internet offers would-be totalitarians a temptation of pervasive surveillance that goes far beyond what the Stasi could ever have dreamed of. Free society and democracy are not likely to survive another decade, although they will probably be born again later in a new form.

Not really, no, not with the media deciding what everybody heard. We had as much of a free society as convenience combined with the interests of every individual running TV news allowed.

It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far ahead of anything that existed then.

>Not really, no,

What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?

Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about when you say "free society." It sounds like a weird mantra.

edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?

I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society or democracy people think of when they say "we have a free society and a democracy."

From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.

It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks, much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New York without paying all your profits out to the cops. People in Peoria had enormous freedom in 01930, 01960, and even 01990 that people in Minsk, Shanghai, and Alexandria just didn't.

Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.

Just FYI the zero-padded date thing is incredibly distracting and weird. (Yes I know there’s some “foundation” pushing this, but still).

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

It is totally useless to zero pad a date in a sentence, it is human to human communication.

BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.

It makes your post come off as an ad for this foundation that 99.9% of people don’t care about and that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed; it’s as if I inserted [DRINK MORE COCA-COLA] into random parts of my comment.

Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally attracting attention to something completely unrelated is bad.

People who are looking for an excuse to give others grief for harmlessly violating social conventions probably should not be posting on a site named "Hacker News"—after all, hackers have always been weird, think of Turing. In any case they are not capable of engaging with my substantive points, should I have any, so I'm not losing anything by discomforting them.

And it's good to know who those griefers are before that becomes a life-or-death question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz, Assange, and so many others.

To be consistent, you should pad the other numbers you use too. Like money amounts. And I think you should pad dates out to eight digits, just to be safe.

I think I'll also pad out your name, Nate______.

Ok that's funny. Thank you for not padding me with zeros.

That would be inhumane.

What foundation?

The Long Now Foundation

In 1990 school kids were pledging our fucking allegiance to an evil empire. Hell no we didn’t have a free society then.

100%

I remember it well. Hands on hearts, droning on between the food pyramid (wherein the USDA redefined "healthy" to mean "buy what the grain lobby sells") and a D.A.R.E. poster. Meanwhile, the CIA was getting caught selling crack.

Only they weren’t getting caught because the media was censored and nobody knew about it. The people talking about it were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

You must not have been around when the government was pushing for backdoors on Telecom products in the 1990s. Before the internet was a thing for most people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to have a backdoor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... actually passed in 01994.

Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific candidate and a compromise between political parties on military presence sounds like a very precarious position for free society to be in.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)

One way to look at it then is that we have dealt with similar issues before and survived.

Not really. I mean logically would you also play Russian roulette repeatedly with no payout just because you haven't died yet?

Actually, no one involved in the 1876 US election survived.

Well, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns".

I heard a story that at the 1864 National Union (Republican) Convention, there was a bunch of haggling about who would be Abraham Lincolns VP.

A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans.

Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it.

It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination.

The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.

Is this sarcasm?

Depends on whether or not one believes that we live in a free, democratic society today. In many ways, yes, we do, in many others, no, we don't.

We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That is not by any means a free society. Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. Legislation like the EARN IT Act is meant to turn back the clock to silence the voice of the people so that, once again, only the voice of the bourgeoisie can be heard.

I believe that the period you refer to had local newspapers, tv stations, and radio stations that were largely independent from this handful of corporations (ABC, CBS, NBC?). During this period, there was limited opportunity to perform population-wide surveillance on the discussion of this coverage. In those days your TV tended not to be equipped with technology that could report what you watched.

In those local markets you had reporters who were friends with those in power and very little got reported.

I think it's fair to say that pre-internet, there were fewer media voices but there were a lot, lot fewer attempts at surveillance.

  Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed.

No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire comment just sounds like speculation about a time that is, in fact, fairly recent history.

  We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought.

That only makes sense if you ignore all sorts of pivotal historical events (eg: uprisings and revolutions).

Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s

To the people that participated in the BBS's it meant a lot and changed everything, for them.

I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of those around them even if in a small way.

Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst for change.

I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS.

I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine.

I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out to us for a reason.

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech.

The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!

In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11.

Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact.

We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA.

In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)

Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.

Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.

So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse?

While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible to most of us now...

And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.

Are you surprised that on HN, of all places, we find a date format pedant? :-D

And a wrong one, at that.

My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.

> My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.

"My opinions are always wrong but some times less wrong than others."

There, FTFY. Now it makes sense: Some times they're less wrong than other times.

> So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse?

In eight thousand years.

Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.

Dear lord … a while ago I had to integrate with a client database that had a required “end date” for indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum year - December 31, 9999.

Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing.

So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early.

I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000.

They never got back to me.

As can be seen here, it’s really distracting. Writing years like that is a great way to have people ignore or forget what you’re actually wanting to communicate.

Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.

#notallpeople

It seems like there was a time when these Long Now dates would prompt curiosity here on HN, without so much hostility as now. I don't care about the dates, but the aggressively conventional are something else.

It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush. That way we know who would have cheered on the court's sentence on Turing or Galileo before it matters.

> It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush.

you know how its annoying asfuck to reed shit without punctuatuin and capitals and possible misspeeled and those fuckers who never use the shift period or comma keys get read a lot less than they might just because its too much drudgery to shlep through their texts? your abit like that and i dont think thats what your going for

One would think you write to be read; to inform, argue, hopefully convince (and possibly even entertain?). This silly affectation is jarring; it breaks up the reading flow and often makes at least me give up. I may be more sensitive than most to sh...tuff like this, but surely I can't be all alone in it.

So what you're doing is just robbing yourself of an audience. Is that really what you want?

OK, maybe it is: We're "unthinking conformists". So... Why do you use correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? The nitwits my first paragraph imitates all say that's the real, you know, sign that you're, like, square. Are you perhaps more of an "unthinking conformist" than you'd care to admit -- above all, to yourself?

Since I already butted in...

I can sympathize with a sensitivity to things that others take in stride: for example, TVs in public spaces, jumping and cutting frenetically, impossible to really ignore.

But here's another example: in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on. I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward -- arresting the reader full stop for the sake of a cultural-politics position completely irrelevant to the point being written about. (Especially since those newer conventions had to evolve.) For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself) -- maybe it's useless to say this, but the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.

"But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe. The point is that in a dynamic free culture you get comfortable with genuine differences and you learn it's pointless to make a fuss over such a harmless eccentricity. And a dynamic free culture is the type that can learn to get better over time. I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem. (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)

I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread. Can't speak for Kragen.

> in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on.

Still is, AFAICS. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the traditional view that it can.

> I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward

Still are, sometimes.

> For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself)

Long before me, it seems.

> the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.

Kind of isn't -- and kind of is: It's informed by lots of things, like prevailing usage, history, social upheaval, fleeting fashions, and... Simple logic. From a single speaker's perspective, most of those are pretty much "divine revelation"; none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena.

Especially for numbers, which more than most other aspects of language are governed by mathematical logic, which less than all the other governing phenomena changes over time.

> "But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe.

No "maybe" about it; it just plain simply is dumb. That's not how numbers work. Also, to the extent that Kragen wants to promote a "long now" perspective: Why just one prefix zero? Bah, that's still practically the day after tomorrow! That should be at least three zeros! Or, heck, why not six -- or fifteen?

See where that gets us in the end? Yeah, exactly: Nowhere. It's just ridiculous.

> I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem.

Yup. And when one person persists in being "a cultural problem" that is sometimes a sign that something is wrong with the culture... And far, far more often a sign that something is wrong with that person. Shaving this situation with the oldest(?) of the philosophical Razors, I'm leaning towards Kragen's affectation.

> (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)

I think it's just simply that the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented, and therefore tends to get annoyed at illiterate -- and innumerate! -- writing more than you might be likely to see elsewhere on the Net.

> I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread.

Sure. Are you getting mine?

> Can't speak for Kragen.

If only they could speak for themself.

Well, I don't feel like I got through, so maybe Kragen in dropping this had the right idea.

We are all of us more wrong than we can imagine. I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. My 80s anecdote was about how an idea I now see as good appeared at first as pointless convention-breaking of negative value, and how you can't tell the difference at first. Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof. ("none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena. ... one person ... something is wrong with that person.") In putting it that way I'm probably exaggerating what you really think, but directionally this does seem to be our difference.

> [zeros are dumb]

As I said, I don't care about this at the object level. In my native culture we shrug and move on.

If Long Now dates end up materially helping to make our culture more farsighted, it wouldn't even be all that surprising. For instance, if it caught the attention of one particular nonconformist and inspired them towards some project that set off another cascade which you didn't see as silly.

> the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

That hasn't changed in this interval.

> I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. [...] Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof.

Maybe something in that direction, but OTOH maybe not quite: I just think it's counterproductive if by running with one's idea, one also actively antagonizes people with it. And Kragen's way of advocating the "Long Now" perspective comes off, at least to me (and apparently at least a few other posters), as equally disrupting to fluent reading as people advocating for other new perspectives while demonstrating their "non-conformist" creds by writing in lower-case-only, skipping punctuation, ignoring (or, likely, more often just not knowing...) the rules of grammar or spelling. (Admittedly, not equally as bad as the arseholes doing all of those at once; just in that direction.) That feels likely to put as many or more people off one's message as it wins converts, so recommending them to drop it was really just honest advice for the good of their own cause. (At least originally, before they apparently confessed to not actually having a cause but just be trolling.)

IOW, TL;DR: Not so much "must come with social proof" as that this seems in practice to be disproving / having disproved itself; while not necessarily as to the validity of the concept itself, but as an effective method of advocacy.

> > the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

> That hasn't changed in this interval.

Yeah, I was only speculating about why a quirky way to write numbers, specifically, comes off as innumerate and might therefore be seen as (approaching-)equally annoying here as bad spelling / grammar / punctuation / capitalisation is elsewhere, in other below-average-illiterate corners of the 'Net.

It may be right to say that in HN-like circles nowadays you should keep to a smaller weirdness budget if you don't want to alienate other hackers. I think that's sad, though. Feeling tempted to start following Kragen on this point just out of orneriness.

> But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!

Any links on reading more about this?

> That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech.

As a student you have a far more limited right to free speech in school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), the famous BONG HITS 4 JESUS case. Those students weren't even technically on school grounds (across the street) but were a part of a school function. A school definitely has the right to suspend a student for distributing material deemed interruptive to the learning environment of a school.

No, they do not. The Supreme Court ruled incorrectly in Morse v. Frederick. Oppressive governments and other institutions infringe on people's free speech rights frequently. The fact that their administrative organs reaffirm those infringements on appeal does not annul the infringements; it merely adds insult to injury.

I wasn't really speaking as to the morality of the thing, more so just arguing the reality of today's legal situations in the US. According to current US Supreme Court precedent, its an acceptable abridgement to a student's speech within the bounds of constitutionality. Not saying that its right or wrong, only sharing what a court would usually find today if you made that argument.

You're forgetting the unwritten "but drugs" exception.

If you genuinely believe that people being able to engage in a frank exchange of views hasn't changed anything... how did Orange Man get elected? :D

BBSes weren't powerful enough to elect him.

4chan/Reddit pretty much propelled his primary campaign. He was just one of the candidates before the memes

> We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought.

And we still do. Some of the corporations have changed, some are the same. What else is new?

> That is not by any means a free society.

And it still isn't. No "EARN IT Act" needed for that.

If the government has the benefits of the internet, and no one else does, isn’t society less free than if no one has it?

> We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.

Some of us did. America has never been a free and Democratic society for all, and we’re actually closer to achieving that than ever if you’re not white/straight/upper-middle class, which is why they’re so desperate to push this bill through.

The government had de-facto control of all mass media before the internet. They could control the narrative to a degree they didn’t need tight surveillance. They lost control of that with the internet and are desperate to get it back.

Yes, but if you shut down the most "free" information platform, and make it only free to those who are rich enough to pay for anonymity then you are doing aggregious harm to democracy and freedom. Perhaps moreso that anyone has ever done in human history. Look no further than China to see the wrong way of doing things and that is precisely what this bill seeks to do. It is not to "protect the children" it is to protect the elite power centers from criticism and transparency by forcing you to open up all your secrets and communications to them to judge and eliminate the challenges and criticisms of their power under the guise of "law and order".

In theory, but often the level of freeness, and your access to democracy, depended on the color of your skin or your gender. (Which is still the case today, to a great extent, but it was even worse 30, 50, 70, 100, etc. years ago.)

The gov isnt worried about criminals or terrorists: those guys are easy to deal with. The gov is worried about organised protests, like those canadian truckers, because protesters are protected by laws. Encrypted communications is an obvious enabler of such protests.

The individuals in the government are worried about all threats. Canadian truckers are certainly one of them, but not a very important one other than they gum up commerce and may eventually develop into a riot.

Criminals and terrorists don’t use public comms to communicate (at least the smart ones). They use dead drops, trusted couriers, and in-person talking.

Protestors by default must communicate in the open, and to each other. They are much more disorganized.

The smart criminals and terrorists are generally the ones working for the government.

Of course they're worried about criminals and terrorists, as well as protests; nobody wants to watch their children die in a home invasion or a burning skyscraper, not even politicians, and nobody wants habitual violent criminals to repeatedly victimize innocent people (unless they identify strongly with the criminals). Peaceful protests can be a powerful instrument for change, including taking away government power, but only when the protestors are willing to die for their cause.

Every day, police officers and prosecutors go to work and spend much of the day worrying about criminals, and a few of them are assigned to worry about terrorists too. When they go home, they have to keep worrying about criminals, too, because their job makes them tempting targets for revenge. I'm not saying people don't seek employment as police officers and prosecutors in order to have free reign for their sadistic urges --- they do --- but that's not the majority and it's never the whole story.

Terrorism can have extremely large effects, just not desirable ones. When the people think the government is doing a bad enough job of protecting them from criminals, terrorists, and protests, that government is at high risk of losing its power entirely, which is something almost nobody in the government wants.

Even anarchists often don't want it, because there's no guarantee that what replaces the government will be better. You may not like the FBI, but if the alternative is the Proud Boys, better the devil you know. Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar.

> Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar.

A mostly liberal-democratic provisional government that was violently overthrown eight months later by a Bolshevik coup because it refused to deal with the same problems (war and famine) that caused the Tsar to be overthrown?

Have we all forgotten the February revolution..?

That's a very interesting definition of "liberal"! They were about as liberal as the british parliament at the time, and that I cannot call liberal in any sense of the word.

And they did lose it in no time, yes

> like those canadian truckers,

I thought the protestors turned out to, by the numbers, prove to be not Canadian and not Truckers.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example. There seem to be more relevant protests in the US you only have to go back a short while.

Meanwhile, it's difficult to assess if the US government has a great track record at dealing with terrorists. We're unsure of how many incidents are prevented.

> Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example.

I think it's pretty clear why the parent poster choose that protest as an example of government tyrrany, and not the, uh, couple of months of gassing, rubber-coated bullets, and beatings that preceded it.

Any source on that?

With the paranoidal view you're placing yourself outside the realms of sensible discussion.

You can't really think that some politicians are knowingly and deliberating proposing an existential threat to "free society and democracy."

Interesting. How would you describe the situation?

> You can't really think that some politicians are knowingly and deliberating proposing an existential threat to "free society and democracy."

Why not? Many people oppose free society, and democracy has never been popular among elites.

OK I should have changed 'some politicians' to 'most of those politicians proposing this law'

If you mean to say that the ones who aren't knowingly doing this to weaken democracy are simply useful idiots, yeah, you're right.

Most of them probably aren't malicious, they're likely just entirely ignorant and easily manipulated, making them just as bad as the malicious ones, given their job is supposed to be to make informed decisions for the benefit of their constituents.

Why not?

There are politicians that support the overthrow of US democracy and the instatement of a dictator. A really obvious example: Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor. He's said the US military should overthrow the government. Literally.. those are the words from his mouth.

Im not going to list a bunch of politicians... but Flynn will say it outright. So your assumption is clearly wrong.

Citation please

edit: Found this. He meant the opposite. Of course.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/flynn-coup-go...

No, they're not knowingly and deliberately proposing an existential threat to "free society and democracy." That would be political suicide in the US. They're knowingly and deliberately proposing an existential threat to free society and democracy. That's not a paranoid view, just stating the obvious.

> They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys.

But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys turns them rather reliably into bad guys.

Yeah but it always looks different if that power is going to be in your hands. Or maybe it doesn't and they just don't care, but I'd like to think it's the former.

Nobody ever said politicians were smart

Everybody thinks they're incorruptible, and they often extend that to institutions they identify with. Very, very few people have ever honestly grappled with their shadow side. Even if you do, you may still prefer your own shadow side to that of whoever your opponents are.

> Everybody thinks they're incorruptible

It chafes me a little to see this so often phrased as something "everybody" thinks. There are enough people who feel otherwise in my social circles that it's pretty easy for me to consider this as a shockingly dumb assumption for a person to hold.

Though I do acknowledge that you're probably close to right from a purely numerical perspective.

I agree.

Just to be clear, "shockingly dumb" is in reference to the incorruptibility belief, not to your claim that it's "everyone".

Though from your response, I think you probably understood what I meant despite the ambiguous phrasing.

Oh, I didn't know! I thought you meant that the claim that there were literally zero people who thought they were corruptible was shockingly dumb, and I agreed, even though (construed literally) it's what I had said. Thanks for clarifying!

There is a simple rule of thumb: if you would not grant a power to your worst enemy, you do not grant it to your friends either.

Its not like history tends to repeat in cycle regardless of the age and technology.

> But we all know

Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z.

Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian, compared to the relative minority it seems to be now.

disclaimer: I am not American, and know nothing about American politics.

I think all these start around Trump's administration. Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news, and some media/social media start censoring his supporter.

After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.

> Trump...misleading information...free-speech-supporter back off alot.

Trump is a correlation to (not cause of) both the left and right in America turning sharply populist and inward looking in recent years. Populists tend not to be concerned with principles like freedom of speech, or the concerns of the global community.

> After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.

Rather democracy supporters back off…

Nah, there was a noticable shift already in the later Obama years, if not earlier.

It is ironic that we should trust government to be an arbiter of truth, given that our government has been a source of "misinformation" for years (a.k.a. blatantly lying to support an agenda).

McCarthyism predates Trump, and I'm sure that social pressures of what you can and can't say in public date back far further

The flip side to being a libertarian is that you still support legislation to e.g. breakup monopolies and protect 'basic' rights, as needed. A sibling comment mentions Trump - he went so far in the opposite direction there is a considerable backlash to seeing what a truly regulated and unprotected environment looks like...

Trump it can be argued went so far to break basic things like US mail, and encourage corporate monopoly, the course correction in the other direction is not only reasonable but expected...turns out divisive (fascist) wannabe dictators are not a good recipe for freedom either...

> Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays.

The alternative to giving a democratic government power isn't 'nobody has power'.

The alternative to giving a democratic government power is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.

When a democratic government has it, you get some say in how it is used.

I think that view is a little too simplistic. There are some powers you probably just shouldn't give to governments, ever. There are some powers that are fine to give to governments, because they're unlikely to be abused, because abusing them confers little benefit to the abuser.

Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot about how it is used ends up being public, so people can audit its use. And so on.

But I think if there's a power that is likely to be abused by government, and really hard to put checks on that (ab)use, then the government just should not have that power, no matter how useful that power might be.

The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal because they're the "good guys" is that even if they genuinely are the good guys, you never know who is going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and certainly won't pass laws to take that power away.

Often the alternative to giving a democratic government power really is for nobody to have that power, and in many other cases the alternative is for the power to be decentralized, so that many people have some of it.

For example, we might give a democratic government the power to tap everybody's phone calls at once, but if we don't, that doesn't necessarily imply that undemocratic, unelected oligarchs, or anyone else, is tapping everybody's phone calls at once. There might just be nobody who has the power to tap phone calls, as is the case with secure free software running on trustworthy hardware, or there might be many people who have the power to tap only a few phone calls.

And we might give a democratic government the power to assign workers to jobs, for example, as the Soviets did. Alternatively, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could assign workers to jobs, as in a coal-mining company town; but an additional possibility is that workers and employers, or unions and employers, negotiate with one another, each limiting the power of the other.

We might give a democratic government the power to decide what's for dinner each day, which sounds ridiculous but is exactly the standard practice in kibbutzim and in school lunch programs in democracies. Conceivably, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could decide what's for dinner each day, though I don't know of any examples; the usual alternative is for each family to decide what's for dinner each day independently, though in many cases this degenerates to an undemocratic, unelected head of household deciding. Often enough, some household members prefer school cafeteria foodoid products to the results, despite having no say in that decision-making process either.

In 2014 a Princeton study posited that the US is more of an oligarchy, than a democracy.

So you're saying that HN has matured? :-)

There is certainly a whole lot less of "we could build an app to solve it!" But there is also more naivete in other ways. I think this is more broadly reflected in society as a whole.

Honestly … times have changed. I was a optimistic liberterian once … I still am… but look at reality. You give people and bussines to much freedome and they use it for things that harm society. Facebook and telegram for example. Snake oil sellers where allways a problem but now it seeems to explode and destroy my liberterian word view :(

Just interesting, how does Telegram specifically harm society? By letting right wing freaks have their echo chambers there, or do you mean something else?

I meant that. Telegram was symbolic for how the freedom of some can impair the freedom of others. I have nothing against e2e encryption or privacy but as I said my liberterian worldview starts to crumble … toward what? I dont know

If you deny them Telegram, Facebook, Parler or any other online platform, people would gather offline and have their echo chambers there. Just as they did before Internet. So you're basically saying 1st amendment harms society, not online platforms.

Hmm no I am not saying that. The problem is that if they would meet offline they wouldnt be a group of 20.000 people or so in one room with the easy possibility to spread their worldview. Free speech is something valuable but beeing able to downstream information to thousand of people instant that easy is a problem. There is a difference between free speach and lying with intent to spread a certain world view.

Edit; As I said I’m a libertarian and a group of whatever people talking what ever where ever is totally fine with me but manipulating people with intent is not protected by the First Amendment And shouldn’t be confused with free speech

I'm not sure what you mean by "manipulating people with intent", but certainly many kinds of manipulation are well within the bounds of freedom of speech as it is generally imagined, and especially within the bounds of what should be legally protected according to even minimal theories of civil liberties. So it sounds like you're less libertarian than even fairly non-libertarian people.

As I said, how big the number is, is the problem. I dont say they should ban telegram or sth. The problem is how easy it is to misuse this platforms for malintent. Thats has nothing to do what someone is saying. It has somethig to do how the message is distributet and if the intent ist the articulating of ones free mind or manipulating the others for benefit….

I think the issue less about finding a good number and more about promoting critical thinking so people can go to a space, consume the words and then call bullshit as they wish.

>beeing able to downstream information to thousand of people instant that easy is a problem

Was it a problem a couple centuries ago, when offline media emerged and blossomed? It was the same effect, just smaller scale. Yet, free press is valued as essential for democracy.

the one thing you can be certain of about giving someone authority over others is that they will abuse it. some more, some less. but everyone will abuse it to a degree.

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests.

I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is to fix what’s broken in the first place. In a healthy democracy the government will take up only the responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than that.

Depends on definition of „people’s rights“.

If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz, then you’ll need big government. That will likely abuse tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.

My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing.

Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.

My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%.

Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes).

If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.

Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.

> With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying.

There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.

Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors and assumptions about how effectively community care could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6% might even be a country where the hospital system fell apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's still a very high rate - from the richest country in the world.

The USA may be the richest country in the world but it doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially considering how widespread inequalities are.

If the real number of cases is double that, then that would be a death rate of ... about 0.6%. And not everyone catches the disease in one pandemic wave, so the total population death rate in the US isn't going to reach that.

And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.

There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.

It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.

The hospital system literally vanishing is not really a possible failure condition. It just doesn't work like that, medical staff will always keep trying to treat whoever they can with whatever resources they have.

The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.

Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.

As long as their is oxygen support and health care people show up for work you are correct. In Mexico and other countries with less access to modern health care the death rate seems to be an order of magnitude higher. (if the CDC data is valid)

This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.

Amazingly, it's true, in countries like Mexico and the USA the death rate was an order of magnitude higher than in Australia: 0.23% and 0.27%, respectively, rather than 0.016%. But even in countries with good access to modern health care the rate was often pretty bad; Italy had 0.24%, the UK 0.23%, Spain 0.20%, and France also 0.20%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

> And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical.

No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.

If you want to see how the virus correlates with death you ought to look at rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, not wealth.

The argument I think was never any concrete number of deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life difficult (epidemiology can still inform political decisions).

Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.

Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.

I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.

> Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.

I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.

It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?

The thing happened everywhere. French prime minister met with mayors and had political meetings unmasked, shaking hands and stuff, at the peek of the pandemic, got covid, then blamed his 11 yo daughter for it.

Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.

The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.

> even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes).

My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.

A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.

Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.

I’m surprised you’re happy about the pass. the only thing the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn’t want the vaccine are forced to be vaccinated. I suppose you didn’t have to be forced, so why do you care ?

so why do you care ?

Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries.

E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1]

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

We had this statistic in france too, but it happens that ICU saturation occures every winter, for flu and such. it’s been on the headlines for almost a decade every year. Mostly due to population getting older, and hospitals poorer. I wonder if it isn’t the same everywhere.

I’m not getting the vaccine and had covid twice. I have antibodies, which should be recognized in lieu of vaccine. I took no space in a hospital.

It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?

Good for you :), but it's not about individuals. Only a small portion of unvaccinated people are hospitalized. However, even 1% of a dense population is still a lot of people and hospitals + ICs get clogged up. The probability of hospitalization is 17x smaller for vaccinated people and the probability of needing IC treatment 33x smaller [1]. So, if all people were vaccinated, we wouldn't have the issues we had last 6 months. Now we have a lot of delayed surgeries, including cancer surgeries, etc.

It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?

As the statistics show, no. Though luckily, things are changing now that Omicron is dominant, so I think all limitations are lifted pretty soon here.

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

Here in New York Andrew Cuomo spent the last decade closing hospitals and reducing hospital capacity at the behest of HMOs, for-profit hospitals, health insurance companies and associated banks and Wall Street investors. It is expensive to maintain hospitals and have enough spare hospital capacity in case of a crisis, and officials at the state and federal level chose profits over capacity.

For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).

1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people

2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...

I've lost a grandma, auntie and am about to lose a father-in-law. All have cancer that was either detected late or was not operable because of there being no IC spaces available.

All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.

Perhaps the healthcare industry reacted poorly.

The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but higher, than Covid.

I’m more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed hospital well before there were vaccines.

It was never going to be 10%. The virus is too localized on the elderly, who isolate and vaccinate themselves well anyway.

I'm probably making assumptions, so I'd like to clarify, which government prohibited travel to such a degree?

In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.

I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.

Australia. NSW to be specific since each state had its own response. But US law affects a lot of services I use.

And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.

The people of Australia get to vote in 4 months for a new government. If people really hated the covid restrictions as much as you, then they will get rid of the people who implemented them.

Wellz it’s a bit more complicated than that, the upcoming election is for the feds who had not much to do with the lockdowns (which was the state govs)

True in respect to direct lockdown orders. However the Feds were responsible for obtaining vaccine supply. A pretty dismal timetable for that led to the term Vaccine Strollout...

Sorry for you, but your country's democratic process is probably broken. In my country covid measures were always just the bare minimum to keep things running and lifted/alliveated as soon as possible.

You’re the exception. Out of curiosity, what country is that ?

In switzerland there was no strict confinment, rather a strong recomendation to stay at home. The most that was imposed was closure of bars and non-essential shops, and restriction of private gatherings to 5 people. Work for home was mendatory unless you could not work from home.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...

Whilst you’re entitled to your opinion, it wasn’t 2 years, it was 6 months of not travelling to the regions in NSW: the rights that were protected were the rights to preservation of life as evidenced by the significantly lower excess mortality in Australia. You obviously value these things differently to me, and it’s hard to have this argument without conflating the other aspects of our federal government that I think we would absolutely agree with, but a once in several generations pandemic is a good reason to do something drastic

That is the popular ideology that was used to justify most of history's worst atrocities.

Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament) satirized the situation in this grook, entitled Majority Rule, in 01969:

His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,

and there were more of them than of the others.

That is, they constituted that minority,

which formed the greater part of the majority.

Within the party, he was of the faction,

that was supported by the greater fraction.

And in each group, within each group, he sought

the group that could command the most support.

The final group had finally elected,

a triumvirate whom they all respected.

Now of these three, two had the final word,

because the two could overrule the third.

One of these two was relatively weak,

so one alone stood at the final peak.

He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair

which formed the most part of the three that were

elected by the most of those whose boast

it was to represent the most of most

of most of most of the entire state —

or of the most of it at any rate.

He never gave himself a moment's slumber

but sought the welfare of the greatest number.

And all the people, everywhere they went,

knew to their cost exactly what it meant

to be dictated to by the majority.

But that meant nothing, — they were the minority.

⁂

The idea of limited government I described, which is fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 01689. Rousseau responded in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute sovereignty of the "will of the people", in The Social Contract, calling it "the general will": https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of political parties.

Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was incoherent in 01785: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox

In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried out this Terror justified by Rousseau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror

In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity had ever known, a system itself established by the will of the people of the Southern States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A few short years later, the will of the people of the US decreed that those people should start killing one another en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four million delivered out of bondage.

In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93

In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out, the will of the people would murder ten million people in concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people" was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than Condorcet had ever imagined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem

In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history, or possibly the second largest, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much of the information needed to make the decisions that are optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

⁂

The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In other cases the policy of establishing limitless state power was popular, but the atrocities in which it inevitably culminated were not.

That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that the will of the people could never err and would always promote the general welfare was an understandable error, but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism—giving individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of the people—works less badly. I know it's not very inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but that's the best we can do so far.

This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of that government.

> in 01969:

> in 01689.

> in 01762

> in 01785:

> In 01793,

> In 01850,

> In 01918,

> In 01933,

> In 01951,

> In 01958

> In 01974

> In 01762

You do know that this affectation makes you look pretty darn ridiculous, don't you?

Well, if you didn't, at least now you do. HTH!

Anyone who reads both my comment and this reply, and thinks this reply is of more value, is in any case beyond hope.

YHBT. HAND.

> YHBT.

OK, thanks for the admission that you're a troll.

> HAND.

POAD.

A government can be both limited and strong!

Those are independent properties. If you don't see the distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these discussions.

A democratic government is a government built and run for the 51%. Technically, pure anarchy is the only form of government that is for the people by the people because... theres only the people. Not some entity set above and beyond the reaches of 'The people', with authority over the people. Not that i believe in anarchy as the epitome of governance, but Bakunin has left me slightly jaded ever since i read him in high school.

I would agree with you that a free society is one that protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK, these power structures that we have put in place are not for the people but are for the politicians within that government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your populace is the key path to power.

in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution, it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their moral responsibility to protect the people.

Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!

While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!

Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save!

Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh, Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a company over 1!

Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the population to agree with the "We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!"

... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic, irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")

> Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!

Smoking is kind of a bad example here. Smoking has obvious secondary effects, i.e. secondhand smoke. I have no problem with tobacco smoking being banned from shared office spaces and other common public spaces. Sure, maybe make it possible to get somewhat easy permits to allow for things like smoking lounges, certain kinds of bars, etc. but overall I still consider it a positive that nobody is smoking at my office, movie theaters, practically all restaurants, on the train, etc.

You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell you want. But you don't have the right to force me to breathe whatever you're wanting to inhale.

> You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell you want.

This position puts you far to the liberal side of any existing internationally recognized democratic government; all of them currently place restrictions on what you are allowed to inhale, and contrary to vkou's point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30230039, that doesn't seem to be the only alternative to ceding power over what you inhale to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.

I agree but why do you need to government to tell you to do that? Move, tell him to put it out, or don't go to that bar that allows smoking...

Pre-smoking bans, people smoked everywhere, all the time. It wouldn't just be me asking one person to put out their cigarette, it would be me asking nearly half the restaurant to put out their cigarettes. And it wouldn't just be the one bar that allowed smoking, it would be practically every single restaurant in town. It would be on the bus. It would be on the train. It would be in the lobby of every hotel. It would be in the grocery store. It would be a good chunk of the office, on every floor.

Governments should have the right to scan human body and minds 24x7. Think of the massive number of lives saved! This will also mean more govt jobs and better employment!

> Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!

Yes, please.

> While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!

Wrong conclusion. (What, you wanna cut my HN procrastination by three quarters?!?) Correct conclusion: Just ban all that endlessly scrolling shit.

yeah, but you are creating a populace that is dependent on their government for motivation, morals and concept of time spent. Not a good long term strat, and is historically what you see in the death throws of an empire.

> creating a populace that is dependent on their government for motivation, morals and concept of time spent.

Huh? How does that follow? I don't think so. Seems at least as likely that "the government" is just collecting and codifying some of the populace's pre-existing norms.

TL;DR: [Citation needed]

> historically what you see in the death throws of an empire.

Throes.

Fuck knows if that's etymologically just a weird old spelling of 'throws' that has survived only in this particular usage or WTF it's all about, but nevertheless that's how it's usually spelled.

There has to be protections for minorities defined as people having minority view points. Otherwise there is tyranny of the majority. A democracy protects the rights of minorities which includes preserving their speech. That may mean allowing opposing viewpoints to take root.

If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic.

To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.

> Free society means limited government

Strong disagree. A good government protects freedom from big private companies that feast on it. Antitrust laws cannot be enforced by a weak government, and without those, there can't really be freedom.

> A good government

if only absolutely everyone could totally agree on one single definition of "good"...

Then you think China is more free than the United States. Some people disagree

Maybe those people absolutely understand the implications for free society. What if there was a power transfer on the background, over many years, unnoticed, and the winning group now doesn't want any disruptions coming from encrypted communication in the future?

It’s truly amazing how many people are conspiracy theorists these days.

I understand your point, but parent did not say it was a deliberate conspiracy. It could also be a dynamic that just happens to push in a certain direction.

For example, the push for deregulation that befenits corporates does not require a conspiring sect of CEOs to secretly infect the law making process, but the general thought frame that is pervasive among the boards of those companies will affect their actions and what think tanks they affiliate with. All the separate lobbies, think tanks (which by the way might be just operating under such disguise, but are funded by external state actors), external corporate consultancy agencies on which governments rely on -- all those might create a current that brings down democratic institutions with no one deliberately doing that, except for a few fascistoid nuts perhaps.

What is no surprise is that all those corporates and those deep state instutions work to further their own interest. The issue is that democracy has lost control of it, and now they are running wild.

Add in corporate media (that are from the same school of thought like those boards of giant corporates) in this mix and you have got a really nasty dynamic, where democracy is just something you need to manage with Public Relations and marketing.

Ending Section 230, incrementally or all in one go, has been increasingly on the minds of politicians (mostly but not exclusively conservative ones) for some time now. There's a lot more to EARN IT than just that, but some of them will vote for anything that increases the liability exposure of anyone hosting anything online.

All section 230 does is make it so that "platforms" can remove posts it doesn't like without needing to assume liability for every other posts. Unless they think Twitter is going to hire a few million employees to screen every post, Twitter and the rest would simply turn off the platform to anyone who isn't verified or doesn't otherwise sign a waiver releasing twitter of that liability (which was possible before CDA, as well, but nobody wanted to introduce that sort of barrier to social media/forums back then).

Section 230 is from 1996. For reference myspace launched in 2003. It has been modified since, but not in a way relative to this discussion. Section 230 classifies providers such as Facebook and Twitter as "interactive computer services" and not "information content providers." This protects them from lawsuits based on the content they provide.

I'm not arguing that Facebook should be held to the same standard as the person who creates the content. However, when Facebook services misinformation on COVID with negligent moderation or even intentional promotion, or they allow eighty thousand posts by Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)-controlled accounts in two years near an election, reaching 126 million users [1 (Mueller Report)], maybe there needs to be some amendment. Perhaps not completely recategorizing Facebook, but adding some more responsibilities on these major platforms to at least not promote bad information, polarizing content, and information campaigns from foreign governments. When I did some research into how to disincentivize social media companies from spreading misinformation, reforming 230 was the best option I saw.

Edit: I posted a more detailed version of this elsewhere on this thread to provide more background. Then I realized I couldn't delete this abridged version.

[1] Mueller, R. S. M. (2019, March). Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I of II. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

If they curate and editorialize they are partly content providers. Where to draw the line is not clear.

I agree. My final recommendation was to treat them with the same responsibilities as media companies which still have a lot of protection, but not as many protections as social media companies.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.

Democracy only directly benefits the people, not those in power. The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship in terms of leaders keeping key supporters happy (the people vs. just those that hold office and control the military) is that democracies tend to employ more creative people with society-enhancing goals, thus driving technology forward and maybe even extending our lifetimes (via better healthcare).

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts

Oh, they understand perfectly.

Power-hungry people love authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is opposed by democracy.

They are the threat.

Its nice to see that the ACLU actually opposes something that stomps on american civil liberties these days!

It’s because all those orgs are co-opted by tptb. Thoughtcrime is already here, it was welcomed eagerly.

it's almost comical how politicians always use the same tactic for destroying online privacy too - "think of the children!"

> While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully.

The original bill was originally pushed because certain republican accounts was banned from certain social media platforms. It is explained pretty well on its Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act#Events_leading_to_...).

One potential reason why it is still getting pushed is that politicians on both sides of the fence is still afraid of the power that social media have, and they are using the pretext of "protect the children" in order to get bipartisan support and getting some distance to the historical events that lead up to the creation of the bill.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.

I proffer instead that this outcome isn't a side effect but their ultimate goal.

> the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully.

I think, what most people are missing, is that Democratic (the free world) governments have lost control of the narrative. It's not that there wasn't corruption before, but people trusted the government more back in the day. Before the immersion of social media, information moved slowly. There wasn't free channels to transfer information (the Media controlled what can get out) and people couldn't take high-quality photos, videos and live stream to their fellow citizens.

This changed now. This means the government and politicians can't control the narrative anymore (ie: almost all politicians are corrupt now!). This is doubly worse since young people disproportionately use social media. TV is still watched, but only by seniors. They'll be gone soon and the politicians will have to rule a ruly population.

The next decade is going to be quite challenging to Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Privacy, Freedom of Movements and all freedoms and liberties really. Many of the liberties the West population take for granted are quite expensive; you better be ready for this change.

This entire comment is the definition of FUD.

It's not that complicated:

Politicians don't know technology

Politicians hear there's this thing that lets bad guys have fully secure conversations that even 3 letter agencies can't crack.

Politicians see blocking that as a political win.

All of this nonsense about corruption... you think politicians are successfully going to get social media giants to intercept DMs that say bad things about them?

Or this is the first step to a CPP-esque lockdown on free speech?

That's fantasy at best and a disturbing level of paranoia at worst.

Stop trying to explain for Politicians. Ignorance is just as harmful and evil.

> This entire comment is the definition of FUD.

This would have been true if this was the first bill. But this bill (and variants of it) keep getting proposed again and again. From different and multiple angles. It's not a small political win here they are looking for.

> you think politicians are successfully going to get social media giants to intercept DMs that say bad things about them?

Yes. But you need the Technology there first. Once it's there, it's much easier to pass these things.

> Or this is the first step to a CPP-esque lockdown on free speech?

Yes. It worked for China. So it might work for us.

> That's fantasy at best and a disturbing level of paranoia at worst.

It's not. The amount of restrictions and surveillance we have today is unprecedented. Things can move fast once the technology is ready and the moment is there to seize.

So you're saying your own comment is FUD except "they keep pushing the bill!"

You agree your comment is FUD except... politicians keep pushing for a bill they see as a political win.

Right.

And your entire comment is doing exactly what you said I shouldn't: explaining for politicians.

Except you're taking this paranoid interpretation where elected officials are un-ironically intentionally trying to turn the US into the next CPP.

Also I love the very well buried lede with "amount of restrictions". Might be related to the pandemic that killed millions but who knows...

The Internet wasn't the first time we had free speech in both senses of the word, though. Before the era of broadcast television, the FCC running a de-facto censorship regime, and the Five Filters; everyone read newspapers to get their news. This prior era of media was a lot more like the Internet than I think a lot of people would care to admit. We had clickbait, they had yellow journalism; we had Trump, they had the Know-Nothings; etc.

One other constant shared between the pre- and post-broadcast eras of media was an extremely high level of distrust towards politicians. Why? Well, the handful of companies that owned TV broadcast licenses weren't about to start biting the hand that fed them. Also, the FCC outright banned them from pushing overtly political narratives. This ultimately acted to reduce the total amount of information voters knew about their candidates.

Let's say that you happen to have brainworms. And your local Senator promised on TV that every brainworm had a right to live in a person's head. You, obviously, vote for him. However, Congress then passes the Comprehensive Brainworm Mitigation Act of 1973. But you remember that your Senator fought for you and your brainworms, because that's all you saw of him on TV. In fact, he goes to the press and swears how he fought to tone down the brainworm bill, or included an amendment for brainworm sanctuaries.

Today? Well, the moment that the Worm Free Children Act of 2023 passes, you're already getting pings on Facebook and Twitter about how your Senator betrayed you. You hear rumors about how he secretly agreed to pass the bill months ago. Someone's already spamming you with memes about how he sleeps with earplugs in his ears, constantly in fear that a brainworm might slither into his ear canal. You're talking in realtime with millions of other brainworm hosts, all of whom are angry and planning protests against your brainworm-hating Senator.

Of course, all of that could be a complete and total fabrication. It does not matter. Defamation is dual to censorship, after all.

This actually isn't a new condition, but regression to the mean. American politics in the 1800s was chock full of people with brainworms trading wild accusations around in similar fashions. The main difference between then and now was just the speed at which news travelled, but the effects were the same.

Edit: See thread below, the EARN IT act does not in any way reclassify the designation of social media companies under section 230 or solve the issues mentioned in this post with 230. The change to 230 just provides exceptions for CSAM. However, keep reading if you want background on 230 and why many people are trying to change it.

I want to provide some background on section 230 which the EARN IT act proposes to amend. I was against regulating social media companies, then I researched and wrote a paper on misinformation and changed my opinion on whether or not any policy action should be taken. I'm not saying the EARN IT act is correct (Edit: It's not), but here are some excerpts with sources on why I believe Section 230 should be amended in some way. I hope it makes more clear the reasons people want to change section 230.

Social media companies currently enjoy protections from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. For reference, Myspace was launched in 2003. Section 230 allows social media companies to be classified as interactive computer services and not information content providers (Gallo, 2021). Due to this designation, social media companies are not responsible for the content they distribute. Even media companies in America are still held responsible for libel or false information designed to incite immediate violence or public harm (FCC, 2021) which social media companies are not. The media is still provided many freedoms guaranteed by our constitution while being held responsible for gross negligence.

Social media companies do not adequately moderate the content they promote to their users, allowing members of society to be presented misinformation by domestic and foreign actors resulting in polarization, the propagation of false facts, and the loss of faith in our democratic electoral process. Social media algorithms, motivated by financial gains, promote divisive content and have little incentive to prevent the distribution of false information. This false, divisive information comes from internal actors, such as those who want to discredit climate change and COVID facts. It also comes from external actors, such as Russia, who want to destabilize our democratic systems and influence our policy choices in their best interest.

For example, YouTube shared videos containing COVID-19 misinformation 20 million times, generating 71 million reactions in eight months (Gallo, 2021). Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a private organization funded by a close confidant of Putin (Bowen, 2021). Eighty thousand posts were made on Facebook by IRA-controlled accounts in two years, reaching 126 million users. The IRA even organized political rallies in the United States through these accounts (Mueller, 2019). Intelligence services have determined that Russia uses its cyber teams to "undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process," as Russia's influence operations demonstrated in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton (Sayler, 2021).

I'm not saying that social media companies should be held to the same standard as content creators or the media, or that the EARN IT act is right. I haven't looked at the implications of that. However, the current law is outdated and something needs to change the incentives of social media companies to prevent these externalities (influencing elections, misinformation, etc) from effecting our population.

FCC. (2021, January 8). Broadcasting False Information. Federal Communications Commission. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/broadcasting-false-info...

Gallo, J. A. G., & Cho, C. Y. C. (2021, January). Social Media: Misinformation and Content Moderation Issues for Congress (No. R46662). Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46662

Mueller, R. S. M. (2019, March). Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I of II. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

Sayler, K. M. S., & Harris, L. A. H. (2021, June). Deep Fakes and National Security (No. IF11333). Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11333

EARN IT is tightly focused on the perceived issue of CSAM material, exploitive "grooming" of minors via the Internet, and the like. It would do zilch to incent large social media companies against using algorithms that implicitly promote outrage-inducing content, much of it naturally being fake news and misinformation. It would also make it harder for smaller, more independent actors to counter these dynamics - because increased, more complex regulation and heavier liability always hinders smaller actors to the benefit of larger ones. You're conflating two issues which have very little to do with one another.

You are right. I just read the bill. I believe 230 needs to be amended and that the damage it provides is real. But, the EARN IT act does not fix that. I do think it's important for people to understand why 230 is bad. But again, this act does not remove the designation as an "interactive computer service." It just provides exemptions for CSAM. I added an edit up top.

When I read in the article:

> the EARN IT Act would, if passed, pare back online service providers’ broad immunity under a federal law called Section 230, exposing them to civil lawsuits and state-level criminal charges for the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) posted by their users.

I assumed it was reclassifying social media companies, which would have broad implications, under the stated purpose of CSAM. I wanted to provide background on why 230 should be changed, not on the content of EARN IT. But I agree it conflates two separate things.

Here is the bill for anyone else that wants to read it.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6544...

Are you looking for the government to censor all "divisive" information or just "divisive information that is false"?

> For example, YouTube shared videos containing COVID-19 misinformation 20 million times, generating 71 million reactions in eight months (Gallo, 2021).

How would reworking Section 230 fix this? Most of that information isn't punishable by the federal government, it falls under first amendment protections.

A lot of the most dangerous speech online is protected speech, the exclusions here like libel or incitement to violence are very narrow. For better or worse, the government can't punish people over saying that vaccines are dangerous. The only entities that can legally crack down on that information are the private entities that control their own platforms.

I often find in critiques of Section 230 that people have (for lack of a better word) an optimistic view of what the government can and can't do in regards to speech. Remember that a lot of the TV content from stations like Fox News are not covered by Section 230, and they're still legal. If the government had the ability to shut that misinformation down, why would those networks still be operating today? Even just regulations on how sorting algorithms work for social media are not certain to pass a Supreme Court challenge.

----

You link to the FCC rules on broadcasting, here's what they state:

> FCC rules specifically say that the "public harm must begin immediately, and cause direct and actual damage to property or to the health or safety of the general public, or diversion of law enforcement or other public health and safety authorities from their duties."

Covid misinformation is obviously bad and harmful, it has obviously made the pandemic worse and people have died because of it. Covid misinformation also doesn't rise to the standard that the FCC sets above; the Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that "immediate" harm is a pretty narrow category, and that causing "direct and actual damage" is also a kind of high bar to clear. The reality is that even if the government got rid of Section 230, it couldn't ban vaccine misinformation from Facebook. At best, it could impose large liabilities that made Facebook very nervous about having unvetted speech of any kind, as well as making it dangerous for any competitors or smaller companies to try and compete without a large legal team backing them up -- in other words, exactly the chilling effects and market consequences that people warn about whenever these bills come up.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.

The truly idiotic thing about it is that they aren't really: cryptography knows no jurisdiction, it's just mathematics. They are limiting the power of law abiding citizens to communicate freely, nobody else.

I agree it's dangerous not only for civil society, but also against other nation states. I have wondered why the TLAs seem enamored of this sort of anti-encryption legislation (since presumably they are the likely only technical enough members to write and promote it). My best guess is not that they "hate freedom" or that they are "compromised agents of a foreign power", but simply that they are fighting the last battle. The older cold war generation has retired, and people in positions of power within the TLAs are simply so consumed by foreign terrorist threats, that they aren't thinking about the fact that if they can read (and forge) these communications, then so can our geopolitical adversaries. Furthermore, the possible disruption of our entire economic (banking) and political system are made possible by such a vulnerability.

I'm reminded of when I was told for years that eliminating net neutrality would destroy the Internet as we know it. Then it was eliminated and the Internet is exactly the same as it was before. Point being, I am extremely skeptical that this bill is an existential threat to free society and democracy.

Anyway, the text of the bill clearly states that offering encryption services cannot serve as a basis for liability under the new CSAM carveout. I haven't seen critics of the bill explain why that language isn't good enough to protect E2EE services from liability. Most critics just pretend that part of the bill doesn't exist.

I agree with your comment, but just to point out something counterintuitive:

> privateer (NSO etc) threat actors,

E2EE is actually a boon to NSO and friends. It's how they get to deliver their exploits to targets without the service operator being able to inspect them or filter them, or retroactively analyze them to plug the exploits. NSO doesn't have any traffic inspection capability, so their antics rely entirely on exploiting target devices, and E2EE counterintuitively helps in that case.

If iMessage weren't E2EE it would be very easy for Apple to implement a heuristic to look for suspicious messages and keep a copy for further analysis, or automatically run them through their codebase in a sandbox and see if it results in any indicators of compromise. But they can't do any of that, and that's how NSO sometimes goes on years exploiting the same iOS bugs before Apple figures them out. With E2EE, you have to rely entirely on endpoint security, and the provider can't help you server-side.

> E2EE is actually a boon to NSO and friends.

I think you're right, but I don't think it's due to some first principles contradiction between E2EE and exploits as much as it is largely a historical anomaly that customers have looked to service providers for security. The track record shows pretty clearly that the service provider's interest in customer security only goes as far as not to be reputationally damaging - we've seen plenty of communications companies actively helping authorities to spy on their own customers.

> If iMessage weren't E2EE it would be very easy for Apple to implement a heuristic to look for suspicious messages

Indeed, it would at the very least be easier, but let's assume Apple did have this capability. The first order of priority would be stopping spam, which is orders of magnitude more common and problematic than targeted exploits. Simply taking a look at the app store kind of shows their ambition level. At best, Apple is going to want to be "more secure than Android", but beyond that.. it's simply not gonna be a priority (and Apple is even one of better ones).

> NSO sometimes goes on years exploiting the same iOS bugs before Apple figures them out

Yes, but I think this is temporary. Citizen Labs have been shortening this round trip time enormously simply by having analysis or software deployed on likely targets' devices. CrowdStrike and similar security companies operate on a similar model, acting as a counter-surveillance trusted third party. On medium-term time scales, I think such models are more ethical, have a superior incentive structure and, most importantly, will prove to be more effective than the usual half-assed service provider solutions. At least, I hope I'm right.

It’s bad, but there is still some light.

This bill, remember, removes Section 230 protections against civil lawsuits for noncompliance.

The solution is fairly easy though. If your messaging app runs somewhere hard to sue (Russia, China), good luck bringing a lawsuit. Even better if it’s decentralized with no clear leader to sue.

If anything this may help get people further away from regulated tech companies.

Isnt it true that the "society" has dug its own grave ?

Where were the freedom of speech defenders (aclu et al) when the progressives and policians in that spectrum celebrated shutting down opinion by effectively monopolies of information (twitter, FB, google, cc infra)

Why is there no common ground? When speech is shut down, no matter the side its on, the net winner is the state.

Frankly there is no room for bipartisan support of anti security state.... Until and unless there is recognition of section 230 enabled abuses that are still ongoing.

Obviouly 230 should not apply uniformly to every single website, but thats the kind of nuance that is missing from the current debate.

But democracy existed before whatsapp, why cant it exist after ?

I mean I agree with what you say it s convenient to anonymously communicate private thought over public telecom fibres, but... I mean... democracy and "freedom" as a Nation citizrns are unrelated to this, completely unrelated.

Taking away freedom of speech and freedom of press, just because it's no longer talking to my neighbor on the corner or smashing ink into paper is the issue.

I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow, by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit. But that has nothing to do with government censorship, that's pure libertarianism and letting the publisher bear the cost. The entire notion of inching forward a general level of public disapproval for encryption is indeed terrifying. The template for government now is so well-worn, to take a 2/3rds opinion in the dumb populace and get them to go against the other 1/3rd in the name of safety; yet, we see it much more clearly now. It's easier to fight.

The platforms that are the biggest targets of this are, unfortunately, extremely compromised already by their failure to regulate their own users. Take that and a dose of populist anger, and it's pretty easy to see how important freedoms will be eroded and ultimately, any kind of private speech will be held as grounds for suspicion, even though that speech has nothing to do with these platforms or this law.

Private speech and personal files never belonged on those platforms in the first place, and to me it's hard to believe anyone doing anything illegal at scale would even be using those platforms. What we're concerned with here is how the demolition of their privacy regulations might turn public opinion against those of us who manage our own privacy.

The one bright spot is that we all see it coming.

What you are proposing is that the only writers we should hear from are professionals at publishing institutions, who have editors to vet their work and lawyers to defend it.

That is certainly a take on what The Discourse should be! Return to the print media era, basically. But it is weird to see this take expressed in the same form it wants to end. Hacker News is social media and YCombinator is surely not going to stand beyond everything everyone posts here, or turn it over to spammers.

No, not exactly. Unlike in the print age, we all have the ability to set up a home server or distributed servers; we have the ability to reach anyone in the world. But we don't have a natural right to do that or extend our readership through someone else's platform. I can sit here and host whatever I'd like. In the BBS era, you were responsible for people posting illegal stuff on your board, and you were held responsible if your board was full of some bullshit propaganda, and it should still be that way. Zuckerberg should be treated like any asshole sysop who isn't tending his domain.

Hacker News does, to a large degree, moderate what people write here. Much more so than any social media platform. That's why it's still a functional platform. You can't just go on here and slander or espouse libelous conspiracy theories. You won't get far.

I'm not saying the gov't should regulate it! Not at all. I'm saying the content distribution networks shouldn't be shielded from civil litigation. HN and Facebook and Twitter aren't general carriers. If they simply delivered messages from point A to B, they might not be liable; but the more a service like FB news feed chooses to re-distribute something, the more they should be held liable for content. Simply putting it on top and letting it be downvoted, like HN, is far less nefarious than re-targeting it and repeating it relentlessly to the most vulnerable 15% of dumbasses who'll believe it. One person posting and having it sink isn't a big deal. But re-targeting that post to others makes you a re-poster. They aren't the postal service. They aren't neutral. Re-posting lies has monetary, reputational and social costs. Facebook profits directly from massively re-posting lies, but bears none of the cost. All I'm saying is that no one in a position to determine what's re-posted or not should be allowed to profit from spreading disinformation with one hand while externalizing those costs onto society, without a neutral arbitration willing to reassess the cost to individuals they harmed.

[edit] The current system can't support free speech, because shielding the re-printers of false speech makes it impossible to disentangle truth from propaganda; and in an asymmetrical field, propaganda always wins. Letting the courts sort it out and putting the social media networks on notice that they were responsible for veracity would solve this silly debate over whether "free speech" is being quashed on private networks, and also, encourage better forms of debate that conformed to certain standards of logic. And if you don't want to conform to any kind of logic, you can always set up your own server.

The established social media sites have lawyers on retainer and will appeal every single case up to the Supreme Court if necessary, and as slowly as they like, just to slow roll those submitting civil suits.

Opening up user-submitted content sites to civil damages would ensure that the largest social networks are the only ones that can afford to fight these cases in court. Smaller sites would become self-censored, even if they weren’t likely to be a target of a civil suit. This would lead to a further entrenchment of the largest social media sites, as they would go to bat for their users at least some of the time. They have to be seen to support their users, or else they would just find an alternative host that isn’t subject to the jurisdiction of the civil suits.

This whole idea seems like a nonstarter, impossible to implement, and with a laundry list of unintended consequences and is counterproductive to your stated goals of reduced propaganda. Instead of being primarily on centralized social media, fake news would be relegated to smaller fringe sites where it can’t be monitored as effectively as on the larger sites, further contributing to the echo chambers you argue against. Your intentions also seem antithetical to free speech between willing participants freely associating.

I think you just jumbled up a lot of counter-arguments here, some of which are interesting and others purely speculative. But let's start where you wound up: The speculation that it's "dangerous" to push fake news to smaller fringe sites hasn't been proven. I've seen a lot of damage arise as a result of the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories from fringe sites onto major sites. I don't see any evidence to support the idea that if the crazy grifters peddling those theories get shunted back to smaller sites, a significant portion of their audience will follow. The history of Facebook has been a pattern of people who have no idea how to find information being fed bad information. Most of those people probably won't find the fringe sites. They weren't there before. Their attention span is short. They're only dangerous as a herd.

The original argument against pushing extremists onto fringe sites was that the fringe sites were dark to law enforcement. I also don't buy that argument. It's a weak anti-encryption argument, and I also don't believe they're anywhere near as dark as LEOs claim. There might be some chatter that existed in the clear, but no one is currently plotting terrorist attacks out in the open on Facebook who will suddenly switch to Telegram if Facebook becomes party to civil suits.

Working back to your previous argument, the idea that the legal juggernauts of the big social networks will protect them while smaller sites self-censor is directly contradictory to what you say about fake news migrating to fringe sites. There's certainly less financial burden on a small site with less traffic to regulate what's posted, and as it stands, small sites do have to regulate what's posted, so it wouldn't be much more difficult. The only people who have broad exemptions over their liability for what's posted, currently, are the big social media sites. So let them spend that good money on their lawyers.

It’s not clear that smaller sites would have fewer lawsuits if the civil suits were to proceed, as they would be flooded with new users, and with new lawsuits, as soon as the large sites became hostile to them. There are already web3 social media sites that require login with a crypto wallet instead of a traditional user account. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create a site that would be immune to such lawsuits even on a small scale, so I’m not sure why you think that adding more lawyer paydays and violations of the right to freedom of speech and freedom to assemble are the answer. If the site doesn’t want to censor first amendment protected speech on their platform, but the government demands it, that’s a first amendment violation.

> I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow

Yeah, ok, I'm with you there...

> ... by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit.

Whoa there, hold on. If we hold Twitter and FB liable for that stuff, then that means we also have to hold every single web forum, support forum, mailing list, blogging platform, etc. liable as well. So those things essentially just disappear overnight, because no one is willing to expose themselves to that sort of legal liability.

Eventually, the only things you can read on the internet come from big corporations that can afford big legal teams, or people who have the technical know-how to host their own blog. HN is gone. Slashdot is gone. The Raspberry Pi support forum is gone. Hell, the LKML is gone. That's not an internet-world I want to live in.

No - I think there's a strong case to be made that FB and Twitter aren't like email providers or other forums like Reddit which are neutral in just showing content. Nor am I saying anything should be censored by the government. All I'm saying is that to the extent Twitter increased the viewership of some piece of propaganda, they should be allowed to be sued for damages. It's their ability to amplify that's the issue, particularly to amplify horrendous lies to the most gullible (and to profit from that). It's not their simple transmission from peer to peer. They're explicitly not just a forum, and they're not a telecommunications service.

> All I'm saying is that to the extent Twitter increased the viewership of some piece of propaganda, they should be allowed to be sued for damages.

With potentially infinite violations and incalculable damages, it’s no wonder why no one who runs any kind of user-submitted content site wants what you suggest here.

They don't want it, but I used to run a BBS, and a casino, and a forum, and I was aware I could be held accountable if I furthered the dissemination of something nefarious. Doesn't have to be CSAM, but the worse it is, the worse the penalty would be. It would be a hard pull to sue a provider over simple defamation that way if they did nothing to encourage or re-post it. But should Ron Watkins be made to answer for what's on 8kun? Fuck yea. And if he should, then why not Zuck?

If you want to run a system that amplifies shitheads, you're a shithead, and if they can be sued, so should you be. We're past the point where we need stimulus to encourage people to start message boards by shielding them from liability for what their users post. Again, this isn't an argument for censorship whatsoever, just allowing private parties to apportion blame when aggrieved. So even then, the scale of allowing something on a baby message board is nothing compared to the network effect of Twitter or FB. Let them bear the social costs that they're so desperate to externalize. FB and Twitter made their explosive growth exactly by exploiting their exemption from the thing that closed down publishers, namely, bearing responsibility for the content they publish.

I told you why I thought your idea was logistically unfeasible and politically incongruent with free speech and right to assembly.

You called me a shithead.

I don’t think your argumentation strategy is convincing me, but I’ll admit I’m not the smartest guy.

I didn't call you a shithead! This may be a classic case of me using the general "you" and someone taking it to mean you, personally. I'm not talking about you personally. *unless you're Ron Watkins. I'm saying if (someone) wants to run a board for conspiracy theorists and it includes amplifying defamation, e.g. saying someone drinks the blood of babies and doxing people, then they should be held responsible for the content posted by the shitheads they allow to post. Very clear.

Not about you.

I was mostly joking to prove a point, but I appreciate you saying that. I was just trying to cool the debate a bit, not stir the pot. I’ll admit I may have inflamed tensions myself, and for that I apologize. You seem to be arguing in good faith, even if I disagree with your position. You seem like a decent person.

I guess I’m more of a discordian, or a culture jammer type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you’re talking about as cognito hazards that spontaneously occur when you have a large enough target demographic for them to appeal to. I suppose I just find your cure worse than the disease. I’d rather take the bathwater and the baby than just the baby. Call me crazy, but I think that variety is the spice of life. Some conspiracies are true, and are only theories until proved. I look at them as pathogens that are endemic, yet without them, we would have no EICAR test files for validating legitimate points of view and nothing with which to compare the status quo. Outsider voices have free speech rights too, even if they use them for ends antithetical to our own; that we oppose them doesn’t justify annihilating them, or their views.

If discourse got us into this mess, I can’t see how less of it is going to get us out of it. We need more spaces for productive discussions, and we need more outreach to the fringes. How else will we convince anyone? If all you want is compliance, then the law is a poor tool for that. It only incentivizes circumvention once ratified.

I appreciate you saying that. And I'm a big ol' Robert Anton Wilson fan, a life-long ACLU contributor, and someone who views free speech as the only way to disinfect hate, racism and lies. And I am very much talking in good faith; this is what I believe. I just think that free speech doesn't have to be equally easy. I remember when news channels in the US had to give equal time to opposite political parties. I watched how that morphed into "fair and balanced" - giving 3 panelists a chance to beat up on the weakest member of the opposite group. I don't think Facebook or Twitter are in any sense Discordian or Erisian in the tidy bubbles they ferment. I agree it's foolish to go about trying to silence people on them. I'd say just shut the whole thing down. If you want real Eris, let a million websites bloom. The information ecosystem was much better when people had to go out hunting than when it was fed to them in a news stream on an app that was designed for nothing more than monetizing their attention span. And a lot fewer people were exposed to truly bad ideas.

I do have a breaking point, as far as ideas and speech; I believe that some ideas are stalking horses for violence, and the people who spout them have no goodwill. Some ideas can't be reasoned with. I'm glad I live in a country that still allows people to speak those ideas, but very few people will defend that notion anymore. I'll defend their right to speak those ideas. I just don't think a private company should be immune from the result of providing them a platform.

The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard. Somewhere along the line, people seem to have misconstrued that, because social media made it so easy to be heard that people assumed that was the definition of free speech.

> The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard.

There’s no right to be heard, true. Yet, these are users complying with TOS. Beyond that, do the users have any obligation to not spread content that they haven’t validated? It seems an unreasonable burden to place on users who don’t post content for consumption by folks who care about such things. Can you blame people for speaking their mind and playing to their audience? Maintaining the platform and only posting constructive, mainstream content only appeals to a certain kind of person, and they may never reach their intended audience with such messaging, warping and contorting their content into something else entirely, potentially alienating the very people they are trying to reach in the first place.

I’m a descriptivist in the linguistic sense, and when it comes to free speech. More is better. Full stop.

I remember when everything was hard online. I don’t wish for those days to return, especially just to comply with misguided, ineffective government mandates at the behest of megacorps and special interest lobby groups.

I think on one side you have security. This means law enforcement, espionage and the increasingly relevant civil security industry. They have pretty straightforward "pro" interests. You also have child protection advocates. They, perhaps rightly, are focused on their own agenda, not the greater picture. It's "not their job" to worry about freedom of speech and association.

This side, like any scrutinized company or government department insisting that "it's a resource thing." IE, their doing all they can with what they've got. Doing better requires something external. More resources, more power, etc. They deliver estimates of how many more children can be saved if only X.

On the other side is more vague. Esoteric digital freedom advocates. Abstract, ideological general freedom advocates. The concentrated, directly interested parties are the social media companies themselves.

So first, social media companies do not want to be stuck in a debate where it's them vs child advocates. They don't want to make esoteric freedom arguments that they don't believe in anyway, and use these to counter child protection arguments.

Second, regulation like this is often beneficial to incumbents. The DMCA, for example. Large incumbents can influence details of legislation, enough that they can at least live with the legislation. It also makes it harder to disrupt them from the outside. Under DMCA, record companies and film studios got what they wanted & social media companies got what they wanted.

>> by making it legally risky for large social media and platform companies to offer end-to-end encryption

I'm converted. I now totally support this legislation. Lack of secure encryption will bring down all the large social media companies. It happened to Blackberry during the London riots a decade ago. The kids quickly realized that someone associated with the police was reading their texts. From that point, Blackberry was doomed. Also Skype.

So let the FBI have a free hand inside facebook. Let teachers inspect the social media posts of their students. Let cops track the location tags of clandestine highschool parties. Every teenager will dump facebook, creating huge new markets for other services. Facebook will be MySpace within the decade.

... you realize it doesnt specify companies by name. If it is legally risky for Facebook, it will be legally risky for any replacement services.

The 3 Techdirt links in the article are especially helpful for catching up.

EARN IT is another skirmish in the 30+ year old Crypto Wars. For those who care about defending privacy and encryption, exhaustion is not an option.

Power-hungry governments must be viewed similarly to an APT in this context. They are following their very nature, and they will never stop inventing new approaches.

There is no other option except to stay organized and always ready to engage.

> For those who care about defending privacy and encryption, exhaustion is not an option.

For those who care about democracy, exhaustion is not an option.

This is why people who believe that they can be "neutral" or "in the middle" make me so angry.

"Two sides" doesn't hold when one side is actively trying to sabotage you.

While I agree with you, I think the last 5 years have shown that exhaustion wins. It is just a matter of time. People won't stay vigilant. They just want to provide a life for their family. Life is hard enough without having to stop clueless and bribed politicians from ending freedom on a weekly basis.

I think the last 30 years of failed government efforts to effectively end the use of secure encryption contradict your opinion. Those battles were won by vigilant defenders. You can and should join them if it's important to you.

The other way to look at your statement is that secure encryption is inherently unbeatable by its very nature, and attempts to legislate against it are like trying to say that 1+1=3 for very large values of 1.

I believe in writing lawmakers and spreading awareness, but people who are skeptical of the legislative/voting path have a point: Building things that are ungovernable plays a critical role in this process. Likely we need to do both.

I don't think this doomer/fatalistic mentality helps anyone. History has also shown that even exhausted people can fight and win.

> They just want to provide a life for their family.

That's true, and keeping people worried about their next paycheck is a great way to control them.

The good thing about this "great resignation" or "great renegotiation", is that some people are starting to take that fight into their own hands. They are shifting the power and taking control of their own lives.

Eventually their focus will no longer be on short-term survival, and thry will take control of other aspects of their lives that currently are not so pressing.

I'm hopeful that younger people will be more aware, and see through these boomer games.

People who are busy with their own life can at least support EFF etc. with donations.

Cynicism is obedience. We can and should beat this.

For those living in California: https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me

A copy of my note if you would like a template:

``` Dear Senator Feinstein,

I am deeply disappointed with your support of the EARN IT act and am expressing my deep concern and disapproval of such a bill.

Congruent with the recent report released by Stanford, I am expressing my deep disappointment in your sponsorship of the EARN IT act. I believe it represents a fundamental undermining of citizens right to privacy through strong encryption under the extremely divisive framing of "protecting the children". As a Father of two children myself, I do not believe that whatever incremental improvement to their safety, if any at all, justifies the undermining of encryption of ordinary citizens. In my opinion, this law actively undermines the fourth amendment in the digital realm and I must state that if you believe this is in my best interest, you have lost both my vote and my trust. ```

Sadly, Feinstein doesn't give one iota of damn ... unless she is being wiretapped.

And, at this point, I'm not sure that she actually even knows what she is doing. However, too many people are on the gravy train that are preventing her from resigning.

Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most. Even after she complained like a baby that the FBI had surveilled her (what did she expect?) it didn't affect her political positions one bit.

She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA. She cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV

> She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA. She cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV

It sounds like you need to do some research about California politics.

Feinstein is by no means untouchable. And more of her support comes from Hollywood and old media than from SV. However, she does have a core in San Francisco given that's where she wound up as mayor stemming from the Moscone–Milk assassinations.

California has jungle primaries so winning the primary isn't enough. In 2018, this meant that the main election was between two Democrats--Feinstein (54.2%) and de León(45.8%). This was actually a pretty solid result given that Feinstein is a strongly entrenched, party supported incumbent. And it was actually the closest election since her first.

And 2018 was just the start of the progressive wing of the Democratic party getting started (that was the year that AOC got elected and surprised everybody), so a highly liberal challenger simply wasn't in the cards, yet.

She will have a much tougher road in 2024, but I will be highly surprised if she even runs.

Good point about CA’s primaries, I forgot about that quirk. But that only makes her permanence worse. By 2024 she might not be alive or too tiered, she’s not young, but she’s not in danger. Shes been senator since 1992!

My SV comment is not that the proles (that includes tech workers) in San Fran care for her, but tech power in SV is allied with her from a decades long symbiotic relationship.

Really? You can't think of _any_ others who have done much worse things to our country?

Well theres only 100 of them. For what I care for she’s always on the other side.

The only time I agreed with her was her torture work, but that revealed her hypocrisy.

So, on the whole, I disagree with her and I believe her to be a massive hypocrite.

> Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most

You don't mind the senators that voted to disenfranchise the millions of voters in Arizona?

It follows from basic math that, if I dislike Feinstein the most, I dislike the other 99 senators less.

However, it doesn't follow from:

“Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most”

That I don’t mind the other 99, or any subset thereof.

This is the kind of comment that I fucking hate the most. You've attacked OP with a stupid, bad-faith presumption that has nothing to do with their simple and straightforward statement.

In case I have to spell it out for you, yes, OP can simultaneously disagree with Feinstein and with multiple other politicians.

> OP can simultaneously disagree with Feinstein and with multiple other politicians.

That's not what they said. They said Feinstein was worse.

Worse doesn't mean that everyone else is swell.

A < B and A < 0 doesn’t imply B>0. All it implies is that A<B

I see. So in your world, when I say that Trump was the worst president in history, that means that I "don't mind" Bush or Nixon?

Help me understand your logic here.

So far for this type of laws she always have a canned response essentially saying "I know better than you".

Anyway I emailed her, and encourage everyone do so. Not doing anything, by assuming it is pointless is a self fulfilling prophecy.

I wish somebody younger would replace her :(

Having peeked behind the political shroud on occasion (and still by no means an expert), I think people overestimate the complexity of the US political system.

Most politicians are not imposing some personal beliefs, they are just representing whichever voice their staffers/office hears most often. And, even for a senator, there aren't that many people who actually call to talk to a staffer.

The ones that do usually have a strong interest, so the staffers generally hear a skewed version of reality (and while these folks are often bright, deep domain experts they generally are not).

Sooo... Calling/writing does quite a bit more than you might think, if you can get even a reasonable number of people to do it who the staffers believe actually have expertise and are within the district/state.

The staffers will probably give a mostly generic response, but these are all tallied up internally and definitely drive policy.

Small business owners banded together to lobby WA state offices, regional offices, etc in the form of letters, calls, emails, and social media, and what that amounted to was having the 2nd most harsh lockdowns / business closures with zero financial compensation from the state.

Gov. Inslee and the Democrats below him had absolutely zero desire to engage in discussing concepts about how to safely keep small businesses open, even when we noted everything Gov. Polis (D-CO) was doing to try and balance things out.

All Inslee cared about was driving one number (COVID cases) down as much as possible to the exclusion of everything else. No amount of lobbying mattered.

If it drove any sort of policy... it had a backwards effect at best. All while huge corporations in our state like Microsoft and Amazon generated record revenues and drove their stock prices up.

I write to all my Democrat reps (I live in a solidly blue state) and get shit all nothing in response to positions that go against the mainstream leftist positions. I still do it because... eh, why not, but I know it has zero value. It's sad.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The only way this ends with the preservation of encryption as a standard is a bipartisan fappening-style leak of CEOs, politicians, lawyers, etc. Not just sexual content, but intimate content of any and all kinds: financial records, healthcare visits, everyday texts, etc.

This is the only way.

I'm in agreement, but how sad a commentary on the state of politics and 'the best governance society has developed so far'?

All I hear from the people at the top is: Me, me, fucking me!

(Would I be any better in a position of power? I don't know, but I'd like to think so).

They would find a way to misinterpret the situation and double down, to fight the criminals at fault who did this to them.

No matter your opinion on the issue, the firearm lobby would probably serve as an effective model for fighting legislation like this on a long term basis.

The second amendment, like abortion, is a political wedge issue used by politicians to wield against their opponents. You’re not going to replicate that with issues requiring more nuance and that cannot be used as emotional cudgels.

The point though is that you can't afford minor losses here and there, because it's a war of attrition. Firearm lobby knows that the opposition's strategy is to just chip away at 2A rights slowly over the decades. Therefore, they can't afford to allow minor gun control victories here and there, or else a century later they are out of business and their supporters have no 2A rights anymore.

Same with this. You can't allow minor anti-encryption victories here and there chipping away at privacy/mathematical rights or your great grandkids won't have those freedoms.

I think the lack of nuance employed by both 1A and 2A communities has been a strength.

Nuance allows compromise, and compromise allows incrementalism. It's a classic fascist play. It's also a classic politician play to get people lost in the details so that no one truly understands their intent, i.e. "never let a good crisis go to waste".

I'm willing to be proven wrong, however.

>> Nuance allows compromise, and compromise allows incrementalism.

Correct. So-called "pragmatism" and constant compromise is how we got into a ton of the messes we are in right now.

"Encryption is my absolute right protected by the 1st and 2nd amendment" - there is no nuance and you are correct, nuance diminishes your rights over time. Plus, nuance is bad for campaign slogans or beating politicians about the head.

It would require people willing to be single-issue voters, the way many are on abortion or firearms.

Would anyone here switch party votes to a candidate who sided their way on tech privacy — even if they disagreed on other core principles like abortion, gun rights, religion in schools, etc?

Maybe a few, but I'm not convinced many.

Tie it to existing wedge issues. "Do you want Facebook knowing every time you buy a gun/get an abortion?"

I wouldn’t. That’s the sad thing in the US with its entrenched two party system. You have to choose between two unlikeable options. I usually vote Green but it’s sad that these votes are “lost”.

The UK, with its n-party system, still manages to pass some pretty zany anti-civil-rights legislation…

Those single issue voters are the not present in many other countries besides the US.

This might show that the right arguments and lobbying can turn what is not a big political debate into a wedge over time.

> the right arguments and lobbying

Firearms and abortion became The Issue for so many single-issue voters because of well-funded, relentless fear-mongering.

You can do the same thing with tech privacy, but you're going to have to "play dirty" to accomplish the same thing, and it's going to take decades.

It's also important to note that abortion successfully tied itself into religion, which is not something you're going to be able to do with cryptography.

they absolutely are - you'll find plenty of voters in Europe who care about nothing other than immigration, for example.

I’m not saying there’s no single issue voters, just that the single issues are not universal and depend on culture and geography.

If encryption is treated as a munition[0], does it mean that the Second Amendment could actually be used to protect the right to use it? If the intent of the Second Amendment is to protect citizens' ability to combat government overreach, it seems like it should...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Graham (R-SC)

Blumenthal (D-CT)*

Durbin (D-IL)

Grassley (R-IA)*

Feinstein (D-CA)

Cornyn (R-TX)

Whitehouse (D-RI)

Hawley (R-MO)

Hirono (D-HI)

Kennedy (D-LA)*

Casey (D-PA)

Blackburn (R-TN)

Masto (D-NV)*

Collins (R-ME)

Hassan (D-NH)*

Ernst (R-IA)

Warner (D-VA)

Hyde-Smith (R-MI)

Murkowski (R-AK)*

Portman (R-OH)*

* are up for re-election this year.

Bit of a pain to find this information really - couldn't find a single news outlet with a list of who introduced the bill. Kinda seems like they don't want to be known.

> Portman (R-OH)*

He's retiring this year. Candidates running for his spot in his party are likely to support it though

Feinstein really needs to go. CA can do so much better.

By all means contact and organize on Senators, it's good practice. In my experience they are completely unresponsive to anything smaller than the largest and most funded groups. Still, making noise is only good.

You may find your local house rep to be much more persuadable and willing to listen to your educated points of view. Getting their position stated publicly and on the record in either direction can be very meaningful.

Really surprised Warner is on this list, and very unsurprised by the inclusion of both remarkable senators from Iowa

Exactly 10 on each side --- that's about as non-partisan as it gets.

I think a lot of us are no longer convinced traditional two-party partisanship is a useful lens through which to understand politics. Regardless of party, the politicians pushing this bill are overwhelmingly pro-surveillance state and pro-big government as well as being invested in perpetuating the two-party machine. Personally, I now see things more through a lens of those who perpetuate the two-party machine and big federal government on one side and those who are skeptical of both the eternally growing central government for it's own sake and the reduction of local and individual autonomy.

Neither big party really represents many of my viewpoints as much in recent years. Even when I do agree with one of them on something, I now suspect many of the inter-party battles are as staged as pro-wrestling where the eventual prevailing side was already predetermined by special interests, lobbyists and the party machines. It's weird how many votes on something I care about fail to survive committee or amendment by just one vote. And the politicians who voted "against" the thing in the 'losing' party, all happen to be in very 'safe' districts or not facing reelection soon and those facing reelection in 'unsafe' districts happen to be the ones who voted "for" it.

This happens far too often to statistically be random chance. I hate that this possibly makes me sound like a conspiracy nutjob but the math here says something's definitely going on behind the scenes.

> It's weird how many votes on something I care about fail to survive committee or amendment by just one vote. And the politicians who voted "against" the thing in the 'losing' party, all happen to be in very 'safe' districts or not facing reelection soon and those facing reelection in 'unsafe' districts happen to be the ones who voted "for" it.

This concept has been identified before, and popularized by Glenn Greenwald, dubbing it the “rotating villain,” which is a delightfully apt turn of phrase.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rotating%20v...

https://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/democrats_34/

> popularized by Glenn Greenwald

Ah, interesting. That is a nice name for the phenomenon. Thanks for the pointer.

Authoritarian abuse is second to war in being the most bipartisan issue.

Hyde-Smith is from MS not MI

To start, I absolutely don't think this bill is good, BUT I think there might be potential for some interesting silver lining.

Let's say it's passed and big platforms such as FB need to start heavily policing their users because they become responsible for all published content. This level of moderation is nearly impossible to achieve, so they are forced to heavily limit participation (you can only post a limited amount, posts need to be confirmed before becoming public, AI filters auto-reject various topics etc.).

Users are pissed and move to platforms with "more freedom", but nothing lasts - as soon as they grow, they all hit those same issues.

Because all the responsibility is on the publisher, the only realistic solutions are smaller and more distributed communities. You can self publish your blog or create an invite-only forum/chatroom/Mastodon instance for your friends/family/neighbourhood.

Because now everyone is doing this, hosting providers, ISPs and software publishers adapt by improving UX and reducing technical barrier to entry. It's basically a reneissance of oldschool internet.

Whaddya say, too optimistic?

whatever "self publish your blog" means, but if it's sufficiently easy for non technical users to figure out, no doubt it's a platform that can be subjected to this law. If it's not an easy-to-use platform it will deplatform and disengage the less sophisticated internet users. The old-school internet was mostly a few eccentrics no one paid attention to.

Disagree - you could take the exact registration flow of any existing platform (e.g. Blogger) and adjust it so that instead of creating an account in their database (and consequently on their platform), it provisions a hosting account in your name and installs some blogging software there.

Here is where we are going:

https://dsignrandom.tumblr.com/post/675431677522329600/not-s...

I think that these bills will have not only a chilling effect over free speech, but also reduce the overall safety of citizens, both of which are truly bad things. And make no mistake, many countries will follow the lead of USA, UK and Australia in taking these steps.

On the plus side, moving free speech outside the moderation of big tech and, by extension, big-government, is a good thing. And that will happen the moment people realize that they are liable for CSAM crimes for posting photos of bread and having a stupid AI flag them, or referring to their cat as "my kid" in a tweet. People with a strong political opinion on bread or otherwise will need to find high-effort platforms to publish those opinions, i.e. magazines, books, and (eventually) face-to-face meetups. My perhaps over-optimistic hope is that this will attenuate the rage-by-tweet phenomenon, we will get back to thinking before publicly expressing something, and people will only get mobilized after informing themselves properly on a subject. Even if this is a "count your blessings" attitude.

The main concern I have is the technological/administrative burden put on smaller platforms, which would cause further consolidation of the web.

What obligations this would impose on an operator of a small web forum?

All it is going to take is one big violent event organized using end-to-end encryption and that's it, this bill (or something like it) will pass. So you should probably prepare for that political battle if this is an issue you care about

What violent conspiracy hasn't incorporated encryption? Can you read in plaintext every email that cross the Web? I can't even access HN over HTTP. Encryption is the default for modern communication. That's the rub: it's a mass surveillance bill masquerading as an encryption bill.

The bill isn’t about encryption despite the messaging. It’s about the design of communications systems that are “unwiretappable.”

Man that's bad. I wish if a bill was off the table once, it can't be simply brought back again and again. It feels like constantly treading water, no wonder people are frustrated with politics.

If anyone needs a link to point politicians to, you can use [1].

Suggestions welcome for improvements.

[1]: https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/

I wish they would address real problems like arbitrary enforcement of TOS that damages users with no recourse. There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support.

Child abuse is serious, but not that common and this law will do little to change that. The lack of a UCC-style law for big tech platforms affects way more people.

This seems like BS that will squelch small players that can’t afford to comply. And consolidate more power into a few small firms.

> There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support.

Yes there is, per the trade regulations you're entitled to a refund

Wait

I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to anything provided as a free service then the problem starts there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of your subscription? Then made you pay for anything over 100 Mb? Then held your email address hostage if you wanted to switch providers? Hell no. But I also don't think government should force anyone to provide services to me for free.

Edit: downvotes without replies do not help me understand where this feeling of entitlement to a free service comes from; insight would be appreciated.

The service isn't free, you pay for it with your personal information. If they want to provide refunds by deleting our information, that seems like a fair trade.

Well one could argue Google and FB services are not free. Those 2 companies are 2 of the most profitable, valuable companies in the world. If they are providing their services for free, how can that be? Our attention and information is what they profit from, and that should not be undervalued. They are certainly not providing these services to us out of the goodness of their hearts.

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment but I don't think this will hold up in case of account deletions or bans.

Let say your 'attention', using the service, is used to pay for 'goods', account/ access to service.

How is the revenue derived fron 'attention'? By the attention being spent on preselected content, e.g. ads, that are choosen by the platform. One could argue that revoking access to a service from the platform side is okay since the attention is not being 'spent' after the removal or ban.

It might be feasible to expect that services, like an email account, are not taken away abitrarly but 'just because it's profitable' is not a sound argument. Making yourself dependent on a platform is not the problem of the platform.

Those services are the payment to you. You are selling your attention to google and Facebook for email/social network access and they then time slice that attention and sell it to advertisers.

If you use Google’s free email, you are not their customer. If you have an AdWords account, you are.

If you don’t like the deal, start charging them money or stop giving your attention to them for what you get in return. It’s that simple.

> Well one could argue Google and FB services are not free.

I don't possibly see how. The services cost no money, thus they are unequivocally free. Perhaps one could reasonably argue that just because something is free doesn't mean the user isn't entitled to any rights, but torturing the definition of free to suit your argument strikes me as obviously fallacious.

> If they are providing their services for free, how can that be

Because advertisers pay them. This logic is like saying FM radio isn't free because it has ads, this is just not true.

You pay with your data and your privacy.

These companies are providing critical infrastructure. If I run a business that's dependent on the phone lines and they cut me off, I'm entitled to a hell of a lot more than the monthly fee for my line. There's many businesses that are solely reliant on Facebook to earn a living. Should Facebook own them?

Paying for their services doesn't seem to make the customer service any better.

I pay for their services with money every month and year. Their customer service sucks. I’m worried about getting hosed by them one day.

There are numerous stories of paying customers losing their account and getting no help.

I didn’t downvote you, but your response seems disengenuous. Even if the service was free, people depend on them substantially and losing that access disrupts businesses and lives.

Google is a monopoly for search. Losing the ability to buy ads or broadcast on YouTube without any due process is a big deal and needs regulation. I’m not a fan of regulation and thinks there are many inefficiencies. But Google has had 20 years without regulation and obviously won’t change because it’s profitable the way they have it now.

> I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to anything provided as a free service then the problem starts there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of your subscription? Then made you pay for anything over 100 Mb? Then held your email address hostage if you wanted to switch providers? Hell no. But I also don't think government should force anyone to provide services to me for free.

I'm gonna argue that government shouldn't force anyone to provide services for free, but they should mandate that if you provide a service, you also take responsibility for the customer's property in context of that service, whether that service is free or not.

If I take my car to be serviced and they accept it, they can't just tow it to a junkyard and tell me to bugger off when I come back for it. Why can Google effectively put my private correspondence through the shredder and tell me to bugger off?

Likewise, offering to hold your grocery bag for a minute for free while you go to the restroom doesn't entitle me to destroy everything in the bag and throw it away.

Squelching small players is the intent. Large institutions are easy to exert political control over. It's hard to exert political control over masses of individuals. It benefits the Republican party when you get your news from FOX. It benefits the Democratic party when you get your news from CNN. It does not benefit the Democratic or Republican party when any individual can broadcast their views to millions of willing listeners on a platform like Youtube. This is why you only ever hear about "misinformation" coming from small time players. When CNN/FOX et al. do it (which is constantly), they get a free pass. Both parties share an interest in monopolizing information flow to their followers, which is why they both support this law.

FOX and CNN are constantly accused of spreading misinformation by huge swaths of the populace (but not necessarily the same swath for both networks).

I'm talking about the specific swath of the populace that can get you banned from YouTube, FB, etc.

Any examples of CNN misinformation? Not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just not aware of it. Meanwhile FOX misinformation is pretty well known.

https://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/02/iraq.weapons/inde...

Russiagate would be just one example. And of course when they said Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer.

It’s not just this specific legislation, there is no reason to give police any additional power and all the reason in the world to dial back the extraordinary power they already have.

Only Rand Paul and Ron Wyden voted against FOSTA/SESTA, the legislation passing 97 to 2

Instead of just getting these shutdown how about an opposing act which puts penalties for lobbyists and politicians who back this kind of thing?

I don't want to keep fighting zombie bills like these, because we will eventually miss one.

> penalties for lobbyists and politicians who back this kind of thing

You want to make it illegal for people to propose and vote for policies that you don't like? What if they beat you to it and pass a law that stops you from getting your law passed?

Some parts of government should be immutable, and putting safeguards to ensure constants are constant makes a lot of sense to me.

The idea that a part of the government could be unchangeable even if 100% of the people in the country oppose it, seems not just dystopian but philosophically absurd.

As a compromise, though, how about having some rules about which laws the government is allowed to make, and requiring something like a two-thirds majority to be able to change those rules.

Then you could have a rule saying that the government can't make any laws that cause the people to not be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Actually you're right, maybe that won't be sufficient.

Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but the facts on the ground are that the constitution is broken all the time without anyone being punished enough to stop them from doing it again. Unless you outline penalties or protections such as qualified immunity for defending the constitution it becomes meaningless.

It seems like this Stanford page has clearly taken a side on the issue. Does anyone have a link to a solid unbiased discussion of the pros and cons of this? It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate arguments in favor of these changes, would be interested to hear what they are.

> It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate arguments

That doesn't follow. The worst laws passed (e.g. the Patriot Act) tend to have bipartisan support.

> It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate arguments in favor of these changes

I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise.

It doesn't seem appropriate to assume that politicians are acting in good faith dialectical fashion, based on literally every observation we've ever made of their actions vs their rhetoric.

Issues like this are difficult as there are conflicting needs and people wearing blinders on the issue. There’s really no correct answer, but there are at least 4-5 camps of true believers.

Recall the HN community going apeshit over Apple’s proposed methodology to address this issue. That solution was engineered to benefit Apple and was imperfect, but fundamentally addressed CSAM risk with a proven methodology and preserved strong crypto.

That visceral, apeshit reaction was incited by a poorly written EFF article that blurred the lines between a parental control and CSAM.

So yay, we won. Now broken encryption is back and may well pass, as both law and order moderates and batshit crazy conservatives can find common ground.

Let's have no fear to face down our opponents' claims. Senators pushing this bill laid down their claims in a document [0], and everyone should put on their critical thinking caps and grapple with it.

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21194217-earn_it_act...

Thank you, something like this is exactly what I was looking for. Balances out nicely with the original posted link.

There's likely to be strong bipartisan opponents to this bill in the Senate as well. Their issues are likely aligned with another senator's response.

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-on-re...

Wyden (like Rand Paul) is the rare congressperson that, while I don't agree with all their views, tends to get certain fundamental freedom issues right, especially where other politicians don't on issues with a lot of money and special interest lobbying.

On any particular issue where Wyden goes against his Democratic party leadership AND Paul goes against his Republican party leadership to agree with each other, that's likely to be an issue where I agree with both of them. Too bad there's no way to vote for a 'virtual politician' that's the logic-gate intersection of those two.

> Too bad there's no way to vote for a 'virtual politician' that's the logic-gate intersection of those two.

Now this is an intriguing idea.

Thanks, This was helpful.

> MYTH: Requiring companies to be on the lookout for child abuse will harm startups and nascent businesses.

>FACT: No other type of business in the country is provided such blanket and unqualified immunity for sexual crimes against children.

This jumped out out to me in particular. I can think of another similar industry that delivers private packets which may contain CSAM. What is the US Post office doing to evaluate the bits they deliver? What is the post man's legal liability?

Are there any issues that come up in Washington that don’t have have legitimate arguments for them, regardless of the status of their partisan support?

The “pros” are fairly straightforward, mass data collection makes it easier for law enforcement to do their jobs, or, at least, that’s their opinion.

> It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate arguments in favor of these changes

Both parties have pretty wide dumb/authoritarian streaks, so it's not necessarily true that there are legitimate arguments in favor. The war on drugs, for example, had/has bipartisan support even though it is an ongoing demonstrable harm to society.

>It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate arguments in favor of these changes, would be interested to hear what they are.

The safety of our children™!

I feel like there's two big issues at war with this one.

1) The Web 2.0 war over how much legal liability internet platforms have to bear. This is the big one to me, ever since the DMCA this is the pivotal issues about the internet.

2) The ongoing war against E2E encryption. This is a nonissue, the attempts of the authorities to restrict digital encryption are pointless and futile.

I'm a big fan of reform in #1. The big internet platforms like Facebook absolutely need to face far more legal liability for their actions.

But conflating the thing into one big bill that pushes forward E2E encryption restrictions is one of the issues with democracy in America.

There is so much horse trading involved in Washington required to do anything, because of lobbyist vetos, the fact all these issues have to end up in an omnibus bill is ridiculous.

The EARN IT bill was not dangerous before this year; it was to hunt down some child predators in all platforms such as TikTok. I don’t know why they need to pass the bill, but the ways of living under this such a bill will be terrifying; such a thing would be spied like Mainland China when they are using a social credit technique for everyone who browses things online. In other words, we must protest the bill by sending some important details of why the bill must rip off from the checklists due to our own security and privacy. Even I am using ZOOM in my iPhone to chat with my friends, including Signal and Discord. Whenever this bill passed, we must be ready for the REVOLUTION to start. That’s all I have to say today.

wow I am just utterly surprised how the politicians in US are trying to pass the bill via CSAM just like the politicians in korea. Korea already has a DNS surveilance on porn related websites because it may contain sexually abusive material that may harm teenagers' mental health (it is called children and teenangers act). They even passed a bill to monitor the videos shared in online chatroom because people may share sexually abusive material via messengers. They have a very strong ethical reason in that they are trying to protect children and teenagers, and it is difficult to overcome that by making a case for privacy protection.

These assholes just keep trying and trying until they get their way. At least it's good to see there's some actual pushback in the United States. Here in Australia, this sort of legislation has bipartisan support, it gets rubberstamped and passed on a Friday evening before a public holiday with the media staying silent.

Keep fighting against these bills, or else you'll get a government that happily runs roughshod over your civil liberties like ours.

Of course they do. They know the equation: we have to win every time; they only have to win once.

Yeah. Maybe there should be a law that makes it illegal to attempt to ban encryption.

But what if they make it illegal to attempt to make it illegal to attempt to ban encryption?

Shouldn't it be covered under the 4th amendment?

There is historical precedent classifying encryption as munitions, so arguably the 2nd amendment would also apply, in addition to the 4th.

There's also historical precedent for classifying encryption software as speech (at least when printed in book form), so the 1st amendment should apply too. Then of course there are 5th amendment issues with requiring people to disclose their encryption keys.

While we're at it, the 3rd amendment forbids the quartering of soldiers in homes, which, as others have pointed out, is at least analogous to requiring government-approved spying software on our phones.

https://www.rstreet.org/2016/04/12/encryption-balancing-the-...

> While we're at it, the 3rd amendment forbids the quartering of soldiers in homes, which, as others have pointed out, is at least analogous to requiring government-approved spying software on our phones.

Very great point! Quartering soldiers involved feeding and housing them, and caring for their mounts. Requiring me to run code on my device without compensation seems to fit that bill rather nicely. Thanks for that.

I'm not sure why a law is needed. These big tech companies do the government's bidding all the time.

Using encryption should be considered a right, this way such kind of bills will become impossible.

Politicians are malignant tumors on free, democratic society. IMO anyone who would choose to run for a political office in today’s society should be banned from ever holding a position of power.

If this bill passes, it will only weaken America's position as leader in the Internet space. The world will eventually benefit from that weakening. We will route around America.

I can't read the article on mobile, it's apparently formatted for an 85" ultra-widescreen 4K screen

Will all government agencies be required to comply? I would think that would be an issue.

Great power comes with great responsibility. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The return of Gestapo.

What we need is positive privacy rights that are very well thought out and firm in preventing legislation such as this from even ever surfacing, as what's proposed in this policy should just be illegal in the first place. These privacy rights would go against what both Silicon Valley and NSA/CIA/Pentagon want, so we need a movement to fight it. I don't think i believe anyone with any power (including Silicon Valley big wigs) are actually opposed to any of this garbage.

Anyway, I'm sick of just being reactive to this anti-human garbage. People need to get clued in and slay the demons instead of building stuff for them.

I know it's wildly off-topic but can someone please explain to me why there are still sites like this that are clearly well funded and professional that fail to have spent - what - 2-3 designer hours time ($150?!) on a simple mobile stylesheet?

They almost definitely get 50%+ mobile traffic. What gives?

I think they’re hiring, if it’s any consolation. I’m sure that HN staff does actually have work besides moderation.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/y-combinator/jobs/7D3d...

We should design cryptosystems that include functionality that support warrants as opposed to being antiencryption and removing encryption.

then that's not encryption ... if it has a back door....

I'm not talking about a backdoor. I am talking about it being a part of the actual system design.

It's unclear what you're talking about then; edit and clarify. Even the most generous interpretation sounds like a backdoor.

You could imagine it as every chat having additional participant which is a person who has a valid warrant. There is nothing secretive about this, nor is it bypassing the cryptographic system somehow. If I send you an encrypted message, is it a backdoor if you are able to decrypt it? No, because that's how it's indented to work.

if the service can get your conversations then it is a backdoor simple...

Sounds like junk crypto.

There is utility to being are to prevent random people and companies from eavesdropping your conversations. Crypto has important security benefits that we can't just give up.

No we shouldn’t. Never. Get that idea out of your head. It can never be secure or safe. This path leads to bodies hanging from the town square.

So you want encryption so criminals who would have otherwise been hung to be able to evade the law? It is pretty clear to me how a government may not approve of encryption for this usage.

Yes. The state has no right to hang anyone. The state has no right to take a life. When you take away encryption, The Innocent and the Guilty are punished, the innocent disproportionately.

That’s the beautiful thing: we don’t have to care what the government thinks. We are 30y into the encryption wars, and they cannot put the genie back in the bottle. It just is.

>The state has no right to take a life.

Some states have the death penalty.

>When you take away encryption, The Innocent and the Guilty are punished, the innocent disproportionately.

More information allows people to make a more informed decision. Punishing innocent people is a different problem separate from encryption.

A cryptographically secure messaging system is either secure for terrorists and child molesters, or it isn't secure for anyone.

Like most reasonable people, I want governments to try to prevent such crimes and to punish people who commit them. I do not, however wish to grant governments unlimited powers with which to pursue those goals. In particular, there are some bright lines which should never be crossed. Those include torture, punishment without a reasonable attempt at a fair trial, and outlawing tools for secure communication.

Here's a thought. Private[0] keys could be held in escrow, with sss[1] being used to decrypt, publically. The sss shares could be held by different branches of government. (state,federal,exeecutive,legislative,judicial)

Please shoot my idea down.

[0] or 'backdoor' keys [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing (or similar)

Personally I think the company should also hold a key. They would use this key after verifying that a warrant is valid. I also think giving out hardware keys with rate limiting / logging features along with key rotation / revocation is essential to reducing abuse.

This is called a backdoor, whether you like it or not. Pinky-promising not to abuse the backdoor key doesn't make it not a backdoor. Backdoors will be abused by governments. Have we learned nothing from the Snowden leaks?

>A backdoor is a typically covert method of bypassing normal authentication or encryption in a computer, product, embedded device, or its embodiment. >Wikipedia

My suggestion isn't covert, nor does it bypass encryption.

>2. A means of access to a computer system that allows unauthorized users to circumvent normal authentication procedures. >thefreedictionary

People with warrants are authorized to access the messages.

The minute your system depends on good behavior from any of the parties involved, you've failed as a designer.

It's like nobody learned anything from Snowden's revelations. The second those backdoors are available, they're going to be surrendered in secret to various three letter agencies in the name of national security. That's going to happen on day one. On day two they'll be breached by foreign intelligence services.

>The minute your system depends on good behavior from any of the parties involved, you've failed as a designer.

Everyone is bad designers then. All of them rely on operating system providers not stealing your messages. Some with the people providing the chat application. Since they have to be able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere.

Society needs trust to function.

> All of them rely on operating system providers not stealing your messages.

You can compile your own operating system and control your hardware supply chain - you don't have to rely entirely on trust for those components.

> Since they have to be able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere.

If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people providing the chat application can't log anything except noise. That's what we're talking about outlawing here.

Regardless of the above, when I say 'system' I'm referring to a cryptosystem, not the other parts of the software stack.

Ken Thompson has something to say about trusting the compiler you use for that OS, or even the microcode the CPU running said compiler is using. It’s functionally impossible to not trust an outside vendor for something on a modern computer

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

All the more reason for open firmware for everything.

>You can compile your own operating system and control your hardware supply chain

It's unrealistic for everyone to audit their operating system and hardware.

>If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people providing the chat application can't log anything except noise.

Yes, they can. If you used a comprimised Element app your encrypted Matrix messages can be stolen.

You’re getting distracted by unrelated concerns. Hint: pay attention to the part where I say

> Regardless of the above, when I say 'system' I'm referring to a cryptosystem, not the other parts of the software stack.

If your cryptosystem is compromised nothing else matters. Your argument seems to be “we shouldn’t worry about secure cryptosystems because these other unrelated things could go wrong,” which I’m not interested in debating with you.

Basically every professional cryptographer has been saying that it's impossible to build a secure system this way since the idea was floated by the US government in the 1990s.

In a perfect world a agree with this. But the power this gives governments is so great that I don't see how it wouldn't end up abused.

In the analogue days "wire tapping" regulated it's self because of the manual nature, and a warrant attempted to ensure enough evidence was required to actually target an individual.

With digital communications the same thing can be done leaving almost no trace against an entire population.

Governments have a LONG way to go to prove that "three letter agencies" won't abuse a system that is setup to provide legal wire taps for digital communications.

> functionality that support warrants

A back door marked ‘staff only’ doesn’t actually know who is staff and who isn’t.

>A back door marked ‘staff only’ doesn’t actually know who is staff and who isn’t.

Which is my you use cryptography instead of just a sign.

What one can make, another can break. Skeleton keys are impossible to secure.

By that logic so is the two parties' decryption keys. Can we make a third party whose decryption key is more secure than the others? I suspect it is possible.

It’s a fool’s errand chasing after a fool’s reward.

This seems like it could have a significant upside if passed. That it would help promote federated and peer to peer free software systems with no centralized, commercial target to sue. Might even require some of the current giant social networks to pair back significantly to avoid liability.

I'm not saying I want it to pass, just think the unintended consequences might be interesting and even beneficial in some ways.

Pretty sure the government won't view it that way. It'll be called a loophole and crushed if it gets mainstream. This is the country where sending an HTML GET and receiving response 200 can be prosecuted under the CFAA.

We need a legal environment that explicitly protects encrypted communications, not one where they are are maybe tolerated on the fringe.

This is a different battle. The government has gone after general purpose encryption multiple times and has been beaten back so far. And while this would definitely be a win for that side of things it isn't the same battle and the Earn IT Act is not about encryption in general. It is about encryption in the context of commercial entities and their managed content.

With greater surveillance power and the precedence of passing this bill the government gains the ability to push a stronger one, including one that targets general encryption.

Your intended effect is uncertain at best, I'm not even sure it's going to be a net benefit in the most ideal scenario (losing encryption in commercial setting is at the very least extremely inefficient), and there would certainly be high costs to the society until that materializes. At worst it would never materialize.

You're effectively advocating to take a very high risk to liberty and privacy for some very wishful thinking.

I'm sorry I didn't make this clear enough. I don't want this to happen, I'm just speculation that it could have side effects that are helpful to parts of the community that would like to see less reliance on centralized systems. I'm not saying that is worth the tradeoff, because I don't think it is. Just interesting.

Regarding the point that this could/would lead to an attack on general encryption, IMO I think they are doing this more because they are beginning to understand that they can't attack general purpose encryption head on. It is needed in to many places to make it illegal. So they are attacking it from the sides, through corporate interests.

Decentralized does not mean lack of liability. That's a marketing ploy. P2P filesharers and tor hosted sites are taken to court on the daily because of this one little trick called the IP address. Everything you send has your external IP. It doesn't matter that they "can't prove it was you". Courts have continually upheld that an IP address is grounds for either civil discovery or further criminal investigation. And yes, the court can absolutely compel you to unlock your full disk encrypted MacBook/Linux/bitlocker whatever.

The only reason people en mass can do decentralized is because of the availability of encryption, because VPN's, because companies and software can offer encryption. This legislation and it's precedent would kill the decentralized web. It's not as if Google is going to go broke - they'd be the first to be approved and go on their merry way.

I said P2P, not TOR. With P2P systems you only host your own stuff. So if they want to take someone to court it would be the person with the illegal content on their system... IE. who you want to go after. There is no reason to have to prove anything. Those P2P filesharers that are taken to court are the ones sharing the files, not just random people on the network.

With P2P and Federated systems (encrypted or not), the people hosting the content are breaking the law and are the ones you go after. Just like now (pre Earn-It), where they go after the people posting the files to the central servers and not the central servers themselves.

As a general rule it's unwise to hope for some unintended side effect of bad legislation to solve unrelated problems. The goal of this legislation is surveillance and control. If passed, it will achieve that goal. If it has a side effect of significant number of people starting to use encrypted P2P communication (doubtful imo), they will pass more legislation to make that illegal too, since "child abusers are obviously using P2P encryption now", and most "normal people" don't. And that time it will be even easier than passing the original EARN IT act.

Government overreach must be fought every step of the way, otherwise by the time it finally gets you personally, it will be too late.

Let's not get blinded by our dislike for centralized platforms. This is not the way to solve their problems, this way only creates more problems for people.

Never claimed to hope for the law to pass and that to happen. It was more speculation on what might happen if it did pass.

Regarding them attacking P2P.. IMO they wouldn't be able to attack P2P specifically without attacking encryption in general. There are to many ways to implement P2P using standard encryption technologies. I think they are starting to realize they can't win that fight without losing the larger war and so are attacking privacy from the angles they can get away with. Like corporate interests to avoid lawsuits.

They can certainly, say, ban Apple and Google from hosting such P2P apps in their app stores, then any such apps are useless to most people. They could also go after developers, forcing them to either install backdoors or shut down - see what kind of laws Australia passed about that, as an example.

Remember they only care about most people, they don't need to get every last one of us. Their point is to make default methods of communication unencrypted.

Sites hosted behind Tor do not reveal your external IP address.

Not directly, you still have to contact nodes to get there. Through traffic analysis we can determine the path, or simply the feds can expand their number of nodes. Feds already own a good chunk of the network. Bandwidth and servers are expensive after all. Or even easier make phishing sites that grab your IP through any number of browser technologies. Torbrowser won't be around for long when Firefox becomes another chromium skin.

This is not an accurate description of anything.

- Traffic analysis only works for a global adversary

- Feds would need to control a very sizeable chunk of the network to deanonymize your HS, and you can use your own nodes (also see Vanguard)

- "phishing attacks that grab your IP through any number of browser technologies" obviously do not apply to servers

- If Firefox would end, Tor would obviously have no choice but to re-write it all for Chromium.

We have to give them something for CSAM, or they'll keep coming at free speech in general using CSAM as cover.

I strongly recommend considering the invention of a sticky, client-side program that scans all images passing through your network interfaces. It is also allowed to send red flagged images to a jury that will be a first hurdle to doing anything: determining it's really a CSAM matter.

I've proposed this before, and got shouted down. Partly because its client side and can be theoretically disabled. But I think it can be made as difficult as black box baseband firmware to undermine. I do not believe the argument that consumers are sophisticated enough to disable this scan, if implemented well. We have demonstrated the ability to force-run processes at every level of abstraction for general compute hardware.

Our best hope is to implement something that has a reasonable chance of catching actual CSAM without generating false positives and without being exploited to prosecute people deemed problematic for arbitrary reasons. Otherwise we get what is probably happening now, which is the secretive scanning of all messages, prosecution limited only by the cost of parallel construction.

Two questions: how do we know that the program only scans images, and only exfiltrates CSAM-suspect content?

Otherwise looks fine, as long as the traffic is never encrypted.

You hit on the feature that makes it viable: you would always know if an image is flagged, and as what. It doesn't stop your nation state from flagging you as a problem because you're gay, but it also doesn't hide the fact that they're looking for that. I think that's the best we can do right now.

> I think it can be made as difficult as black box baseband firmware to undermine.

And once we've set the precedent in law that the government gets to force mandatory unauditable features onto all computing devices, what makes you think they'll stop at image scanning? You're basically saying that no Free and Open Source machine should ever be allowed on the internet again.

If it can't be designed properly, then I withdraw the suggestion, but I think it's possible to design something that cannot hide from you the fact of a detection and the questionable content. That is, if they don't stop at image scanning for CSAM then you'll at least know it, even if you can't stop it. Not perfect, but its something.

Couldnt it be easily broken by masquerading a jpg as a txt file? Or actual people who pass such images use some kind of masking techniques. I will tell you what, any thing can be broken if it’s on software. DRM is broken by design because it failed to stop shit its only a hurdle to actual users.

That doesn't sound like an argument against my proposal. Or, if it is, it's like arguing against using locks because any lock can be picked.

Any counter-measure, even the most invasive and draconian, can be foiled by simply doing your CSAM offline, using photocopiers and the postal service. That would be a big improvement, I'd argue.

So whats your big improvement then? Locks are there to prevent random joes from entering your house, no one expects a lock to work against thieves that would be foolish because it never stopped em. Your argument is otherwise, you expect your “lock” to work on culprits. Also your offline scanning tech requires an update to hashes all the time, whats stopping any jury/govt from injecting hashes that aren’t CSAM, expecting governments and as an extension judiciary to operate in good faith is more foolish to assume. Im not even talking about breaking into the scanning software, defeating the scan is as easy as not sending them as image simple.

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