> Attributing this policy drive to altruism is truly naive wishful thinking.
And attributing it to malice is truly naive pessimistic thinking.
The reality is that both of those positions exist. There are people in government (and anywhere) that want to help or hurt people. I find transparency more helpful than hurtful, because we are in an age where there are public repercussions for visible actions.
That misses the point of rights in the first place. A proper system operates under the assumption someone will try to abuse it and has measures to counter it. Just like a banking website designed under the assumption nobody would try to access it illicitly is hopelessly naive so is assuming it about the levers of power.
Rights and justice are based upon the same assumptions - no you can't take the prosecution's word that they are totally guilty because they look shifty and aren't from around here! They have to prove that there was a crime and that they committed it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Until they can prove say secure communication in itself can kill anyone in the world like a magic spell they have no case for this.
Pessimism is thus wise in the same sense that you shouldn't ask a stranger on the street to hold your wallet for half an hour.
Maybe so, but this transparency doesn't go both ways. Instead the government takes a paternalistic view and makes it as hard as possible to have themselves held to account (directly contradictory to the spirit of democracy.) For example, in Australia it has become more and more illegal for journalists to report on human rights abuses and material from whistleblowers about the government's activities. Earlier this year they tried to legislate 15-20 year jail sentences for journalists who broke the government's vague parameters for responsible reporting, under the guise of national security and preventing journalists working as spies for foreign agencies. Treating the free press as enemies of the state by default is deeply troubling, I hope we can both agree. This is what I see in these debates about encryption and backdooring. I'd feel much more comfortable being held to account for my communications if I felt empowered to hold my government to account in the same way.
I would say you're wrong when trying to say people are good/bad. For the most part the people in the machine don't matter. They are cogs in a machine that only see a very small amount of information and rarely know what the big picture looks like.
The output of the machine is what matters. If the output of the machine is bad, then everybody that is a part of it is and unwitting bad actor.
We have to make sure we don't make bad public policy machines.
> And attributing it to malice is truly naive pessimistic thinking.
My government is literally killing refugees in order to make a public statement that seeking asylum in our country is worse than staying in a country where you face death from bombs, lynch mobs or government execution.
I think my interpretation of this Five Eyes directive as a lazy power grab is being extremely kind to the people involved because I'm implying they have a plan and are aware of what they are doing.
And attributing it to malice is truly naive pessimistic thinking.
The reality is that both of those positions exist. There are people in government (and anywhere) that want to help or hurt people. I find transparency more helpful than hurtful, because we are in an age where there are public repercussions for visible actions.