
Lawrence Lessig: Technology Will Create New Models for Privacy Regulation - oznathan
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/12/30/lawrence-lessig-how-technology-policy-will-evolve/?mod=WSJ_TechWSJD_NeedToKnow
======
rayiner
> It is really a generational effect. People in law school learned this way of
> thinking 10 years ago, and they are coming into their place in the
> regulatory space.

As someone in that group, I don't know if I see any evidence of this
generational effect. The Internet is just the latest battleground for
ideologies that have always existed: consumer protection, national security,
business freedom, market solutions. The same sort of thinking guides the
people who call for backdoors now, who called for banning encryption in the
1990's, who called for easier access to credit card and other transactions in
the 1970's, etc.

Businesses that create technological products are always going to be entities
the government can control. And regulators will never be encryption utopians.
They'll always be mild pragmatists willing to make compromises whose values
fall moderately left or right of center on the authoritarian scale.

~~~
mindslight
Politicians/regulators can never be encryption utopians because they always
seek more power. However, widespread adoption of secure encryption [0] could
turn proposals to ban it from being seriously "debated", to the equivalent of
that state senator who wanted to legislate pi = 3. "Physics drives finance
drives politics", and all that.

[0] Obviously without centralized database MITM, using software not
distributed by a centralized entity that can be easily controlled as you point
out.

~~~
rayiner
It's not even a matter of "politicians wanting more power." The public wants
the government to have power over people, because they are (reasonably or
not), more scared of other people than they are of the government. People fall
on different places on the spectrum for how they weigh the loss of privacy
versus the need for security, but very few are willing to say "we need
pervasive unbreakable encryption, whatever the consequences to law
enforcement." Even terrorism aside, very few people are willing to give up the
power of authorities to investigate, say, the transactions of suspected
financial criminals.

~~~
mindslight
It's natural for regulators to want more power - since they're _good_ , they
can always choose to not wield that power _later_. The motivation is the same
at the smaller per-person scale, with democracy encouraging every person to
think as a mini regulator - deciding whether a behavior should be prohibited
or encouraged and then enforcing the majority's opinion onto the minority,
rather than leaving the behavior unjudged.

Encryption is such an obvious target because it enables nothing besides
_hiding_. Society/government can never see the value in anything that serves
to keep society/government out of individuals' business, even though the
former only exists on the proceeds of individual autonomy.

So in essence, the crypto/software war is self-defense against
govermment/society. Not in the sense of overthrowing or repudiating the entire
concept, but in the sense of holding the Schelling point of freedom of
speech/thought versus a society/government that, through the same information
technology advancement, would otherwise seek to subject them to totalitarian
regulation (even if by the majority).

~~~
rayiner
I agree with most of your analysis. That said, between the time the telephone
was invented to the time encrypted email was invented, we had a rather
prosperous and progressive period during which there did not exist a
convenient means of communicating over long distances the government could not
access with the appropriate process. I think the whole system is more robust
than you give it credit for.

~~~
mindslight
That seems like a pretty short time period to claim "robustness", especially
with the quantitative trends the entire time. Remote communication was not so
heavily relied upon in the past, whereas now it is a staple of modern life.
Furthermore, the scale and inhumanity of the system has increased
geometrically, no longer limited by actions of individual agents to perform
taps/investigations, but instead a court order (in name only) for an ongoing
wireline/database dump of millions of people who are then all investigated
statistically.

FWIW, your statement could be made even stronger by saying that never before
in history has it been possible for individuals to securely communicate over
long distances. But technology adoption does not respect a fundamentalist
approach - talking in an isolated house with no electronics was a lot more
relevant a hundred years ago than today! So we need to judge the autonomy of
an individual carrying out his usual day-to-day tasks in both time frames.

------
mark_l_watson
I think that Lessig has it right: people will not fight for privacy if privacy
inconveniences them too much. I jump through hoops to get some small level of
privacy and still enjoy web properties that track users.

A little off topic, but I think it is time for the USA to do a "let's go to
the moon" type effort to make digital systems secure and protect privacy. I
know this is a long shot though: it would take re-purposing the capabilities
of the NSA (and the FBI, etc.) to making digital communication secure.
Obviously this requires NO BACK DOORS, and more research into digital
security. There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA and it would be
good to have them working on helpful tasks like securing the Internet for
businesses, the government, and individuals - and not waste time on spying on
innocent people. In the 1990s the NSA and FBI did a lot of good work in this
direction, but then the bogus 'war on terror' pushed them off course.

------
miguelrochefort
None of these articles explain why privacy is a good thing. They just assume
it to be a fact. I have some issues with this.

What if the entire premise of privacy being beneficial is flawed? What if the
actual problem is that we build systems and processes that rely on the
unsustainable idea of privacy and the wishful ability to keep secrets? Do
people not see that this makes everything more fragile and likely to break?

I don't want more regulations for startups that want to analyze my genome, nor
do I want to become an expert in internet security just to browse the web.
Writing software is already difficult as it is, and the requirement to protect
privacy makes it even more difficult and risky.

The real question is, what can we do to make living a transparent and open
life possible.

~~~
nunyabuizness
I wish I could upvote this more. One reply mentions how easy anti-sodomy laws
would be to enforce if we had no privacy. Considering how much faith people
put in democracy and the democratic process, you'd think that people would
concede that it's the law and our influence over it that's the problem, not
privacy.

One question I like to propose to those who disagree with this sentiment is as
follows:

Imagine you live in a hypothetical world where all things you consider moral,
just and socially acceptable were legal and societally acceptable and where
everything else was illegal and societally reprehensible. What role would
privacy play in such a society? What benefits would it provide?

I have yet to get a good answer to that question; if peeing in public was ok
with me, everyone else and perfectly legal, what reason would I have not to do
it? (You can mention shaming and whatnot, but I posit that in this
hypothetical world based on my morality, if I didn't shame people, no one else
would either).

tl;dr: the problem isn't privacy, the problem is law and our inability to
influence it, for which our best tool for the problems that arise from our
lack of influence is privacy.

~~~
jib
Privacy is a protection and insurance for the future.

Things, like say, recording the religion of someone in an open, embracing and
understanding society that has full religious freedom, so you understand what
your population identifies seems harmless, right?

It certainly seemed like it to the Jews in the Netherlands in the 1930s.

~~~
nunyabuizness
Would privacy protect a black in 1930's Poland? Would it matter to them if
they did or did not register their identity or religion with their government
of full religious freedom? Where's their right to privacy (of their
ethnicity)?

The only insurance against unrestrained power for anyone's future is
restraining the power, not privacy. Privacy is what you resort to when all
else fails, which even then is clearly not enough for everyone.

~~~
jib
It is well established that the extended civil records of the Netherlands in
the 30s contributed to the high rates of mass murder in the Netherlands
compared to other countries with less developed systems. This is a real life
example of where a lack of privacy thinking, even though not done with bad
intent, led to significant loss of life.

Protection of personal rights is not about a single solution, it is about
multiple systems in a Swiss cheese model where privacy is one of those layers.
Other layers are a judicial system, democratic elections etc. Stating that
there are situations where one of the layers fail isn't proving anything, it
is obvious that they fail some of the time. The question is if a layer adds
something significant some of the time. Privacy does.

~~~
miguelrochefort
Even if privacy successfully protected those people, I would argue that this
would make things even worse. Why? Because privacy protecting the majority of
people minimizes the apparent danger of the underlying problem (killing Jews),
which cause people to ignore the problem as if it doesn't exists, during which
the problem grows until privacy proves to not be enough.

Privacy is a painkiller. It gives us the impression that the problem isn't
there, but in reality it keeps getting worse until death hits.

------
Create
_[Moglen] said "You mean The United States government is, from now on, going
to keep a list of everybody every American knows. Do you think by any chance
that should require a law?" And he just laugh because they did it in a press
release in the middle of the night on Wednesday when it was raining_

[https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-
of-...](https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought-
requires-free-media)

------
zby
That Enigma project that he bases his opinion on looks rather suspicious for
me.

Here is their white-paper:
[http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf](http://enigma.media.mit.edu/enigma_full.pdf)

I am a bit skeptical on anything with blockchain in the synopsis these days.

