61–70 of 234 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word in "liberal democracy" is "liberal", not "democracy". There exists only a single political system - an oligarchy. When the oligarchs decide to be nice, we call that "democracy".
Not saying this applies to you, but generally when I see someone espousing this opinion online, they are about to endorse a country who literally has a single king-like ruler, who will throw you in jail if you speak ill about them
The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
Mate, we've not been a democratic superpower for more than a decade now. Just a rudderless, inward looking joke floating adrift off the west coast of France.
So, what's going to happen with secure banking? Will local govt officials (councillors) get to spy on all my credit card transactions and sneak a peak at my account passwords and PINs? This will basically make e-commerce a risky business. If I buy something from overseas, will I then get in trouble for setting up an end-to-end encrypted link with their shop or is it more likely that international sites will just stop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word in "liberal democracy" is "liberal", not "democracy". There exists only a single political system - an oligarchy. When the oligarchs decide to be nice, we call that "democracy".
Not saying this applies to you, but generally when I see someone espousing this opinion online, they are about to endorse a country who literally has a single king-like ruler, who will throw you in jail if you speak ill about them
The statement only observed a bad thing. It did not advocate or even hint at some other bad thing as a proposed solution.
Putting words into someone else's mouth is worse even than whatever they might have said if they had actually said it.
It's an actual wrondoing that you did vs a fabricated wrongdoing you accused someone else of doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The king doesn’t really have any power in practice, I think the royal family mainly exist for tradition/tourism reasons at this point At least according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index it’s one of the most democratic countries at 18th in the world (to be fair that’s made by a UK company but I don’t see why they would be biased)
The king does have some power, but it's mainly lobbying. Big party donors in America have far more power.
I’ve always just thought of royalty as sort of like the prototype for American celebrities like the Kardashians. Just a bunch of people who are famous for being famous.
The fact that every "democratic" superpower seeks to criminalize or prohibit E2EE at the same time gives the impression there is some sorta coordination between state actors to do so.
There's no smoky backroom where Biden and Macron and Sunak and Scholz sit in high-back leather chairs with glasses of whisky scheming about how to counter each threat to their power (with their super-secret puppeteers present only as a grim silhouette in the shadows, or maybe as an unexpected call at a climactic moment).
The only coordination that exists at the level of these superpowers is systemic, caused and communicated purely by a commonality of incentives and threats, not by words.
Every government wants power. One obvious means to achieve that is to retain an ability to surveil their populace. They grew accustomed to growth of this ability as communication shifted from whispered conversations to physical letters to telegrams to analog telephones to unencrypted Internet communication; now the ability of ordinary citizens to trivially encrypt their communication is a major setback to that expectation.
The timing of it is merely coincidental, or at most coordinated by the cross-border technological developments.
The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1]. Diffie j…
> UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased. These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and th…
???: "Peter Mandelson is a hom… owner"
Regular guest: "Why can't gay people own homes?"
Host: "Well, new Director General, let's see if that goes out."
At the time, and I'm pleasantly amazed how fast this has changed, being gay and in charge was still mildly scandalous in the eyes of tabloids, and that was about the same time the age of consent was equalised.
However such (entirely valid) reasons for respecting privacy should be for all, but as far as I remember Mandelson was the only person who got to keep that particular secret.
Conversely, right after the referendum someone said the BBC should play "God Save The Queen" at the end of the day's programming in concordance with the departure from the EU, and Newsnight responded with this, which is still up on their official channel: https://youtu.be/WwsQ_5Wm4oo
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word in "liberal democracy" is "liberal", not "democracy". There exists only a single political system - an oligarchy. When the oligarchs decide to be nice, we call that "democracy".
Not saying this applies to you, but generally when I see someone espousing this opinion online, they are about to endorse a country who literally has a single king-like ruler, who will throw you in jail if you speak ill about them
edit: re-reading your comment, I think (mistakenly perhaps) you were suggesting that I support Russia. I would like to clarify that I most certainly do not.
The UK has threatened this on and off for a while. I recall around 2000 they proposed a bill which would have forced everyone who wanted to use encryption to escrow a key with the government. I used to watch some TV in those days and the UK programme "NewsNight" had a discussion about it. There proposing the idea was some poor government flunky. There explaining the flaws in the idea was Whitfield Diffie[1]. Diffie j…
Also I don't trust any government not to mishandle crypto keys, so backdoored encryption = broken encryption