I also really believe that this raises the bar for everyone. If the government has to work harder to prove your guilt, the case is all that much stronger when the threshold is met.
I'm probably preaching to the choir but I increasingly see arguments to the contrary as boiling down to "make things so the executive branch of the government doesn't have to work as hard" which I don't find compelling as a societal value.
The irony is that it’s precisely why GPs dad had a job, with full transparency there’s essentially no need for any type of forensics.
Models could identify "suspicious" behavior and generate plausible theories to fit the desired witch hunt, based on what they read. Scary.
It's more that the privacy-first folk are the ones that bother expressing opinions in threads like this. I think these days, a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
> a large part of HN audience doesn't especially care about privacy, and a good chunk of us are the ones that created the current privacy hellscape we have.
Any thread about Signal has top comments bashing Signal over something much more minor like backups, lack of stickers, Moxie's side project with MobileCoin, and/or some conspiracy about secret backdoors. Yet, there is never an alternative offered which my grandma could use. No, she can't use Matrix. Maybe your grandma is tech literate, but mine grandma is 90. Even my parents aren't tech literate! Hell, I couldn't even get my group of PhD level CS friends to try out Matrix with me, but I could strong arm half of them into using Signal while the other half just wanted to use iMessage.
Any thread on ZKP coins like ZCash devolve into conversations about how Monero is better.
Any thread on Firefox has a top comment about how much Firefox sucks because the icons are a bit different or how the dev tools are better or some other excuse. They all devolve into people just talking about their favorite color of Chrome (e.g. Brave, Opera, Edge). IDGAF, just install Firefox and uBlock on your family's computer, they won't notice the difference between FF and Chrome.
Or any number of other such topics. They devolve into purity tests and tribalism. The lack of perfection in some tool only becomes some excuse to continue licking the boot. Can we not acknowledge that things have flaws but that these flaws are a worthwhile cost to not living under surveillance capitalism? I hear so many people complain about surveillance capitalism and then only throw up their hands in the air to say "but what can you do?" or "it's the way things are." We're the fucking people who made it that way and we're the fucking people who continue to make things that way! Not every HN user works at big tech, but I'm willing to bet nearly every HN user is their family's goto tech support person. You at least have that power to influence your friends and family about how to solve these problems.
We're the people that other people look to for tech advice. We can have nuanced conversations all day, and I think we fucking should, but most of them turn into dumb flame wars like "vim vs emacs" or "spaces vs tabs" and all this ends up with is the system perpetuating. Can we just for one god damn month not roll around in the mud? All the time I hear about how we love merit and meritocracy. Well let's fucking do it then. And we're engineers, if there's flaws in these OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS, then let's fucking fix them instead of just complaining about the flaws of living under the boot. Or do we just like to complain and they've won because they convinced us we have no power?
You're right that privacy and freedom should never be sacrificed for convenience or aesthetics!
E2EE messenger Wire comes from the people who created usable Skype and contributed to the royalty-free audio codec Opus (https://opus-codec.org/) which now enables WebRTC (used by modern conferencing apps including Zoom, Jitsi, GoToMeeting). They contributed to the IETF encrypted group-messaging protocol MLS (https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/mls/about/), which has been ratified and lives alongside TLS.
IETF MLS is one step on a long path to messenger interoperability, e.g. Matrix plans to implement MLS. Contributors to MLS include Apple, Cisco and Facebook.
Unlike Signal, Wire never mandated disclosure of phone number or address book contacts. Their business model is paid enterprise customers, but they continue to maintain free clients for iOS, Android and web, with open-source client and server code.
I'm happy there's alternatives. Competition is good. But that's beside my point.
Maybe to make the same mistake I'm critiquing, am I understanding things correctly? Does the free version of Wire not encrypt messages at rest?[0]. Seems weird to not make the messages encrypted when they're on device. I think this is going to be a deal breaker for people because they don't want their whole conversation history scrapped anytime they get stopped at a border crossing.
Next time ask him if he'd be OK living in a glass house, since, as he's not a bad guy, he has nothing to hide.
Surely he doesn't see any point in keeping any of that information private, he's a good guy and not doing anything wrong, therefore he has nothing to hide and no use for privacy.
Your father is subject to a simple but pervasive error: Not every justification who is a good or a bad guy is ethical right in every aspect of life.
In the tech industry you also find a bend of very economically self interested version of privacy, which is that giving privacy to your users is a great way to claim you didn't know anything bad was happening. I'm pretty sure that, not high minded ideals, is why Meta invests so much in e2e encryption and privacy for WhatsApp, and publicizing it - when the next horrible thing is planned using Whatsapp, it lets them disclaim all responsibility for moderating what's happening on their platform
This is such a sham though.
You have some privacy-protecting technology everyone would benefit from. Ordinary people don't really understand it but would use and benefit from it if it was the default.
Laws are passed that make it illegal to use or otherwise highly inconvenient, e.g. you have to fill out an onerous amount of paperwork even if you're not doing anything wrong. Ordinary people are deterred from using it and ordinary systems don't adopt it. Criminals continue using it because they don't care about breaking the paperwork laws if they're already breaking the drug laws.
Then people say look at this evil technology that only criminals use! As if the reason others don't use it wasn't purposeful.
The issue is that it's treated as a "financial asset" to begin with, which de facto inhibits its use as a currency. You want to pay for a sandwich with cash? Hand them bills, get sandwich. You want to pay with cryptocurrency? File securities paperwork. Who is going to do that?
By comparison, things like foreign currencies that float against the dollar aren't reported when the transaction amount is below a threshold.
Yes. Both are real facets of this type of tech. For all the handwringing about "but what if fascism" that we have here in the US, I'm pretty sure 90% of the actual worries American cryptocurrency users have in their hearts is either about tax evasion, money laundering, or using crypto to buy/sell something illegal (Granted, there are some things illegal to buy/sell that there could be an ethical argument shouldn't be illegal -- probably certain drugs for instance). If someone has made bitcoin transactions to say, donate to EFF, Planned Parenthood or ACLU, I would take a bet of 5 Bitcoin that he isn't going to be imprisoned for that fact in this country. Yes, even though Trump is President.
But I think we who believe in privacy make ourselves look bad if we try to pretend that there isn't a ton of that stuff going on.
It's a reasonable opinion to say that privacy is good, but I think the thing to argue and "prove" is that it outweighs the fact that this technology also enables all this bad stuff. Which is a value judgment and thus you need to convince people, rather than just point to the word "Freedom" and assert.
Yet. They want to execute people for being trans in Florida, by separately passing laws that child abusers get executed, and that being trans == child abuse. It's not hyperbolic to worry that donating to a trans rights organization could make you a governmental target. Scammers might steal some of my money, but they're not going to abduct me off the street into unmarked vans in front of my kids.
> Nobody thinks that "being trans == child abuse."
Yes, they pushed laws that say that "cross dressing" in the presence of a minor should be considered child abuse, and they define "cross dressing" as wearing clothing not appropriate to your birth sex, so a trans woman wearing a dress in public would count as child abuse. In the media they talked about "drag shows" but the bill would have effectively made trans people dressing as their gender a felony.
> We don't let them get tattoos and piercings.
Many ear piercing salons will pierce the ears of children as young as 6. Some infants get their ears pierced. Many children do not even need the consent of their parents to get piercings. Tattoos I'll grant you.
> They do argue that encouraging children to do permanent elective surgeries is child abuse.
Nobody is encouraging children to get permanent elective surgeries. Children are not receiving permanent surgeries. Gender reassignment surgeries are only done on people 18+ except in extreme cases (which apply to both trans- and cis-gendered people), and only after years of other care and treatment. Puberty blockers are not permanent -- that is their entire point. These "drive-through" gender reassignment surgeries are a total fabrication of anti-trans groups.
Many more cis-gendered children receive puberty blockers (e.g. for those entering puberty way too early) and other gender-related care than trans-gendered kids. Conservatives do not argue that children should not receive these surgeries, they only argue that trans children should not receive these surgeries. The exact same care is either classified as legal or illegal depending on whether its purpose is to reaffirm birth sex or not. Nobody is trying to outlaw any of these treatments or care, they are only trying to outlaw its use in trans people. Nobody objects to the care, they object to the existence of trans people.
> Some people believe we should also not let them sterilize themselves as minors.
This is not a thing that happens.
> But I'll refrain from discussing this off-topic subject further.
"Let me just spread complete disinformation, but you're not allowed to reply to any of it, or you're being off-topic, and I refuse to engage with you." This is an extremely bad-faith way to end your post. You are spreading misinformation. Stop it.
We have to decide what kind of society we want. One with locks on doors or a world where that is illegal. Bad guys use locks and so do regular people. Taking away everyone's freedom and safety because it makes it easier to catch "bad guys" is not worth the tradeoffs in terms of safety / privacy or creating a society worth living in.
This is archaic thinking, today all it takes is the president tweeting about your donations for your family to have to into hiding forever.
Poe's Law strikes again, but for reference there are even several major categories:
Some things are nobody's business. If you have religious parents and you're gay, you may not want them to know that, even if your religious parents work for the government.
People have proprietary secrets. A drug company or tech company can't be spending a billion dollars on 95%-finished R&D only to have a random cop take a $10,000 bribe to hand it over to a foreign competitor.
It's important to protect the political opposition from the incumbents. The thing Nixon had to resign over? That.
Sometimes the bad guys work for the government. If your abusive ex is a cop, they shouldn't be able to trivially find you without a warrant.
The government shouldn't be able to go on a fishing expedition. If you do something that isn't illegal, or that you have a right to do, that shouldn't be an excuse to trawl through your life so you can be prosecuted for breaking a law that everybody breaks but only people who step on the toes of the powerful are prosecuted for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." -Cardinal Richelieu
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." -Edward Snowden
- Megacorporations cozying up to government in exchange for access to this information, for a competitive advantage, targeted advertising, etc. Lawmakers will bend over backward for corporations if they are promised "job creation" in their districts, or it could be lobbying or even straight-up bribery. We have a sitting supreme court member who openly takes bribes and he's suffered no consequences for it. It's not hard to imagine data the government collected in a giant dragnet being shared with generous campaign contributors.
- Laws changing to target an out-group. Remember how the government was keenly interested in people's period-tracking apps so they could imprison people who they suspected had an abortion? It doesn't matter whether your private data could incriminate you now, it's dangerous if it could incriminate you from any future government that is hostile to you.
You: "But you are randos on the internet, not the government!"
So I can get any of that from anyone if I just bribe the right government official? Or if I want that info for nefarious purposes I just have to get hired at the right agency? Or I can lobby to get a law passed that says everyone with the sequence "GATTACA" at a particular site on chromosome 7 is inherently evil and must be locked away for the public good? (Oh, what a surprise, it turns out that DNA sequence is incredibly common only for your particular race, huh.) Or if you're a celebrity, any cop can demand to search your phone without a warrant and get all of your private photos to sell to tabloids? You're genuinely ok with all of this? You find people who are concerned about these things suspicious?
Laws change. People in power do not always have your best interests at heart.
Even the companies that don't make money from ads have no qualms just letting Google or Facebook collect data about their website visitors.
To you, he seems to believe Yes, and to him, I think you seem to believe No. Historically, the answer has been Yes, and crypto has fundamentally changed that. I think crystallizing exactly why you believe the right answer is No is essential, otherwise you're just not going to convince people on that side -- in their mind, I think, you're demanding more rights than you historically had, and at the cost of protecting the rest of the population.
- does the plain view doctrine allow TSA to look under your clothes with mmWave sensors? or to peek through your walls with IR cameras? to use laser microphones to listen in on a conversation? to use EM emissions from your computer to conduct a side-channel attack?
- does the third-party doctrine allow police to read your emails (unlike actual letters) without a warrant? or your papers on Google Docs? to access streaming cloud backups from your home security cameras? to buy your location data from data brokers?
- does your fifth amendment right against self-incrimination protect you from confessing your passwords? from taking a polygraph? from measuring your P300 signal as you look at a lineup? from using fMRI to reconstruct images from your visual cortex?
- does the right to bear arms include AR-15s? machine guns? loitering munitions? tactical nukes? ICBMs?
there's a scale from textual pedantry to handwavy analogies. courts are increasingly going on vibes and hacking together post-hoc justifications because the source material is too abstract and too dated to allow any straightforward reading.
everybody is a bad guy in the eyes of their political opponents.
Millennials see reality through the lens of 'Squid game' and 'Hunger games.' Meanwhile boomers think we're Snowflakes. They don't understand that we're fighting a relentless psychological war in a hyper-competitive environment of scarcity.
Just like many cops (and thieves) invest pretty heavily in physical security.
And why the first thing a cop does if another cop starts hassling them (and won’t back down) is get a lawyer. Because they know.
It’s often less about what you did or didn’t do, and sometimes more about what someone wants/needs to nail you on.
Honestly, if I had spent 30 years of my life trying to catch criminals, I would probably believe the same. Just like dermatologists telling everyone to put on sunscreen at all times (because they see skin cancer cases on the daily), criminal prosecutors often live in a bubble, where crime happens all the time and everywhere, and you can never have enough sophisticated tools to catch the perpetrators. They completely forget that normal life away from crime exists, too.
I just thought this was worth sharing, my dad was a tech guy (though not much of a programmer), the folks on HackerNews and related sites mostly have a privacy-first worldview. But not everyone shares this view, especially those who work in or around law enforcement. Civilians who believe in the right to privacy must stand their ground in the face of this.