Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states?
It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.
Was there legislation? If not, how was it "banned"?
No, this is absurd. You don't get to imagine injustices by "the left" just because you don't like them. Right now the right is actively censoring teachers as private individuals. Where is this happening from left wing politicians?
But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
Interesting, what's a good source on that?
Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”
It has nothing to do with sex. Republicans in florida have quite clearly criminalized same sex couples doing normal things.
Because that would be the equivalent.
The children are not the teachers friends. Leave them alone.
I don't care who their partner is, neither does my child. No one cares. Maybe we should ask why government employees aren't keeping stronger boundries when around children?
Also... Seriously? You aren't fooling anyone with these absolutely convoluted hypotheticals. No one is going to jail for saying "that's my <whatever>". It's an weak case when you need to reach outside of reality.
and you do realize that marriage and relationships ARE part of education? history english etc. at what age do kids learn about what a husbands or wife is and what is marriage? because that is the same age they should learn about same sex relationships.
> I don't care who their partner is, neither does my child
lots of people do. lots of parents want their kids to not be exposed to the fact same sex couples exist, hence the don't say gay bill. and afterwards schools pulling all library books because the mere mention of a same sex couple in one is enough for them to be sued under the bill.
you are correct no one will go to jail. but school districts can be sued, which means they will not hire gay teachers because of the simple risk one parent gets upset and racks up a legal bill for them
THAT is why its so bad, how is that so difficult to understand for you?
Because, the core of it was to ensure that said 3rd graders knew two things: 1. What the correct anatomical names for their genitals - parts of their bodies - are, and 2. What is appropriate and inappropriate touching.
Now, the reason you want to teach these things to children, really as young as possible, is because it turns out there's been quite a lot of child abuse cases where the defense case has rested on the fact that the victims don't actually know the anatomical names of body parts. And as a result when you go to prosecute, you can't conclusively prove from their testimony what was taking place, which it turns out has a habit of not convincing juries.
A child who only will sort of gesture to the lower part of their body, because they don't know to volunteer the correct name of the body part, again, it turns out, leads to a court system which fails to apply justice properly, and also increases the general risk of abusers being able to operate because they convince their victims that everything that's happening is "okay".
Oh, and as it turns out, it's also very hard to teach children how to identify this sort of thing without touching on the idea of their being multiple sexualities, because of course to teach something like appropriate and inappropriate touching you are quite likely (a) having to service questions from children who'll ask why it's not inappropriate for mommy and daddy, or (b) have to ask what about daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy and (c) who might struggle with the notion if it's not correctly identified that the inappropriate thing will apply regardless of gender, and yet can also be appropriate for adults regardless of gender.
There's a reason no one targeting primary school level physical education classes wants to say anything more then "sex ed" because, if they had to actually cover the content of what they were opposing, they'd rather look they were basically defending child predators. Which, though not directly, they are.
Sex education is just part of the trend.
I mean, there's objective truth here; "he believes is correct" is a distortion of the facts. LGBTQ people actually do exist. Suing a school district and opposing the legislation of a state that's trying to erase classes of people from existence seems like a reasonable thing to do.
The Temecula school district in question decided they wanted to remove gay-rights activist Harvey Milk from the state-approved curriculum. Are we going to be willfully naive (or just flat-out bigoted) and suggest that they wanted to do that for any reason other than not wanting their kids to know homosexuality exists?
In the case of Florida, if teachers are allowed to discuss heterosexual relationships (even just simply talking about "mom and dad") in the classroom (which of course they are), legally requiring that they pretend homosexual relationships don't exist seems a bit absurd, no?
I'm not buying any of this as liberals trying to restrict free speech. If anything, it's the opposite: what if teachers wanted to teach the material the Temecula school board decided they wanted removed? What if teachers in Florida don't want to be afraid that they just might say something about a homosexual relationship and get fired?
Mitigations are now everywhere. I can’t watch a video of Elon Musk explaining how new Tesla cars will start up by recognizing specific patterns in the driver’s testicles without a big warning telling me that the video is AI-generated.
Funnily enough, the absolute best content tends to be the stuff with fact checker warnings.
> Although the content the EARN IT Act seeks to regulate is abhorrent and the government’s interest in stopping the creation and distribution of that content is compelling, the First Amendment still requires that the law be narrowly tailored to address those weighty concerns. Yet, given the bill’s broad scope, it will inevitably force online platforms to censor the constitutionally protected speech of their users. (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...)
The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020 (EARN IT Act) amends an existing federal law to force online platforms into changing how they moderate content online by scanning and censoring more of their users’ communications. (https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-earn-it-act-is-a-d...)
If it’s hard for a provider to tell what’s unlawful, but it’ll face legal liability if it gets it wrong, then the obvious incentive is for the provider to avoid the danger zone and censor lots of lawful content along with the unlawful content, just in case. This is exactly why Section 230 immunity is so important, because without it, platforms would constantly censor a lot of legal speech by their American users – maybe your speech – as a byproduct of trying to censor illegal speech, for fear that if they didn’t cast a wide net, some illegal speech would slip through and they’d get sued for it. (https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/03/earn-it-act-uncon...)
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/government-...
That's banana republic level technique and tactics. This is something a Francisco Franco might have done. No, no, we don't have censors, we're just making sure only the truth of the moment is published. And of course, blackhole all the contradictions.
What other truths are you struggling to publish? What contradictions do you have that you're unable to display anywhere?
> Federal embeds counselling companies on content
What's this? I haven't heard about it.
The essence of freedom of speech has always been the ability of the common or marginalized folk to discuss and criticize those with power and privilege - the state, the landed, the majority. Attacking marginalized minorities is not the purpose of it and is a categorically different type of action - the marginalized don't have power over others to begin with.
Frustratingly the US is actually rather poor about expression freedom in a number of other ways (ways which ironically almost never come up when Americans talk about speech freedoms), and ranks below many other western nations.
If you make this the principle according to which you allow or censor speech, the predictable outcome is that would-be speakers will seek to establish that they are common and marginalized (or speaking for those who are) and their opponents have power and privilege (or work on behalf of those who are), as in a classical bravery debate (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debate...). In general, the powerful and privileged tend to be the ones who win these contests.
In fact, it is the fascist right that want to remove privacy, has passed laws (like PATRIOT) to do so, and the supporters simply say “if you don’t want to be spied on, then what are you hiding”
The right wing are the ones actively pushing this along with “if you think privacy is a right, then you are a predator. Won’t someone think of the children?!”
> "There has not been a liberal push away from encryption."
Pointing out Democratic congresspeople who push away from encryption does not contradict wredue's claim. Liberal is not a party affiliation, when Democratic congresspeople push away from liberal principles they are being illiberal. Liberal doesn't mean "whatever it is that Democratic politicians support".
And yes, I know this is confusing to Americans who received their political education from AM talk radio or cable television, who's understanding of the term amounts to "whatever it is that Democratic politicians say." When a Democratic politician calls for violent lyrics in rap music to be banned (as some did in the 90s), that is illiberal. When a Republican says that abortion should be legal, that is liberal. Even though liberal values are generally associated more with one party than the other, that doesn't mean liberalism is nothing more than party affiliation.
It’s not that far of a shift (at least from the 90s Clinton admin).
> there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship
The shift is to protecting the rights of people oppressed by hate speech, in the balance between its speakers and victims. It's based on the idea that the politically vulnerable have their rights - including their free speech - abridged by hate speech. It says hate speech censors the politically vulnerable, so at some points, we must censor one or the other.
It's tricky, but portraying it as 'anti-free-speech' is like portraying 'pro-life' advocates as 'anti-personal-rights'. If we're honest then it's not that simple, whatever one's perspective.
I'm not sure how E2EE is implicated: If the speech isn't heard by the politically vulnerable, it's much less likely to be oppressive; if someone texts me hate speech over Signal, the encyrption doesn't matter. If it's a plan of violence, that's of course a different and existing issue.
> I get downvoted for having an opinion not totally in lock step with the social-liberal worldview.
The victim routine degrades the credibility of your comment. It looks like someone just following standard right-wing rhetoric. Also, you don't offer convincing evidence.
"Hate speech" is not defined in US law. Hate speech -- however one chooses to define it, outside of threats and incitements to violence -- is not illegal.
Hate crimes are a different story.
I've been applauding deplatforming and censorship of racist hate groups for years now, but more recently I've started becoming a bit worried that we're falling into a bizarro-world version of Niemoeller's "First they came for the socialists...".
On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person. And on the other I worry that deplatforming shitty people doesn't actually fix all that much, and can often make matters worse.
On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person."""
Remember that any party that would want to stifle speech could easily pay a third party to claim to be offended by speech.
To be clear I am not talking about the heckler's veto, where someone tries to actively interfere with the reception of someone's speech
It depends what they say. If they say 'advocate for yourself and we'll lynch you', it does effectively censor you.
Can you link to anything that actually backs up that claim of yours?
A business choosing not to do business with you, even in very specific and obtuse ways is not censorship. A private entity has no legal, ethical, or moral obligation to signal boost or publish anything they do not want to.
Also, language is not harmful. It may be abusive or offensive but it's not harmful. That's not to say people don't allow themselves to become affected by language --but one can be negatively affected by lots of language that isn't "hateful" but may be truthful or carry unwanted information.
Furthermore, language is demonstrably harmful by way of the weight we've given it over the years. We've also made strides in society in recognizing how to avoid using or enabling it in ways that harm marginalized groups.
This isn't rocket science.
More accurate to say the establishment shifted away from liberalism.
In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second.
In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said."
To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.
No one has the right to dictate the manner in which I communicate with another individual, contending that it doesn't cause network problems (such as the FCC and radio band restrictions. And to the point, I believe the ban of cryptographic communication on public radio channels to be unlawful and unethical)
I knew absolutely no privacy during most of my childhood. Many times I did not even have a door to my room. Every single bit of privacy I did attain was an act of defiance. Even owning an email address was against the rules of my household, but if I hadn't protected my right to do so and to conceal the act of doing so, I wouldn't be here today as an engineer discussing the merits of privacy on the internet with you.
God forbid what an entire organization of narcissists and control freaks can accomplish when given legal blessing.
As an aside, you might find it interesting that cryptography was actually classified as munitions in the United States at one point, so the analogy does have merit.
If the state is suspicious of you then they can come over, break in, tie you up, search all your stuff, and take anything they like home with them. It sounds infuriating but it’s what we need in order for the state to catch villains and the crucial part is they can only do it with a warrant.
If a judge ordered you to unlock your phone and hand over all your messages, you’d probably be sour but you should also be morally ok with complying.
Obviously there might be unsolved issues around a) preventing such a system from decaying over time and b) providing some sort of mechanism for people born into a governing society they do not agree with to travel to another society without unachievable economic hurdles. This of course too has limits.
I do differ with you in that I do not believe another entity has the right to compel anyone to do anything. The judge can take my phone, but if it's locked, I cannot be compelled to produce a password. This is established by the fifth amendment, but would probably be better formalized today in a new constitution.
This isn't true, if you're talking about the USA. Within 100 miles of a border, CPB and homeland security can conduct warantless searches, without probable clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Martinez-Fuer...
This range includes the all but one of the largest American cities.
That's just the law, though. Functionally and practically speaking, the cops can break in and kill you without a warrant, and do so frequently. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/ They can also kill your dog, and frequently do https://aldf.org/project/dogs-shot-by-cops/
You shouldn't be even compelled to help the government convict your loved ones, much less yourself. The government has enough money, powers and people at its disposal, why should they be allowed to be lazy and strongarm you into helping them against your vital interests?
Go far enough in that direction and you'll end up with show trials.
But now it's more like dictatorship and police controlling opinions, which, when it happens in non-western-aligned countries, we all agree that is a really bad thing.
Nobody has a right to snoop on other people's communication. Not even people wearing robs and wigs.
No. It is not my moral obligation to obey the orders of other human beings. Ever.
If you want this to be a moral issue you must first prove that there is a moral basis for compliance and I've yet to hear one. Pointing a gun to my face and telling me what to do doesn't sound moral to me. You can ask. Nicely.
If you want to actually live outside of society, perhaps the only way to do that is on a simple sailboat like Moxie did for a while:
https://archive.org/details/holdFastADocumentaryByMoxieMarli...
But even that only works temporarily because eventually something breaks or runs out, and you will be re-confronted by reality (some society somewhere) once ashore. For example your hypothetical phone unlock is what happened to Moxie. From Wikipedia:
"While entering the U.S. on a flight from the Dominican Republic in 2010, Marlinspike was detained by federal agents for nearly five hours, all his electronic devices were confiscated, and at first agents claimed he would only get them back if he provided his passwords so they could decrypt the data. Marlinspike refused to do this, and the devices were eventually returned, though he noted that he could no longer trust them, saying, "They could have modified the hardware or installed new keyboard firmware."
The social contract is the only contract in the world that you can be legally bound to the terms of without ever having agreed to it. In this way, the government acts very much like any other organized crime group: "follow the rules we create or else".
Sure you can -- just head off to https://www.thecollector.com/bir-tawil-unclaimed-land/ and enjoy your isolation!
I didn’t say you can live outside of society peacefully in such a way that everyone will just leave you alone but a life of crime is a choice available to everyone.
People for whom the system offers no advantages are far more likely to make that choice.
My original point is that the current state of the law is not some grand moral absolute, it’s just how things happen to have worked out based on a bunch of decisions made by a bunch of people.
You can choose how to react to that up to and including breaking the law. The degree to which you do that can determine your consequences.
Also sometimes the bear eats you and you’re just unlucky.
Try "impossible". No person reading HN is prepared to forgo all of what civilization provides. There are probably a very few people on the planet, who are already living in an extremely isolated tribal setting, who could go it alone, but if they're reading HN I hope they'll speak up now, I'd love to hear their opinion on this.
The clear implication of your original statement was that it is possible to not owe society anything by not taking anything from others. To do that requires a level of self-sufficiency that only a very small fraction of people possess.
“For many, society doesn't provide any advantages and so they choose non-compliance and all the consequences that come with it.”
So what I mean is you can choose to live outside of society, meaning not complying with laws. That is lawlessness, it’s a life of crime.
Living as a sovereign citizen outside of any legal structure in such a way that you neither depend on any legal structure nor do you infringe upon any legal structure is very difficult, and available only to a very small number of people.
But anyone can choose lawlessness at any time.
If you are prepared to live without everything "other human beings" offer you, then sure -- but you're not prepared to do that. So you must reach some sort of agreement with "other human beings" even if that means obeying the occasional "order".
I don't obey their orders. If I cooperate with another entity I do so on my own terms. I am only morally accountable to myself and must reckon with any consequences of my actions that might reflect harm upon me. I have agency.
So yes, I must operate in an ordered system but at no point am I morally obligated to another actor.
Couldn't people just talk quietly and nobody would ever know what they said to each other? Humanity has survived how long under this condition?
The difference was they had to be actively targeting you beforehand, and it was an ongoing high expense per target. Now we bulk collect data on the basis that someone might be guilty in the future
The ability to have a private conversation that remains a secret forever is a fundamental human right that goes back a hundred thousand years.
One thing that always amused me to death is how firearms are banned from the Republican convention.
Even with plastic explosives, basically anybody who isn't a fugitive, convicted felon or a drug user is allowed to get a federal license for explosives.
I guess it comes down to how you define "arms" and I'm not a constitutional scholar. So: you do you, enjoy your tank :-)
And if you haven't seen it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_(film)
This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated.
This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that.
Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions.
It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.
If the government recedes to a level of totalitarianism wherein you must use your guns to protect your way of life, there's been absolute failures on uncountable levels, and guns won't fix anything. If you threaten to use your gun to destabilize the authoritarian government, they have five hundred ways to kill you easily from a distance. "But guerrilla warfare!" If you're stockpiling guns so as to be one day be a guerrilla, why not instead just take action now to prevent your government becoming that way, by voting for more progressive leaders, participating in protests, and engaging in civil disobedience and disruption?
I don't disagree with the general idea of restricting the ability of government to control personal freedoms to a certain degree, but it doesn't make any sense to me why we like to use the government to regulate what companies are allowed to put in the food they sell us, but not regulate what kind of guns our neighbors can own.
Also free states exist outside of the USA, so clearly those amendments are not a prerequisite of freedom.
I also wouldn't call it a pathology in the average case, not unless you believe there is no use for law, courts, police etc, and are a proponent of anarchy.
The argument in favor of private communications is in fact predicated on this: no one can actually cause damage just by communicating. Damage might happen as a result of it, but there is no information so dangerous that the transmission of it must be known up front, and should be pre-emptively scanned for and alerted on. There is always a chain of additional activities and actions which is required for harm to eventuate.
To be clear, I 100% believe that self defense is also intrinsic to being a mobile animal, and everyone has the right to be their own first line of self defense. But most people go their entire lives without needing to defend their self, but nobody goes more than a few days without needing to communicate with someone, often somewhat intimately. The amount of words someone generates is staggering, and if archived arbitrarily, can almost certainly be used against them.
The speaker is telling you what they're going to do - everything else is a formality. Your problem began well before they had a sentence, and wouldn't end if they didn't have one.
I think it's interesting that all of these discussions imply that there is nothing essential about the right to self defense [even from governments] using the most effective tools possible.
Same. The purpose of kinetic weaponry -- even when used in self defense -- is to injure and kill.
Communications encryption has so many varied uses, there's just no comparison.
Those in power and their sycophants fear both of them enough to launch entire propaganda campaigns on their own citizens to restrict them.
Said another way, if you want to analogize e2e encryption to a bazooka, then the government being able to read all of your private communications seems to be the equivalent of having someone constantly violating the fourth (remember that one?) amendment in your house, 24/7.
In any case, my point was about the ability of civilians to conceal, surveillance is only relevant in its inability to keep up.
To your main point, it's important to understand that most people don't feel the need to conceal their conversations from the government. Note: this is not an "if you're not doing crime, what do you need to hide?" argument. I'm just stating the fact that the reason the government can surveil so much information is because people don't choose to encrypt their communications. If they did, the government would have access to very little. Until/unless they set up cameras and microphones everywhere.
It has never been easier for the government to access your speech because never before has such a large portion of speech been recorded.
Police 30 years ago would kill for the data they have access to now. Encryption slightly slows down how quickly the amount of information they have access to is growing, but it can't remotely complete with how quickly the amount of available information is growing.
It's really only just the US being an outlier here. There's no other western country where people think it's normal or a fundamental right to carry automatic weaponry.
I therefore cannot see the comparison to encrypted communication. Everyone communicates, increasingly through software. To keep things that once were private private, encryption is a key ingredient.
Not sure what your point is.
(Also, the production of new automatic weapons for the civilian market has been illegal since 1986, and civilian ownership of automatic weapons is heavily regulated).
Warrants are still a thing! The government in the US can still get a warrant and they can compel you to show them the contents of your Signal messages. No fancy E2E backdoors are required. ;-)
It’s also not clear that the government can compel you to reveal a password, much less compel you to incriminate yourself.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/11/29/fbi-n...
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-should-n...
This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
(Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.
I haven’t researched it, though.
That doesn't mean the violations are acceptable, of course.
This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored).
There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?)
But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again.
Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present.
This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works.
My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest."
In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?
That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.
I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies
What a reflection of the massive political shift from individual liberty and 'all men are created equal', for which privacy is necessary, to compliance with power. Now that's "far out on the political fringe" and even "anarchy"?
I know most people don't think philosophically about it, but Signal's principles are pretty mainstream American (and probably other free countries), afaik - or knew?
EDIT:
> Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist.
Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc?
EDIT2:
I think that's what the article really is about: The author's theory that this sort of vision is utopian, very fringe, and therefore impossible.
It's pretty shocking to see it in Wired, which once led in exploring, beliving in, and bringing to the world's (or its readers') attention exceptional innovations well beyond the conceptions of the norm.
Now they doubt such things ipso facto. Nobody seems to remark on the extraordinary reactionary philosophy that is flooding the public space, the antithisis of creativity, freedom, innovation, and 'intellectual curiosity'.