Statement on EU-US Cooperation on Turning Public Opinion Against Encryption
globalencryption.org
globalencryption.org
The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance. For example, running talking points on the MSM works well. They run the talking points and in the next days, everyone is parroting what they heard on the news, as if it's their own views.
But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media). They are burning through the cultural & social capital which sustain these institutions (like the MSM or academia), and don't realize that once it runs out, they will no longer have these levers and buttons at their disposal.
At that point, the only way to increase compliance is with force. And once you go down that road, it becomes extremely clear to those wielding that force, just how precarious their situation is (e.g. Maduro assassination attempts). That is how totalitarianism takes root, fear of the people.
Someone called it "Manufacturing consent". I think this name describes it pretty good.
What these politicians do not seem to underestand is that those law may turn against them at a later point in time.
> "The Engineering of Consent" is an essay by Edward Bernays first published in 1947,
https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/richard-david-precht-hara...
His earlier books had a slightly penetrating American style, popular science peppered with human interest stories.
Precht, however, is willing to make himself unpopular, but he is also one of the few intellectuals who can afford to do so. Many media workers probably don't like to read how strong the pressure to conform is, they prefer to suppress that.
Those laws are incredibly unlikely to be turned against elites and former elites, and if a situation[1] ever arose where they would be, a lack of these laws on the books would not save them.
Populist uprisings are about the only things that elites are scared of, and these kinds of laws help prevent them[2].
[1] That kind of situation would require a complete and utter breakdown of the elite social contract. Things would have to get unrecognizably bad before we are at that point.
[2] Ever notice how, say, pro-gun politicians tend to want guns to be everywhere except near them? As a class, they aren't interested in dealing with the consequences of their policies.
I’ve also noticed that anti-gun politicians tend to have armed security teams with them.
I’m not giving up my guns until they do.
Unlike their counterparts, they are actually trying to solve the problem, instead of hypocritically exacerbating it.
If you're going to hold someone accountable, why not make your support of the pro-gun ones conditional on them providing you with a security team?
You’re assuming gun control laws will protect you from random acts of gun violence, which they won’t. Criminals get their hands on guns they can’t legally possess every day. There are more than enough gun control laws on the books and most Americans aren’t voluntarily turning theirs in no matter what the law says.
You’re also making the false assumption that I only support the personal right to bear arms for self defense against criminals. I also support it to defend against tyranny, which to me is far more likely to be a threat than a random act of gun violence.
"No way to prevent this", says only nation where this regularly happens.
> Criminals get their hands on guns they can’t legally possess every day.
They get their hands on guns because the country is flooded with them. Because people in states with next to no private sale restrictions sell guns to them. Because people aren't held liable for selling a gun without running a background check.
Not to mention all the gun violence performed by 'law-abiding gun owners'. (Who, after performing it, are, of course, labeled criminals.)
> There are more than enough gun control laws on the books
In some states. They get flooded by illegal guns from neighboring states, which have no such controls.
> I also support it to defend against tyranny, which to me is far more likely to be a threat than a random act of gun violence.
Why is it, then, that the militias and their friends seem to roll out to defend tyranny, not oppose it? Why are the 2A advocates deafeningly silent on police killing POC in their homes/vehicles? Why does a cop thinking that 'He may have had a gun' a death sentence for the person they are apprehending? Why does this group intersect so much with the Jan 6 attempt to overthrow the results of an election?
I hear 'guns will protect us from tyrrany' a lot, but in practice, I see the opposite.
They have a belief that they will be The Law up to the end of their lives. One very well grounded on reality.
They will use national security as an excuse to keep their encryption while taking ours away.
I think anything that's not completely candid with the public is eventually seen as dishonest whether rightly or wrongly. Personally I think no matter how well-intended it's hard to see nudge theory as anything other than 'shady behavioural psychology tactics to induce compliance with government policy without personal consent or a democratic mandate' which is something I believe fundamentally breaks the social contract.
I mean that's what "leader" means at the end of the day. Of course, though, leader isn't the only way to refer to politicians. In German leader translates literally to Führer ... which isn't really used since the ultimate demise of Herr Schickelgruber. We also use "Repräsentant" whose English counterpart is obvious. Also some people believe that politicians are supposed to know what's going on and what to do - even me - question is where a line is crossed.
> But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective
I doubt that given those tactics have been continuously applied since ever.
> e.g. waning trust in the media
yes, but the result is simply new media channels and outlets which are supposedly more trustworthy. those abusive politicians we are talking about here will play those media entities like an instrument and simply switch where ever they expect to get the most attention.
> They are burning through the cultural & social capital which sustain these institutions (like the MSM or academia), and don't realize that once it runs out, they will no longer have these levers and buttons at their disposal.
They won't need those levers and button anymore. Abusive power hungry politicians belong to an elite whose end game is a totalitarian state for them to parasitize. At that point everybody has to believe or at least shut up ... or men will come and take them away.
> At that point, the only way to increase compliance is with force.
Exactly.
> And once you go down that road, it becomes extremely clear to those wielding that force, just how precarious their situation is (e.g. Maduro assassination attempts).
One can argue that most totalitarian states end badly but that can take a while. Criminals also do criminal things despite bleak prospects. One might argue they are statistically stupid for being criminal just to have a good time for a while. But that's just your sane point of view. For people who _are_ of criminal mindset (and I consider politicians with totalitarian inclination effectively to that group) really enjoy their life style.
> That is how totalitarianism takes root, fear of the people.
This and fear of the goverment.
> I mean that's what "leader" means at the end of the day.
I disagree with this sentence.
Many minor leadership positions and a generation of parenting taught me that leadership is an act of service. My purpose is to help coordinate the fulfillment of others' needs. If I ever forget that, I will have lost my way.
The most dangerous situation for a dictator is to be faced with multiple independent and competing sources of truth that all disagree with you, because they will propagandize your subjects away from you quite quickly.
They certainly do in Russia. People there (esp. older people) absolutely believe all the propaganda that's fed to them about the war in Ukraine by Russian state-owned media.
> And the legitimacy of that model [traditional institutions] absolutely depends on having a semi-monopoly over information in every domain, which they had in the 20th century. There was no internet and there was a fairly limited number of information sources for the public. So our ruling institutions had authority because they had a very valuable commodity: information. [1]
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22301496/martin-gurri-the...
I find it frightening how western liberal countries are becoming more and more like China, possibly in an attempt to beat them.
The more educated you are, the more you realize people don't know that much. If everyone could see the consequences of their beliefs and actions, governments wouldn't need to exist. Public education/shaping interests can be a good thing.
Shaping someone's opinion of sugary food or smoking cigarettes, or the negative effects of various drugs or any other number of things can be good. Informing the public of foreign adversaries fomenting and supporting fascism via bot networks promoting hatred and division is a national security issue. Good faith information from places of intellectual authority is positive for society.
The problem is not the government shaping interests, the problem is who is the government shaping interests for.
In a democracy supposedly the government acts on behalf of the people, but we do not live in a democracy, the west is largely plutocratic. Governments represent billionaires (not literally billionaires, but the wealthy). That's why our government promotes socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Because the government works on behalf of those with money.
This is not a casual statement. This is the product of our voting system. Before anyone gets to vote on any candidates, candidates must fund raise to win a primary. Before any person votes on candidates, money votes on candidates. So our government is responsive to money, because money votes first.
So it is not the government shaping interests, but the government using force on behalf of the wealthy that is problematic.
All political roads lead to a central problem: The rich are too rich and therefore cannot be bound by law and are able to coerce the government to act on their behalf.
Informing people of facts is different from shaping opinions - the former tries to give people what they need to make their own decisions while the latter starts out with a conclusion and seeks to make the general public arrive at it too. Manufacturing consent is as much about omitting information or outright preventing it from spreading as it is about providing information that would support your conclusion.
Sugary food, smoking cigarettes, and legal drugs are interesting examples here because there is a third party that benefits from them and is actually engaging in similar tactics to shape the public's consent. Perhaps the most obvious part of this is advertisement. Ideally the government would recognize this and severly limit how corporations can manipulate people.
I do agree with your point that the root cause of all of this is that the government is representing the people as you would expect from an ideal democracy.
Yet if you don't have any trashcans or other ways of disposing waste around, and you don't have much social pressure against it, many people will eventually leave their waste behind somewhere.
Much better to nudge them towards complying in specific with the laws that they want in general
but here's a much more explicit nudge example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas
Their role is managing while being accountable. And doing said managing by the least amount of coercion and the maximal amount of convincing.
There's no such thing as "represent". It's a political dead end meant to draw votes and political power to those who are presented as "representing" the current social division magnified by the media, whether it's race, religion, or the usual liberal conservative division.
You're supposed to hold them accountable even and especially if it goes against your "representation" or interests. But so long as the majority are playing the "representation" politics meta game, there's no hope for accountability.
...
> But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media).
I though that too ~20 years ago. I live in a small country with elections every few years (usually less than the full term of the government) and a "one supposedly rightwing party" vs. "a bunch of supposedly left wing parties"... the mix of left wing parties also slowly turned to "a new face + a bunch of old parties" recently.
Every pre-election period we get a bunch of people advocating online and in person, that if "party X" got elected, they'd solve the "problem Y", because they can do it, and "current party" is blocking them... somehow those same people (and not just fresh 18yo going for their first election) forget, that party X has been in the government 3 years ago, and the government before that, and before that, and that the "problem Y" has existed for atleast 20 years (healthcare, housing,...), and they did nothing.
People either forget or are gaslighted by the media.
> assassination attempts
This happens when problems get unsolved and worse and worse for years... bad healthcare, especially mental health, depression, drugs, save 10k, but the apartment you wanted is now 30k more expensive, average rent higher than average pension, etc., create more and more people with nothing left to lose.
It’s a very cynical view of the potential for human government that believes there is no way that the democratic will of the people affects what goals ‘regulators’ pursue.
Consider the possibility perhaps that the point of government is to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma and move people into a better collective equilibrium than they will naturally settle into. Nudges can be a useful tool for creating better outcomes for everyone.
In theory, at least.
Did I understand that correctly? If I did, I don’t think anyone would disagree… in theory. The problem is there’s no standard way to measure and certainly no agreement on what that collective equilibrium should be.
Until we figure that out—no thanks. I’ll take my naturally not-as-optimized freedom without the government’s input.
So I don’t think we should handle this as a yes no question.
Criminal law is just another form of regulation. Somehow we decided that taking cocaine is a crime. And that pedophiles are criminals. And then government tries to ensure compliance with criminal law.
People generally agree that it is fit and proper for government to act, through education and other means, to ensure most people aren't criminals.
You might say: "well criminal law is different - but is it?
Someone spent 8 years in jail for sending lobster in an incorrect container. Not a live lobster, a dead one.
If someone wants to punch you in the face just how "optimized" do you want their freedom to do so, without legal consequences, be? Aka how many "nudges" should be in place to make that harder to get away with? If you don't want to get punched, you want people to think there'd be consequences, that bystanders would tell on them, etc. All those "nudges" need to be stronger than the "snitches get stitches" and similar nudges from the other side.
No-one specifically voted for the patriot act, no one was elected on promices of passing it, yet it became law.
In Britain they are considering a law to ban drivers under 25 from carrying any children in the car. Noone has ever voted for this.
https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/company-car-tax-and-legisla...
I feel this isn't a terrific example as it doesn't seem to be true.
"The notion the case was about packaging is incorrect,' [the prosecutor] said. 'Packaging was the means by which the crime was concealed. It was the mechanism to conceal the extent of overharvesting."
ref: https://web.archive.org/web/20210603000400/https://www.eenew...
US Gov's overzealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz on behalf of major publishers (and major donors) might work better. That involves creating law and the exercise of gov power, both of which were granted to the copyright interests behind influential lobbyists.
A vast majority of the population agrees that sexually violating a child is morally reprehensible and fit for a wide range of punishments. And that’s been a social standard for most of the world, for a REALLY long time.
I’m not sure about the number of people who agree or disagree with cocaine being illegal. But everyone knows it’s self-destructive behavior that can easily boil into destructive behavior for others. Therefore, most people I know understand why it’s illegal and agree with it.
So my original point still stands. It’s largely not-optimized, and largely consented upon on the large points that matter concerning violence and preservation of life. That doesn’t make it without flaws which, by nature makes it unoptimized.
But surely it can only run so long. The problem is that most people believe that their countries can’t fall into authoritarianism because they are a democracy.
Similarly, I'd say some nudging is in order to tackle the obesity epidemic in the US and other places.
That's the very definition of "leader". It's exactly what leaders are supposed to do: "lead". They're supposed to have a vision, and get other people to follow them to achieve that vision.
What you're advocating for is a "manager" or an "administrator", not a "leader".
Not in shaping our interests, but the interests of the 'deplorables', the people who disagree and who they see as beneath them.
Nothing requires to vox populi of some issue to agree with its own opinion of five minutes ago, or its own current opinion in a similar issue. Your opinion as voter can be as fickle as it pleases you. The law requires fairness, though, and our leaders are the unfortunates whose job it is to tell the voters about the longer-term principles and try to shape people's opinions. To make them less fickle and more principled.
Now, which principle? I don't mind if a particular politician or party tries to shape voters' opinions around the principles in that politician's or party's program.
But backdoors and unacceptable, that's like mandating that every house have microphones in every room connected to the police center
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
OTOH for "Animal Farm" he specifically wrote an essay[1] explaining why he wrote it, meant to be a preface to the book. Ironically, the preface was dropped from the book when it was originally published for the very same reasons discussed in the essay. And I feel that many of those reasons are still at play today.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Digital rights, digital ownership, digital business models, privacy, security, speech, digital policing... they're all very different from their analog analogs.
The differences between A & B are less pronounced in the digital realm.
Police hacking into devices has more in common, practically and culturally, with signals intelligence than it does with ordinary policing.
I don't disagree with you. I just don't agree that "it's very simple." We need to invent or adopt novel concepts, not insist that nothing has changed.
That's not the same for software. It's pretty much trivial to write an encryption software which is basically unbreakable. Complex software has bugs, but sometimes simple software is enough.
That said, I don't see how backdoors would help here. Evil guys won't use vulnerable software.
"Bad guys" could still use encryption of course, but the government would gain the ability to easily surveil most people, which is what they're really after.
this is lacking imagination
Most items around us will be smart withing 10 years.
There are coffe machines that stop working without internet, dishwashers and washing machines that have wifi. You cant buy a TV and a Car without internet connectivity. Mac OS won't run an executable withour connecting to an apple server.
All of them phone home.
The government just needs to tap into the datastores assembled by these companies. Datastores in centralised datacenters, which are large regulated installations.
They don't need to do any extra work. The police doesnt need to raid every house.
See this misses the more nuanced point. I bet my last cent that everyone who doesn't want Apple's ability to meaningfully control their platform eroded would change their tune immediately if we had a regulatory environment that had any teeth whatsoever when it comes to policing malicious software.
People are currently backed into a corner where the only not incompetent regulatory body for software is Apple right now. I would love for iOS to be completely open but maligned actors who would use that against my interests need to be stopped and Apple being closed doesn't get in the way all that much.
* You must be able to cancel subscriptions in one click with no human interaction and users must be able to choose an immediate cancel for a pro-rated refund even if they paid "yearly."
* You must allow opt-out of all tracking and data collection without providing any disincentive for doing so.
* All free trails must not require a CC and can only be continued after explicitly done so by the user.
* Delete the concept of implied consent. By existing you consent to.. fuck off.
* Establish a legal definition of dark pattern and make them illegal and reportable by users for a cut of the fine.
* You must be allowed to purchase a completely ad free experience.
* You cannot sell OS features like notifications or running in the background.
* All digital goods must be able to be returned within x days of purchase.
My wishlist could go on.
I definitely would change my mind. The complete lack of any effective protections against bad actors is the sole reason I'm willing to tolerate what Apple is doing with the iOS App Store.
I've never been fully satisfied by this assertion.
Apple has the ability to push whatever code it wants to whatever device it wants. They can make a version of iOS that bypasses encryption and restrict it to only run on devices identified by a warrant. They could post it on GitHub and it wouldn't matter because iPhones would refuse to run the code if it had been modified by somebody other than Apple to run on any device. You would need Apple's internal code signing keys to actually do any damage.
Currently, the security of your iPhone is dependent on Apple's internal security. If that gets compromised then your phone can be compromised. In a world where law enforcement can get a warrant to force Apple to unlock a specific iPhone, the security of your phone is still dependent on Apple's internal security. Nothing changes for anyone not targeted by a warrant.
You don't need to give law enforcement a universal backdoor key to enable them to execute warrants on devices. What am I missing?
Of course. Apple could absolutely do this and undermine any trust people have in them in seconds if they want to.
Didn't they pass a law in Australia requiring corporations to do exactly what you describe? I remember reading news here about several corporations just moving off of Australia as a result of the inherent untrustworthiness of any system where the government can compel any party you're doing business with to ship you malware.
Apple objected to being compelled to create the tooling to bypass an iPhone's security. That implies they can do it whenever they want, they just choose not to.
its necessary security, so you agree with this correct?
I agree that giving law enforcement a universal key that can defeat all encryption would be a monumentally stupid idea, but it's not actually necessary to enable them to bypass encryption on specific devices. As far as I can tell, privacy activists have just made up the fact that law enforcement wants a universal key because it's easier to argue against that than to argue in favor of their actual position.
Access to bank account details and emails is also routine in police investigations. And they can simply smash your door in if they need access to your house.
You need hardware that can securely hold secrets; you need software to detect tampering and tell the hardware about it; you need software that the hardware trusts to communicate with apple servers. Without the whole integrated pipeline from local secrets cache to apple servers, protected because it's all owned and managed by the same secret-keeper, what apple does can't be done.
The fact that this is not how security on iPhones works at all.
There are unencrypted partitions of the storage yes, which means the device can boot into iOS without any user password, but the ones containing user data are encrypted and an OS update can at best remove the limit on how fast or how many times you can attempt to unlock the user data (or rather the Secure Enclave which stores the actual key for the user data).
Sure, if you have a 4-6 digit PIN code this is then quickly unlocked in that scenario you're talking about, but if you have an alphanumeric password you can make that attack completely infeasible.
Bottom line is there is no way for Apple to make a version of iOS that completely bypasses encryption, encryption doesn't work like that.
They could, I guess, make a version which silently checks if it's host devices serial number is in a certain list provided by e.g. law enforcement, and then silently removes the SEP encryption, IF the user unlocks the device AFTER that software is installed. But they would have to secretly add this code to the normal iOS releases which would severely compromise their customers data en masse if they did it this way, or create a way to push a specific build over the air to a specific device (which actually doesn't sound that far-fetched honestly, now that I'm thinking about it), without alerting the user that they are installing a backdoor for law enforcement.
I don't think that's feasible either way, because it would quickly come out that they've done that and once the cat's out of the bag they are losing big bucks, and would be criminals will simply stop installing updates on their iPhones.
Wouldn't an OS update be able to store the user password in a plain text file on the non-encrypted partitions? I don't think those partitions are hardwired to be readonly until the rest of the system is unlocked?
What is wrong with these people? How can anyone, let alone an educated, well-traveled leader, be so obtuse about the implications (and for that matter, the realism) of any such scheme?
Smart or dumb, they are just in it to gain power.
You can imagine how this quirk of psychology affects power at all levels in our society.
If using gpg via email on an Open System (Linux, BSDs), good luck stopping that.
They won't engage us on those terms. They'll use their authority to pass laws saying use of cryptography strong enough to defeat them is evidence of guilt. Judges will instruct juries to assume there's CSAM in your encrypted hard drive.
They want power over you, and this is just another means to that end.
You can read up on how Polish government used their access to Pegassus.
So either a large part of HN has already been co-opted by this public campaign, or is uneducated/obtuse, or is able to trace a very different set of weights for what you can do with your expression but not your money.
Maybe HN just hates cryptocurrencies.
Or more specifically, all the endless scams and grift that orbit around cryptocurrencies, the failure of cryptocurrencies to actually solve any problems of the existing financial system (because you need to inevitably bridge the two) as well as the negative externalities that cryptocurrencies have on the environment and hardware availability.
There are people here on HN who say they actually met at least one of these politicians. Check out this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35656323
These are the people imposing their silly laws on us. It's a joke. I wanted to respect them enough to think it's all some sort of master plan to oppress us more efficiently but could very well be that they are dumb enough to back this without understanding what encryption even is.
Never underestimate the appeal of making one's job easier.
Although you are right, it does take a certain level of intelligence to recognize when one is outside of their element and to seek proper expertise. Assuming no malicious intent.
For example: https://www.youtube.com/@OxfordUnion/videos
The Oxford Union is the world's most prestigious debating society with a tradition of hosting internationally prominent individuals across politics, academia, and popular culture. Founded in 1823 at a time when The University of Oxford restricted students from discussing certain topics, The Union continues to uphold the principle of free speech through the exchange and debate of a wide range of ideas and opinions, presented by a diverse range of speakers - some inspiring, others controversial. As we celebrate 200 years of free speech during our Bicentenary year of 2023, we reaffirm our commitment to our integral values and also our belief that the discussion of complex topics should not only be encouraged but is an essential element of any free society.
Make special note of the attitudes displayed by these bright young minds and the questions put to the speakers. Heck, might even notice the ever increasing pop-culture nature of the proceedings. I guess hearing from PSY about Gangam style is one of the most of all time.
In short, a large chunk of these "elites" who go into politics are nepo babies governed by fashionable group think no different from their less monied peers. iPhones are the great equalizer. Everybody is equally cringy. It is a different caliber of person now from the heyday and naturally trends towards authoritarianism.
The exceptionalism is gone a long time ago already. It was perfectly lampooned half a century ago in shows like 'Yes Minister'. Lofty ideals, duty, intellectual curiosity, honesty, a sense of decency, long ago succumbed to mediocrity and farce. And that was the 80s. We are way past that stage where there was still a sense of shame, past the age of spin, hurling into cynical ambivalence now and soon complete forgetfulness.
In short, the West really is in decline and has been for a long time. People who have a clue about why this is a bad idea are nowhere near the halls of power. And I don't mean intricate technical knowledge, these subjects go back centuries, the relevant ideas and ideals are at the very core of what made these societies great in the first place. Poof.
You know why this is wrong instinctually, at your core, because you paid attention to the ship of state and still give a shit about something bigger than yourself. They don't.
There's nothing outright wrong with them, they are just basic ordinary consumers. And the lessons of the past will have to be re-learned if we don't accidentally find ourselves this time in an unescapable permanent dystopia.
I suppose there's the concern that a statement like "we prosecuted 2387 child molesters based on surveillance of unencrypted chat" would cause future offenders to stop using unencrypted chat, but I think that's a red herring. Any reasonably clever criminal would not be sending felonious content unencrypted today.
Unfortunately, they've often been shown to also be lying bastards in other matters, so why would we believe them for this situation?
Or their other behavior
Just that its easy to imagine being in that role, being privy to some insane shit that barely gets stopped, and never again thinking twice about violating all these rules just to prevent that kind of thing.
Doesn't mean what they're advocating for isn't messed up. But its not hard to think through how they get there.
Hmmm, sounds more like fantasy thinking (to me). :/
There will be no implications if encryption is banned. People have been using unencrypted wired phones and unencrypted bank cards for a long time and the world hasn't collapsed.
Also, there is no need to ban any encryption, client-server encryption protocols like HTTPS can stay, provided that the server would log all session keys for future lawful access.
This global movement against encryption -- against citizen's privacy, really -- is all about power maintenance. Power groups want to have access to our conversations so when the election period approaches, they will be able to run sentiment analysis on the data collected from our conversations, and then fine tune their election campaigns accordingly. All the current excuses about fighting organized crime, violence to children etc. are well known excuses used for many years within different context to roll out surveillance bills.
Control over encryption is overwhelmingly about those in power keeping others out of power. If you have access to all of your opponent's communications because you're already the president, there's really nothing the opponent can do to balance things out. Any grassroots movement to displace you and your government would never get off the ground - they'd be arrested before they could even organize, since the entirety of your comms is available to the establishment.
Dark pattern checklist:
√ Emotional manipulation
√ Implicit "consent" rather than opt-in
√ No opt out button
Right then. Great to know what they're advocating.
I’m having trouble with the link. How substantive is this allegation?
1A: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
4A: "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."
Wholesale banning of anonymous money transfers would also, in my opinion, be a violation of 1st and 4th amendments. But banning encrypted speech & communication altogether (or compelling an open-access backdoor) is clearly a violation of 1st & 4th amendment.
there's already enough cameras to capture every angle - including the ones at registers that clearly are there just to capture your face.
The only reason i can see for a cashless society is: someone is going to make shedloads of money on the microtransactions. Visa, MC, AmEx, JP Morgan, etc.
You can do that in the US though with cash. There might be some transactions that you can't do in physical cash but that is more of a practical/convince limitation and not a legal one.
- Erode what resistance to total surveillance remains.
- Practice total surveillance.
Here is my plan to oppose that plan:
- Rekindle Orwell's 1984 as a full literary/movie/video-game genre, where awful things happen to people when the government or an associated non-knocking variant of the Spanish Inquisition shows up because somebody committed wrong-think.
I'm a little afraid that if we don't succeed in bringing this problem to the general's public attention via their binging habits, as a sort of social vaccine, we will end up with the disease.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and mass culture of movies and video games is really the most effective way to teach the broader audience about these issues. Black mirror did a great job with some episoses, and also handmaid's tale has had a big impact in thinking about women's rights.
What are you talking about? I've never seen this. As far as I'm concerned, AML/KYS is just the financial arm of global mass surveillance.
While I recognize and appreciate, on a personal level, the freedom that this provides me, freedom exists only to the extent that there is a government enforcing boundaries on freedom to prevent it from turning into anarchy. I'm afraid it's not going to be hard, over the years, to find enough pedophiles and terrorists to make a compellingly popular case for more regulation of encryption.
> Prior to the invention of the postal service, most communications were verbal and privacy was (relatively) easy to ensure.
? Messenger service seems about as old as the written word.
Targeted taps and phone calls don't scale. Even police states that wanted to surveil their entire population could only directly monitor a small portion of the population at any time. These barriers no longer exist.
> Messenger service seems about as old as the written word.
Widespread literacy is a 19th/20th century invention. The telephone and telegraph became popular for non-essential communications only in the 20th century. Asynchronous "store and forward" electronic communications became a primary channel for communications (as in, nearly everyone in your family uses it in place of phone calls and paper letters, or even private conversations) only in the 2000s.
Maybe let's not fall to 10-foot tall syndrome in either direction. Two things can be true: law enforcement is overstating terrorism and criminal dangers that it's facing, and encryption advocates are overstating totalitarianist danger.
Maybe the problem is that in many Western countries there isn't a huge smoking gun where surveillance powers are "routinely used" for visibly nefarious things. Even things as bad as Snowden exposed (and they were shocking) don't seem to resonate with a lot of folks, maybe because it doesn't seem like the govt was actually able to do anything with all the data that they grabbed anyways. In the US, I haven't really heard of cops blackmailing people over intercepted data, for example. Or jailing of political opponents based on their online habits.
I'm not sure if encryption fans are either not looking to be in office, or not popular enough to be elected. But if it's an issue people care about a lot, there should be no problems getting elected on that issue. Don't be on HN taking to me, go talk to some random people and see how they want to vote on that issue or if they even care. But maybe, just maybe, you'll find that there are other things on their mind right now.
So as far as I'm concerned, the political angle is mostly about dragging our feet to buy us more time to develop the anti-surveillance tech like encryption as far as possible in the open before it is heavily regulated.
I find I am not in a hurry to hand over what little space is left.
You're going to oppress the world's entire population of human beings with warrantless global surveillance because of a few "pedophiles and terrorists"? What a tiresome argument, seriously. Go ahead and find us thousands of "pedophiles and terrorists". It won't matter how many you find because what you're proposing as the cure is the tyranny of a government panopticon.
Its already happening with financial transactions, regular speech is not far behind.
No, it doesn't. Which is trivial to prove, considering we have had widely available encryption for two decades now with no anarchy or encryption fueled societal collapse in sight. Actually, countries without backdoor laws are some of the most prosperous and safe places on earth. And even western countries that have decided to chase after the encryption boogeyman (Australia, for example) didn't experience a drop in crime rates.
Hold on. I'm not arguing that encryption causes anarchy. I'm just making a general point about the idea that effective freedom requires a government to intervene to restrict freedoms, in at least _some_ matters. For example most people would agree that prisons are necessary to keep compulsively violent people from harming others. That doesn't mean everyone should be locked up at the government's whim. The question for encryption is, is there _a_ limit to what the government should allow.
> Actually, countries without backdoor laws are some of the most prosperous and safe places on earth.
Not sure about either the correlation or the causation. I'm not sure what countries you have in mind, but just to share two examples: - China seems to be increasingly safe and prosperous and has backdoors. (And it's totalitarian, but I'm just going by the safety and prosperity characteristics that you mention.) - In the US, Signal was featured prominently as the communication medium of choice for people convicted of a seditious conspiracy case. Only thanks to human infiltration was the government able to obtain these communications. I think it's reasonable to expect the government to have the ability to legally intercept the communications of people planning violent regime overthrow.
And so are the tech bossess! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35653867 https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-tech-bosses-are-lett...
The tech-empires are letting whichever country wants to come in & start dictating terms, step all over people. We no longer even have the spine to call out journalism done in un-Free areas, we've decided Government-sponsored is too risky to even inform people about. https://rsf.org/en/index
With online platforms being cajouled every which way, one would hope the US Government could find some scant resemblance of a soul & do the right thing, which would be to help wage this culture war for a moral & ethical cause, to actually help our Democratic values, instead of psychological assaults on them. The government should be pushing back, demanding more encryption, more privacy, especially more privacy, privacy that even the tech bossess can't access much less the government.
Alas instead of helping fight the good fight, here we see the US-EU is playing the jealous rival, trying to steal some of the same advantages the data-slurping panopticon totalistic information-societies.
We need legal stands from governments to protect & advancing freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of ideas, freedom to think. We ought recognize & attend to open society & other essential liberty.
It's been such a ride. A lot of people are pretty grimdark on what Social Media is & means & the fate of interconnectivity, but my word, how can anyone feel so jaded & old at this point? We are so young, we have explored so few & such narrow options for how we might gather & share & communicate across the internet & it's many sites. I can acknowledge that folks are unhappy, that we are scared of what lies beyond the now tarnishing gilded Creator age, and you're all right, but man, the internet is so phenomenal. This is such an amazing creative ability to create & connect, to explore thought, expands the Rhizomatic / Assembly theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblage_(philosophy)) view of the world so deeply. There is so much to learn & figure out.
If we can keep this democracy. If we can maintain a vector where we can keep creating new interconnection, new people-figuring-out-what-protocols-people-want-to-use between us. We can combat so much shallowness by owning our speech, by owning our relays, by opting into being our own more selctive amplifiers, picking for ourselves what is signal and what is noise, calling out the short fun & what has real lasting value. Keep making the world more seen, keep sharing & thinking ourselves out loud, in public. And together in private.
Law Enforcement can't just be out wasting that shoe leather anymore.
Every justification for usage or backdoor encryption is eventually rooted in monitoring financial transactions, or preserving the means in which a state can collect them. The "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs" are perfect examples of this.
They strike me as one of the cornerstones of civilization. I.e. the state builds things that are for the common good using those resources.
The temporal effects of income tax are often lost in colloquial debates among non-economists who have the impression that they exist primarily for moral reasons — however, the wealthy, in practice, are very good at avoiding them.
Yeah, this is a problem that would need to be solved.
I believe consumption tax is a better approach, in my opinion.
Consumption tax is immediate, indiscriminate at the time we spend the money, while property tax tends to be applied at various times throughout the life of the property.
If there are consumption taxes, they should only be for the raw materials and energy (as part of mineral rights).
edit: i.e. when wealthy people say this, it is usually just a euphemism for lowering their personal tax burden.
Wealthy people require more protection (as they are excellent targets) and more scrutiny (because their financial affairs are complicated, and they can take advantage of criminal opportunities that require large amounts of capital), so taxes should rise with wealth.
edit 2: When people believe that both income and wealth taxes should be discarded for taxes on consumption, you can be sure that they are wealthy with a high income.
However, most corporations own a lot of other assets that are already registered with the government, or pay rent to other corporations that do: real estate, mineral rights, and intellectual property. If we can figure out how to tax these things, that could help.
As a bonus, if property taxes (or better yet, land value taxes) were 5x what they are, we probably would fix the housing crisis as all the property hoarders unload their underutilized property onto the market.
The reason government steps in in cases like loss of job and provision of welfare is because nobody ever expects to be in those situations. But when you end up in those situations, having not bought insurance prior to being there, you will naturally find them pernicious. In order to prevent that from happening, government programs provide a kind of nationwide or statewide insurance policy that you are bought into by default just in case you should happen to need it some day.
You're arguing that you never will, and that might be the case, but that's also strictly speaking a risky proposition if aggregated over the entire population of the US.
>Nobody said anything about shutting down social programs, you can still have those without forcing people that don’t use them to pay for it
Which implies that the people paying for them are the ones using them
I frankly have no idea who you are talking about. You're going to have to elaborate because right now it sounds like a cheap strawman.
So a kid with cancer needs to pay the government for Medicaid? After all, they are the ones receiving the benefit.
"Taxes Are What We Pay for Civilized Society."[0]
[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/