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Comment by GTP | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure whether I agree or not, as without cryptography the only way to have a private discussion with someone, which I think is equally important to transparency, as people usually are "transparent" about personal stuff with close friends/family members only under the condition that other people don't have access to the information, would be to have such conversation in person behind closed doors. Which it isn't always easy, think people living far apart. Consider also that having no cryptography isn't by itself enough to have a transparent government: they can still lock important documents in a physically secure place and have a long jail sentence as a deterrent for people thinking about leaking them.

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> Consider also that having no cryptography isn't by itself enough to have a transparent government: they can still lock important documents in a physically secure place and have a long jail sentence as a deterrent for people thinking about leaking them.

But here you say that: Security can depend on social contract and not technology. But the same argument can be applied to your original objection. We can mandate (in the social contract) that people have the right to privacy. (And there are some analogs where we do that, for example, we could have Gattaca-like dystopia where people's access to health care is based on genetics, yet all developed countries have a ban on such discrimination.)

I think it's far more dangerous that the government or adversary is technologically capable of being non-transparent than if ordinary people don't have capability to be non-transparent. It's because I believe power ultimately thrives on information asymetry, and the encryption only amplifies this asymetry.

> It's because I believe power ultimately thrives on information asymetry, and the encryption only amplifies this asymetry.

Quite the opposite, I find. In fact, the government has the infrastructure and political power necessary for surveillance of people. The reverse is definitely not true. Regardless, assume you are in an authoritarian state with a powerful state police: how would you even attempt fighting it if you do not have a way of coordinating with the other people being oppressed? How can you trust communications if the government can interfere?

I simply don't believe that in an actual authoritarian state, private (Internet) communications are a neccessity for fighting back. I was born in Czechoslovakia, and if I look at what actual dissidents did, it seems that once your goal is to fight back, you just have to get used to that you're gonna be surveilled no matter what. Because if you want to convince many others that the system is oppressive, you will have to make yourself known. Vaclav Havel discusses some of the strategies in the Power of the Powerless, and it also goes to Gramsci, who observed that it's mostly ideology that keeps the systems of power.

I think privacy is important in democracy, but if you're taking on an authoritarian state, that some police knows what you had yesterday for dinner, that's the least of your problems.

To clarify: The harsh truth is, in an authoritarian state, the police doesn't really need your communications; they already know what you're up to: no good. That's enough for some of them to justify any action they want against you.

I am going to be pedantic as i am perfectly aware that you do not mean it this way but here we go:

> Security can depend on social contract and not technology.

Social contracts are technology, laws are technology, law as a concept is technology, Society is technology.

If you really want to be pedantic, you should recognize there is a difference between technology as implemented (the social contract as it's implemented now) and choice of technology (all the different ways how the social contract could be different, reflecting history and geography).

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