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Oppose the Earn IT Act

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Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#381

Post by bduerst »

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…

The best response is simpler than that, that even encryption laymen can understand:

"If I have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to look."

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#382

Post by metta2uall »

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…

But YouTube Live is publicly accessible, it's not the same as a law enforcement warrant. I think a better analogy is whether it should be okay for a judge to allow police officers to storm into your private residence with only a few seconds warning, and then proceed to examine and even take away anything in your room.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#383

Post by hristov »

It is interesting how this dovetails with the trade war with China. When the media got all hot and heavy about evil Huawei and how the would use their communication equipment to spy on America, my response was simple. They can't spy on us if we encrypt everything. If they want to give us cheap subsidized telecom equipment, let them, we will just use encryption for everything.

Then the government decided to ban encryption and then things started to get clearer.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#384

Post by dragonwriter »

hristov wrote: post #383

It is interesting how this dovetails with the trade war with China. When the media got all hot and heavy about evil Huawei and how the would use their communication equipment to spy on America, my response was simple. They can't spy on us if we encrypt everything. If they want to give us cheap subsidized telecom equipment, let them, we will just use encryption for everything. Then the government decided to ban encryp…

> They can't spy on us if we encrypt everything.

Well, they can if it gets onto their hardware before being encrypted or after being decrypted, such as if it is encrypted or decrypted on their hardware, and since Huawei makes a lot of consumer gear...

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#385

Post by old-gregg »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #375
old-gregg wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I fully support strong privacy & encryption, there is absolutely no logic in this argument because it tries to build upon an unrelated hypothetical. A stronger argument should have tried to explain how this violates the constitution: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...

The logic used here is argument by analogy. Talking about the constitution would be a different argument.

Analogy != "something different entirely". If we accept such weak criteria for acceptable arguments, one could argue for or against anything by picking a convenient "analogy".

Pointing out that a weakened encryption is analogous to getting a wiretapping order for everyone without a cause is a stronger argument.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#386

Post by jay_kyburz »

snicky wrote: post #370
jay_kyburz wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah? And what if there are no other cars on the highway?

Killing yourself is still a cost to society. People have to come out and scrape you off the road, put all your bits in a box and bury you.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#387

Post by mhh__ »

pphysch wrote: post #113
snarf21 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear-mongering is strong. Look at all the freedoms we lost after 9/11. Pedophiles and terrorists and porn are always the scapegoats. It is also a very electable sound bite. Everyone is against the "bad people". Re-election at any cost is the goal. We have government of the people and by the people but we stopped being for the people long long ago.

Don't forget the communists, the OG once-and-future scapegoats.

With communists, especially in the 50s you would have been arguably justified in being extremely sceptical of them in power. Not to the extents of McCarthy but keep in mind that around that time the KGB were really flexing their muscles.

In the UK, the soviets were almost totally successful largely because the British establishment could not believe that someone who came from the right place and went to the right place could really be a communist spy. Even after, with or without hindsight, it was obvious Kim Philby was almost exonerated and re-entered MI6 to an extent purely because the people above him decided it was simultaneously too damaging and unlikely for a Cambridge man to be a communist.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#388

Post by ClayShentrup »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #230
JoshTriplett wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would be greatly reduced due to RCV (and Approval) being better at capturing preferences The problem is that IRV/RCV doesn't capture your preferences, because it ignores all your preferences except your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated. IRV is reasonably good at making sure that third-parties can't prevent first-parties from being elected, but very bad at actually allowing third parties to actually b…

While I’d take approval voting over FPTP, to me it exacerbates the issue of voting being highly tactical. Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins. If there’s someone I believe to be an existential threat to the country on the ballot, my best choice might be to check everyone other than them even if that means checking the box of…

> it exacerbates the issue of voting being highly tactical.

No. Approval voting has been extensively studied by game theory experts like NYU political science professor Steven Brams, and found to be one of the most resistant to tactical voting. Computer simulations show it performing exceptionally well even with highly strategic voters.

https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html

https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse7

There's even a mathematical theorem (proof) that, given plausible strategic behavior by voters, approval voting always elects a beats-all "Condorcet winner" when one exists. This is mild (some would say GOOD) reaction to strategy.

https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW

> Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins.

Yes, this is beneficial not harmful. The alternative is that the voting method must ignore all preference data about the relative support of X vs. Y as long as the voter prefers X to Y. That causes big problems.

https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/later-no-harm-72c44e145510

It is precisely why ranked voting methods like Instant Runoff Voting are so vulnerable to tactics. If I prefer the Green, my general best strategy is to tactically rank the Democrat in 1st place, thus "burying" the Green and making the mere appearance of un-electability a self-fulfilling prophecy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ

https://www.rangevoting.org/NESD

The major moral of voting theory is to AVOID RANKED VOTING METHODS, favoring RATED voting methods like score voting, STAR voting, and approval voting. Here's a presentation I gave in 2015 to the Colorado League of Women Voters explaining more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBm_Hcu4DI&t=488

I would also recommend the 2008 book "Gaming the Vote". Full disclosure: I'm in it.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#389

Post by ClayShentrup »

elihu wrote: post #197
godelski wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Fair Vote and the CGP Grey videos, while I like them for an introduction to the subject, both have two very misleading points. 1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods. 2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effe…

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…

"Resistance to tactical voting" is a dumb, essentially nonsensical, concept. What we care about is how well the voting method performs given there is some amount of strategic voting. I made a simple chart here to visualize this fallacy.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basi...

Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#390

Post by antoncohen »

metta2uall wrote: post #382
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…

But YouTube Live is publicly accessible, it's not the same as a law enforcement warrant. I think a better analogy is whether it should be okay for a judge to allow police officers to storm into your private residence with only a few seconds warning, and then proceed to examine and even take away anything in your room.

No, because when police have a search warrant and storm your home, they can't seize the private conversation you had in bed with your partner a year earlier. They can't suck the memories out of your head. Technology like mobile phones and messaging have become an extension of us, they are used for private conversations and personal memories. Breaking encryption on these is not like search warrants of yesteryear, and not like wire taps. In traditional search warrant they would not be seizing communications. And in wire taps they would only get conversations going forward, not years in the past that they can search through, and even with conversations going forward they sometimes wouldn't be allowed to listen to personal conversations.

The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the constitution) is all about protecting us against abuses of government officials. It presumes people in government could be bad, and we need protecting from them. By allowing a government official to seize all our private conversations it could allow a bad government official to go fishing and find things things that they can use against their enemies. There are many, many laws. Many of them aren't enforced, but could be.

For example in some states adultery is illegal, even a felony in some states. Not just in small states, but in New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. In Massachusetts there hasn't been an adultery conviction since 1983. But if law enforcement was allowed to decrypt an iPhone, and find private bedroom things, it could be used as an attack on a political enemy.

It isn't only "bad people" that should be worried about the government. I think pretty much everyone agrees Martin Luther King Jr. was a good person. But the government at the time didn't think so. When he was killed the first people on the scene were the police officers who were doing surveillance of him from across the street. That is the kind of government we need to be protected from.

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