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Comment by WaitWaitWha | Hacker News Reader

History has shown us time and time again that when privacy is given away because "bad people can use it", without fail turns out to be detrimental to the law abiding citizens, with little to no impact to criminals. In many cases it further pushed the government into a dictatorial, even totalitarian regimes.

This has happened with speech, journalism, gatherings, associating with people, religion, self defense, and many more.

The very definition of a criminal is someone who ignores some laws, performs illegal (not legal) acts, including the laws that supposed to correct them.

People need to stop voting on purely emotion, and vote more with logic and ethics.

edit: add qualifier of "purely" & "more", as to acknowledge the responses and the nuanced problem around the overall topic.

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I don't think blanket statements like this are true, and I don't think they're a healthy way to frame the debate. To take a non-trivial example, requiring cars to bear license plates - something almost everyone accepts, at least in the United States - has a lot of upsides like enforcement of traffic laws. Sure, perhaps traffic cameras aid totalitarian states in tracking the movements of citizens, but I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy.

This is a long way of saying that, even as a strong privacy advocate, it's worth noting that the tradeoff is real and the terms of debate ought to be over whether the tradeoff is a good one or not. In the case of encryption, this is a difficult question for us to answer because we're essentially asking how many crimes might have been prevented or might have gone unpunished had the perpetrators used encrypted communications. That being said, I think the security state would be hitting us over the head with these statistics if they could actually make a coherent case - the fact that Reid Blackman is instead making a fallacious comparison between encryption and the nuclear launch codes suggests that the figures don't add up.

> I don't think blanket statements like this are true, and I don't think they're a healthy way to frame the debate. To take a non-trivial example, requiring cars to bear license plates - something almost everyone accepts, at least in the United States - has a lot of upsides like enforcement of traffic laws. Sure, perhaps traffic cameras aid totalitarian states in tracking the movements of citizens, but I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy.

That's terrible comparison. Cars are in public by default, more than that with cameras you don't even need to have license plates to track someone, they just make it easier.

There is also very little stuff that would be privacy violating, yeah, sure, someone might note that your plates showed up at your lover's house but... they could just record you exiting the car, same with any illegal stuff.

The social contract is also different, you're allowed to drive on public infrastructure funded by everyone, and in return you need to have car that not massive safety hazard and abide by law. Communication has nothing to do with it

> This is a long way of saying that, even as a strong privacy advocate, it's worth noting that the tradeoff is real and the terms of debate ought to be over whether the tradeoff is a good one or not.

I'm sad to inform you that cat is out of the bag for decade or two now, and if criminals chose to have encrypted communication they don't need Signal for it. The cat will not go back into the bag no matter how much legislation tries. The math doesn't care for politician's feelings.

There is no tradeoff here - bad guys can do it already using many other ways, it's just trying to limit it for the normal people

> In the case of encryption, this is a difficult question for us to answer because we're essentially asking how many crimes might have been prevented or might have gone unpunished had the perpetrators used encrypted communications.

The other side is people dying or getting jailed because their tyrannical government didn't like what they chatted about.

> That's terrible comparison.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that encrypted communication is a 1:1 analogue to license plates. I'm arguing that they both reduce privacy to some extent, and therefore it's not right to simply say the tradeoffs are never worth it. (I would also quibble with your application of social contracts, but I don't think the details are actually that relevant given the above.)

> I'm sad to inform you that cat is out of the bag for decade or two now

I didn't intend for this to be an actual policy debate; I understand that you can't legislate away encryption. I was simply making the point these debates (is encrypted communication a social good?) aren't totally tradeoff-free, and pretending they are won't get us anywhere constructive.

> There is no tradeoff here - bad guys can do it already using many other ways, it's just trying to limit it for the normal people.

While you can't legislate away encryption itself, it's naive to think that governments have no control over how popular and widespread encryption becomes. "Bad guys can do it" doesn't mean "bad guys will do it" - the mountain of unencrypted communication used as evidence in the criminal justice system proves that. I'm firmly pro-Signal, but my guess is that if the government banned Signal tomorrow, fewer bad guys would use encrypted communication just because Signal is easy to use and most criminals aren't James Bond-style supervillains. (There are, of course, second-order effects that I wouldn't want to start speculating about.)

> but my guess is that if the government banned Signal tomorrow, fewer bad guys would use encrypted communication just because Signal is easy to use and most criminals aren't James Bond-style supervillains.

I was with you until this part, because I can't create a successful parse tree from it.

My point was that some "bad guys" aren't using encrypted communication at any cost; they're using encrypted communication that's easy enough to use. If you made encryption a bit harder to use (say, by taking away Signal), some percentage of existing "bad guys" would no longer use it. (To be clear, I don't think this is a reasonable argument for banning Signal; I just wanted to make the point that laws do affect the prevalence of encrypted communication even among criminals.)

false and dangerous analogy. knowing your number plate is comparable to knowing your phone number, rather than the real analogy of bugging your converation in the car. the number plate yields metadata about journeys, not the actual conversation.

"i mean people who argue for privacy would never have a problem with barcodes on milk"

> "i mean people who argue for privacy would never have a problem with barcodes on milk"

I mean; unless you pay cash for ~everything your spending habits have generally been wide open since the 50s in the name of convenience.

Vast majority of transactions were still mostly cash beyond some basic "pay my rent and utility bills and buy a car" until maybe starting at the 80s / 90s, and using credit cards back then was done wayyyy less than even the early 2000s.

True. For some perspective, half my work group wasn't yet born in the time periods you're referencing.

> license plates

That's funny, someone noticed it. License plates are a giant privacy problem. Yes, even before Snowden had to tell us, we had totalitarian bullshit like requiring ID (and the prospect of 10*X years of jail if you fake it) for hotels, receiving mail, and driving. You bring up a good point that the one you are replying to is absolutely correct, not just on a blanket statement level. There's almost no exceptions to it.

ALPR systems were controversial when they were first implemented, as it gave governments ways to track people who are not even suspected of committing crimes.

I still oppose them, as do other activist groups, but that infringement upon privacy was lost in battle a decade ago to "who cares, the police say they arrested a kid selling pot to his friends with ALPR and I have nothing to hide".

As it stands now, there are ALPR systems at every intersection in my neighborhood. If some weirdo with access to the system, which might be anyone that the government contracts with, wants to stalk me, their ex, etc, they can now do it with the push of a button and with little to no oversight.

> I still oppose them, as do other activist groups, but that infringement upon privacy was lost in battle a decade ago to "who cares, the police say they arrested a kid selling pot to his friends with ALPR and I have nothing to hide".

I had colleague like that. I then asked "sure, let me install camera in your bedroom, you have nothing to hide, right?" He STFU about it after...

Part of me is convinced that some people like that would be easily persuaded into putting cameras in their bedrooms if they were told it would keep them safe from burglars/murderers/terrorists/pedophiles/bears/tigers[1]/or whatever boogeyman they particularly don't like.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw

Previous poster wasn't talking about automatic scanning of all license plates, but about license plates themselves and (maybe) speed cameras and the like. These are two different things.

This partiuclar method should be deprecated in favor of using AirTags.

> I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy.

I think most people have never even considered the matter in those terms; they just accept that license plates are how we do things and don't bother asking why.

When you actually ask why, your claimed upsides don't, IMO, actually amount to much. Enforcement of traffic laws? Most of those are revenue sources for local jurisdictions, not improvements in safety. If someone does no harm when violating a traffic law, there's nothing actually worth enforcing from a safety perspective; and if someone does do harm, how much help is a license plate in tracking them down? What fraction of people who are in traffic accidents leave the scene in their vehicle before the police get there, but get found later because their license plates were known? A large enough fraction that license plates for everyone are justified taking into account the privacy downsides?

This, btw, is the same logic you apply yourself in the latter part of your post. And your conclusion?

> I think the security state would be hitting us over the head with these statistics if they could actually make a coherent case

Which means that, since they're not, there actually isn't a case. And I agree with that--both for license plates and for encryption backdoors. And for other claims that we need to give up our privacy for some other supposed benefit.

License plates are the primary enforcement mechanism for traffic laws. Traffic laws (red lights, speed limits, etc.) provably save lives, and surveys have shown that people's likelihood of obeying such laws correlates with their perceived likelihood of being caught.

I think your argument about tracking down people who didn't actually do any harm misses the point - you might not intend to cause harm but the behavior you exhibit may simply lead to more harm if everyone did it. Should drinking and driving be legal as long as you don't hurt anyone?

I have made the same point with regard to a tradeoff betweening traffic laws and encryption (intentionally, since that's the point of my post - everything is a tradeoff). But I think license plates enable a system beyond "man in police car" which provably saves many lives. Even if you disagree (and I think you'd almost certainly be in the minority if you conducted a poll), the fact that we're even discussing it proves the GGP wrong - privacy tradeoffs aren't necessarily harmful ipso facto.

> the behavior you exhibit may simply lead to more harm if everyone did it.

This the same justification that is given for all nanny state laws. And I don't find it any more convincing than the justification that is given for encryption backdoors.

The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. Not if they do something which you or the government thinks might cause harm if enough people did it. Actual events trump guesses.

> Traffic laws (red lights, speed limits, etc.) provably save lives

Compared to what?

Compared to a society where we didn't punish anyone even when they did actually cause harm, probably yes.

Compared to a society where we did punish people who actually caused harm, but didn't interfere with people who hadn't? I don't think so.

The problem with punishing people who haven't actually caused harm is that they know they didn't actually cause harm but you punished them anyway. That weakens people's respect for the law in general. They start to view the law as a game, where the government tries to catch you breaking an arbitrary rule and you try to avoid being caught. That is how speeding laws, for example, are treated by virtually everyone.

Nobody counts the costs of that when judging laws. But we should. And if we did, I think we would end up just where I am advocating: we would only use the law to punish people who actually caused harm. Sure, put a sign on the road that says "maximum recommended speed 55 mph", as long as it's only a recommendation--if a cop can't randomly pull me over for exceeding the limit just because he happened to spot me, or because it's end of the month quota time and the municipality needs some more income. If I actually cause an accident, and I get penalized more because I exceeded the recommended limit, that's fine; that's what the law is for. But not until I actually cause harm.

> This the same justification that is given for all nanny state laws.

If you don't find compelling the proposition that laws disincentivize behavior, then we won't really be able to come to much agreement on anything.

> The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm.

This presupposes that causing harm is entirely within your control. If you drive home drunk, you might kill someone simply because they happen to be there, not because you did anything differently - you may not even have seen them! (Thomas Nagel writes about this exact scenario in his 1979 paper, Moral Luck). Similarly, if you're driving 100mph and get into an accident, you're more likely to kill someone than if you were driving at 70mph and got into the exact same accident.

To take a step back, you've advanced a legal framework based on a consequentialist view of morality. Consequentialism can be problematic along a number of axes which is why our legal systems don't work that way.

> The problem with punishing people who haven't actually caused harm is that they know they didn't actually cause harm but you punished them anyway. That weakens people's respect for the law in general. They start to view the law as a game, where the government tries to catch you breaking an arbitrary rule and you try to avoid being caught. That is how speeding laws, for example, are treated by virtually everyone.

Not if they understand that a particular behavior leads to harm and thus ought to be disincentivized, e.g. drink driving.

Your comment on speeding laws is incorrect, because it assumes that speed limits have no bearing on driver behavior. In fact, setting speed limits either too low or too high is problematic. When you set the speed limit too low, you create a potentially dangerous speed differential between those trying to abide by the speed limit, and those ignoring it. Past a certain point, however, most drivers will cluster around the given speed limit which means you're simply artificially increasing the fatality rate of accidents (since they will occur at higher speeds).

No offense, but this is the dumbest idea. This system you’ve proposed allows for absolutely negligent recklessness, until (not unless) someone gets hurt. Teenagers or other irresponsible people would just go batshit until they killed someone, and only then, would we be able to stop the reckless behavior, which could easily have been predicted to have killed someone? No thanks, I don’t want to live anywhere near your society. We can certainly argue about whether the max limit should be 55 or whatever, but not that there are limits in general.

Do you know of an example where speed limits being a non-enforceable recommendation has actually proven anywhere near as effective in reducing road fatalities as legally enforced limits? And how far do you want to push this argument- that if I choose to drive an unroadworthy unregistered vehicle at 200kph on the wrong side of the road while highly intoxicated, I shouldn't be fined unless I provably cause injury/death/property damage to others?

> The correct way to give people an incentive not to cause harm is to punish them if they cause harm. Not if they do something which you or the government thinks might cause harm if enough people did it. Actual events trump guesses.

Sooo let me get it straight, you're saying that someone should be allowed to drive in wrong lane or drive in middle of road and only get punished when they actually crash into someone? Because that's what you're saying.

> If I actually cause an accident, and I get penalized more because I exceeded the recommended limit, that's fine; that's what the law is for. But not until I actually cause harm.

Can't punish a corpse, can't resurrect whoever you killed.

>* you're saying that someone should be allowed to drive in wrong lane or drive in middle of road and only get punished when they actually crash into someone?*

I'm saying that the law should not be able to punish them if they haven't caused actual harm. If they do cause actual harm, I have no problem at all with these things being treated as aggravating factors that increase the punishment.

> Can't punish a corpse, can't resurrect whoever you killed.

That's just as true under our current system as it would be under the kind of system I have been describing. But under our current system, as I have pointed out, people lose respect for the law in general when the law punishes them when they haven't caused actual harm. That doesn't seem to me like a good thing. Nor does it seem like a way to reduce the amount of actual harm people cause. Loss of respect for the law in general means people are less likely to pay attention even to laws that do relate to actual harms.

Your point is well-argued and I mostly agree.

But this: > Should drinking and driving be legal as long as you don't hurt anyone?

to some extent is the case in parts of Europe. In some countries 1-2 beers (or equivalent) are allowed and police cannot proactively control it. Yet if you get into an accident it can be an aggravating condition.

I don't mention the concrete countries and laws to avoid people starting to nitpick and dissect minor details.

And yet people don't like red light cameras. Case in point: many municipalities in US ban them outright, in most cases due to popular demand from their constituents.

A lot of people favor traffic enforcement of, especially, significant violations in general without favoring the automation of every relatively minor traffic violation. Automated systems could of course be setup to mostly just catch gross violators but for lots of reasons they won't be.

Yeah I don't find your argument here compelling at all.

You're right that I hadn't thought about license plates in these terms before, but now that I have, I'm convinced that they are a very good trade-off. So no, I don't think people only accept this because they haven't thought about it. I think enough people thought about it and accepted it long enough ago that we simply don't really need to think about it anymore. It was something that was invented, worked well, and thus faded into the unquestioned background. And that's good!

> I don't think people only accept this because they haven't thought about it. I think enough people thought about it and accepted it long enough ago that we simply don't really need to think about it anymore.

If you have any historical evidence that this is how any of our common traffic laws that punish people who haven't caused harm, I would love to see it.

My understanding is that no such process ever took place: government bureaucrats decided that certain arbitrary rules were appropriate and that anyone who violated them should be punished, based on whatever information they considered relevant, and imposed them by fiat. That is how 55 mph speed limits were imposed throughout the US, for example.

And that doesn't even consider the part about traffic laws being revenue sources for state and local governments. The overall incentive to over-impose laws is huge. Yet somehow the laws we have are exactly right to optimize our safety? I strongly doubt it.

> My understanding is that no such process ever took place: government bureaucrats decided that certain arbitrary rules were appropriate and that anyone who violated them should be punished, based on whatever information they considered relevant, and imposed them by fiat.

... that's the process I was talking about. Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy.

You seem to dislike a lot of the rules and incentives in the space, and I'm sure I agree with you on a lot of the details, but none of this is going to lead me (or many other people) to a categorical "license plates are bad" conclusion. I'm very glad we do licensing for cars and drivers, despite the existence of problems on the margins.

> Bureaucrats making rules and then seeing if voters reject them by electing people to make different rules is how things work in a representative democracy.

No, it's not. In an actual representative democracy, the elected representatives write the rules. That's what they're elected to do. And when the US was originally founded, that's what they did.

In what we actually have now, which would be better described as a "bureaucratic oligarchy with a veneer of representative democracy", elected representatives don't even bother to read the umpteen-page laws the bureaucrats write before they vote on them. And no voters have a strong enough incentive to actaully hold the representatives accountable because of the well known problem that doing that requires lots of work and the chance that any particular voter's vote will make a difference is much too small to justify doing all that work. So the only people who actually vote on the substance of issues are those who are driven by ideology or special interests--i.e., those who have other incentives to do all that work and don't care whether their individual vote makes a difference or not.

> I'm very glad we do licensing for cars and drivers

The question is, why? The only argument I've seen made in this thread is "it helps to catch people who violate traffic laws". That's the argument I have been rebutting. Is that the reason you like it?

I ask because there are other arguments for licensing cars and drivers besides that one, but nobody has mentioned them here.

> The question is, why?

Generally speaking, it is a mechanism that helps enforcement of regulations related to owning and operating a vehicle.

One might agree/disagree with whether or not (or the degree to which) there should be any regulation for owning or operating a vehicle.

If one accepts some form of regulation, then the question becomes whether or not license plates are an effective tool to enable enforcement of said regulation.

> Generally speaking, it is a mechanism that helps enforcement of regulations related to owning and operating a vehicle.

Ok, so this is basically the same argument other people have been making. My response is the same as it has been to others.

I see. What are you trying to accomplish with this debate? Is it to prove to others that you're right, to change their minds, to test your own ideas, or what?

We're way down a pretty irrelevant rabbit hole, but no, the designers of representative governments did not envision that all rulemaking be done by legislative bodies, because that would be completely impractical.

> That's the argument I have been rebutting.

You believe you've been rebutting it, but like I said at the beginning of my comment: I am not persuaded.

> What fraction of people who are in traffic accidents leave the scene in their vehicle before the police get there, but get found later because their license plates were known?

As a cyclist who continually sees stories of aggressive car behaviors being reported and acted on because the cyclist had cam footage of the license plate I'd say the fraction is close to 100%.

So yes, it is a trade-off and in this case I agree with the OP that is is worth it.

> As a cyclist who continually sees stories of aggressive car behaviors being reported and acted on because the cyclist had cam footage of the license plate I'd say the fraction is close to 100%.

My anecdotal evidence, for what it's worth (which is not much in either case), is exactly the opposite: in every traffic accident I have been involved in, neither I nor anyone else left the scene.

(Btw, when you say "aggressive car behaviors", are these things that actually caused harm?)

As far as actual data that would be strong enough to justify imposing public policy on everyone, I don't think it's there.

> As far as actual data that would be strong enough to justify imposing public policy on everyone, I don't think it's there.

In 2020, 26.3% [1] of cyclist fatalities were caused by hit-and-runs. That's a bit over 1/4 of cyclist fatalities. What more would you need, 1/2?

[1]: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/biking/what-...

> In 2020, 26.3% [1] of cyclist fatalities were caused by hit-and-runs.

How many of the hit and run drivers were caught because of the license plates on their vehicles? That's the relevant data for this discussion. I don't see it anywhere in the article you referenced.

In 100% of cases I've seen where camera evidence compelled the police to act after a cyclist had been a victim the fact the licence plate was visible was the factor that made the police act.

> My anecdotal evidence, for what it's worth (which is not much in either case), is exactly the opposite: in every traffic accident I have been involved in, neither I nor anyone else left the scene.

You probably aren't the problem here. To generalise broadly on the cases I've seen the issue was usually caused by drivers who decided their aggressive instincts would be best served by running cyclists off the road.

These people don't stop after doing it because they believe their actions are appropriate.

(The other common case is people running cyclists off the road when they don't realise they are there. Generally these people don't stop either).

Define harm. Threatening behaviour included or excluded? "Likely to cause harm" or "intending to cause harm" included or excluded.

Is running off the road OK if no material harm?

What if they have a heart attack 20min later due to stress?

> Define harm.

Our common law legal system does a pretty good job of that already. For example:

> Threatening behaviour included or excluded?

See the legal definition of assault.

> "Likely to cause harm" or "intending to cause harm" included or excluded.

"Likely" is excluded in common law if that's all you have, because, as I said in response to another post upthread, actual facts trump guesses. "Intending" falls under assault if, roughly, the intent is perceived by the target.

> Is running off the road OK if no material harm?

Again, see the legal definition of assault.

> What if they have a heart attack 20min later due to stress?

How would you prove, in a legally sufficient sense, that the heart attack was due to whatever happened 20 min earlier?

I'm not proposing "caused actual harm" as the standard because I just made it up. I'm proposing it because it is the standard that our common law legal system has used for the vast majority of its history. It's only fairly recently that nanny state legislators started thinking (incorrectly, in my view) that they were smarter than centuries of common law jurisprudence.

If hit and runs were known to be virtually untrackable, I'd guess you'd have a lot more hit and runs.

> If someone does no harm when violating a traffic law, there's nothing actually worth enforcing from a safety perspective; and if someone does do harm, how much help is a license plate in tracking them down?

Laws are often about reducing risk.

If I drive 100 miles/hour (160 km/hour) through a school zone when kids are present but do not actually hit anyone I have not actually done any harm, but I did greatly increase the probability of harm. I just happened to get lucky on that particular trip trough the school zone.

> People need to stop voting on emotion, and vote with logic and ethics.

There is no purely logical reason to vote at all that isn't fundamentally rooted in emotion. This is typically a desire for something to change in one way, a fear that it will change in another, or anger or indignation that it has already changed in some detrimental way.

Indeed, your own argument is based on the fear of dictators, the looming threat freedom being taken away.

Ethics too is rooted in emotion. When we look at something we consider unethical, something unjust perhaps, we feel anger and indignation. If we perceive such an event is about to happen, we feel fear. If we perceive it has been averted, we feel happiness.

Yes, goals re ethics are rooted in emotion. The actual problem, which is definitely occurring on this topic, is when acting on snap emotional judgements compromises the longer term emotional desires that matter more. It's using emotions to work forward from your emotional goals, instead of logic that would actually acheive them. This is definitely still a case of (specific and qualitatively different) emotions triumphing over logic, so I don't think it's crazy to talk about it that way.

I mean, you're right in the big picture, but in a practical sense with the way people usually think about "emotion", it's not a terribly effectual perspective.

> Ethics too is rooted in emotion.

Says who? Can you prove it? This is a pretty big claim to make

One can construct an argument based on the is-ought problem. As a brief recap: Statements about how things ought to be can not be derived solely from statements about how things are.

For example, from "my house is on fire" (what is) alone does logically not follow "I should try to extinguish the fire" (what should be), without a quiet assumption something like "my home and belongings should not go up in flames" (what should be).

Ethics are obviously within the category of how things should to be, and thus it cannot be derived in its entirety from the state of the world as it is.

Thus ethics must be derived from some other notion about how the world should be. If you take account of the sources of our fundamental notions about how the world should be, you'll find they're all some variant of emotions, or possibly something like aesthetics, which unfortunately again cooks down a desire for that which is pleasant to the mind and senses.

All other notions about how the world should be are so-that something else, which if you keep following the reasons so-that, all land in emotions. For example, the reason why we seek things like truth and justice is because we like how they feel, we feel content, as though things are the way we think they should be. We dislike lies and injustice because they make us angry when it happens to others, sad or indignant when they happen to us.

If we did not feel this way, surely we would have no reason to prefer justice to injustice, or truth to lies. It would by definition be all the same to us.

Alternatively, one may argue that God has decided how things should be. But that is just replacing human emotion with the moods of God. God may get angry if you marry your daughter and ransack the temple and will be happy if you offer libations. An ethics based on piety is a system of ethics based on whatever makes God happy.

> Thus ethics must be derived from some other notion about how the world should be.

Yes, but bringing in is-ought only tells us that the ethical realm is self contained. It doesn't tell us that the ethical realm is reducible to emotions

> All other notions about how the world should be are so-that something else, which if you keep following the reasons so-that, all land in emotions.

You're just repeating the same claim that I questioned earlier

> For example, the reason why we seek things like truth and justice is because we like how they feel, we feel content, as though things are the way we think they should be

Can you prove this? Why this specific explanation and not some random other one like "because God wills it"? It's unclear to me why this explanation is any more convincing

> Can you prove this?

Arguments can be constructed for or against such things, they cannot ever be proven. Very few things can be conclusively proven about the world. We could after all be just be brains in vats being fed a simulated reality and we'd never prove the fact. There is always that doubt.

The perhaps most damning argument is to consider a being without desire, fear, content, disgust, anger, and other such things.

What would compel this entity to any action?

Try to rob them with a gun and they will not fear you. "I'll shoot!", you'll say, and if they react at all, they'll say "ok".

Try to bribe them with delicious food, wealth, sex; and you'll get nothing. They do not desire it.

Commit an injustice in front of them and they'll likewise not be angered. Stop a crime and they'll find no reason to praise you.

Even if we permit them to feel pleasure or pain, which is generous and not necessary for the experiment, they will by our definitions not desire the pleasure and seek it out or fear the pain and try to avoid it. Permit them hunger and let them starve, and they will not desire it to end.

This entity has no state of the world that brings them joy since they do not know what it is, and no state of the world that brings them anger or resentment for similar reasons. The pleasure of the beautiful will not be sought out for they have no desire, and the nausea and revulsion of the hideous will not be avoided. As a consequence, the logical and consistent will not be preferred to the illogical and inconsistent.

Their ranking in a social structure will not matter to them, since they will not fear becoming an outcast, have no envy of the success of others, and so on.

Since that is the case, core to this being is that all states of the world are equal in their eyes. Could this entity using their perfectly intact faculty of reason derive a system of ethics? This seems unlikely, since normative statements do in conflict with this prefer certain states of the world to others.

> Try to bribe them with delicious food, wealth, sex; and you'll get nothing. They do not desire it.

Sounds like an enlightened person to me

> Could this entity using their perfectly intact faculty of reason derive a system of ethics?

See Kantian ethics

I generally agree with you; governments have c̶h̶i̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶w̶a̶y̶ taken a sledge hammer to privacy with The Patriot Act, NSA's mass surveillance program, PRISM, and the UK's Investigatory Powers Act etc. It is hard to quantify the chilling effects of losing privacy, similar to being impossible to prove a negative as there is no conclusive way to prove that something does not exist or did not happen.

The argument that privacy is terrible because it can facilitate crime also neglects to consider that many other ways exist to encourage and obstruct crime and that nearly everything facilitates crime to a degree. For example, car ownership enables hit-and-runs, you can't have burglaries without homes, and gun ownership... is a topic for another thread, but you get the point.

If you consider violating people's privacy a crime then... well... it'd be like stealing someone's car so that it can't be stolen.

> History has shown us time and time again that when privacy is given away because "bad people can use it", without fail turns out to be detrimental to the law abiding citizens, with little to no impact to criminals. In many cases it further pushed the government into a dictatorial, even totalitarian regimes.

I agree with the conclusion, but I wonder about the claims and reasoning.

Can you give us examples? I don't recall that many 'bad people can use it' arguments that led to what is described. I doubt it's led a liberal democracy to become authoritarian, and under existing authoritarian regimes, there is little or no privacy to give away.

Finally, the biggest privacy threat in free countries now isn't government but corporations.

As far as privacy goes, the USA Patriot Act is probably one of the better examples of "we have to erode privacy to catch criminals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_t...

As for general "bad people can use it" scenarios, US airport security would be my go-to example. Everyone has to take their shoes off at airport security, even though the Deparment of Homeland Security's own tests have shown that that terrorists could still still easily sneak weapons and explosives through security: https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners...

Those are alleged examples of privacy eroding, but not of it leading to authoritarian government.

> People need to stop voting on purely emotion, and vote more with logic and ethics.

Ultimately, though emotion–or at least, subjective preference–is the root of ethics; logic can get you from that root (plus, where relevant, observations about the world) to more complex non-root ethical statements, but it gets you nothing without the root preferences, which it cannot generate.

Who's logic and ethics? I think that is the heart of the issue.

Hard for all of us to stand together apart.

History has also shown us time and time again that absolutism isn't orthogonal with reality. Absolute privacy still results in tyranny, you just won't see it coming until it's far too late.

I don't know what to tell you other than the fact that "lawful intercept" only became lawful in the 1970s and that the laws/modern law enforcement techniques you think are saving us from anarchy are relatively new. In the UK wiretap evidence isn't even admissible.

> Absolute privacy still results in tyranny,

what are the examples of this, can't think of any?

I usually just ask for their credit card numbers if privacy is so unimportant.

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