The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect.

They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which means letting criminals and terrorists run free. They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys.

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. That requires the people in the government to identify more strongly with the people living under the government than with the government itself. This is precarious at the best of times. Why would the governing party want to make it easy to organize dissenting political parties and alternative centers of power? Power might fall into the wrong hands.

I know that sounds sarcastic, but try to see it from their perspective, even if you don't agree with it.

I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is to fix what’s broken in the first place. In a healthy democracy the government will take up only the responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than that.

Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...

In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.

I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.

And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.

Oh, so the law shouldn't be the same for everyone. Not making exceptions for celebrities is "bureaucratic, pointless, vindictive".

That's one way of looking at it. Seems to be yours.

* People who do not have COVID should be allowed to do whatever they like.

* People who are currently known to have COVID maybe should get treated differently.

Banning people who don't have COVID, who likely have immunity to COVID and who have more than enough money not to be a drain on the hospital system is really stupid. Spiteful behaviour just to make a point.

All these restrictions didn't stop 1.1mil ... so far & rising ... cases in NSW in 2 months. They are completely pointless. They didn't do anything. They are a waste of time that do no good and that we do not need. Anyone who cares can go worry about their own personal lockdowns.

There are single digit travellers daily who have COVID. 10,000+ daily local cases. Restrictions on tourists are literally meaningless. And didn't even stop Omicron crossing the border.

This has descended into farce, there is no justification beyond bloody-mindedness at this point.

BTW, I wish you guys luck in opposing your government. Hope our don’t follow.

Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.

Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.

Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.

I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.

It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?

Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.

The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.

There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.

There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.

It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.

The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.

Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.

This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.

My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.

A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.

Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.

Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.

Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.

I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.

Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries.

E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1]

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).

1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people

2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...

It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?

It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?

As the statistics show, no. Though luckily, things are changing now that Omicron is dominant, so I think all limitations are lifted pretty soon here.

[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...

All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.

The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but higher, than Covid.

I’m more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed hospital well before there were vaccines.

Those are independent properties. If you don't see the distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these discussions.

If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic.

To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.

If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz, then you’ll need big government. That will likely abuse tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.

I would agree with you that a free society is one that protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK, these power structures that we have put in place are not for the people but are for the politicians within that government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your populace is the key path to power.

in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution, it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their moral responsibility to protect the people.

Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!

While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!

Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save!

Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh, Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a company over 1!

Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the population to agree with the "We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!"

... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic, irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")

Smoking is kind of a bad example here. Smoking has obvious secondary effects, i.e. secondhand smoke. I have no problem with tobacco smoking being banned from shared office spaces and other common public spaces. Sure, maybe make it possible to get somewhat easy permits to allow for things like smoking lounges, certain kinds of bars, etc. but overall I still consider it a positive that nobody is smoking at my office, movie theaters, practically all restaurants, on the train, etc.

You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell you want. But you don't have the right to force me to breathe whatever you're wanting to inhale.

This position puts you far to the liberal side of any existing internationally recognized democratic government; all of them currently place restrictions on what you are allowed to inhale, and contrary to vkou's point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30230039, that doesn't seem to be the only alternative to ceding power over what you inhale to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.

Yes, please.

> While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!

Wrong conclusion. (What, you wanna cut my HN procrastination by three quarters?!?) Correct conclusion: Just ban all that endlessly scrolling shit.

Huh? How does that follow? I don't think so. Seems at least as likely that "the government" is just collecting and codifying some of the populace's pre-existing norms.

TL;DR: [Citation needed]

> historically what you see in the death throws of an empire.

Throes.

Fuck knows if that's etymologically just a weird old spelling of 'throws' that has survived only in this particular usage or WTF it's all about, but nevertheless that's how it's usually spelled.

Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament) satirized the situation in this grook, entitled Majority Rule, in 01969:

His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,

and there were more of them than of the others.

That is, they constituted that minority,

which formed the greater part of the majority.

Within the party, he was of the faction,

that was supported by the greater fraction.

And in each group, within each group, he sought

the group that could command the most support.

The final group had finally elected,

a triumvirate whom they all respected.

Now of these three, two had the final word,

because the two could overrule the third.

One of these two was relatively weak,

so one alone stood at the final peak.

He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair

which formed the most part of the three that were

elected by the most of those whose boast

it was to represent the most of most

of most of most of the entire state —

or of the most of it at any rate.

He never gave himself a moment's slumber

but sought the welfare of the greatest number.

And all the people, everywhere they went,

knew to their cost exactly what it meant

to be dictated to by the majority.

But that meant nothing, — they were the minority.

⁂

The idea of limited government I described, which is fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 01689. Rousseau responded in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute sovereignty of the "will of the people", in The Social Contract, calling it "the general will": https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of political parties.

Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was incoherent in 01785: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox

In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried out this Terror justified by Rousseau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror

In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity had ever known, a system itself established by the will of the people of the Southern States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A few short years later, the will of the people of the US decreed that those people should start killing one another en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four million delivered out of bondage.

In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93

In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out, the will of the people would murder ten million people in concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people" was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than Condorcet had ever imagined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem

In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history, or possibly the second largest, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much of the information needed to make the decisions that are optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

⁂

The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In other cases the policy of establishing limitless state power was popular, but the atrocities in which it inevitably culminated were not.

That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that the will of the people could never err and would always promote the general welfare was an understandable error, but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism—giving individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of the people—works less badly. I know it's not very inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but that's the best we can do so far.

This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of that government.

> in 01689.

> in 01762

> in 01785:

> In 01793,

> In 01850,

> In 01918,

> In 01933,

> In 01951,

> In 01958

> In 01974

> In 01762

You do know that this affectation makes you look pretty darn ridiculous, don't you?

Well, if you didn't, at least now you do. HTH!

YHBT. HAND.

OK, thanks for the admission that you're a troll.

> HAND.

POAD.

But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys turns them rather reliably into bad guys.

It chafes me a little to see this so often phrased as something "everybody" thinks. There are enough people who feel otherwise in my social circles that it's pretty easy for me to consider this as a shockingly dumb assumption for a person to hold.

Though I do acknowledge that you're probably close to right from a purely numerical perspective.

Though from your response, I think you probably understood what I meant despite the ambiguous phrasing.

Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z.

Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian, compared to the relative minority it seems to be now.

The alternative to giving a democratic government power isn't 'nobody has power'.

The alternative to giving a democratic government power is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.

When a democratic government has it, you get some say in how it is used.

Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot about how it is used ends up being public, so people can audit its use. And so on.

But I think if there's a power that is likely to be abused by government, and really hard to put checks on that (ab)use, then the government just should not have that power, no matter how useful that power might be.

The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal because they're the "good guys" is that even if they genuinely are the good guys, you never know who is going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and certainly won't pass laws to take that power away.

For example, we might give a democratic government the power to tap everybody's phone calls at once, but if we don't, that doesn't necessarily imply that undemocratic, unelected oligarchs, or anyone else, is tapping everybody's phone calls at once. There might just be nobody who has the power to tap phone calls, as is the case with secure free software running on trustworthy hardware, or there might be many people who have the power to tap only a few phone calls.

And we might give a democratic government the power to assign workers to jobs, for example, as the Soviets did. Alternatively, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could assign workers to jobs, as in a coal-mining company town; but an additional possibility is that workers and employers, or unions and employers, negotiate with one another, each limiting the power of the other.

We might give a democratic government the power to decide what's for dinner each day, which sounds ridiculous but is exactly the standard practice in kibbutzim and in school lunch programs in democracies. Conceivably, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could decide what's for dinner each day, though I don't know of any examples; the usual alternative is for each family to decide what's for dinner each day independently, though in many cases this degenerates to an undemocratic, unelected head of household deciding. Often enough, some household members prefer school cafeteria foodoid products to the results, despite having no say in that decision-making process either.

Edit; As I said I’m a libertarian and a group of whatever people talking what ever where ever is totally fine with me but manipulating people with intent is not protected by the First Amendment And shouldn’t be confused with free speech

Was it a problem a couple centuries ago, when offline media emerged and blossomed? It was the same effect, just smaller scale. Yet, free press is valued as essential for democracy.

Trump it can be argued went so far to break basic things like US mail, and encourage corporate monopoly, the course correction in the other direction is not only reasonable but expected...turns out divisive (fascist) wannabe dictators are not a good recipe for freedom either...

I think all these start around Trump's administration. Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news, and some media/social media start censoring his supporter.

After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.

Rather democracy supporters back off…

It is ironic that we should trust government to be an arbiter of truth, given that our government has been a source of "misinformation" for years (a.k.a. blatantly lying to support an agenda).

Trump is a correlation to (not cause of) both the left and right in America turning sharply populist and inward looking in recent years. Populists tend not to be concerned with principles like freedom of speech, or the concerns of the global community.

  Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed.

  We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought.

Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s

I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine.

I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out to us for a reason.

The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!

In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11.

Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact.

We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA.

In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.

Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.

you know how its annoying asfuck to reed shit without punctuatuin and capitals and possible misspeeled and those fuckers who never use the shift period or comma keys get read a lot less than they might just because its too much drudgery to shlep through their texts? your abit like that and i dont think thats what your going for

One would think you write to be read; to inform, argue, hopefully convince (and possibly even entertain?). This silly affectation is jarring; it breaks up the reading flow and often makes at least me give up. I may be more sensitive than most to sh...tuff like this, but surely I can't be all alone in it.

So what you're doing is just robbing yourself of an audience. Is that really what you want?

OK, maybe it is: We're "unthinking conformists". So... Why do you use correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? The nitwits my first paragraph imitates all say that's the real, you know, sign that you're, like, square. Are you perhaps more of an "unthinking conformist" than you'd care to admit -- above all, to yourself?

I can sympathize with a sensitivity to things that others take in stride: for example, TVs in public spaces, jumping and cutting frenetically, impossible to really ignore.

But here's another example: in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on. I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward -- arresting the reader full stop for the sake of a cultural-politics position completely irrelevant to the point being written about. (Especially since those newer conventions had to evolve.) For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself) -- maybe it's useless to say this, but the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.

"But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe. The point is that in a dynamic free culture you get comfortable with genuine differences and you learn it's pointless to make a fuss over such a harmless eccentricity. And a dynamic free culture is the type that can learn to get better over time. I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem. (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)

I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread. Can't speak for Kragen.

Still is, AFAICS. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the traditional view that it can.

> I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward

Still are, sometimes.

> For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself)

Long before me, it seems.

> the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.

Kind of isn't -- and kind of is: It's informed by lots of things, like prevailing usage, history, social upheaval, fleeting fashions, and... Simple logic. From a single speaker's perspective, most of those are pretty much "divine revelation"; none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena.

Especially for numbers, which more than most other aspects of language are governed by mathematical logic, which less than all the other governing phenomena changes over time.

> "But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe.

No "maybe" about it; it just plain simply is dumb. That's not how numbers work. Also, to the extent that Kragen wants to promote a "long now" perspective: Why just one prefix zero? Bah, that's still practically the day after tomorrow! That should be at least three zeros! Or, heck, why not six -- or fifteen?

See where that gets us in the end? Yeah, exactly: Nowhere. It's just ridiculous.

> I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem.

Yup. And when one person persists in being "a cultural problem" that is sometimes a sign that something is wrong with the culture... And far, far more often a sign that something is wrong with that person. Shaving this situation with the oldest(?) of the philosophical Razors, I'm leaning towards Kragen's affectation.

> (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)

I think it's just simply that the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented, and therefore tends to get annoyed at illiterate -- and innumerate! -- writing more than you might be likely to see elsewhere on the Net.

> I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread.

Sure. Are you getting mine?

> Can't speak for Kragen.

If only they could speak for themself.

We are all of us more wrong than we can imagine. I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. My 80s anecdote was about how an idea I now see as good appeared at first as pointless convention-breaking of negative value, and how you can't tell the difference at first. Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof. ("none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena. ... one person ... something is wrong with that person.") In putting it that way I'm probably exaggerating what you really think, but directionally this does seem to be our difference.

> [zeros are dumb]

As I said, I don't care about this at the object level. In my native culture we shrug and move on.

If Long Now dates end up materially helping to make our culture more farsighted, it wouldn't even be all that surprising. For instance, if it caught the attention of one particular nonconformist and inspired them towards some project that set off another cascade which you didn't see as silly.

> the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

That hasn't changed in this interval.

Maybe something in that direction, but OTOH maybe not quite: I just think it's counterproductive if by running with one's idea, one also actively antagonizes people with it. And Kragen's way of advocating the "Long Now" perspective comes off, at least to me (and apparently at least a few other posters), as equally disrupting to fluent reading as people advocating for other new perspectives while demonstrating their "non-conformist" creds by writing in lower-case-only, skipping punctuation, ignoring (or, likely, more often just not knowing...) the rules of grammar or spelling. (Admittedly, not equally as bad as the arseholes doing all of those at once; just in that direction.) That feels likely to put as many or more people off one's message as it wins converts, so recommending them to drop it was really just honest advice for the good of their own cause. (At least originally, before they apparently confessed to not actually having a cause but just be trolling.)

IOW, TL;DR: Not so much "must come with social proof" as that this seems in practice to be disproving / having disproved itself; while not necessarily as to the validity of the concept itself, but as an effective method of advocacy.

> > the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

> That hasn't changed in this interval.

Yeah, I was only speculating about why a quirky way to write numbers, specifically, comes off as innumerate and might therefore be seen as (approaching-)equally annoying here as bad spelling / grammar / punctuation / capitalisation is elsewhere, in other below-average-illiterate corners of the 'Net.

Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing.

So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early.

I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000.

They never got back to me.

While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible to most of us now...

And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.

"My opinions are always wrong but some times less wrong than others."

There, FTFY. Now it makes sense: Some times they're less wrong than other times.

In eight thousand years.

As a student you have a far more limited right to free speech in school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), the famous BONG HITS 4 JESUS case. Those students weren't even technically on school grounds (across the street) but were a part of a school function. A school definitely has the right to suspend a student for distributing material deemed interruptive to the learning environment of a school.

Any links on reading more about this?

I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of those around them even if in a small way.

Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst for change.

And we still do. Some of the corporations have changed, some are the same. What else is new?

> That is not by any means a free society.

And it still isn't. No "EARN IT Act" needed for that.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)

A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans.

Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it.

It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination.

The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.

Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23

This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting!

I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that.

So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms?

I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons!

The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.

I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.

Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal porn and because they were part of the group they got convicted of downloading.

I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to report it.

Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the world in plain sight masquerading as good guys!

The laws are not fit for purpose.

Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.

The government had de-facto control of all mass media before the internet. They could control the narrative to a degree they didn’t need tight surveillance. They lost control of that with the internet and are desperate to get it back.

It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far ahead of anything that existed then.

What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?

From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.

Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.

Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally attracting attention to something completely unrelated is bad.

And it's good to know who those griefers are before that becomes a life-or-death question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz, Assange, and so many others.

BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.

edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?

But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.

Strong disagree. A good government protects freedom from big private companies that feast on it. Antitrust laws cannot be enforced by a weak government, and without those, there can't really be freedom.

if only absolutely everyone could totally agree on one single definition of "good"...

I thought the protestors turned out to, by the numbers, prove to be not Canadian and not Truckers.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example. There seem to be more relevant protests in the US you only have to go back a short while.

Meanwhile, it's difficult to assess if the US government has a great track record at dealing with terrorists. We're unsure of how many incidents are prevented.

I think it's pretty clear why the parent poster choose that protest as an example of government tyrrany, and not the, uh, couple of months of gassing, rubber-coated bullets, and beatings that preceded it.

Every day, police officers and prosecutors go to work and spend much of the day worrying about criminals, and a few of them are assigned to worry about terrorists too. When they go home, they have to keep worrying about criminals, too, because their job makes them tempting targets for revenge. I'm not saying people don't seek employment as police officers and prosecutors in order to have free reign for their sadistic urges --- they do --- but that's not the majority and it's never the whole story.

Terrorism can have extremely large effects, just not desirable ones. When the people think the government is doing a bad enough job of protecting them from criminals, terrorists, and protests, that government is at high risk of losing its power entirely, which is something almost nobody in the government wants.

Even anarchists often don't want it, because there's no guarantee that what replaces the government will be better. You may not like the FBI, but if the alternative is the Proud Boys, better the devil you know. Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar.

A mostly liberal-democratic provisional government that was violently overthrown eight months later by a Bolshevik coup because it refused to deal with the same problems (war and famine) that caused the Tsar to be overthrown?

Have we all forgotten the February revolution..?

And they did lose it in no time, yes

Protestors by default must communicate in the open, and to each other. They are much more disorganized.

You can't really think that some politicians are knowingly and deliberating proposing an existential threat to "free society and democracy."

Why not? Many people oppose free society, and democracy has never been popular among elites.

Most of them probably aren't malicious, they're likely just entirely ignorant and easily manipulated, making them just as bad as the malicious ones, given their job is supposed to be to make informed decisions for the benefit of their constituents.

Im not going to list a bunch of politicians... but Flynn will say it outright. So your assumption is clearly wrong.

edit: Found this. He meant the opposite. Of course.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/flynn-coup-go...

Your points are well-heard, even by those in the IC. What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior. I strongly believe that fighting this issue with a hard-line no compromise response will result in an undesirable outcome for your agenda.

I am not a fan of kneecapped cybersecurity in consumer endpoints, which is the elephant in the room. It's a compromise borne of the E2EE entropy problem, intentional or not. I don't support unchecked recoverable encryption in any centralized fashion, nor do I support covert backdoors or skeleton keys.

Unfortunately, too many folks defend their position from libertarian ideals, a position which does have a technical justification. It just misses the bigger picture - that most folks in govt are just doing their job. A compromise will seek to enable those doing their job correctly while preventing abuses with technological means.

Telling the govt "too bad, you can't stop math" will backfire. The law can be used to force tech companies to literally stop doing math at scale.

Because symmetry. Criminals using e2ee are not going back.

Not to support the act, but your comment doesn't really address the issue.

If they want to investigate stuff, they should have to get warrants and literally send out operatives to physically compromise the targeted equipment. This puts a limit on the scale of government operations. This is how it's supposed to be.

According to you, which is OPs point exactly. The discussion needs to be framed in a way that stakeholders are walking in common ground, not yelling at each other at a distance from their respective ideological ivory towers.

FWIW I happen to agree with you, but IMO “this is how it’s supposed to be” is not a productive argument.

It's a devious exhaustion tactic and it's unethical (without commenting on the bill itself, which I find abhorrent to a free and just society)

We owe no apology to anyone. They're the ones trying to undermine the whole world's security and freedom. They've grown addicted to total access and want to maintain their power which they frequently abuse. Nothing will ever justify it, certainly not their constant "but it makes our job harder" sob story.

And sure, someone might follow up with "but I trust my elected officials/police/FBI/etc. not to abuse power". But then you can provide examples of times when that trust was misplaced. Or point out that elected officials are elected in and out and law enforcement officers quit/retire and are hired all the time, and the incoming people might not be so trustworthy.

So yeah, "this is how it's supposed to be in order to prevent the abuse of power" may not be a complete, ironclad argument, but it's a good jumping-off point to further discussion.

It is nevertheless, the correct argument that is at the heart of the issue.

It needs to be had over and over again until it finally gets through the bureaucrats heads that no; your convenience does not outweigh fundamental freedom from panoptic surveillance.

The only way for such an argument to proceed is to convince enough people that such a trade results in a world not being how it is supposed to be.

TL;DR: This argument lies on the "ought" side of Hume's is-ought distinction [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

(This is also simplifying a bit, as there are cases where differing goals can have the same next steps. An apolitical example would be a temporary alliance in a board game, where you and I team up to stop a third player from winning. Our long-term goals differ, as each of us wants to win for ourselves, but our short-term goals align at stopping the third player.)

The Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in unswervingly-- was written at a time when privacy was the DEFAULT. Any person could walk into any building or any field and speak, anonymously to another person. It cost quite a bit to spy on someone and that was a natural limit to how much spying could be done.

The argument from the other side is always-- the framers didn't imagine a world where everyone is carrying around a device that spies on them and they didn't happen to imagine a dystopian future where people are paying corporations to spy on them with unimaginable devices, so, we should be allowed to do that.

Politely, fudge that.

(I do care, and like I mentioned in my original comment, I agree with the parent).

What does that mean?

Meanwhile, I don't really feel like there was much privacy back when the constitution was written. What makes you think there was?

Any type of eavesdroppi g would have to be done via tge post, which to this day has better confidentiality guarantees because USPS is one of the only service providers to which Third Party Doctrine does not apply for auto-negating expectations of privacy.

if you were investigated, it would have to be by a local law enforcement official. There was no cross-referencing of biometrics, fingerprints, or driver's licenses across state lines.

There were no license plates to track. When they were eventuallu implemented, it would be decades before data stores were implemented that allowed real-time tracking via ALPR.

It was, in fact, not a given or even remotely a given that it was considered technically possible to localize or pin down an individual without one or more individuals being engaged in the act of tailing.

There is no question that at the timeof the signing of the Constitution, the world had a much higher degree of privacy by default.

i think that's mostly right. i also take the controversial view that consumer encryption should have a front door for law enforcement. there should be a mechanism where if they are in possession of a valid warrant, and said warrant is validated by third party watchdogs, then they can enter into decryption protocol that will immutably log that the protocol took place in a public, yet cryptographically time embargoed location.

i don't agree with the idea of mass-surveillance data mining dragnets, i think they're constitutionally problematic, but on the same token, if a valid warrant has been issued, investigators need to be able to do their jobs and we as citizens need to be able to audit that said powers are not being abused.

but i will admit, this thinking is immature. the prevalence of information systems in our lives has resulted in the most detailed and rich records of human activity that have ever existed. this is new. on the flip side, advancements in communication have enabled all sort of new paradigms in crime that weren't really possible before. i suspect that getting all of this right will be quite difficult as we don't even fully understand how much the game has changed with these new technologies pervading our lives.

maybe there'd be some key at the root, but it doesn't have to be known.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

There is no practical scenario where those who want to use e2e will not have that capability. Even if technology companies are totally banned from producing it domestically, it's trivial for foreign companies to provide the e2e software and supply it over the internet.

Thus, supporting an end around, can be attacked as well..

How about a good faith discussion of the fact that crime rates are at historic lows, or the fact that many crimes (burglary, car theft) are never investigated, or the fact that surveillance is never going to solve, let alone prevent the real issues that people care about, like domestic violence, gun violence, or the epidemic of prescription pain killer addiction.

Focus on crime prevention, not more law enforcement empire building.

You cannot really engage in criminal behavior exclusively via E2EE communication. Victim would use the communication as evidence. All the crimes you are talking about have an essential component outside E2EE communication, which means that detection and evidence gathering is possible without breaking E2EE.

I think that the tech community has extended entirely too much "good faith" towards a law enforcement and intelligence community who feel entitled to review and record all communication at their own sole discretion. I know you think that you're the "good guys", trying to keep us safe from "adversaries", but you have to understand that after the Snowden leaks, many people in the tech. industry don't see you that way. They see you as the diet-Coke version of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and feel that if you were able to slip your legal bonds, you'd attack free speech just harshly as the Chinese Communist Party does.

Of course, from your perspective, it's not cracking down on free speech. It's "preserving democracy" by "suppressing misinformation" planted by "hostile adversaries" and "non-state actors".

Any office with excessive power will be a magnet for assholes. Excessive power will be abused.

Public policy orgs like EFF etc have proposed modifications to limit the most disastrous elements of this proposal but to the extent those proposals fix or limit the 'accidental' limitless liability for communications platforms, they are met only with disingenuous cries of "think of the children." I think it's pretty clear the lack of "good-faith discussion" lies with the people who've never openly acknowledged what all this is really about.

> even by those in the IC.

Hopefully the intelligence community, as opposed to the domestic law enforcement agencies, already understands how dangerous this legislation could be for U.S. national interests. The unintended consequences won't stop at social media. Platforms of all kinds will react to the liability exposure or merely the possibility of it. With other nations imposing their own in-country data requirements on trans-national platforms how many platforms (or their upstream technology providers) will maintain a separate insecure version for domestic tapping and a robustly secure version for international use? Just like our own backdoors being used against us, we've already seen how this kind of thing has a way of undermining our own security. Short-sighted bureaucrats are playing with fire here.

> too many folks defend their position from libertarian ideals

I don't see how this is tied to uniquely libertarian ideals. The 4th amendment prohibition on government search of citizen's "papers and property" isn't some aspirational ideal or partisan political viewpoint - it's always been at the very core of the nation. It's also been continuously endorsed by both liberal and conservative supreme courts for hundreds of years.

> that most folks in govt are just doing their job.

To the extent their actions undermine the constitution, it's no longer "law enforcement". Sadly, quite the opposite. If the law is the 'operating system', then the constitution is the 'secure kernel' - the last line of defense against both external AND internal threats capable of undermining the integrity of the entire system. Law enforcement has privileged accounts which are THE primary internal threat the secure kernel was designed to stop. From day one in the 1700s, the constitution has always made the job of law enforcement MUCH harder. That's not a bug. It's "As Designed" and perma-marked by the original designers (and the maintainers in SCOTUS) as "Won't Fix". Hell, it goes beyond just a feature - limiting the power of the government is the explicitly stated purpose of the thing - to the extent it puts a big fence around the few powers granted to government (with the barbs pointed inward) and grants everything else, mentioned or not, as powers granted to citizens.

It's always been well understood, as well as taught in elementary school, that the unique freedoms the country was founded on came with a cost - and sometimes that cost would be high, but... preserving these freedoms, including making things harder on law enforcement (and potentially easier on criminals), was worth the cost. I suspect congress is going to be surprised by how non-partisan (and non-negotiable) the fundamental integrity of the system is for most users.

What would a "solution" for the IC allow them to do, and what would be the limits on it? Would the IC stop asking to weaken encryption after it was granted?

"Meet us halfway" is meaningless if we don't know what halfway is or what the extent is of what you're asking for, and proponents of these bills never give an answer to that question because they don't have an answer to that question. Is "meet us halfway" on CSAM zero CSAM, because I've people advocate for that -- and if that's the position and any time that encryption gets in the way of that we need to compromise, then you are effectively asking to abolish encryption. Is it that there should never be any information that law enforcement can't access -- because if so, you're asking to ban encryption.

Others have pointed out (correctly) that law enforcement today has unprecedented tools to monitor civilians and catch criminals, everything from facial recognition (which has largely not been banned across America) to digital dragnets to public social media to cooperation with companies that hoover up tons of PII. We carry devices that allow law enforcement with a warrant to ask cell companies for the name and location of everyone inside of a radius. That is a frankly wild amount of power.

You have already been met hecking way more than halfway on the issue of privacy vs law enforcement, and it's just utterly dishonest to claim otherwise. What we're seeing is that on the one issue where law enforcement has less access than they used to have, that's suddenly an existential problem. And my takeaway from that is that what law enforcement is asking for is not to be met halfway, law enforcement is asking to weaken and disrupt literally any tool that makes their job harder in any way at all. Any technology that weakens their level of access to anything is an existential problem to them.

It is not Libertarian to ask for end to end encryption, that is a normal, moderate position for people across all political spectrums to take. The characterization of "maybe police shouldn't be able to access everything about me at time, including my location and every single one of my conversations" as a Libertarian view is just so utterly disingenuous and dishonest. So what is a halfway position where people in the government will stop calling to weaken encryption? I do not believe that position exists, and I have never heard anyone try to articulate it using measurable criteria that don't boil down to "we'll constantly balance and use the courts". I have never seen law enforcement as a unified group argue, "you know what, we have too much access here and maybe we should have less, and it's good that this technology makes our job harder." It doesn't happen.

There is not a solution to this problem that law enforcement will ever be satisfied with other than complete surveillance of everyone in the United States. And these are the people that whine that privacy advocates are "absolutists." I carry a hecking cell phone already; you have monitoring tools, stop acting like you don't. Stop pretending that an era of unprecedented surveillance at a level that has never before been seen in all of human history is actually super awful and hard for you because you can't also read every single text message I've ever sent across all of time.

I think, what most people are missing, is that Democratic (the free world) governments have lost control of the narrative. It's not that there wasn't corruption before, but people trusted the government more back in the day. Before the immersion of social media, information moved slowly. There wasn't free channels to transfer information (the Media controlled what can get out) and people couldn't take high-quality photos, videos and live stream to their fellow citizens.

This changed now. This means the government and politicians can't control the narrative anymore (ie: almost all politicians are corrupt now!). This is doubly worse since young people disproportionately use social media. TV is still watched, but only by seniors. They'll be gone soon and the politicians will have to rule a ruly population.

The next decade is going to be quite challenging to Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Privacy, Freedom of Movements and all freedoms and liberties really. Many of the liberties the West population take for granted are quite expensive; you better be ready for this change.

One other constant shared between the pre- and post-broadcast eras of media was an extremely high level of distrust towards politicians. Why? Well, the handful of companies that owned TV broadcast licenses weren't about to start biting the hand that fed them. Also, the FCC outright banned them from pushing overtly political narratives. This ultimately acted to reduce the total amount of information voters knew about their candidates.

Let's say that you happen to have brainworms. And your local Senator promised on TV that every brainworm had a right to live in a person's head. You, obviously, vote for him. However, Congress then passes the Comprehensive Brainworm Mitigation Act of 1973. But you remember that your Senator fought for you and your brainworms, because that's all you saw of him on TV. In fact, he goes to the press and swears how he fought to tone down the brainworm bill, or included an amendment for brainworm sanctuaries.

Today? Well, the moment that the Worm Free Children Act of 2023 passes, you're already getting pings on Facebook and Twitter about how your Senator betrayed you. You hear rumors about how he secretly agreed to pass the bill months ago. Someone's already spamming you with memes about how he sleeps with earplugs in his ears, constantly in fear that a brainworm might slither into his ear canal. You're talking in realtime with millions of other brainworm hosts, all of whom are angry and planning protests against your brainworm-hating Senator.

Of course, all of that could be a complete and total fabrication. It does not matter. Defamation is dual to censorship, after all.

This actually isn't a new condition, but regression to the mean. American politics in the 1800s was chock full of people with brainworms trading wild accusations around in similar fashions. The main difference between then and now was just the speed at which news travelled, but the effects were the same.

It's not that complicated:

Politicians don't know technology

Politicians hear there's this thing that lets bad guys have fully secure conversations that even 3 letter agencies can't crack.

Politicians see blocking that as a political win.

-

All of this nonsense about corruption... you think politicians are successfully going to get social media giants to intercept DMs that say bad things about them?

Or this is the first step to a CPP-esque lockdown on free speech?

That's fantasy at best and a disturbing level of paranoia at worst.

> This entire comment is the definition of FUD.

This would have been true if this was the first bill. But this bill (and variants of it) keep getting proposed again and again. From different and multiple angles. It's not a small political win here they are looking for.

> you think politicians are successfully going to get social media giants to intercept DMs that say bad things about them?

Yes. But you need the Technology there first. Once it's there, it's much easier to pass these things.

> Or this is the first step to a CPP-esque lockdown on free speech?

Yes. It worked for China. So it might work for us.

> That's fantasy at best and a disturbing level of paranoia at worst.

It's not. The amount of restrictions and surveillance we have today is unprecedented. Things can move fast once the technology is ready and the moment is there to seize.

You agree your comment is FUD except... politicians keep pushing for a bill they see as a political win.

Right.

-

And your entire comment is doing exactly what you said I shouldn't: explaining for politicians.

Except you're taking this paranoid interpretation where elected officials are un-ironically intentionally trying to turn the US into the next CPP.

Also I love the very well buried lede with "amount of restrictions". Might be related to the pandemic that killed millions but who knows...

> privateer (NSO etc) threat actors,

E2EE is actually a boon to NSO and friends. It's how they get to deliver their exploits to targets without the service operator being able to inspect them or filter them, or retroactively analyze them to plug the exploits. NSO doesn't have any traffic inspection capability, so their antics rely entirely on exploiting target devices, and E2EE counterintuitively helps in that case.

If iMessage weren't E2EE it would be very easy for Apple to implement a heuristic to look for suspicious messages and keep a copy for further analysis, or automatically run them through their codebase in a sandbox and see if it results in any indicators of compromise. But they can't do any of that, and that's how NSO sometimes goes on years exploiting the same iOS bugs before Apple figures them out. With E2EE, you have to rely entirely on endpoint security, and the provider can't help you server-side.

I think you're right, but I don't think it's due to some first principles contradiction between E2EE and exploits as much as it is largely a historical anomaly that customers have looked to service providers for security. The track record shows pretty clearly that the service provider's interest in customer security only goes as far as not to be reputationally damaging - we've seen plenty of communications companies actively helping authorities to spy on their own customers.

> If iMessage weren't E2EE it would be very easy for Apple to implement a heuristic to look for suspicious messages

Indeed, it would at the very least be easier, but let's assume Apple did have this capability. The first order of priority would be stopping spam, which is orders of magnitude more common and problematic than targeted exploits. Simply taking a look at the app store kind of shows their ambition level. At best, Apple is going to want to be "more secure than Android", but beyond that.. it's simply not gonna be a priority (and Apple is even one of better ones).

> NSO sometimes goes on years exploiting the same iOS bugs before Apple figures them out

Yes, but I think this is temporary. Citizen Labs have been shortening this round trip time enormously simply by having analysis or software deployed on likely targets' devices. CrowdStrike and similar security companies operate on a similar model, acting as a counter-surveillance trusted third party. On medium-term time scales, I think such models are more ethical, have a superior incentive structure and, most importantly, will prove to be more effective than the usual half-assed service provider solutions. At least, I hope I'm right.

The original bill was originally pushed because certain republican accounts was banned from certain social media platforms. It is explained pretty well on its Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act#Events_leading_to_...).

One potential reason why it is still getting pushed is that politicians on both sides of the fence is still afraid of the power that social media have, and they are using the pretext of "protect the children" in order to get bipartisan support and getting some distance to the historical events that lead up to the creation of the bill.

I'm not arguing that Facebook should be held to the same standard as the person who creates the content. However, when Facebook services misinformation on COVID with negligent moderation or even intentional promotion, or they allow eighty thousand posts by Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA)-controlled accounts in two years near an election, reaching 126 million users [1 (Mueller Report)], maybe there needs to be some amendment. Perhaps not completely recategorizing Facebook, but adding some more responsibilities on these major platforms to at least not promote bad information, polarizing content, and information campaigns from foreign governments. When I did some research into how to disincentivize social media companies from spreading misinformation, reforming 230 was the best option I saw.

Edit: I posted a more detailed version of this elsewhere on this thread to provide more background. Then I realized I couldn't delete this abridged version.

[1] Mueller, R. S. M. (2019, March). Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I of II. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

I'm converted. I now totally support this legislation. Lack of secure encryption will bring down all the large social media companies. It happened to Blackberry during the London riots a decade ago. The kids quickly realized that someone associated with the police was reading their texts. From that point, Blackberry was doomed. Also Skype.

So let the FBI have a free hand inside facebook. Let teachers inspect the social media posts of their students. Let cops track the location tags of clandestine highschool parties. Every teenager will dump facebook, creating huge new markets for other services. Facebook will be MySpace within the decade.

Oh, they understand perfectly.

Power-hungry people love authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is opposed by democracy.

They are the threat.

Anyway, the text of the bill clearly states that offering encryption services cannot serve as a basis for liability under the new CSAM carveout. I haven't seen critics of the bill explain why that language isn't good enough to protect E2EE services from liability. Most critics just pretend that part of the bill doesn't exist.

This side, like any scrutinized company or government department insisting that "it's a resource thing." IE, their doing all they can with what they've got. Doing better requires something external. More resources, more power, etc. They deliver estimates of how many more children can be saved if only X.

On the other side is more vague. Esoteric digital freedom advocates. Abstract, ideological general freedom advocates. The concentrated, directly interested parties are the social media companies themselves.

So first, social media companies do not want to be stuck in a debate where it's them vs child advocates. They don't want to make esoteric freedom arguments that they don't believe in anyway, and use these to counter child protection arguments.

Second, regulation like this is often beneficial to incumbents. The DMCA, for example. Large incumbents can influence details of legislation, enough that they can at least live with the legislation. It also makes it harder to disrupt them from the outside. Under DMCA, record companies and film studios got what they wanted & social media companies got what they wanted.

The truly idiotic thing about it is that they aren't really: cryptography knows no jurisdiction, it's just mathematics. They are limiting the power of law abiding citizens to communicate freely, nobody else.

I proffer instead that this outcome isn't a side effect but their ultimate goal.

Where were the freedom of speech defenders (aclu et al) when the progressives and policians in that spectrum celebrated shutting down opinion by effectively monopolies of information (twitter, FB, google, cc infra)

Why is there no common ground? When speech is shut down, no matter the side its on, the net winner is the state.

Frankly there is no room for bipartisan support of anti security state.... Until and unless there is recognition of section 230 enabled abuses that are still ongoing.

Obviouly 230 should not apply uniformly to every single website, but thats the kind of nuance that is missing from the current debate.

Democracy only directly benefits the people, not those in power. The only difference between a democracy and a dictatorship in terms of leaders keeping key supporters happy (the people vs. just those that hold office and control the military) is that democracies tend to employ more creative people with society-enhancing goals, thus driving technology forward and maybe even extending our lifetimes (via better healthcare).

This bill, remember, removes Section 230 protections against civil lawsuits for noncompliance.

The solution is fairly easy though. If your messaging app runs somewhere hard to sue (Russia, China), good luck bringing a lawsuit. Even better if it’s decentralized with no clear leader to sue.

If anything this may help get people further away from regulated tech companies.

I mean I agree with what you say it s convenient to anonymously communicate private thought over public telecom fibres, but... I mean... democracy and "freedom" as a Nation citizrns are unrelated to this, completely unrelated.

For example, the push for deregulation that befenits corporates does not require a conspiring sect of CEOs to secretly infect the law making process, but the general thought frame that is pervasive among the boards of those companies will affect their actions and what think tanks they affiliate with. All the separate lobbies, think tanks (which by the way might be just operating under such disguise, but are funded by external state actors), external corporate consultancy agencies on which governments rely on -- all those might create a current that brings down democratic institutions with no one deliberately doing that, except for a few fascistoid nuts perhaps.

What is no surprise is that all those corporates and those deep state instutions work to further their own interest. The issue is that democracy has lost control of it, and now they are running wild.

Add in corporate media (that are from the same school of thought like those boards of giant corporates) in this mix and you have got a really nasty dynamic, where democracy is just something you need to manage with Public Relations and marketing.

It's worth noting that the companies destroying democracy that this bill regulates (Google, Facebook, etc.) are major donors to all of these organizations.

It’s not like those companies have “destroy democracy” as their mission.

Your real problem is with the people using those platforms, but I guess it's harder to complain about democracy being ruined if it's literally the people participating in it who are ruining it.

That's not to say guilt by association, but yes it is suspect.

The platforms that are the biggest targets of this are, unfortunately, extremely compromised already by their failure to regulate their own users. Take that and a dose of populist anger, and it's pretty easy to see how important freedoms will be eroded and ultimately, any kind of private speech will be held as grounds for suspicion, even though that speech has nothing to do with these platforms or this law.

Private speech and personal files never belonged on those platforms in the first place, and to me it's hard to believe anyone doing anything illegal at scale would even be using those platforms. What we're concerned with here is how the demolition of their privacy regulations might turn public opinion against those of us who manage our own privacy.

The one bright spot is that we all see it coming.

Yeah, ok, I'm with you there...

> ... by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit.

Whoa there, hold on. If we hold Twitter and FB liable for that stuff, then that means we also have to hold every single web forum, support forum, mailing list, blogging platform, etc. liable as well. So those things essentially just disappear overnight, because no one is willing to expose themselves to that sort of legal liability.

Eventually, the only things you can read on the internet come from big corporations that can afford big legal teams, or people who have the technical know-how to host their own blog. HN is gone. Slashdot is gone. The Raspberry Pi support forum is gone. Hell, the LKML is gone. That's not an internet-world I want to live in.

With potentially infinite violations and incalculable damages, it’s no wonder why no one who runs any kind of user-submitted content site wants what you suggest here.

If you want to run a system that amplifies shitheads, you're a shithead, and if they can be sued, so should you be. We're past the point where we need stimulus to encourage people to start message boards by shielding them from liability for what their users post. Again, this isn't an argument for censorship whatsoever, just allowing private parties to apportion blame when aggrieved. So even then, the scale of allowing something on a baby message board is nothing compared to the network effect of Twitter or FB. Let them bear the social costs that they're so desperate to externalize. FB and Twitter made their explosive growth exactly by exploiting their exemption from the thing that closed down publishers, namely, bearing responsibility for the content they publish.

You called me a shithead.

I don’t think your argumentation strategy is convincing me, but I’ll admit I’m not the smartest guy.

Not about you.

I guess I’m more of a discordian, or a culture jammer type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you’re talking about as cognito hazards that spontaneously occur when you have a large enough target demographic for them to appeal to. I suppose I just find your cure worse than the disease. I’d rather take the bathwater and the baby than just the baby. Call me crazy, but I think that variety is the spice of life. Some conspiracies are true, and are only theories until proved. I look at them as pathogens that are endemic, yet without them, we would have no EICAR test files for validating legitimate points of view and nothing with which to compare the status quo. Outsider voices have free speech rights too, even if they use them for ends antithetical to our own; that we oppose them doesn’t justify annihilating them, or their views.

If discourse got us into this mess, I can’t see how less of it is going to get us out of it. We need more spaces for productive discussions, and we need more outreach to the fringes. How else will we convince anyone? If all you want is compliance, then the law is a poor tool for that. It only incentivizes circumvention once ratified.

I do have a breaking point, as far as ideas and speech; I believe that some ideas are stalking horses for violence, and the people who spout them have no goodwill. Some ideas can't be reasoned with. I'm glad I live in a country that still allows people to speak those ideas, but very few people will defend that notion anymore. I'll defend their right to speak those ideas. I just don't think a private company should be immune from the result of providing them a platform.

The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's no right to be heard. Somewhere along the line, people seem to have misconstrued that, because social media made it so easy to be heard that people assumed that was the definition of free speech.

There’s no right to be heard, true. Yet, these are users complying with TOS. Beyond that, do the users have any obligation to not spread content that they haven’t validated? It seems an unreasonable burden to place on users who don’t post content for consumption by folks who care about such things. Can you blame people for speaking their mind and playing to their audience? Maintaining the platform and only posting constructive, mainstream content only appeals to a certain kind of person, and they may never reach their intended audience with such messaging, warping and contorting their content into something else entirely, potentially alienating the very people they are trying to reach in the first place.

I’m a descriptivist in the linguistic sense, and when it comes to free speech. More is better. Full stop.

I remember when everything was hard online. I don’t wish for those days to return, especially just to comply with misguided, ineffective government mandates at the behest of megacorps and special interest lobby groups.

That is certainly a take on what The Discourse should be! Return to the print media era, basically. But it is weird to see this take expressed in the same form it wants to end. Hacker News is social media and YCombinator is surely not going to stand beyond everything everyone posts here, or turn it over to spammers.

Hacker News does, to a large degree, moderate what people write here. Much more so than any social media platform. That's why it's still a functional platform. You can't just go on here and slander or espouse libelous conspiracy theories. You won't get far.

I'm not saying the gov't should regulate it! Not at all. I'm saying the content distribution networks shouldn't be shielded from civil litigation. HN and Facebook and Twitter aren't general carriers. If they simply delivered messages from point A to B, they might not be liable; but the more a service like FB news feed chooses to re-distribute something, the more they should be held liable for content. Simply putting it on top and letting it be downvoted, like HN, is far less nefarious than re-targeting it and repeating it relentlessly to the most vulnerable 15% of dumbasses who'll believe it. One person posting and having it sink isn't a big deal. But re-targeting that post to others makes you a re-poster. They aren't the postal service. They aren't neutral. Re-posting lies has monetary, reputational and social costs. Facebook profits directly from massively re-posting lies, but bears none of the cost. All I'm saying is that no one in a position to determine what's re-posted or not should be allowed to profit from spreading disinformation with one hand while externalizing those costs onto society, without a neutral arbitration willing to reassess the cost to individuals they harmed.

[edit] The current system can't support free speech, because shielding the re-printers of false speech makes it impossible to disentangle truth from propaganda; and in an asymmetrical field, propaganda always wins. Letting the courts sort it out and putting the social media networks on notice that they were responsible for veracity would solve this silly debate over whether "free speech" is being quashed on private networks, and also, encourage better forms of debate that conformed to certain standards of logic. And if you don't want to conform to any kind of logic, you can always set up your own server.

Opening up user-submitted content sites to civil damages would ensure that the largest social networks are the only ones that can afford to fight these cases in court. Smaller sites would become self-censored, even if they weren’t likely to be a target of a civil suit. This would lead to a further entrenchment of the largest social media sites, as they would go to bat for their users at least some of the time. They have to be seen to support their users, or else they would just find an alternative host that isn’t subject to the jurisdiction of the civil suits.

This whole idea seems like a nonstarter, impossible to implement, and with a laundry list of unintended consequences and is counterproductive to your stated goals of reduced propaganda. Instead of being primarily on centralized social media, fake news would be relegated to smaller fringe sites where it can’t be monitored as effectively as on the larger sites, further contributing to the echo chambers you argue against. Your intentions also seem antithetical to free speech between willing participants freely associating.

The original argument against pushing extremists onto fringe sites was that the fringe sites were dark to law enforcement. I also don't buy that argument. It's a weak anti-encryption argument, and I also don't believe they're anywhere near as dark as LEOs claim. There might be some chatter that existed in the clear, but no one is currently plotting terrorist attacks out in the open on Facebook who will suddenly switch to Telegram if Facebook becomes party to civil suits.

Working back to your previous argument, the idea that the legal juggernauts of the big social networks will protect them while smaller sites self-censor is directly contradictory to what you say about fake news migrating to fringe sites. There's certainly less financial burden on a small site with less traffic to regulate what's posted, and as it stands, small sites do have to regulate what's posted, so it wouldn't be much more difficult. The only people who have broad exemptions over their liability for what's posted, currently, are the big social media sites. So let them spend that good money on their lawyers.

I want to provide some background on section 230 which the EARN IT act proposes to amend. I was against regulating social media companies, then I researched and wrote a paper on misinformation and changed my opinion on whether or not any policy action should be taken. I'm not saying the EARN IT act is correct (Edit: It's not), but here are some excerpts with sources on why I believe Section 230 should be amended in some way. I hope it makes more clear the reasons people want to change section 230.

Social media companies currently enjoy protections from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. For reference, Myspace was launched in 2003. Section 230 allows social media companies to be classified as interactive computer services and not information content providers (Gallo, 2021). Due to this designation, social media companies are not responsible for the content they distribute. Even media companies in America are still held responsible for libel or false information designed to incite immediate violence or public harm (FCC, 2021) which social media companies are not. The media is still provided many freedoms guaranteed by our constitution while being held responsible for gross negligence.

Social media companies do not adequately moderate the content they promote to their users, allowing members of society to be presented misinformation by domestic and foreign actors resulting in polarization, the propagation of false facts, and the loss of faith in our democratic electoral process. Social media algorithms, motivated by financial gains, promote divisive content and have little incentive to prevent the distribution of false information. This false, divisive information comes from internal actors, such as those who want to discredit climate change and COVID facts. It also comes from external actors, such as Russia, who want to destabilize our democratic systems and influence our policy choices in their best interest.

For example, YouTube shared videos containing COVID-19 misinformation 20 million times, generating 71 million reactions in eight months (Gallo, 2021). Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) is a private organization funded by a close confidant of Putin (Bowen, 2021). Eighty thousand posts were made on Facebook by IRA-controlled accounts in two years, reaching 126 million users. The IRA even organized political rallies in the United States through these accounts (Mueller, 2019). Intelligence services have determined that Russia uses its cyber teams to "undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process," as Russia's influence operations demonstrated in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton (Sayler, 2021).

I'm not saying that social media companies should be held to the same standard as content creators or the media, or that the EARN IT act is right. I haven't looked at the implications of that. However, the current law is outdated and something needs to change the incentives of social media companies to prevent these externalities (influencing elections, misinformation, etc) from effecting our population.

FCC. (2021, January 8). Broadcasting False Information. Federal Communications Commission. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/broadcasting-false-info...

Gallo, J. A. G., & Cho, C. Y. C. (2021, January). Social Media: Misinformation and Content Moderation Issues for Congress (No. R46662). Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46662

Mueller, R. S. M. (2019, March). Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I of II. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download

Sayler, K. M. S., & Harris, L. A. H. (2021, June). Deep Fakes and National Security (No. IF11333). Congressional Research Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11333

When I read in the article:

> the EARN IT Act would, if passed, pare back online service providers’ broad immunity under a federal law called Section 230, exposing them to civil lawsuits and state-level criminal charges for the child sexual abuse material (CSAM) posted by their users.

I assumed it was reclassifying social media companies, which would have broad implications, under the stated purpose of CSAM. I wanted to provide background on why 230 should be changed, not on the content of EARN IT. But I agree it conflates two separate things.

Here is the bill for anyone else that wants to read it.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6544...

How would reworking Section 230 fix this? Most of that information isn't punishable by the federal government, it falls under first amendment protections.

A lot of the most dangerous speech online is protected speech, the exclusions here like libel or incitement to violence are very narrow. For better or worse, the government can't punish people over saying that vaccines are dangerous. The only entities that can legally crack down on that information are the private entities that control their own platforms.

I often find in critiques of Section 230 that people have (for lack of a better word) an optimistic view of what the government can and can't do in regards to speech. Remember that a lot of the TV content from stations like Fox News are not covered by Section 230, and they're still legal. If the government had the ability to shut that misinformation down, why would those networks still be operating today? Even just regulations on how sorting algorithms work for social media are not certain to pass a Supreme Court challenge.

----

You link to the FCC rules on broadcasting, here's what they state:

> FCC rules specifically say that the "public harm must begin immediately, and cause direct and actual damage to property or to the health or safety of the general public, or diversion of law enforcement or other public health and safety authorities from their duties."

Covid misinformation is obviously bad and harmful, it has obviously made the pandemic worse and people have died because of it. Covid misinformation also doesn't rise to the standard that the FCC sets above; the Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that "immediate" harm is a pretty narrow category, and that causing "direct and actual damage" is also a kind of high bar to clear. The reality is that even if the government got rid of Section 230, it couldn't ban vaccine misinformation from Facebook. At best, it could impose large liabilities that made Facebook very nervous about having unvetted speech of any kind, as well as making it dangerous for any competitors or smaller companies to try and compete without a large legal team backing them up -- in other words, exactly the chilling effects and market consequences that people warn about whenever these bills come up.