Yet another reminder that if you are a US citizen, your safety and your freedom are far more threatened by those in DC than anyone in a foreign country.
The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
371–380 of 494 posts
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#372Whenever a bill appears, disappears and reappears there’s a big chance it is a case of a “milker bill” or a “toll booth bill”. Basically go after an industry with money and propose some really inconvenient thing for them and say it will go away if you “donate to my campaign” usually through “lobbying efforts”
Big examples in the past were SOPA act for example
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/opinion/politicians-extor...
EDIT: it seems to happen at all levels
https://abc11.com/amp/politics-durham-city-council-extortion...
https://abc30.com/amp/nelson-esparza-charged-extortion-city-...
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "why do you have the right to know?" is a decent answer. "What level of trust do you think you've earned?" "What do you want to do with all this information?" "How will this make things better?' "Don't you have more important things to spend time and money on?" "Is this really the best thing the government should be working on right now?" "How does this help any of society's ills?" "Will taxes need to be incr…
"IT PROTECTS THE CHILDREN!" they'll scream, while using it to take more power away from society and concentrate it into their own hands. Surveillance isn't some harmless thing, because you can tell a million lies with a drop of the truth in them for any reason you want. Imagine you get established in life and decide to run for local politics only to have the fact that you've gone to Vegas 4 times in your life somehow…
> "IT PROTECTS THE CHILDREN!" they'll scream, while using it to take more power away from society and concentrate it into their own hands.
I don't think you're wrong in predicting this, and I actually think you're proven correct by precedent already. The answer to this is many and varied, but one core concept that should always be kept in mind is, much like "with great power comes great responsibility":
With great claims comes great burden of proof
What statistics are you trying to improve, and have you got a baseline you can share with us that can be used in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years to prove the effectiveness of this legislation in "protecting the children"? What's your time frame after which, if no measurable improvement to these statistics has been made, then the legislation will be declared a failure and repealed?
(This is, of course living in some kind of utopian thought experiment, and society just doesn't have the memory to allow such holding the decisions of the powerful to account, but it was therapeutic to write, and it's a worthy goal for long term pursuit).
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#374A reminder that "you have nothing to hide" argument is a fallacy because people abuse their power: Some first hits as reminders of places where their powers are abused [1]: "NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog... [2]: https://reason.com/2022/07/26/police-can-access-your-ring-ca... [3]: https://reason.com/2021/04/26/warrantless-border-s…
Nothing to hide is a premise based on most people being terrified of confrontation. It's an intentional staging to force confrontation or capitulation. When people say they have nothing to hide, in most cases what they're actually saying is that they're afraid of the confrontation implicit in the opposite response (I'm going to forcefully argue for a right to privacy). They're telling you that they're a coward.
The more I think about this, the more it rings true. Implicit in the phrase "I have nothing to hide" is an assumption that everything is open to inspection by default, and concealment is deviance. In most situations, nobody assumes anything close to that. When they do, they're taking a supine position, like an animal submissively exposing its belly.
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#375Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that definition I would say secrecy is also necessary for an open society. For example my bank password is something I don’t want anyone to know.
In practice your bank password is indeed a secret, and that's a bad thing, because that above definition is wrong, which is why I prefer to think about the U2 lyric (from "The Fly"): "They say a Secret is something you tell one other person, so I'm telling you, child". The bank knows your password. Which means they (or more precisely their agents, employees, etc.) can lose it yet they'll probably try to blame you. It…
Don't they usually store a hash of it? And doesn't it therefore for the most part work exactly the way you say it ideally should?
Of course leaking the hash of my password might make it easier to crack, to some extent, but if they've done a good job then this is much better than it being something the bank can trivially lose.
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a straw man. I don't think any politician would ever suggest such a thing at face value unless couched in some other argument. For example, after 9/11 a politician would have said, "I respect your need for privacy, but we live in extraordinary times, and we need to temporarily lift the restrictions on our agencies to effectively combat an imminent threat." The real argument being made isn't that we sh…
I think the US government has debunked that for us, repeatedly and thoroughly. If this is really their argument they've already lost.
Lost in which arena? Do you trust politicians to not expand the scope of governance? If they are called out, they can simply rebrand their efforts under a new bill until 3 letter agencies get all the goodies they desire. How much patience does a low information public have? Is it as much as the political and security state classes?
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#378A reminder that "you have nothing to hide" argument is a fallacy because people abuse their power: Some first hits as reminders of places where their powers are abused [1]: "NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog... [2]: https://reason.com/2022/07/26/police-can-access-your-ring-ca... [3]: https://reason.com/2021/04/26/warrantless-border-s…
To my mind, another problem is the one-sidedness of this effort. Why is someone privileged to scan my data but I can’t write a scanner and parse theirs? There seems to be a fundamental injustice here. Completely ignoring privacy as a concept for a moment, a fair trade should be like for like, value for value.
That's just how government works in general though. [0]
"Why is someone privileged to arrest me but I can't keep them locked up in my house?"
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, politics understands that alright, don't you worry about that. Politicians are the enemies of privacy for the masses, because a transparent population is a population that is easier controlled and manipulated. That's also why terms are being used deliberately incorrectly, to move legitimate positions nearer to criminal activity. Just ask anyone interested in hobbyist chemistry.
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> 1984.
I think it was 1986, as in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. [1]
> That way build sympathy for the law-breakers, then legitimize them via immigration reforms that only benefit the illegals
it was noted "The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans"
Re: The EARN IT bill is back, seeking to scan our messages and photos
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FEINSTEIN Many years ago, I remember she supported a similar bill around limiting encryption. Around six months later, it was reported some government agency was spying on senators' emails, and she wasn't happy. I don't think she made the connection between the two, or that she supports widespread data collection when it's not her data.
Why do Californians keep re-electing her?
This is basically fourth-hand info, so take it with a grain of salt: but what I've heard boils down to this:
The Democratic Party, in its capacity as an actual political organizing apparatus (not an identity/platform), never really recovered from the broad shift in influence from labor to finance in the late '70s/early '80s. It has thus fallen back to relying heavily on a strained ad-hoc network of political machines built by various "rock star" Democrats. That's why the party loosely realigned around "third way" / "blue dog" Democrats in the '90s; it's not that there was some transcendent soul-searching about principles, it's that people like Bill Clinton and Evan Bayh were supported by campaign apparatus that won tough elections. More broadly, this has led to an arguably pathological degree of deference among Democrats to any org that has a track record of winning elections. And whatever faults Feinstein's political machine has, it has that track record.