If a technology enables criminals to coordinate without any hope of detection that seems worthy of some fear to me.

Anyone can host an e2e chat solution, trying to take Signal down doesn't change anything for serious organised crime.

That's the price you have to pay if you want to live in a free country.

The point of the original article is that it's not black and white. There is no, and never can be any, entirely free country. I want to be free enough to have good privacy, but not so free as to allow a crime ring to take over my town.

if you are in a position a crime ring can take over your town, no amount of surveillance will help, it will most likely make the crime ring stronger by giving them access to it, there's a joke here about the government being already the crime ring I guess.

Some people say that already has happened, and the crime ring is called "the government".

>Some people

Other people think those first people are complete nutjobs.

you are eating the pudding....

This has always been true. The old fashion way of doing it was called "getting together in person someplace private." Yes Signal makes it a bit easier, but also general technology makes it harder too.

They can do that. The cat is out of the bag. Worst case they can just use GPG/PGP, S/MIME or a bunch of other ways. Backdooring a communication medium just means they won't use it in the first place.

And to think, two years ago the people who say this also willfully handed over their privacy of their own bodies, their own medical records, and their own movement in order to protect themselves from a virus. We'll happily defend Signal, Bitcoin, whatever else. But the second someone starts asking for your (vaccine) papers suddenly destruction of privacy is okay for the "common good". All it takes is one very well constructed appeal to authority to destroy 100 years of work. No matter the alleged "good" intentions.

I bring this up because all privacy falters in exactly the same way. Everyone is for it so long as <bad person> is not doing something they don't like. To me, it's a binary choice. You are either for privacy or you are not. There is not "well...sorta...except". Tyranny comes in many forms. One of those is waffling on such issues. As a demonstration, I'm sure I'll immediately catch flak for this post and possibly even be accused of being an "anti-vaxxer". These people are the same people who will sell you and your privacy out the second it becomes inconvenient to them. Worse, these people can vote.

The average person will sell you and your privacy out the second they think you're up to no good. Privacy is no good if you know what people are up to. The dunning-kruger effect especially among allegedly intelligent people in regard to this subject has left a lasting impression on me. It's a paradox of the pseudo-intellectual.

You're not allowed to drive at twice the speed limit, nor to smoke in enclosed public spaces, and, in certain pandemic situations, you shouldn't be allowed to breathe unobstructedly on strangers. Where's the privacy dimension?!

What level of risk do you believe allows massive corporations to loot the government?

1 in 100,000? 1 in 10,000?

> To me, it's a binary choice. You are either for privacy or you are not.

This is called black and white thinking and it's generally a intellectual dead end. Applying wanton black and white thinking is a sign of a mind incapable of nuance, and rich, deep thought.

> Applying wanton black and white thinking is a sign of a mind incapable of nuance, and rich, deep thought.

Can't think of one instance where a group was able to politically accomplish something on the basis of "nuance"

If someone is making an appeal to "nuance", they're losing

Right, so what most people do when faced with a lack of knowledge is go out looking for it or maintain weakly held beliefs. To conclude that something isn't possible because one doesn't know of it is thought-limiting.

This is the political version of claiming, "I don't know how to sew and I've never seen someone sew. Therefore sewing is impossible." It's stunningly wrong. I can't seriously believe someone would think this way.

> Right, so what most people do when faced with a lack of knowledge is go out looking for it or maintain weakly held beliefs.

Exactly. This is why I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to find a real unicorn in nature. Weakly held beliefs are never good enough for me!

I have never seen someone ridicule the idea that "Absence of evidence is evidence of absence" before, but you do you.

You're a moron.

We've banned this account. You can't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html