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Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

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Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#91
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with newspaper reporting hearsay, while describing it as hearsay? NYT didn't seem to pass it as anything else than it is. What's your logic here? Should all anonymous sources be banned? Or only the sources with opinions that you don't like?

Actually, most reputable newspapers have very strict rules about anonymous sources, including some who ban them altogether. Here is the NY Times Standard and Ethics Statement, which describes the newspaper's "distaste" for anonymous sources: http://www.nytco.com/who-we-are/culture/standards-and-ethics... In fact, that's probably the reason it was pulled: a complaint was made to the NYT Public Editor about the piece's…

If so, they should say so. Silently pulling the article and redirecting the URL is a little misleading.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#92
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to get rid of this narrative of bad versus good people while we're at it. It removes every bit of nuance from the discussion.

That's the point. What the Paris attackers did makes them bad people. It's not up for debate.

The problem is that by calling them 'bad people' you imply that they committed the crime because they were 'bad people'. And that's the core of the problem. They were not 'bad people' before they committed the crime. They were just people in need of help. By focusing on how they were 'bad people' you make it seem like you haven't contributed to the problem and there is no other solution then to fight them (using violence) while in fact there are many things we could have done differently and many things we still can do to prevent these crimes from happening. The fact is that it's much easier to blame it on them for being 'bad people' then to look at the consequences of our own actions.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#93
post #48
post #31

This issue brings up a larger point that many in the tech world have ignored for awhile. Now that end to end encryption is easily accessible by everyone, how do the authorities figure out beforehand when a terrorist attack will take place? The answer is not banning encryption technologies or giving authorities a 'key' as the FBI director has proposed. But now authorities have a very difficult problem on their hands.…

It takes what it has always taken: good police work. Encryption is like envelopes for the mail. They can be broken into with enough force, but their purpose it to shield the contents of the message from those handling it in transit. A post card offers no such protection. So suppose the banned encryption (envelopes). Im sure the government would still reauire envelopes. As would anybody dealing with health records. Or…

Good insight, I wonder how many nefarious plots were thwarted by surveillance rather than old-fashioned police work.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#95

I blame prime numbers, even co-primes should be banned. Please contact your representative and help us free the world from evil math.

This! The generation of large primes needs to be banned. The government needs to work with chips manufacturers to insure that no computing device can generate large primes. This is the root of the issue. If large primes go away, so does encryption! We need to make sure our government understands this.

#BanLargePrimes

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#96
Countries fail to police immigration, promising us that it will go well and we'll all benefit. Then they demand our civil liberties so they can police the immigrants they invited. And our taxes have to rise to pay welfare to them. But don't worry; a few million more and we'll all be better off.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#97
post #49

Increasingly we're seeing 'encryption' discussed in mainstream media as a tool that can only be used for nefarious ends. Kind of like how they talked about "cookies" in the late 90s and early 00s. It's unfortunate that there's no way [without a lot of money] to launch a campaign that highlights the fact that most sensitive online transactions rely on encryption - banking, purchasing, etc - to protect you from The Bad…

We have to get rid of this narrative of bad versus good people while we're at it. It removes every bit of nuance from the discussion.

It doesn't just remove nuance, the entire framework of the discussion is built on untruths when we start there.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#100
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to get rid of this narrative of bad versus good people while we're at it. It removes every bit of nuance from the discussion.

Unfortunately this is a very widespread notion in culture and is helped by major religions.

I wonder how true that is. For Christianity at least, most dominant theology takes the view that the things that exist in the world can be used for good or for ill and aren't inherently one or the other in and of themselves.
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