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Comment by throwit1979 | Hacker News Reader

throwit1979

Disagree completely. Technological solutions are the only feasible ones because the majority of the population is absolutely fine with the status quo.

In a democracy, complacency guarantees that nothing will change and in fact will likely get worse.

For those of us to whom privacy actually matters, we need to recognize that we are in the vast minority, and as such, our voice will be completely incapable of effecting political change. Technological tools then become our only option.

Then there's the issue that even IF political action had a chance, it would still be ineffective. Case in point: voting for "the other guy" HAS ALREADY FAILED everyone who actually bought Obama's lies about reducing the police state.

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Agreed. Here's an interesting article:

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21582004-crime-plungin...

Quoting:

> Cherished social theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic diversity would unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong. Young people are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent and to have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better behaved than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued that crime could never be curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.

> The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved. Car immobilisers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security guards and marked money have all but done for bank robbery. Alarms and DNA databases have increased the chance a burglar will be caught. At the same time, the rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic gizmos are so cheap.

It's not liberal politics or conservative politics or even socialist or libertarian politics that is responsible for the fall in crime. It's good old-fashioned technological solutionism.

Criminals and governments are fundamentally different adversaries, and it is a mistake to assume that techniques that help against the former are even semi-useful against the latter; if you build enough technology to try to keep them out (already hard: they not only have access to immense resources, but likely also are slightly ahead on technological advances) at best you can hope to rot in the system while they figure out what to do with you (or, if you are a provider, maybe you can get away with pulling a Lavabit).

The biggest crimes have been relabelled, and now the continuing theft of people's futures by a wealthy self-styled "elite" is considered lawful.

> Technological tools then become our only option.

Your only option for what? Privacy? If that's all you are trying to achieve then maybe it's sufficient. Many people perceive this as part of a much larger threat to civil liberties though.

GPG isn't going to stop you getting detained and strip searched at the airport. TLS isn't going to stop you being questioned about that cousin coming to visit from Pakistan. Only giving political donations in Bitcoin isn't going to keep you off a list of dissidents forever.

And ultimately people do care if their government is keeping them safe or not. So far they have zero evidence of that. You don't think people care about the billions of dollars spent reading their email instead of actually protecting their lives?

If you feel truly passionate about this issue, your job isn't just to convince politicians it is important. It is also to convince the average Joe that it is important. The tech community has a tendency to be too insular. Part of the problem is that we aren't doing a good job of explaining an issue like this to people outside our community.

What really made all this possible?

Linux and commodity scale-out hardware made this surveillance possible. The vast majority of politicos have near zero understanding of the technology, capabilities or even have the groundwork to ask the right question.

National Security types are simply exploiting what the technology allows. As are FB, Google, MS, Apple et al.

So Valley, heal thyself first.

"majority of the population is absolutely fine with the status quo"

The majority isn't happy, they just aren't hungry enough to make changes. Plus what can the majority do when the political/economic/information system is totally rigged against them? Voting doesn't work in the national arena, protests don't work and revolutions/social disorder have a high chance of failure, death, destruction and worse government.

The conclusion still stands. Societal change is much more difficult to implement than technological change that works on an individual basis.

If everyone is fine with the status quo why would they adopt technologies that challenge the status quo? In general security systems will cause some amount of inconvenience and the perceived benefit must outweigh the cost of that inconvenience.

Except they're not. The profusion of even naive encryption amongst the general population is effectively zero, assuming you exclude transparently-used encryption like SSL.

When 50% of the membership of AARP is using GPG and having key signing parties, then we can talk.

Actually, 10% might be enough, if you believe some of the research on how society-wide changes happen. That doesn't really change the overall conclusion at the moment, but it's nice to stay optimistic...

I don't think privacy is that hard to maintain if you don't engage privacy invading devices, right? You can walk naked around your home privately, but it isn't really possible to walk naked around a public square privately.

The Internet is a social tool and is used to engage remote information, not local. I want to protect privacy as much as the next person, but I have a reasonable understanding of the context of privacy.

There's simply no way to legislate (socially guarantee) privacy for individuals on the largest piece of social infrastructure ever built.

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