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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

We (the citizens) need access to all the politicians communication, just in case if they do anything illegal... 24/7 microphones, digital communication tracker, etc. Let's start with that, and then move on to "normal people", if politicians still believe in no privacy.

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Politicians are the most surveilled people, and sometimes vote for things like this for fear of or as the result of being targeted by their own or other countries' intelligence agencies.

If the CIA wants Spain to ban encryption, they're not going to be bothered by the resistance of some Spanish MPs, they're going to fix the problem.

We (the citizens) need to ban secret police and secret courts.

> Politicians are the most surveilled people, and sometimes vote for things like this for fear of or as the result of being targeted by their own or other countries' intelligence agencies.

Not here. Probably not anywhere outside US and some very few countries.

Politicians are mostly corrupt, though degrees vary. Most relevant child abuse was covered by famous politicians¹²³⁴⁵. Nevertheless, the same politicians cut budgets for police to do actual investigation work, because that could harm themselves, then want to cut the last line of defense the public has to do actual investigation and journalism (which requires free speech and privacy) by declaring that this is required to fight pedophilia.

We need to do something against this. We really do.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein

² https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336831983_Understan...

³ https://time.com/2974381/england-land-of-royals-tea-and-horr...

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux

⁵ https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/past-pedophile-...

If you downvote, please at least state a reason. All of the links are reputable and verified. And all of them were covered by famous, reputable politicians.

Two good reasons to downvote this would be 1) that it's a conspiracy theory and 2) that reading about pedophilia every time one turns on the internet is exhausting.

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's a collection of links that describe actual conspiracies.

Not all of them - the Time one from 2014 (link number 3) actually links to the Wikipedia article that has a section about the VIP paedophile ring claims (that the article is mostly about) being discredited in 2015 [1]. (The page title was changed from 'Scandal' to 'Hoax' after the article was published and redirects)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elm_Guest_House_hoax

Not everything that's uncomfortable and swept under the rug is a conspiracy theory. Calling the revelations about Jeffrey Eppstein and his shady connections in 2023 conspiracy theory comes off as dismissive.

Relevant standup bit https://youtu.be/b6NmjK2pgiQ

But I sort of get your #2.

Unlikely the garbage dreamt up on 4chan is the truth. Sure the government lies. Doesn't mean your interpretation is correct.

Nobody said that on this thread, I hope you know that.

Critical thinking and scepticism are essential, both when you read things from traditionally reputable sources, like WaPo, NYT, state media, politicians, and alternative media, like Youtube opinion people, online forums, or your friends, family and colleagues.

My point is simply that "distrusting the government" doesn't mean you should believe the theories. The theories are probably less trustworthy. They can be less trustworthy than a untrustworthy government!

> Critical thinking and scepticism are essential, both when you read things from traditionally reputable sources, like WaPo, NYT, state media, politicians, and alternative media, like Youtube opinion people, online forums, or your friends, family and colleagues.

And I never said otherwise :)

>it's a conspiracy theory

Are you disagreeing with the information in GP's links? As far as I can tell this is all looks pretty legit and the onus is on people like you to prove that all this evidence is somehow fabricated.

He seems to be disagree with how they are characterizing the info in the links.

>"reading about pedophilia every time one turns on the internet is exhausting"

That's because politicians keep bringing this up.

"it's a conspiracy theory" Is not a fact a good reason.

Why do conspiracy theories get a bad rap? it's because there's people who think the moon landing isn't real and the earth is flat. These are what jumps to mind when anyone says "conspiracy theory". Here you are using that association to try to cover for corrupt politicians, which is not exactly a very far out there concept.

> Why do conspiracy theories get a bad rap?

Because it's usually speculation without evidence, and because no matter how much evidence contradicts a conspiracy theory people continue to cling to it like a religion.

I'm not sure what "Most relevant child abuse was covered by famous politicians" is supposed to mean, but most child abuse isn't committed by politicians, there is no evidence that most politicians are child abusers, and there have been several insane conspiracy theories about child abusing politicians in recent years so it's pretty natural to be skeptical when it looks like someone's starting down that path.

I expect there's already people who'd say "The crazy conspiracy theories about child abusing political figures were intentionally spread online by child abusing politicians so that anyone on social media talking about politicians abusing children would only be met with eye rolls"

Didn't downvote. But saying we need to do something about corrupt politicians isn't novel. I'm also not sure how pedophilia and Jeffrey Epstein is meaningfully related to the topic at hand.

Politicians usually go with the "think of the children" persuasion tactic when they want to do some nefarious stuff (and when they don't "fight terrorism" or recently "misinformation").

If “novel” comments were really what this site was about, it would have been dead years ago.

You state that "Most relevant child abuse was covered by famous politicians" and list 5 examples. This does by no means prove your claim. For all I know, the rate of child abusers could be much lower among politicians than in the general population.

I assume he meant covered up, right? Anyway there is a lot of gross stuff happening, but he hasn't substantiated that point.

This powerful "pedophile network" is likely politicians who shopped online at Tesco in the early 2000s and had their credit card numbers used by criminals for fraudulent purposes, and likely got caught up in Operation Ore and falsely accused of having purchased child pornography online. Thousands of people in the UK were raided by police and had their life destroyed over this, and the majority were entirely innocent.

At the time the News of the World, a Rupert Murdoch owned tabloid, was stoking the moral panic over pedophiles and creating an atmosphere of fervour over this issue. Maybe other News Corporation owned media worldwide might have started this whole panic around child pornography in the first place, in the early 2000s? With Murdoch seeing the Internet as a large threat to his dominance over the media?

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

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/apr/26/comment.s...

https://www.duncancampbell.org/content/operation-ore

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/the_home_office_cover...

And rooting out hidden enemies within is typical of what happens during a moral panic. Same with McCarthyism. In reality it's very unlikely that there are pedophile networks within the UK government.

My reason to downvote will be: Around half the girls I've met in my life were molested by adults as children, and it wasn't by famous people or politicians. It was by neighbors and family members in the suburbs where they grew up. It's fine to call out hypocrisy in the ruling class that covers up for their own while claiming to be trying to address the problem, but at the end of the day the vast majority of the millions of daily cases of child abuse are taking place right nextdoor or even in the same houses as the people who make a lot of noise about corrupt politicians. I'd even go as far as to say that an obsession with famous child abuse cases is a good indicator of someone who's either committed or thought about committing that sort of crime.

Politicians are just ambitious people, sharing full spectrum of other traits. Most people would become equally corrupt if presented the opportunity. Being ambitious just amplifies the temptation.

You underestimate the selection pressure. While I agree that many people would become corrupted, the profession (so to speak) attracts certain people. It is even to the point where you need some negative traits (explicitly: skeletons in the closet) to rise up, because it means you're easier to control.

> Most people would become equally corrupt if presented the opportunity

Bold claim, without anything to back it up.

As a first step, I'd settle for 1 party consent for recording everywhere.

And no more unrecorded votes.

Can someone steelman the argument against one-party consent? I literally can't think of any reason anyone would want it, other than wanting to be able to lie about what they said later. It doesn't even help people who are saying things that might be dangerous if they leak, since illegal != impossible.

It probably felt right around the time when recording devices were first invented.

> Can someone steelman the argument against one-party consent? I literally can't think of any reason anyone would want it, other than wanting to be able to lie about what they said later.

Are you actually asking hackernews, in a thread about banning encryption, why "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is not a good justification for being monitored without your consent?

I don't consider it "being monitored" when the person you're talking to is the one doing the recording. Contrast "I'm legally allowed to keep emails sent to me after I first read them" with "other people are legally allowed to read emails sent to me". Wouldn't almost everyone agree that the former is a good thing but the latter would be a bad thing?

> don't consider it "being monitored" when the person you're talking to is the one doing the recording

Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate. You can't negotiate in earnest if every offer for compromise you put forward immediately results in (a) the losers of that compromise creating a ruckus and (b) your opponent using (a) to weaken you.

Public negotiations reward playing to the audience. (You see this in small groups–letting leaders or the people in a friend group who disagree pull aside almost always solves the problem better than litigating it as a group.) If every conversation might be recorded for replaying to a third party, then every conversation will be treated as an open one. That destroys room for compromise.

This seems like a weak argument since compromise may be more difficult, but it certainly isn't impossible when conversations are transparent. Eventually the "losers" of a compromise are going to learn about how their elected officials voted and what the impact of that vote will be for them, and they'll hold their elected officials accountable for it regardless.

It just isn't worth forcing every person to give up the ability to protect themselves by recording their everyday conversations just so that politicians can lie to the public and their donors while screwing over the people behind closed doors.

Legislative deliberation, i.e. hashing out details, should be open [1]. At the bargaining phase, when you're working out high-level frameworks, the theory says closed doors win [2]. (Put another way, in a transparent bargaining environment, the winning move is to ignore your opponent and beat your drums to your base.)

> Eventually the "losers" of a compromise are going to learn about how their elected officials voted

The point is to let both sides table ideas without having to face the downside. To propose what if scenarios to the other side.

[1] https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/api-gateway/apsa/assets...

[2] https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/225/1/open-door8.pdf

That cuts two ways. If everything they said was on the record there would be no point in putting on a show since it will immediately turn out the show is all fake.

Imagine if politicians acted like normal people, negotiating things in nuance instead of being showmen.

Don't blame the politicians. Blame the people who have opinions. The public debate is so dominated by bad-faith arguments that it's not productive to treat it as a real debate. Until the social consequences of arguing in bad faith are severe enough, all meaningful political discussion must happen off the record.

> Compromise is reached in quiet, safe places. Politicians make bombastic statements for their base and donors, and then go behind closed doors to negotiate.

That may be. But corruption also festers in quiet safe places. It's not clear to me that the the tradeoff is worth it.

> corruption also festers in quiet safe places. It's not clear to me that the the tradeoff is worth it.

Public legislating, private bargaining [1]. This keeps substantive deliberation in the public domain while the horse trading, the job republics delegate to elected representatives, has a limited space within which it can efficiently engage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36037530

Okay, fair enough. I was so focused on my own perception of privacy that it hadn't occurred to me that the person I'm talking to has every right to record the conversation just as much as they do to remember it.

Speaking as someone who often has to tell people "Email that to me or I won't remember it", I can see the utility without it being intrusive.

The main difference is that if they remember it and tell someone else, it's hearsay, but if they record it and play it for someone else, it's evidence. At least until deepfakes ruin that idea and make the two equivalently refutable.

You seem to be referring to zero-party consent, which yes HN would tend not to want. I think most of HN would be into one-party consent, meaning you can time shift that which you already had the ability to hear (and therefore let third parties hear it, without knowledge of the other original party).

The police already have the ability to monitor you without consent. One party consent lets people record their own conversations and push back against false allegations about what they did or did not say.

Having to be constantly on guard about what you say in case someone's recording you and can play it back for others, or in court, often out of context...

Basically, some expectation of privacy especially in a 1-on-1 conversation, even if it's via telecommunications tech rather than in-person.

Some people adopt a more filtered, cautious way of speaking anyway as a defense mechanism. For them it doesn't matter so much. Other people talk informally with less of a filter, and for them it matters quite a bit.

Given that recording is ubiquitous now anyway, and voice deepfakes are about to render even that irrelevant, there probably isn't a good argument against 1-party consent today.

(However, government officials, outside of a foreign policy context, deserve no privacy for anything related to their official duties. The argument that they need to be able to talk informally with their peers, without fear of public judgment, works against the public interest far more than it works for it. That helps build rapport, but no politician these days would fully trust someone they're just building rapport with; that kind of thing may be valuable for diplomatic relations and spies, but not for regular government officials. Privacy and secrecy among ordinary politicians is little more than a recipe for corruption and side-dealing that they know the public would be rightly upset about.)

To add some practical context to this insightful comment: in Belgium, 1-on-1 conversations are considered private and as such protected, meaning you need a judge order to listen in. However, If the conversation is professional, both parties are allowed to record it.

Now, any conversation with 3 or more parties is considered public. A closed group chat on whatsapp has the same legal protection as shouting it on a megaphone to a crowd, meaning none whatsoever and people have already been convicted for their speech in closed chats or forums.

The sane version is one-party that is actually participating in the conversation needs to consent, 3rd parties to the conversation have to ask.

Some strong arguments against one-party consent:

1. Privacy. The cornerstone of personal conversation has always been an inherent right to privacy. Traditionally, conversations held in confidence were sacrosanct, and any disclosure of their content required mutual agreement. Otherwise, the second party can simply deny it and it will never be known with certainty what has been said.

2. Chilling effect on authenticity. In a climate where any conversation could be recorded without one's consent and later used against them, people would be compelled to adopt calculated diplomacy in all their interactions. This would sterilize authentic conversation, replacing genuine thoughts with measured communication, removing a lot of depth and meaning.

3. Weaponization of speech. Recordings under a one-party consent system could be misused in a myriad of damaging ways, from creating training data for voice (deepfake) AIs to insidious forms of blackmail. This extends beyond traditional notions of blackmail to include public shaming or character assassination. This is the "group chat has leaked" scenario, but potentially decades later. One could be a completely different (and potentially reformed) person, but their past will always haunt them and not let them get ahead in their public life, like hold an office or public trust.

4. Limited utility. In many places that allow first-party consent, these recordings are not recognized as valid evidence in court without consent from all parties involved. This significantly undermines their perceived utility as a defensive tool. Is it worth surrendering our privacy for this?

5. Accountability for human folly. People often vent and ramble, it's part of our emotional expression and a necessary component of our mental health. If every idle venting or thoughtless comment were recorded and held against us, it would make our lives much less peaceful. Sometimes it's good to let some thoughts die in a conversation. Reflect on your own past and the blunders of youth - good that they were not recorded, right? This also applies to intoxicated conversations, conversations while suffering from mental health illness, and similar.

6. Two-party consent already serves many purposes. For most business or evidence needs, two-party consent is enough. One can simply tell the other party that they will start recording the call if the other party does not hang up, and that will be implicit second-party consent in many countries. So one can record conversations, and one can choose to have only recorded conversations with some people. One-party consent has only marginal benefits over two-party, but it has significant downsides.

7. Little effect on harassment or threats. Threats and intimidation could be made in other ways, like face-to-face, or through coded language. "Your political campaign is going great, it sounds like a guaranteed win unless someone fabricates a scandal. You need to play it safe with the people that could."

8. Third-party recording. One-party consent doesn't mean a third party isn't recording. For example, smartphones could record audio of conversations for ad targeting and government purposes if there was one-party consent (one party turned on the call recorder).

9. Other contexts. If the laws for one-party consent are too permissive, this could lead to a lot of surveillance activities becoming permissible. For example, the definition of a conversation could be stretched to include all chatter on an office floor if just one person consents to the recording (perhaps a manager).

> Privacy, Limited utility

Where/when has the been true? Nowhere I know of.

> Chilling effect on authenticity, Accountability for human folly

There are lots of places with 1 party consent already. Not a problem

> Weaponization of speech

People who are going to commit crimes won't hesitate to commit other crimes. Irrelevant.

> Two-party consent already serves many purposes

For business 2 party consent is not enough. It would be enough if people didn't regularly commit crimes... but they do. Wage theft is probably the most common type of theft. Add on shenanigans with worker's comp, and other workplace nastiness and 1 party consent is very much needed.

> Little effect on harassment or threats

If one person can understand covert speech, other people can too. Irrelevant.

> Third-party recording

I'm a little sympathetic to accidental sharing of recordings, but there are plenty of ways to record that don't have this danger (dedicated recording devices and apps where the data doesn't leave the phone come to mind).

> Other contexts

Lots of things are possible. Your example isn't particularly compelling, though: not every instance of speech has an expectation of privacy.

Spain is already a 1-party consent country, it is legal to record any conversation as long as you are part of it. However, it is not legal to publish them, but they can be used in a trial.

Thanks. Looking up “1-party” sent me down an interesting rabbit hole learning about the limited “0-party” rights of interception. For radio interception in NJ, it is legal (and only legal?) to intercept:

f. Any person to intercept any radio communication which is transmitted:

(1) by any station for the use of the general public, or that relates to ships, aircraft, vehicles, or persons in distress;

(2) by any governmental, law enforcement, civil defense, private land mobile, or public safety communication system, including police and fire, readily accessible to the general public;

(3) by a station operating on an authorized frequency within the bands allocated to the amateur, citizens band, or general mobile radio services; or

(4) by any marine or aeronautical communications system;

———

Which would imply that broadband RF recording using SDRs, even if it excludes the cell phone bands, is not OK!

For example, the MURS band seems to be illegal to intercept.

Absolutely ridiculous, this signal is coming into your private property, it should never be illegal to receive it. So they are criminalizing monitoring the voltage on a piece of wire (an antenna) in your own property, that is what an SDR does.

These signals are being sent into your property, whether you want it or not. I think you have a natural right to receive it. It doesn't matter if the government says it's illegal, or attempts to enforce it. Just as we can hear anything nearby with our ears, nobody tells us we can't overhear conversations in a restaurant, trying to do so would clearly be absurd. My opinion here is from natural law.

42 states (in the US) have one party recording so I think that it is by far the normal situation.

https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...

Why is it big is that California have too much power for encouraging/removing technologies.

"Dutch PM Mark Rutte questioned after deleting text messages for years" - https://www.euronews.com/2022/05/19/dutch-pm-mark-rutte-ques...

In the uk politicians were allowed to opt out

https://www.digit.fyi/data-protection-political-parties/

While of course no government comes close to that level of radical transparency, Finland comes closer than most. I believe Finland requires all official government documents be made public by default, unless they are specifically exempted. Many other governments, like the US through FOIA, let citizens request documents with varying degrees of success, but proactive disclosure is much more rare. And of course, this is just about official documents and doesn't cover the contents of private meetings.

(I'm just an interested observer, so I'd love to hear from actual Finns on how they feel about their government's level of openness!)

It's the same here in Sweden. It just feels natural that _obviously_ we should have access to what goes on in the public sector, unless there's a very specific reason not to. There was a huge backlash when the current government decided to hide who received electricity subsidies this last winter, as it was seen as a way to hide corruption.

Way back when, Ukraine implemented video recording of all politicians' offices in order to combat corruption. I read an article where a citizen was trying to get something done at a local government office, tried to offer a customary bribe, but was rejected as the officer pointed to the recording camera in the corner of the room.

More responsibility demands more scrutiny.

If they got nothing to hide why wouldn't they do it?

Yep, and they're working and being paid for and by us. If they're working for the benefit of the people (or at least their voters), why would they keep secrets from us/them?

Not to defend politicians, but I don't want to be does on just because I think I'm doing nothing wrong

I believe your parent commenter is being sarcastic by quoting the "nothing to hide" meme. Politicians notoriously have many things to hide.

Yep, I realized that right as my post submitted! That's what I get for replying too fast before coffee

I have been advocating this for some time. If we want full transparency, let's start with the public servants. Oh, they won't be able to make backroom deals, fail at peace agreements because they walked out after 2 hours, and we'll know exactly how they failed? Yes, that's how it should be, because millions of plebs will have to fight and pay the price for their abject failure, negligence and incompetence later. Let it be on full display!

Look, maybe nuclear secrets, black ops and some kind of weird Blackwater (er excuse me Academi) stuff can be off the books, although that has historically resulted in a lot of misery, especially the CIA: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/23/511185078/america-in-laos-tra... and is probably a major reason behind war in Ukraine since 2014 ... but also in dozens of other countries, too. You'll find out when it's fully declassified 10 years later, but by then they'll just say "mistakes were made".

If we knew about how the covert operations that led to wars that killed MILLIONS of people, we'd hold them to account: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/how-jimmy-carter-...

Come to think of it, we'd all be richer, too. Want to get rid of wasteful spending? Start with the Pentagon. Somehow debt-ceiling Republicans aren't eager to do that but it can't account for $35,000,000,000,000 https://www.yahoo.com/video/pentagon-35-trillion-accounting-...

Thankfully we have C-SPAN at least.

that’s what I’m saying, quadruple or 10x their pay to increase the cost of them selling out for corruption but also make them wear 24/7 body cameras, maybe we can get the true patriots who are willing to sacrifice some privacy to do the good work and as a bonus shorter terms will just work themselves out naturally

Patriots ought to work for free.

This is about duty. Not about profit.

I think you have it flipped.

Have everyone in govt making in excess of 2x poverty line be subject to a tax of 99% for all income exceeding the avg of 5 years of income before joining govt

You can be rich and join govt. You can live ok post-govt. But you sure as hell should not get rich off govt

It's called public service for a reason. Its a service. Not a career.

Either you have a sense of duty and are willing to sacrifice, or else go work on the private sector.

We need statesmen. Not rent-seeking politicians

Yeah but the rent seeking politician says everything I want to hear, so I’ll vote for them.

if you have to wear a 24/7 live stream body cam though

Doesn't this make it impossible for anybody not already rich to get into politics? You'd need a second job to support yourself. And second jobs are a problem not only for focus, but also as conduits for corruption

if you are not rich, what makes you so special to think you can be rich , after leaving the govt?

What has changed since the moment you joined, (nonrich), and now suddenly, you leave and you are hot stuff ?

You can still earn a living in govt, even nice money ( >$100k+ for senior jobs) the point is, that is your cap. Job security and duty come at a price. That price is not trading in insider govt connections.

You can live comfortably. You can have job security. But you cannot get rich off it. That is your "sacrifice" if you want to call it that.

And to be clear, because i realize my comment was not: You can have a really nice bump in earnings while in govt. - For example, if you have an avg salary of 50k, then join govt, at make 100k, that bump is yours to keep just like everyone playing by the same rules. However, once you leave govt, your cap goes back to 50k . So either retire in govt or just go back to what your situation was.

As you may imagine, the complaint is never that public service pays "well" therefore the hypotetical is very unlikely to happen in the first place.

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