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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

I always feel somewhat awkward reading blog articles like this.

While the author is certainly fighting a good cause, their writing style is very self-righteous and shows lack of self-awareness. Is it working in politics that makes one so jaded and fond of their own prose?

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As a UK citizen, I feel jaded and bitter about this topic, as the government have been pushing to "ban encryption" in one form or another for... it feels like decades now? And each time they're advised against it or unable to get it into law, they draw up another proposal and try to sneak it in another way. It feels like one of these days, if they keep trying, they'll manage get it past the experts/lawyers somehow and it'll doom our privacy for a long time. So in the writing, I don't detect over-reaching self-righteousness or a lack of self-awareness - more, awareness of just how tiring and arduous this push for "encryption bans" is getting to everyone who understands the implications of it, and how frustrating it is to have to repeatedly deal with this kind of insidiousness in government.

> It feels like one of these days, if they keep trying, they'll manage get it past the experts/lawyers

I felt exactly the same way about Brexit; it was clear that if we voted Remain that Nigel Farage would still be there - alongside Maxwell's Demon - to shove us towards the door at the next opportune moment.

Seems like this is one of the hardest problems in modern politics - populists only have to win once, due to us having a complex system of preferential arrangements and one-way door decisions.

To use an infamous quote: We have to be lucky every time. They only have to be lucky once.

(for people who don’t know the origin, it’s from the IRA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing#IRA_sta...)

The quote is a pithy formulation of Blotto game theory, or "front analysis" [0] which I've taught in cybersecurity for some years now as an introductory concept alongside Dolev-Yeo [1]. It is obliquely connected to the "attackers advantage" (here as a business concept [2]) and "terrorists always win in the end".

As the number of fronts to defend grows, in space or time, the uncertainty of how to allocate resources against novel attacks becomes overwhelming, as does the burden of hyper-vigilance. The enemy can afford to sleep and wait.

Security is an essentially conservative project. One is defending existing resources, rights, powers... against an opportunistic insurgent. Security of democracy (as Franklin said, "if you can keep it") against tyrants (who are simply "terrorists" in waiting) is no different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blotto_game

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolev%E2%80%93Yao_model

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413841-the-attacker-s-...

Ironically, Thatcher was in fact lucky every time and they never ended up being lucky at all.

> it feels like decades now?

About 3 of them.

What is it with anglophone politicians and encryption?

Everything sounds silly if you read it to yourself in a silly voice. The whole thing did not come across self righteous at all to me. Maybe it is because I follow the developments in net politics enough to know that the cynical undertones here are totally warranted.

Like in Germany, where the supreme court told the government twice that storing all communication data of their citicens without any cause or court order is totally illegal. Guess what: they try it again right now.

The UK government demonstrated in similar fashion that they are not just incompetent, but act with incompetent mallice. Acting above them is hard to avoid, because they make it very hard not to.

One could wonder why it is always the people fighting the good causes that have to act perfectly and self-aware, while the bad actors are given all the slack in the world constantly, while they lie, deceive and twist everything that comes in front of them. "Oh you naive fool, you actually want to be GOOD? Let me find a hair in your soup to validate my own fatalistic position!"

I understand that the writer makes a lot of presumptions about the reader, but this is to be expected it is a personal blog called "Hi, I'm Heather Burns" and from the title there is a certain narrative with context implied. There is not an inch of objectivity explicitly or implicitly expected here.

Politics are "self-righteous", if you are not "self-righteous" in discussing and arguing for policies - no matter which view or policy we are talking about - you are not really making a good point, you certainly aren't trying to advocate for whatever you believe in, and you are not morally consistent.

That aside, this particular issue has been beaten over and over, and for someone who is an expert and a career policy advocate: they are not going to waste effort and time by repeating the same points almost everyone reading their blog agrees upon.

I'd argue good policy is a matter of compromise, not conviction.

You need both. As there are some things you cannot conpromise on. Like. Idk. Things factually impossible. Or Human Rights.

Maybe I would tend to agree with you in a different context, but here there is no compromise: it is either backdoor communications at mass or encryption.

I agree with all the other points made here around politics; Compromise, check. Realism, check. Popular conviction, check! ... But one simply cannot go up against mathematics armed with wishful thinking.

The reason this is an issue for splitting is that there really are no half-measures. One must choose a path.

The confounding thing about the UK and encryption these past years is that we've had a technically uneducated government and/or advisors that are mischievous. Nowhere have I ever seen the basic humility and falliblism to say;

  "This is a complex issue. We don't really understand the parameters.
   Choosing this or that path could have terrible consequences. What
   do you the people think?"

Of course most will say, the uneducated "people" are the last to have any useful input. At least the elected government have some political chops, if not any technical vision. But we're not asking "the people" to weigh in on the merits of key escrow or weakened PRNGs - the choice is fascism or democracy - because people have a fundamental right to privacy and democracy cannot thrive without that.

One of my favorite quotes:

"Politics has nothing to do with what a person personally advocates for." - Norman Finkelstein

An example he often gives is advocating for a world without borders. You can advocate for it, and create a group of like minded peiple and write blogs about it, but it will be like creating a cult. Politics, according to him, starts with what the people want. It has to have some concrete proposals and practical momentum that are accepted (or at least not resisted) by the general public.

The most jaded thing about all of this was your commentary.

relax, it's just color VS colour all over again

If this blog post makes you feel awkward, then you really shouldn't read Marina Hyde's opinion pieces for the Guardian, such as this one: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/rishi-...

This way of making fun of politicians is more a British thing I guess...

It's the result of online culture rewarding snarky hot takes with increased ad revenue

And it's infected the whole web so that even free blogs use the same voice

As someone who did activism work involving working my provincial government in Canada, sorta ya. For a lot of people, you’re basically navigating the nearly kafka-esc political process, but from the perspective of a ‘normal’ person, as opposed to a politician who gets paid to do so 8 hours a day or whatever.

Also surrounding oneselves with like-minded people who all believe they’re, to some extent, ‘saving the world’, does in fact make you a bit pompous(if only temporarily haha)

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