In days of yore my CS law module was taught by a QC - that's a high
ranking barrister in the UK - who explained the world of difference
between the "The Rule of Law" and "the law" in a class called
"jurisprudence".
Rule of Law (capitalised conceptual) is there as permanent ground
truth in contrast to the ephemeral du-jure laws.
At times I still struggle with that profound counter-intuitive idea;
that if one deeply, passionately believes in the necessity of The Law
and all of society's institutions, one must with equal passion break
laws and throw rocks at the police when they are tools of tyrants,
idiots and dumb laws.
Indeed today I think that opposition to technological tyranny has
become the mark of the true conservative, and that defenders of common
sense and simple human dignity are forced to assume the "radical"
position.
Of course, the idea that there is any kind of "permanent ground truth" around morals/laws is very much up for debate. Some philosophers think it exists (usually called "natural law" [1]), while many others think it's nonsense.
I would guess that most anthropologists, for instance, would say it's rubbish -- people who have studied the exceedingly wide variation in what is considered moral or immoral across cultures. A duty in one community may very well be a prohibition in another.
But you don't need to believe in any kind of "permanent ground truth" law in order to "break laws and throw rocks at the police". You merely have to believe that the current laws/administration are acting unjustly according to the local morals of the time and place.
It's permanent in the sense that it doesn't change from one person's trial to another's. Not in that it can't change at all. IMO, the GP didn't explain it very well, I prefer the word "objective" here.
Some level of prohibition against lying in court, judicial corruption and generally perverting the course of justice must exist in order for a system of law to operate.
I am no anthropologist myself but I remember hearing that this list is actually rather small. Religion was an example that was given and I would believe marriage. How many others, though?
Maybe we would say, "whether you are required to marry your brother's widow" - it would be a somewhat unusual choice in modern western cultures, but not forbidden.
I didn't think we were restricting the discussion to modern western cultures. In some cultures, marrying your brother's widow has been required; we generally see this as being part of the social safety net in that culture.
In some cultures, marrying your brother's widow is prohibited because it counts as incest.
I don't know how I would describe the state of this variable in modern western cultures. In modern America, I tend to think it would raise eyebrows and people would be uncomfortable with you.
So looking at the wiki entry on Levirate marriage[1] I see that it's been more common than I remembered, a quick look around didn't turn up any cultures where it would be flatly forbidden as incestuous (I picked modern western as an example where like you say it would seem unusual, but I can also imagine scenarios where it'd be seen as heartwarming, making sure the widow and children were housed and fed etc.)
> Despite the great store Deuteronomy places on this practice, the Priestly Torah seems not to endorse yibbum. It legislates the following blanket prohibition:
> [Lev 18:16] Do not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife; it is the nakedness of your brother.
> Here the text forbids a brother from marrying his brother’s wife, ostensibly even after the brother has died. No exception is noted for the brother’s childless widow.
> This problem so bothered the Sages, that they list it within a collection of contradictions in the Torah whose reconciliation is a feat so intangible “that the mouth is unable to utter and the ear unable to hear"
> The cumulative evidence suggests that P/H did not consider yibbum an option, and likely repudiated it. Perhaps the Priestly authors did not feel that incest should have any exceptions—yibbum, which involved a woman marrying her brother-in-law, is at its core incest with an “indulgence.”[5]
> [5] The Sages seem aware of this problem. See, for instance, Tosefta Yebamot 6:10 (cf. Yeb. 39b):
> A man who goes in unto his childless sister-in-law for the sake of beauty or for the sake of property is to be considered as if he is committing incest
That's certainly interesting, both required and forbidden is a case I hadn't expected. I suppose it'd be more practical then to look at historical records and see if the practice was non-existent, or just rare (presumably it wouldn't ever have been common).
Indeed, Ragnar Redbeard's philosophy [0] (Arthur Desmond) is worth a
read.
I dipped into it a bit in my study of ethics, and there's many eye
opening passages, though it's mostly a rehash of Nietzsche, minus the
compassion and good humour :)
Today it's regarded by some as a seed of "far right supremacist"
thinking. And sadly these ideas are confused with the work of Darwin
etc.
We should also note many historical counterparts, and remember that,
for example, the Greeks rewarded soldiers with "spoils" as payment.
I think what I'm saying about upholding the principle of Rule of Law
above the laws of foolish men is quite separate from this - although
when governments test their people to the point of rebellion it is
about the brute reality that might does not lie where it is supposed.
I think the Law of Power (basically, "might makes right") will run circles around any other "law" concept. Whether even this conforms to some "natural law" underneath, is secondary IMHO.
Yup. And underlying ‘might makes right’ is another even more basic one, ‘they who survive and reproduce wins’.
Everything else gets layered on top, with more and more sophistication.
Ethics and morals are attempts to encode various ideas of long term successful strategies for that longer term goal, to help counteract many of the shorter term incentives. But, like most ‘shoulds’, they are often just wishes by those disconnected from the actual reality on the ground or from those that have no ability to make them actually make sense.
Local vs Global maxima perhaps? Or ideal vs reality? Or protective delusions? Or wisdom of the ages? Or tools to direct the median? Or longer term goals?
The most basic law is the only law that can not be broken, the laws of physics. That is what might makes right is backed by, surviving and reproducing is what you get as the result of being able to inflict more violence on the other side than they can on you.
> surviving and reproducing is what you get as the result of being able to inflict more violence on the other side than they can on you.
This is a common misconception. A lot of surviving and reproducing is possible when you work together and cooperate. As King Pyrrhus found out the hard way fighting the Romans.
Sure he initially succeeded in defeating a roman army or two. But you know what? Due to their superior organization skills, the Romans could just field another one. And another one.
"If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined"
Eh, might makes right is in one scenario. Poisoning, betrayal, manipulation, propaganda, co-opting often work too. As many ‘strong men’ have learned to their detriment.
Underlying it, those who survive will justify however they want, they’ll be the ones writing the history books.
I meant that in the fundamental sense, that I can do whatever I want and nobody can stop me, as long as I have the most physical - in the sense of physics - power. The only thing that I can not do is force others to do things I want them to do, they can always decide to refuse and die. Poisons are just molecular bullets. Betrayal, manipulation, and propaganda, not sure how they would achieve anything if I have enough power.
Theoretically, sure. Though if you went that route, ultimately you might just be ruling over a pile of ashes no?
Practically, how do you propose acquiring that power, or having anyone to rule over, that would not leave you vulnerable to all those other things I listed?
As in, whatever power you have being used to serve someone elses interests instead of your own, or even be used to destroy you. Or your own basic needs being sabotaged behind your back to murder you.
There is a reason why dictators and kings tend to have somewhat predictable endings, and it's rarely 'passing away peacefully in their sleep at a ripe old age'.
“Might makes right” seems more like an observation of a particular instance in the feedback loop of building power.
America is for example in a pretty strong position, but maintains power by doing diplomatic stuff. Being in some sense the leader of a big coalition of friendly countries (imagine if we had to force EU countries to accept our bases by violence, it is way cheaper to just be on friendly terms with them and pay a little rent). Being the world’s reserve currency. Setting up and having outsized influence in international organizations.
That sort of stuff requires give-and-take diplomacy, cooperation, and setting up a system of international norms and laws that everyone at least pretends to respect.
Might might make right, but a complex system of rules, conventions, laws, negotiations, reputations and even person-to-person relationships made quite some might. It’s sorta chicken and egg.
> Might might make right, but a complex system of rules, conventions, laws, negotiations, reputations and even person-to-person relationships made quite some might. It’s sorta chicken and egg.
All of those systems are a response to “might makes right” and the history of violence with the ultimate conclusion in the trenches of WWI and WWII. Wars to decide whose might is rightest became so destructive in the modern era that we created all these complex systems of geopolitics - because few of us can stomach destroying a century of industrial progress to prove our might anymore.
“Might make right” still dominates the interactions between unequal states.
It's called hegemony. Hegemony is just another form of dominance, as ultimately it's backed up by force of arms. Power flowing from the barrel of a gun and all that.
The sort of economy required to build a top-tier military nowadays requires international trade and cooperation.
If this sort of military force can’t be produced without a bunch of willing allies, then the force is just an intermediary step. It is constrained by the need to keep those allies willing.
I’m not saying the world is all butterflies and roses, just pointing out that that constraint is real, and I think it is not really what people think of when they say “might.”
Timescales matter. US may not be able to sustain a top-tier military on its own long-term, but short term, they do have the top-tier military and their "allies" don't, so international diplomacy remains the art of skate-dancing around explicitly talking about where the US aircraft carriers are parked now. And that's skating constrained to boundaries defined by MAD, let's not forget that.
In actual practice, I mostly see Natural Law cited as an excuse for homophobia, used in a manner which is transparently reasoning backwards from conclusions. I imagine that actual philosophers might occasionally make better use of it, but I am put off the idea.
Defining Rule of Law as “a permanent ground truth” is likely part of the confusion, as that definition doesn’t really encapsulate the concept.
I find it much easier when it is defined in contrast with “not rule of law” or “arbitrary rule by men” as it is traditionally described.
The point being that it is not about the laws themselves, but rather the manner in which power is exercised. Laws may exist, but if some people are not be bound by them, and are able to wield the laws however they wish (we call these people tyrants), then you don’t truly have rule by law, you are rule by arbitrary will. In order to have rule by law, the law must be the source of power itself, and must apply to all people equally.
This is where resistance to unjust laws or unjust authorities comes in. When people use their authority to put themselves above the law or excised use the law in an unjust/unequal manner, then we are stepping outside the bounds of the rule of law itself. The law is reduced to a mere tool of oppression rather than a source of legitimate authority.
A corollary to this, as mentioned by another commenter, is the concept of so called “natural law”, that is law that exists as an antecedent to human law or is given by god/some other non human source. Note that rule of law is not the same as nor is it dependent on a concept of natural law. The concept of “The Rule of Law” is much older than that of “natural law”.
> if one deeply, passionately believes in the necessity of The Law and all of society's institutions, one must with equal passion break laws
"-- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Lots of ethical systems justify opposition to unjust laws. Utilitarians would say you should disobey a law if it causes more harm than good (while accounting for the good that comes from general order when people do obey the laws). This isn’t just a conservative position
This feel like Utopian thinking. I believe that there are better and worse ways of living and thus better and worse laws. Most ways of living and laws come with trade-offs, others appear to be materially better or worse all around. In other words, there *is* a type of ground truth we can move towards and not everything is relative.
However, we are humans and thinking that "we have arrived" and "I know Utopia" is full of pride and not humble.
Rule of Law is a *process*, that is, it should (ideally) be procedurally symmetrical to all people it applies to based on each person's applicable merit or demerit. So long as you live in a republic, you should try to follow the Rule of Law. No, you are not obligated to throw rocks at police, even when they are tools. You fight tyrants where it matters to them, in the courts, voting box, and make the rule of law apply to them. Tyrants won't care if you injure an officer, in fact, they will use that against you (see rules for radicals, they want your reaction). You find the real battle and fight there.
>Rule of Law (capitalised conceptual) is there as permanent ground truth in contrast to the ephemeral du-jure laws.
That's a strange way of articulating it. The Rule of Law is simply the concept that a society is ruled (hence the name) by the body of law that it passes. That, quite literally, the ruler of the land is the Law.
Some may wince at the use of the word conservative given its connotations. But small-c conservative tendencies are what temper small-p progressive initiatives from quickly entering dangerous waters, just as progressive tendencies counter conservative initiatives when they are sinking us deeper into harmful ruts.
I can sympathize with the general notion that more encryption is better, even if I wouldn't go to the extreme of declaring it a duty. But the author just completely lost me at:
> We should all use PGP, SSL or equivalent tools; VPNs, Tor and/or SSH tunnelling; IPFS, or other distributed file systems — and ditch proprietary OS's in favour of Linux or truly free Android distros... Those tools and techniques should cease to be arcane nice-to-haves for nerds: we must get more non-technical people onboard.
This is so unrealistic and impractical as a moral "duty" for "all", it undercuts my ability to take the rest of the piece seriously. It's not any kind of seriously considered ethical analysis, weighing the pros and cons of what's actually best or most effective in the real world -- it's a pipe dream.
"Those tools and techniques should cease to be arcane nice-to-haves for nerds: we must get more non-technical people onboard" is key here, I would say.
If those tools cease to require arcance incantations and work seamlessly like every other thing everyone else is already using, then I don't think it's unrealistic at all.
It's only impractical if you actually require end users to understand and apply all of these technologies. It's a lot more tractable if they're abstracted away.
The fact is that developers very (very) rarely have to interface directly with TLS or the Signal protocol, yet billions of non-technical users implicitly use them in our browsers and via Signal or WhatsApp.
In my view, the challenge in the adoption of secure/private-by-design tech is the simplicity and usability of the interfaces and the capabilities these tools provide.
We need secure tools to compete on capability in order to garner mass usage. Without (significant) feature superiority there's little reason for users to make the switch. I'm actively trying to solve some of these problems at Backbone [0]; aiming to build a usable, secure experience for end users and a simple, robust end-to-end-encryption interface for developers.
The fact that it's unrealistic doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to achieve it. And the first step towards achieving something big is to state it as a goal when it's still unrealistic.
At some point, going to the moon was unrealistic. Right now, ending wars is unrealistic, but it's also absolutely necessary.
If you instantly switched over the average person and took away their Windows/Mac, they would be lost and would constantly get bit by the cons of those technologies. Ever had to teach someone something simple in Excel? Imagine how teaching them SSH would go.
However, that doesn't mean it can't be a gradual process that takes years or generations even.
I feel like the "all" in this passage is everyone who is capable, not the population in general. The population in general is the second phase, but they need a beachhead to be established to help them. First the capable group needs to stop hiding behind the excuse that the incapable group can't do what they can but won't.
> it undercuts my ability to take the rest of the piece seriously at all.
This lack of ability to be able to control your emotions undercuts my ability to take the rest of the comment seriously at all. It's not any kind of seriously considered rational comment, weighing the pros and cons of the thoughts presented -- it's bad commentary.
Living in a pipe dream where you think people want to be educated about maximizing their freedom, at the expense of their time or convenience, is delusional. That's why the rest of the piece is basically irrelevant, if it only works when everyone or the majority follow through with this plan.
Could your technophobic family handle it? You grandmother? That weird uncle that decries anything digital but has the latest iPhone with all the default config in place?
I'm so sick and tired of techies infantilizing the rest of the population. It started with making apps "accessible" but the result is that they've dumbed down an entire generation by limiting them to their locked down mobile phones. Now everything supposedly should be accessible to everyone without them having to invest a second of thought, so much so that this now has somehow become the norm.
People who care will figure it out, and those who don't will be left behind.
But no, thats not acceptable because you have to gouge everyone to make as much money as possible nowadays.
Most of the population are not tech involved people, they like and use the entertaining/communication related features of the device. Making things extremely easy is what tech is all about.
People who care will figure it out, and those who don't will be left behind. Is that not the case for most of history? Atleast apps as you say are accessible to everyone without them having to invest a second thought.
Why should the average joe have to consider a second thought? If my Dad wants to watch his favourite TV show, he should be able to do that in the most accessible way possible.
Perhaps Microsoft shouldn't have built a GUI and should've kept the CMD line around so that we would've all had to learn to "do it the hard way" and wouldn't have been infantilizing us with buttons, graphics, file explorers, hyperlinks and applications.
Quite a few people could do what the article asks if sufficiently motivated. How do you propose to motivate them?
I often have trouble convincing people to install Signal, which requires about two minutes for people who barely know how to use their smartphones and under one for people who know where the app store is. If a majority people don't have the motivation to do that much, we have a very uphill battle.
That's probably the most self-aggrandizing interpretation. Could it be that other people have other priorities or interests rather than spending their time figuring out how to obtain digital privacy without compromising in the areas they care about? No surely it's their low "cognitive capital" /s
You are very fortunate to never had the displeasure of having to interact with profoundly stupid people. Not ignorant, not uneducated, but genuinely stupid and slow people.
E.g., People for whom significant, immediate, unexpected mechanical feedback in operating something simple, like window blinds, wouldn't cause them to consider whether they might be doing something wrong, and instead continue operariting the blinds in the wrong direction until they snap and break, genuinely being unaware that they were doing it wrong.
People who are genuinely lacking the common sense you'd expect a human to have, not even with any cognitive disability or learning disorder of any kind - just genuinely stupid but otherwise ordinary people.
What are you talking about? How does this relate to anything in the discussion? Besides, you were denigrating the intelligence of the average person, as though that's the reason they don't acquire all the skills necessary to have digital privacy.
Ironically, that's a stupid assumption to have. You might be in your own bubble, but I know many very intelligent people who do not have the time or interest in gaining digital privacy. It's not as easy or without compromise as you seem to think.
The impact of using https versus http is miniscule compared to the impact of using Tor versus not.
Yes, I agree that everyone should have access to those technologies by default. I also think that the implementation for the layperson will make the projects almost unrecognizable.
I disagree; the impact of https is huge: your page cannot be hijacked by an intermediate party (e.g. your Internet provider). Nobody can insert malicious javascript into the page or modify its contents for a social engineering attack. You can be sure that your personal data cannot be intercepted by a third party, and so on.
I don't see it as unrealistic, as for your comprehension ability, that's debatable. For this to work on everything, it needs to be hardware implemented (security chip/SOC), to avoid taxing the CPU and rest of the system. Software engineering has been lax for so long, but paradigm is changing and it should be security first.
For human-related endeavors, motivation of the stakeholders is the key part that determines whether something is realistic or not.
All kinds of technical difficulties can be fixed with effort and talent of a few people, but if something requires will of the masses and there's a lack of will, that thing is simply not going to happen no matter what you do - because there's no "just" with respect to lack of will, that's lack of something necessary that you can't easily create.
See my other replies: it's not about the will of the masses, it's about our collective will of us, the tech people, to build the tools that make using these technologies ubiquitous. We've been fixated on our own problems ("what is the best framework for building a blog ?") instead of acting with everyone else to build what we collectively want. It's our responsibility to be of use to the society, not just to us.
IMHO in this respect we already have built 'what we collectively want', however, the limiting factor is a lack of will to use or prefer privacy-preserving solutions. The society has voted with its attention and wallets, and it doesn't want what the tech people think is good for society. You can't build a technical solution to a social problem - well, you can, but it won't get used and so it won't solve anything.
Yes, most of these tools are a pain in the ass to use, so people can't be bothered.
The only universally used tech on this list is SSL, because end users don't need to "install SSL and learn to use it" - we had to put in the work to upgrade or shitty servers, and they get the benefits.
Time had proven that the "don't you care about your privacy" argument doesn't work, so it's up to us to make the privacy-respecting tools better than the alternatives
That's exactly my point. I'm not deluded to the point I expect people to read up and install all these tools; it's our job to make these tools so ubiquitous that it doesn't take any effort to effectively use them.
Expect people to install those tools in unrealistic. But companies can implement all the features in the end product (web browser, email client, IM client etc.).
As I said in another comment, it's not about everyone installing ssh and pgp and configuring them and learning how to use them, it's about us in the tech community to provide tools so easy to use you don't even know you're using state-of-the-art privacy tools. Like what Signal has done, and now it is expected that any messenger at least positions themselves on the end-to-end-encryption. Or like what Deltachat is doing with automatically configuring PGP such that users don't ever need to read those 3 dreaded letters.
Been there, done that. It's already hard to scale those two apps beyond your immediate circles and people won't just stop using WhatsApp or Viber or whatnot. But then try to convince your friends that they have to convince their friends. Friendships are not a pyramid scheme.
As I said in another comment, I'm not expecting everyone to actually learn and install those tools, I want all the people who can use them and modify them build on top and provide tools that spread the use of these technologies. I don't expect everyone to configure tor hidden services, but if we can make it so that most traffic goes through tor, because the clients and the servers use it by default, then that will be a nice step. The Tor Browser makes using tor way simpler, if that could be used and advertised as a default browser, that would be great.
To me, the sociological aspect is in the way we act together as a society, helping others do what we think is good, providing support. Not simply how one is expected to somehow learn and do everything out of nowhere.
I like the concept, but I think the problem here is that governments have the means and resources to go after folks building and distributing browsers, apps, etc.
The decentralized nature of the technologies mentioned contributes substantially to their resilience. Re-centralizing them opens new avenues of attack and new targets to silence and corrupt for the state.
"as for your comprehension ability, that's debatable"
This comes across as rude, especially in response to someone that did not themselves say anything warranting a rude response. You can disagree and make your point without doing this. I'm pointing it out because you genuinely may not be aware and I want to give the benefit of doubt (something I myself too often do not do online).
In short: since the EU is trying to introduce legislation to monitor private communication, the author states that it's a moral duty of everyone to start encrypting their communications (instant messaging in particular), as a form of civil disobedience. It works when many (preferably most) people disobey.
Unfortunately this doesn't work because a _lot_ of will people legitimately will tell you they "have nothing to hide" and would tell you they'd let 3-letter agencies in the U.S. go through their phone with a fine-tooth comb (at least, until they're actually being faced with that reality and try to get out of it).
The only reason we currently have any message encryption is because a few tech companies have made the decision to protect as many as possible by releasing products which enable it (iOS, Whatsapp, and now texts via Google Messages). Not everyone who uses these products knows they're protected and not everyone will care if they were to turn off E2EE tomorrow.
"The only reason we currently have any message encryption is because a few tech companies have made the decision to protect as many as possible by releasing products which enable it (iOS, Whatsapp, and now texts via Google Messages)."
Completely false. Phil Zimmerman gave us PGP for free in 1991, and numerous open encryption standards now belong to the general public. Giving credit to Apple, Meta, and Google for this isn't just blatanly incorrect; it erases the hard work of genuinely good people, and shifts the credit to user-hostile mass surveillance corporations.
PGP et al is basically irrelevant given how few people use PGP compared to the >2.5 billion users that use Whatsapp and >1B using iMessage.
My wording wasn't exact; other encryption programs have enabled secure messaging, but without big players it would've been outlawed by now because it would've been easier to say "only criminals" use encrypted communication.
As for the "numerous open encryption standards", these are fairly irrelevant since the foremost goal is not encrypted messaging, but mostly for creating a secure way for business to interface with customers (can't run a startup or Fortune 500 business without being able to trust requests and responses). Getting people to use encrypted communications is the hard part, not designing the encryption or even implementing it.
iirc moxie built double-ratched in the same spirit as zimmerman built pgp and gave it away for free. thou he even went as far as integrating it into a mass-market product (wa) to twart the "only criminals" thing that seriously held back adoption of the latter throu export controls.
didn't help as much as they hoped, as there are no trustworthy platforms to run any of it.
A technology being published does not mean that it is available, especially for technologies that require uptake by the general public. And, well, PGP and GPG have reputations for such awful usability that they _might as well not exist_ as far as the general public is concerned. As another comment here mentions, just look at its uptake numbers! There are probalby more people qualified to do open-head neurosurgery than there are people who are qualified to use PGP. It's no more "available" than the C64 demoscene, orbital rocketry, or quantum physics. Signal and Apple and Google aren't being credited for developing the core tech, they're being credited for refining it until they can wrap it up in a package that's so user-friendly and low-friction that _every single person on the planet_ can use it.
The only "qualification" to use PGP is to read the manual.
You claim that _every single person on the planet_ can use the corporate apps, which implies that every person is able and willing to buy a device which can run them. Not everyone can buy a smartphone, and not everyone is willing to buy one for various reasons, but anyone with access to ANY computer can run PGP.
As long as computers exist, we'll have PGP. The other messengers rely on centralized infrastructure which could go down by accident or by hostile actors. Even Signal, which I love and recommend - and was not mentioned by the post I was replying to earlier (why?) - could easily end its services one day.
The wrong thinking I see in your post and the earlier one is this:
1. Lots of smart people create encryption schemes
2. Phil Zimmerman invents and releases PGP, giving the power of encryption to everyone with a computer.
3. Years pass...
4. In the smartphone era, Google, Facebook, and Apple incorporate encryption into their apps, in order to entice users to use their platforms and take their friends with them.
5. You and that other guy are all like, "Praise be to Google and Meta and Apple for giving us the power of encryption!"
WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol for its end-to-end encryption. The Signal Protocol was developed by Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike for Open Whisper System, their Open Source initiative.
> the author states that it's a moral duty of everyone to start encrypting their communications as a form of civil disobedience. It works when many (preferably most) people disobey.
I'd certainly support it. What he's calling for - it's similar to the dominant spirit in the US after the Edward Snowden revelations. It resulted in a lot of ethical and beneficial stuff happening in a relatively short amount of time.
Not just in tech, even news orgs lost much of their aversion to covering surveillance abuses. At least for a time.
The easiest way to combat "you have nothing to hide" is if you were in a country taken over by dictators or terrorists, those leaders don't care and cannot be reasoned with. They will use the backdoor at any time to punish dissent or any misalignment with their rules.
And if people say, "but our country is free", tell them that if your country was not, how would you get back to freedom? Is your software and hardware free and open so that you could do this?
If the E.U. really made Chat Control, it would require a DRM that would restrict non-signed OS from running. How would you install freedom software under this situation?
The only way is to prevent the implementation of locked hardware in the first place.
The easiest way to combat "you have nothing to hide"...
How about saying I have lots to hide.
I want to hide what I had for breakfast. I want to hide what book I'm reading. I want to hide what time I went to bed. I want to hide how many times I go to the gym each week. I have lots and lots to hide. I am not the property of the state and neither are my actions; I have lots to hide.
This feels a bit redundant. If you were in a country taken over by dictators or terrorists, those dictators or terrorists won't hesitate to deploy a mandatory surveillance regime (see: Xinjiang), they don't need a leg up from the previous democratic government. If your country is not overtaken by dictators or terrorists, the "nothing to hide" argument stands.
This hypothetical situation is not made materially worse by the existing backdoor.
No, it doesn't, because it's not an argument. It's just an assertion--and one which, as another poster has pointed out, is false. Everyone has things to hide. But "hide" is not a pejorative term here; it's just a recognition of the fact that people have private lives that they don't want to share with everyone. The so-called nothing to hide "argument" depends on ignoring that fact and treating "hide" as if it had to be something nefarious.
Setting up a backdoor is more difficult than co-opting one that already exists. It's called the bootstrapping problem, and you posting this right now are the beneficiary of a hell of a lot of bootstrapping.
So your assertion fails before you even get to merits.
I don't understand what you mean by "bootstrapping" in this context. If you can get your phone or computer randomly inspected and copied on the street, and then thrown in jail or executed for trying to avoid surveillance, there is no need for "backdoors" or "bootstrapping". The government just passes a relevant law and surveils, no need for fancy backdoors when you can do straight interception and bans.
Besides, "you need to protest RIGHT NOW so that you can delay total surveillance regime by a year or two if the government eventually turns North Korean" does not sound like a strong call to action to me.
>1. My government will use this tech only for good.
Precisely, and even now there are a steady stream of examples of people in power using tech for no good, here's just a tiny snippet of examples where police had mis-used databases to spy, stalk and harass:
The more you look, the more you find - and this barely scratches the surface of ways that systems that hold personal data can be abused.
When designing any new law, we must always consider the fact that there is no such thing as "good guys" and "bad guys". The potential for abuse must be extremely limited and the benefits of the law should legitimately outweigh the potential abuses.
> If the E.U. really made Chat Control, it would require a DRM that would restrict non-signed OS from running
I have seen this claim, but I don’t believe it is necessarily true. If EU legislation limits encryption on WhatsApp and other messengers offered on the Play Store, then that already implements the law for the vast majority of the population. Us nerds might be able to run whatever OSs we want, but we and even non-nerd sideloaders are nearly a rounding error.
Since most Android phones and all iPhones cannot install freedom software, they don't have to explicitly put a DRM at the hardware level, because it is already there from Apple or most Android manufactures.
Apple devices can only install software from a signed key. Most Android phones can only install Android from the device manufacture signed key (unless Google Pixel for example).
However, Android allows installing apps from not just the Play Store on most devices, so either the Android OS would need an update, or the hardware would need an update.
The author advocates using encryption as an ethical duty, OK. But it would not be an effective form of civil disobedience. This is unrealistic:
> We should all use PGP, SSL or equivalent tools; VPNs, Tor and/or SSH tunnelling; IPFS, or other distributed file systems — and ditch proprietary OS's in favour of Linux or truly free Android distros.
This is not anything the general public, for whom today their mobile phones with Play Services are the default device and things like WhatsApp their means of communication, is going to do. All the state needs to do is force weaker encryption on the common apps offered on the Play Store, and that covers the vast, vast majority of the population.
Yes, I know SSH tunnelling and compiling your own Android are tall orders for the average user. Here I'm just hinting at some examples that are well-known among us geeks, but there are easier to use alternatives to all that. I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail. VPNs are so easy to use nowadays. The UX on Signal isn't particularly challenging to the average user of WhatsApp.
There is a lot we techies can do to educate normies and respectfully push them in the right direction, but we keep on neglecting that responsibility under the excuses of bad usability, lack of features, or convenience for users.
On an earlier draft I also had a sentence like: “a big effort in usability and outreach is needed”. Definitely so.
My point is not that we can get all EU citizens to switch to SSH tunnelling and Purism, but that we IT professionals should spend more time and effort educating a fraction of the population to move the deal in the right direction and avert catastrophe.
> we keep on neglecting that responsibility under the excuses of bad
usability, lack of features, or convenience for users.
A value leverage point to look at is; why are these perceived to be in
tension in the first place?
Revising the concepts of "convenience" and "usability" to incorporate
not having your life, business and affairs ruined petty tyrants seems
the way to go.
It seems quite possible to design software such that it's more
difficult not to encrypt than it is to use insecure defaults.
That's more or less what happened with browsers vis a vis https by
default, no? I really have to go out of my way these days to view a
plain http site.
> I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail.
End-to-end encryption without a trusted server makes multi-device usage rather complicated within a number of contexts. Full-text search for example then requires all your e-mails to be indexed on each individual device you're using for accessing Protonmail, and you need to keep that index permanently unless you want to re-download all messages and re-index them again the next time you need to search something.
I don't very frequently use full-text search from my phone for example, but when I need it, I do need it, so neither proposition (permanently occupying valuable space on my mobile phone with a search index I only occasionally need, or else wasting a noticeable amount of time and data volume to re-index all mails every time I want to search something) sounds really enticing.
Catastrophe, you mean like thousands of radicalized people meeting securely in secret online to disrupt an objectively legitimate thing?
I would like more widespread penetration of critical thinking (such as teaching people to pattern-match on the most common fallacious techniques used by cults, conspiracy theorists, propagandists, modern snake-oil salesmen, and other ne'er-do-wells) before we deploy some "mass security recommendation" that would enable people to more comfortably plan things like firebombing vaccination centers based on secretly-exchanged nonsense. I mean, isn't that why "the authorities" (assuming they are good actors, which is of course an unknown) are nervous about pervasive, easily-accessible security?
Fortunately, it seems like most bad actors are idiots who have zero qualms about insecurely broadcasting their thoughts on social media leading up to their committing of despicable acts. But your efforts might make such "precognitive noise" "secure by default".
(In principle, I agree with you. This Martin Fowler piece on privacy, I consider seminal: https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html I'm just saying that no single technology seems to be a universally-satisfying panacea.)
Privacy for everyone includes privacy for people you don't like. Having literally everyone know about ways to have secure and private communications would actually be a good thing.
Do the bad guys use these technologies? Yes, but so what? It's like saying that we shouldn't educate people about knives because some guy can use it to kill people.
This whole fear of educating people about privacy tools because some criminals will use it is so tired and irrational. Criminals do it already and have done it for a long time. It's inevitable that more people will use them in the future, including the "bad guys". How about we just accelerate it and instead think of why people commit crimes in the first place? Nah, too hard, let's try to ban math instead.
> Fortunately, it seems like most bad actors are idiots who have zero qualms about insecurely broadcasting their thoughts on social media leading up to their committing of despicable acts.
At some point they'll stop doing it and become more aware of their OPSEC. Or they do it intentionally because they want to get caught.
> There is a lot we techies can do to educate normies...
This isn’t something you’ll find universal agreement about. My own position is that we techies are seen as weirdos by most of the population, and what we should do is leave normal people alone. Definitely not try to “educate” them – think about how elitist that’s going to sound to many of them.
The phrasing of "educate" (not to mention "normies") definitely implies a patronizing and unhelpful approach. I don't think technical people should go around giving unsolicited lectures to people they perceive as lacking technical expertise. However, I don't think there's anything wrong with technical people sharing what we know in a respectful way to people who are actually interested in a way that accounts for their needs. For example, if a social group you're in is deciding what messaging app to use to coordinate meeting up, it would be appropriate to share what you know about the various options' end-to-end encryption. But going on a rant about the privacy issues of a social media app because a distant relative mentioned it offhandedly probably isn't productive.
By analogy, I wouldn't mind a friend with medical training sharing what they know about heatstroke prevention to a group of us before we embark on an hike. I would mind them giving me nutrition advice based solely on what I ordered at a restaurant.
I find the opposite. When I really sit down and lay out for my parents the implementation details of what goes on, yes, immediately the reaction is to the negative. They come back later though and ask for clarification. They ask more questions, and they more patiently listen to the answers.
Education has always been and always will be an uphill battle. No one likes to be taught. We do it anyway, because both are enriched in so doing.
I think this is a mistake. If you actually want to switch to FLOSS and control your own devices, you should abandon semi-proprietary technology relying on a huge corporation and switch to a GNU/Linux phone, like I did.
Then we should make it our responsibility to ensure the general public can do these things and refuse to support companies that try to make it more difficult.
We are everyone who understands this and capable of doing this. Creating a repo is only one way to help. Supporting alternative mobile devices outside the duopoly is the other. This is exactly what I'm doing.
> SSH tunnelling ... distributed file systems ... ditch proprietary OS
Yes it goes into arm-waving rant well beyond benefit of encrypt/private data.
SSH tunneling can wrap communication in another layer of encryption but so what. Distributed filesystem is not a magical privacy sauce. Proprietary OS (commercial or my home-developed POSIX compliant OS?) is bad how? While telemetry by commercial OS may be a concern it is not the same concern as me keeping my files private with encryption.
The author slips toward Richard Stallman activism about related and wide-ranging issues, which detracts from achieving engagement by average person.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms
And all this privacy tooling is a bandaid solution to the problem of privacy in the digital realm. It addresses problems after the fact rather than addressing the underlying symptom which is dragnet surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and people farming / i.e using people as a datapoint to power an AD engine.
I moved my wife and I to a Matrix server that I control, with disk encryption on top of the Matrix encryption. Signal was great for us, for a long time, but it was time to move on.
I've even set up a Matrix chat server for my business for "office hours." The governments of the world have no right to see my comms with my (future) customers.
And as soon as I can (when I have customers), I will be donating to the people who run Matrix. I'll probably set up a support contract.
If you can set up a Matrix server for friends and family, do it.
Also, I believe we as programmers have more duties to stop this tide of authoritarianism. I'm writing a blog post now called "Your Loved Ones Are Prisoners, and You Made the Chains" because yes, this is partially our fault.
Consider explaining to my loved ones how TSA full body scans are voluntary opt-in chains. Like encryption back doors, if people having nothing to hide why not consent to voluntary full body scans?
Lots of comments here mention that the vast majority of people won't use PGP, Linux and other things to protect their privacy, because they don't care/are dumb/have more important things to do/whatever.
The bottom line though is that people that are more tech savvy and more knowledgeable will always have better privacy no matter what, unless you literally enforce Linux and all that on everyone, which is just not gonna work.
And even if it does, you'll then have to ensure they actually use it properly without screwing things up and compromising their privacy, by which point you'd need every person to know a good amount about networks, security, operating systems etc, which is even harder.
The best course of action is making privacy tools easier to use, so that more people can use them. But without some massive change initiated by corporations or governments, it's infeasible that everyone suddenly gains privacy. YOU have to put the work in to protect yourself, not someone else. And most people don't care. And that's fine. Most people suck anyways!
It's easy enough to become aware of privacy issues in the modern world, don't pretend like people don't know about them. If people care about them, they will learn how to solve them for themselves, there's plenty of info. If they don't, there's literally nothing you can do.
Most people aren't given the choice. When they are actually presented an equally simple decision between more privacy and less privacy, nearly everyone chooses privacy.[0] Making privacy just as easy as not-privacy is exactly what needs to happen, and that is likely to only happen through regulation. We can already see how hard companies work to avoid complying with GDPR and the cookie law.
My informal observations at TSA gates indicate 99.9%+ of people opt-in to the voluntary full body scan privacy invasion. Some people are enthusiastically posing for the TSA voluntary facial recognition cameras. Vast majority of people act like they don't care about privacy.
A bit of a tangent, but I followed the link at the bottom to https://stopchatcontrol.eu/ and while I want to take the site seriously and agree with the message, I can't with that silly usage of emojis (scroll down). Seems more like a joke website than a serious piece of advocacy it purports to be.
I think because keyboards on Android etc. suggest an emoji by default based on the last word, and people seem to think it "softens" a sentence, especially when mentioning something embarrassing, like sex.
> The EU Data Protection Board, the European Parliament’s Research Service and the EU Council’s Legal Service say they are warning of chat controls. Ursula von der Leyen is not interested in these opinions <clown and red flag emojis>
This is straight up crass and off-putting. These shitposting emojis do not belong in a serious pitch.
Legislation in favour of the consumer is almost starting to seem detrimental to the startup founder. The number of barriers, prerequisites, requirements, etc that a founder needs to consider pre-launch is bordering on insurmountable.
This might just be me feeling like this, but even considering geo-residency in some of my early prototype designs feels very odd.
I was optimistically hoping PaaS providers would catch up and fill in the middle ground. But seemingly for every Enterprise customer I'm manually filling out a document declaring our data residency, our vendors residency and how we use certain data.
I'm an advocate for privacy, but f* me this is getting to be overwhelming.
That sounds more like legislated administrative burden and nothing to do with consumer protection. A law to protect consumers can be developed without all the burdens. (why do you need a declaration?, you're either compliant or you're not.)
You don't need all of that stuff if your business respects people's privacy by design.
It's like complaining that the GDPR is causing cookie banners on every site. That's only half the reason. The real reason is that the websites need one's opt-in to do something they shouldn't be doing. Obviously the law should have been crafted with an automatic system to reject all non-necessary cookies in mind, but the fault for the cookie banners still lies with the website.
If your system has the notion of users at all, then most of that red tape is unavoidable, no matter how privacy-respecting you are being.
Either a solid and affordable PaaS solution or at the very least a single global international standard is sorely needed here. The current model is barely sustainable as it is, and it's getting worse, even for privacy-respecting endeavors.
The culture and politics around what startups are and can be seem to have avoided these questions too long. Now that we're evaluating these concerns more in earnest I think it is worth a little soul-searching to determine if it really is worth the money to follow the herd and invest one's time and effort into such applications of technology.
Latest news is Gerard Darmanin, french minister of the interior, is trying to use the latest attack in a french school to ban encryption or at least force encrypted messaging vendors to add backdoors for governments:
> Whatever protection I'm getting from non-consensual surveillance, I am declining it.
So far as I know, the only way to do that is to leave whichever country is doing this, which — trust me on this as one who has done so for slightly messier reasons — is a right PITA even when going somewhere else that has a functioning society. I don't think there's any other way to make yourself an "outlaw" in the old-fashioned sense of the word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlaw
The bonus is now everyone knows they do which further erodes the base legitimacy of the institution, increasing the likelyhood of reformative action potentials.
And by extension ending every internet-connected good or service, from email to online banking to remote work to shopping on Amazon or viewing TV on Netflix — therefore The Powers that Be are more likely to outlaw specific uses of encryption to show to voters that they're "doing something about $the_problem".
If they actually want to catch all crime, the only way to do it is mass physical surveillance, either with laser microphones Van Eck phreaking, or with smart-dust and the like. These technologies aren't limited to just government surveillance, so I've been saying for ages now to anyone who will listen that we need to massively alter our "common sense" attitudes to crime and punishment before organised crime starts using it to automate mass-scale blackmail: a judge or a police officer snorting cocaine would be demonstrating poor judgement just to perform the act, let alone as a result of the drug itself, but society is much worse off if a mafia records them doing it so they can get their people off the hook for bigger crimes.
And no, governments can't just use such surveillance to arrest everyone who breaks the laws: my go-to example of this is heroin in the UK, because as far as I can tell nobody defends heroin, yet enough people use it (200k) that fully enforcing the "no possession" law for that substance alone and nothing else would nearly triple the current UK prison population (95k, though I'm assuming that at most only a small percentage of them are currently getting heroin into their prison).
I don't know what the best way to approach things like this would be, only that it's not going to be an easy thing that can fit into a comment box — the best I can do is say that my vibe is instant-and-tiny penalties, so a speeding offence might be £0.1/minute/(MPH over the speed limit)/(thousand pounds of monthly disposable income) or something like that.
> We should switch to Protonmail or similar webmail
Doesn't Protonmail decrypt at the server? That is, can't Protonmail read your encrypted messages? And don't they have form for grassing people up?
I'm not sure about those two claims. But that's the point - it's difficult for even a techie to use crypto(graphy) safely. If you want to use it as an impediment to snoopers, or as some kind of statement, cool. But if you let the server decrypt your messages, you aren't really safe.
Signal disloses your phone number.
I think I understand the limitations of PGP/GPG; I'd use that, if my correspondents had ever heard of it (and if I were sure that they weren't going to forward/reply-to my messages in plain, or store the plaintext on some Google server). But at the moment, the state of end-user encrypted messaging software doesn't look very safe to me. What I would like to see is an end-to-end scheme that can't be used unsafely, even if the user is an idiot, and that is used more-or-less universally.
Otherwise I'm reluctant to SHOUT my secrets over the internet.
> Doesn't Protonmail decrypt at the server? That is, can't Protonmail read your encrypted messages?
It doesn't decrypt them server-side, but since they're the ones serving you up with the webmail interface, you still need to trust them that the webmail code doesn't do anything nasty it shouldn't actually do.
> Those tools and techniques should cease to be arcane nice-to-haves for nerds: we must get more non-technical people onboard.
I'm having a feeling that the OP either had a lot of luck at persuading and educating non-techie people or hasn't yet had many such encounters with the general population.
I don't want to be overly inflammatory but the core issue here is that Europe very badly wants to be a technocratic police state.
Free speech is a joke in Europe (despite loud denials from Europeans who insist free speech exists in Europe and the restrictions are /necessary/ in the war against misinformation).
The right to protest is slowly getting strangled. How are Europeans OK with protests requiring /permission/ from the police?
Government transparency? Zero to none. You'll get stonewalled or ignored when you ask for information. Don't be so difficult. Just believe the government has the /best intentions/.
Surveillance cameras on every street corner. No store accepts cash money anymore. Your car and phone track and store your every move.
This crackdown on encryption is just another domino about to fall.
Post-ACID for stateful services -> DHC: Durability*, hygiene**, and confidentiality***.
* Superset of bare metal recovery readiness, proven backups, monitoring, availability, and warm storage integrity.
** Superset of consistency, isolation, referential integrity, and data hygiene.
*** Superset of authenticated, G4+ FHE, and/or zero-knowledge encryption at rest and in-flight, elimination of side-channels, least privilege access control of metadata and data, removing plaintext paths, reducing privacy-liability metadata, and eliminating bleed-through of internal metadata externally.
^he has a video on this topic, its a rather philosophical channel, and this is a rather philosophical video
ie, legitimate political opposition to the "only the state can see all of your secrets" is actually "let everyone's secrets be out in the open, those of politicians too"
if opposition starts using the logical endpoint of this line of reasoning, perhaps these constant attempts at removing our freedoms might diminish in quantity
Secure is relative here. In this case, it would exist in one additional place (besides your possession) if the whole key was stored on the document.
You can also break up keys into multiple parts, such that you need N pieces of M total to recover the key. e.g. N = 2, M = 3: you derive three subkeys, two of which are needed to recover the key. Or, you could require the key stored in the will, plus any number of other keys for recovery.
Cryptographers have spent a long time doing math to make these kinds of key systems possible. I've gone down many a wikipedia rabbithole in the past about such problems.
Persuasive writing is a skill. You lost my attention and I turned against your argument because of your "stylistic point". If it'd been written differently, I would have definitely agreed and supported the points I did read.
> (Norway) the most robust democracy in the world (which also happens to be a EU member state)
Norway is not in the EU.
> Hungary and Poland, are still immature barely-liberal regimes with more than a whiff of political repression (“flawed democracies”)
Coming from a Spaniard? Go fuck yourself.
Like tripu, I am strongly and vocally in favour of privacy and individual agency. But some of the ideological drip in this piece left a bad taste in my mouth.
I was already fixing the error, and writing in my head the kind answer above. I hadn't seen this nasty comment.
Why the ad hominem?
I'm ranking governments — not individuals — according to international reports I've seen. Those classifications are debatable, of course. There might be bias, or nuances I'm missing. But why do you presume malice on my part?
> How on Earth is it relevant that I'm a Spaniard?
He probably can't trust you because _he's known too many Spaniards_. (Sorry for being off-topic, but I really could resist making that reference to the greatest movie of all time;-).)
More on topic:
> Hungary and Poland, are still immature barely-liberal regimes with more than a whiff of political repression
I don't know what reports you've read, but I don't think we have any "political repression" here in Poland. Mind you, we had a huge demonstration opposing the ruling party 2 weeks ago (and many more in earlier months/years), and I haven't heard about any nasty consequences for people taking part in them. Though there is a lot of propaganda, both in the country and abroad, painting the government (which, by the way, was more or less voted out two days in an election) as some kind of evil empire, but that is just that - propaganda.
That said, I understand that (almost) nobody has time to study politics of 50+ (or more) countries just to write a blog post or something, so it's not like I blame you.
I used these reports, which I already knew before writing this post:
• Both Poland and Hungary are classified as “flawed democracies” by The Economist. Only 24 countries are considered to be “full democracies” (and this is irrelevant, but Spain happens to be among them). https://pages.eiu.com/rs/753-RIQ-438/images/DI-final-version...
• Amnesty International on Poland: “Access to abortion was further limited. Criminal charges were used to curtail freedom of expression. The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. Freedom of peaceful assembly was restricted. Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.”https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...
• Amnesty International on Hungary: “Discrimination against LGBTI and Roma people persisted. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights suffered significant rollback. Teachers were denied the right to strike. Pushbacks of refugees and migrants continued in violation of EU law. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary had violated the ban on collective expulsions. Other judgments from the Court were not fully implemented. […] The European Parliament declared in September that Hungary could not be considered a full democracy.”https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...
They classify Hungary as a "flawed democracy" because people living in Hungary do not support Western values as much as they would like them to do. I would take those classifications with a pinch of salt. Both the Hungarian government and the Hungarian people are seeking to keep their cultural values, and/or traditions. Telling them to do this and that to undermine it is going to be responded to with criticism. Of course the West and especially the EU hates them. In fact, Hungary is being extremely hated for staying neutral with regarding to the Ukraine-Russia war, and refusing to send weapons or money for weapons to Ukraine. Yes, Hungary is hated because of its pacifist views. Now, would you ever take anyone seriously if they hated Hungary for not supporting and refusing to fuel the war? They think that Hungary is a flawed democracy because (and maybe for other reasons as well) the Hungarian people (!) keep voting for Orbán.
I'm not denying that bias or that animosity that you describe. It may well be that Hungary is despised in some circles because it's more conservative than most European countries.
That is still compatible with a dispassionate evaluation of the democratic quality of its political system.
Again, I'm not necessarily defending my sources here. But I'm not automatically discounting them, either.
The Economist classifies Hungary as a flawed democracy due to a very poor mark in "political participation", "functioning of government" and "civil liberties". Those sections look at measures such as "voter participation/turn-out for national elections", "the degree to which the judiciary is independent of government influence", "the degree to which citizens are treated equally under the law", "how pervasive is corruption", "is there an effective system of checks and balances on the exercise of government authority", etc.
Freedom House ranks Hungary poorly in aspects such as "are safeguards against official corruption strong and effective", "are there free and independent media", "is there freedom for nongovernmental organizations, particularly those that are engaged in human rights– and governance-related work", "is there an independent judiciary", etc.
If you have reports that put Hungary at the top on rankings of democratic health, freedom, civil rights, etc — please share them, and we can evaluate their merits. Otherwise, these reports are the most comprehensive I know of, so I have to use those.
Political corruption is definitely a huge, pervasive problem in Hungary, and there is a lot of favoritism/nepotism going on. I would also say that the media is not independent either.
> The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary.
This is highly debatable, though I do not claim to know enough about this issue to be able to say a lot.
> Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.
I'm not sure what exactly they mean, but I suspect this may be about so-called "same-sex marriage". The definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman is fortunately written into Polish constitution, which is quite difficult to change, so there's that. (Also, not calling a same-sex relationship a "marriage" does not really violate anyone's rights.)
> Access to abortion was further limited.
Which - given how abortion is basically killing innocent human beings - is a huge step towards freedom (more precisely, the right to live).
EDIT: also, I love how you mention Spain time and again. I can only assume you come from there, and if that's the case, I highly applaud your patriotism.
> "by the end of [2022], 79 Polish administrative units still declared themselves so-called 'LGBT-free zones'. [...] LGBTI rights defenders faced ongoing criminal and civil proceedings. [...] In January, during court proceedings brought by one activist who had been arbitrarily detained for 24 hours after the so-called Rainbow Night protest in 2020, the police officer who arrested him admitted: 'We were instructed to stop all persons displaying the colours of LGBT, regardless of how they behaved'".
> Given how abortion is basically killing innocent human beings - is a huge step towards freedom
I don't think that condemning a fetus with terrible congenital defects to be born against the will of its parents is a step towards freedom.
> I love how you mention Spain time and again. I can only assume you come from there, and if that's the case, I highly applaud your patriotism.
I don't know whether you're being honest, or sarcastic. In any case: I tongue-in-cheek "defended" Spain above just because @Radim said to me: "coming from a Spaniard? go fuck yourself" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914718 ), which I found baffling, irrelevant, and very nasty.
I am against all patriotism and nationalism. I am not "proud" or "ashamed" of privileges or defects that I got by chance, or traits over which I bear no responsibility or I can't control.
Assume I'm from North Korea. Or from Vanuatu. Let's discuss ideas, not individuals, please!
A reaction to the relentless anti-Polish & anti-Hungarian propaganda being spewed by the "mature fully-liberal regimes" of the EU. Enough.
You'd think the people of Poland and Hungary (who voted in their leaders, democratically, repeatedly) have horns and drink baby blood. This undermines your other valid points re/ privacy – who'd want to hitch their moral wagon to someone this naive?
The "Spaniard" part was in reference Spain being the bedrock of fascism (via Spaniards…), and remaining a dictatorship long after WW2. In stark contrast to the struggles of Poland's "immature" democratic republic during the same period. The irony was too sweet to pass up.
Your argument assumes a just state that will not outlaw things like dissent against the government, being LGBTQ, etc. Plus, having something to hide does not automatically mean you are doing something criminal. I do nothing criminal, but I still have things to hide.
>Your argument assumes a just state that will not outlaw things...
No, once things are outlawed you should stop doing them. Any prior messages don't matter since the law can't apply retroactively. I am assuming ex post facto laws are prohibited.
>Plus, having something to hide does not automatically mean you are doing something criminal.
If you the reasoning for hiding is because you don't want the government to see it then it is likely criminal.
There is a difference between standard privacy where your information is not accessible anyone you know or anyone in the public versus a level of privacy where not even the legal system with a court order can get the information.
>Some of its member states, like Hungary and Poland, are still immature barely-liberal regimes with more than a whiff of political repression (“flawed democracies”).
Seriously? You must be reading the media that push the narrative a country is democratic if allies of EPP(the largest EU party) win the elections there consistently otherwise it is a horrible autocracy. Imagine people actually voting for who they want for and these people than rule, without asking Brussels for permission! What audacity! They even had the audacity to veto ACTA (remember that)!
It is extremely funny the ruling party that is called "undemocratic" after ruling for 8 years in Poland has now(last Sunday) essentially lost power in democratic elections with the highest voter turnover ever. If this is what happens in a "flawed democracy" I'd not want to live in an "unflawed one".
Also, you seem to be against the overtly autocratic laws proposed by the EU commission like this monitoring law. Perhaps you don't know the party that just has won the election in Poland (the so called "democratic opposition", why democratic? Because democracy is only when they win of course.) is led by Donald Tusk, who was the leader of the previous EU council and is/was the deputy of EPP, the biggest party in Europe (guys that want to pass the law you're so much against).
So where did these "undemocratic" claims come from? In Hungary allegedly there are some curbs on freedom of speech etc. But in Poland? No, the biggest proof is that there are plenty of opposing media (that's why the opposition won).
So why?
Well. The EPP-aligned Po party in Poland when they miserably failed the elections in 2015 immediately started claiming the now ruling party is "undemocratic" (*both parties actually broke the constitution regarding the highest court so there was a typical "pot calling kettle black" situation - that wasn't even the biggest argument, the biggest argument was that they were "power hungry" by rightfully and legally taking power in a country where the majority voted for them by electing their own officials into various state enterprises etc - stuff every single party did before and will do after).
Time has passed, the ruling party has made stupid mistakes, they pissed lots of people by being too religious and pushing their worldview on everyone including myself(for example the high court members elected by them made a ruling you can't abort a pregnancy just because the foetus has a deadly disease, it has always been legal to abort if the mother is in danger) on everyone, but what they also did is they actually fulfilled a number of promises they made prior to the elections. Perhaps that is normal where you live, but it Poland it wasn't. It was normal not just to completely forget all your promises, but to pass laws directly opposing them. They were the only party that actually did what they said they will, also they found and stopped corruption and vat fraud that amounted to 50% more money in the budget during their rule, huge number of roads, motorways etc were built. Also they (called "far right in the west, funny again" increased child benefits essentially getting rid of child poverty). So they won the next election. They continued doing what they did before, but then covid happened and they made stupid mistakes, they were suspicions of corruption on buying respirators etc. Then Russia and Belarus started picking up tens of thousands of people from middle east and africa, flying them to Belarus (for between $5k and $50k per head depending on "class of travel") and forcing these people to attack the polish border in hope Poland will take them in, they will cause mayhem like everywhere else in Europe unconstrained illegal immigration happened turning Poles anti-immigration (guess why, they were hoping well close the borders on Ukrainians). These were people from mild climate countries being dropped in a middle of a forested area with bogs, rivers etc in winter. They were told if they want to get to Germany they have to attack Polish border guards and they did and still do. Why don't they just ask for asylum in Poland, asking the first border guard they meet? Because they want to go to Germany and asking for asylum in Poland means they would be sent back to Poland by the Germans. Until now Polish border guards have saved over 200 people that were stuck in swamps, or having hypothermia etc. They got free heathcare in Polish hospitals. How many if them claimed asylum in Poland? Less than 50. What happened to the rest? They preferred to be dropped of on Belarusian side of the border hoping to try again to cross illegally later.
In this environment the opposition started making baseless claims about "the forest service building mass graves pits" and other bullshit(despite there being lots of humanitarian organisations there illegally), the government instead said they'll build a 180km border wall in 6 months. The opposition said it will never happen, then the wall was built.
Then the war in Ukraine started and specially in the beginning they handled it very well too. Not only Ukrainians were given the same heathcare and rights to work and run businesses like Polish people, but they got the same benefits. Every single government service in Poland has been translated into Ukrainian. 250k Ukrainian kids went to Polish schools. Poland led by that party was the first country to send 200 tanks to Ukraine, anti helicopter rockets, electricity via a new 500kV interconnector and the government did everything in its power to shame pro-Russian countries like Germany and France to help until they did start helping.
Then the inflation happened, still thanks to good economic policy Poland survived it with one of smallest unemployment rates in Europe. Now the inflation is dropping and people forget about such things when times are better.
However, this "undemocratic" ruling party that won the elections twice (not in a landslide - 90% Erdoğan's Turkey style, but in difficult coalitions both times) seemed to became tiered. The campaign focused only on how Tusk was a horrible corrupt prime minister before, that he was openly Pro Putin's Russia until it wasn't possible anymore and that his first party was funded illegally by German CDU (it is illegal for foreign organisations to fund parties). Younger people didn't remember his rule and the crapoy campaign from the "undemocratic" ruling party in connection with that it is unlikely to win for the third time meant they lost. They, as a single party, got the most votes, but the "democratic" opposition has more votes together so they basically lost.
As for the stupid claims of spying on "opposition and some journalists" the only proof is that pegasus was found on their phones and one of these people was being investigated at the time (in connection with illegal party funding). How do you know it was Polish police that used Pegasus and not Russia, Israel or any number of other countries? And if they did, what proof is there for it being done illegally? If it happened it required court order and if it did well know everything about it now that the "undemocratic" government lost power in democratic elections.
I am baffled how we went from a liberal "free" democracy to this ersatz of a totalitarian regime where all our conversations/messages/photos need to be dissected, catalogued and approved by un-elected bureaucrats.
I mean you can literally go to eastern Europe to see the vestiges of the Stasi where they used to listen to the conversations of their citizens while trying to find dissidents among them. This isn't some kind of distant past, this is almost like yesterday and yet here we are again.
How come we end up here again? Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?
And then to turn around and seeing the EU wanting to give lessons of democracy to China or NK? What a joke.
The future is grim and to be honest I would just rather they came out in the open and acknowledged the fact that democracy and privacy as we know it is dead. Then each and everyone can decide to accept this fact or fight back.
Instead we get this grandstanding about civil liberties but in the background they are ever so working on diminishing our individual freedoms.
Many people look at things like the Stasi and think - the problem with it was who was in charge, not that it existed.
We’re the good guys so it would be a good thing. Not a bad thing.
The problem is, they’re almost always the absolute worst to deal with, as almost any evil is excusable when done ‘for the right reasons’ or when ‘we’re the good guys’, where selfish evil at least sometimes takes a break or feels bad. And selfish evil is usually more predictable.
It’s a constant struggle. The underlying need for some to control others, to know what others are doing at all times (and the corresponding elements of control and manipulation) has always lived in every group.
How a group does is more about what it does with it, and how it directs it/reins it in (and acknowledges it), rather than its lack of existence.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth."
The tricky part is, everyone tends to forget the inconvenient things. Or just not research them. Even if it’s staring them in the face.
And denying that we could be bad (or have bad tendencies) that need to be resisted makes it more likely that we would, ultimately, be really bad.
But acknowledging we can be bad ‘hurts’. People want to feel good, and right, and justified. The more pain they are in, the more true it is. People don’t like pain. When it gets really bad, they look for scapegoats and seek comfort in delusion, anger, etc.
There is a balancing act in here somewhere. Frankly though, looking at history as best as I can - the wheel exists, and the analogy of the wheel is so apt because it does keep going in cycles. Pretending that knowing history will somehow insulate us from repeating it is a delusion.
It will all happen again.
The best we can hope for, is that we can make it less painful or evil when it does.
Thanks for the clarification. I understand your point about the research not being done and also the lack of acknowledgement that we as a species are not as good to each other as we think and that we are very much capable of repeating the horrors of WW2 in a heartbeat.
But still, I can't help feeling like we are regressing.
Through failure of instinct. Seeing government agents open your letters, copy their contents, then re-seal them to send them on their way, or tap your phone and listen attentively with headphones, provokes an immediate, instinctive, visceral reaction. There's no need to construct elaborate scenarios how an ordinary law-abiding citizen could fall afoul of his government to make them see the threat.
But change those human spies into innocuous databases and convenient phones, and you lose the benefit of instinct.
The problem is that the new law would certainly have people involved in it to double check the false positives which could amount to millions of photos and messages being shared each year with LEOs.
Not to mention that they would use all this data to train the next generation of algorithms.
The "how" is simple: because it could be done with relative ease now. So those charged with preventing crimes can push for it and pushing back against crime fighting is a tough stance to take.
Also, assuming high levels of privacy in the days of old might be in error, depending on what you were doing.
To me the difference between the iron curtain and today is storage and retrieval. The Bluffdale NAS has been quietly recording everything we say and do, and in 10-20 years it will be a gold mine for manipulating presidential elections. In fact, I can't wait (only for the satisfaction of seeing my prediction come true) to see the first election where the "dirt" on the candidate is an 8th-grade myspace/facebook post.
Take this to NSA levels of privacy invasion and things are about to get _really_ interesting. Nixing candidates is only the beginning, you can sell them protection, or force them to pass/don't pass laws or foreign policy. To me, that's the _real_ benefit of all this. they probably couldn't care less about dissidents.
> I am baffled how we went from a liberal "free" democracy to this ersatz of a totalitarian regime
> How come we end up here again? Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?
You need to read more anarchist/communist literature that explains the situation as it has always been: the presence of a State, as an entity, implies that the population has never been in control. The State has always been. Yes, sure, sometimes the State gives a facade of openness, but it's always been a facade.
Whatever the "free" era we think happened, that era was still definitely not free for a part of the population: marginalized people, non-obedient people, people with an identity considered deviant, .... It wasn't "free", it was just "free for me"
I agree with you, that's why I put the "free" in quotes.
I am not deluded to the point that I think everyone had a great time in the last 30 years or so but since the fall of the USSR and some of it's satellites states , it seemed like we were on an upward trajectory in terms of human rights, democracy and civil liberties.
If the last 30 years have only been a blip in terms of freedom acquired by some parts of the global population, does this mean that we are just returning to the mean value of freedom and that we are by definition always meant to be under some kind of semi-authoritarian regime?
> since the fall of the USSR and some of it's satellites states , it seemed like we were on an upward trajectory in terms of human rights, democracy and civil liberties.
The fall of the USSR is the victory of capitalism and most above all the spread of neoliberalism, definitely not an upward trajectory for human rights, democracy or civil liberties. If you think it's been going up, it's because you were not in the group that has been crushed by it, which means you were in the group that, on the global stage, was crushing the other. Our collective well-being always depends on exploiting someone else, unless you're one of those who is simply exploited
> we are by definition always meant to be under some kind of semi-authoritarian regime?
No, we are not doomed to live under a semi-authoritarian regime because we are not doomed to live under a "regime", or more precisely, a State. Alternatives have existed and have all been crushed by conservative, usually capitalist movements but also Stalinism. They failed not because of their inner issues but because they didn't have enough power in the balance to survive against antagonist movements. Which is enough for me to believe there is some good in it, and it's worth fighting for it
> If you think it's been going up, it's because you were not in the group that has been crushed by it, which means you were in the group that, on the global stage, was crushing the other.
Which is the group being crushed by capitalism? The major complaint against it is inequality, which in practice has meant that it has benefited some people a lot and some people only a little. There are very few people worse off under it than what came before.
Its biggest failings are government failures to appropriately price externalities and the enactment of rules that constrain competition when a government is captured by industry.
But how do you want to fix that? Government-operated commerce certainly doesn't, the environmental record of state-operated industries is catastrophic -- you're essentially asking the industry to regulate itself. Anarchy can't price externalities, how does it propose to prevent anyone from dumping in the river?
The workers who are barely paid a living wage, the workers who are currently in a row with Meta because it used their work for mediation but exploited them, the workers who are currently doing all the not-artificial job of teaching AI. Capitalism works by exploiting people, globalization has just made it less visible
> So what do you want to do instead?
I want people, those who wield tools, those who build tools, those who use resources, to be the ones to decide what we build, how we build it, how much we build it. I don't want industry to regulate itself, I want the users to be their own industry, or if they don't want to/can't, to control the industry.
> Anarchy can't price externalities, how does it propose to prevent anyone from dumping in the river?
Contrary to popular belief, anarchism doesn't mean the absence of rules. How does capitalism proposes to prevent anyone from dumping in the river ? It doesn't, there are rules outside of capitalism that block it from dumping. The trick is to work out who decides the rules.
Anarchism is about taking control of our lives, of our futures. It's about doing for ourselves rather than complaining and hoping someone else does it better for us.
> The future is grim and to be honest I would just rather they came out in the open and acknowledged the fact that democracy and privacy as we know it is dead.
That's overcooked. We've only had strong end-user crypto(graphy) for about 20 years; you can still have private conversations, whether in a field or in a private space that you are sure isn't bugged. This is no worse than it was 20 years ago. "Democracy [...] is dead" is a counsel of despair.
The assumption surveillance stopped after stasi is astonishing.
I believe it never went away and technology simply kept making it more pervasive, more efficient. It didn't suddenly happen in the last ten years or so, it was a continuous progression over decades.
I don't mean to say that surveillance stopped necessarily but I thought that the thought of having a police state such as it was in East Germany or in other Eastern European countries would have vaccinated the world against those tyrannical tendencies.
It's little bit what we have now with respect to nuclear weapons, where we have used them twice and decided to not do it again (so far).
I just cannot fathom that someone is genuinely ok with having their worst secrets and their deepest fear out there in the open being sorted and analyzed by some black box algorithm who may or may not start an investigation against them because they said the wrong thing or shared the wrong image.
Agree. Many reason for people to accept it or resign though (none good):
* everyone seems ok with it
* I do not have a dark secret
* I do have a dark secret but why would I be of interest?
* my data is already out there anyway, no point encrypting anything now.
* so far, so good, why change?
* Nothing is secure anyway, everything is hacked, so what’s the point?
Perhaps it was never a liberal 'free' democracy in the first place. Or if it was, then it resides at an unstable point, and the stable points are full of nightmares.
> Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?
The very microsecond that some tragedy befalls the populace, the very first thing people start screaming about is how pathetic the government is for not knowing about the tragedy in advance and preventing it.
We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.
If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.
Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.
> You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram.
So you... put some secret agents on Telegram to infiltrate the terrorists. In the same way as you got into the room with them before people had portable phones. You bug their phones in the same way as you used to bug their rooms -- through physical access. Which is effective but expensive, and so it works against terrorists and serious criminals but not for mass surveillance.
> When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it.
If we actually had sufficiently secure communications to ward off our own intelligence agencies, why would some other country's have any more luck? Preventing theirs from working against us is good.
Technically shouldn't be happening? Also, probably shouldn't be happening period. Every time it does, Stuff Goes Wrong (tm).
I think the relevant Franklin quote was: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
> When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it.
I don't quite understand your logic. My naive intuition says that applying the strongest possible security posture in all aspects of society will lead to the society being at its most secure.
I'm aware that sometimes seemingly counter-intuitive things hold. If you state that weakening civilian security might somehow strengthen overall security, you may somehow be correct. But you're not quite connecting the dots for me here yet?
> The very microsecond that some tragedy befalls the populace, the very first thing people start screaming about is how pathetic the government is for not knowing about the tragedy in advance and preventing it.
I agree with you that is true but is there any proof that even if all telecommunications were open completely to the governments, it would be possible to stop every incoming attacks/tragedies?
Because that is the current justification that is being used now. Oh if only we could see your Whats-app messages, then we'll be able to stop these horrors. I am not inclined to agree that this would solve anything at all.
Notwithstanding the umber of false positives that this system would generate, there is no risk zero.
> We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.
This argument does not make sense.
We accept a certain level of risk that is inherent to living in a modern civilization.
We don't ban cars even though the damage they do to people each year is infinitely greater than terrorist attacks. How many people have died of terrorist activities in the last year vs the number of people who have been killed/maimed by reckless/ drunk drivers?
So on this basis alone, if we aim at reducing the global number of preventable deaths, then banning cars would be the best thing to do.
> If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.
This solution only works if the government that is doing the monitoring decides to keep it's pinky promise that it won't use this info to get rid of political dissidents or groups of people that are not acceptable/needed anymore.
Is there any reason to believe that a government that gets all this data would use it only for the good of its citizen and not to target certain populations?
Is there any reason to believe that this data would be kept from being shared without consent?
If we look at the last century of history, any time a government has been granted such access, it used it to the detriment of it's citizen and kept themselves in power trough coercion and threats targeting any one who dared resist them.
So forgive me for not wanting to share even more of my private life with someone would may use it later against me.
Finally, we both know that there is no such thing as backdoor for the good guys only, if it exist it will be exploited by foreign actors as soon as possible.
> Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.
This is straw-man argument. Just like the argument about saving the children now. So you don't want to have the government read all your messages, and watch your private conversations, surely you must be a child abuser or a friend of the terrorists. Give me break.
More to the point of your comment, how would opening my private life to the government protect my country from being targeted by a foreign government?
> You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.
And that was exactly my point about the coming out with it already. It seems that the governments in the Western world are hellbent on making sure that they are perceived as freedom loving, democracy loving states. This stance comes with all the posturing regarding China and Russia when in fact they dream to have the same access.
So why the charade? Let's call a spade a spade.
If you want access to every thing I read, every single thing I type, every image I share, then this is not freedom. This is a digital prison and I would very much appreciate it if they could stop lying to our faces and be honest about it.
In days of yore my CS law module was taught by a QC - that's a high ranking barrister in the UK - who explained the world of difference between the "The Rule of Law" and "the law" in a class called "jurisprudence".
Rule of Law (capitalised conceptual) is there as permanent ground truth in contrast to the ephemeral du-jure laws.
At times I still struggle with that profound counter-intuitive idea; that if one deeply, passionately believes in the necessity of The Law and all of society's institutions, one must with equal passion break laws and throw rocks at the police when they are tools of tyrants, idiots and dumb laws.
Indeed today I think that opposition to technological tyranny has become the mark of the true conservative, and that defenders of common sense and simple human dignity are forced to assume the "radical" position.
High ideals are very expensive.