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Comment by astroflection | Hacker News Reader

Governments should be transparent and the people should be opaque. Any government that attempts to make things otherwise looses legitimacy.

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> Governments should be transparent and the people should be opaque.

I'm going to add this to my repertoire since it's a lot more concise than most of my rantings on the topic

Or as someone put it, "People shouldn't fear the government. The government should fear the people."

I feel like we've lost the vocabulary we ought to be using to talk about the legitimacy and role of the state. More people need to read J.S. Mill (and probably Hobbes.) Even today, works by both are surprisingly good reads and embed a lot of thoughtful and timeless wisdom.

But isn't the government fearing the people exactly why they're relentlessly pushing ChatControl?

if they feared the populace, they couldn't push for legislation that entrenches their position without any benefits to citizens.

US cops fear everyone else, and look what that gets us.

Yes, I love this idea. I've heard it framed as "Transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak."

Governments need privacy. They literally investigate child mollestation cases. They hunt spies. They handle all sorts of messy things like divorce between couples with abuse.

I'm not commenting on the government coming in at unveiling encrypted communications, but certainly a better approach than "governments should be transparent and the people should be opaque" would be "governments should be translucent and the people should be translucent too".

There is a clear difference between specific activities that need privacy (especially if it is temporary privacy or cases where it is protecting the privacy of the citizens not the government itself) and privacy by default for most or all government work.

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