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Comment by can16358p | Hacker News Reader

We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.

Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.

Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.

This will only hurt people actually fighting for their rights, and this needs to stop.

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> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.

I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.

In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.

Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done.

Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.

A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.

TFA rightly calls on citizens to instead be that group, on the side of freedom.

Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.

I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”.

Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.

I believe the idea is not that they hide their motives, but that they hide from their motives. May or may not be true, but still...

That’s fair, but it’s still an unsavory argument style. “I know the secret motivations of those in power, which even they don’t know”. It’s a weird way to remove agency from the powerful in the name of, IDK what.

I think hide implies intent to deceive. It's often more like conscious and sub-conscious reasoning. We constantly tell a story to ourselves about our motives. We're impulsive and wrong a lot of the time. And nobody is the bad guy in their own story.

Maybe it's willful ignorance. Ignorance of the misuse and harm of mass surveillance.

Maybe. Are you as open to the idea that those who oppose surveillance (that’s me) also have secret motives and engage in willful ignorance, so you can’t trust my anti-surveillance arguments? Because, the theory goes, even I don’t know the dark motives that are making me say those things?

Do you see how impossible any dialog becomes in that model?

If you frame it as ignorance, the next step is to enlighten the other side with the factual arguments you want to make. "The threat landscape isn't as bad as you claim it is." "Mass surveillance has downsides that are worse than you would think." If you assert deceptive intent, it kind of slides into character attacks.

It's true that people sometimes don't argue in good faith, and it's fair to question hidden motives. But I think if you have better facts, you should keep arguing the facts.

Better said than me. There are different approaches to changing someone's mind if they're misunderstanding something, versus if they're straight-up lying to you.

The fact that there exist highly public straight-up lying politicians doesn't mean the mass of politicians are liars. Most are trying to do a decent thing, with the understanding they have.

Casting one's democratic agents as "other" corrodes democracy, decreases participation, and generally furthers the problem being bemoaned: lack of attention to citizen desires.

Yes, and it’s frustrating to see people whose policy positions I generally agree with (less surveillance, please) resort to this kind of rhetoric. People who disagree are not only wrong, and not only intentional wrongdoers, but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know?

These people have obviously never tried to get four people to agree on what movie to see.

> but they have secret motives even they themselves don’t know?

I’m not sure that’s what is implied; it’s just obvious that publicly proving one’s “true motives” is quite difficult.

Secret motives aren't really the right argument, I agree. Citing the seemingly-inevitable negative outcomes may be a better approach.

When someone argues for ubiquitous mass surveillance, ask them to explain exactly how the Stasi worked, how they came to power and what can be done to keep it from ever happening again. Point out that these questions have to be addressed before arming the state with surveillance tools that previous abusive regimes couldn't have dreamed of.

That's the biggest thing that frustrates me about NWO (as a concept) used as a rhetorical device in argument: it's not necessary.

You have world history littered with examples of mass surveillance platforms being used for oppression.

No explanation or justification of why that happens seems necessary! It's a stronger and supported argument to just say "Whatever the cause, when mass surveillance has been implemented historically, it is eventually used to errode civil liberties and increase population control."

> There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda.

There doesn't have to be, but there totally can be.

Nonsense. Government organizations never do things in secret. The very idea is patently absurd. I mean, how would that even happen in practice, someone does something without blasting it on Twitter, as I said, absurd.

Maybe the things that get blasted on twitter are formally secret things that government agencies do that someone blew the whistle on?

Which means there could be an untold number of things which they do which are currently secret.

I heard once that things, sometimes shady things, exist outside of the twitterverse.

There are boatloads of laws in any democracy that would never survive a referendum. This law is one example.

Let's face facts here: 90% of the aim is to make policing cheaper and more pervasive. To make it possible for algorithms to police people, because then those algorithms can replace attention by police officers. Even most police officers themselves wouldn't agree to that.

>formally

or formerly?

Could be both…

I’m truly astonished that there are people who refuse to believe that the people in power are constantly conspiring. It’s like you are completely ignoring all evidence, or discounting it as one-offs.

Sure, maybe it’s not NWO or the illuminati, but you can’t possibly dismiss all the behavior we see and impacts we experience?

Sure, but it's not a singular shadowy cabal in a star chamber. There are different groups who all have an negative impact on our lives.

The banal and stupid: Elon Musk and his fellow trust fund buddies and VCs doing jello shots and going "Antifa sucks amirite?" and acting on their stupidity because they have money and power.

Banal and stupid category 2: CEO groupthink. Let's all have layoffs before there's an actual recession because activist stockholders demand it and we don't have the guts to propose something better.

Then there's the John Birch Societies of the world: the actual organized shadow political movements. The Koch brothers using massive corporate profits to fund the right wing think tanks over multiple decades. They don't take credit, but the ascent of the right wing crazies is entirely down to them and fellow travelers.

Banal and stupid category 3: the people attending the WEF/Davos. enough said.

etc. you can probably list your favorites here, and you might slice them differently than I have. What there isn't is a single central group making decisions for the rest of us, nor is there any organized left-wing cabal. If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America, I'd love to know about it, because I'd like to join that group and I've never seen one in 20 years of looking.

If you study system theory you'll understand that a bunch of seemingly self-motivated actors without a central leader can achieve a system-wide outcome. A ant colony might be a simple example of this.

> If you do think there's any kind of organized left-wing group of any sort in America

I’m neither American, nor was talking about “left wing” American cabals that control the world.

I’m not sure why this has to be a singular group. It’s a tale as old as time, rich vs poor. One can clearly observe multiple not-necessarily-colluding but powerful groups globally and locally, who all aim to control and subjugate the rest of us.

This makes no sense to be a semantic debate where you grind an axe that “there is not just one illuminati” and act like that means something impressive.

It's like being biten by an unknown insect and refusing to acknowledge the fact for the lack of a correct binomial nomenclature for that insect. No name = no entity, that's their motto.

Another way of phrasing this is "always argue against the best possible interpretation of your opponents argument."

It's a HN rule for good reason. It makes your own arguments stronger.

Even if your opponent _is_ a shadowy new world order cabal member or supporter, arguing against the best possible interpretation which requires of their stance helps sway random citizen X who may not know of or believe in such a cabal.

Yeah - also sometimes there are legitimate tradeoffs and the answer is non-obvious!

Stuff like Google’s CSAM detection really does detect abuse. It also can cause problems for a parent if there’s a false positive.

The reason these things are hard is because it’s a discussion of what’s better on net and it’s not the case that there is no tradeoff.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...

If OP can’t acknowledge that he’s just ideologically partisan and won’t be persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree. Deeply understanding the opposite position requires accepting that there are smart reasonable people that hold it (for good reasons!), not that they’re all some “shadowy cabal” lying and hiding bad intent.

There are definitely a lot of smart, reasonable people with sincerely held beliefs who nonetheless lie about their motivations and work with like minded people to draft and support legislation under false pretenses for the greater good. They say they want to stop child pornographers and I’m sure they do, but their actual motivations are to monitor political dissidents.

Sure, but they’re not the entire set - and it’s the people that hold the view earnestly that are more interesting to steelman.

The same could be said for people who want encryption (and often is by partisans on the other side, “you just want to hide bad behavior and only pretend it’s about general privacy”).

I think strong encryption and user control is important (I work on urbit full time at Tlon and encourage friends to use Signal), but I still recognize there are real tradeoffs that result from empowering individuals this way, I just think on net it’s the right decision even with the often terrible downsides.

It’s easy to pretend there are no downsides and people like to structure policy opinions as if this was the case, but it rarely is.

> “ Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.

I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?

On questions of simple fact (for example, whether Earthly life arose by natural selection) there’s a legitimate expectation that the argument should be a one-sided battle; the facts themselves are either one way or another, and the so-called “balance of evidence” should reflect this. Indeed, under the Bayesian definition of evidence, “strong evidence” is just that sort of evidence which we only expect to find on one side of an argument.

But there is no reason for complex actions with many consequences to exhibit this onesidedness property. Why do people seem to want their policy debates to be one-sided?

Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”

This works both ways.

Other motives are also suspected among the people and organisations fighting these laws.

The intent does not even matter long term.

The danger is an oportunist individual or group taking advantage of the thing.

Let us play fantasyland and we assume there is one day a pill that feeds you for a day, tastes better than any food, makes you full and beats obesity.

Do you think the ownership of that would not be fiercly fought about and the development should be kept secret?

If it is not secret, anyone could just steal that revolutionary idea.

> It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either.

NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer. This exact terminology is openly used by many politicians now, demanding for a NWO. Depending which bubble you live in, you have not seen any or only too little such speeches.

Evidence?

Sure, if your bubble is "project veritas".

Example, even though I don't believe many of the conspiracy theories regarding them, here's the WEF calling for everyone to literally build a "New World Order."

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together...

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/conspiracy-theor...

The term New World Order has been used for over a century by politicians. It’s hardly believable that Woodrow Wilson was using a secret code word to communicate a plan to do evil things in the 21st century when he was advocating for the League of Nations.

> NWO is not a conspiracy theory any longer.

It never was. Conspiracy nutheads just took it for them, and gave it their own evil twist. They always take something and see the evil option in it, and sell it as some fact which never was there. A similar thing happened recently with the term "Great Reset".

But the simple truth is, we always strive for a better world, so aiming for a new world order is something totally normal happening. Nobody thinks the world today is flawless.

Anybody writing about a "New World Order" is clearly joking.

There is no order in this world, except the laws of physics, "Me!" and some love.

Not necessarily an intentional conspiracy, but it can just be that of a herd mentality. As a species, we are conditioned to follow the herd, to go along to get alone. Those that do not follow tend to get trampled, their concerns not even listened to.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

The reason is, and always has been, to enable lazy police work. They won't have to do their jobs if facebook will just tell them who the criminals are.

So, if everything is encrypted, how do you expect the police to catch ped0philes, for example?

"So if everyone has the right to privacy, how are the police supposed to do their job?"

Somehow the police managed to catch bad guys before mass surveillance existed. Maybe they should look at that?

Ever think there aren't as many pedophiles as you think? Maybe many have their own children to abuse or organizations with trust, like the church, in which encryption doesn't mean anything.

State of the art encryption has become so widespread and well known that anyone with the tiniest interest in privacy can download one of the hundreds of open source E2EE messaging platforms to use for their criminal activities.

This line of thinking has always struck me as extremely odd - as soon as current, presumably E2EE, methods of communication are tapped into for intelligence and law enforcement purposes, criminals can and will switch to projects that don't comply with the backdoor laws. It's a violation of privacy that only law-abiding citizens will be subject to, for everyone else it's optional.

You might catch a wave of them off guard in the beginning, but in the long term all you end up doing is surveilling innocent people and maybe catching lowest hanging fruit - the types of people who are already dumb enough to share their criminal activities on Facebook.

borrowing from gun reasoning, if encryption is made a crime, then only criminals will use encryption.

That goes way beyond the scope of legislation in question. Suggesting that something akin to the great firewall of china could be deployed in the EU is unrealistic - having said that, it sure feels surreal when expression and support of these authoritarian ideas by EU representatives doesn't lead to immediate political suicide.

Why do you think a Great European Firewall is unrealistic?

It would likely break dozens of individual member state laws protecting freedom of speech, privacy, net neutrality, and the scope of policing powers which would have to be changed or grossly violated. This seems, to me, culturally and politically untenable on a national level because the population at large hasn't been condition to accept iron fist authoritarian rule and gross violations of their personal liberties.

First, I was being sarcastic. But in terms of "political suicide", remember that politicians a) have info we don't, b) have fear mongering elements screaming in their ears, and c) have surveillance lobbyists taking them out to dinner.

Actual criminals don’t only communicate with just other criminals. They actually have to get out and do crime… So police can catch them the way they always did, when things were organised by talking together in private when nobody else could listen to them.

Definitely think that's why it happens, at the tactical level. Why make your job harder than it could be?

Another way of phrasing this might be "people will not have to pay as much tax if technological tools are used to assess crimes rather than traditional high-touch policing (ie high man-hours)".

Generally people want all the [other] criminals catching, but do not want all resources of the state used solely for policing. Optimisations then are preferred even if there is collateral harm.

In goriest form, I think of this as the drone argument.

Is it better to put boots on the ground, some of whom may die and who may cause collateral casualties in executing their mission, or a (hypothetically idealized) drone that kills only the target?

Still haven't decided if I have, or there even exists, a good answer to that.

The answer is yes. Murdering other humans who have no way to see it coming and no way to defend themselves is deeply evil. Especially when you factor in the murder of innocents (also referred to as collateral damage), and the facts that mistakes happen.

But people are people. They get nervous/scared in situations. Maybe the boots on the ground snap and murder a bunch of civilians they thought were threatening.

A perfect drone wouldn't do that.

But on the other hand, a perfect drone has no cost of use, other than monetary. Which seems far too low a bar to set for the seriousness of taking a life.

What if the "other human" is in the process of murdering people at that very point?

Send police to deal with the situation. If that is not possible for some reason, then that is the problem that needs fixing. You don't need murderbots.

It's never impossible, but in e.g. a hostage situation, this may result in a lot more innocent deaths.

I suppose a better question would be, why do you feel that in this particular situation - a murderer on rampage - you still feel that it is "deeply evil" to kill them in such a way that they "have no way to see it coming", to the point where you'd prefer other people to risk lives to do it in some other way?

There is no need to pretend. People with power want more power. As a thought exercise consider how you would arrange the world were you in a position to do so and try to determine placement of structures that could undermine your benevolent rule. Freedom of speech is such a structure. It is not really a paranoia if there are people out there working on just that. Now, just because there are also fellow travelers who truly believe 'for the children' cry, that is quite another and separate conversation.

>People with [goals] want more power

Sometimes those goals align with other people's interests. Sometimes not. Unless there's a way to portion out power across a population on a case by case basis there's going to be conflict of interest.

Indeed. Presumably that's why it made the very first amendment. If only they'd thought to explicitly state that included privacy. :(

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them"

How did you got this out of GP? I think you both saying/meaning the same.

> and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.

Yep, and their actual desire is to control people's freedom (even admitting that some or all of them themselves belief that this is only for good cause, the reasons that also GP listed.. ).

Intelligence and law enforcement aren't typically empowered voters in democratic legislative bodies.

And yet, they tend to be very successful on getting any proposal they want from those bodies.

You can wonder why.

Same reason every parliament in the world, including congress, has their own separate police force protecting them rather than relying on the real one?

Those two police forces do have competing interests at times, hence the domestic police does not enter the parliamentary premises unless it is specifically called by a parliamentary decision.

I don't have to wonder, I know.

Because they present a social good (less crime, adherence to law, order) that's one of the bases of civilization to those bodies, and those bodies give them more latitude than competing interests because of the primacy of that good.

Which is how I'd want the system to work, because any system fully optimized for freedom without national security exceptions wouldn't survive as a major world power.

They don't always get what they want. They do tend to get what they want. Occasionally things are scaled back later, as excesses are discovered.

Working as designed and intended.

Or to put it another way, what substitute system would you rather put in place, and how would it handle malicious internal groups and external world powers?

>listen to the loudest and most organized group

I donate money to the EFF in the hope that they turn out to be this group eventually

Amen. Every year.

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't really believe too much in the existence of such a group, but I can argue this is really bad logic.

A. Do you think such a group would be public with their ambitions? Such a group would doubtless deny their own existence. Arguing that they do, or do not exist, can only be based on observation and opinion, because it is not falsifiable.

B. Secret societies do exist, and there are some that still exist to this day that had major political power previously. The Freemasons, for example, were pretty influential in the French revolution on both sides, and counted leaders like Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Paul Revere, and so on among their members. We know that nine freemasons, at a minimum, signed the US Constitution. (Then, fun fact, they put "Novus ordo seclorum" on the great seal of the US.)

C. And even if there weren't powerful secret societies historically (which is doubtful), we currently live in a very globalized world with much easier ability to meet and privately message, so there's always a first. Saying that it never happened, therefore it can't happen, is always misguided.

D. The World Economic Forum literally called for everyone to build a New World Order in 2018. With that exact terminology. It's still on their website. I would argue that makes them partially culpable for the conspiracies. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/we-must-work-together...

I dont think it will be a "secret cabal". It will simply be a bunch of powerful people arguing that their personal interests are the national/global interest. And believing this whether its true or not. And institutions falling in line with this.

You see this kind of attitude at a lower level on HN, for example, all the time. And this flaw in human nature only grows the more powerful you become.

When I was in IT, the rule was 'no essential businesses processes in Excel unless defined and approved' to ensure 1. The formulas were actually correct and 2. We could provide continuity should the person leave 3. These items were included in corporate backups not just user level ones, etc. Hardly anyone followed that process. People are going to use the easiest/best/quickest tools available to get their job done. Add in promotions based on making 'big' cases and you have quite the incentive to abuse these tools without some huge conspiracy. Simple human nature.

15% of my day job (for going on a decade now) is helping people untangle Excel hairballs. It's opened my eyes to how creatively badly people can solve problems, given no alternatives.

Whilst the connection between excel and an evil, secret world cabal is not unreasonable, I'm going to assume you accidentally replied to the wrong comment.

no matter the reasons, even if current politicians and institutions are 100% trustworthy, no such law should be made.

you cannot guarantee that future institutions, and governments will be benevolent, and with such laws you give them easy access to tools of oppression.

Ahem, have you forgotten about the NSA spying on US citizens? Every government covets that power. It's a fantasy to assume they don't.

As a jailhouse lawyer at a Federal Prison the amount of parallel construction in America is shocking. If you know the level the average FBI agent works at, look up other cases they are involved in and the level of work they did on them and 'quality' of their testimony and 'understanding of tech' they demonstrate, and then see these cases where they made amazing leaps of logic and connections and suddenly became technology geniuses it's easy to identify.

But of course you need paid access to Lexus Nexus to look any of that up because while 'case law' is the law of the land and cases records are 'public' you have no way to, you know, access it or the information from all those 'public' cases they are involved in without paying big $$$. So the average person has no way to get exposed to how things really operate and instead go off some Constitutional and televisions crime drama 'ideals' that we all want reality to look like. It was really interesting spending hours going through those cases in the law library when I had 'free' (just trade a day of your life) access to it.

> it's then used by law enforcement

Never seen any abuse by law enforcement before :|

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy

I wouldn't be so naive. Groups like the Council For National Policy and Lance Wallnau pushing The Seven Mountain Mandate have been working for DECADES to push the agenda that you're seeing in schools and politics today.

Maybe not a "world order", but they'd certainly like to be.

Is anyone else astonished by how dramatically Hacker News has shifted its tone on this issue over the last five to ten years?

Eternal September, when big social media sites get big enough you will find larpers and bots including Hacker News.

Even so, the larpers and bots seem more authoritarian now.

Not sure Eternal September is an apt ad hom, when the parent you're responding to has been bitching about government overreach since the original meaning of the phrase.

Gadflies play a critical role in the ecosystem! :)

Mhmm. And what separates a gadfly from not-gadfly?

Gadflies target Bellerophons obviously.

It your steed can't handle a few gadflies, riding off to Mount Olympus is irresponsible.

Society as a whole has dramatically shifted its tone, and HN is still a part of that, however idiosyncratic.

It doesn't need to be a "World New Order" for three letter agencies lobbying to increase surveillance, and hence their power over the people. You are right, bureaucrats are clueless, but they don't need to be sharp, the agencies that will benefit from violating people's privacy and right already are. The is no possible good coming from those laws, the argument of "saving the children" falls flat, because you could extended to anything, "ban knives because children could cut themselves", etc... Privacy is a right, and those agencies(also known as deep state) pushing lawmakers to subvert it, are doing in to control people indeed.

"No possible good" is strong phrasing.

Putting aside the distracting CSAM branding, I can think of at least five good ones.

None of which I'd personally value over freedom, but it's disingenuous and a failure of understanding your opponent to pretend benefits don't exist.

> A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement.

I agree with you. We are too dumb, to selfish, to humans to be able to run a a New World Order, with decades-long plans in silence. For sure one stupid member would do a tiktok video while using their funny clothes

How do you explain the countless tyrants in ancient and modern history? Hell, even in contemporary times. The truth is that there are absolutely very dangerous people around. And also a lot of good people too. We can't know for certain who is who, so the best approach is to be as polite as if they were good people but as cautious as if they were evil.

There are only ever two high level options:

1) Put someone in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of the masses

2) Put the masses in charge, so that they can overrule the evil of individuals

Naturally the Romans, governmentally smart buggers that they were, adopted both.

In modern times, I think the best we can get is putting the masses in charge, with specific prohibitions on dumb things we know they'll try to do (e.g. trade freedom for security when they're scared).

> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.

It's marketed to upper-middle class elites as reasonable, and of course it's upper-middle class elites that are paid to put together this marketing. But it's really orders from an owner class that has entirely different interests from the other 99.9% of the population.

If an individual member of of the upper-middle class has a problem with {the imposition of the week}, they are harshly corrected, shunned, then eventually ejected from the upper-middle class. Your credentials will be taken away, your friends will avoid you to keep from being suspected themselves (and will rationalize this behavior to overcome cognitive dissonance, becoming energetic state chauvinists), your credit will be destroyed.

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.

This is just a slander. There are people who own large parts of the economy, and people live for decades, and people pass their ownership to their children. They are also friends with their peers. The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.

> The fantasyland is when we imply that they never speak to each other, never make plans, and have no agendas. It's a failure of thinking at scale.

This fantasyland is denifately common falacy many here believe

However it remains to be shown that their plans are what you say they are

I think you are wrong here and right.

There is no conspiracy, it has all already happened.

Maybe not on a global scope, but have you heard of the "stasi"?

Any political party can conspire to enforce something against the voter base that is not represented, pretty much any time.

The saying "knowledge is power" and 1984 and such havent been there for no reason.

People have written conspiracy theories about rfid chips, they have been ridiculous and what could these have given away other than location data and body temperature? Meanwhile, everyone has a mobile phone and a pc and smart devices which are phoning home sending the data to be sold to the highest bidder.

There have been terrible people in power on this planet and their paths should be full of obstacles.

Ask the people who suffered under pinochet, stasi and countless african dictators.

Better to not hand anyone the full infrastructure for absolute power and control if it can be prevented.

Nuclear codes and production secrets are not visible on youtube, and I think medical data, bank accounts, browsing history and docs on pcs should not be subject to preemptive surveillance.

If there are issues with child pornography, we have police forces for that, by all means, go for them.

If there is a terrorist problem, we have armies to sort them out, by all means, go for it.

> However it remains to be shown that their plans are what you say they are

I didn't mention any plans other than {the imposition of the week}, so I think introspection is due to discover why you think I did.

This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history. The PATRIOT act in America was quickly used to facilitate mass surveillance, and it reflects a greater pattern of government behavior. While there are "useful idiots" who embody the technically clueless bureaucrats you describe, there is absolutely collectives of nefarious actors aiming to control populations.

> This is just such an ignorant take with no regard for real history.

I take issue with your inclusion of the word "just" in this sentence. I don't disagree that it is an "ignorant" (in the technical sense, not pejorative) take with ~~no~~ little regard for real history, but that isn't all ("just") that it is. Almost certainly, this behavior is a consequence of heuristic (sub-perceptual) intuition, that is as it is as a consequence of the substantial and constant training/propaganda humans have been subjected to regarding "democracy" and "conspiratorial thinking" over the last decade or so, and especially heavily during the Trump and then COVID periods.

So when questions like this arise, it genuinely(!) seems to people like government officials are trustworthy, in fact. "Seems in fact" is an oxymoron of course, demonstrating how influential cultural norms can be, and in turn how bizarre "reality" is (and why, partially).

If hackers on HN used the same logic & epistemology they use in forum discussions when they are writing code at work, imagine how much of an even bigger disaster things would be out there!! :)

While I'm at it, I should probably also take a shot at this comment from above:

>> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.

And who is it pushed by? Politicians. And who is not asked their opinion on the matter? Voters. And what does this demonstrate? That "democracy" in practice is not a match for how it is described, not even close. And yet, day after day millions of instances of these same sorts of illusory discussions take place, here and elsewhere. It may never end.

Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream....

> I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state.

> In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}.

If public servants were left to their own devices and could mandate any law they like, they would instantly prohibit any behavior that is not explicitly allowed. Because that's how they themselves must function so that public can hold them accountable.

The trouble is that they inherently push this mentality to the politicians who must rely on them to get popularity contest points and sometimes manage to win these nonsense laws that help nobody.

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.

Sure, but there actually is "them". They are clueless, individually powerless, out-of-sight, largely disconnected social class that actually makes this happen. And they can wait decades for the right situation. In Czechia, the public servant actually responsible for introducing DNS blocking was actually tasked with online hazard oversight. He pushed it through in order to block just 6 websites because it was somehow easier for him than negotiating banning payments to them, probably because of turf wars. The respective two ministries are rivals and won't ever cooperate. He lobbied for this for like 10+ years and then a bunch of idiots has gotten elected and ran with it.

So in a way, you are right. But you are also somewhat wrong. From my experience finding the actual people pushing for this (it's usually not the politicians) and outing them would work way better.

> Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem.

Thankfully, we don't have to pretend! A cadre of wealthy Americans have a documented history of conspiring against the people of this country.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/u...

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

Parts of Germany instated laws that allowed to arrest people without trial for 30days.

They claimed to only use it to prevent severe crimes like terrorism.

Current statistics show, the most people that got arrested via that laws are climate activists.

So either the law makers and police are incompetent and therefore shouldn't make these laws way or they know what they are doing and therefore shouldn't make these laws.

BTW these laws made for "good reasons" don't get the jobs done.

On the other hand in UK we pass laws that make it illegal to steal dogs. Which was obviously illegal anyway.

I think American terror watchist has grown to nearly two million people. Are there really milkions of terrorists in US? How have they not yet blown up everything

I think the craziest thing you have in UK is Section 60. Specifically, the fact that a measly police inspector can unilaterally declare that "incidents involving serious violence MAY take place in a specified area", and then cops can stop and search anyone in that area without reasonable suspicion.

There is a "them" though: Tech giants. And they are pushing/lobbying hard with their huge financial reserves, which they extracted from clueless uninformed masses. A company like Google would love for all privacy protections to disappear tomorrow, because of the riches they can amass then. It is simply capitalism and greed at work.

"Them" is a metaphor for aligned incentives. If there are incentives for something to happen, it will happen. These incentives create a self-organizing conspiracy where the participants don't even need to communicate with each other, but they are co-operating anyway, just by acting in their own interest. It doesn't matter whether "them", the NWO or the lizard people are real or not; the end result is the same.

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.

I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out:

1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next?

2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what?

3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement?

Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud.

If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate and access information freely.

Agreed. Just like every fight for freedoms, it is a constant battle, and one that will never end.

The alternative would be China-style surveillance state, and be cool with it? Nice

> everyone actually adopts them

I think that scenario is unrealistic because if a majority of people are at a point where they would go to such lengths for privacy, democratic governments wouldn't be monitoring everything in the first place. I believe most high-democracy-index countries are democratic enough for this to apply. Actual reason for these policies is that most people do not care about privacy.

I know. It's a thought experiment to show that even in unrealistically optimistic conditions, technology is still not sufficient to solve the problem. I intentionally ignored the societal component of adoption for this reason, showing that it makes no difference.

IMO, your hypothetical falls apart at the second point:

> Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures.

A government could legislate that it may not rain anywhere in the country on Tuesdays, but executing that isn't practicable. Likewise, backdooring one family of CPUs may be possible, but you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.

And I want to say that there exists provably un-backdoor-able "zero-knowledge" computing, something like Ethereum's smart contract ISA, but I may be misremembering.

In the end, our governments are democratic, we elect politicians to represent our will. They shouldn't be pushing for things like backdoors at all when no citizens are in favour. So yes,

> [...] we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak.

I agree that China is currently, to continue your metaphor, winning the fight against privacy—but only because using the government-friendly superapps is necessary for everyday life, and not because they've blocked the likes of Tor.

> you can't simply tell chip fabs to backdoor each and every design. They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.

Yes, it's supposed to be an unrealistically optimistic thought experiment, both in favour of the efficacy of technical solutions (ignoring the societal component) and government power (ignoring economic side-effects). It shows that technology alone cannot outmanoeuvre unchecked power, and so power must be kept in check.

In reality, there are multiple forces beyond legislation that naturally add friction, which you allude to... However governments can get very far before hitting those thresholds, especially if there is no pushback from the people. There is also the problem of compounding policies eroding democratic freedoms, that can allow for easier enactment of ever more extreme policies, even in spite of economic consequence. For instance this is the case with the GFW in China where workers no longer have access to the full wealth of information available on the wider internet to perform their jobs as effectively.

The ultimate point I'm trying to make here (and I think we are in agreement), is that as technologists we cannot simply bury our heads in our code, we must acknowledge that developing more resilient technology is only a single component, it is not sufficient. Supporting the fight against freedom eroding policies is necessary.

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

> They'd grind to a halt in order to comply.

that would be the intended outcome: comply or die.

The key here is that the "systems" that we need to decentralize include political and economic systems, not just technological ones.

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.

I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.

here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it

in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them

many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too

in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did

"if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought

the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers

All those things are enjoyable and have no legal alternative. A chat application would have.

uber cab is not especially enjoyable, and the legal alternatives (for riders) include taxis and remises (not to mention buses, trains, bicycles, private cars, private motorcycles, and electric scooters; buenos aires is pretty dense and public transport is pretty good)

uber was just better

the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them, geez

the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex, which many people actually preferred; possibly you haven't heard, but it's a more popular alternative even today

you're right about heroin and meth though, so, one out of four i guess

Did you forget about alcohol, nicotine, caffeine? Totally legal addictive alternatives.

arguably caffeine and alcohol are even less adequate as a replacement for heroin than a bicycle is as a replacement for uber cab

i mean if the objective is just 'euphoria' (as opposed to avoiding opiate withdrawal or having a 60-hour-long orgy) there are a lot of ways you can get it: hyperventilation, falling in love, roller coasters, exercise, praying, etc., and i thought about saying this, but i think that this really is a pretty weak counterargument to dtech's claim that heroin and meth have no legal alternatives; they're pretty much right about that

Only Uber had an alternative, the rest you either didn't address or are incorrect

> the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex

Unless you're subscribing to a unscientific "people choose to be gay" philosophy, having sex with a gender you're not attracted to is not at all an alternative.

> the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them

You mentioned surviving today, currently a lot of those games cannot be bought legally, which is what I meant with no alternative. Back then also a lot of people didn't pirate, and a lot of people who did did so because they had little money. I would count that situation as having no available alternative.

We were discussing a hypothetical chat application which currently are offered for free, so money is not an issue there.

This draws a false dichotomy between "people use X" and "nobody uses X." There's actually a sliding scale of how many people use X. When a thing is illegal, fewer people will use it and the people who do use it will be at risk. If we thing a thing is important and that people should be able to use it, it's bad if that thing is illegal. There's a reason why people fought so hard decriminalize gay sex—not because laws against gay sex made it impossible, but because those laws were nevertheless really bad for gay people.

i don't agree that i subscribe to that dichotomy

i think it is incorrect for precisely the reason you state

It is fairly easy to argue that people have more gay sex now that gay marriages are legal.

plausibly, and plausibly making private communication illegal would result in less private communication successfully taking place, but it certainly wouldn't result in private communication dwindling to an insignificant activity, which is the most charitable interpretation i could come up with for the obviously absurd claim i was rebutting, 'if it's illegal people just won't use it'

> It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it.

Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.

Bittorrent still exists. Plenty Gen-Zers use it too.

Thank you for illustrating the point!

Gen-Xer here: Napster was never made illegal

Napster lost several lawsuits in the US and filed for bankruptcy

But Napster the brand was sold to Roxio and continued operations

it's still active today

https://www.napster.com/

Anyway, in retrospective, Napster times were fun, university networks were clogged by students downloading music all day long and, at least in my country, many people bought a dial up internet connection just to use it.

But it had serious unexpected consequences, it gave birth to new generations of listeners that do not buy music, because they never had to, and the musicians are now paid virtually nothing for the music they create, while majors still make a lot of money, which isn't exactly what we hoped for when we hated on Metallica for suing Napster.

People were not using it because it was illegal, people were using it because it was cool. It was mostly young people.

Chats are a different beast, if they were ever made illegal, a lot of people would stop using them, because they would disappear from app stores and a prominent smartphone manufacturer we all know would probably delete the app remotely from the users' devices and report to the authorities whoever would dear to sideload it.

I feel sometimes a little bit conflicted about those years when I see my musician friends touring over and over because selling records and make a living of it it's not a thing anymore, and now I buy a lot more music than I did in the past (which was already a decent amount), directly from artists when I can.

"never made illegal" but "lost everal lawsuits", got it

Civil court in America is just as powerful as criminal and only requires a preponderance of evidence standard be met.

it wasn't illegal in my country so...

anyway, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. lost a lot of lawsuits, I believe they are still not illegal.

People were also using it to discover new music. Most radio stations in the US are owned by a couple of large corporations who play the same bland stuff nationwide. Most of my CD collection comes from artists I discovered back then.

Once a decentralized system becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, banning it becomes tantamount to imposing economic sanctions on yourself. That's basically what happened with the internet. That might have just been a fluke, but it would be awesome if we could somehow manage to create more systems like that.

The problem is that when political elites are faced between the choice of ruling an impoverished population and losing power, they will always choose the former.

It is necessary both to try to get rid of bad laws and to encourage, facilitate, and protect mass civil disobedience.

I've always wondered behind the rationale on privacy being a human right. What if it wasn't? What if instead we were enforcing transparency? Force everything to be public, starting from the government down to the local coffee shop. All transactions, all communications, everything. Make privacy a crime for everybody, including the government and the military. Just as a thought exercise, it would be a remarkably different world. I think the problem privacy is solving enables a different set of problems to emerge that would have otherwise been impossible. And one could argue that these new problems are those that enable the necessity for privacy to be established as a human right in the first place.

The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively).

Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.

Privacy though is perpetuating that priviledged class because they can do their shady business in secret. If everything was transparent, that would be harder to achieve.

Also the "every human society that's ever existed" isn't true, because for sure when humans were nomads, you basically knew what's happening with everybody in your tribe, transparency was at 100%, privacy at 0. It's also the case today in many places such as small villages where everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it seems to be ok.

It'd be great to expose shady business, but somebody has to enforce the forced transparency and that's a LOT of power. Whoever has that power can pretty easily keep privacy for themselves and their friends, use it to blackmail others, and enforce it more harshly on their enemies.

My point is that no matter what society you look at, the privileged get the nice things (like privacy) automatically whereas the underprivileged have to get it encoded into law, and even then it's not guaranteed. It's a rigged game, and the right to privacy levels the playing field.

When humans were nomads, we didn't have human rights so the point is kind of moot, but we still had secrets (even if gossip made it harder to keep them secret) and we still had a strong social hierarchy with privileged elders.

Of course, it needs to be constitutional for it to work, a complete ban of privacy. There can't be any entity that is priviledged over that because that would be terrible. Keep in mind that "human rights" is a thing we invented (or those people in power invented) and also a thing we can change, my point is that the human right of privacy really only actually benefits those in power more than the common person (who is going to be subjected to the violation of their privacy anyway) and by making privacy illegal constitutionally is really going to level the playing field.

I've had similar thoughts, but I always land on the asymetry between governments and its populace being the key issue.

If transparency is the norm, governments need to go first.

Since that will never happen, the only solution remains privacy for all, or no government at all.

Sure, let's make everyone to walk around naked. Let's also make sure, that everyone knows what is going on in your life, where you and your loved ones live, what they buy, how much money they make, what they say, ....... Your argument is ridiculous.

people need privacy not because their acts are unworthy

people need privacy because others' intentions and judgment are unworthy

if you've ever known anyone who was gay, who got divorced, who secretly had a deprecated ethnic background, who left their faith, who didn't want their ex-boyfriend to know where they lived, who revealed government corruption, who struggled for political change, or who could be raped or robbed by a stranger, you've known someone who needed privacy

even though they had nothing to be ashamed of

you might argue that if nobody had privacy, nobody would be able to get away with rape, or with lynching people they discovered had a drop of black blood, or with lynching apostates, or with gay-bashing, so these things wouldn't happen in a world without privacy

that would be a stupid argument because people did those things openly all the time, and they usually got away with it, and some of them still do; humans have a social pecking order, and it is defined by aggression with impunity

also people murder their ex-partners all the time even when they won't get away with it

Dealing with aggression using privacy doesn't seem to be solving the problem though, nor it is a solution? You shouldn't live your life hiding. We need privacy because of X, underlies the assumption that X is something different and unwanted, perpetuating that idea it's trying to protect. If everything was public then it would more easily become part of reality, part of normal. Hiding in privacy just keeps the problem going.

We need privacy because of X, underlies the assumption that X is something different and unwanted, perpetuating that idea it's trying to protect

this is poorly expressed, but i think you're trying to say that privacy can only be justified to hide 'unwanted' things, and so, for example, arguing that people need privacy to hide being gay implicitly accepts that it is bad to be gay; is that what you meant?

this is the premise i explicitly rejected in my comment; to use that example, this is an instance of what i said

gay people need privacy not because being gay is bad

gay people need privacy because others' intentions and judgment toward gay people are bad

you seem to be arguing that it would be good to improve others' intentions and judgment toward gay people, and this is correct, but there are limits to how much mere exposure can effect such a change

i am not willing to sacrifice gay people's lives for that

it should be extremely obvious that your reasoning is invalid in some of my examples

your teenaged neighbor doesn't want everyone to see her in the shower and to know when she's alone and unprotected because she's vulnerable to being raped

there is no assumption that the shape of her breasts or her walking home alone last thursday are 'something different and unwanted' or in any way bad; quite the contrary, her ability to walk home alone is precisely the good that it is important to protect in this situation

the problem is, as ought to be obvious, certain other people's intentions toward her; she needs privacy to protect herself

But if you take today's societies as an example, those that do encourage being openly gay are those that have much less incidents of judgement towards gay. Societies where it's culturally fine to be naked in various situations, you forget about it, it doesn't become a thing to notice anymore. If you're at a nude beach, or at a sauna, people don't suddenly rape each other because they see them naked. It becomes normal very quickly.

I understand what you're saying but my point is if we didn't try to protect X, it would eventually be normalized, become part of daily life and not noticeable as a thing that needs to be protected AND that it seems that when putting protections for X, that protection implicitly includes the assumption that X is bad. A naked body isn't inherently an invitation for rape, unless you implant that idea into someone's mind through the ban of public nakedness, and being gay isn't a thing to judge, unless you make it a taboo and discourage its public expression.

I'm not convinced, the real life evidence in actual tolerant societies seem to suggest that the more open we are, the less secrets we keep and the more transparent we are, life improves.

Without privacy, human beings cannot be their true, complete selves. Why do some people only sing in the shower?

> Why do some people only sing in the shower?

Because we have structured society and our culture in such a way that some people can only feel safe when inside a small thick wall cell with the door locked behind them. That's terrible though, my proposition is to invert that, what would allow people to sing in the streets without any fear of judgement, and use that as a basis. Privacy as an idea suggests "let's put more doors with locks" when in fact that doesn't help at all. It doesn't address the problem that necessitates those doors with locks to exist.

I couldn't agree less. It's not a function of social structure or culture, it's an innate human trait. Your proposed society is to me simply a dystopia where no one is free to be a complete human being.

Separately, privacy and secrecy are related but distinct things. Telling me that you sing in the shower is a different thing than inviting me in to see and hear it.

There are a lot of people objecting to the "real motivation" argument (it's just bureaucratic incompetence, they don't know what they're doing, etc. etc.)

Usually those are good arguments. Not this time.

This proposal is Pure Evil. Hardly anyone is willing to come out and say they admire the Chinese social credit system. But when their every action leans towards replicating it, it's more than fair to drag them out into the sunlight.

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.

No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.

Trying to fight legal frameworks with technology, failed in the past with some notable but hardly repeatable exceptions. In the 90s a few geeks tech awareness could match the resources of a small state, non tech-savvy state. Nowadays it is impossible because the discrepancy in resources is huge.

There are countries that force you to download their own "secure" SSL certificate, so they can sniff all traffic. China is the worst and most prominent example.

This battle need to be fought on the street, with votes, by raising awareness, etc. If we want to be "free" we need to take-over the political battle, not the tech battle because if we win on that front, most likely won't matter. I don't want to risk jail for using an open source encryption tool.

>No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place.

I'm reminded of the EMH joke about the economist walking by a 100 dollar bill on the street, assuming that it must be fake because if it were real, someone already would have picked it up.

What is EMH? Sounds like a crypto convention to me.

Efficient Markets Hypothesis

> We certainly need decentralized systems

Matrix and XMPP exists, what should we do to make this more popular?

Make it accessible.

> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.

I'm not for more surveillance, but this is the exact argument that people give against gun control

So?

Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.

Don't call encryption illegal. That's letting them shape the narrative.

Isn't the whole point that they're trying to make mathematics illegal? To my knowledge, encryption is currently legal.

To those who say "it's impossible to make encryption illegal": there have been sillier laws. George Orwell once imagined a society where 2+2=5 was a law. While they usually do, laws don't have to make sense.

My favourite example in the world of "silly" laws - Saudi Arabia invests massive money in scientific research, and still executes people for Sorcery and Witchcraft

We don't need to look to fiction in the US to see examples of encryption controlled by the State with laws, it was literally US government policy in the 90s/early 2000s. Examples include banning export of encryption keys longer than 40 bits etc to make it easier for US secret services to crack the foreign purchaser's systems, the debate during the Clinton administration on what should be permitted encryption-wise was intense at times.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

You should look into the so called ghost guns that show up. It hasn't been easier to get one, whether from assembling a kit to 3d printing to finding plans to build one from scrap.

It's still hard. I couldn't go out and make a gun right now. Meanwhile, many children have invented their own codes and ciphers by age 10, armed only with paper and pencil and the desire to keep a secret. A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that "hey, maybe asymmetric encryption is possible" and the knowledge that (F_p \ {0}, ×) is a group.

> A basic understanding of group theory lets you invent RSA, a practically-unbreakable asymmetric cryptographic scheme, given only the idea that

And I bet the NSA would break your homegrown RSA built with your basic understanding of group theory in a few minutes. RSA is extremely subtle to implement correctly and if you get it wrong you can easily leak everything.

Unlikely. The hard part of implementing RSA is making it secure against timing attacks, but I doubt my desk calculator and I will be particularly vulnerable to that. It's not like I'm going to suffer from the ECB penguin issue: MY MSGZ R SMOL and my key size is large enough to avoid that.

RSA really is very simple group theory. It was independently invented at least three times, as I recall.

Outside of the USA you can't simply order gun parts or ammunition without a licence. You'd have to manufacture everything yourself. That's a lot harder than simply 3D printing a lower receiver.

Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose. You'd be prosecuted even if you used it to defend yourself.

While true, the post I was responding to claimed you needed to be a gunsmith. That simply isn't true anymore.

> Also that gun would be useless for any legal purpose

Also irrelevant, given that the topic is illegal firearms.

You pretty much need to be a gunsmith to create a reliable weapon that won't jam and won't explode in your face. In most countries you can't order weapon parts online - all load-bearing parts are regulated. You can't manufacture those without gunsmithing skills and equipment.

This is why criminals prefer to smuggle industrially manufactured illegal guns from somewhere else instead of making them at home.

Gun laws don't prevent someone from making shitty homemade guns. They prevent them from getting properly made ones. Accessing gun smuggling networks isn't that easy without connections to the criminal underworld.

I looked up Luty's homemade firearms. He claimed that they can be manufactured by anyone. But that's obviously not true. He definitely had good metalworking skills. I certainly would not be able to manufacture anything like that at home.

If you pay enough attention, you will notice that the same argument is used to push many political agendas (for better or worse):

- "You can't ban encrypted messaging. Terrorists will always find a way to communicate."

- "You can't outlaw abortions, just safe ones. Women will always find a way."

- "You can't uniformly enforce gun control. Dedicated criminals will keep buying weapons on the black market."

- "You can't ban cryptocurrencies. Enthusiasts will still trade on P2P exchanges."

All of these are half truth, and half lie. Every policy introduces a certain amount of user friction, which is proven to discourage action. Some people will refrain from infringing the policy (e.g. using guns, performing abortions, using encrypted messaging apps), some others will comply. Percentages obviously vary depending on the specific policy, but it's never 0% nor 100% like "both" sides want you to believe.

The common theme of most of the above points is that the freedom of the innocent will be reduced or their suffering increased if the change is enacted, while less innocent people can continue to ignore the rules. It's oppression of the weakest.

In general, society should be very careful with the things it bans. Prohibition is a hammer best left for extreme situational outliers, not one that should be used for each and every thing someone happens to dislike.

Unfortunately, societal amnesia means we will never learn this lesson. We will continue to ban things too much, and be too oppressive, until it becomes too overwhelming and a revolution happens. Rinse and repeat.

I'm sure all of these examples (encryption, guns, abortion, crypto currencies) are considered by some people to be that extreme situational outlier, and needs to be banned yesterday.

Mine is proof-of-waste crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, or Ethereum before the PoS merge. Too much CO2 for too little gain.

(There's also the Ponzi aspect, but I don't think we need new laws to ban Ponzi schemes: if a crypto currency turns out to be a Ponzi scheme, just sue them for making a Ponzi scheme.)

A quicker way is to note that a given policy would be difficult to effectively enforce. People like to say unenforceable, which is rarely true given enough resources. But if there are two solutions to an issue, and one isn't as easy to enforce, that is a valid point. Using gun control as an example, restricting sale of ammunition instead of firearms might be difficult to enforce, because ammunition is easier to manufacture at home. Restricting sale of marijuana isn't effective because anyone can grow it in a closet, but testing at employment centers adds a lot more friction as you say, and you don't neednto monitor people's power usage or send around sniffer trucks.

It should be noted tho that the easiness of "finding a way", and the difficulty of enforcing the law, varies widely between these.

For example - and I say this as someone pro-gun - gun control would likely be the easiest to enforce since it necessarily involves physical things, and not easily obtainable ones at that, at least if you want efficient guns. E.g. black powder is not hard to make, but good luck trying to make it work in anything semi-auto without constant jamming. Sure, there's an active "gun hacker" scene where people come up with designs that can be made at home with readily available tools etc, and it's great as a counterbalance to heavy-handed attempts to regulate... but there are no from-scratch designs that are even close to just about any semi-auto rifle on the market in terms of firepower or reliability (the non-from-scratch designs involve making the regulated parts of the firearm at home, and buying everything that can go over the counter; in US, the latter is everything except for one part).

OTOH if you ban encrypted messaging, how would you enforce that? It's hard to detect on the wire if the protocol is specifically designed to withstand such scrutiny, so you'd have to go after distribution of software. You could force Apple and Google to scrub their app stores, but then people can still install directly on everything other than iOS, and they'd just download it from foreign websites. So now you need some kind of a national firewall to detect and block that etc. It's not that any of that is impossible, but it's certainly much harder, and it would affect a lot more people overall, resulting in more pushback.

For years the US government has attempted to limit the use (and 'export') of strong encryption protocols like PGP using the argument that they should be treated as munitions. The case against Zimmermann in the early 1990s regarding his posting of PGP to a Usenet site, and the eventual decision by the US government not to proceed with the case, is illustrative. Here's an excerpt from the statement by lawyer on the case. It's from over two decades ago, but still worth reading (the laws have been relaxed somewhat since then, but it's not really clear how far):

http://dubois.com/No-prosecute-announcement.txt

> "Now, some words about the case and the future. Nobody should conclude that it is now legal to export cryptographic software. It isn't. The law may change, but for now, you'll probably be prosecuted if you break it. People wonder why the government declined prosecution, especially since the government isn't saying. One perfectly good reason might be that Mr. Zimmermann did not break the law. (This is not always a deterrent to indictment. Sometimes the government isn't sure whether someone's conduct is illegal and so prosecutes that person to find out.) Another might be that the government did not want to risk a judicial finding that posting cryptographic software on a site in the U.S., even if it's an Internet site, is not an "export". There was also the risk that the export-control law would be declared unconstitutional. Perhaps the government did not want to get into a public argument about some important policy issues: should it be illegal to export cryptographic software? Should U.S. citizens have access to technology that permits private communication? And ultimately, do U.S. citizens have the right to communicate in absolute privacy?"

> "There are forces at work that will, if unresisted, take from us our liberties. There always will be. But at least in the United States, our rights are not so much stolen from us as they are simply lost by us. The price of freedom is not only vigilance but also participation. Those folks I mention in this message have participated and no doubt will continue. My thanks, and the thanks of Philip Zimmermann, to each of you."

One obvious concern about this move in the EU is that they'll try to criminalize the use of cryptography again.

Systems outside the control of any government entity devolve into a familiar cavalcade of horrors. You need a better answer for the fact that those horrors exist, and that many people who draw government paychecks devote their careers to fighting them in good faith, with good results.

You'd think that after twenty years the debate would have moved past advocating for complete lawlessness, but we get stuck in the same puerile tropes. The fact that bad state actors exist does not change the fact that horribly abusive material, with real victims, will be shared on any platform those abusers consider safe, and that the existence of such platforms will encourage further abuse.

Anyone who has worked on child sexual exploitation material on any platform knows this, and any privacy advocate has to have a better answer for it than 'nuh-uh'.

> Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography"

The four horsemen of the Infocalypse

> The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime.

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

>Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.

That's the hard part, IMO.

Imagine that we really got that "decentralized system that cannot be controlled" going and everyone is using it. Everyone, including those who is into illegal things. And they don't get caught.

Now the government starts to push their "this decentralized shit is doing more harm than good" agenda. Whatever their motivation is, it would be easy to sway public opinion against surveillance-free communications, because the harm is real, not hypothetical, like it is now.

Criminals are using encrypted communications right now, though. The harm is already real.

Now, I have a cryptography library to polish.

They are not widespread now, though. The government is keeping their communications under control, more or less. Only most educated criminals have good enough opsec. The gov can subpoena whatever service they use today and disrupt their communications without disrupting everyone else's. They don't have so called collateral privacy. The 'encrypted' part doesn't really add much harm.

With truly decentralized system things would be different.

> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.

Thats the same argument for less gun control.

Who is "actually fighting for their rights in the UE" exactly? care to share some examples?

> Privacy is a human right

I believe you where talking about secrecy.

WhatsApp chats are secret, but not necessarily private.

Authorities can ask Meta to release the meta data and they can inspect phones to retrieve the chat logs.

Private communications have never been secret, it was always possible for the people with the necessary authorizations to access them.

Privacy is consensual, secrecy is not.

But there is no right to secrecy.

As much as I love mullvad and their excellent products, they never link the proposal they talk about in that page, which hinders the people' ability to form their own opinion.

All the material we can find revolves around the same actors, quoting each other, some like the Pirate party, say it was leaked

Leaked Commission paper EU mass surveillance plans

https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commissi...

But it's not true, it's officially published on the EU website, it wasn't being kept hidden, it had to be translated to all the EU official languages before being published.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...

I understand being concerned, what I do not understand is being catastrophic.

Even if everything they wrote was true, a proposal is not a law, so whatever happened in the Swedish parliament, was not influenced by the EU proposal.

p.s. the system is similar to CSAM, which I don't like either, but sooner or later such systems will be everywhere, like it or not.

The discussion must be held in a way or another.

Apple too considered scanning the users' devices to match CSAM pictures, they dropped it, for now, but probably only because they are developing their own system, independent from the government, so they don't have to give them any kind of access.

Here the discussion is being held in public, by people elected by European citizens directly with their vote, these people are paid exactly to discuss these matters, theya re doing their job.

You wrote "the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it." but the they you mention are elected officials, not SP.E.C.T.R.E. evil agents

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity.

No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen.

Though, part of this deal is that we take control on when they go too far, and do stupid things. Which seems to be the case in this case, because of which we push against it, because that's how we hope to get a healthy world.

> Privacy is a human right.

So is security. It's all about balancing interests and abilities.

> whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.

That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.

> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway.

No, they are not. The majority of criminals are not some organized super villains. They are usually also depending on the same tools and networks as everyone else. And they are also just flawed humans, making errors.

> > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it.

> That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS.

Are you familiar with a country called China?

"All leaders want their countries to be like China" is conspiracy BS, yes.

Nostr has been with good development lately.

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