Says a bunch of companies received millions in fines a few years ago and it names AT&T, Charter, Comcast and some lobbying group.
Who would vote for that system?
I read your comment as “…corporate defrauders…” and it made just as much sense in context.
Yes, this is disenfranchising. But not being heard while some company pretends to speak for you is even more disenfranchising.
That will become less effective as companies become increasingly centralized, with just a few having many, many brands.
So your second intuition about proof of identity is better, but the minute you invent a foolproof identity system and it gets widly used (by fiat or even voluntarily), you give a tremendous amount of power to the issuer/manager of it, as they basically hold the power of also removing/altering your public identity at their whims. You also make it harder and harder to remain anonymous and preserve your privacy, two things that might seem useless in a functional democracy, but unfortunately democracies are not perfect and they can turn into totalitarian systems where the wet dream of dictators is exactly this: having total control over every individual, especially the ones who would dare signing petitions against them.
This is by far not something humans have solved systemically, we have the technical solutions to build such systems, and governments tend to push to implement them, but as someone who cares about privacy/censorship resistance I do my best to build alternative, opt-in, systems to go around them.
Think of the inertia that mag stripe only payment cards have in the USA, and think about how long it's taken to get chip cards rolled out. And then consider that we don't have the more secure chip and pin variant that Europe has, and (to the best of my knowledge) don't have any plans to go that route in the future.
A bad solution with broad penetration and huge network effects is one that can't easily be changed in the future. Let's do imagine some worst case scenarios and think about what it would involve to harden a system against them before rolling it out to everyone.
Between astroturfing, AIs, trolls, and foreign involvement, we are increasingly in need of a countering force. We are currently suffering under the tyranny of the anonymous!
It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies! The arguments of the 1990s do not make sense given the realities of the 2020s.
Are you? What happens if this "need" isn't filled? Just because you can't probe popular opinion with an open comment system, it doesn't mean it is a requirement for society to work. We have systems to vote that work and don't have these issues. Simple paper ballots work really well.
> It is astonishing that so many people are still swayed by such outdated cyberpunk ideologies
Private companies and governments have never collected as much data as they do now, mostly without real consent, and they are getting the means to exploit this data very efficiently now with AI. The cypherpunk ideology (cyberpunk is a fictional sci-fi genre, although it's kinda related with its themes) applies more than ever in this context, it actually predicted the situation we are living, so I can't agree with you when you claim it is "outdated". Individuals should value their ability to be anonymous if they intend to remain somewhat free, this is the "counter" to mass surveillance.
I can’t come up with a better argument than I’ve made in these two articles:
https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-the-an...
https://www.williamcotton.com/articles/authentically-human-i...
They are both short reads.
A decentralized way to issue and authenticate private keys, so as to eliminate the trust requirement- not just transferring it to a certificate issuer- seems needful.
Not only could it help eliminate the manufacture of consensus in OP, such a technology would have broad implications for trust and might lend itself to anti-counterfeiting measures.
Although such a development would also amount to solving the problem of Byzantine consensus so I would feel most fortunate to see it happen in my lifetime.
Oh, I assume this will be run by companies. What is stopping them from impersonating you? Or impersonating you after you're dead? How can we trust these companies not to sell access to identities? Further, why not sell/rent your access to your own identity?
Partly it's audit: check some randomly chosen votes, look for anyone not remembering casting their vote.
Partly it could be cryptography: you keep a private key and sign your vote with it. Your public key is stored by a trusted centralized institution, or several (see GitHub and signed commits), so anyone can verify your vote, but nobody can fake it.
I wouldn't want my employer, for instance, to be able to verify that I voted for their preferred candidate for state representative and take retaliatory actions against me if I didn't.
I mean voting for various petitions, etc, the stuff outlined in the article.
Better fraud protection during general elections would be great, too, but it's a different and more complex area.
I mostly say about giving a ton of identifying info so that your vote can be reliably tracked back to you: not only email (with a one-time link to confirm the email works), but also a phone number, postal address, maybe even some government ID like SSN or driver license number. It removes any expectation of anonymity from the vote or signature, and this is by design. Fraud of the kind the article mentions would be easily detectable by a random check of 1-2% of the signatures (and more is suspicious patterns are noticed). As a side effect, it would make a vote or a signature a much more conscious, committed decision.
Yes, fraud can still happen. But if you fake 100,000 comments eventually you will be discovered and held responsible. What this would reduce is systemic fraud at scale.
I'm pretty sure the Venn diagram of people without access to government issued ID and legal, eligible voters is two distinct circles.
They have a register of random documents issued by 3rd parties that they will accept as proof of ID.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/24-things-that-require-a-...
When they are poor enough they either don't or have incredibly limited funds. I'm not sure what you don't understand about this
Personally I think a verified voter ID should be both required (so as to prevent voter fraud) and provided freely to everyone.
Others have commented on your point about money already
STATE AG used Federal IG investigation to extract money from these crooks.
Why didn't FBI raid these companies?
They raided a ex-Presidents private residence for papers.
Identity Theft x 1 Million counts
> They raided a ex-Presidents private residence for papers.
Because that's not really how the FBI works. Recovering classified material from someone not entitled to be in possession of it is totally different. You probably want to read more, you seem to be speaking only at a very surface level, probably more than just Facebook too.
That said, while your rational for why they should be raided by the FBI is insane. I'm with you on the underlying idea. It seems crazy to me too that no federal agency is seeking charges under 18 USC 1001. How'd they avoid that?
They know who hired them, but they don't say in the report.
> The OAG has not found evidence that the broadband companies or their lobbying firm had direct knowledge that the lead generators they had funded engaged in fraud. As a result, the OAG has not found that these parties violated New York law.
> Under federal law, it is illegal in some circumstances to lie to the government, to copy another person’s identity, and to interfere with government processes. In New York, it is a misdemeanor to impersonate another by website or electronic means with intent to obtain a benefit. These criminal statutes were not designed to deter the misuse of hundreds of thousands of individuals’ identities. Congress and state governments — including New York’s legislature — should amend impersonation laws to provide for substantial penalties when many individuals are impersonated before a government agency or official.
I'd like to see them punished as much as possible under existing laws. The US government maybe could do so with what they currently have. NY would need to find evidence that shows intent. Not sure about other states.
This is the most galling aspect of that article - crickets on who paid them to do the deed. The comapnies named are obviously front company for hire. The clients are telecomms that require FCC licenses to operate. They should get their licenses revoked.
Even supposing they did it this way, and people gave their informed consent (fat chance, but for the sake of the hypothetical), that's still fraud. Unless every single comment had a "written and submitted on behalf of X by firm Y" disclaimer, it's still misrepresenting the comments as coming directly from individuals.
Regardless of what fine print unwary consumers agreed to, the agencies being deceived didn't agree to any of it.
Wow. Just wow. How can anyone at these companies be avoiding jail time?
And who hired them? Is there no money trail?