Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds

Ah, the famous “maybe if I take a step back they’ll appreciate it and not push harder”. Or maybe it’s “if I give the leopard my face maybe it spares my body”.

I’ll let reality speak for itself: look no further than Stingrays and every bit of legal abuse they enabled, where innocent people are spied on in bulk with flimsy excuses. How well did it work out when the protocol was already maximally compatible with laws?

There’s no “minimally compatible”, you either have the privacy technically guaranteed or you don’t. If it’s technically allowed to breach it, it will soon be done as a matter of routine under the guise of “protecting”, “preventing”, and so on.

So in the end we didn’t lose anything, what we did was we gained a short period in which we could all taste that freedom. If we used your proposal nobody would have had even that to begin with.

This logic would have been easier to forgive if it came from youth and inexperience, from someone who never got to know about the endless abuse of surveillance that was inflicted indiscriminately on everyone.

> I promised myself I would never join their ranks.

A wasted opportunity, missed by at least 1 article :).

Privacy is being abused by criminals to victimize people at scale. Just because privacy is a moral good doesn't mean you are morally off the hook for enabling criminals.

Governments are so aware of this they're passing sweeping laws against it. This is your new reality -- you can't just bury your head in the sand. The whole point was saying that there could have been a middle ground that protected more of your rights than where you're at now if it weren't for the absolutism.

Turns out that being an absolutist isn't helpful.