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The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

251–260 of 520 posts

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would require people willing to be single-issue voters, the way many are on abortion or firearms. Would anyone here switch party votes to a candidate who sided their way on tech privacy — even if they disagreed on other core principles like abortion, gun rights, religion in schools, etc? Maybe a few, but I'm not convinced many.

Those single issue voters are the not present in many other countries besides the US. This might show that the right arguments and lobbying can turn what is not a big political debate into a wedge over time.

> the right arguments and lobbying

Firearms and abortion became The Issue for so many single-issue voters because of well-funded, relentless fear-mongering.

You can do the same thing with tech privacy, but you're going to have to "play dirty" to accomplish the same thing, and it's going to take decades.

It's also important to note that abortion successfully tied itself into religion, which is not something you're going to be able to do with cryptography.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#252
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS. I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine. I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure…

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman , and The Turner Diaries , selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible…

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#253
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts. The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect. They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which…

> They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys. But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys turns them rather reliably into bad guys.

> But we all know

Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z.

Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian, compared to the relative minority it seems to be now.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#254
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're exactly wrong. The Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in unswervingly-- was written at a time when privacy was the DEFAULT. Any person could walk into any building or any field and speak, anonymously to another person. It cost quite a bit to spy on someone and that was a natural limit to how much spying could be done. The argument from the other side is always-- the framers didn't imagine a wor…

> Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in unswervingly What does that mean? Meanwhile, I don't really feel like there was much privacy back when the constitution was written. What makes you think there was?

there wasn't even .uch in the way of federal law enforcement.

Any type of eavesdroppi g would have to be done via tge post, which to this day has better confidentiality guarantees because USPS is one of the only service providers to which Third Party Doctrine does not apply for auto-negating expectations of privacy.

if you were investigated, it would have to be by a local law enforcement official. There was no cross-referencing of biometrics, fingerprints, or driver's licenses across state lines.

There were no license plates to track. When they were eventuallu implemented, it would be decades before data stores were implemented that allowed real-time tracking via ALPR.

It was, in fact, not a given or even remotely a given that it was considered technically possible to localize or pin down an individual without one or more individuals being engaged in the act of tailing.

There is no question that at the timeof the signing of the Constitution, the world had a much higher degree of privacy by default.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#255
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS. I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine. I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure…

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman , and The Turner Diaries , selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible…

> But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!

Any links on reading more about this?

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#256
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman , and The Turner Diaries , selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible…

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#257
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman , and The Turner Diaries , selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible…

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#258

These assholes just keep trying and trying until they get their way. At least it's good to see there's some actual pushback in the United States. Here in Australia, this sort of legislation has bipartisan support, it gets rubberstamped and passed on a Friday evening before a public holiday with the media staying silent. Keep fighting against these bills, or else you'll get a government that happily runs roughshod ove…

Yeah. Maybe there should be a law that makes it illegal to attempt to ban encryption.

Shouldn't it be covered under the 4th amendment?

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Squelching small players is the intent. Large institutions are easy to exert political control over. It's hard to exert political control over masses of individuals. It benefits the Republican party when you get your news from FOX. It benefits the Democratic party when you get your news from CNN. It does not benefit the Democratic or Republican party when any individual can broadcast their views to millions of willin…

FOX and CNN are constantly accused of spreading misinformation by huge swaths of the populace (but not necessarily the same swath for both networks).

Any examples of CNN misinformation? Not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just not aware of it. Meanwhile FOX misinformation is pretty well known.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The minute your system depends on good behavior from any of the parties involved, you've failed as a designer. Everyone is bad designers then. All of them rely on operating system providers not stealing your messages. Some with the people providing the chat application. Since they have to be able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere. Society needs trust to function.

> All of them rely on operating system providers not stealing your messages. You can compile your own operating system and control your hardware supply chain - you don't have to rely entirely on trust for those components. > Since they have to be able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere. If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people providing the chat application can't log anything except noise.…

Ken Thompson has something to say about trusting the compiler you use for that OS, or even the microcode the CPU running said compiler is using. It’s functionally impossible to not trust an outside vendor for something on a modern computer

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

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