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An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

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Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#111

Post by mratsim »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

This bill will be sold to the right as helping fight against foreign terrorists living in the US. It will be sold to the left as helping against the alt-right organizing and spreading hate. And it will be sold to everyone as helping stop child exploitation. In addition, there is already a lot going on in the country to keep the average person from focusing on this issue. It seems like allowing the government to spy o…

The 4 horsemen of the infocalypse:

- terrorists,

- drug dealers,

- pedophiles,

- organized crime.

Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Have a target "thing" you wish to stop, yet lack any moral, or practical reasons for doing so?

1. Pick a fear common to lots of people, something that will evoke a gut reaction: terrorists, pedophiles, serial killers.

2. Scream loudly to the media that "thing" is being used by perpetrators. (Don't worry if this is true, or common to all other things, or less common with "thing" than with other long established systems—payphones, paper mail, private hotel rooms, lack of bugs in all houses etc.)

3. Say that the only way to stop perpetrators is to close down "thing", or to regulate it to death, or to have laws forcing en masse tapability of all private communications on "thing". Don't worry if communicating on "thing" is a constitutionally protected right, if you have done a good job in choosing and publicising the horsemen in 2, no one will notice, they will be too busy clamouring for you to save them from the supposed evils.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#112

Post by redis_mlc »

p_l wrote: post #92
redis_mlc wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we had concentration camps for Japanese people during World War II I study WW2, and it's important to be factual. The correct term is internment camps. Japanese-Americans usually lost their property, but the purpose was to locate them in central locations, not to re-educate or liquidate them, as our enemies did to the Allies. For that time in history, it could be argued that the decision made sense. Japanese subs d…

That's what concentration camp is for. To concentrate and control. There were separate death camps (sometimes combined) that involved direct train-to-killing-field pipelines, and most concentration camps involved work in horrible conditions, but that's because of further goals above relocation.

Not in the US.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#113

Post by mratsim »

kelnos wrote: post #94
austincheney wrote: post #21

The solution to policies like this is serverless or point-to-point systems. As an application publisher you cannot be held liable or obligated towards that which you do not possess and are, by design, not capable of possessing. As an example consider copyright law and BitTorrent. BitTorrent provides a software application and protocol but not servers or services, so the BitTorrent software is never liable for the cop…

The solution is to vote out idiots who support things like this, and get the government actually working for its citizens again, not against it. That's hard, and feels damn near impossible sometimes, but it's required. You can't fix social problems with clever technological workarounds.

But clever technological workarounds might expose those idiots for what they are:

Clowns trying to "regulate" things they don't understand without seeking expert advices beyond their narrow lobbyists.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#114

Post by zulgan »

reading those bills makes me feel quite hopeless, considering Gell-Mann Amnesia[1]:

  Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open
  the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s
  case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see
  the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or
  the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the
  story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet
  streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

  In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple
  errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international
  affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more
  accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the
  page, and forget what you know.
It is horrible to think the same thing probably exists in politics, and I cant even imagine what goes through in fields I don't understand.

[1]https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#115

Post by incompatible »

bilegeek wrote: post #95
incompatible wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going after systems that have over a million users would leave a pretty big loophole for niche vendors and open source. But with such a big precedent, those could easily be targeted later.

For those, like you and me, who have been touting open-source as a beacon of hope: I'm sorry, we're done for. First, anything that has more than a gig of memory and sells over a million units must be engineered according to the government's whims. That is pretty much ANYTHING useful nowadays. Hardware will now spy on you. And even though there is old hardware, and theoretically zero-trust programming techniques out t…

Such a crack-down on the free-sharing world of the Internet has been a popular prediction at least since the 1990s, and you can probably find it in the oldest Usenet archives. However, it isn't hard to imagine that we are at a turning point in history, moving beyond the status quo in international relations that has been in place since WW2.

That means a possible end to a whole range of international agreements and treaties, and a fragmented world where anything is possible, somewhere, now that there is no chance of global consensus about anything at all. I'm waiting patiently for the international consensus for protection of "intellectual property" to break down. Plenty of countries take a net loss from it, and without the carrot of access to international trade systems like the WTO, if such are discontinued, they won't have an incentive to continue with it.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#116

Post by mratsim »

austincheney wrote: post #56
nikitaga wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says that this bill applies to operating systems just as well. It's doesn't matter what's typical or reasonable, the hostile actors pushing this and the EARN IT act don't care. Let's skip the denial stage. This is not a technical problem, it's a political problem and needs political solutions. Whatever technical solution you come up with will simply be made illegal if anyone but the nerdy 0.0001% will end…

> Whatever technical solution you come up with will simply be made illegal if anyone but the nerdy 0.0001% will end up using it. But that never happened with BitTorrent. Conversely, industry gradually stopped caring about pursuits of IP violators. While this is ultimately a political problem it will only be practiced where it’s enforceable like all other political problems.

> While this is ultimately a political problem it will only be practiced where it’s enforceable like all other political problems.

Building a company in the US becomes an untenable legal and security risk as if you don't backdoor yourself you'll be liable but if you backdoor yourself and competitors or spies or journalists get the keys, I'm pretty sure you can't ask the US government to pay back the financial or PR losses (which is actually something you can do in Switzerland for privacy-related issues)

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#117

Post by alkonaut »

> (R-SC)...(R-AR)...(R-TN)

It's funny how you can read just that and know that the bill is going to be absurdly bad. Not even just bad in the philosophical/political sense but actually just bad as in not understanding the problem space, or not even formulated clearly or coherently.

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#118

Post by bonzini »

mjburgess wrote: post #49
grey-area wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the symbol of fasces was only used in ancient Rome and has no other meaning? Or the swastika, used in India as a symbol meaning wellbeing? Do you genuinely think symbolism and the meaning of words isn't plastic and contingent on context?

I think when people trade on the negative connotations of "fascism" and then turn around and go "oh i mean this..." they're being duplicitous and alarmist. The antifa lot essentially define fascism as an eternal set of human psychological impulses: nostalgia, in-group preference, desire for cultural homogenity, etc. These did not lead to Fascism, the "obviously bad thing" which they are being alarmist about. Fascism…

Fascism was a direct result of social conflict and worker's movements in Italy after WWI. Check out the "biennio rosso" (two red years); "The revolutionary period was followed by the violent reaction of the Fascist blackshirts militia and eventually by the March on Rome of Benito Mussolini in 1922"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biennio_Rosso

Re: An even worse anti-encryption bill than EARN IT

#120

Post by mratsim »

personjerry wrote: post #29
valvar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really intellectually curious if you avoid articles that are too long or 'intimidating' (what does that even mean)? Perhaps you meant 'timid', not 'curious'.

The articles are of interest to me, but as I open 20 tabs or so the prospect of diving into thick paragraphs on each link seems tedious and daunting, so I put them off and never actually come around to them. I found bookmarking apps would just allow me to delay them indefinitely, so that didn't work either, so I built this to get the approachable inverse pyramid structure entry into any article.[0] [0]: https://en.wi…

I prefer in-depth article that don't skip over "details" and I expect that from an university publication.

Otherwise I would read my Twitter feed.

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