I really sort of expected that by the time I reached my age that we'd have more policy makers that understood tech a little better. I feel like in the last say 25 or more years ... the needle hasn't moved.
I'm not sure what you mean by "more" but what you are asking for is in fact happening.
The position of the US executive on encryption is well summarized by the Lavabit case.
> Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, which has been ordered to help the F.B.I. get into the cell phone of the San Bernardino shooters, wrote in an angry open letter this week that "the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create." The second part of that formulation has rightly received a great deal of attention: Should a back door be built into devices that are used for encrypted communications?
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/a-dangerous-all-...
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information," but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will "detail these kinds of requests" in a separate section on push notifications in its next report.
They also can't refuse to comply with warrants demanding any such unencrypted data that is stored on their servers.
That's not the same thing as adding a back door to allow access to encrypted user data that is stored on the user's device.
It's also different than storing encrypted user data on your server, when you have purposefully designed a system where you don't have access to the user's encryption key.
Encrypted user data backup is the feature that Apple disabled access to in the UK rather than comply with the order to insert a back door in the OS.
I would also point out that it was Senator Wyden who initially informed the public of how much the government was already spying on their unencrypted communications.
His record on civil liberties is excellent.
Good security models typically don't hinge on being lucky.
Should we disbelieve them when they say they don't do so?
He said Apple does not have and won’t create a backdoor. That was well crafted and means exactly what he said, any implicit meaning is an artifact of your brain.
I absolutely don't actually know anything about Apple, but I've seen some of the ways even small companies legally split themselves up to avoid tax or various forms of liability. Multiple phone numbers to the same phone, multiple domains and email providers to the same laptop. Multiple denials that you've ever heard of the other company let alone happen to share the same office space...
There's a massive difference between a truthful statement and an honest one; anyone that works with code should understand that.
That seems to be the most salient property of his presidency. His position on any issue is whatever he just said, with no regard to what it might have been yesterday.
It's too bad that when he is in power he does not actually make the latter happen, because it should be scrapped entirely.
The only other country with a debt limit set in an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP is Denmark, and they sensibly have set theirs far above their actual debt so it becomes just a legal formality rather than a policy tool.
The problem with it in the US is that the debt ceiling limits government borrowing to pay for debts that have already been incurred. It doesn't control the amount of spending or the deficit--that is controlled by the budget that Congress and the President approve.
If we can't just scrap it completely, then at least the budget process should be changed so every budget bill must be accompanied by a raise of the debt ceiling by enough to cover whatever extra debt that budget will be adding.
I think we're up to the killing part now.
There are two problems here:
(1) We devote more resources to catching child abusers. There are all kinds of legal "if you see something, say something" requirements that make every doctor, nurse, and schoolteacher in the country part of the effort to do this.
(2) I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections. There are many, many circumstances where you're free to devote double the resources to something, but you'll see at best a trivial improvement in results.
You make this statement but provide no evidence. Because there's laws on the books, we "devote more resource" than, say the entire DEA, which unlike these laws has a gargantuan budget? That's nonsense.
> I see no particular reason to believe that additional resources would lead to a noticeable increase in detections.
Look harder? Read up on the topic? String operations work. More would work more often and catch more abusers.
Let alone the resources we could be pouring into children's mental health services (instead of kicking families off health insurance like the current administration has accomplished).
The Epstein list proves we do more to protect child abusers.
> Trump has also been critical of the UK stance on encryption. The US president has likened the UK’s order to Apple to “something... that you hear about with China,” saying in February that he had told Starmer: “You can’t do this.”
> US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has also suggested the order would be an “egregious violation” of Americans’ privacy that risked breaching the two countries’ data agreement.
I think that’s exactly why I want encryption.
Perhaps he likes the idea of E2E, but just for himself and his friends. I duno, but whatever it is, it's not about the important things after the fact.
DOGE is clearly operating illegally for other reasons - not distributions funds that were appropriated by Congress for instance. But data sharing isn’t the root issue. It’s spineless Republicans in Congress and a sycophantic Supreme Court.
And it’s possible to say both that if you are here illegally you should be deported and that it’s currently being driven by animus, cruelty and it should be easier to obtain legal residency especially in areas where we do need more workers and implement another program like Reagan did in the 80s
You don't want your local dog catcher to be able to look at your medicare records just because "he's the government, and medicare records are government data".
Shouldn't everybody have access to government data, with a few exceptions?
Beyond that many of the departments that this data is being extracted from have rules about who can access (no not everyone in the IRS has free reign) and what they can do with it. For good reason, IRS's job is to focus on what the law says they should do, not say punish political enemies and so on.
But transfer it to DODGE, ICE, Palantir, there are no laws at all regarding what they can do with that data.
In some countries, tax data is available to everyone. Norway, Finland and Sweden in particular. There may be others
When politicians say "we need a special key for police to stop child abuse" it's not that they don't know this means "a backdoor with no technological way to limit its use". On the contrary, they know it very well and it's exactly what they want to achieve under the guise of children protection. It's the public at large that don't understand it -- or so they hope.
Every time ukgov tries to make some sort of tech policy, it's embarassingly wrong, or naive, or both.
This comes from a country that effectively gave away ARM.
https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media
The most popular subjects for MPs who won seats in the Dec 2019 election
Politics - 20%
History - 13%
Law -12%
Economics - 10%
Philosophy - 6%
English - 4%Also, the people pushing for these measure (e.g., the U.K's equivalent of the NSA, GCHQ and most national-level police departments) understand these issues perfectly well.
Surely some of them understand the technical details. That doesn't necessarily mean they understand or respect the wider implications of a policy. This is why it's important to have a government that sets policy - taking into account all of the competing influences and potential consequences - and politically neutral technicians who then implement government policy.
No-one would dispute that if the government could examine every communication everyone ever sends then it could catch more very bad people and prevent more harm to innocent people. The problem is all the other stuff that also happens if you give a government that kind of power over its own people.
If by "hack" you mean she guessed the password, then yes.
Rupert Murdoch is 94.
"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland" Angela Merkel (2013) during a press conference with Obama.
"The internet is uncharted territory for us"
But it’s not like many young adults today who grew up with mobile phones understand computers either. At 51 growing up with computers in the 80s, I find myself explaining what I think should be simple computer concepts to both my parents generation and my adult children.
My 80 year old mom is not a stereotypical old person who doesn’t know how to use a computer. She is a retired math teacher and has actively been using computers since we had an Apple //e in the house running AppleWorks in the mid 80s.
When she was tutoring teenagers mostly as volunteer work after she retired, she had to teach them how to use Office/Gsuite.
I'm not being sarcastic. For real, what major government wouldn't want that in their favor?
Unless they're even more hubristic than we imagined.
They care about maybe a maximum of five having that access, and I'm sure they realize that #1 on that list (PRC) won't need much time to become a peer on any given technology.
That is the opposite of privacy.
Reminder that he's funded by Thiel and friends with Curtis Yarvin, which goals include the end of democracy and the federal state and replace the system with tech CEO kings over feudal states.
It has nothing to do with their technical knowledge. It has everything to do with human nature.
If you want to push back, the law is not on your side.
With a few notable exceptions, the level of knowledge, expertise and understanding amongst government advisers and policy makers is abysmally low. c.f. https://jackgavigan.com/2015/11/23/how-well-advised-was-the-...
The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.
With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.
I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
The politicians might not know tech, but the NSA, GHCQ, etc. that push for these anti-encryption laws most definitely do know technology, and is the main lobby against encryption.
It goes beyond just getting politicians that understand tech. We need politicians willing to rein in the intelligence apparatus put in safeguards, and checks and balances on their power.
I recently listened to some clips from a hearing with questions about zero-knowledge proofs, algorithmic transparency, etc...this was pretty unthinkable two decades ago. Some agencies and legislative bodies also now have technical staffers and some advisory boards with technologists. So, yeah it it slow and sometimes frustrating, but it's not static.
This is going to be heresy here, but honestly I think it's a reasonable position. Not one I would take, but reasonable.
For the first time in human history there can be large scale communication it is mathematically impossible for governments to have any access to. If you believe that governments are doing the job of protecting their citizens (and many do), it's entirely reasonable for them to want this type of access.
They have it with the postal service, and analogue phones and the world didn't collapse, and many criminals got caught.
Phone wiretapping (until recently I suppose) and mail inspection required a human to take some action to listen in; you couldn't just monitor everyone's communications. Now you can.
I don't think anybody is saying that the motivations are bad. We all want safety, right?
The closest thing I hear is, they feel that the cons often outweigh the pros. I think this correlates with their trust in authorities, given the countless abuses we see authorities perpetrating when granted power.
There's a reason "think of the children!" is literally a joke mocking safety-based pretexts for reductions in rights.
The analogue systems had fundamental limits on how many people could be surveilled, and still we had abuses of the system. The digital system makes you choose between "surveil absolutely everyone all of the time" and "surveil nobody".
Note that you mention the postal service. Remember the Horizon Post Office scandal, where there was a huge swathe of wrongful prosecutions?
Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.
Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but the form factor of the modern smartphone discourages creation.
When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together” just to open MSPaint and create shitty drawings. I don’t see anything similar today.
Ever take photos or videos with your phone? Is that not creation?
>When I was a young child me and all my friends would “use the PC together”
Same, but this is more "old man yells at clouds". Children today have their own way of creation, now using AI.
If you make a list of creative activities that can be done on a computer or phone, a big majority are notably harder to do on a phone.
Spending time learning how to actually create it, and then actually creating it is what makes someone an artist.
The children's "own way of creation", in your own words is to imagine what they want to create, and then ask something else to try doing what they want. If it's not what they want they complain and ask the system to try again.
I wouldn't be called an artist if I imagined a picture of myself riding a dragon, and then proceeded to commission a painting of that. Asking someone else to do the thing for you isn't being creative. It's being lazy. It's not making art "accessible". They couldn't do art before, and they still can't now. They just believe they can, just because they can "bark out an order at a slave".
Says who? Someone sold a white canvas with a banana taped to it, that a toddler could have done in 3 minutes. What's there to learn to do something like that?
>I wouldn't be called an artist
Pretty sure people do whatever they enjoy doing, and they don't give a f if some pretentious people call them artists or not.
This comment is a very narrow and elitist PoV, focusing on art specifically, which is a thing a lot of people would struggle to define, and also has nothing to do with the topic of using computers, since most people don't use computers for art but to make their lives easier, more efficent and more fun.