Indefinite prison for suspect who won’t decrypt hard drives, US government says

>And historically, from Jim Crow laws, to J.E. Hoover and McCarthy, and onwards to Snowden, this is wrong, because?

Most of the examples you gave are historical. Regarding Snowden: has anything been used against anyone? I'm not condoning the snooping, BTW.

I think when you compare the US government to the likes of Russia and China, you'll see that the US is really not "out to get you". Certainly in this case it's pretty obvious that the govt isn't out to get an innocent person. There is a lot of strong evidence already that he has been collecting child porn. That of course doesn't mean that illegal procedures should be used to obtain more evidence, but we shouldn't get hysterical about it and say that the govt is going to use this to frame innocent people.

> There is abuse of children, then there's the act of making recordings of it for others to consume. The latter certainly functions on a demand curve, as it takes more work to produce something than it is to just do it.

With the Rhino argument, the entire reason for the act occurring is economic (kill rhino, collect horn, get paid). For paedos, the act occurs because they want to do it. Being able to gain social standing or affirmation is secondary. People record child pornography for posterity without distributing it.

> There probably isn't much rationality to it. Legislation is more of a political process than a rational one.

Agreed, and that is the thesis of my argument.

> I would agree with that assessment. But there's also a shocking amount of truly, unbearably horrific content in the world. Disgust may not be the most rational basis to make something illegal on, but it's better than nothing. Laws are intended to be iterated on over time, a more nuanced view will eventually prevail, though it might take decades.

Disgust is not a reasonable basis for making something illegal. At a bare minimum, I believe that the first amendment rights of people drawing depictions of child abuse are being violated. But it's "icky" and not politically viable to defend, so nobody defends them.

> Paedophilia is not illegal. It's child abuse and possession of child pornography that's illegal. You can't convict someone of being a paedophile, there's no law against it.

Possession of something that depicts, but is not, child pornography is also illegal (and to your point, irrational to make illegal).

At the risk of losing my footing to try to make a point, I think it's somewhat similar if someone said "Being homosexual isn't illegal but engaging in any act whatsoever, whether it victimizes anyone or not, is." We've already ruled that sodomy laws violate people's constitutional rights. I'm not saying that paedophiles should have the right to express their affinity with children (they cannot consent), but removing all outlets for it smacks of trying to pray the gay away.

I think our nation would be far more sane if we decriminalized mere possession of child pornography, as disgusting as it is. I would rather have my fifth amendment right not to decrypt a drive than catch people that have not directly (and I would argue also not indirectly) harmed anyone by viewing images.

> So, if you want to use it you need to demonstrate harm.

That's a false dichotomy. We cannot have perfect knowledge about everything that could possibly help or harm society. We need to retain the ability to act in its absence.

> I really don't know, but I also accept I don't know.

Not all things should be treated this way, but in the case of kiddie porn, I'd argue that defaulting to the stance that all conduct in this space being morally wrong, perhaps even criminal, is justified.

It's tempting to want an ideological framework that preserves sanctity of thought so that we don't have to consider that we, ourselves might be morally wrong on occasion, but the world doesn't work that way. The mere fact that millions of people want something is enough to create a market in violence and suffering. Whether it's children, rhinos, or slaves. (I use market in a non-economic sense here, any venue for satisfying a desire is a market)

Freenet has only symbolic privacy protection for downloaders. Privacy is supposed to come from your node requesting not only blobs it is downloading for itself, but also blobs other nodes have requested from it. Unfortunately, as far as I understand, freenet's routing algorithm is such that these two classes of requests come from blatantly different statistical distributions. The further a requested blob is from a node's address the more likely it is the node is requesting the blob for itself. Another layer of protection is the blocks being encrypted, but if they are publicly published that can be changed with a bit of scraping.

What this means is that by running a single freenet node you can monitor half a hundred others. What's surprising is that it hasn't been done earlier. You don't even have to commit a crime to do it as a civilian.

This could have been avoided if freenet was hoisted on top of tor (not totally trivial because freenet runs over udp) or had an onion routing layer of its own. If the glaring privacy flaw was fixed freenet would have amazing properties which tor lacks, namely very safe and scalable (no dos unless you take down the whole of freenet) static hosting and non-realtime communication in general, and utter censorship resistance. Trying to figure out who has a blob only spreads it around more.

It's a shame the ideas behind tor and freenet haven't come together in a popular project.