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Oppose the Earn IT Act

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Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't even have to be corruptible. People are fallible . Someone could just make a mistake. No bad actors needed. (Bad actors exist, and make the problem worse. But the problem exists even without bad actors.)

The TSA used essentially this system for luggage locks. You could have a lock on your luggage, but the TSA had a master key that could open any luggage lock. The master keys became available on 3D printing sites after the TSA allowed a photo of them to be published in a news article: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-lugg...

This is an apt reminder that the question is not "how likely is it that backdoor keys will be leaked/stolen?", but rather "how soon until the first backdoor keys are leaked/stolen, and how frequently after that?"

And to make it much worse, we would now also have to ask "how soon until the required systemic weaknesses themselves are used an attack vector for a mass breach?".

Just for a moment, ignore all arguments about citizens' rights to privacy, potential for abuse by the organizations authorized to access the secrets (and their many fallible and corruptible employees), and so on. Of course all that _is_ important, but just for the sake of argument, ignore it. The problem remains that if anything resembling the "EARN IT" bill passes, then attacks against encryption will _scale too effectively_, and the USA will have exposed itself to having the secrets of thousands of politicians and civil servants leaked to an adversary at once. What do you think happens to democracy when that happens?

I get that many people are short-sighted, or even simply apathetic to the long-term consequences of a law that might make their job easier today. But it seems that whenever computers are involved, lawmakers become _so_ incredibly short-sighted that it verges on madness.

Consider this: a bill requiring a small GPS and remote-controlled bomb to be installed in the engine of every car would allow the police to entirely avoid dangerous high-speed pursuits. If it could be done cheaply enough, should it be done? It's pretty easy to understand the myriad ways this could be abused, so it would never happen. But add computers to the mix, and suddenly any kind of foresight goes out the window.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#352
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…

Having a conversation in a bar thinking it's private..

Anyway, it might at well be Pleasantville 1950s for a lot of people. They are both hiding everything and being suspicious AF of anybody with something to hide.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#353
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?".

I've used that one before. And for those who truly do believe they have nothing to hide, you can point to the ~1% of wrongfully convicted inmates in the US who probably thought they didn't have anything to hide either.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#354
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…

Humans need privacy because of the selfishness of our survival biology. There simply are bad people in the world, and I wish it were different, but it's not. 'Just trust us' are words often told to us by people who only want power - at our expense. The best sentiment I've ever heard about privacy is from Shoshana Zuboff, and it's now influenced my thoughts. It's at the end of her amazing 2018 book 'Surveillance Capit…

> To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity. >there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled.

I would agree. Those are very important points. When people being watched they are not as free as they could be in their actions and exploration of ideas, because they measure what to say and what is forbidden to say. This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity domain.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe. Well, that's pretty much wishful thinking. > Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from. Are they now. Let's put it this way: secti…

> Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News. Under what law? Section 230 is a special exemption for tech companies. Without it, Google is indeed subject to the same laws as Fox News. Now, it's possible those laws aren't strong enough... but they'd be equally not strong enough upon both Google and Fox News. Currently, Fox…

[deleted]

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#356
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…

While this is on the right track, one would point out that these conversations wouldn't be public they would only be visible to government authorities. I think the due process argument is more compelling. Part of preventing abuses and corruption by law enforcement is ensuring they can only surveil people with reasonable suspicion. Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. But it's crucial that this gets…

>Yes there are people who should be under surveillance.

When I read this as you put it . It comes to me something we tend to forget that surveillance is a form of attack on a person's freedom obviously. The fact of it presence is already an insult actually.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#357
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?".

I usually say something similar, "Oh? Let me show your browser history and all your text messages to your significant other, your co-workers, and your boss."

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#358
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…

May be a good argument would be that it's not about 'nothing to hide' it's about your authority to decide wether you wish something to hide or not.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#359
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't the counterargument be "but only the government would have access, and we can trust the government"?

The counter-counter-argument is the whole history of both individual (against policy) and official (by policy) abuse of surveillance in the history of government. Every expansion of monitoring must weigh the specific expected benefits against the very real cost of expanding both of those abuse surfaces.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

STAR sounds very reasonable. And yeah, I'm definitely open to ordinal systems besides IRV. I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (which is of course the whole point of voting systems to begin with). I'd consider IRV or MMP vastly better than FPTP, and something like STAR or Ranked Pairs only slightly better than that. Which is a good example of a preference that STAR would be good…

> I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good

I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.

But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?

And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!

You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"

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