The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
eff.org
eff.org
Some first hits as reminders of places where their powers are abused
[1]: "NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
[2]: https://reason.com/2022/07/26/police-can-access-your-ring-ca...
[3]: https://reason.com/2021/04/26/warrantless-border-searches-dr...
Your social security number? Your bank account number? Your debit card PIN? Yeah, pretty sure you have something to hide.
This is what fascism looks like.
Before that you shared your consuming habits online.
Then it becomes illegal.
You are now a suspect and get a search warrant and if they find traces of marijuana you go to jail.
Locks are more for security than privacy, and it's important not to conflate the two. People can have nothing to hide, but also not want to be robbed.
And as for email, that's again a matter of security because then someone could impersonate you for one, and I can't name a service that allows you to omit having a password for your email account.
(I know, looking too deeply into it! Sorry.)
Is that adequate security? Is that adequate privacy? This is what bills like EARN IT and its ilk are positing with backdoors et al. It depends on your threat model.
If a warrant opens a door or account one way or another, it can be argued that privacy-wise, locks and passwords are poor solutions. Are you protecting business data or trying to survive in an oppressive regime?
Different solutions for different problems, how appropriate they are varies with demographics too.
This is an interesting talking point about privacy and security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35617773
First it's just one, then it becomes the other.
Ergo, if this is a consideration within your threat model, it's an inappropriate solution. However, I am highlighting that EARN IT is no more a threat than existing service providers abiding by a court order, ergo the existing solutions likely aren't fit-for-purpose for some folks, depending on threat model.
Yes. Privacy is a subset of security.
Off the cuff:
* Being an anonymous person walking through a city. This is a privacy concern and only becomes a security concern if I'm a public persona or some kind of person of interest.
* Moving to a new school/city/job and not having your social reputation follow you. This allows a lot of people a chance to redefine who they are and how they interact with people around them. This can't happen if everybody always knows somebody's pervious public persona.
* Breaking a law and being fined/punished/imprisoned for it. Without privacy, such a person has a much poorer chance of having a decent life even after they've done their time or paid their dues.
These all strike me as privacy concerns, but not necessarily concerns to security. I think they're all important enough to consider privacy as a good thing in it's own right and that such scenarios signal that it's possible to advocate privacy in the absence of (or opposition to) security concerns.
The most accurate lines I can draw around either are abstract enough that they end up in the same bucket, but perhaps we're defining them differently
So you need to protect the system to protect the information on it, but there are also sometimes trade offs between security and privacy when you offload some system protection by giving away some information to another party. For example SmartScreen with Microsoft, and Safe Browsing with Google Chrome.
> IMO these are all 'security' related, just personal security (which is what I define privacy as).
I think this level of reduction becomes problematic in scenarios where security>privacy advocates talk about security in the collective sense.
Playing devil's advocate to highlight where I believe this reduction of security->personal security->privacy breaks down: A man borrowed many books from a library on the topic of explosive chemistry. That man later was involved in terrorist acts.
This is a situation where one could argue that less privacy for people in relation to their library borrowing habits may have resulted in greater security.
This is an example of an event that has happened, and while I hate the cliche of terrorism in debates about privacy and feel this particular point can be argued, it's exactly these kinds of scenarios that security>privacy advocates use to push for fewer privacy protections across large groups of people.
The Sokovia Accords Debate [1] from the Captain America Civil War (2016) film says it best, imho.
You know information people ALWAYS blindly believe 100%? "Leaked" data. Imagine how much power one could have with manipulated, leaked, data.
I guess if we're nitpicking I'll point out that this is still privacy (how one keeps their password) for the sake of security. Information is kept private and passwords are information.
This seems like it's shifting the goalposts. Someone says something about "nothing to hide but they have locks on their doors" and you say "security isn't the same as privacy". It's accurate but it's moot. I keep the location of my hide-a-key private so I can continue to keep my house secure with the lock on the front door. I keep my email password private so I can secure the account against unauthorized access.
Some people do use their email for what they would consider sensitive communications, and it's less than helpful to suggest they need better opsec practices in response to someone else saying that they should be able to expect their email to be private. It's saying "just hide it better, lol" when that's literally exactly what many people are trying to do when speaking against this sort of legislation.
Where I live, there are no laws against public nudity (as long as the nudity isn't "salacious" in nature). And yet, very nearly 100% of the people are clothed at all times.
People also smoke cigarettes, eat junk food, and do things that are unnatural and otherwise detrimental due to what they're bombarded with.
I wear clothes, I'm not a nudist. I have zero shame about my body though, it's a body—we've all got one.
The point as per my other comments: different solutions for different problems, the appropriateness of each varies with demographics. E.g., if you're surviving in an oppressive regime as a dissenter, email is something to be avoided. If you're running a business, it's likely fine, provided that it's compliant for your industry, e.g., HIPAA.
With what I had in mind, if you logged into my Gmail account, which provides both sending and receiving, you could impersonate me to my own mother, but I would have nothing to hide as I don't receive any sensitive information via email (privacy). However, accounts elsewhere could be recovered via my email, and thus be used to impersonate me elsewhere (security).
Which means they do have things to hide. There are lots of thieves in places of power, and that is a compelling reason not to let them have our data.
There is a difference between pooping in front of family and in front of strangers.
I guess he is a metaphor for the surveillance state. Or the other way around. Dunno.
He might have been a little younger, I don't remember precisely, I don't believe he was talking much at the age when this happened.
Would they be okay with the data being used to overcharge them whenever they're in a hurry because the organization knows when they don't have time to comparison shop?
How about maximizing their tax burden by using the data to calculate the highest tax rates each area would tolerate before moving or changing their vote?
Suppose the government falls under the control of the party they don't like. Should they have access to the data that allows them to most effectively target their propaganda?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT
But I find the sort of people who believe in "nothing to hide" tend to believe in the efficacy of bureaucratic systems set up to prevent that sort of thing. A belief (ironically) bolstered by the privacy those organizations secure for themselves, so that those kinds of individual abuses are rarely discovered. Who watches the watchers?
Whereas it's easy to understand that if you don't have a high opinion of the opposing party's most recent President, you might very well not want their administration knowing everything about everyone.
When people say they have nothing to hide, in most cases what they're actually saying is that they're afraid of the confrontation implicit in the opposite response (I'm going to forcefully argue for a right to privacy). They're telling you that they're a coward.
If they truly have no ethical or moral boundaries, then they are probably deviant enough that they won't be able to get into a position to set much policy, anyways, by definition of their lack of fitness to represent the majority of any population.
You go ahead and zen out and, in turn, take those things with grace by going along with it when someone raises a fuss ("oh, I am soooo humiliated! :)"). Or if you're of another archetype, you'll find witty ways to playfully snap back and turn it around on people trying to clown on you (alas, I'm not of this type/talent). Moreover, there are the countless, other not-uncommon approaches that often lead to escalation/hostility/violence.
Then it becomes a drag (and where the issue lies) when it really catches on in wildfire manner, to where it will have practically problematic effects on you personally or professionally, not unlike the lie that makes it halfway 'round the world before the truth can put its pants on.
As far as I see it, all of that is what is trying to be highlighted with the pooping witness analogy. Of course, that should probably be underscored when presenting it.
You'll probably still get a "yeah, that's fine" or "I don't care what anyone else thinks" after you elaborate. And tons of other cans of worms can reasonably be opened as topical offshoots; I'm just trying to concur that the "I don't mind" response doesn't really feel like a response.
Maybe some people even think they believe it when they say it, but I've yet to see anyone who is willing to demonstrate it when pressed, and I've even met a few people who have claimed that they have no concerns at all about their privacy, but who then ended up feeling violated when even small things they assumed were private ended up being exposed.
-- excerpt from A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, Eric Hughes, March 9, 1993
It's funny (not haha-funny) how political policy in 2023 is still trying to catch up to morality understood 30 years ago. I remember being annoyed at newscasters abusing the term "hackers" in the late 90s and extremely broad definitions of "hacking" being applied in court-rulings. It must still be really difficult to comprehend tech and the consequences of these kinds of policies for policy makers. Either that or policy makers really are maleficent towards life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That's also why terms are being used deliberately incorrectly, to move legitimate positions nearer to criminal activity. Just ask anyone interested in hobbyist chemistry.
A better example would be encryption keys.
"They say a Secret is something you tell one other person, so I'm telling you, child".
The bank knows your password. Which means they (or more precisely their agents, employees, etc.) can lose it yet they'll probably try to blame you.
It is possible to not have this happen via what's called an Augmented PAKE - the bank wouldn't know your password, but they'd be able to check you still remembered it - however almost certainly none of the systems you use today do this.
Of course leaking the hash of my password might make it easier to crack, to some extent, but if they've done a good job then this is much better than it being something the bank can trivially lose.
Any bank that restricts which characters one can include in a password probably doesn't store a hash of it.
Even with Client side hashing, the software can still validate password requirements on the client side, you may be able to bypass those requirements by modifying the client side software.
So still no, having password requirements tells you nothing about whether the password is being stored in the clear or not. The statement that I disagreed with is still completely false.
"#" can mean phone number "+" or "&" can mean concatenate variables
It is vastly easier to screen out possible problems at the user/browser level than rewrite zillions of lines of legacy code.
Putting aside the banks who literally do store the password because they have security procedures like "Please enter the first and fifth characters of your password" even those that do store a password hash still need you to submit your password to authenticate.
So, like the lyric says, you tell the bank your password. You hope they just use it to authenticate you and immediately discard it, but if bank security lapses are anything to go by they're probably logging it "for security" and there are definitely employees able to snoop the decrypted plaintext passwords from customers on some internal teams.
That is what Augmented PAKEs fix, it's really hard to do well, and of course banks see themselves as infinitely trustworthy so why would they bother.
This mistaken sense of self-worth applies to your credit card PIN by the way also, of course banks and thus bank employees can know your PIN, which means when a purchase is "secured" by the PIN that rules out some local pickpocket having made the purchase, but as well as you it leaves open the possibility that it was a bank employee or their co-conspirator.
Normally banks can't and shouldn't know the password in most jurisdictions. It does pass to their server, but they're supposed to only store a hash of it, so not be able to know what it is.
But if anybody makes this BS argument, just ask them for the credit card number and the 3 digits on the back of the card, telling them you will post it online.
You should almost never be forced to nude up.
The right protection is for the power to not exist.
"What level of trust do you think you've earned?"
"What do you want to do with all this information?"
"How will this make things better?'
"Don't you have more important things to spend time and money on?"
"Is this really the best thing the government should be working on right now?"
"How does this help any of society's ills?"
"Will taxes need to be increased to manage, store, and analyse the mountains of information that will be created?"
"How long will you store messages between me and my daughter about her contemplating suicide, and will those messages prevent her from getting a government job later in life?"
"Does the storing of all this data come with a responsibility to make it accessible to defend people who have been accused of a crime?"
"My wife works in law enforcement, will she have access to this trove of data?"
"Will there be a process to remove data from this trove that may be libelous or cause undue harm to an individual or company?"
"Is the government responsible for the complete chain of access to this data, or are there private companies involved that have to be trusted not to sneak a peek?"
"What specific issue, currently facing today's society, does this solve?"
Surveillance isn't some harmless thing, because you can tell a million lies with a drop of the truth in them for any reason you want.
Imagine you get established in life and decide to run for local politics only to have the fact that you've gone to Vegas 4 times in your life somehow turned into a completely untrue "drug use and prostitution" scandal that destroys your credibility and political career before it even started.
Imagine having your grandkids' college scholarships revoked because you ran an incredibly unprofitable and short lived onlyfans for 3 months in your late teens.
Maybe the results won't be as overt as this. Maybe it will be worse.
Either way, it is invasive and gives complete strangers power over your future and your children's future that they simply should not have and have no reason to ever have.
It's morally repugnant and abhorrent to any person who takes the time to think not of what information will be collected but of what that information will be used for and by whom.
The children of the people who as of today are still talking about how great trump is and how he "brought peace to the middle east" and how "evil demoncrats are running a global cabal to turn humans into monkeys" are the people who at best will be the parents and friends and neighbors of the people who will have finely grained and exacting data of everything you have done from well before the day of the passing of a bill like this.
This bill would make America the equivalent of living in an overly nosy HOA city everywhere for everyone. The people who fit in and don't make waves will get the 1950's nuclear family treatment, and those that don't will get the April 26, 1986 Pripyat nuclear treatment.
The argument above could really only be used if a case came to court and evidence providence needed to be questioned.
This argument is a poor one in the face of politics or lawyers because the ambiguity is such that it becomes a case of "who do you believe is telling the truth" because a jury is a group of humans, and our nature appears to be to err on the side of guilt over innocence. Hence accusation=at least guilty of "something". It therefore works in favour of the power status quo.
I have some baggage relating to this.
I don't think you're wrong in predicting this, and I actually think you're proven correct by precedent already. The answer to this is many and varied, but one core concept that should always be kept in mind is, much like "with great power comes great responsibility":
With great claims comes great burden of proof
What statistics are you trying to improve, and have you got a baseline you can share with us that can be used in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years to prove the effectiveness of this legislation in "protecting the children"? What's your time frame after which, if no measurable improvement to these statistics has been made, then the legislation will be declared a failure and repealed?
(This is, of course living in some kind of utopian thought experiment, and society just doesn't have the memory to allow such holding the decisions of the powerful to account, but it was therapeutic to write, and it's a worthy goal for long term pursuit).
True change lies in policy and legislation, not in technical defence. The ability to change policy and legislation is a sign that 'power' is coming back into balance between the people and the government - and if we can't do that, then the power balance needs restorative work.
Technical defence should always exist, but rarely be necessary, especially against the government of one's own country.
(If one can argue in good faith in public, visibly, the bad faith of the opposition matters less than the ability to make aware as many of the public as possible. Bad faith, irrational, or malicious actors should be able to be backed into a corner with their own arguments)
Regular people (aka "voters") don't have the power to demand anything. They're driven around like cattle.
You see, just statistically speaking, they have pedophiles on staff, staff with potential data access. They have ex husbands that want to abduct their kid after the messy divorce where the wife had to get a new identity, but good luck fleeing from your husband who has DB access at the DoE.
The real world is messy and filled with bad actors in positions of power and access to data that enables their abuse.
The less data there is, the less they can abuse it.
Almost like… guns. The less guns are out there… oh. Oh…
You guys in the States are screwed. I’m sorry for you all.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Keep escalating until they balk. Once that happens: "oh, so you do value your privacy?"
If they actually do share this sort of info with you, give you copies of their keys, and let you put up cameras in their house, it's probably safe to say that they are part of a vanishingly small minority, and you really don't need to care about their views on privacy. (Hopefully this assertion ages well years from now.)
* Cameras on their front doors (Ring doorbells, etc.) * Mics all around their house (Alexa's and other digital assistants) * 3D accurate maps out the entirety of your house's floor plan (Roomba's etc.) * Digital door locks managed in the cloud * Real-time position tracking (airtags, Google Maps app & equivalents, etc.)
We already have concrete evidence of some of the above being used / abused against the interest of the owner.
Until you can make a compelling case about why this is bad, I would wager that the default stance of the public is that no privacy is required.
Those who are burnt by this trust, tend to change their mind quickly.
It's pretty blatant in my neighborhood already. Whenever something criminal happens and cops come around one of the first things they ask is if I have a Ring doorbell they could take a peek at.
Completely ignoring privacy as a concept for a moment, a fair trade should be like for like, value for value.
I wonder how it is that the NSA hasn't already enabled that. One of my early concerns with government spying is that we'd up with some kind of NeoMcCarthyism on crack where someone in power would be able to discredit any inconvenient person or even identify and eliminate the career of a potential opponent before they grew to become a real threat. It's astonishing to me that with the wealth of data being collected already it hasn't happened. We've certainly had some very petty and morally bankrupt people in high positions who I'm sure would not have hesitated to abuse that information.
The risk is certainly real, and laws like EARN IT would only make it easier. Even today it seems like it'd be trivial for someone in power to plant a forbidden sequence of zeros and ones on somebodies mobile device at anytime and ruin them.
On paper, at least, the NSA technically isn't allowed to act on US soil or against US persons. The FBI would be the most likely vector for such a political police action, imho.
It seems pretty weird to assume it's not already done and in use by select people or groups in the NSA already. They literally have the ability, they're smart enough to pick their targets carefully, and there's plenty of evidence of their oversight being useless.
Obama campaigned on the promise to end domestic surveillance, and while politicians lie all the time to get elected, listening to him speak back then I believed him. He was a strong orator and was saying what I wanted to hear which admittedly makes my judgement there a bit suspect, but he also had a long history of speaking out against things like the patriot act, the illegal wiretapping of Americans, and national security letters.
Once he got into office however, instead of reining in the NSA he greatly expanded the NSA's ability to spy on the American public and he started defending them in speeches. I've often wondered if he was shown something highly classified that convinced him that violating every American's rights was genuinely needed, or if he was just threatened into compliance by showing him what information they'd collected on him and his family.
"Why is someone privileged to arrest me but I can't keep them locked up in my house?"
Of course, numerous ethical concerns surround the monopolization of violence, but for I want to focus on on the negotiation of rights for societal benefits.
Similarly, we often surrender our privacy with the promise of protection from criminal threats. However, this bargain becomes unjust and imbalanced when we look at it critically. The map is not the territory as the saying goes, and what are sold as effective measures against crime (on "the map") don't seem like they would be in reality ("the territory"). We risk relinquishing our privacy for nothing of value in return.
This, at least, is my perspective on the matter.
Some clever answers: “If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these – as right as they are – is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
— https://www.wired.com/2006/05/the-eternal-value-of-privacy/
The real argument being made isn't that we should give all our secrets to the government, but that we should trust that the government will comply with our 4th Amendment protections and avoid gathering this data without a valid warrant issued by an impartial judge. If you're reading this, I'm guessing that like me, you don't believe a word of that. But that's the argument that's being made, and that's what needs to be debunked loudly and publicly.
They didn't get much push back when they threw out net neutrality which most Americans supported and as far as I know nothing was ultimately done about the faked opposition either (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...)
This would only be true if government were in fact answerable to people. It isn't, and hasn't been for a long time, if it ever was. Legislators decide what they want to vote for, and then decide how to brush off people who tell them anything they don't want to hear.
I'm very tired
This worked surprisingly well and without fail for the conservative side of my family. The instant I reminded them who was president at the time (Obama) all of them changed their mind
I don’t love this strategy. It leans into fear mongering a bit much, but if none of the other very helpful rhetorical techniques folks have shared here don’t work. This one has some staying power.
The balance between privacy and the authority is just that. We outsourced the rule of law to the state in order to have a fair and just society. Ipso facto the government should be fair and just to have the right to invade some amount of privacy in order to keep a society free, fair and just.
That’s why the judicial branch exist: to see if what the government (or anyone) did was playing by the rules. Which brings us back to politics being a danger to a society if people vote in unjust or unfair people.
"You are responsible for protecting the confidentiality of your username and password(s), if any. In addition, if you choose to be remembered on your device or browser, or link your use of the Visa Solution with a digital wallet, on one or more device(s), you are responsible for protecting the safety of and access to such device(s). It is important that you do so since we are not responsible for any losses you incur as a result of unauthorized use of your Eligible Card and, depending on the circumstances, your Issuer may hold you responsible for unauthorized use of your Eligible Card account."
Another example for mandatory secrecy are confidentiality requirements imposed by professional obligations, such as for lawyers and physicians, in order to ensure fair trials, and for the protection of human dignity.
No, the real answer here is to address the actual corruption to expose and remove it.
Not to mention, if you have nothing to hide, how can someone abuse their power to use it against you?
These bills are put in place because they save lives, especially vulnerable children.
Also because we have a lot to hide that we should be able to. Our intimate pictures with our partners, our chats with friends (and gossip), our business plans, our in-progress work and ideas, yet to be filled patents, password and account credentials, and lots more.
And as you mentioned, power will be abused. Unchecked power will be abused unchecked. This is ethically, morally and humanely wrong.
There's so much wrong with this bill and the thought behind it. It should never see the day of light.
>This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. (Emphasis mine)
1. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-fred...
As romantic as it sounds, the one single purpose for for-profit companies is to produce shareholder value, and very few of them see shareholder value in keeping a legal department specifically designed for fighting constant and endless attacks on our privacy.
Much more profitable to do anything else instead.
but a hundred years from now i do think “have to go live in a cabin in the woods” will be more like “get to”. because if that was something everyone could easily manage, i have no doubt i’d find myself in some cabin-in-the-woods community full of all the other wackos like me.
Alone? No chance whatsoever.
Bundy standoff worked, after all. Of course it has the prerequisite of being willing to die for the cause, which I doubt many people have, aside from the very select few for whom the most important mission in life is to live free.
Me? I thoroughly admire such "wackos", but I enjoy the finer things in life way too much for this to be a feasible option for me.
If they did, Google and Meta would be out of business. The only thing they really offer is for advertisers to target really, really specific groups of people thanks to the data they collect from those groups (EVERYONE, except a handful of HN readers and other dissidents) which everyone voluntarily hands over, because they simply don't care.
Of course, it's just a symptom of the problem.
Refuse to believe all you want, but have a deep think and consider whether the average person cares about his privacy. Even if they say they do.
Freedom doesn't sell anymore. Outsourcing virtually every single aspect of your life to a corporation that Just Knows Better(tm) does. Everything is a service. Most of the tech you own is a service, not a physical item.
And both things can't be true simultaneously, you can't crave freedom while outsourcing absolutely everything to someone else. Freedom requires you to take over the responsibility over your life, which far too many people simply aren't willing to do. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this is where the society has ended up in.
Over the years I've received so many odd looks when I bring up privacy that I've stopped and just accepted that my vote or email to my representative is all I can do. I hate to be cynical, but this train isn't derailing anytime soon. EFF is doing God's work here, but the American citizen will continue to be hypnotized until things get bad enough for them to care, in which it will already be too late.
Now many of the same websites (eg Reddit) are owned by large entities who don't care. Probably because they've made their money, so who needs a free Internet?
Onerous regulations are a kind of regressive tax on businesses, favoring very large firms with big budgets and lobbyists over upstarts and small business.
Not only do they not care, they benefit from these laws, because they have the resources to implement new requirements while smaller sites don't.
Today we're back to pointing to governments abusing data to target minority children or immigrants to show this. And of course, governments oppose any limiting of the scope of their data collection by pointing out "security issues" (we can't have CHILDREN communicate privately! Look! 3 out of 5 million children got seduced with drugs to go into prostitution!).
Of course, governments' collection of data is not even effective, the government GOT it's data collection wishes from 10 years ago that it said was going to use for prevention (police can now access both comments from teachers AND medical reports on any kid) ... and yet the number of children ... went up, not down.
And of course, nobody wants to point out that 3 out of 3 of those children ran away from government help first chance they got. Nobody seems to feel this might indicate that perhaps something is wrong with the government, and the government's reputation, that needs to be fixed first. They are of course arguing the solution to their reputation problem is to collect more information on EVERYONE, and use more violence against children for less and less reasons, where any small excuse can be found (because 3 children were actually confirmed to have this happen to them ... the government locked up over 300 children, generally against both their own and their parents wishes. Somehow this didn't make any difference in the numbers at all, and frankly I find it very, very hard to believe the number would have risen 100 TIMES without them doing this)
Good times make weak men.
Weak men make bad times.
Bad times make strong men.
Strong men create bad times.
Bad times create strong men.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclical_theory_(United_States...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#Secular_cy...
Certain locales like Japan are dealing with the reality that newer generations forget history. Specifically for this example the history of WW2, and Japan's desire to not take a part in instigating WW3.
As the saying goes, those who forget history (read: weak men) are doomed to repeat it (read: create bad times).
Hell, we're seeing it in our own little techie corner of the world: People have forgotten (read: weak men) the consequences of a browser monopoly (read: IE6), and have ushered in the age of a Chrome monopoly (read: doomed to repeat history).
Asabiyyah is strongest in the nomadic phase, and decreases as the civilization advances as the ruling class begins to focus more on maintaining their wealth/power individually at the expense of the group, which covers the Strong Men and Good Times phase. As decadence increases group solidarity decreases Weak men and bad times occurs, which readies the cycle to start anew with additional strong men, which matches with Khaldun's period of 3 generations per cycle.
It's a pretty bare bones social cycle theory by modern standards but the core idea common to both seems to be that history is a cycle of barbarians conquering decadent civilizations, only to eventually become fragmented, self serving and vulnerable themselves at some point. The applicability to the modern world seems to depend on whether the underlying causes have been eliminated, in a "The End of History and the Last Man" sort of sense.
Those Who Remain: A Postapocalyptic Novel is not an academic work of sociology.
i put my pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else, anyone who wants to look through my window in the morning can verify that for themselves. shame is defeated by coming out of your shell, not hiding inside it. i draw the shades and recede to my private world only when i want to remove stimuli for the sake of deep focus. or when i'm fearful of this abstract mass of power hanging always above me at every moment and threatening to destroy me if i'm honest about how i enjoy the "wrong" drugs, or about how i embrace a moral compass which guides me to not fund the machine that takes my brothers away from me and pits them in armed conflict against my sisters, come tax season.
!
as far as i can tell that's the only "good" reason to embrace privacy: that in this crazy contradiction it's impossible to be authentic if the wrong people know you as you are. i don't think it's good to use that as a basis on which to idealize privacy in the abstract. i think it's deeply disturbing and we should use it as a basis to fight all these real things which make one fear authenticity. privacy is a necessary stopgap: negating power imbalances is the most proximate thing to a solution.
kudos to the young and bold who seek to find themselves among others. praise to the old and scarred who fight to make that possible.
I would say that the US and China are both fantastic examples of why you don't want to allow the construction of a surveillance infrastructure - privatized and public, respectively. We pity each other partially thanks to the propaganda - but I think more importantly because we really are pitiable.
If there is anything I have learned is that persistence will eventually pay off. Louis Rossmann [1] has been fighting the good fight for right to repair for so many years and while it isn't quite there yet and there have been lots of downs, there have also been lots of ups [2]. Nothing's infallible.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup [2] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/11/apple-announces-self-...
E.g., I stopped giving money to Mozilla because I was dissatisfied by where that money was going, what it wasn't being spent on, what it was being spent on instead, and how ineffective they were.
Great that Rossmann got results, but is the methodology that the EFF is using the same as what Rossmann has used? Is it even an appropriate comparison when one is a threat from government, and the other is a matter of anti-consumer ethics with corps?
This is just yet another attempt at Lawful Interception[0], only this time, on steroids. They will continue to try and erode privacy, and therefore, erode democracy. But we do have tools to combat this at our disposal. My only worry is the outright banning of such tools, then we're royally fucked.
This whole clusterfuck is a result of old people not knowing their ass from a pihole.
Of course, then the posts just get kicked down the line to the next new tech that nobody groks, but at least perhaps we can stop fighting this specific one so hard and so frequently.
Though I guess it's depressing that people in their 20s and 30s can't afford kids now.
And that's just the sponsors, not the people who will vote for it. Some on that list do belong in nursing homes, but age is not a factor. It's mostly just the political establishment and newcomers hoping to join that establishment.
Shortly after they came forward, I read an article stating gathering so much data on so many people essentially allowed any real terrorist (domestic or foreign) to essentially hide in plain view because of the amount of data being collected could not be sifted through fast enough to flag any person or group before they were able to carry out an attack.
Yes, I'm very much on your side in terms of the constant attacks on our privacy and rights. While at the same time, I acknowledge that there is some inherit defense to them gathering too much data which in some sense allows us to maintain some level of privacy in the meantime.
there's a reason early central governments were all symbolized by a stick.
But, of course, that'll never happen, because who would willingly give up such a juicy tool for gaming the system?
Never mind that modern American "patriotism" isn't anything of the sort, but is much closer to nationalism.
Consider the recent report [1] that only 25% of people don't think the media is deliberately misleading them - 50% think they are, 25% are undecided. The implications of that cannot be overstated, especially as the media has increasingly become little more than a proxy for the official position of the day.
[1] - https://fortune.com/2023/02/15/trust-in-media-low-misinform-...
Please let me know if you know of any because I'm getting absolutely tired of working four months for free each year, knowing that my tax dollars are paying for goods and services from which I'll never be able to benefit.
American freedom seems to largely be centered around the ability to make money, the way things are going nowadays. We were more free in the 70s and 80s. Nowadays people in some areas get child services called because they dared to allow their child to venture somewhere by themselves. America is often the worst offender in some of these areas. True patriotism is understanding that we're not the "best" country in the world, and that we could stand a lot of weeding out chaff. Taxes go to a lot more waste than would ever come out of individual benefits, when you take the end result benefit to society. "Freedom" to allow poverty to exist is "freedom for some, but not for all".
There's also the freedom of speech, which thankfully is damn near absolute in the US. In fact it has only increased since the 70s.
If you're morally opposed to that, I'd recommend Singapore for its financial freedoms. After working there for a year, I was initially opposed to such an authoritarian government, but they're one of the rare ones who use their power to run their country very efficiently and keep out of the way of private enterprise.
Also South America, and even the Caribbean islands
I don't know how I'd fair in SE Asia, South Africa, or South America, but my hunch is that it wouldn't be great unless they had similar free speech absolutism.
Now that most communication takes place online, it seems the obvious solution is to say anything controversial via pseudonyms. As long as you don't get careless about protecting your true identity, that seems like something you can do just about anywhere.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/30/politics/what-happens-if-the-...
As an exercise, imagine someone who self-identifies as a patriot. Ask them what makes them a patriot. (If you're not American, you might not get what I am getting at, but probably Canadians get it)
There's a huge subset (dare I say majority) of those "patriots" you deride who don't like this stuff, don't think their goings on are any of the government's business. But of course you ignore that because they don't want what you want on meaningless social issues.
1. Don't talk long and loud about being patriots (i.e. don't self-identify) 2. Tend to work for the government. Career govvies or military. They show their patriotism through action.
> There's a huge subset (dare I say majority) of those "patriots" you deride who don't like this stuff, don't think their goings on are any of the government's business.
I know the type well, as that describes one side of my family. Despite your protestations, we're saying the same thing.
I just want to chime in here and say that working for the government isn't the only way to be a patriot (i.e. serve the country). Upholding American values is something anyone can do in any part of society.
The actual history of the FBI (whether the near universal perjury in fiber “analysis” cases, the repeated use of provocateurs to discredit protest, especially civil rights, movements — up through the last few years — etc.) tells of a very different culture.
Do I win a prize?
Laws may now only be passed and officially discussed using their globally unique identifier like SB-47226
When politicians advocate for or against these laws in the public sphere they will still make up catchy names to make them stick in peoples heads.
Now you still get misleading names but its twice as hard to understand what bill is what.
This particular globally unique identifier gets reset with every sitting.
"H.R.13293 — 118th Congress" would be a globally unique one. Unless it conflicts with some of the state legislatures.
I say we go the other way. All travel by government employees/officials is available to the public (can be historical to avoid security issues). Complete financial transparency by all government officials/senior staff and their family members enforced at the bank level - you must list all your accounts, a cumulative amount of assets, list of specific assets >10k in value. The financial institution is responsible for providing that directly to the IRS which then removed account numbers, institution names, round values to the nearest N to avoid identity theft, etc.
The entire political apparatus in the US seems to shy away from any real transparency yet want to foist it on everyone else not in power. That’s not really living your values.
https://act.eff.org/action/the-earn-it-act-is-back-seeking-t...
no. better to dispel the myth: those who rule without consent are illegitimate rulers. the problem isn’t us failing to persuade such rulers. it’s us failing to reject such rulers.
but no, i'm not saying you should let yourself be steamrolled. anyone in this thread has the knowledge to work around this particular adversarial legislation; to build systems where bad actors have less power over you. spin up a Matrix server. bridge it to Signal or Telegram or wherever else you need to stay in contact with your less nerdy friends. then when bad people try to do bad things to the people around you, point them to that escape hatch you've already prepared.
to answer this literally: no. nothing out-of-the-box for that, at least.
but do sci-hub, zlib, and friends have such a mechanism? we've been here before with CFAA, then DMCA. ostensibly, we lost those legislative battles against DRM and copyright. and yet it's easier to access academic articles than ever before.
we have those things above because despite what legislators did, enough of the public is engaged with our goals, or views them as worthy, that it's political suicide to actually enforce on them.
so just do that again, but here: convince the public -- your peers -- that end-to-end encryption isn't for baddies; that privacy is a good thing. that your cause is morally just. build the tooling that makes privacy easy. then use it, share it, spread it. if we get that far, then congrats: whatever the legislators say can't actually hold water.
if you don't buy that, then do what worked for SOPA: voice your opinions publicly. keep the pressure on for months with website blackouts, banners and boycotts. make it a spectacle.
neither solution ends with "write your legislator". if you want to write them, i won't stop you: but that's not where the meat of any of this is actually determined.
- don’t vote.
- if handed a ballot with this issue on it, would mark the “no” column.
and if that were the case, i propose that you consider more seriously that second point. if voting is the path to better outcomes, you want always (1) more voter turnout AND (2) more precise translation of voter preference into policy.
i feel that what we’ve got today is something like a B, B- on voter turnout, but an unambiguous F on how votes drive policy. that if our democracy was somehow such that the conversation being had was “don’t forget to vote against EARN IT on your ballot” instead of “don’t forget to write your legislators about EARN IT”, we’d both find that a better system? ambiguities, caveats abound. i’m not literally saying that every policy issue ought be on the ballot, just that if the formal systems for fairly translating individual preference into policy were more capable, we wouldn’t feel any need to reach for informal methods like writing legislators or rejecting authority.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Let’s name names, the senators who introduced this are Mr. GRAHAM, Mr. BLUMENTHAL, Mr. GRASSLEY, Mr. DURBIN, Mrs. HYDE-SMITH, Mrs. FEINSTEIN, Mr. HAWLEY, Ms. CORTEZ MASTO, Mr. TILLIS, Ms. HASSAN, Ms. ERNST, Mr. WARNER, Ms. MURKOWSKI, Mr. WHITEHOUSE, Ms. COLLINS, Ms. HIRONO, Mr. CRUZ, Mr. RUBIO, Mr. CORNYN, and Mr. KENNEDY.
Many years ago, I remember she supported a similar bill around limiting encryption. Around six months later, it was reported some government agency was spying on senators' emails, and she wasn't happy. I don't think she made the connection between the two, or that she supports widespread data collection when it's not her data.
But, when you look at Feinstein's accomplishments, she has represent her constituents as well as anybody... She authored the Respect for Marriage Act (undoing the conservative Defense of Marriage Act). She's pursued fair pay for federal wild land firefighters. She's protected millions of acres of federal land in CA for recreation. The list is extensive, as it should be for somebody of her tenure.
And with all that said, I do feel it's time for her to retire. I'm unconvinced on term limits, but I do dislike the tendency of long-time politicians to hang on well past their prime (and this applies equally on all sides of the aisle, and also to the courts).
The Republican Party of today is changing right before our eyes. Many hard-line issues are becoming soft - famously recently with Trump and his complete lack of religiousness.
Many of the other hard-line issues were distorted by political opponents, such as your claimed "gay" issue (when viewed through a religious lens, the marriage issue makes more sense, it wasn't really about people's sexual preference, it was about a specific word. if anything, republicans are absolutely terrible at getting their message across, consistently... but I digress...).
The point was, the younger generation of Republicans do not staunchly adhere to these "classical" Republican views - and the party is changing. The Republican Party seems to represent a lot more working-class people and minority groups today than a decade ago - voter segments that historically were under lock-and-key for Democrats.
To that end, the Democrat party is also changing; getting pulled a lot more left-ward than most average Liberals are comfortable with. It's a weird world where the likes of John Stewart and Bill Maher sound more like conservatives than liberals.
Both parties have found themselves within an identity crisis. My gut tells me there will be a course correction for the Democratic party not to distant in the future, and the Republican party will continue to "liberalize" as the younger generation takes over. We'll see where the road takes us all...
> Republican party will continue to "liberalize"
I think it is more accurate to say that both of them have transitioned into iconic status. The political/marketing machinations have lofted their identities so high that it barely matters that they are humans at all. They are brands. There is also the basic senate rules mentioned elsewhere, which institutionalize seniority.
Look at the list of longest serving US senators and ask yourself if Feinstein is really an anomaly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_United_...
Edit to add: remember when we used to have this conversation about Strom Thurmond or Robert Byrd? It's idiomatic.
I mean, sure, if the democratic vote was a monolith that was capable of making a single choice or even knowing what its own choices would be we could say that it must be this way because people want it like this. Rather than it being yet another consequence of antiquated voting systems incrementally improving while claiming all the hard work is already done
She’s a democrat, but runs against democrats (usually), and wins largely because she’s been there forever and, tbh, California is a pretty spectacular place to live.
Thus, as CA is pretty great in general, Feinstein “can’t be that bad,” so why mess up a fine thing.
(Keep your “CA sucks” comments out of here please; your perception doesn’t matter in this case. Most Californians like living in California, by and large. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but neither is any state.)
A senator represents the state's views within the federal government, and has next to nothing to do with internal policies within the state.
Electing Feinstein or some other person has effectively little-to-no impact on a California citizens daily life.
> (Keep your “CA sucks” comments out of here please; your perception doesn’t matter in this case. Most Californians like living in California, by and large. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but neither is any state.)
People are allowed to gripe about where they live. Just because you live somewhere doesn't make it perfect by any stretch. California has a lot of problems, and needs to address them, regardless of your political persuasion.
You and I know that a senator is not an in-state representative, and that their work is federal in nature. Most people who vote do not know that, and do not understand the distinction between state reps and federal reps. If you took a poll, how many people do you think would even know CA had a state senate and separate federal senators? I would surmise very few.
As to the point about CA; I agree, gripe away if you’d like, and I agree CA has many issues it needs to address. So does literally every state; my point was to not go down that rabbit hole, and instead realize that most Californians like it here. They enjoy the weather, infrastructure generally works, etc. As a result, most vote for the status quo. I’m not saying that’s a good thing.
Sadly, agreed. Perhaps this is a component in the ever-growing push of state issues into the federal level.
> ...CA has many issues it needs to address. So does literally every state... instead realize that most Californians like it here...
Well, this is saying nothing at all, is it? We can safely assume citizens of any state generally like where they live, lest they'd move away if they had the means.
However, we rarely see a dogpile of people publicly bemoaning Massachusetts, for example. Perhaps there is something going on in California right now, some sort of breaking point, where people are starting to realize some of the problems California has are unique to California, caused by decades of possibly misguided but well-intentioned policy. Policy does not happen in a vacuum.
It's also interesting to see someone such as yourself feel it necessary to qualify your love for the state you live in. It has a sort of, captive, feel about it.
I do not get the sense that the political climate in CA is any different than those were when I lived there, excepting perhaps San Francisco which is, incidentally, the same discourse as is happening about NYC in NYC right now too (lots of friends and my family still lives there).
I’m not trying to qualify my love for CA; I was making the point that the people who vote Feinstein (or McConnell) in are generally happy with the status quo in their state. CA was mentioned specifically because we were discussing Feinstein, but that’s why people vote them in; they’re generally content with the status quo.
The ones who are unhappy either leave to states that fit them better (if they have the means), or complain about it to their friends and/or on HN/Twitter. But it isn’t the majority.
The difference is you don't often hear complaints about MA unless you also live in MA. At this point, pretty much the entire country is sick of hearing Californian's complain...
I think the issues in NYC are similar to that of California's mega-cities (LA, SF), which is why we hear more about them.
These cities went from lawlessness and chaos, to law-and-order cities a few decades ago. Things got great, and then collectively people forgot what it used to be like... and fell into the same trappings. Today, these three mega-cities are facing lawlessness and chaos again - and I predict a law-and-order decade is coming soon.
Anecdotally (which isn't worth much I know), and having lived in CA my entire life, I have noticed an increase of complaints from fellow CA citizens. People are tired of the fires, power outages, water shortages, homelessness, etc. All are related to policy decisions made sometimes decades ago, and we're just now paying for it.
I think if you truly love where you live, recognizing these issues is a necessity. Pretending issues are the same everywhere and are something that "just happens" or are caused by external forces is akin to keeping our collective heads in the sand. Decisions have consequences - so we better make good ones.
That’s because “SF is hell” is a good media story along with “tech bros hate poor people.”
> I think the issues in NYC are similar to that of California's mega-cities (LA, SF), which is why we hear more about them. These cities went from lawlessness and chaos, to law-and-order cities a few decades ago. Things got great, and then collectively people forgot what it used to be like... and fell into the same trappings. Today, these three mega-cities are facing lawlessness and chaos again - and I predict a law-and-order decade is coming soon.
I don’t disagree; but I think it’s notable that NYC is the other big tech hotspot. I give it five years before Miami is in the news for the same.
> Anecdotally (which isn't worth much I know), and having lived in CA my entire life, I have noticed an increase of complaints from fellow CA citizens. People are tired of the fires, power outages, water shortages, homelessness, etc.
I wonder if this is just because we’ve gotten older? I certainly didn’t care when I was 22. I definitely care now.
> All are related to policy decisions made sometimes decades ago, and we're just now paying for it. I think if you truly love where you live, recognizing these issues is a necessity. Pretending issues are the same everywhere and are something that "just happens" or are caused by external forces is akin to keeping our collective heads in the sand. Decisions have consequences - so we better make good ones.
I agree with all of that. I wish everyone did.
The Democratic Party, in its capacity as an actual political organizing apparatus (not an identity/platform), never really recovered from the broad shift in influence from labor to finance in the late '70s/early '80s. It has thus fallen back to relying heavily on a strained ad-hoc network of political machines built by various "rock star" Democrats. That's why the party loosely realigned around "third way" / "blue dog" Democrats in the '90s; it's not that there was some transcendent soul-searching about principles, it's that people like Bill Clinton and Evan Bayh were supported by campaign apparatus that won tough elections. More broadly, this has led to an arguably pathological degree of deference among Democrats to any org that has a track record of winning elections. And whatever faults Feinstein's political machine has, it has that track record.
I know we shouldn't assume malice when incompetence explains things, but I genuinely do think a lot of people who run governments do actually think they should not be affected by the same rules they want to apply to everyone else.
Listen to her talk sometime.
A bewildering and curious lot our leaders are.
The same people want to read the communications of private citizens.
They aren't even pretending that there isn't a double standard anymore.
Rarely, if ever, does a bill sponsor have much to do with the bill. At least in my experience. It was a game to see who we could round up for the bill, and then a political game about who would look better or bring a stronger base.
I was more curious over whether the "rounding up" and adding her to the list involved her being present or questioned in any capacity, or whether she just had a standing guideline that she wanted to be listed as a co-sponsor on any Judiciary Committee bills also sponsored by Durbin and Graham or something like that.
That said, even if you strike her name from the list you know this is bad because it's a bunch of bipartisan long time congresspeople who are sponsoring this bill. When the careerists of the swamp get together to do something we the people always lose.
There was no reasoning with her either, frankly because she is well-aged, and thus thinks herself “wise” with very little left to learn.
It was honestly infuriating.
[edit] In case anyone thinks I’m exaggerating, I promise I’m not. I went back to look at my texts to my now-wife after that meeting, and I was livid and extremely disappointed. She was at a table of, at the time, a dozen or so cybersecurity experts from industry and academia, and instead of listening to (or rather, hearing) what they had to say, she pushed forward an agenda of “trying to stop evil” while “protecting the children” and “thanking us for our concerns,” all while explaining that she understands encryption and knows how important it is, but that it’s more important for the military to have it and normal people don’t really need it as much. After all, it’s not like we don’t talk to other people in coffee shops where people can overhear and stuff.
Ugh.
The country would be an objectively better place if both the House and Senate had a mandatory retirement age.
But honestly, she’s a fantastic example of why we should have term limits, at the very least.
Surely there's some other (D) that could have replaced Feinstein a decade ago - but California keeps re-electing her? There's near unanimous agreement she "lost it" long ago - yet here she still is.
A mandatory retirement age is great and all... but maybe we need to figure out why people vote for someone nearly nobody wants in the first place. Just the "safe" vote? That can't be all of the story...
There's the good 80 years old, and then there's the bad 80 years old. We all know it when we see it... and we're watching it in real time in multiple places within our federal government right now.
We, as a country, are about to face this very same question again, as President Biden is expected to announce his re-election bid shortly. Are we OK with that as a country, given his obvious decline in the past few years? Objectively, and without red or blue coloring, he's not the Joe Biden of 2008.
So, what do we do?
If you're old enough to have had strong opinions about LBJ when he was in office, your time has passed and we really don't need you in the Senate, or the White House, or anywhere else in government making decisions that will have impacts decades after you're gone.
Put another way, what rules of the Senate benefit length of service over anything else?
https://www.senate.gov/about/traditions-symbols/seniority.ht...
Most people don't do extensive (or any) research before voting. They choose a candidate based on party affiliation or the information on TV. So for that majority of people, they will vote for a candidate whether or not the candidate is of sound mind. They assume other people have done the due diligence.
On the other hand, you have the parties themselves. The Democratic Party would rather have a senile Democrat than a non-senile Republican. And the Democratic Party is itself strongly influenced by other Democrat politicians who may even appreciate a senile coworker since that coworker can be more easily manipulated. So they have no incentive to risk losing that by suggesting or supporting a different Democratic candidate.
That in turn means new Democrat candidates will struggle to get the amount of support or funding which is necessary to publicize oneself enough that the complacent members of the public mentioned earlier could vote for them.
So the answer on the inside is that nobody willing to run against her has the power to, and nobody with the power to is willing. On the outside, it's people who don't care who is running, they only care about the letter next to the name, so would never vote for a Republican or an Independent.
Bonkers.
If that were true, why aren't we allowed to elect someone younger than 30?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy_laws_in_the_U...
"United States Senator:
Minimum age: 30"
The downside there is that Gov. Newsom then gets to appoint someone to serve the rest of her term, and then will have the incumbent advantage in 2024, even if they turn out to be not that great. But I think that's probably preferable to the current situation.
She was a moron then, and now she's a senile moron. Her aides, who ended up hanging out with me all weekend, were a perfect illustration of the donor class kids who weren't that smart but got into ivy League schools by legacy admissions. Zero intellectual curiosity, super aware of social status, everything they said seemed preplanned and inauthentic.... Just gross.
and I know many people her age that have
there’s people that make excuses for it and there’s people that don’t. I don’t buy “brain plasticity”, my observation is that it comes down to who your peers are, what social consequences you have
No one is saying you owe your least favorite senators better, but you owe the community better if you're posting here.
I can't link to the guidelines because I'm on my phone - but this is in there!
If one can't call a person in power names, that implies many things you probably didn't want to imply.
But restricting speech concerning those in power imply things that I would presume he would not want to imply.
The owner’s actions speak louder than their words and the moderations actions in their properties are not a mystery or unexpected
The owners have left this platform and mostly hang out on twitter.
> the moderations actions in their properties are not a mystery or unexpected
Something we could agree on until relatively recently, there seems to be a notable change in direction and a growing dissatisfaction online and offline amongst actual entrepreneurs (the sort that apply to ycombinator) and investors. If those users don't matter and start leaving what is this site actually for my friend?
But as far as what he owes to the community, I think he doesn't have to explain anything of his experience interacting with someone. He interacted with Feinstein, his takeaway was she is a "senile moron". I for one won't fault him for that, but you obviously have a different take and that's fine.
As an aside, the fact you flagged my comment as well implies very dark things. It is perhaps better I take my leave because I have no interest in enabling such matters. Though it does sadden me, in a deeply ironic way, that an American entity subscribes to such things. People have died to protect the right to speak ill of those in power.
“I met her in 2003, along with her aides at a party I was invited to (in a fluke) in Palm Springs.
She was ignorant of tech and science then, and now she's the same but more senile (as happens with age). Her aides, who ended up hanging out with me all weekend, were a perfect illustration of the classic trope of donor class kids who weren't that smart but got into ivy League schools by legacy admissions. Zero intellectual curiosity, super aware of social status, everything they said seemed preplanned and inauthentic.... Just left me feeling gross.”
I don’t think ‘dang would have had an issue with that wording. It doesn’t take much to be substantive rather than resorting to ad hominems; the latter is just easier.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-fi...
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open-hearing-fi...
Feinstein shows her true colors.
The first is 2013, right after Snowden leaked the presidential surveillance program. These are our elected officials who oversaw the program. They knew of its existence before the leak.
The second is 2017, right after the Supreme Court ruled the presidential surveillance program was illegal (one justice calling it "Orwellian" in their comments).
Listen to these people in 2013 defend their actions and, in 2017, try to defend themselves and justify their actions. Not only is it clear that they don't think they've done anything wrong, at least one of these people thought they had a viable chance at running for president after this.
We the people trusted them to keep secrets responsibly. We trusted them to oversee programs that citizens could not hold accountable. They utterly failed and, if they had their way, would have continued failing in their responsibility. From watching these hearings I get the distinct feeling that these elected officials consider the problem to be the leak, not that someone had to utterly ruin their own life in order to expose this group's crimes.
The only person who demonstrated they may be fit for their position is Sn. Wyden. Listen closely to Wyden's statement. He is unable to disclose secrets, but he very clearly (and strongly) suggests that the U.S. clandestine groups are harvesting geolocation data without warrants in mass under these programs.
We really need term limits for Congresspeople. I hesitate to suggest age limits, as one's ability and aptitude for governing later in life depends on many factors, but that may be appropriate as well.
Good. I hope they start spying on her just for kicks. People who would deny us our privacy should be leading by example.
Might as well add her name on there too.
It's highly unlikely this comes from a place of malice, but rather is a second order effect of organizational incentives to do better work.
Regardless, it's important for citizens to fight back against this pressure as it can be conceived as a potentially never-ending erosion of human rights.
Of course. Of course Cruz and Hawley are actually angels that are a victim of circumstances. Collins? Fucking immaculate.
I don't know how many times we have to "fight back" when they come uo with this BS. They should just cut it out and serve the people that elected them.
PS: Mandatory "Think about the children!"
This is the only true way to stop these type of bills.
Article understated things by calling it a "group" of senators. That's a lot of senators already willing to get this thing off the ground.
This law creates an unelected government commission stacked with law enforcement personnel that can dictate "best practices" for internet websites and apps.
The EARN IT Act removes legal protections for users and website owners and allows state legislatures to encourage civil lawsuits and prosecutions against those who don’t follow the government’s “best practices.”
Websites and apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect user privacy will be pressured to remove or compromise the security of their services or face prosecutions and lawsuits.
This law falsely assumes that all internet users should be under suspicion for child abuse, treating us all like we're in a permanent criminal lineup.
The available evidence shows that scanning software designed to detect Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) is far from perfect and often results in false accusations.
The EARN IT Act threatens to export these false accusations to vulnerable communities around the world, where they can be wielded by police forces with even less accountability than those in the United States.
The EARN IT Act leaves room for client-side scanning, violating user privacy by sending data to law enforcement straight from user devices.
Everyone has a right to privacy, even if they have nothing to hide. Just like we close the door when we use the bathroom, we should be able to keep our online conversations and information private. It is a fundamental right that allows individuals to have control over their personal information and to be free from unwarranted surveillance. Without privacy, people can be vulnerable to all sorts of abuse, including identity theft, stalking, and harassment.
The act then removes nearly 30-year-old legal protections for users and website owners. If EARN IT passes, we’re likely to see state lawmakers step in and mandate scanning of messages and other files.
The proposed law has been defeated twice before but needs digital rights supporters to speak up and stop it from passing again. We need to support a free, secure, and private internet.
Big tech companies, employees of said companies, and their lobbyists and marketing angles, of course, are loudly against it, which is why you will see less support for it here on HN.
So if you enable iCloud advanced protection, that is "evidence". We really really need a younger congress.
So few letters. Better to just get rid of both.
(Verses the parent poster may be referring to: https://www.openbible.info/topics/all_shall_be_revealed )
It's much harder to rescind a law than pass it, which means they only have to win once and we have to win every time. We are doomed by this asymmetry.
Even if they can't prove you are guilty, the absolute nightmare of going through the due process of law and being tagged as a risk is something to think about and take it seriously. The concern must not be if the app is based on what country, it must be why does this app want to know so much about me, or why does the govt need to know my every opinion.
US trusted Dick Cheney's words and we all know what happened.
Big examples in the past were SOPA act for example
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/opinion/politicians-extor...
EDIT: it seems to happen at all levels
https://abc11.com/amp/politics-durham-city-council-extortion...
https://abc30.com/amp/nelson-esparza-charged-extortion-city-...
"The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology.It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals. In practical terms its emergence is linked to the rise of a bureaucracy that administered things and people in interchangeable fashion without concern for ends or assumptions. This state formation matured during a period in which the office of the President be- came supremely powerful as a broker and legitimating instrument of national security activity."
"...The society is at a turning point. And in this regard so is the legal profession. Either we will surrender representative democracy, embracing instead different forms of corporate fascism and bureaucratic control (military, police, and social) which cannot be halted through citizen action and democratic pro- cesses, or we (including the legal profession) will begin the difficult task of dismantling the national security apparatus. It does not seem likely to me that those who struggled in the sixties to develop a new meaning of democracy will settle for bureaucratic or corporate fascism. And those who are neutral on the question will be less likely to acquiesce in fascist or bonapartist deformations once it is clear that they are inefficient, and that they provide only insecurity, unemployment, imperial wars, a deepening arms race, and a pro- cess of repressive exclusion which reduces politics to an empty game."
[0] https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol40/iss3/7/
Plain text at:
https://archive.org/stream/democracy-versus-the-national-sec...
For example, I've repeatedly seen claims that this bill would effectively outlaw end-to-end encryption, but the bill explicitly protects companies that offer encryption from liability.
>None of the following actions or circumstances shall serve as an independent basis for liability of a provider of an interactive computer service for a claim or charge described in that paragraph:
>(i) The provider utilizes full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services.
>(ii) The provider does not possess the information necessary to decrypt a communication.
>(iii) The provider fails to take an action that would otherwise undermine the ability of the provider to offer full end-to-end encrypted messaging services, device encryption, or other encryption services"
When I look to the EFF for an explanation about why this language isn't sufficient, I get this:
>The bill clearly leaves room to impose forms of "client-side scanning"
Going back to the bill, the phrase "client-side scanning" doesn't appear anywhere in the text despite the EFF implying that they're quoting from the bill. If they're not quoting from the bill then what exactly are they quoting from? This is the kind of thing that makes me unable to trust them to be accurate, which makes posts like this effectively useless to me since I feel the need to independently verify all of their claims.
An example of this is the National Rifle Association (NRA). They used to think that carrying guns around in public should be restricted and require licensing, and that dealers should need to be licensed, and that some kinds of guns should be restricted.
For the EFF the thing that made me think that they are going down that road was during the controversy over Apple's plans to scan for CSAM. Apple had actually announced two things: (1) scanning on-device for CSAM in material about to be uploaded to iCloud, and (2) scanning on-device of devices with parental controls enabled to block messages that contained content that might be harmful to children.
Most of the discussion was about #1, both from the EFF and from everybody else. #2 was much less discussed.
Here's how #2 worked in the case where you have a child who is 13 or older with a phone on your family plan and you have enabled scanning.
1. I send your kid pictures of my dick.
2. The software temporarily blocks that and gives your child a modal dialog telling them it blocked something because their parents think it might be harmful, and asking the child if they want to go ahead and view the material.
3. If the child says no the material remains blocked and nothing else happens.
4. If the child says yes my dick picture is unblocked and nothing else happens.
If your child is under 13, here is how it goes:
1-3: same as the 13 and above case.
4. If the child says yes they are given another modal asking of they are sure and reiterating that their parents think the material may be harmful, and telling them if they do elect to view it their parents will be notified. They are again asked if they want to proceed to view it or not.
5. If the child says no, the material remains blocked and nothing else happens.
6. If the child says yes my dick picture is unblocked, and the parents are notified.
The EFF objected to this, on the grounds that #6 violates my privacy since I sent my dick pictures to your kid, not you, and did not consent to you getting access.
WTF? It used to be that a big argument from privacy groups against server-side scanning to protect children is that children shouldn't be getting to the bad parts of the net in the first place, and keeping the kids away was something the parents should take care of with things like time restrictions and parental control software.
The EFF will not ever support a regulation on big tech behavior.
That’s the fear, anyway.
While here in Switzerland we have direct democracy, where such decisions have to be confirmed by national referendums (we have several each year), and most certainly this one would not be approved.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I personally believe "papers, and effects" apply to digital things.
It seems futile to fight these kinds of things, especially since if something isn't legal, it'll likely get done via some shady method (eg. mass surveillance).
I wonder what an emerging information system would look like where these kinds of policies just wouldn't be relevant. P2P? Turning away from online tech in general?
When the bully comes to the playground, it seems like a good idea to just go play elsewhere.
If by EARN IT, they mean Americans should earn their freedom - which this government is using its own crimes[1] as a pretext for taking from them - that seems really just unwise.
[1] EDKH
Feedback welcome. I want it as short and as punchy as possible.
this is already happening in a lot of cases, we need to make sure this legal grey zone is closed and ruled in favor of privacy. as government powers are derived from the people, and I don't have any right to walk into your house and ask for your mail, the government has no right to invade our privacy. there are better ways to keep us safe. lots of private software does this already and has lots of problems. I see no reason to assume the government would be any better. I could maybe get behind less privacy for government programs interfacing with the American public and for corporations
https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/salem-witch-...
There is something We the People can do, as an industry, it is described at the bottom of this link. First it describes the massive extent of the problem, then links to the solution:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
If you are thinking “why should I bother clicking on that random link?” It starts out by linking to all the stuff the US government has already done, including defeating the EFF’s challenges recently in court — that’s defeating the same guys who published this new piece.
https://govscent.org/bill/USA/118s686is
We also have the topics and summaries by section, but I have yet to build the UI for it.
That should include a privacy-friendly counter-proposal for dealing with the trade in CSAM, which is a real problem no matter how much the tech community tries to wish it away by saying 'it's already illegal'. It's disingenuous to look at one issue and say 'scope creep, this will threaten our freedoms' while looking at another issue and saying 'we already passed a law, therefore the problem doesn't exist'.
As if the "intelligence community" that ran Jeffrey Epstein is going to use their shiny new surveillance powers to eradicate pedophilia.
Skip the rhetorical flourishes and come up with a proposal that addresses the issue. If you refuse to do so, then you can't complain about privacy-eradicating opponents offering their mediocre or bad policies. Refusing to acknowledge an issue exists is an automatic loser.
You're right, here's my proposal: we install 24/7 camera surveillance in the home of every suspected pedophile. We'll start with you, since our Proprietary Algorithms have determined that those who point fingers and yell the loudest are usually the biggest pervs.
In the meantime, keep on glowing buddy!