111–120 of 312 posts
> Dang it, guys. Encryption is now illegal for us to use, everyone uninstall PGP. Said no terrorist or criminal. Once the cat has been let out of the bag there is no getting it in again.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-abou...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 viol…
This sounds uncomfortably close to victim blaming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
> The government needs to work with chips manufacturers to insure that no computing device can generate large primes. Please don't tempt them.
If the priorities are Freedom > all, then encryption is a necessary tool.
If the priorities are Prosperity > Safety > Freedom > all, then society will run roughshod over freedom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some would argue that banning tools of any kind is a stupid and feckless way to address cultural problems.
But that arguing would clearly be flawed. I could thing of a lot of weapons that I would not want to see in the hands of everybody I meet on the street. I think it is partially correct to say that about certain information based "tools" (like encryption or information in newspapers) but sometimes that is not true as well, for example with certain malware
Terrorism is pretty far down the list of things that frighten me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you can see that they think the exact opposite. In order to do something like that, they have to convince themselves that they the good guys, and it has to be done to "purify the evil in the world" or something. The truth is that people are not inherently bad. Evil feeds on itself; if you insist on calling them bad, then you are falling into the same trap that they did. Hopefully you wouldn't act in such a hei…
> The truth is that people are not inherently bad. I don't know about that. I'd argue that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but it doesn't make them not-bad. And humanity definitely has base instincts - if we didn't, we wouldn't need governments and police.
I would agree that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but since there's no objective 'bad', wether or not they're 'actually bad' is up to the observer. When a person is labeled as 'evil' it's not a description of them as a person but a description of what the describer thinks of them. Hitler wasn't evil because he killed millions of people, he was evil because the general consensus is that doing the stuff he did makes you an evil person.
If one loses sight of this and starts think of evil as objective reality, they're taking their biases and opinions as objective reality, and down that path lies ruin.
Jim Bamford of Foreign Policy said encryption was part of the way this was done. On the Diane Rehm Show, when asked what we know, he said "not much, but that encryption or anonymizers, like Tor, might have been used to hide their communications". So they're already working to plant that narrative in listeners' heads.
If you weren't aware, Bamford is actually one of the good guys in this debate. Don't make him say things he didn't say.
"One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Ma…