When you look at the things the left and right agree on you can see who really runs the show.
Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
341–350 of 361 posts
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need to rather argue that the moral cost and side-effects of public surveillance far outweighs its usefulness. The argument I make is that it is more cost effective to develop a society where one does not need to commit crimes to get by in the first place. Law enforcement is reactionary and can only punish when crimes are already committed. While we shouldn't get rid of law enforcement, because crime will always…
It's very clear that the people in power in the UK and USA don't want the law to be enforced. They seemingly don't want low-crime society, they want only to be immune to prosecution themselves. Your idea seems predicated on people in general being benevolent towards others. That's not going to work, there's a significant motivated cadre who want to do terrible things provided they 'win'. You don't enlist Cambridge An…
I think if you find that you poll a random set of people, most of them are (for the most part) benevolent towards one another. So I think it is disingenuous to talk about people in power and then apply that to people in general when these two have different behaviors. The point of democracies are to increase the robustness of governments to help discourage abuse of those in power while providing mechanisms to remove those that do abuse that power. Obviously this can be improved, but that's a different conversation all together.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very clear that the people in power in the UK and USA don't want the law to be enforced. They seemingly don't want low-crime society, they want only to be immune to prosecution themselves. Your idea seems predicated on people in general being benevolent towards others. That's not going to work, there's a significant motivated cadre who want to do terrible things provided they 'win'. You don't enlist Cambridge An…
> You don't enlist Cambridge Analytica when you think you're right, you do that sorry of thing when you don't care about being right/moral/legal but only about subjugating others. Be careful about how you frame that. While this is true of some people who engage in activities like this, there is also the "ends justify the means" group. The latter does believe what they are doing is right and moral, and that being righ…
I see this line of thinking frequently, especially in modern politics, and it always fascinates me. I can get people to agree that the system is messed up because it is a race to the bottom. I can get people to agree that someone needs to draw a line in the sand for it to stop. I can get most people to agree that sacrificing moral values in an effort to win results in a hollow victory (and encourages the race to the bottom). But the interesting part is that my opinion that one needs to hold their own tribe accountable for sacrificing morals is extremely controversial. Yet I see it as logically following from the above.
I think this is why we can see people gladly vote for those that they very much disagree with. I think this is why attacking someone's tribal leader makes them double down and strengthens their convictions rather than changing belief. I think the question is how to get people to realize that you have to fight fair to get others to fight you back with fairness.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
So this statement: “See encryption is just math, and you can't really outlaw or limit how math is used.” Is false.
A sufficiently authoritarian regime can outlaw pretty much anything they want, if they're willing to be heavy-handed about the enforcement and make a mockery of the justice system in the process—both of which can be observed in the anti-money-laundering regulations. Enforcement won't be 100% effective, of course, and the collateral damage would be enormous. It won't have nearly as much effect on the actual "bad guys"…
Exactly, that’s why statements like “you can’t outlaw math” are counterproductive and wrong.
You can outlaw math, and the result will be really bad.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first half I disagree with: if a law is passed, circumvention tools won’t help. This is what it seems like you have been arguing for up till now, and frankly not getting traction. However, the second part (about the fait accompli) is a very important point. You’d have to achieve widespread usage among the general population for this to be effective to be effective.
I don't see how you could disagree on the first point though. Not only is is often done today to varying degrees of success depending on country and technology, it was exactly how much of consumer crypto got its start back in the earlier days of the internet. During the 90's technologies like RSA, PGP and others basically got built and released while constantly treading all over extremely shaky legal ground. It was t…
I am well of the history.
Treading shaky legal ground is not the same as circumvention.
This time around, if encryption is banned, they will do more than just hound Phil Zimmerman for years on end.
They’ll come after the end users, and ‘circumvention’ won’t help.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of no government ever that has been so benevolent that its citizens didn't benefit from privacy and security.
This implies that said governments are bad. Or have the perception of it. You know who benefits from VPNs, privacy, and security? The proud boys. Russia. China. Steve Bannon. And their bots, that's who. They are a threat to civil society at present, and they're using that very privacy and security to organize to destroy the thing you're trying to "protect" by drinking Barlow's kool-aid.
Those people also benefit from cash, opaque walls, and freedom of speech. That bad people benefit from something is hardly a damning case against it.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#347Let's be real, beyond this being bullshit, it's double-bullshit. Setting aside that it's a morally corrupt idea that wouldn't help, it wouldn't even work. You can't get rid of encription. Code is easier to spread than both drugs and guns and neither of them are as widely useful to criminals. How could anybody who's not completely incompetent think that this would possibly affect more than just the average consumer? Who votes for these clowns?
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't enlist Cambridge Analytica when you think you're right, you do that sorry of thing when you don't care about being right/moral/legal but only about subjugating others. Be careful about how you frame that. While this is true of some people who engage in activities like this, there is also the "ends justify the means" group. The latter does believe what they are doing is right and moral, and that being righ…
I see this line of thinking frequently, especially in modern politics, and it always fascinates me. I can get people to agree that the system is messed up because it is a race to the bottom. I can get people to agree that someone needs to draw a line in the sand for it to stop. I can get most people to agree that sacrificing moral values in an effort to win results in a hollow victory (and encourages the race to the…
If you have the time, I'd highly recommend writing this argument as a blog post; it deserves a higher and more exclusive visibility than it gets as embedded in these forums.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to expr…
> We should not be arguing that that nothing good comes out of surveillance. The problem is that we, the people, can never know what, if any, good is coming out of surveillance. Attorney General Barr admitted that in one of his speeches arguing for back doors in encryption. The government cannot reveal what is being discovered through surveillance without disclosing sources and methods that it (understandably) wants…
It's often not the the government "cannot" reveal those details (maybe not immediately and directly in some cases, sure, but certainly with the distance of time that tools such as FOIA requests require), but that they "won't" and have no interest to. It should be the public demand with each attempt to increase surveillance to increase oversight. Sousveillance (watching the watchers) is the best known defense we have at keeping surveillance in check. The hard part is speaking those demands to those in power, embedding those checks/balances/required transparency in the surveillance processes in such a way that they cannot be circumvented by those in power.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
To paraphrase someone I know, "once they run out of criminals, they'll just start catching people they don't like". Once they have this ability, it will be much harder to make them give it up.
>To paraphrase someone I know, "once they run out of criminals, they'll just start catching people they don't like". >Once they have this ability, it will be much harder to make them give it up. There's an argument to be made that this is already happening and, in fact, has been happening for decades. I'm of course referring to the "War on Drugs." There's quite a bit of analysis in the literature to show that restric…
Having watched the newspaper coverage of the debacle involving Breonna Taylor with neighborhood interest, it's very clear how much the War on Drugs has caused so much pain for so little gain. There are so many facts involved that make it harder and harder to not cynically and conspiratorially believe there was some sort of personal vendetta involved and the media circus a cover up (the latest word is the city's Drug Enforcement SWAT team throwing the cops involved under the bus for not complying with Drug Enforcement accountability procedures in a warrant search involving a person's residence and throwing the entire department under the bus for trying to execute too many warrants at the same time spreading itself too thin and not following procedures). Occam's Razor still suggests outrageous ineptitude was involved, and the feeling of a conspiracy is just cops doing what they always do and protecting their own as long as they can before only breaking ranks just when public scrutiny gets too tough.
(But the detective that put together the residential warrant "bundled" it with a bunch of non-residential warrants, nearly burying/hiding it, when it took it to the Judge to be signed, and then again the SWAT team now says that the residential warrant execution plan was buried in the same swamp of non-residential warrant executions, and it's really hard to keep from wondering if that was malice or incompetence as all these details come out. Was it personal? Or was it dumb luck? I can't even tell which is worse at this point, because either seems to show a lack of responsibility, and both are worsened by likely what will continue to be a lack of consequences or atonement.)