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Oppose the Earn IT Act

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Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#301

Post by jay_kyburz »

apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

I think this misses the point. When people say "nothing to hide" they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_.

I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships.

We need privacy because if ever laws are passed that we don't agree with, we need to be able to break them until we can have the law changed.

For example, if it was against the law to be a pro-democracy protestor.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#302

Post by el_dev_hell »

cortic wrote: post #269
apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

My nothing to hide argument is a little different; Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney probl…

I like this argument.

My normal response to "I have nothing to hide" is: "Cool, can I take a look at your browser search/reddit history?".

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#303

Post by krapp »

bcassedy wrote: post #288
krapp wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have not seen any evidence that it is a serious problem in that it has significant impact at a societal level. >Let's not forget that the same people that propose these bills are the ones hanging out at Epstein's private island. The implication in the last sentence of your comment would seem to contradict your initial premise.

There are only a few hundred people in Congress. Even if all of them were partaking this still wouldn't be a societal impact level issue.

Your comment seemed to imply that a network of pedophiles in Congress was tailoring these laws specifically to weaken law enforcement's ability to prosecute people like them. That would certainly lead to a societal impact, as it would by design empower and entrench child pornographers and pedophiles across the board.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#304

Post by newacct583 »

mindslight wrote: post #285
newacct583 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. In general, a "centrist", in common usage, is a person who broadly supports existing social structures. So yes, they're going to support law enforcement over privacy, the media industry over public access concerns, etc... So to anyone who cares deeply about some issue of social change, a centrist is going to look "just as bad as" the "other side". But calling them (sigh)…

> a person who broadly supports existing social structures. So yes, they're going to support law enforcement over privacy, the media industry over public access concerns We already have a word for this - conservative . And I do agree that conservatives have consistent and valid points, even if I do not agree. I don't know what other word to use besides "authoritarian" as in the two-dimensional political space with re…

Again, you're playing semantic games. That's not what "conservative" means in modern political discourse, at all. And I'm sure you know this. In fact when journalists want to use the sense you cited they generally have to call it out explicitly (c.f. "small-c conservative", by reference to the Conservative parties in commonwealth nations).

> I don't know what other word to use besides "authoritarian"

And for the same reasons, it doesn't help your case to invent new jargon here either. The word you're looking for, describing people generally predisposed to agreement with existing social and government structures, is "centrist". It's what I use, it's what everyone in journalism uses. It's probabaly what you use too when you're talking to people in the real world and not trying to score points with hyperbole on HN by likening centrists to Nazis and Communists.

Basically: you know what I meant.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#305

Post by zxzvxczv2c_xcm »

Maybe it would be a fair deal if all members of the government equally open all their communication, including all their private matters to the entire world. Equal monks, equal hoods. They are honest people that have nothing to hide, not? I mean, exemplary people should be an example to the people.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#306

Post by jay_kyburz »

shay_ker wrote: post #244
apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

I like the speeding analogy. "I have nothing to hide" "Have you ever sped on the highway?" "Well, yes" "Imagine if the government reveals it's been tracking everyone's speed, and has decided to write everyone tickets for speeding." "That's insane, the government can't do that!" "Exactly"

This is not a good analogy because if you speed on the highway you are putting other peoples lives at risk, and doing it in public. I think we probably should have a satellite tracking every car and issuing a ticket as soon as a car speeds.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#307

Post by lr4444lr »

apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

Most people implicitly mean, "nothing unlawful to hide" when they say that, I think.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#308

Post by EGreg »

apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

The police should wear body cams all the time, and we can end qualified immunity

Got nothing to hide and there will be no problem, right?

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#309

Post by ppierald »

There is a fantastic book that covers all of these topics and goes straight to the heart of the "nothing to hide" arguments both pro and con.

In fact, the book is titled "Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security" by Daniel J. Solove. I would highly recommend for those who are security and privacy conscious.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#310

Post by godelski »

ekimekim wrote: post #297
elihu wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when people talk about RCV (in the context of single-winner elections), they're almost always talking about the same thing as IRV. "Ranked voting" is the more general term. > Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to det…

> This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my pr…

STAR, the system we're advocating, solves a lot of these issues though. Score voting is "like" approval voting but with more precision (really approval is just the binary version of score). STAR05 is often suggested because experimentation shows that it has enough expressiveness to generate good winners but is simple. You can always add more expressiveness by increasing the range in which you can score candidates, but there's diminishing returns as you increase it and added complexity (I don't think people will have a problem rating 0-10 though since we actually do that a lot).

I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).

If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).

But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).

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