Hacker News Reader

Comment by failbuffer | Hacker News Reader

When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them?

For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.

With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?

View on HN

Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?

https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/

>Warrant required Government must go before a judge to access your metadata, location, or financial records — just like searching your home.

>No Data Shopping Agencies can no longer simply purchase data from brokers to bypass the warrant process.

>Face recognition banned Warrantless facial recognition and AI biometric surveillance in public spaces is prohibited.

>You Can Sue Private right of action means if the government violates your rights, you have legal recourse.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8470...

It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.

It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.

Perhaps something like a mandatory "Do not track" option for all data supported services, where you can "buyout" your data (at market rate) to prevent it from being sold.

I'm not pissed about having to pay for things. I'm pissed about having to pay, and then the thing being shit. Maybe if they have to earn their income they'll actually work hard.

>It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.

Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.

>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.

Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).

>i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor

Why? Where is any equivalent measures coming from the US left?

It is because that’s how people identify as Democrats want them to behave? There seems to be a rift there.

Massie and Wyden are both anomalies in their respective parties. There’s not really any “privacy caucus” at a national level right now, to my dismay.

There were more people willing to stand up for privacy after 9/11 during the “with us or against us” GWOT, which really says something.

And Massie was kicked out after the most money was spent in any house primary and Trump heavily campaigned for the puppet candidate.

It's a super Trump-loving district with mostly elderly turnout, kind of crazy they had Massie for so long, him being a good guy and smart and all.

The same way we dont want smart people on juries, smart people in government is haram. especially people with technical educations who care about privacy. very haram!

You forgot the police with its explicit maximum IQ limits.

This is not a real thing, but people on the Internet badly want it to be.

Objectively, the left has this very strong ideology of “education will fix everything, and until then we know what’s best for the masses”

This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.

Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.

Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.

Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.

Nah, gonna be populist idiots from the other side.

What is "the whole woke thing"?

Because Congress doesn't work if an issue becomes partisan.

The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.

An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.

I think it's because there hasn't been a widespread reckoning moment for the privacy apathetic yet.

For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.

So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.

As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.

Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.

What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?

Do you have any thoughts on the bill?

One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed.

Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?)

I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible legislation?

>given you have a multiparty system [... why you struggle so hard to...

Multiparty yes, but also first-past-the-post, which favours 2 dominant parties.

Aha, thanks for this.

It’s a multiparty system that was recently in a minority configuration but through a fairly interesting series of floor crossings and by elections to fill open seats the Liberal party under PM Mark Carney has obtained a majority which more or less allows them complete dominance over the legislative process.

An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.

As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will Make them backtrack.

And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.

>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence

So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)

Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.

> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.

Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.

>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec

It's "Bloc". The NDP did well in Québec not long ago, when they had a candidate that the electorate liked.

I'm assuming you're talking about when Jack Layton led the NDP?

That was 15 years ago

Correct. And yes I consider it 'not long ago', it was only 4 parliaments ago.

For the Americans and others:

Our prime minister pretty much has full and complete control of the legislative and executive branches and even the appointment of judges. If you vote against your party then you can be kicked out. The whip is pretty absolute.

The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.

When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.

Some left libertarian positions support collective action to dismantle hierarchical power systems. It’s just difficult (impossible?) to maintain this sort of group orientation at scale; it inevitably devolves into factional power seeking/domination politics.

You're referring to various strains of anarcho-libertarianism, correct? I'm more familiar with geolibertarianism as a left-leaning libertarian faction, which doesn't have these stability problems, but does have a huge initial-conditions problem (it's nearly impossible to institute a land value tax in a society that doesn't already have one because of the effect it has on land prices, which are a primary storage form of wealth).

Yes, but those are the largest left-libertarian groups right now. I don’t think that Georgism would have these issues but you’re also correct about the difficulty of implementation. (It is garnering some interest in the UK, although I fear they will botch any implementation due to the immense power of the landowner class there.)

And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.

Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.

And then when a libertarian option finds itself getting mainstream, it quickly gets co-opted by authoritarian market forces, because they are so powerful. See how Git got coopted by GitHub, and half the stuff AWS does.

We don't need a "new" bill of rights. If they don't respect the first one why do you think they'll respect the next one?

There's a different remedy for the current situation.

> … why can't we make that happen?

Greed. More money to provide the tools of oppression via government contracts.

Frankly? Never. And the root cause is because majority of people have access to the internet now. The small voice of people who care about some stuff is completely overshadowed by billions of people scrolling through YT Shorts / Reels / TT.

Because libertarians generally want fewer laws, not more.

And there are far too few of them elected to have any real impact.

that doesn't mean they don't want some of the 'right laws'. otherwise they would be anarchists and communists not libertarians.

When people working for corporate interest will stop being voted in. Good luck

> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley

As a libertarian myself - these people are fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights wherein when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. The philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.

Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.

There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.

>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?

Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)

I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.

The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)

> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley

Those are pro-surveillance, pro-repair-prevention, pro-fascism.

Libertarianism is about your freedom to restrict others, if you are rich and powerful.

Whereas traditional Democrats and Republicans are all protecting privacy?

Thomas Massie is a wealthy libertarian and introduced a bill to protect privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network, he's part of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Massie, it's just protecting self interest by deregulation.

recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) there's a netflicks documentary by the same name that is NOT a substitute for the book.

The millionaires libertarians consistently support republican party. They are the ones ahifting it to the right and towards fascism.

Whoa whoa whoa whoa. You can't just call everyone you disagree with a fascist.

I dont call "just anyone" I disagree with that. I call it a specific libertarian millionaires and republican party as is now. Because they fit the definition. And have fascist goals.

I disagree with many other people who dont happen to be like that.

How do they fit the definition? What specific fascist goals?

I don't have a strong bill into who you are or your expertise on the matter, so I have to question it, especially no credentials on the matter extending a "definitive answer" to the people involved.

I read what they write. I see what they pust for. The millionaires were very open about their political goals, their distate for democracy. Republicans are very open about their wish to create white nationalist ethnotstate and their treatment of power is on full display.

Do you also question those who pretend libertarian millionaires are all about freeedom? Or just take that as granted? Do you also question those who paint republicans in positive light where it is clear lie?

Freedom to put whatever you want in the EULA.

Because they're not libertarians. They're greedy narcissists who what to do whatever they want to anybody and just say that it's libertarian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com