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Comment by rockyj | Hacker News Reader

Ban everything you cannot control / understand! That is the classic Indian bureaucracy reaction.

For example, They also banned tinted windows in cars after an assualt happened in a car. Then, there was a time where they banned something or the other on a daily basis.

Even right now there is Section 144 imposed in multiple cities - which means a "ban" on "unlawful assembly" of 5 or more people. 5 or more people in multiple cities which have a population of millions! Now, how do they enforce / check these "assemblies of people" depends on the people you ask. I have already spoken too much.

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> Ban everything you cannot control / understand! That is the classic Indian bureaucracy reaction

Reminds me of how India's leading research institute removed ceiling fans to prevent student suicides

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/news/story/iisc-ba...

The issue is India doesn't have a judicial agreement with Switzerland over data sharing (which includes User IP Addresses) for criminal investigations [0] while the US does [1], and Protonmail only honors Swiss litigation [2]

This should change with the new India-Switzerland FTA though.

[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/files/ParsheeraJha_DataAccess....

[1] - https://www.dataprivacyframework.gov/framework-article/1%E2%...

[2] - https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement

I think the actual issue is that a government holds the insane belief that by blocking one out of many ways that someone could make an anonymous threat, it somehow contributes to the safety of their citizens.

> blocking one out of many ways that someone could make an anonymous threat, it somehow contributes to the safety of their citizens

If you make an anonymous bomb threat using Gmail in India, Google will hand off all information to the Indian government as they have operations in India and will be held liable, just like they would in the US.

This is the reason why Proton AG honors American law enforcement requests - the US and Switzerland have an agreement that data platforms in both countries need to honor each other's law enforcement requests.

If Proton AG won't give User metadata without litigation in Switzerland, it will get blocked in those jurisdictions it doesn't play ball with.

This is why most piracy platforms and data platforms will honor metadata requests from US Law Enforcement - you will become a toxic financial liability if you choose to flout US litigation.

Your statements are correct but they aren't relevant to parent's point. Blocking an email provider has absolutely no positive effect on the safety of the citizens. While it has the potential of a lot of negative effects, like the inability of other innocent citizens to use their email account. It is the same thing when the GoI went ahead and blocked pastebin.com because of a bunch of pastes.

> Blocking an email provider has absolutely no positive effect on the safety of the citizens.

If all the available platforms allow for data sharing and tracking on judicial orders, then a perpetrator does not have a safe way to give threats, without the risk of being identified.

In my opinion, this is a deterrent in itself, the fear of getting caught.

Ah my bad, I should have explicitly mentioned that merely a threat does not constitute a safety issue enough to justify a broad ban. If such a ban could prevent a real attack, then sure.

Yes, personally even I would feel disturbed and anxious when somebody threatens me, but it would be too broad to classify mental disturbance as a safety issue. I am saying this having survived an episode where my father was threatened for life.

> Blocking an email provider has absolutely no positive effect on the safety of the citizens

I agree that it's a half assed patched, but if a platform isn't responding to litigation or law enforcement requests, there is always the chance of bad actors weaponizing that loophole.

And it's not like Proton AG hasn't been linked to terror attacks. The perpetrator of the Bataclan Massacre used Protonmail to communicate with handlers, leading to the French government to require email platforms like Proton AG to honor French law enforcement requests [1].

[0] - https://www.wired.com/2015/11/isis-opsec-encryption-manuals-...

[1] - https://www.ejn-crimjust.europa.eu/ejnupload/DynamicPages/Fr...

That is false information, there was no connection between Proton and the Bataclan attack.

Upvote this. Can't edit my previous comment which misread the wired article linked or can @Dang just delete the offending comment for incorrect/misleading info?

> blocked pastebin.com because of a bunch of pastes

Say what now?!

It was a temporary block due to an overly broad denylist the Indian government put out in 2013. Pastebin ended up getting unblocked in India in the same time period as well.

> using Gmail in India, Google will hand off all information

Why should you use am E-Mail provider to send an electronic postcard. Since when would you need a third party to send E-Mails?

Explain yourself, usual annoying sniper...

To the best of my memory, sending emails did not require external infrastructure.

It feels like the Indian gov is reactionary and has tunnel vision. They fix one problem but never consider if that fix will cause problems elsewhere or if even if that fix is worth it.

The issue is that India has a body of hand picked bureaucrats, who have the authority to both target and ban platforms they cannot control or spy on.

The article clearly states that all was a hoax and there weren't any bombs. The Indian government is setting up a nice slippery slope here for total political control of the Internet.

Perhaps ProtonMail would be better off if they just pulled out of the country.

> issue is that India has a body of hand picked bureaucrats, who have the authority to both target and ban platforms they cannot control or spy on

Agreed. Indian jurisprudence has not kept up and is still stuck in an authoritarian mindset found in the Colonial British legal system (same problem in Pakistan, Malaysia, Kenya, and Singapore as well btw)

> setting up a nice slippery slope here for total political control of the Internet

The Indian government has always had the authority to control electronic communication due to the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 [0] and it's equally authoritarian successor the Telecommunications Act, 2023 [1].

India always has been, and sadly, always will be an Illiberal Democracy, and for the exact same reasons that Malaysia, Kenya, and Pakistan will be as well.

It's the original sin of the British Colonial legal system.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Telegraph_Act,_1885

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act,_2023

Right, but the US didn't block Yandex Mail when it was HQ'd in Russia.

It's not for Switzerland's data sharing with the US that folks in the US have access to ProtonMail.

> Now, how do they enforce / check these "assemblies of people" depends on the people you ask.

I assume police officers enforce / check them when they need to fill their ticket quota, want to get money through a bribe, or just want to punish someone who personally annoyed them? That's how it usually works with half-enforced laws.

In every law, there should be a requirement that it either gets enforced equally, or it loses power.

But who enforces the equality of the enforcement? The only feasible system for this is 100% transparency of all legal proceedings and massive penalties for obscuring any legal proceedings. Governments and law enforcement bodies have only ever paid lip service to these ideals. They always resort to excuses involving "national security", "Realpolitik" or other convenient constructs that just happen to bias the legal system towards the incumbent powers.

Selective enforcement transfers all power to the enforcer.

... which is the point.

It doesn't even have to be that deliberate - these kinds of things end up being the reason you can use when you can't find/prove another.

Which has 'good' uses too I suppose, as in where everyone agrees it was correct even if technical process a bit silly. (Not just cop on the street arresting 'obvious' drug dealers or whatever for unlawfully assembling, but charging mafia with tax evasion, or sexual assaulter CEOs with securities fraud.)

But.. I'm guessing the majority of unlawful 5 or more assembly cases are not 'good'.

> In every law, there should be a requirement that it either gets enforced equally, or it loses power.

The evil twin of this is maximized enforcement where enforcement and punishment have become a strong focus and shaping societal behavior is maybe a justification. It is the point at which we have lost our way.

Which in turn is caused by inflexibility of law change.

If a law in place is found to be overly strict or general, then it should be changed or removed, and doing so should be simple and swift.

> If a law in place is found to be overly strict or general, then it should be changed or removed, and doing so should be simple and swift.

This would be a sweet world to live in. We'd have to change many reward systems to get there.

Pointedly, we'd have to improve public thinking - but most folks have already made their easy, positive changes. What's left are difficult positive changes and easy negative changes.

This is true of every nation on earth. The bar is lower in countries where volumes work better.

It's not specifically Indian. Canada just banned Flipper Zero devices because the little radios can replay car key fob signals and older cars are susceptible to replay attacks.

Stupidity is everywhere.

UK government has tried to ban encryption time and time again. This is what happens when you have old/incompetent career politicians in power instead of deep thinkers like scientists and engineers.

> deep thinkers like scientists and engineers

That doesn't work, either, because they tend to be rather dismissive of human concerns, and, at its heart, government is all about humans.

I don't have a solution, but I don't think that declaring that only one-or-another "class" of humans is fit to govern, is it.

The U.K. has a system where experts in various fields like medicine and engineering are put in the lawmaking process, in addition to experts in becoming elected (ie raising money and selling non tangible ideas to people)

It’s not perfect of course, but in my opinion it’s better than a fully democratic system.

Do those unelected experts advise on new legislation, even write it (why not? We don't expect elected politicians to be experts in much more than ordinary people) or do they also vote to approve or reject those laws like elected politicians do?

Theoretically they do both. I think the system that the above commenter is alluding to is the House of Lords, where a bunch of unelected "lords" can vote on legislation. The idea is for the lords to be people with particular expertise who we want to be voting on stuff. For example if you have some very highly thought of scientist or engineer you reward them with a peerage and they can sit in the house of lords and vote on stuff. Of course the reality is not so great.

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

That's a stereotype and probably not true. Many deep thinkers are humanists.

It's probably more likely around the hyper rational types, but my boss is the most empathetic engineer I've ever worked for. This is anecdotal but your comment seems fairly clearly overbroad

I've seen the stereotype confirmed on HN several times already. Whenever I, a blind pedestrian, voice my concerns about driverless car technology, I am being downvoted and outright critizised. The undertone is "How can this single person try to block an emerging technology". That pretty much confirms the statement that tech people sometimes have a hard time with human concerns.

I am empathetic to your concerns but I may or may not agree with your proposed solutions. I do think it's always important to keep in mind that empathy and compassion aren't the same thing, or always aligned. Compassion is more utilitarian. Driverless cars will save a lot of lives when the technology is good enough, and the compassionate thing is implementing the technology when it saves more lives than it endangers. If that's the non-empathy you are getting from the HN community then the community is right, but again, I genuinely empathize even so.

i think it just confirms that in any given group of people, a majority percentage of them will be self absorbed dickheads.

I don't think it's always necessarily a majority - it's just always going to be more than we estimate.

> Many deep thinkers are humanists.

That's the deal, though. Engineers and scientists don't have a monopoly on "deep thinker™".

My sister is a "deep thinker." She has an economics degree from Princeton, and has been working at very high levels, for decades.

Very decent human being. Not sure if she'd be interested in being a "leader," though.

That's part of the problem; it's almost as if wanting the job, automatically disqualifies you.

But you are right. It's an overbroad statement.

It's worse than you think. Read the Criminal Justice Act (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988 (S.I 1988/2019) and marvel at some of the nonsense some politician thought it important to ban.

My personal favourite is "Death Stars", since it creates the mental image of some constable trying to confiscate a superlaser-equipped battlestation.

Here's the relevant text of the legislation:

> the weapon sometimes known as a “shuriken”, “shaken” or “death star”, being a hard non-flexible plate having three or more sharp radiating points and designed to be thrown;

Its possible for young people to make these mistakes. My wife is not an old man and her default position is not to defend e2e encryption. So all it takes is a spurious argument against it (think of the children!) and without skin in the game she is happy to go along.

The argument is about proportional gain vs proportional loss and she is not aware of the devastating loss of privacy that would come from banning strong safe encryption.

You could prevent this by teaching rational thinking and cognitive biases at the school level, but I assume the reason that hasn’t happened yet because said students would start calling out the hyperbole that politicians and business people often like to employ.

It Would not be enough.

Good unbiased Thinking requires effort. To optimize this there are caching mechanisms at multiple levels, from inside your brain to the societal level to save the energy required to do the thinking. If you deem that cache and all future ones to be invalid(untrustworthy) you'll have to do a lot of thinking from scratch.

If you want to practically brick such agent you'll just need to do a denial of service by bringing a huge deluge of claims that they have to spend more than their lifetime thinking through all of them critically.

I am not going to jump to the bait of defending my own wife as a rational person.

Instead I'll just point out that difference in information is not difference in ability. She just wasn't aware encryption was used basically everywhere, and so could be forgiven for not having at hand the information to refute the assertion that some back doors in one algorithm or system is harmless.

Only an education in these subjects will help, or a widespread awareness campaign by educated folks. Or even a law protecting it as a fundamental right.

Just as I criticize her field all the time, and am quickly embarrassed by my presumption of hyper rational super powers. Or at least I was for years.. I'm getting better.

At least electromagnetic transmitters are something one expect to be regulated.

It is bad regulation, but it's just overzealous. Email ban is borderline censorship.

Flipper Zero complies with all regulations, it's a certified consumer device. That it can record and replay a radio signal is not something that should be regulated.

We have laws for stealing cars, we don't need to ban specific tools that, among a multitude of other uses, might be used to steal a car.

Sometimes overreaching laws is the only way. E.g. knife carrying laws.

we should ban people from buying kitchen knives ! better not cach you in your trip from the mall to your house. /s

I was thinking about knives carrying laws.

What if the only use for FZ was stealing cars, would that change things?

The 1986 Assault Weapons Ban in the US restricted the sale and ownership of several non-existant gun attachments and modifications. It also for some reason banned specific guns like the KS-23 (quite ridiculous gun you should read on if you're a fan of them) that was only manufactured in the Soviet Union and other bloc states and literally couldn't be imported to the US normally regardless because it used the barrel off a 23mm aircraft cannon.

Remember to always put someone with no knowledge of guns in charge with making gun laws.

> For example, They also banned tinted windows in cars after an assualt happened

I think every jurisdiction should put limits on how tinted the windshield and front windows can be. Being able to see where a driver is looking is important in many situations in order to avoid collisions. It's especially important for pedestrians and cyclists that have to cross the path of cars.

I think this sort of government hand holding is unnecessary and promotes the surveillance state. I'm all for going back to the levels we had in the 70s. People should be given the means to be safe but it shouldn't forced on them, same with surveillance. I think putting bumper guards on everything in life leads to a society that is afraid of everything and values safety over liberty, like the society of today.

As a cyclist I have to be very aware of people opening their car doors into my lane. This is a direct safety concerns for me and not some hurr durr soorvwaylanze concern about slippery slope fallacies. You wouldn't say this about OSHA either (I hope).

This is not about protecting the person tinting their window, but everyone around them. As such, it doesn't even qualify as government hand holding. Your not protecting someone from themselves.

> Ban everything you cannot control / understand! That is the classic Indian bureaucracy reaction.

This is the classic reaction of any government. I assure you Indian one is not in any way unique. That's why you need a strong constitution and an independent constitutional court - hardly possible, but at least it's a goal.

You don't seem to understand governments.

They are controlling it because they absolutely understand, and can give a narrative of how anonymity can be used for nefarious purposes.

I support banning of tinted glasses, because, for the population and education level here, these measures are necessary. Because one rape is too many, and what is to be done ought to be done. For those unaware, this ban on tinted glasses in a car or a vehicle came about when there were a spate of rapes and assaults on women done in a moving car with tinted windows.

Unlawful assembly laws are there in many countries.

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

In India, it is used often, but generally when there is a communal angle involved. India sees many rallies and protests (there is one massive one going on right now).

> For those unaware, this ban on tinted glasses in a car or a vehicle came about when there were a spate of rapes and assaults on women done in a moving car with tinted windows.

A moving car? Gee, wonder why they didn't ban moving cars as well.

It is that way everywhere. Bonus points if you claim it is because terrorism or pedophiles.

They're searching for you right now.

You are now probably banned also HN.

"India has banned rockyj from posting on Hacker News."

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