Unless we pass an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing the right for private individuals communicate over encrypted channels, which won’t happen.
And we have to win every single time one of these bills come up. They only have to win once.
And we have to win every single time one of these bills come up. They only have to win once.
Passing another amendment will accomplish nothing, it will get ignored just like the 4th one.
We have no shortage of laws already. Including many laws that (on paper) protect individual rights. All of those laws are routinely being ignored. They don't mean anything.
The constitution is meaningless. The bill of rights is meaningless. International human rights treaties are meaningless. All that matters is what happens in practice.
If individual rights exist in a country, it's because of how society and the government operate – not because somewhere, there's a piece of paper that says so. A democracy can turn into a dictatorship without a single law having to change.
I.e. Laws and rights are meant to be subtractive rather than addative. You can remove my rights by law, short of that I can do whatever I want.
One important function of laws is to delimit and codify the exercise of rights and freedoms. Another is to explicitly limit the government. We should probably be amending the Constitution to accomplish this more often, actually.
It's similar for limiting government. Our original designin the US was that the government only has the powers expli itly given to it by the people. We can have laws limiting the government, but again those are really just moral stances because the government should default to having no power.
We lost this somewhere along the way, slipping to a point where it's commonplace for the government to claim to have authority we never gave it while we look for laws that grant us our freedoms rather than fight against laws that limit them.
Assumptions don’t age well (earth is flat and the center of the universe, diseases are caused by the humors, a weapon only marginally increases the harm a human can do, etc etc). All laws (the constitution included) are created upon assumptions and they should go through a controlled burn once in a while or else we get end-of-empire wildfires.
I’m also wondering what good to see in an armed citizenry being “not shabby” - and before you say something to the effect that it “keeps our government in line” try to remember they have stratospheric death robots that think your ar-15 is just adorable.
We get nothing done, and what we do get done is exclusively to the benefit of those that can afford to finance campaigns. Our legislative branch is an absolute joke (life terms, like, really?) and the whole idea behind the senate is meaningless in a world where we can fly from one end of the country to the other in a day, and have instantaneous communication.
Our systems of voting are similarly backwards, designed in a time when you had to send a dude on a horse to communicate.
Seriously, page 1 rewrite. The whole damn thing.
Personally I'd love an amendment declaring our right to privacy, though we really just need to better enforce illegal search and seizure.
> I’m also wondering what good to see in an armed citizenry being “not shabby” - and before you say something to the effect that it “keeps our government in line” try to remember they have stratospheric death robots that think your ar-15 is just adorable.
So are you saying we shouldn't have the right to arm ourselves because we're already so outmatched by our own government?
And to clarify here, the goal of an armed citizenry and armed militias was extremely important when we didn't have a standing military. The original goal was much less about actually making sure citizens come uld overthrow their own government, that's a modern view usually held by those who don't realize how terrible a civil war would actually be.
I'm of the opinion that we should get rid of this farce that we must have a permanent, massive standing army rather than attempting to disarm all our citizens. Our military needs something to do as long as it's there, we're always going to be looking for a fight to prove why they exist.
Yes, this is something more 2nd Amendment advocates should learn about. The militia was instituted for the common defence and was characteristic of the "...organic union of society and government..." that Huntington attributes to many of the late medieval institutions which contributed to the decentralised, self-balancing system of public policy which the founders inherited from the English.
We've since destroyed that goal. Our education system is trash, we don't train our citizens how to take care of or defend themselves, and the gun debate has largely devolved into "no one should have guns because we have cops and armies for that" versus "I have a right to bear arms so I can keep this oppressive government in check"
It's hard to take these gun nut militias seriously when all their videos have them doing dumbass shit like barrel flagging and handling them loaded when they're just showing them off. Never mind that mass shootings have become like, the new normal. If we are showing we can't be trusted, then we can't be trusted. It's pretty cut and dry.
Lots of countries don't have a constitutionally guaranteed right to say harmful things or carry a sidearm, so I'm going to say, just based on other cultural-similarities, it'd probably be a lot like the UK or Canada...
> Many people on this site are not fans of the 2nd Amendment, but I think they would have to acknowledge that, without it, the situation of the armed citizenry today, while not really comparable to that of colonial times, would be much shabbier than it is
erm, no, I don't think I do. It sounds a lot like you're saying you think things are "much shabbier" in the UK or Canada than in the USA, but friend this just isn't true.
The idea that one could be convicted and jailed for saying something deemed offensive in public is completely insane. If I think the PM is being an asshat I would like to be able to say that openly without fear of jail time.
I don't have as much experience with the UK, but with regards to Canada I would indeed consider things there to be shabby. A peaceful protest should never be justification for the government to shut down bank accounts of private citizens. Hell even a violent protest shouldn't lead to that kind of intervention, we were shutting down bank accounts during BLM protests which were sometimes anything but peaceful.
Now, none of this is half as good as colonial times. In the United States, we didn't see much restriction of the arms market until the 1930s. Americans freely traded all classes and varieties of weaponry -- small arms, cannons, swords, &c -- during the colonial era and for more than a century after. Americans today have much less of the freedom promised by the 2nd Amendment than we used to; but we have retained much more of this particular right of the English than any other English speaking country.
With regards to privacy specifically, we could go a long way with the existing rights protecting us from illegal search and seizure. That should really cover any overstepping by the government and police, leaving only the need to limit what private companies can and can't do (though this should be done with laws and not amendments).
The USA already has this. The first amendment…
I've seen arguments that the encryption algorithm itself is speech and should be protected, similar to the cake decoration.
In addition to protections on speech, the Constitution also has protections on privacy (albeit not literal - that protection has been interpreted by courts over the years - the Griswold case being the most recent/important interpretation of that right [google: "Griswold penumbra"], and now Dobbs could see some of that protection walked back).
Yeah, that's an interesting distinction for sure. I mean, this has gone back to PGP and the encryption wars in the 90s where it was illegal to export an electronic version of PGP from the US under... ITAR, I believe (secure encryption was considered a munition and thus export-restricted?). And it was worked around by publishing the source code in a book, which could be exported just fine. Where it gets a bit more complicated is publication-restriction vs. use-restriction though; I'm sure I could readily find bomb plans on and possess the plans freely, but the moment I follow the directions in those plans I am committing a criminal act (in Canada at least it'd be "possession of a prohibited device").
The Griswold and Dobbs thing is a really unfortunate situation :(.
Up here in Canada, we've got a kind of interesting situation that really favours E2E and I wish I had a citation handy... basically, law enforcement cannot search your cellphone for evidence without a warrant, as expected, and also can't get a wiretap without a warrant. The situation that arose, though, was that one of the major telecommunication companies was keeping short-term SMS logs for ostensibly system debugging and law enforcement realized they could request those logs warrant-free. Because it was voluntary third-party disclosure, no one was "compelled" to disclose these logs and there was no protection in place for either party of the communication.
That restriction lost in early appeals, but IIRC, it never made it to SCOTUS, as the tides changes and industry forced the government to relax the restriction somewhat (IIRC, some restrictions still apply, but not to what we'd consider "normal" encryption products).
Edit/Addition - also worth noting the target/subject of speech matters. Political speech is the most protected, with almost absolute protection.
And often missed by the general public - speech is protected only in the senes the government can't restrict it (without a very good reason), but that doesn't mean speech is free of consequences from the public.
The government was forced to relax the regulations when the Ninth Circuit found they were an unconstitutional restraint on speech.
https://cr.yp.to/export/1999/0506-order.html
All software has had first amendment protections since that ruling, and the only reason it never made it to the Supreme Court is because that ruling has never been appealed by the government.
Congress can make any laws it likes, and there’s existing unconstitutional restraints on software in the law today (like the DMCA anti-circumvention restrictions), but it has subsequently never attempted to enforce any restraints of writing or distributing software, and couldn’t without the permission of the Supreme Court.
I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t understand how so many people on HN seem to be unfamiliar with this case. It’s arguably the most important legal decision in the history of writing software.
I understand here on HN it looks so obvious, but if you stop and think for a moment it is no natural at all.
The only natural way of having a private conversation is directly from mouth to ear. Private remote communication never existed until recent technology made it possible during the last decades.
We are in the same situation as cars, where people have been walking for millions of years but little more than a century ago we got the ability to move freely along longer distances at previously unimaginable speeds.
I'm not against private communication, as I'm not against cars, but it's just normal that new things get regulated in a society. All countries are OK with driving being regulated (get a licence, always show a readable registration plate...), so why are we shocked every time someone proposes to regulate remote conversations?
I also understand the point that encryption is either breakable by nobody or by everyone (thus the thing about only authorities being able to eavesdrop is moot), but please stop assigning to a pinnacle of modern technology the same status as a natural human right.
Julius Ceasar used encryption (poor, but effective at the time). The enigma machine was developed at the end of World War 1. Unless you have a very charitable interpretation of “last decades”, the premise of your argument does not stand up to basic scrutiny.
Countries signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should respect Article 12:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Still, nobody was ever shocked that a judge could order letters to be open or telephones to be tapped. And yet, as soon as someone asks whether we should consider something similar for electronic encryption, HN reacts as if this was something never heard of, nor imaginable.
Treating a recent advancement in computing technology as the most natural of the things is not good advocacy of an issue.
You want a law that says we can't share prime numbers?
My only point is that discussions concerning the use of encryption must be accepted, because there is nothing inherently evil or unnatural in them. Don't let's get shocked any time someone proposes something that goes against some folks' credo, and let's debate the proposal in a constructive manner.
This is false.
https://www.wired.com/story/smartphone-encryption-law-enforc...
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/encrypted-messages-dont-al...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7b4gg/anom-phone-arcaneos-f...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/fbi-afp-underworld-cr...
https://www.wired.com/2015/01/silk-road-trial-undercover-dhs...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/mossad_hacked...
https://lawjournal.mcgill.ca/article/law-enforcement-access-...
US Mail, land line telephones. I don't believe either can be intercepted without a warrant.