Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right – in the short term. In the mid- to long-term, I'm not so sure.
What about those new movies?
What about them?
Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
131–140 of 409 posts
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#132Imagine when your most effective countermeasure you have against encryption is authoritatively demanding others don't use it.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
There seems to be a function missing from government. All governments, AFAICT. Legislators change the law (including, rarely, the constitution) — effectively by applying a hierarchy of "countermanding orders" — to suit the changing interests of the public. Courts interpret the law, but only downstream of legislation. The executive can make regulation and executive orders, but only in agreement with the law. But at th…
What fantasy are you living in? Have you seen the formation of any countries? Even one? Have you ever seen representative anarchy? Please tell me where - I'll be there like a shot! > embedded journalism to figure out what issues "the people" are beginning to care about Afaik, journalists are there to tell the people what to think - what do you think propaganda is? Do you think that propaganda is something the Russian…
> Have you ever seen representative anarchy? Please tell me where - I'll be there like a shot!
"Representative anarchy" was my shorthand for the concept of "whoever can stand up with a megaphone and get the largest mob behind them wins." To do this, the person with the megaphone needs to understand what hot-button issues will make the mob follow them in their coup or secession attempt. In that sense of understanding the public, they are acting as a kind of representative. Not a democratic representative — but the same kind of representative that you get when someone stands up and shouts something in a bar and everyone else shouts "yeah!"
Yes, the mob can be manipulated. But the nice thing about the breakdown of law and order, is that it stays broken until someone who's good at governing actively re-establishes it. If the mob that the new guy used to depose the old guy, doesn't appreciate the new guy's first few acts in power, then said mob will still usually be riled-up enough — and the new guy's hold on power will still usually be tenuous enough — that the mob will just turn around and depose the new guy, too. (Look at the War of the Roses for many small examples of this; or for a perfect example, at Burkina Faso's two coups in one year last year, where the second one was driven precisely by the public's lack of faith in the guy who did the first coup.)
> Afaik, journalists are there to tell the people what to think
Maybe I chose the wrong word? I suppose I meant intelligence operatives — but not the secret kind. Just, people who are paid to go and watch things and talk to people, and tell their government department what they found out. Census workers, for example! Or the people who go into retail stores to get the pricing data for the central banks to calculate the Consumer Price Index.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#134Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…
>It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars They didn't, and for what it's worth public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the law. I think anyone discussing a British law ought to keep that in mind ( https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBil... ). Even on the most contentious parts of the bill: Do you bel…
The problem with all of this is that these poll questions don't leave room to allow people to understand the implications and consequences of taking one of the positions.
Let's say the question was written something like this:
> Do you believe it should or should not become a legal requirement for the following to scan messages and posts on their platforms for child sexual abuse, even if such scanning would also compromise the security and privacy of all law-abiding users of the platform?
I obviously can't say for certain, but I think that 60% and 79% would drop, at least some substantial amount. Even if the "should not" positions wouldn't go up, I think it would muddy the waters enough that many new people would fall into the "don't know" camp.
The problem is that the polling just presents these questions to evoke a "oh, obviously I'd want this, to protect the children!" sort of reaction. The "but think of the children!" thing is almost a joke or cliche at this point, but it is disturbingly effective at shutting off people's critical thinking, causing them to agree with whatever the argument is. On top of that, media reporting around these issues never gives the pro-privacy angle enough consideration. And even when it does, it's usually in small "nerdy" publications that most people don't read. I'm also of the opinion that many people just can't and won't understand, adopting the fallacious "if I've done nothing wrong, I have nothing to hide" position.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its really quite surprising just how many American issues come down to this. Much of the identity-politics driven discussion of late can really just be boiled down to liberal vs conservative / right vs left.
I have noticed that people who are steadfast in positions and don't listen to reason and subscribe to 'identity' politics on both the left and right differ mainly in where they were raised and by who raised them. The Berkeley folk who mandate it illegal to burn wood in your own fireplace have more in common with people who think trans people should be forced to live as the gender defined at birth than they do with pe…
“Don’t tell me what to do.” Brought to you by the party of telling people what they should do.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars They didn't, and for what it's worth public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the law. I think anyone discussing a British law ought to keep that in mind ( https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBil... ). Even on the most contentious parts of the bill: Do you bel…
The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.
Given that according to the last question on that survey the public also overwhelmingly (~90%!) supports holding senior managers personally accountable and punishable by law should firms fail to comply I think it's fair to say they want authorities to have the ability to enforce these measures. The GCHQ has nothing to do with it.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars They didn't, and for what it's worth public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the law. I think anyone discussing a British law ought to keep that in mind ( https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBil... ). Even on the most contentious parts of the bill: Do you bel…
The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.
Maybe not, but even the more mild option of Apple/Google doing a local scan of the device, and then secretly sending some sort of result to Apple/Google to take some action, is also pretty awful from a privacy perspective.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public u…
This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most important documents when understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and simultaneously the least read! I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended – I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' – I just mean that any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the…
For completeness, read the anti-federalist papers too. The collective opinion of Hamilton, Madison, and Jay is just one point of view.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#139How can the Signal app "exit the UK market"? Can't people just use the app anyway?
There's a couple ways:
- Signal could just ban all UK IP addresses from accessing its messaging servers. Your encrypted messages still pass through servers controlled by Signal, Inc.
- UK government could require ISPs to deny access to Signal's messaging servers.
Of course, one could just use a VPN, set up a VM in a third country and run a Signal Proxy Server, etc.
It was hard enough getting family/friends to download/use Signal, as its UX is sub-par compared to alternatives.
If you start telling them they have to use a VPN, or run a server, etc, that will kill the network effect in UK.
Re: Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law
#140The water flowed under this bridge 20 years ago. This whole discussion seems like it’s happening in the wrong decade. The issue now is that it’s so easy to collect circumstantial information that is constantly leaked by GPS-enabled apps, searches, card purchases, clicks, cell phone tower data, etc. that governments don’t really need the actual contents of messages any more. I’m still glad Signal exists, but it’s part…
I wore a "this t-shirt is a munition" tee back in the day. With a quarter century of hindsight, I think encryption as a privacy tool may not have been a solution, but a sedative that prevented the smartest people from seeing how bad things really were and applying their courage to those problems.
What would we have done differently?
All this stuff is really convenient. Would we have really said “no” to turn-by-turn navigation? Avoided online purchases? Used cash for most of our transactions? Printed things out so we don’t use the internet while outside?