We've changed the url from https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1486049822847250433 to the original source it points to. Some of the comments were posted before the change, and will make more sense if you've looked at both.
All: while I have you, please post thoughtful, substantive comments. Avoid snark, attack, flamebait, and ideological talking points. The latter lead to the repetitive, nasty sort of internet brawl we're trying to avoid here. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that.
Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism.
Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.
It's a special sort of odd neoliberal fantasy where capitalists or technologists can route around an authoritarian social movement that seizes the power of the state.
Do you want to know what happens to people who think they can route around an authoritarian regime with clever computer code? There's a relevant XKCD about a $5 wrench [1], except instead of a $5 wrnech it's the entire apparatus of a developed nation-state.
If you really think authoritarianism is coming to your country, stop fucking around with prime numbers and get serious about the work of political persuasion.
Technology people make this mistake a lot. They see a problem like "the government might track all of our payments in the future" and create bitcoin. Or "the government might rootkit our phones" and creates an open source hardware phone. Or "the government might want to see who you are communicating with" and create an E2E encrypted chat application.
None of these solutions do anything to solve the original problem, it just allows a portion of the population to ignore them.
I am the author of the original tweet, so allow me to push back on this point of view.
Technology people are not the solution to this problem, we are the problem. And we really need to stop being the problem. There have been authoritarian governments before, and still are all over the world: but they've never had access to technology anywhere near as powerful as what we have today, e.g., ubiquitous user location or unencrypted smartphone backup or vast unprotected email databases. These technologies themselves are brand new: smartphone cloud backup is only 10 years old, and ubiquitous GPS-enabled smartphones are younger than my middle-school aged child.
But thanks to aggressive deployment by Silicon Valley we went ahead and created a surveillance utopia on a timescale so short that most citizens don't even realize what we've done. Future governments now have capabilities we could never have imagined a decade ago: centralized data repositories and collection systems that would make the Stasi blush. These systems now exist because people like us built them and decided to leave the problem of securing those repositories to the future. But we're running out of future.
Is more privacy the solution? I don't know. It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused, and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale. I suspect this could happen but would be slow and inefficient and full of friction. None of that has to happen now -- there is no friction -- because Silicon Valley has already done the architecture work and deployed the technology at scale. They did it recklessly and with no thought to how it might be abused, and now they're finding it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. It will not get easier.
TL;DR: The data repositories already exist and all that's protecting them is a fig-leaf of legislation and honest government behavior that could disappear at any moment. Removing those repositories might not save us, but we need to try. We sure need to stop creating more of them.
Okay, so we delete existing repositories and stop collecting that data for now. I'm in full agreement.
I just don't see how developing new systems is any sort of solution.
> It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused
The genie is out of the bottle. Issuing an edict to "do things like you did them in 2022" doesn't exactly require genius-level administrative talent...
It's also a bit presumptuous to assume that a future authoritarian regime wouldn't have expert technologists at their disposal... why do you make this assumption? Technologists are just people; a few will be partisans and many more will go along to get along. (To wit: how many of your colleagues at Johns Hopkins who have personal issues with the defense industry don't take boatloads of $$$ from DoD? Or at very least submit to NSF CFPs that are transparently adjacent to concurrently running DARPA programs? Ditto for colleagues who have beef with the tech industry?)
> and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale.
No forcing of consumers required. Just point a gun at whoever has market power and tell them to do things like they were done in 2022. After all, we are talking about an authoritarian regime.
You make a reasonable case for deleting existing troves of data, and a good counter-factual case for never developing smartphones in the first place. But, again, the genie is out of the bottle.
> It's also a bit presumptuous to assume that a future authoritarian regime wouldn't have expert technologists at their disposal...
I think your thinking here is too binary. Clearly there exist possible futures where authoritarian governments are hyper-efficient and have brilliant technologists advising them. In those futures we're clearly doomed and thus we might as well give up now. The thing is, those futures are not inevitable. There are also many (IMHO more realistic) futures where governments are messy and inefficient (like they are today), where their authority is blunted by organizational and jurisdictional issues (as it is today), where their technologists are not hyper-competent (believe me, as they are today.)
In those worlds there is a huge difference between a scenario where the full weight of FAANGM's resources is pushing to build massive data repositories, and one where they've taken firm technological steps to limit it. We are in the first world and we should be in the second one.
> Issuing an edict to "do things like you did them in 2022" doesn't exactly require genius-level administrative talent...
I think that this will actually be more difficult than you think: this is why governments are spending ~millions right now to slow down the deployment of new encryption technology [1]. But stop worrying about 2022: what you should be worried about is 2036. Look at what we've done to privacy since 2007 -- the year the first iPhone launched. Now imagine someone from ~14 years in the future coming back to to explain what Silicon Valley has done with even better technology like wearables and powerful ML tooling. When you're in a hole, the most important step is to stop digging.
I think you massively under-estimate the banality of authoritarianism.
If an authoritarian movement takes over the US government, at least a majority of the Johns Hopkins CS faculty will continue taking grants from the NSF/DoD. Many of those grants will be more-or-less aligned with the objectives of that authoritarian movement. Non-authoritarian students will grind away on those projects.
Something similar would happen at FAANGM. No iCloud backups? NBD; lean on those companies to collect whatever data the state wants. You don't need super competent loyal technologists, because FAANGM and their employees will most of the time just do what you tell them. You don't need existing troves of data, because you can start collecting at any point and still get a huge amount of utility.
Could the authoritarian world be marginally better if big tech makes an about-face and stops collecting data? Sure. Is that difference enough to make any sort of significant difference in the lived experience of people or the trajectory of the authoritarian regime? Probably not.
I don't think you're wrong, per se, about the risks. But I don't think you have a compelling solution. And, anyways, there are much stronger arguments for reigning in data collection at big tech than the risk of impending authoritarianism.
Right? This comment thread reads like this sort of thing hasn’t already happened here. But it has. The US may not be the most authoritarian regime, but I think that its recent actions scream authoritarianism louder than any words claiming that it’s not.
Partially correct. But we only have an ounce of privacy because states are not able to intrude all systems that we have. If it would be possible, surveillance would be even more extensive.
Sure, if there is enough incentive they might compromise your communication. At that point the wrench argument becomes very true.
So yes, technology did prevent the worst. It is true that it doesn't solve the problem of politcal ambitions of course, that was never the intend.
> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism.
> Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.
That seems to me like false dilemma of ideal freedom vs authoritarian regimes. Full-scale authoritarian regimes are scary but unlikely risk for western democracies. The real risk is small-scale creeping authoritarian policies accepted democratically with popular support.
We have to consider that liberty is not without real trade-offs between it and other values. It is fantasy to offer political persuasion as a solution. Different people have different preferences for political values and if there is a policy that is unacceptable for liberty-loving minority but satisfies preferences of majority by offering better support for other values, then it is unlikely than just political work can stop it (that would mean to convince others to accept a position detrimental to their own values). And there is enough people who in good faith would like to repress terrorist, CSAM, corruption, tax evasion, public health risks for a 'small' liberty restriction.
While this is 100% correct that Surveillance-resistant systems or other technical means are not he answer to authoritarianism, this statement has at least two problems.
1. A technical solution may not in itself be the way to counter authoritarianism, but may assist in either resisting it or prevent it from gaining enough power. Since democracy is a state of permanent fight against the iron law of oligarchy (which ultimately leads to authoritarianism), any thing that reduces the power of the govt to a certain extent is good. In other words, we don't want the govt to be 100% efficient in whatever it does. Arguably modern tech in current state gives the govt near 100% efficiency in surveillance, so this has to be countered with any means, most of which are of course political and legislative, but surveillance-resistant technology can also play its part.
2. Authoritarianism is not the only threat. It's entirely possible to have a democracy in place and yet have a miserable existence under it. For example, if every perfectly democratic law we have now is enforced with 100% efficiency it will feel very close to a dystopia. Technology can help alleviate this to a certain extent.
> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism.
>
> Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.
Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them.
The only surveillance resistant (not surveillance-proof obviously) technologies are distributed, decentralized ones implemented in open source.
You're right that political activism is ultimately the only good answer. But it's not either/or, it is still quite useful in parallel to also develop, maintain and popularize decentralized systems as much as possible.
> Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them.
There’s a range on this - ask Apple about the FBI – and there are still several levels of usefulness: designing systems which don’t store data unnecessarily, forcing things to follow the legal process rather than quietly turning data over, and notifying the user when this happens. Obviously not all of this is possible to varying degrees but not all authoritarian states are the same, either.
> get serious about the work of political persuasion
The Conversations with Tyler Cowen podcast episode "Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy (Ep. 106)" has some interesting content in this regard. Tang works on the government side but the same principles are involved regardless of direction.
When authoritarianism comes around, it wont just be surveiling. An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because the goal is to turn the state into an all-encompasing master of peoples lives, and work is a large part of peoples lives (especially in an a11n regime!)
Whether or not the state can surveil is a moot point if the owners of the tech are in on the game.
They don't want to type the letters in the middle, so they dropped them and put a count of how many letters were dropped. I'm mostly familiar with a11y meaning accessibility.
I believe this pattern was originally popularized by "i18n" for "internationalization", partly for convenience and partly to have an identifier that would fit in legacy systems.
According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name.
('K9' is homophone for 'canine'. To be homonyms, two terms should have different meaning - if two terms share the same name and meaning, they are the same...)
> get serious about the work of political persuasion
The thing about populist authoritarian movements is that they're popular. They're supported by a large segment of the population, and that segment is full of passionate intensity while the rest of us lack all conviction [0].
I can't think of a large populist authoritarian movement in the last hundred years that was defeated by mere "political persuasion".
So... what? Don't try? Don't bother? That's like saying don't bother cooking your food because even cooked food can get you sick some of the time. Or do you believe that a hypothetical future authoritarian government can hire an army of thugs to kneecap everybody who they believe shared an anti-regime meme? Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Laying the framework for anonymous communication today while it's easier just to be on the safe side is worthwhile.
Interesting thought, another reason to get to space.
With the internet and modern IT tools, authoritarian control over the populace is approaching turnkey. Well, it is, we just haven't had a strongman yet in the US (that wasn't an idiot).
The only defense is the speed of light. A question: at what amount of transit time from "the authority" to "the colony" does total information control fall apart? 1 light-minute? 1 light-hour? 1 light-day?
Nevertheless, space will be a whole new set of rules. The "authority" will be on Earth, and won't be able to think in terms of "space".
I strongly agree with you, but at the same time think giving more control to individuals in terms of communication, expression, and infrastructure is probably helpful?
Non-technological and technological solutions aren't mutually exclusive.
I guess I always think of the the quasiomnipotent totalitarian state as a kind of theoretical [anti?]ideal state, sort of like "what's the worst possible case scenario and how does this do in that scenario?"
The goalposts are always being moved but that doesn't mean you shouldn't adjust accordingly.
We are long beyond that point, sadly. We are right now in the process of
a) becoming legally required to own and carry a particular kind of device and
b) being legally unable to fully control said device and
c) having that device explicitly working (again by legal requirement) against our own interests
It will be interesting to watch how things will progress and whether governments or corporations will be the ones holding control over the devices.
It will also be interesting to see how the mandatory usage and mandatory anti-user-services will be implemented in detail.
I guess that mandatory usage will be a race between mobile payment and government services like eID and eLicense. Anti-user-services will take some time to be fully developed, but I guess the first thing will be content scanning in messenger apps, closely followed by a list of illegal words or names.
I don't have to buy a phone. Yes, the apps make the border easier for Covid, but don't be ridiculous. I can fallback to filling out a piece of paper. Furthermore, I can buy an [PinePhone, Librem 5, etc] phone and "fully control" that.
As for c) that's been part of life since the government got the right to tap your phone or telegraph.
Right now there are troubling signs for the direction of American democracy, but the courts have held up and life is still pretty good and, for some, getting better. I know mistakes happen and it isn't perfect, but we're no where close to being forced to own and carry a device.
In Denmark where I live there are now trivial things that are impossible to do without an Apple or Google smartphone, and important things that are becoming very hard. Unless laws are specifically enacted to enshrine "analogue rights" or whatever, it will become impossible to exist here without a smartphone over the next decade.
Cash is largely dead and will die when the legal requirement to accept it is phased out at some point in the next few years. In addition to credit cards, there is one app for payments (owned by the largest retail bank) that has become the de facto standard for person-to-person transfers. So we are already at the point where not having a smartphone makes you a second class citizen, unable to participate in some parts of the economy.
- cars will certainly soon have the state's "black box" in them
- Your ID card already has RFID, and it will only get more powerful
- credit, payment, banking, passports, air travel ... all getting centralized.
- Go ahead and fallback to paper, that just means the paper is entered into a computer when you hand it in and they "review" it. What will probably happen is that the all-paper route will become FAR MORE ONEROUS will submitting to facial recognition, DNA samples, and the like to back-verify your identity, higher fees, wait times, until you submit to practical day-to-day needing a on-body computer device like a phone.
- all democracies know laziness is the key to functionally subverting rights, it's only going to get worse.
- even if you don't submit, all they people you know WILL, and the government can track you by tracking the people you know. So I guess, no friends for you.
Now, for every place I said government, cross that out and put in "multinational corporation that is a monopoly or cartel in all its markets"... and it's all there, turnkey, same policies, but even less legal / constitutional protection.
The worst example I've seen personally was the pension plan provider at my current job. They required an app to sign up and manage everything. They don't have a web site and I was the first person to ask about it.
Parking in many places requires an app from an app store.
There's lots of small community things, local classifieds etc., that exist in niche things that only have an app. Like I said, trivial things, but they add up to everyday life becoming harder.
As for legal requirement: the government single sign-on that is used to interact with all government services and is also mandated for many important things like banks, insurance etc., is app-centric, though not app-only. They used to send one-time pads on cardboard but recently switch to electronic tokens. All government ID (for public health etc.) is also moving to apps. You can still get plastic cards, of course.
If you find yourself in a state of emergency, you might be out of luck if you don't own a SIM card registered to your own name, plugged into a modem which you cannot fully control by law.
BTW, if you want to make a call over the telephone network, neither the PinePhone nor the Librem 5 carry a modem you can control. In both cases, the modem is a black box with non-free firmware that you're probably not even allowed to modify, depending on jurisdiction.
Oh, and it doesn't even have to be an emergency. You might find out that your hospital only accepts appointments made by phone, and will turn you around from the door due to COVID restrictions when you try to schedule a visit. What will you choose?
Granted, it's not a legal requirement to take advantage of your legally mandated health insurance, but it's a catch-22 that was constructed out of a clash of laws.
No one doubts that owning at least a burner "dumb" phone has become a practical necessity.
It's the idea of an actual smartphone not just maybe, hypothetically but "right now becoming" a legal requirement that seems to be -- more than a bit of stretch, here,
"Call this number from your car" was a common procedure, on arriving at a place, for much of COVID. Hard to do that without a cellphone (or a carphone, I guess, but who still has those? Cops, maybe?)
Did you try running banking apps on the PinePhone?
My bank has made it (almost) impossible to make payments without a phone, btw. Either you need to receive SMS messages or use their proprietary app. I could receive SMS messages without a phone but I would expect this to be a solution that eventually gives me more trouble than it's worth.
In most of Europe, depositing cash rarely happens unless you're a business owner depositing the day's earnings. Withdrawals is easier from an ATM.
Many banks require you to call ahead if you want to make a large cash withdrawal, and if you make a large deposit you need to be able to document where you got the money from or had the authorities called on you.
I think I haven't deposited since I last emptied my piggy bank as a kid, probably in the early 90s. And I've actually never in my life withdrawn over the counter, I was given an ATM only card sometime when I was deemed old enough to use it.
In the eyes of your bank, the _least_ suspicious thing you can do is show up to your local branch and present your physical card and photo ID. Your bank will be much more cautious for large transactions done through an app, where the only authentication is a password and possibly an SMS message. Your bank will probably ask a few questions if you show up in-person to deposit $50k cash into a personal account, but it's not like you could avoid that by using their app.
> Have you actually tried depositing large amounts of cash on a regular basis? Sounds like a good way to get your account flagged and suspended.
1. OP said "make payments", not "receive money". Literally no one is going to give a shit if you make your mortgage or car payment in cash.
2. LOL, yes, I deposit cash all the time, including a quite large sum at least twice a year (charity events). Cash-based businesses are still very much a thing.
3. I write like $10K worth of checks every month, and deposit around $3K-$6K worth of checks every month. No smartphone required.
"Literally no one is going to give a shit if you make your mortgage or car payment in cash."
Are you sure? To get a mortgage they check the source of your down payment and it cannot be cash. Seems odd if they don't also check source for payments.
Making payment on existing loan != taking out a new loan.
> they check the source of your down payment and it cannot be cash.
If you mean literal physical cash: the main reason for this is that no one involved in the transaction is interested in taking on the risk of carrying briefcases full of cash across town.
If you mean money in a bank account that is of unknown provenance: This isn't really an issue unless you make a huge lump sum deposit just before closing and have absolutely zero documentation regarding where it came from. Even then, giant sums recently deposited isn't a problem. You just have to prove that it's of non-criminal provenance. Recent pay stubs or sales receipts will do.
That has nothing to do with the money being "cash" or not, though.
And even then, it's mostly about access to giant piles of credit. If you don't need to borrow huge piles of someone else's money, then no one gives a shit. E.g., I've purchased property with a cashier's check, which is about as close to literal cash as you can get without major security risks involved.)
> Lenders won't lend you money with a down payment of unknown provenance
That's actually incorrect, to my understanding. If you have 100k in your bank account for a year, the lender doesn't care when you pay your down payment out of that regardless of where it came from. They object when there's a recent transfer/deposit of that money because it could indicate an undocumented loan, throwing off the debt to income calculations.
Right. I think I must've got my edit in after you posted.
> They object when there's a recent transfer/deposit of that money because it could indicate an undocumented loan, throwing off the debt to income calculations.
Right. It's not some authoritarian plot. They just wanna make sure you're not a fibbing about your net worth before handing you a giant stack of their money. If you can prove the money is yours then they're fine.
There's a middle ground here that has existed for a long time. Mail hand-written cheques for your bills, deposit your paystub into your bank account, withdraw cash on a periodic basis for daily spending. You don't even need to use a banking card for any of this.
I haven't been to a store that has refused cash and have never been required to use a banking app.
I still pay most of my bills with checks. I also collect rent and pay rent with checks. Basically my entire financial life except for perhaps eating out and buying useless things online is mediated in cash and checks. This is very normal in my social circle.
Just because you choose to use e-banking doesn't mean that cash and checks are inaccessible, or even particularly inconvenient.
I have a hunch it depends heavily on your location. I have never seen a check in my life, and I have never heard of anyone I know using them. I wouldn't be able to say whether such a thing even exists here. Cash is still a thing but not universally accepted; not having a credit or debit card would be a major inconvenience. Banks can be hard to access because they've reduced offices and opening hours. You don't go there unless you really have to.
Like the sibling commenter, I'm from Finland. The same applies to most of the Nordics though; I doubt my kids will ever see a check. People simply don't use them and cashing one would probably be quite difficult (not to mention expensive).
I don't think there are any businesses here who'd accept a check. Banks would probably do it for a fee, or at least require you deposit the money to your account.
Bills here are paid with bank transfer. It doesn't have to be done though online banking, but doing so is obviously easier.
My bank has a mobile friendly website? I'm sure it would work on PinePhone. Either way, this is goalpost moving. I don't even need to own a bank account. OP said government.
There's always a trade-off between security and convenience, and similarly, there tends to be a trade-off between different forms of freedom. If you want the freedom to choose any bank without any inconvenience, then you'll have to sacrifice software freedom. If you want the freedom to fully control your computing devices, then you'll have to be selective about the bank you use.
None of the banks in the country where a friend of mine lives offer the services he demands: he is planning to live the country.
Many in this branch of discussion seem to be measuring their possibilities against a current situation in their area - while in some other regions the situation is worse to desperate - and they are not seeing a trend.
Normally, you would not support the trend. When a whole society but only a few support it - by buying, adopting etc. - there is probably little to be done but hanging to the escape routes you have.
You can (and in a way should) also wake up the sleepers, but it will be hard or less feasible to properly reach the masses.
The TV show Upload [1] has a group of people dubbed the "Ludds" (i.e. Luddites) that refuse to be party to the turn that the technological revolution has taken and stick to traditional ways of doing things. I strongly believe if that were to happen in our world today, much of Silicon Valley would be "Ludds", while a mass of non-tech people would happily welcome our new technological overlords.
I'm about as technical as it is possible to get. I fucking hate technology these days. It all sucks, it tries to insert itself between everything human and sane, and extract value for its masters. People are serfs in closed silos. They own nothing, just like the serfs of old: not their farmlands or cattle (laptops, phones and data), nor their homes (accounts in the 'cloud' subject to AI shutdown without human recourse).
It will take a while of it getting progressively worse before an apathetic consumer class will finally be exploited enough to start demanding proper rules around all of this. I don't think progress will stop when the situation at it's worst. But I do think we'll have to get through that first.
> It will take a while of it getting progressively worse before an apathetic consumer class will finally be exploited enough to start demanding proper rules around all of this.
We'll see about that, I guess. Revolutions in the past were successful because you couldn't control people so strongly and you needed the to work to be able to tax them.
With our new surveillance tech and automation I am afraid this has changed for the worse
1) Initially, when a new technology is discovered and leads to a paradigm shift, commercial/capitalist ventures are most efficient at digging down and innovating quickest. A depth first search if you will: relentlessly driving down costs, improving the technology and consuming or destroying the competition. Then, once the time is right, the exploitation begins. No longer are the newest models of $TECHNOLOGY strictly better than their predecessors, any progress is incremental and genuine innovation is partially co-opted by marketing.
When this happens the screws start getting tightened. Companies used to rapid growth due to merit try to maintain growth velocity by cutting cost, exploiting regulatory loopholes yet to catch up with the paradigm shift, and any other things not directly related to their new niche that the risk/reward calculators deem worth it (breaking laws, anti-patterns, etc.).
The reaction to this is two fold: 1a) governments want to stick their hand in the newly-added piece of the pie, 1b) people don't like being more and more exploited.
2) People understand when they're being screwed. Our sense of 'justness' is about as evolved as can get, people might not always be able to pinpoint what is screwing them over, but the anger still builds. I believe (really can't justify any of the things I'm claiming here as truth, it's just my opinions) that trust takes longer to build than to destroy. I loved google for 2 years, I've hated them for much longer. I feel intuitively that I'm being exploited when forced to help their machine learning algorithm detect traffic signs that only a few people will profit off. I feel like I've never entered into a fair contract where I'm obtaining search results in exchange for some of my attention; I'm just forced to fill these things out every once in a while to access a site unrelated to google. Can you believe my GP's site has a google captcha page on the contact form? Where I enter medical data? I _HATE_ that.
3) People like me (and you?) spread the word. After the initial rush described in point 1. other ways of working gain speed. Technology, organization, open source, education, they all make it easier and easier to replicate what was an enterprise deployment a decade ago as a small group, or even individual, today. One day a matrix bridge will allow me to message all my friends from a single, polished place, with good UX. One day later a friend will see me using it, and the word will spread.
The inherent nature of information favors the communicators, integrator and middle men. It's impossible for a silo to detect with certainty that you are not actually using a third party app, like a matrix bridge, to talk to your friends. A false positive will lead to more feelings as shown in point 2, a false negative is the natural result of progress in point 3.
4) Governments cannot afford a completely tech illiterate population. Security and military forces around the world have recognized for years already that information technology is another avenue to achieve their goals. Knowledge of the possibilities of information technology is a natural (but certainly not perfect) antidote to some of the ways an opponent might exploit your population. Organizations (in a liberal country) in this sphere will focus on education, partially to increase their own resilience against attack, and create a fertile recruiting ground for new recruits.
In times of frustration with the modern Internet, I've often sympathized with the Amish.
For those unfamiliar, the Amish are a religious-society that avoid the conveniences of modern technology. They live in houses without electricity, and travel by in horse and buggy. It's sort of like they hit a point in history and saw where the world was going and decided, "nah, we're ok, we like how things are now."
When frustrated, I imagine a new-Amish. A secular society, who lives their lives (mostly) off the Internet. I'm not exactly sure what that would entail, nor do I think I'd actually want to live that way. It's just a fun thought experiment.
I submit that the Amish have been successful in their efforts because they have a unifying transcendent value system that gives their group cohesion and purpose. Secular efforts will quickly dissolve into warring sub-tribes.
I agree, their religion probably does a lot to hold the Amish society together. It sets out a common set of rules that everyone plays by. There is also the strict punishment of social shunning for not following the rules. I wonder how fa
I disagree that a societal value system _must_ be religiously-transcendent to be effective. I can't name any such system that has had 100% success, but I reject the notion that it's impossible for a a functioning secular society to work.
To be sure, my idea of a new-Amish whose only rule is minimal Internet usage, would not work as a tight-knit community. There would have to be a bigger connection than a common disdain for the Internet.
Religion is the only reason and purpose which motivate their minimal use of technology. There are many different sorts of Amish, each with different rules (in the tradition of protestant sects which split on a regular basis), depending on which amount and type of technology they believe would interfere with their devotion. It is not some sort of hippy community which rejects the excess of modern technology and wraps some spirituality around it. It is the other way round.
Interestingly, they also give their young a chance to leave temporarily, known as the Rumspringa, and then decide whether they'd like to return and live as Amish or stay in modern society (with the ability to still visit if they'd like). A few decades ago they retained 75% of their children. Now it's closer to 90% which probably tells you something.
Much of Silicon Valley likes to think they would be Ludds but they do so while hailing an Uber from their iPhone and hoping that their DoorDash is devlivered on time so they can eat while they watch a HBO Max show and they hope that nobody stole their Amazon Prime package.
I think it applies more along the lines of "free" products where "you are the product" comes into play. It may entirely be biased based on who I know, but I know more tech people who refuse to have a Facebook because of tracking than I do non-tech people.
>> I strongly believe if that were to happen in our world today, much of Silicon Valley would be "Ludds", while a mass of non-tech people would happily welcome our new technological overlords.
Which would be very interesting because it's the Ludds who are building that tech. But hey, it pays well...
Much of Silicon Valley is just looking for a way to pay their exorbitant rent and/or become million(billion)aires. SV isn't going to take a principled stance on anything. Heck, the big players all know which side their bread is buttered on and the bigger they are, the more entwined in the corruption they are.
It's my understanding that the Luddite movement was less about personal preferences or adherence to tradition, and more a labor movement that was opposed to losing their livelihoods to early forms of automation.
Well, they did not lose their jobs to automation for the most part. But tech enable rigorous surveillance so that taking a leak has to be a timed. Yeah, technology...
They're the ones who buy "smart locks" then get locked out of their place because they dropped their iPhone in a puddle or the lights went out
They're the ones who come with genius ideas like reinventing the bus with Uber or fall for stuff like uBeam because they're too lazy to plug their phone into a charger
But then they save the PIN on their phone instead of their memory because tiktok burned out their brain and they left the key home because "why do you need it since you have your iPhone!?11" and if this last point looks ridiculous remember this is exactly what happened with some Tesla owners going into areas of low cell service.
And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?
...
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
For now. As an example, there are Amazon Prime discounts available at Whole Foods, and this QR code which asserts your membership cannot be printed because it embeds an OTP-like temporal code which changes every 60 seconds.
Any QR code which can be printed, can be copied. There's a vested interest for the operators of these systems to reduce the copyability of these codes (think: vaccine passports). Embedding a temporal code, changing the QR code every few minutes, and invalidating old codes, essentially OTP, is the most straightforward and industry standard way of doing this; it's inevitable.
It's a looking-forward statement... projecting current trends 5-10 years in the future. More likely will be a de-facto requirement to participate in society rather than a law. As I mentioned in another comment, many private companies are already requiring it.
Another forward-looking statement might be that "governments will require constant 24-hour curfews 10 years from now". After all, that's just projecting and extrapolating from recent historical events (temporary movement restrictions, or lockdowns).
Anyone can make "forward looking statements". If they're going to be useful and not dismissed as hysterical fear-mongering, then it helps if they're actually credible.
In some societies, "ability and availability to install mobile applications" is now taken for granted. This comes from the fact that in some societies the vast majority of the members take sheepish "what others do must be right" behaviour as granted. Those mentalities are enablers for regulations that may claim to mirror alleged "de facto" situations - making relevant prospects credible.
Surely many state supported sacrifices to privacy of the recent times (in some regions) were "supported" with "Don't they have FB anyway?" (thing is, of course, no they don't - a few would never).
> projecting and extrapolating from recent historical events
When some of the «recent historical events» come in "support" of already established desiderata of some parts (say, cashless society - to be intended as option dropping), creating an acceleration towards said trends, then they get relevant.
Choosing to ignore clear trends is a strategy as well. I put away the smartphone for several weeks this year, was surprised how many things it discouraged and a few times prevented.
In modern republics there is the practise of turning custom into law[0] by the generalized social manifestation of said custom, without said law having been enacted by a legislative body such as congress. All it takes is one judge setting the precedent.
A life without a smartphone is already difficult. Possible, but difficult; it involves knowing people who have smartphones, and using fragile hacks, and doing without. With only “show the screen of your smartphone” proof-of-whatever being used, and the phasing out of paper documentation, it's not unreasonable to think we might end up in a situation like this. (Though, it definitely hasn't already happened; I don't think this is the case in any country.)
OP stated, verbatim, that smartphones are "becoming legally required".
I understand the slippery slope argument, even if I think it's kind of alarmist, but... I mean, come on. Present tense?!?! We are sooooo far off from a legal mandate to carry a smartphone that I'm not even sure how to politely react to this statement.
> it's not unreasonable to think we might end up in a situation like this.
This is perhaps a good use of the double negative, because it's certainly not reasonable either.
It doesn't have to be written law passed by a government for something to be "legally required".
Just like the government doesn't have to pass laws or implement systems for surveillance when they can just rely on FANG to do all the data collection for them.
They don't require you buy the device - they merely require apps that run on the device to do certain necessary things, such as drive a motor vehicle, enter certain buildings, use public transportation, etc.
The migration to "Oh we now have mobile enabled -- X" is already happening, with "X" being boarding pass, driver's license, building pass, payment method, etc.
First, it's a convenience, then it becomes a requirement.
At that point, we'll need two devices. One to act like a wallet does now, with all those various passes, permits, and payment methods. For those wealthy enough and who GAF about various issues, that would be a very cheap device and the second device would be your "real" one.
AFAIK we're actually in exactly the opposite situation. I can be imprisoned for not having a physical copy of my driver's license while operating my vehicle!
> First, it's a convenience, then it becomes a requirement.
What requires a smartphone app?
> At that point, we'll need two devices.
So, just to be clear, you're going to carry two smartphones. One that has a PNG of your driver's license on it and another that doesn't.
...why? What's the "win" here? And if you're so concerned with privacy why on earth are you carrying around that second smartphone? Just carry around the first one with the appropriate PNGs/QR codes and leave it at that.
I mean, all of this is kind of beside the point, but I'm asking for clarification because I'm genuinely bewildered about your threat model.
> For those wealthy enough and who GAF about various issues, that would be a very cheap device and the second device would be your "real" one.
If by "wealthy enough" you mean "has 40 bucks, or any friend who bought a smartphone in the last 3 years and doesn't want their old one."
>>Who does any of the things you listed?
1) Any of the states/countries who uses vaccine passports.
2) Any employer using smartphone badges [0]
>>why? What's the "win" here?
The win would be that the one carrying all your 'required' stuff is not the same one as the one you use for telecommunications & other work. Separation. The one with all your licenses, accounts, etc. has ONLY that stuff.
And sure, if you want to carry only one with the minimal stuff, go for it.
>>If by "wealthy enough" you mean "has 40 bucks..."
Yes, I'd make the license/pass/etc phone a cheap one, but it still might require a separate plan, which is monthly maintenance, etc...
>>I'm genuinely bewildered about your threat model.
I'd say the main post described it rather well.
Just the combination of nice-to-have options becoming mandatory/primary, the underlying device thus also becoming mandatory, and the device explicitly working against our interest.
While 'I've got nothing to hide', I still don't like my devices gathering data on me that isn't also useful to me.
E.g., right now, it's pretty optional to be tracked - just leave the smartphone behind, bring cash and your license/badge/whatever. We can't do that when all those passes are on the same device, along with our communications history and more...
It is starting at this stage as a convenient option [0][1]. The stage to be concerned about is when it becomes ubiquitious, then default, then mandatory. Might not be soon, but it is a large round rock rolling downhill. Might be stoppable, but that's usually the default progression.
Okay, but that was speaking in the abstract context, and you're right, I was assuming the future tense and not unambiguously forcing it there in that line.
That said, another part of it was clearly in the future tense.
>>At that point, we'll need two devices.
So, thanks for the alert, I'll try to be more clear next time.
My main concern was the assertions made in the comment I initially responded to, several layers up. Whose author seems to have ghosted us, since making them.
This fills me with dread, resentment and anger. I wanted a future where I would be the master of technology, and what I am getting instead is more of the "I can't let you do this, Dave" vibe. I want to live in a community of individuals, not be subjugated to whatever happens to feed the anxieties and neuroses of society. Is there... will there be a way to resist this obscenity?
It's interesting you say that I've recently started reading Dune, and one point that I found interesting was that the Butlerian Jihad was not a revolution where they swore of the machines who had become malicious against them but rather that some humans were using the machines to oppress other humans and that is what led to the Jihad. I find it interesting that all these technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier really just end up transferring power from one group of people to another.
So what I am saying is a Butlerian Jihad is always a solution.
> I find it interesting that all these technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier really just end up transferring power from one group of people to another.
But that's what affluent people have always been doing whenever given unrestricted freedom. That's because they are better at using technology and finances and everything else.
Bitcoin was supposed to free money from financial institutions. But that's naive -- financial institutions have way more firepower and experience at subverting markets to their will.
The same goes for anything else. The larger the company the easier time it has to influence lawmaking, judicial, executive.
Maybe what we need is an equivalent of Butlerian Jihad but against organisations that are too big to be controlled.
I don't think that Butlerian Jihad is a solution because, apart from authorial fiat in fiction, groups willing to use intelligent machines will not be ruled over by forces unwilling to use intelligent machines. It's like positing a future where a coalition of crossbow-using armies defeats armies that use rifles and then imposes a comprehensive ban on rifles.
Resisting foreign occupation is much easier than imposing a foreign occupation of one's own. The Taliban never had a chance of imposing its rule in the United States. The Butlerian Jihad of the Dune universe eliminated intelligent machines everywhere.
Either support the inevitable neo-Luddite revolution (probably will happen in next 10 years), or move out of the reach of the technological system. Both options will be very difficult.
No, the reason you see this increasing control is because people dont' want to give a small minority the ability to fuck up the rest of society. There is nowhere go to on Earth, because the entire world is spoken for.
Hence why people will settle space. It's treated as a pie in the sky joke today, but once it's "affordable" (ie, 250K per ticket) many people will go. Long term, it'll be an essential pressure release valve, as various discontents and dissidents go there to try and build their own versions of society. And that's great, the rest of us will just sit here trading freedoms for comfort and everyone will be happy.
It's not just per person ticket cost, you need to put a whole space station up there. For the kind of money it would cost it would be affordable to buy whatever freedoms you want right here on Earth.
There's already a movement to live at sea, in international waters, which makes a hell of a lot more sense -- but that movement has insufficient traction with the rich to fund itself. Living in space in the future will always be more expensive than living at sea is now.
Rich people have little reason to be dissidents (though they may want to pose themselves that way), and also it's near impossible to become rich in the first place without being highly conformist toward power, and those attitudes propagate even to heirs.
This is why the Bitcoin bubble is interesting. Large wealth transfer to non-conformists. I've seen them fund some pretty cool stuff, garbage NFTs aside.
Surveillance will be even greater in an offworld colony. But they will, perhaps, be free to set dinner of their own rules and laws as the group sees fit.
Even before covid, when it turned out that society wants to track my movements or to reward and punish me based on my medical history, it could easily be swayed with such words as "pedophile ", "terrorists", or "drugs". So much so that it might want to be able to monitor my private messaging (and prevent its encryption) to make sure that I am neither a pedophile, nor a terrorist; or might want to check my social media profiles at the border to make sure I haven't expressed any sympathies to a terrorist organisation. Today, it also seems to be eager to do things to fight "misinformation". I am sure more examples can be provided.
> The power elite sets policy. Not vague sentiments.
What do you mean by this? What's a power elite; doesn't it, in a democracy, rule with the approval of the society, and why would one be happy with a power elite's policy that lets it intrude into your private life anyway?
However much of a bogeyman the pandemic turned out to be, the concern is that the state, proverbially, doesn't let a good crisis go to waste. Such was the case after 9/11; and there are signs that such is also the case now.
I agree that the aftermath of 9/11 wasn’t handled properly. You can’t react to a terror attack by becoming more afraid of terrorism—that just means that the terror attack was a success.
Technological progress and economic incentives seem (to me) to make ubiquitous surveillance unavoidable. Given that, it seems that the best solution would be to force our rulers to be subject to ubiquitous surveillance.
I'm sorry, but appealing to companies makes no sense. For one, it is against their financial interests, and second, if it can be introduced, it can be reversed.
He should appeal to the media instead: they should make people aware not how much control they are giving away now, but how dangerous it can become in the future. But it seems to me very few people would listen or care.
One could interpret this call to action being targeted as much at individual workers in SV, and its general culture (as in, quit your high-paying VC-backed job, and work on something FOSS/federated).
In either case, I agree appealing to corporations makes no sense; in those rare cases where their bottom lines aren't aligned with future authoritarian states, it's because they want to become quasi-authoritarian fiefs themselves.
I'd be curious on the media using this from a fear angle. In everything you have to ask yourself "where's the incentive". For decades, the Media (big-M) have relied on fear for viewership, because it sells. Sounds like they could pretty easily sell government surveillance as fear if they chose to. There's a lot of information to be had in why they're not currently doing this, be it their own fear of US government, China, etc.
Nope, not everybody cares. My father is staunchly in the "I have nothing to hide" camp, more specifically, he thinks "what does it matter if <company> knows I do <thing>?"
Meanwhile many of my other relatives are afraid of being tracked, but they attribute that tracking to spy chips bill gates put in the covid vaccine. Meanwhile, as my father above pointed out, they carry their phones with them everywhere, and use facebook prominently.
>Reminder to Silicon Valley: there’s an even chance that many governments in the world will be run by authoritarian movements in the future. Your window to deploy surveillance-resistant systems is running out.
Tech companies don't have a great human rights history when there is money to be made.
Tech companies only stand to gain from partnering with an invasive government. The idea that they'd side with us over the state that regulates them and provides a market to seek profit is a fantasy
Tech companies' clients are advertisers and businesses, whose interests align with those of the tech companies. We get the end product for free, and we are not the clients.
Their clients are paying them to do exactly what they do. Do you perhaps mean their "data subjects" will change their behavior? That hasn't happened so far - advertising is a hell of a drug. How many people can even resist the upgrade treadmill for the overwhelmingly anti-user devices in their pockets?
The most eligible client of a surveillance resistant system is a challenger to the throne, not a pleb. Since the most powerful can optionally exercise their power through persuasion of a multitude of plebs, there is a natural 50/50 split of power between the masses and the elite.
It's almost like Snowden forgot the US has the largest prison population ALREADY. The time ran out in the late 90s when all the Surveillance technology was being built by Silicon Valley.
I honestly don't think deploying surveillance resistant systems now will help against an authoritarian government.
Imagine if WhatsApp, Messenger, and Apple Messages were all fully end-to-end encrypted.
An authoritarian government comes in and demands that Facebook/Meta and Apple release a new version that is either not end-to-end encrypted or somehow allows the government to be able to see the messages.
Do you really think they will resist? Do you see Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg willing to have all their wealth confiscated and spend the rest of their life in prison on the charges of assisting terrorism (remember, we are talking about an authoritarian government. Remember also what happened to the Russian oligarchs to defied Putin, and the Jack Ma in China)?
So Facebook and Apple release the new version, and disallow using the old version (users get a popup saying they need to upgrade their app).
Do you really think any significant portion of users will not "upgrade" their apps to the less secure version and lose out on all their existing chat history and networks?
The people that would be aware of this and resist this, are likely using apps like Signal, Matrix, etc (apps that prize security over engagement and that have not come from the Silicon Valley tech giants).
> An authoritarian government comes in and demands that Facebook/Meta and Apple release a new version
That is why a surveillance resistant system should 1) have open protocol 2) have free & open & fully auditable implementations 3) be sufficiently simple that disjoint groups (and individuals) can maintain and audit compatible implementations.
It's easy to make demands when the system is centralized; I don't think such a system can resist surveillance (or censorship or much else).
Many people who care already have moved away from social media anthem likes.
It always makes me laugh to see people talk about privacy security from their MacBooks with their apple, Facebook, Google, reddit, Instagram and YouTube accounts. Meanwhile they really happy to handout your info when LE asks.
I think it's imperative that governments all over the world take steps to reduce dependence on American infrastructure. Russia is working on this, but it's a slow process - especially on the hardware side of things.
If the US goes (more) rogue at some point, Europe will be left holding the bag. The sphere around Russia and China will make it, but what does Europe have?
This is ironic considering Russia and China are already quite authoritarian societies. China is especially heavy handed on the surveillance side of things.
This sort of flamebait is not welcome on HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. We ban accounts that take threads further into flamewar this way. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Edit: since your account has repeatedly been posting flamebait and unsubstantive comments, and you've ignored our request to stop, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
> People in China are ok with surveillance because most of them tend not to do things like riot for every reason, or murder people for fun.
Are you sure that it's a lack of entitlement causing this, and not - maybe - threat of "disappearance" or death for speaking out? The Tiananmen Square massacre was not that long ago, and many understand the repercussions of dissent in no uncertain terms.
> Russia and China don't have the issues like in the US where every single individual believes they are entitled to some special rights and privileges because of entitlement.
Not being entitled to rights as an individual is generally the complaint against the political systems of China and Russia.
>US where every single individual believes they are entitled to some special rights and privileges because of entitlement.
Most of these are encoded in law in the Bill of Rights. The US government is doing its damndest to ignore and/or circumvent these rights though on several levels like surveillance, arrest for peaceful protest/assembly/redress, arrest for refusing to ID without suspicion of a crime, civil asset forfeiture, etc.
Once you lose these rights, they are historically impossible to get back, in most cases, without some sort of long term violence.
If your hopes for an anti-authoritarian future rest in Europe, you're in for a major disappointment. As had as it's gotten here in America, we're still doing better than the rest of the world - at least for now.
I'm using "Europe" largely in the sense of "influence sphere of EU/Germany". I'd count the UK (and countries like Norway, Switzerland) into this influence sphere, even if they're not officially members.
It's close enough to what people generally mean when they say Europe. I consider Norway to be part of Europe, for instance, and I'm a Norwegian. Although there are certainly subtle distinctions; Norway has a higher degree of North-Atlantic cultural heritage, has economic interests that contrast with those of continental Europe and aren't formally part of the EU.
You could make similar remarks for many countries that would generally get a 'yes' to the question "is X a European country".
Russia is working on terrorizing their neighbors, and suppression of their own population except super rich. Sure, every move they make is supplied with "blame America!", but I doubt that this "trick" really works nowadays.
The truth is singular, we don't live in parallel universes. My prior is that 2+2=4. But, of course, this is not a place to fight about everything else. We have a free speech here, so that everyone can just stick to their own thoughts.
No, but many people in the middle east do.
So I suppose you could say that, yes, the US technically does not terrorize their neighbors. They just go to the next neighborhood.
The US terrorizes several countries like Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela and others in the past. Canadians and Mexicans happen to be allied, in order to avoid this fate.
"This is not a drill" makes me think there's an immediate threat that needs full attention, especially from snowden's account. Is this just more twitter slang to add emphasis?
You have to additionally consider that Snowden resides in a country under a "managed democracy" (to be charitable), and widely believed to be currently undergoing preparations for war. He probably expects his communication freedoms to be curtailed very, very shortly. To him it's definitely not a drill.
Definitely Twitter slang to add emphasis. "This is not a drill" implies that people have been preparing a response and now is the time to execute it properly.
Matthew Green
@matthew_d_green
Reminder to Silicon Valley: there’s an even chance that many governments in the world will be run by authoritarian movements in the future. Your window to deploy surveillance-resistant systems is running out.
Ok, that's just a copy paste, but the message is: Encrypt all the things (no backdoors) so your civilians can't be spied on and their vital communications can't be disrupted. Right? That's the message (again)?
I mean I agree, and I use services accordingly (Signal, NextCloud, Home Assistant) but, is there a special reason why he is saying it now, with some urgency? Did something happen?
In terms of "Did something happen?" there's a fair number of examples of governments both failing and succeeding at strong arming tech companies for intelligence/defense/etc. However, the big event you seem worried about is a predicted near future event hasn't happened yet. Like a tech equivalent of climate change, all the little things over the years add up to one big urgent thing.
Dramatic escalation of the conflict between NATO and Russia is a matter of weeks. You can be sure governments in the west will use that 'good crisis' to crack down on civil liberties.
I don't think this is in response to anything specific. It's more an acknowledgement of an ongoing "boiling frog" problem.
I recently heard Eliezer Yudkowsky make this comparison in the (somewhat) related domain of AI safety: let's say you gained reliable intel that aliens were invading in exactly 30 years. Do you begin acting immediately, or do you wait? Anything you could do now, you could probably do next year. But the problem is, there's no obvious point at which to act; on any given day, you keep kicking the ball down the road.
The same logic applies even if the length of time is unknown (X years). There is a high probability of future crises regarding both AI safety, and authoritarian states leveraging surveillance and social algorithms. In both cases, if we wait for a clear instigating event, it may be too late.
It's painfully obvious OP is talking about a smart phone and a vax passport.
You don't have to be "anti-vax" (which is a stupid stupid term) to be anti-vax-passport.
The people pushing for vax passports have no clue what they are unleashing. It is absolutely fascist, evil and incredibly surprising to me that 99% of the people on this website are in 100% favor of it.
My concern is more with people in somewhat unusual circumstances who get "lost in the bureaucracy".
I am fully vaccinated, but unable to get a QR code – digital or paper version. My circumstances are somewhat unusual: I moved back to the Netherlands after a few years abroad (I am a Dutch citizen), and due to the difficult rental market and not having a job (yet) I've been forced to stay in temporary accommodations. I can't "officially register" with the city there, and thus unable to get the QR code in spite of having all the other official documentation.
This is a problem for various reasons, and something that will finally be fixed next month or so when I start my new job, but it's not really something I can fix now. Never before has such a "unusual status" led to a near-complete exclusion from basic participation in social life. I can basically do bugger all except sit at home, and after being away for many years I don't know anyone, too. It's not a good situation. I guess I should count myself lucky as we don't require these things for public transport.
Is my situation unusual? Sure. But there are lots of unusual situations out there, ranging from simple ones ("I lost my phone this morning and now I can't go to {job interview,funeral,etc.}") to more complex ones.
Furthermore, since the current vaccinations only work so-so, it's not really clear to me how effective all of this really is and I wouldn't be surprised if the effectiveness was only very limited, or even net negative (just as bicycle helmets can provide a net-negative to cyclists safety, since cyclists tend to take more risks on average while wearing a helmet).
Overall, I'm not a huge fan, although I'm obviously biased on account of being disadvantaged quite a lot in my current situation.
No offense intended but if that's the worst that happened to you during the pandemic so far, I'd count myself incredibly lucky and be happy about it. People slipping through bureaucratic cracks is unfortunate but happens with literally everything, emergency or not.
-- we could assume you received papers at the vaccination;
-- said vaccination certificates are insufficient and you seem to require a different, related, complex document, which basically states the same of your vaccination certificate.
Though one understands the use of certificates as passes could boost practice for falsification of simpler certificates, the practice as described still seems absurd.
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to do flamewar on HN—we're trying to avoid having this place burn to a crisp, and we need everyone's help with that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
By the way, it isn't in your own interest to do this either. By posting this way, all you do is discredit your own view and reinforce the other side. You give people who might be open to your view a fresh reason to reject it—after all, if fuming and fulminating is the best that you can come up with, your case must be terribly weak. This is a poor trade for you to make in exchange for a moment of internet venting.
Well there is an interesting history to passports. This article does a decent job of outlining how they morphed from a tool to help fight the Spanish Flu to what we see today.
https://apposition.substack.com/p/papers-please
Also there is quite a bit of economic work that showcases the positive impact of removing such stringent barriers to the free movement of people.
Of course, restricting people's movement across imaginary borders is very silly indeed. The point I was making is, I see plenty of frothing about vaccine passports, but not one single one of those people having conniptions about them is able to articulate what they would enable a government to do that they can't do already with your normal passport, driving license, tax ID etc.
The difference is that passports are only required for fairly rare activities (international travel, certain kinds of government interactions), whereas COVID passports are required for a lot of every-day things.
A driving license is a license is a certification that you've proven yourself capable to meet the minimum requirements to operate a potentially dangerous device, and more akin to doctor's license, lawyer license, etc. I don't think it's really the same thing.
My concern isn't really with "government can do $evil_stuff", but more in the general restriction of things.
This doesn't address the rather hysterical slippery slope argument that was being espoused. That's the one that I've never has a sane answer to - anything the government might want to do in the future with a vaccine passport, they can already do now with the plethora of unique identifying information they have on you.
The current system is fine for controlling new accounts that just show up to spew invective. They're quickly downvoted and/or flagged, even banned when they go too far. Multiple times I have seen article authors or project creators register a new HN account to specifically comment about work of theirs that has reached the front page of HN. They may write a dozen posts on their first day here, all of them useful.
Why are we attacking the person instead of the argument? We should be discussing the points, not trying to start a flame war. I'm really not sure how vaccination documentation to eat in a restaurant is equivalent to jailing people for their ethnicity, sexuality, or ideology. Can we take a step back and discuss your thought process? You have come to a much different conclusion than I and I would like to understand how. While doing so, can we kindly assume the other person is not trying to be evil?
I don't think 99% of Hacker News is in favor of requiring covid vaccination in order to perform everyday activities. It probably a double-digit percentage, but there's plenty of debate. I for one am generally speaking against both that and coercive forms of vaccination against any current diseases, even though I mostly consider it an irrational bet to skip vaccination.
It's definitely a reference to smartphones, but I was thinking more of the everyday activities themselves moving over to de facto requiring a smartphone. E.g. ordering takeaway, using certain public services, ordering transportation, communicating electronically at all and so on. Plenty of authoritarian dreams are enabled by that trend.
> I for one am generally speaking against both that and coercive forms of vaccination against any current diseases, even though I mostly consider it an irrational bet to skip vaccination.
Hopefully you're also speaking out against seatbelt laws, helmet laws, laws requiring women to wear tops places men aren't required, and second hand smoke laws?
Generally any laws where one person's freedom of choices for safety, apparel, and air polluting activities bump into other people's rights to not be annoyed by you and not cover your health expenses. In principle, they're all the same principles...
For instance, it's unclear how to rationalize against mandates for triangles of cloth on one's face in a public venue when folks are fine with mandates for triangles of cloth on one's chest at the beach. In only one of those is the lack of fabric known to kill people, but that's not the mandate we're fine with.
This whole "my freedoms!" thing needs to go back to first principles, build it back up across all domains to what we think it should be, with consistency.
An issue in fact is being revealed in these times with organized mutual assistance, "covering each other's health expenses", as a burden. Because it can go off the limits of good sense. As in: if one were mandated to eating salad and exercising, and to only use the car under emergency to minimize the risk of crashes, then mutual assistance would be a "shoved service" instead of a welcome feature.
> people's rights to not be annoyed by you and not cover your health expenses
The principle of "not damaging others" ("do not smoke in my face") cannot be simply mixed with "not being a burden to society" in matters that show less trivial tradeoffs.
I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing. When I hear people say "vaccine passport" I assume they mean "COVID-19 vaccination documentation". Is that a correct interpretation, or does a vaccine passport mean something more? If it is just "COVID-19 vaccination documentation", has there been a push to not allow the paper documentation? I've been primarily using my paper documentation without issue. As far as I'm aware, digital access to your vaccination status is simply a nice to have redundancy.
I need to lead this with "I'm fully vaccinated and pro-vaccine" so nobody gets the wrong idea (I'm disappointed that this is the state of discourse) BUT...
Anyone can print a piece of paper. If vaccination requirements are going to have any teeth whatsoever, they will need to be much more invasive. A central database is the minimum. You'll need holographic cards with your picture, like driver's licenses. Spot checks on restaurants to ensure they're checking ids properly, and serious consequences for failure - you'll need a license to serve food, and the FABC (food and alcoholic beverage control) board will be able to fine you or revoke it.
Basically, you'll need to treat almost all of public society the way we treat alcoholic beverage sales.
I personally find that terrifying and would rather see covid run rampant.
The vaccination certificate in the EU has a QR code that can be cryptographically verified to have been issued by a legit authority, tells why the certificate has been issued (e.g. vaccination, negative test, etc), and embeds the name of the person such that their identity can be cross-checked against some form of official ID.
So there's no need for anything more complex than a piece of paper you can download + print. What you can't do is make a QR code of your own, change the validity reason of an existing code, or use somebody else's certificate with your own identity.
You still need the enforcement regime. Restaurants/bars/etc must have someone at the door scanning everyone's QR code (and cross checking it against a photo ID). Law enforcement must run stings against restaurants to ensure they're checking properly.
Restaurants can have the ID check done by the waiter when taking the order. There is very little overhead, certainly no need to employ an extra person to check papers at the door. I doubt any law enforcement is running random stings. They would probably wait for members of the public to report this first.
I don't think checking IDs is gross, and obviously if you do, there is nothing I could say to change your mind. But it doesn't change the fact that Covid passports are easily implementable with paper, there is no need for the to be "holographic picture ID".
You seem to have latched on to the least important part of what I've said. Yes, a centralized database combined with always-on internet access can suffice instead of holographic cards (in the same way that nowadays, police officers don't really need to look at your drivers license - they can just look you up from their car), but that's strictly worse from a privacy/dystopia perspective. And it does not work at all for offline dining.
Holographic cards would actually be better since it doesn't notify a central authority where and when everyone dines. You seem to be comfortable with the idea that "party of 6" sits down, and the waiter spends the next 5 minutes screwing with his phone scanning everyone's (printed?) QR codes and verifying faces. I would rather get covid.
Here in the US, ABC boards do in fact run stings on bars and restaurants to make sure they are checking ids. And yes history has shown that it is absolutely necessary if you want compliance.
There is no need for a centralized database or always on internet access. How did my description suggest that either would be needed? As the verifiee, you need to print a piece of paper and have an ID. As the verifier, you need an offline app. No central authority is notified of the scan. None of this is rocket science, it is basic public key cryptography.
It does not take 5 minutes either. In practice it takes about 5 seconds to scan and validate the cert.
You have built an elaborate fantasy of how bad the system would be, rather than look at how the systems deployed for half a billion people actually work. Literally none of your stated fears actually bears out in practice. Suggesting you'd rather just get Covid is just depraved.
OK, I'll concede that PK cryptography can be used to eliminate the online requirement given that you don't need a revocation mechanism. You're still going to need active measures to ensure restaurant compliance. And signing these without a centralized database at the signing authority? Theoretically possible, practically impossible.
Tell me, where is it that these systems are working for half a billion people?
I'm guessing this is somewhere with a vastly different cultural landscape than the US. Depraved or not, I still value what little anonymity I have left.
This is how the EU (and some associated countries) have it set up. One obviously would like to centralize the signing just so for some basic auditing and to limit the number of public keys that get installed. But that just means a central signing service, it does not need to have persistent storage in said central location. In practice having the generated certs in a central DB is very useful for the users though, since it makes it trivial to install the certs on a new phone etc.
It's painfully obvious that they don't mean anti-vax, given "mandatory usage will be a race between mobile payment and government services like eID and eLicense".
As most things, even if you were required to carry an electronic vaccine proof, you would simply be unable to do certain things; most bars require ID to enter, and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they'll be required to use scanners that verify REAL ID status (given all US territories and states, outside of American Samoa[0], issue DLs or ID cards with REAL ID).
Agreed. Soon children will need vaccine passports to attend public schools. Bars may even start requiring age passports to consume alcohol. Truly, Pandora's box has been opened.
The other day I was driving recklessly down the road, minding my own business, and an officer asked me for documents showing I had performed my due diligence to drive on a public road without endangering others. Truly we have lost the fight already. As long as I am only thinking of myself, doing my own thing, nobody should bother me - it's private!
I initially missed your sarcasm but yes, truly, this is the worst outcome. What’s next, requiring driving passports to operate a vehicle? Identity passports to enter a foreign country?
Madness ends with discrimination. The importance of a licence to operating machinery dangerous for the nearby only after validation is clear-cut; that of limiting access to damaging intoxicants to weak decisors with unmyelinated brains is clear-cut; other contexts are not.
All: while I have you, please post thoughtful, substantive comments. Avoid snark, attack, flamebait, and ideological talking points. The latter lead to the repetitive, nasty sort of internet brawl we're trying to avoid here. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html