As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.
> Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use.
You are forgiven if you have missed it but in the wake of Snowden Google and others have hardened their systems massively.
Signal, Matrix and others are actually making it hard to do dragnet surveillance.
> And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.
Because boundaries have been overstepped again. This is a constant battle that we software people have with authorities :-)
There has been an informal truce that they leave our devices alone and we accept that they scan the cloud.
Now things are about to change and we'll respond. We've won before and I think we can do it again.
PS: There are always good reasons.
PPS: We won the last big one: Cryptography software was "munitions" and couldn't be exported until someone took it on them to make a book out of it, ship it to Europe and let cryptography people here scan it.
So according to the argument up front terrorists won, and I guess we should have a lot of problems now, but we don't have.
If you've never seen a slippery slope in action, ask someone else if they have. It always starts with something everyone can agree on. It's the inevitable slippage over time as the population replaces itself with people who arrn't intrinsically cognizant of the "before" state and the implicit normalization of deviance that represents. We may only live for about 100 years, but I challenge you to look at the size of the United States Code and what has been specifically carved out as illegal or aberrancies normalized just in 200 years.
As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.