A huge educational campaign is necessary to convince people and the average politician that being pro-encryption doesn't mean being criminals or pedophiles. So it's a lost battle already, and the intelligence services everywhere know it's just a matter of time.
Eventually a pro-privacy activist will be found with child pornography and everybody will cheer and applaud any form of privacy-stripping law.
The children angle is insidious, and where the discussion keep devolving even in tech-savvy forums like this one, instead if seeing it's convenient and very effective marketing to hide anti-privacy goals.
The entire rhetorical position is difficult. One of the (somewhat implicit) rules of public discourse seems to be "assume good faith". To make the argument that people should have freedom from government requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good. It is insanely challenging to carry that position in a debate. Keep your eye out for the handful of people who manage to do it without being tarred as crazy. That rhetorical imbalance makes it safe and straightforward for power politicians and police to argue that they should get to read everyone's emails.
It is tricky to understand why centralised power is a terrible thing that will lead to corruption and injustice. Implementing a system that tolerates privacy requires the bureaucracy to not grasp power. We've always been lucky in a sense that a critical mass of people learned they need to fight to protect freedom as an ideal, even if they can't exactly explain why or if the details seem to lead to bad outcomes (see also "fight for your right to say it"). It may be the only defence against a Stalinist- or Maoist-style collapse.
I don't think it's that. The argument should be similar to the Veil of Ignorance: do you want every conceivable future government to have these powers?
Of course, the damage the bad apples do far outweighs the benefits of the good so that argument doesn't hold. A century of good governance with global assistance barely balanced out the damage Hitler triggered in 5 years. Destruction is easy and creation is hard. And that plays out on the small scale too with small numbers of corrupt officials undoing huge amounts of work by good people.
If we had perfect information, we'd find that the spying apparatus of the 5 Eyes has done far more bad than good to the general welfare. The political corruption that must be causing is immense, we already know that every president since Obama has been targeted by the intelligence apparatus in some form. It is unlikely it ends there.
I'm less sure about the situation in the UK, but they generally follow the US trend.
The fundamental problem is that given any permission (an extension of trust), individuals will--100% of the time--abuse it in the absence of oversight.
It's not a matter of if/when, only a matter of to what degree. But being individuals, we are empowered to choose how we grant or revoke such permissions to other individuals. If you stop trusting your spouse, you can revoke their access to your email.
Government is a superset of Individuals. There is no greater clique they are accountable to. Any permission extended (surrendered) to it is an implicit conversion of ownership. If you stop trusting your government to act responsibly with surveillance, you can't revoke that permission. It's no longer yours.
...like the toy you hand over to the playground bully because he "just wants to see it for a second." He was polite enough to state the conditions of release upfront-- but nothing on the playground compelled him to actually abide by his own terms. You find out too late he's a liar, and if you're lucky, you'll get your toy back, when he's done with it, and likely in pieces.
It's frustrating trying to protect children from amorphous threats whose access methods are abstract, virtual and obfuscated by incomprehensible technology and encryption. The question is always whether we maintain absolute anarchy or accept nanny-state dystopia.
Maybe it's time we consider kicking kids off the internet altogether before surrendering any more personal rights to a bully with the weight-class of an entire institution.
I see you posting an opinion I agree strongly with here often. Glad you’re still at it.
I will offer a positive side to this situation. Their war against math proves the math works and they don’t have an internal workaround. Since a war against math is bound to fail in long term (just like the war on vegetables aka “war on drugs”), short term victories of oppression won’t shut down the future.
The children angle is insidious, especially when whistle blowers, reporters, and power players in revealing high up people involved in pedophilia seem to all magically have unfortunate accidents. It is a tool to emotionally manipulate a population which is ravenous against pedophilia. A very effective one. I look forward to the day these people are all held accountable.
Not so fast. We're getting government pushed "equitable math" curriculum for everyone who can't afford private school. [0] [1]
[0] https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke...
[1] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
https://twitter.com/MPSHarrow/status/535444154680377344?lang...
They thing is the Brits had a right and gave it up for no reason at all, and will give up more, without a fight.
* UK: Gun deaths per 100,000 people - 0.20
* USA: Gun deaths per 100,000 people - 12.21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
Your freedoms end where my freedoms begin, and guns are just a tool to change that dynamic. They serve no other purpose, unless we're talking hunting, for which you can still get guns, after some education.
I don't get how Americans seem to think it makes sense to require a license to drive a car but not to own a gun? Who is more dangerous, a guy driving a sedan or one holding an AR?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...
The right to effective self defence is a natural right and requires no license.
Americans use guns defensively hundreds of thousands times a year.
Encryption can very much be used to facilitate murder.
Your data is not as important as your life.
I don't see how that's correct, defending oneself with something natural sounds OK though.
Same situation. You are home. Should you be forced to engage the criminal with your bare hands knowing that if you lose the fight your kids will be murdered?
The context here is owning something to provide "effective self defense" - so where do we draw the line? Can I decide that only owning a gun is not enough against the other gun owners so I need something more effective?
GP's claim is this right justifies owning a weapon that can easily kill. That's far beyond "effective" in my view.
I think that's the definition of effective. Someone breaks into my home high on pcp, the most effective way to stop them hurting my family is killing them. Is that not a true statement? What is a more effective way to do it, knowing that failure potentially means the death of your kids? I'm not going to engage them with a tazer, there's the chance they will walk right through it, then what?
Anthony Smith, the current #5 ranked light heavyweight in the UFC is 6'4 and probably walks around at 230lbs. A guy on drugs broke into his house and Smith fought him and could not put him down. This is a guy that could defeat 99% of people on earth in a fight. Why would a normal civilian choose to fight a home invader with their fists when a more effective option is available? What if 2 people break in?
"Can I decide that only owning a gun is not enough against the other gun owners so I need something more effective?" I don't think firing a rocket launcher at someone in your house is going to be as effective as a firearm due to the potential for collateral damage. Also tanks play hell with my new wooden floors. Claymore mines are always a risk when stumbling around in the dark. There is no other rational more effective choice than a firearm for someone defending their home.
It's fine to like and defend liberties often labeled "natural rights", but justifying them on the basis of their being "natural" doesn't tend to be a strong line of argument—while it does open up room for making jokes by intentionally confusing two senses of "natural", which one may as well since the word doesn't carry much meaning in the phrase "natural rights" anyway.
*Note: the government could disallow one from having them so long as that person goes through due process, at which point Constitutional restrictions placed upon the government are relaxed in specific areas.
He runs for office and the people in power simply pull up his chat logs, accuse him of being a racist and thats it for him. This is just one obvious example but there are millions. He is in an open marriage, gay, a swinger, satanist, you name it, it will be used against him.
Its a way for the government in power to stay in power.
The noided assumption is that politicians and business leaders self-compromise in order to boost their chances of career success (and/or that they see getting compromised by Epstein et al as a career perk rather than a career mistake). It's the same principle as cops only being able to get promoted if they're known to be on the take.
This sort of law enables dragnet surveillance. Domestic Intelligence are always looking for new ways to take temperature readings on agitation before it boils over into public protest and to identify previously unknown community leaders that should be placed under more direct surveillance.
Are you implying there's a stabbing epidemic in Britain? (apologies if I'm misunderstanding that)
Britain doesn't have a stabbing epidemic[1]. It's a meme
Media attention made the obsession, not whatever actually happens in the real world. Ah, if only people cared as much about heart and brain diseases :(
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-... (click on Rate per 100k on the last table)
No, my point is that the insane knife restrictions we have aren't actually necessary since many countries lack such restrictions and still don't end up with a stabbing epidemic as a result.
1) There is in fact a need to curb knife crime, without these measures people would die a lot more.
2) There is no significant risk of knife crime, UK uses arbitrary law application to harass undesirable individuals and/or instill a "harmless mindset" into its subjects.
Not sure what's worse.
Whatever their problem is it's not guns.
However, easy access to guns mean that people in an unstable mental state might use one to commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do (or at the very least significantly reduce the amount of victims if they had to use a knife instead of a ranged weapon).
What you describe is a definition of a nanny state.
Once you exclude these....
> commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do
These become so rare that they are effectively non existent when compared to literally any other cause of death.
Yes, America has an incredibly violent "macho" culture for a so-called first world country, in general and not just as it pertains to firearms. It's probable that the high rate of gun ownership is a symptom of this rather than a cause. But given that this is the case, proliferating the means for people to easily murder each other in such a society is obviously going to exacerbate things.
Always puzzled me.
I wish people would acknowledge both sides of the coin instead of simply pretending the other side doesn't exist.
Yes society uses surveillance to identify and prosecute criminals (of various ilks, including those who abuse children). If you render that surveillance impossible by construction then people who might previously have been caught will not be.
Instead you pretend that the only goal here is am authoritarian state straight from 1984.
The risk of the second is one reason not to do it. IMO it's easier to think what happens when you make it easier for people to be blackmailed, manipulated, impersonated, defrauded. But again, that's just an opinion.
If we want to protect children, why are we completely ignoring those 90%? Where are the bills mandating installation of cameras in all households with children?
If you want to protect children from strangers on the internet, perhaps fund schools so they can properly teach children that the internet can be a dangerous place. Bills like this aren't going to do shit to protect children.
This is not some spectrum with safety (but loss of freedom) and danger (with freedom) on each end. The results of this bill will be both less freedom and less safety.
Society shouldn't use surveillance to identify criminals. We'd look back at dragnets to catch runaway slaves or hunt down the homosexuals with horror (as, indeed, we generally do in states that successfully institute mass surveillance to catch criminals). As recently as a few years ago, 'criminals' were people found outside their own homes and places like China were successfully catching them much to the net loss for everyone. There is a strong - indeed, overwhelming - link between places with good privacy, good protection of freedoms and citizens living happy prosperous lives.
The people pushing mass surveillance know all this. It has been bought up every time some bright spark comes up with the idea of rolling out mass surveillance. These people understand the societal consequences that they are ushering in. Too many of them understand what they are doing to pretend they have pure motives. This is empowering the worst of the authoritarians.
I don't think that's entirely true.
I am sure many MPs, charities, and campaigners do only see this as an issue of child (and more generally, public) safety.
I think the difficulty has always been explaining to laypeople that allowing any kind of monitoring or surveillance significantly weakens the security of encrypted messaging.
Exactly, they could start teaching law in a concept understandable manner from primary school age, concentrating on what can cause the damage mentally and physically, like the spread of germs from a young age. But they dont, so kids cant even protect themselves in an offline world and the state gets to maintain its air of pseudo respectability whilst most people dont understand how the state is causing lifelong trouble.
It is worse. Encryption does protect children instead of endangering them. So these "charities" aren't even doing their job.
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49376/documents/282...
And the next step is wide scope censorship like that instituted by the CCP. The ideas that we should censor politically inconvenient truths like the migrant crisis are already in the UK.
So do opaque walls and the absence of surveillance cameras in cars and homes. Oh don't worry - the recordings will be securely stored, and only available with a court order, only issued for "serious" crime!
It's strange that as surveillance proliferates, the shrinking scraps of privacy we have left are deemed a growing problem, not a vanishing one.
One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.
There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.
I understand of course that scale is an issue online, but that doesn't affect the idea that encryption gives us basically unbreakable communication over a distance, and removing it is not eroding our last vestiges of privacy.
No one is saying anything like that.
Further, usually, a judge has to approve. There's at least some oversight and reasonable cause involved.
It's recently started to emerge that US opened and censored all international mail 1950-1989. We're talking millions of letters a week. It started as a measure to remove all reference to US use of biological weapons in the Korean War and grew from there. (the third season of the Blowback Podcast did a couple of interviews which covered it really well.)
This is still the case. That's not a good example of privacy being eroded.
Now most conversations have moved online, and a secret record can be cheaply created of exactly who is talking to who, when, how often, and in the absence of encryption, even what they are saying. Phones we all carry, even without spyware apps, can be located through signal triangulation, before we even get to facial recognition and omnipresent cameras, smartphone or otherwise.
That, theoretically, we can recover some of the privacy we used to have (so long as we don't get targeted surveillance, which has become so effective defeating it is nearly hopeless), does not mean that, in practice, privacy has been massively eroded for the average person.
It's less of a sledgehammer and more of a ballistic missile. With nuclear payload.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
There is no way this doesn't quickly turn into full government monitoring of everything being sent over technology. Before that even, I assume the search for CP will be done via image hashes provided by a government database. Whats to stop the government from simply putting a hash of information it does not want public? The snowden files or something similar. Quickly identify and remove leakers.
Its a very slippery slope.
So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
What they should be doing, is rather then increase the risk of for the majority who use encryption for valid reasons (privacy, not nefarious), is invest in services to allow individuals to gain help, in a manner where they won't be ostracised and at risk, all from trying to come forward and get help to amend their behavior.
I am father myself, and like a majority (being a parent is a moot point really) am appalled and disgusted by CP, but me being that way won't stop individuals from succumbing to obtaining CP. Some of them do this even though they know it could trash their seemingly normal life (they often have their own families who are totally unaware). This to me suggests there is some sort of psychological disorder at play, and these people need professional help and intervention.
Trying to snoop on everyone, to seek these people out won't achieve anything. They are willing to offend even with extreme risks already in place (being labelled as a pedophile for the rest of your life). Them being snooped on won't stop it all, the same vicious cycle will continue to play out, but now with all of us lacking a basic right to privacy.