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...
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.