Interesting how our leaders see their role not as representing our interests, but in shaping our interests. There exists an entire subject in political science dealing with how to increase compliance with the schemes of regulators (see Nudge Theory).
The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance. For example, running talking points on the MSM works well. They run the talking points and in the next days, everyone is parroting what they heard on the news, as if it's their own views.
But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media). They are burning through the cultural & social capital which sustain these institutions (like the MSM or academia), and don't realize that once it runs out, they will no longer have these levers and buttons at their disposal.
At that point, the only way to increase compliance is with force. And once you go down that road, it becomes extremely clear to those wielding that force, just how precarious their situation is (e.g. Maduro assassination attempts). That is how totalitarianism takes root, fear of the people.
"Manifacturing Consent" is a book written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. They discuss the propaganda model of communication in much broader sense.
Simulacra and Simulation. And other works by Jean Baudrillard. His philosophy focuses on the unreal nature of contemporary culture due to mass communication and mass consumption.
Richard David Precht is a poor caricature of a French public intellectual figure and loves to create outrage to stay relevant. He lives off the same mainstream media that he criticizes.
Precht doesn't seem particularly French to me. He is a solid craftsman. I associate French intellectuals more with esprit and a certain craziness.
His earlier books had a slightly penetrating American style, popular science peppered with human interest stories.
Precht, however, is willing to make himself unpopular, but he is also one of the few intellectuals who can afford to do so. Many media workers probably don't like to read how strong the pressure to conform is, they prefer to suppress that.
> What these politicians do not seem to underestand is that those law may turn against them at a later point in time.
Those laws are incredibly unlikely to be turned against elites and former elites, and if a situation[1] ever arose where they would be, a lack of these laws on the books would not save them.
Populist uprisings are about the only things that elites are scared of, and these kinds of laws help prevent them[2].
[1] That kind of situation would require a complete and utter breakdown of the elite social contract. Things would have to get unrecognizably bad before we are at that point.
[2] Ever notice how, say, pro-gun politicians tend to want guns to be everywhere except near them? As a class, they aren't interested in dealing with the consequences of their policies.
> Ever notice how, say, pro-gun politicians tend to want guns to be everywhere except near them? As a class, they aren't interested in dealing with the consequences of their policies.
I’ve also noticed that anti-gun politicians tend to have armed security teams with them.
You're assuming that your guns will protect you from random acts of gun violence, which they won't. It's why those politicians have security teams, as opposed to personal guns. What they are doing is completely rational in a country where it happens, frequently.
Unlike their counterparts, they are actually trying to solve the problem, instead of hypocritically exacerbating it.
If you're going to hold someone accountable, why not make your support of the pro-gun ones conditional on them providing you with a security team?
> You're assuming that your guns will protect you from random acts of gun violence, which they won't.
You’re assuming gun control laws will protect you from random acts of gun violence, which they won’t. Criminals get their hands on guns they can’t legally possess every day. There are more than enough gun control laws on the books and most Americans aren’t voluntarily turning theirs in no matter what the law says.
You’re also making the false assumption that I only support the personal right to bear arms for self defense against criminals. I also support it to defend against tyranny, which to me is far more likely to be a threat than a random act of gun violence.
> You’re assuming gun control laws will protect you from random acts of gun violence, which they won’t.
"No way to prevent this", says only nation where this regularly happens.
> Criminals get their hands on guns they can’t legally possess every day.
They get their hands on guns because the country is flooded with them. Because people in states with next to no private sale restrictions sell guns to them. Because people aren't held liable for selling a gun without running a background check.
Not to mention all the gun violence performed by 'law-abiding gun owners'. (Who, after performing it, are, of course, labeled criminals.)
> There are more than enough gun control laws on the books
In some states. They get flooded by illegal guns from neighboring states, which have no such controls.
> I also support it to defend against tyranny, which to me is far more likely to be a threat than a random act of gun violence.
Why is it, then, that the militias and their friends seem to roll out to defend tyranny, not oppose it? Why are the 2A advocates deafeningly silent on police killing POC in their homes/vehicles? Why does a cop thinking that 'He may have had a gun' a death sentence for the person they are apprehending? Why does this group intersect so much with the Jan 6 attempt to overthrow the results of an election?
I hear 'guns will protect us from tyrrany' a lot, but in practice, I see the opposite.
On the other hand, technical capabilities are highly likely to be used against elites and former elites; there often are situations where a country's police or intelligence communities are opposed to some political parties, so if there are backdoors in everyone's (including politicians) communications, they should rightly fear that their phones will be abused by their political opponents.
or instantly. politicians are people and I'm pretty sure they use phones. if a backdoor is added it will almost instantly be used against them I'm sure. even well meaning apps are hacked.
This is where you’re wrong. Inconvenient rules don’t apply to them. They can engage in insider training and enrich themselves. They can disarm the public while they are protected by armed security. They will lay our secrets bare while maintaining theirs.
They will use national security as an excuse to keep their encryption while taking ours away.
oh they understand that. They are just scheming to make sure they are on the right side. Politicians are hated all around but most of the time, they are people who are willing to take massive personal risks.
For a case study in this phenomenon the UK made use of nudge theory during the covid pandemic and I think one of the outcomes is some people distrusting the organs of state in a way they didn't before. I think people remember the 'look them in the eyes' campaign along with other 'nudges' and associate it with a time they not only felt miserable and scared but also felt taken for mugs by the very politicians who were trying to increase compliance when things like Partygate and shady government contracts to friends of ministers came to light.
I think anything that's not completely candid with the public is eventually seen as dishonest whether rightly or wrongly. Personally I think no matter how well-intended it's hard to see nudge theory as anything other than 'shady behavioural psychology tactics to induce compliance with government policy without personal consent or a democratic mandate' which is something I believe fundamentally breaks the social contract.
> Interesting how our leaders see their role not as representing our interests, but in shaping our interests.
I mean that's what "leader" means at the end of the day. Of course, though, leader isn't the only way to refer to politicians. In German leader translates literally to Führer ... which isn't really used since the ultimate demise of Herr Schickelgruber. We also use "Repräsentant" whose English counterpart is obvious. Also some people believe that politicians are supposed to know what's going on and what to do - even me - question is where a line is crossed.
> But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective
I doubt that given those tactics have been continuously applied since ever.
> e.g. waning trust in the media
yes, but the result is simply new media channels and outlets which are supposedly more trustworthy. those abusive politicians we are talking about here will play those media entities like an instrument and simply switch where ever they expect to get the most attention.
> They are burning through the cultural & social capital which sustain these institutions (like the MSM or academia), and don't realize that once it runs out, they will no longer have these levers and buttons at their disposal.
They won't need those levers and button anymore. Abusive power hungry politicians belong to an elite whose end game is a totalitarian state for them to parasitize. At that point everybody has to believe or at least shut up ... or men will come and take them away.
> At that point, the only way to increase compliance is with force.
Exactly.
> And once you go down that road, it becomes extremely clear to those wielding that force, just how precarious their situation is (e.g. Maduro assassination attempts).
One can argue that most totalitarian states end badly but that can take a while. Criminals also do criminal things despite bleak prospects. One might argue they are statistically stupid for being criminal just to have a good time for a while. But that's just your sane point of view. For people who _are_ of criminal mindset (and I consider politicians with totalitarian inclination effectively to that group) really enjoy their life style.
> That is how totalitarianism takes root, fear of the people.
>> Interesting how our leaders see their role not as representing our interests, but in shaping our interests.
> I mean that's what "leader" means at the end of the day.
I disagree with this sentence.
Many minor leadership positions and a generation of parenting taught me that leadership is an act of service. My purpose is to help coordinate the fulfillment of others' needs. If I ever forget that, I will have lost my way.
Historically once people recognize the media is not trustworthy they discount it. You see this in the former USSR countries. People don't take the media seriously like they do in the west.
Yes, and this is very exploitable by dictators and those wanting to become such. If you can't get people to buy into your propaganda paper you can at least get them to buy into nothing at all, detach themselves from any notion of objective reality, and accept all complicity with whatever war crimes the regime wishes you to commit.
The most dangerous situation for a dictator is to be faced with multiple independent and competing sources of truth that all disagree with you, because they will propagandize your subjects away from you quite quickly.
>You see this in the former USSR countries. People don't take the media seriously like they do in the west.
They certainly do in Russia. People there (esp. older people) absolutely believe all the propaganda that's fed to them about the war in Ukraine by Russian state-owned media.
Martin Gurri in The Revolt of the Public had a pretty good explanation of this. Leaders used to be the gatekeepers of information, and thus maintained control. Now the Internet has lifted the curtain and opened the floodgates of information, causing a loss of control, thus pushing many leaders to double down on attempts at controlling the narrative. When control gets too strong, we see revolts.
I too love Gurri, but I don't think this is at all what he is saying. The Internet and particularly the social media have certainly something to do with it, but to my understanding he is talking about the erosion of knowledge-creation and the collapse of "elites". (Note also that everyone in this forum probably belongs to the latter category in a way or another.) His takes correlate with those from political scientists who talk about institutional decay and such things.
> And the legitimacy of that model [traditional institutions] absolutely depends on having a semi-monopoly over information in every domain, which they had in the 20th century. There was no internet and there was a fairly limited number of information sources for the public. So our ruling institutions had authority because they had a very valuable commodity: information. [1]
I really don't think that's necessary. So far there has never been a lack of people willing to commit atrocities when ordered to under the right conditions.
The more educated you are, the more you realize people don't know that much. If everyone could see the consequences of their beliefs and actions, governments wouldn't need to exist. Public education/shaping interests can be a good thing.
Shaping someone's opinion of sugary food or smoking cigarettes, or the negative effects of various drugs or any other number of things can be good. Informing the public of foreign adversaries fomenting and supporting fascism via bot networks promoting hatred and division is a national security issue. Good faith information from places of intellectual authority is positive for society.
The problem is not the government shaping interests, the problem is who is the government shaping interests for.
In a democracy supposedly the government acts on behalf of the people, but we do not live in a democracy, the west is largely plutocratic. Governments represent billionaires (not literally billionaires, but the wealthy). That's why our government promotes socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Because the government works on behalf of those with money.
This is not a casual statement. This is the product of our voting system. Before anyone gets to vote on any candidates, candidates must fund raise to win a primary. Before any person votes on candidates, money votes on candidates. So our government is responsive to money, because money votes first.
So it is not the government shaping interests, but the government using force on behalf of the wealthy that is problematic.
All political roads lead to a central problem: The rich are too rich and therefore cannot be bound by law and are able to coerce the government to act on their behalf.
The more educated you think you are, the more you look down on people and deny their ability to think for themselves.
Informing people of facts is different from shaping opinions - the former tries to give people what they need to make their own decisions while the latter starts out with a conclusion and seeks to make the general public arrive at it too. Manufacturing consent is as much about omitting information or outright preventing it from spreading as it is about providing information that would support your conclusion.
Sugary food, smoking cigarettes, and legal drugs are interesting examples here because there is a third party that benefits from them and is actually engaging in similar tactics to shape the public's consent. Perhaps the most obvious part of this is advertisement. Ideally the government would recognize this and severly limit how corporations can manipulate people.
I do agree with your point that the root cause of all of this is that the government is representing the people as you would expect from an ideal democracy.
Most people don't like littering and pollution. So we've passed laws against it.
Yet if you don't have any trashcans or other ways of disposing waste around, and you don't have much social pressure against it, many people will eventually leave their waste behind somewhere.
Much better to nudge them towards complying in specific with the laws that they want in general
That's not even nudging, that's just providing a necessary option. There is no coercion between "I want to throw something away" and "There's a trash can on the curb".
You're just trying to redefine the concept of the nudge. What a nudge is, really, is a thing whose purpose is to influence a choice, not to constrain it so that there is no choice.
Their role is neither representing nor shaping interests.
Their role is managing while being accountable. And doing said managing by the least amount of coercion and the maximal amount of convincing.
There's no such thing as "represent". It's a political dead end meant to draw votes and political power to those who are presented as "representing" the current social division magnified by the media, whether it's race, religion, or the usual liberal conservative division.
You're supposed to hold them accountable even and especially if it goes against your "representation" or interests. But so long as the majority are playing the "representation" politics meta game, there's no hope for accountability.
> The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance.
...
> But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media).
I though that too ~20 years ago. I live in a small country with elections every few years (usually less than the full term of the government) and a "one supposedly rightwing party" vs. "a bunch of supposedly left wing parties"... the mix of left wing parties also slowly turned to "a new face + a bunch of old parties" recently.
Every pre-election period we get a bunch of people advocating online and in person, that if "party X" got elected, they'd solve the "problem Y", because they can do it, and "current party" is blocking them... somehow those same people (and not just fresh 18yo going for their first election) forget, that party X has been in the government 3 years ago, and the government before that, and before that, and that the "problem Y" has existed for atleast 20 years (healthcare, housing,...), and they did nothing.
People either forget or are gaslighted by the media.
> assassination attempts
This happens when problems get unsolved and worse and worse for years... bad healthcare, especially mental health, depression, drugs, save 10k, but the apartment you wanted is now 30k more expensive, average rent higher than average pension, etc., create more and more people with nothing left to lose.
> There exists an entire subject in political science dealing with how to increase compliance with the schemes of regulators (see Nudge Theory).
It’s a very cynical view of the potential for human government that believes there is no way that the democratic will of the people affects what goals ‘regulators’ pursue.
Consider the possibility perhaps that the point of government is to overcome the prisoner’s dilemma and move people into a better collective equilibrium than they will naturally settle into. Nudges can be a useful tool for creating better outcomes for everyone.
I read this as “The government’s role is to nudge people into what the government determines is better than the people’s natural inclination.”
Did I understand that correctly? If I did, I don’t think anyone would disagree… in theory. The problem is there’s no standard way to measure and certainly no agreement on what that collective equilibrium should be.
Until we figure that out—no thanks. I’ll take my naturally not-as-optimized freedom without the government’s input.
I've had similar criticisms to nudging, that it's basically just the same as advertising exploiting human biases, and that it's not really conducive to insight and a better political culture. It is kind of paternalistic. However, most real-world applications of nudging I've seen were uncontroversially beneficial. As a typical example, markings on roads can be spaced and designed in ways that make drivers slow down in danger zones, thereby reducing accidents. I've been to a number of talks about nudging over the years and know people working in that area, and have never seen an example where the term was used for "shaping public opinions", let alone shaping political opinions.
Guess the problem is, there is a whole other group of parties how are manipulating us to act towards their interests. And I would say it’s clear that they are winning (see for example obesity, opioids).
So I don’t think we should handle this as a yes no question.
Your point of view falls apart when crime enters the picture.
Criminal law is just another form of regulation. Somehow we decided that taking cocaine is a crime. And that pedophiles are criminals. And then government tries to ensure compliance with criminal law.
People generally agree that it is fit and proper for government to act, through education and other means, to ensure most people aren't criminals.
You might say: "well criminal law is different - but is it?
Someone spent 8 years in jail for sending lobster in an incorrect container. Not a live lobster, a dead one.
I think the difference is criminal law seeks compliance with the laws as they are, but this manufacturing of consent seeks compliance on bills when the elecorate may well note vote in their favour otherwise. Does that make sense? In one case they do what the public has told them and in the other they're telling the public what to do. As public servants the first should be acceptable but the latter now.
Not everyone wants to follow criminal laws 100% of the time.
If someone wants to punch you in the face just how "optimized" do you want their freedom to do so, without legal consequences, be? Aka how many "nudges" should be in place to make that harder to get away with? If you don't want to get punched, you want people to think there'd be consequences, that bystanders would tell on them, etc. All those "nudges" need to be stronger than the "snitches get stitches" and similar nudges from the other side.
> Someone spent 8 years in jail for sending lobster in an incorrect container. Not a live lobster, a dead one.
I feel this isn't a terrific example as it doesn't seem to be true.
"The notion the case was about packaging is incorrect,' [the prosecutor] said. 'Packaging was the means by which the crime was concealed. It was the mechanism to conceal the extent of overharvesting."
US Gov's overzealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz on behalf of major publishers (and major donors) might work better. That involves creating law and the exercise of gov power, both of which were granted to the copyright interests behind influential lobbyists.
Eh, not really. Criminal law is by-and-large generally consented upon.
A vast majority of the population agrees that sexually violating a child is morally reprehensible and fit for a wide range of punishments. And that’s been a social standard for most of the world, for a REALLY long time.
I’m not sure about the number of people who agree or disagree with cocaine being illegal. But everyone knows it’s self-destructive behavior that can easily boil into destructive behavior for others. Therefore, most people I know understand why it’s illegal and agree with it.
So my original point still stands. It’s largely not-optimized, and largely consented upon on the large points that matter concerning violence and preservation of life. That doesn’t make it without flaws which, by nature makes it unoptimized.
It’s roughly the same thing with currency. The trick is to call it modern monetary theory instead of the printing press. of course, who doesn’t want modern?
But surely it can only run so long. The problem is that most people believe that their countries can’t fall into authoritarianism because they are a democracy.
I agree with you, but nudging can be a good thing if it's meritorious. Lincoln, for instance, had to manipulate people to some extent to achieve his goal of emancipation.
Similarly, I'd say some nudging is in order to tackle the obesity epidemic in the US and other places.
Would be great if it's was that simple, but for every person who wakes up, two younglings replace him. It's a cycle from birth to "education" to wokester to actually opportunity your eyes. Welcome to the real world, Neo.
>Interesting how our leaders see their role not as representing our interests, but in shaping our interests.
That's the very definition of "leader". It's exactly what leaders are supposed to do: "lead". They're supposed to have a vision, and get other people to follow them to achieve that vision.
What you're advocating for is a "manager" or an "administrator", not a "leader".
I had a nice dialog with GPT (davinci) that made me reconsider very similar reticence I felt about nudging. I think nudges can be done in ways that are transparent, ethical and long run net positive. But clearly it’s a very complicated subject.
Well, our leaders serve two goals: The voters' will and the fairness of the law.
Nothing requires to vox populi of some issue to agree with its own opinion of five minutes ago, or its own current opinion in a similar issue. Your opinion as voter can be as fickle as it pleases you. The law requires fairness, though, and our leaders are the unfortunates whose job it is to tell the voters about the longer-term principles and try to shape people's opinions. To make them less fickle and more principled.
Now, which principle? I don't mind if a particular politician or party tries to shape voters' opinions around the principles in that politician's or party's program.
I have no problem with the police hacking into devices. They have the right to use bugs and find exploits just like they have the right to pick a safe of force a door.
But backdoors and unacceptable, that's like mandating that every house have microphones in every room connected to the police center
I was thinking about this today. Like we watch a moive about cold war times and see the gmen or the stasi doing some unbelievable intrusive surveillance and think wow what times they would have been to live in, and at the same time my every movement for the past 10 years when I had a cellphone in my pocket is in a database somewhere and I barely think about it.
Or, we watch a movie like 24 where the protagonist is asking his agency buddies to hack random computers while straight up torturing people to get information - and we cheer for him.
I think the difference is that in those situations the people had no say in what was and wasn't acceptable and some of the things we take for granted as basic freedoms may have been outlawed and targeted. This is why you can feel comfortable with it but they could not: there's not a huge disparity between what you want to do or say and what you're allowed to do or say, and you feel the punishment for doing or saying as you shouldn't is acceptable.
This is problematic if, as is often the case, it leads to keeping vulnerabilities undisclosed, so that they can continue to exploit them. This gives bad actors more opportunity to find and exploit the same vulnerabilities, and it gives security companies that find vulnerabilities the incentive to sell their services to the police and to government agencies instead of informing the software manufacturer.
This is limited by the “big actor’s” perceived benefit of catching the bugs. They are already known to not be overly generous. Conversely, security companies can potentially monetize the same vulnerability over and over.
I finished reading the book yesterday. I truly believe Orwell was a time traveler. (joke) The parallels between Oceania and some nations of the world nowadays is infinite.
You should try reading some of his non-fiction. This was written in 1944:
"I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible."
This is amazing. I didn't know he wrote non-fiction. And I can tell there is little difference between this piece of essay and what we read from Emmanuel Goldstein in the book. Perhaps Emmanuel Goldstein is Orwell in 1984, or even Winston and everything else in the book was written "based and around" Orwell's non-fiction essays. Who knows? Thanks for sharing anyway.
That one is from a letter, but yeah, it is basically a brain dump of the thoughts that would eventually crystallize into "1984" three years later.
OTOH for "Animal Farm" he specifically wrote an essay[1] explaining why he wrote it, meant to be a preface to the book. Ironically, the preface was dropped from the book when it was originally published for the very same reasons discussed in the essay. And I feel that many of those reasons are still at play today.
Now every time I see a war or natural disaster story on the 6 o'clock news I have the movie adaptation's voice in my head saying "Oceania is continually at war with East Asia"
There comes a point where reasoning about rights by analogy loses its bite... imo.
Digital rights, digital ownership, digital business models, privacy, security, speech, digital policing... they're all very different from their analog analogs.
The differences between A & B are less pronounced in the digital realm.
Police hacking into devices has more in common, practically and culturally, with signals intelligence than it does with ordinary policing.
I don't disagree with you. I just don't agree that "it's very simple." We need to invent or adopt novel concepts, not insist that nothing has changed.
You can open any door or safe. The question is about required time and noise. If you're not restricted by those factors, you'll open it.
That's not the same for software. It's pretty much trivial to write an encryption software which is basically unbreakable. Complex software has bugs, but sometimes simple software is enough.
That said, I don't see how backdoors would help here. Evil guys won't use vulnerable software.
The logical conclusion to the war on general purpose computing (as currently perpetrated in the large by Apple, and spun even by people here as a worthwhile tradeoff for "security") is that computers will be replaced with appliances that can only run government-sanctioned, closed-source software. That is the only way these laws could be enforced.
Even if "normal computers" are left free, anti-encryption legislation could be enormously effective at the level of the general population even if it only manages to twist the arm of Apple, Google and force them to remove such software from their appstores.
"Bad guys" could still use encryption of course, but the government would gain the ability to easily surveil most people, which is what they're really after.
Yeah. It started with silly things like copyright enforcement, slowly paving the way to ever greater oppression. As an AMD engineer put it, these days processors essentially come pwned from the factory. Computers are too subversive a technology to allow normals unrestricted access. Encryption is powerful enough to defeat nations.
> computers will be replaced with appliances that can only run government-sanctioned, closed-source software
this is lacking imagination
Most items around us will be smart withing 10 years.
There are coffe machines that stop working without internet, dishwashers and washing machines that have wifi. You cant buy a TV and a Car without internet connectivity. Mac OS won't run an executable withour connecting to an apple server.
All of them phone home.
The government just needs to tap into the datastores assembled by these companies. Datastores in centralised datacenters, which are large regulated installations.
They don't need to do any extra work. The police doesnt need to raid every house.
> as currently perpetrated in the large by Apple, and spun even by people here as a worthwhile tradeoff for "security"
See this misses the more nuanced point. I bet my last cent that everyone who doesn't want Apple's ability to meaningfully control their platform eroded would change their tune immediately if we had a regulatory environment that had any teeth whatsoever when it comes to policing malicious software.
People are currently backed into a corner where the only not incompetent regulatory body for software is Apple right now. I would love for iOS to be completely open but maligned actors who would use that against my interests need to be stopped and Apple being closed doesn't get in the way all that much.
* You must be able to cancel subscriptions in one click with no human interaction and users must be able to choose an immediate cancel for a pro-rated refund even if they paid "yearly."
* You must allow opt-out of all tracking and data collection without providing any disincentive for doing so.
* All free trails must not require a CC and can only be continued after explicitly done so by the user.
* Delete the concept of implied consent. By existing you consent to.. fuck off.
* Establish a legal definition of dark pattern and make them illegal and reportable by users for a cut of the fine.
* You must be allowed to purchase a completely ad free experience.
* You cannot sell OS features like notifications or running in the background.
* All digital goods must be able to be returned within x days of purchase.
> I bet my last cent that everyone who doesn't want Apple's ability to meaningfully control their platform eroded would change their tune immediately if we had a regulatory environment that had any teeth whatsoever when it comes to policing malicious software.
I definitely would change my mind. The complete lack of any effective protections against bad actors is the sole reason I'm willing to tolerate what Apple is doing with the iOS App Store.
>As we have stated in the past, there is no effective way to weaken encryption for some use cases such as law enforcement while keeping it strong for others.
I've never been fully satisfied by this assertion.
Apple has the ability to push whatever code it wants to whatever device it wants. They can make a version of iOS that bypasses encryption and restrict it to only run on devices identified by a warrant. They could post it on GitHub and it wouldn't matter because iPhones would refuse to run the code if it had been modified by somebody other than Apple to run on any device. You would need Apple's internal code signing keys to actually do any damage.
Currently, the security of your iPhone is dependent on Apple's internal security. If that gets compromised then your phone can be compromised. In a world where law enforcement can get a warrant to force Apple to unlock a specific iPhone, the security of your phone is still dependent on Apple's internal security. Nothing changes for anyone not targeted by a warrant.
You don't need to give law enforcement a universal backdoor key to enable them to execute warrants on devices. What am I missing?
> They can make a version of iOS that bypasses encryption and restrict it to only run on devices identified by a warrant.
Of course. Apple could absolutely do this and undermine any trust people have in them in seconds if they want to.
Didn't they pass a law in Australia requiring corporations to do exactly what you describe? I remember reading news here about several corporations just moving off of Australia as a result of the inherent untrustworthiness of any system where the government can compel any party you're doing business with to ship you malware.
In the current world Apple is not actually able to compromise your iPhone, warrant or not, by design (remember the whole FBI debacle?). Encryption is done through separate hardware on the phone that they can’t remotely bypass. In the world you’re proposing they would have to be legally compelled to engineer a weaker system. That’s the problem.
I could be wrong but I don't remember Apple claiming it was literally impossible for them to open an iPhone. If that were true then Apple wouldn't have had to fight them at all. The government can't force you to do impossible things.
Apple objected to being compelled to create the tooling to bypass an iPhone's security. That implies they can do it whenever they want, they just choose not to.
They could create a build with unlock attempts removed, making it possible to brute-force weaker unlock schemes. That's what they didn't want to do because if they created something like that they would lose a lot of customers.
great idea. while we are at it, we should also require that the police have a key to your house and vehicle, as well as your debit card pin number and, email password, and bank password.
its necessary security, so you agree with this correct?
They effectively have all of those things already. You don't need a key to enter a house or a car, and they can get anything they want from your bank and email provider with a subpoena.
I agree that giving law enforcement a universal key that can defeat all encryption would be a monumentally stupid idea, but it's not actually necessary to enable them to bypass encryption on specific devices. As far as I can tell, privacy activists have just made up the fact that law enforcement wants a universal key because it's easier to argue against that than to argue in favor of their actual position.
They already have the capability to remotely access most modern vehicles, this is built in to cars manufactured in the past few years, along with telemetry that tracks everywhere you drive.
Access to bank account details and emails is also routine in police investigations. And they can simply smash your door in if they need access to your house.
To the degree that they can do it, they can only do that because they own both the hardware and the software, and they are tightly integrated.
You need hardware that can securely hold secrets; you need software to detect tampering and tell the hardware about it; you need software that the hardware trusts to communicate with apple servers. Without the whole integrated pipeline from local secrets cache to apple servers, protected because it's all owned and managed by the same secret-keeper, what apple does can't be done.
The fact that this is not how security on iPhones works at all.
There are unencrypted partitions of the storage yes, which means the device can boot into iOS without any user password, but the ones containing user data are encrypted and an OS update can at best remove the limit on how fast or how many times you can attempt to unlock the user data (or rather the Secure Enclave which stores the actual key for the user data).
Sure, if you have a 4-6 digit PIN code this is then quickly unlocked in that scenario you're talking about, but if you have an alphanumeric password you can make that attack completely infeasible.
Bottom line is there is no way for Apple to make a version of iOS that completely bypasses encryption, encryption doesn't work like that.
They could, I guess, make a version which silently checks if it's host devices serial number is in a certain list provided by e.g. law enforcement, and then silently removes the SEP encryption, IF the user unlocks the device AFTER that software is installed. But they would have to secretly add this code to the normal iOS releases which would severely compromise their customers data en masse if they did it this way, or create a way to push a specific build over the air to a specific device (which actually doesn't sound that far-fetched honestly, now that I'm thinking about it), without alerting the user that they are installing a backdoor for law enforcement.
I don't think that's feasible either way, because it would quickly come out that they've done that and once the cat's out of the bag they are losing big bucks, and would be criminals will simply stop installing updates on their iPhones.
an OS update can at best remove the limit on how fast or how many times you can attempt to unlock the user data
Wouldn't an OS update be able to store the user password in a plain text file on the non-encrypted partitions? I don't think those partitions are hardwired to be readonly until the rest of the system is unlocked?
> ...at the EU-US Senior Officials Meeting on Justice and Home Affairs, held in Stockholm on 16 and 17 March, the minutes of which are now available. The delegations “… concurred on the need to mirror privacy by design with lawful access by design…,” apparent code language for mandating the undermining or removal of strong encryption practices.
What is wrong with these people? How can anyone, let alone an educated, well-traveled leader, be so obtuse about the implications (and for that matter, the realism) of any such scheme?
Most of our leaders are much less bright and much more self-centered than almost anyone would imagine. The evidence repeatedly validates this, but we're reluctant to believe it. Many do come from relatively elite backgrounds but their knowledge and morality have surprising gaps.
I believe it’s difficult for nontechnical people to fully grasp the consequences of having so-called backdoors in the digital realm. It’s different from the physical world, where something like a master key or the possibility of forceful entry isn’t unreasonable. They probably think it must necessarily be possible to have something equivalent for electronic communication.
Power I guess, only because they can. But if you communicate by Cell Phone (txt, email...), encryption can be stopped by law only because they are closed systems. But I tend to believe Cell Phones already come with a backdoor, so laws do not really matter for those.
If using gpg via email on an Open System (Linux, BSDs), good luck stopping that.
> using gpg via email on an Open System (Linux, BSDs), good luck stopping that
They won't engage us on those terms. They'll use their authority to pass laws saying use of cryptography strong enough to defeat them is evidence of guilt. Judges will instruct juries to assume there's CSAM in your encrypted hard drive.
Same I here: I don't really mind because I've never assumed smartphones to be secure. But maybe I have been wrong because they do seem to have problems in decryption of things like Signal or even the Meta's stuff. As for serious transnational crime, I really doubt whether these proposals will make any difference. After EncroChat, serious criminals have probably gone back to pencil and paper and whispering.
The PEGA committee reports are "hilarious" reading. The "best" situation seems to have been in Greece where ordinary politicians have spied other ordinary politicians and ordinary civil servants other ordinary civil servants. Must be fun to work in such a state apparatus.
Well, if you were to ask in this very same forum if the trade-offs of private and permissionless communication, as granted by cryptography, should apply to money. You would get a much different answer.
So either a large part of HN has already been co-opted by this public campaign, or is uneducated/obtuse, or is able to trace a very different set of weights for what you can do with your expression but not your money.
You won't get a different answer from me at least. KYC/AML is just the financial version of global surveillance and should be fought just as vigorously.
Or more specifically, all the endless scams and grift that orbit around cryptocurrencies, the failure of cryptocurrencies to actually solve any problems of the existing financial system (because you need to inevitably bridge the two) as well as the negative externalities that cryptocurrencies have on the environment and hardware availability.
The disconnect is wild. Spending magic money online can already feel like instant messaging, e.g. Zcash with its encrypted memo field for text messages is basically as if Bitmessage had an optional monetary payload
They don't actually fucking know what they are doing. They get these righteous ideas into their heads and convince themselves they're doing what's good for us. They ignore the consequences even when it affects them, reacting with a literal child-like entitlement and self-importance "you can't read my messages, just the other people's messages, I'm a special class of person, this is outrageous".
There are people here on HN who say they actually met at least one of these politicians. Check out this thread:
These are the people imposing their silly laws on us. It's a joke. I wanted to respect them enough to think it's all some sort of master plan to oppress us more efficiently but could very well be that they are dumb enough to back this without understanding what encryption even is.
> What is wrong with these people? How can anyone, let alone an educated, well-traveled leader, be so obtuse about the implications (and for that matter, the realism) of any such scheme?
Never underestimate the appeal of making one's job easier.
Part of the benefit that comes from being well traveled is sharing stories and experiences with locals, leaders don't do any of that. Generously, most of them are too busy to do so, and instead spend most of their time in a building that could be anywhere in the world in a similar looking conference room.
Although you are right, it does take a certain level of intelligence to recognize when one is outside of their element and to seek proper expertise. Assuming no malicious intent.
The Oxford Union is the world's most prestigious debating society with a tradition of hosting internationally prominent individuals across politics, academia, and popular culture. Founded in 1823 at a time when The University of Oxford restricted students from discussing certain topics, The Union continues to uphold the principle of free speech through the exchange and debate of a wide range of ideas and opinions, presented by a diverse range of speakers - some inspiring, others controversial. As we celebrate 200 years of free speech during our Bicentenary year of 2023, we reaffirm our commitment to our integral values and also our belief that the discussion of complex topics should not only be encouraged but is an essential element of any free society.
Now, click around a few of the videos, and observe if the above description, an honest self-image of the best and the brightest, I'm sure, comports with the actual reality on display.
Make special note of the attitudes displayed by these bright young minds and the questions put to the speakers. Heck, might even notice the ever increasing pop-culture nature of the proceedings. I guess hearing from PSY about Gangam style is one of the most of all time.
In short, a large chunk of these "elites" who go into politics are nepo babies governed by fashionable group think no different from their less monied peers. iPhones are the great equalizer. Everybody is equally cringy. It is a different caliber of person now from the heyday and naturally trends towards authoritarianism.
The exceptionalism is gone a long time ago already. It was perfectly lampooned half a century ago in shows like 'Yes Minister'. Lofty ideals, duty, intellectual curiosity, honesty, a sense of decency, long ago succumbed to mediocrity and farce. And that was the 80s. We are way past that stage where there was still a sense of shame, past the age of spin, hurling into cynical ambivalence now and soon complete forgetfulness.
In short, the West really is in decline and has been for a long time. People who have a clue about why this is a bad idea are nowhere near the halls of power. And I don't mean intricate technical knowledge, these subjects go back centuries, the relevant ideas and ideals are at the very core of what made these societies great in the first place. Poof.
You know why this is wrong instinctually, at your core, because you paid attention to the ship of state and still give a shit about something bigger than yourself. They don't.
There's nothing outright wrong with them, they are just basic ordinary consumers. And the lessons of the past will have to be re-learned if we don't accidentally find ourselves this time in an unescapable permanent dystopia.
If they're trying to influence public opinion and there really are a bunch of successes from surveillance programs that can be defeated with consumer-grade encryption, they could find ways to declassify statistics.
I suppose there's the concern that a statement like "we prosecuted 2387 child molesters based on surveillance of unencrypted chat" would cause future offenders to stop using unencrypted chat, but I think that's a red herring. Any reasonably clever criminal would not be sending felonious content unencrypted today.
This is one of those classic problems where if they didn't violate civil rights and something terrible happen the public backlash clamoring for civil rights violations would push them 10x further into outright oppressive practices (i.e. after Sept 11th in the US) than if they'd just broken the rules in the first place.
Just that its easy to imagine being in that role, being privy to some insane shit that barely gets stopped, and never again thinking twice about violating all these rules just to prevent that kind of thing.
Doesn't mean what they're advocating for isn't messed up. But its not hard to think through how they get there.
I find this much more likely than others' explanation that they're evil, that it's just about power, that there is a conspiracy among world leaders, etc.
There is nothing wrong with these people. Those in the power always want to have more power.
There will be no implications if encryption is banned. People have been using unencrypted wired phones and unencrypted bank cards for a long time and the world hasn't collapsed.
Also, there is no need to ban any encryption, client-server encryption protocols like HTTPS can stay, provided that the server would log all session keys for future lawful access.
I finished reading 1984 (the novel) yesterday, so my comments are under some influence.
This global movement against encryption -- against citizen's privacy, really -- is all about power maintenance. Power groups want to have access to our conversations so when the election period approaches, they will be able to run sentiment analysis on the data collected from our conversations, and then fine tune their election campaigns accordingly. All the current excuses about fighting organized crime, violence to children etc. are well known excuses used for many years within different context to roll out surveillance bills.
I'd disagree. Democracy in the US is already extremely well controlled. You only have two realistic options, and the primary that led to those two options is fairly undemocratic. Between gerrymandering, citizens united, private control over corporate news, and a million other things, meaningful democracy may as well be dead (or perhaps never existed).
Control over encryption is overwhelmingly about those in power keeping others out of power. If you have access to all of your opponent's communications because you're already the president, there's really nothing the opponent can do to balance things out. Any grassroots movement to displace you and your government would never get off the ground - they'd be arrested before they could even organize, since the entirety of your comms is available to the establishment.
The cool thing about technology is it works both ways. If backdoors are mandated it’s only a matter of time until all texts, location history, etc. etc. of those in power become public - we already learned that those people don’t have the strongest opsec to begin with. This will lead to a backlash and an equilibrium of sorts.
Those in power will be allowed to use encryption due to "state security" or something stupid like that. Only us plebeians will be forced to reveal our dirty laundry to the world.
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Dark pattern checklist:
√ Emotional manipulation
√ Implicit "consent" rather than opt-in
√ No opt out button
Right then. Great to know what they're advocating.
It is pretty frightening how normalized this has become so that even organizations that should have the user's interests in mind won't even think before pulling this kind of shit.
1A: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
4A: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
In the US, there's not a right to privacy, or at best it's complicated. At least federalists or conservatives endlessly argue that doesn't exist, for reasons that I don't understand. If we had a right to privacy in the US, it probably wouldn't protect criminal communications, and the potential of illegal behavior is used as the justification for all kinds of quasi illegal investigations.
What about banning end-to-end encryption while keeping client-server encryption (like Telegram or Apple does)? If people are not allowed to transfer money anonymously, why allow them communicate anonymously?
People are allowed to transfer money anonymously, vis-a-vis cash. Banks belonging to the Federal Reserve system are of course subject to a number of arbitrary regulations that are certainly debatable, but also not outside the realm of ordinary government regulation of interstate/international commerce.
Wholesale banning of anonymous money transfers would also, in my opinion, be a violation of 1st and 4th amendments. But banning encrypted speech & communication altogether (or compelling an open-access backdoor) is clearly a violation of 1st & 4th amendment.
Most of the world already has a "interaction between a natural person and the government is subject to formal identification with government-issued documentation", the US could indeed go that route if they wanted. Nobody could feasibly ban private anonymous communication, though.
it wouldn't be too terribly hard to make "cash" less anonymous, for instance, serial number scanners in cash registers - like banks have those safes that are computer controlled and pop out the exact bills and counts you request, just replace all cash registers with either cashless self checkout or those vault style dispensers and receivers. If every point-of-sale has the serial scanner, cash is now no longer anonymous. They'll know who got it, and if someone else gets it scanned then they know that there's a link between you and that person.
there's already enough cameras to capture every angle - including the ones at registers that clearly are there just to capture your face.
The only reason i can see for a cashless society is: someone is going to make shedloads of money on the microtransactions. Visa, MC, AmEx, JP Morgan, etc.
> If people are not allowed to transfer money anonymously, why allow them communicate anonymously?
You can do that in the US though with cash. There might be some transactions that you can't do in physical cash but that is more of a practical/convince limitation and not a legal one.
I don't understand the crusade against encryption. No ban has any chance of actually being effective at stopping criminals, they will just continue using open source software. All you end up doing is exposing law abiding citizens and corporations to an incredible amount of risk, because suddenly all their critical private data is secured with a common backdoor that can be abused by anyone who finds it. Adding backdoors to commercial encryption is practically handing the Kremlin or CCP the keys to all our critical infrastructure.
- Erode what resistance to total surveillance remains.
- Practice total surveillance.
Here is my plan to oppose that plan:
- Rekindle Orwell's 1984 as a full literary/movie/video-game genre, where awful things happen to people when the government or an associated non-knocking variant of the Spanish Inquisition shows up because somebody committed wrong-think.
I'm a little afraid that if we don't succeed in bringing this problem to the general's public attention via their binging habits, as a sort of social vaccine, we will end up with the disease.
Absolutely, this fight needs to be fought on the cultural/political battlefield. It can never be just a technological arms race or solution, because technology usually favors the rich.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and mass culture of movies and video games is really the most effective way to teach the broader audience about these issues. Black mirror did a great job with some episoses, and also handmaid's tale has had a big impact in thinking about women's rights.
Love how supposed privacy advocates will use patriot act arguments to justify violating financial privacy, then immediately turn around and play the other side when the same talking points are used against any other kinds of privacy.
Contrarian opinion ahead. We live in a very unique period of history - a bubble really - in which governments are not able to intercept certain communications or decrypt certain records, even with the full force of the law behind them.
While I recognize and appreciate, on a personal level, the freedom that this provides me, freedom exists only to the extent that there is a government enforcing boundaries on freedom to prevent it from turning into anarchy. I'm afraid it's not going to be hard, over the years, to find enough pedophiles and terrorists to make a compellingly popular case for more regulation of encryption.
The situation where governments can’t (bulk) intercept communications describes basically our entire history, with as small weird exception towards the end. Prior to the invention of the postal service, most communications were verbal and privacy was (relatively) easy to ensure. Even up until very recently, communications interception required some extraordinary action like placing a durable wiretap on a line and listening to verbal communications, or else laboriously steaming open mail. It’s only in the last fifteen years that we moved the bulk of our private, non-business communications onto electronic media that have long-term centralized storage and processing power to scan them. Coincidentally that’s almost as long as encrypted messaging has been popular.
For bulk interception, it's true that a certain technical capacity is there that didn't use to be there. But targeted taps and intercepts, though expensive, used to be more straightforward in terms of process.
> Prior to the invention of the postal service, most communications were verbal and privacy was (relatively) easy to ensure.
? Messenger service seems about as old as the written word.
> But targeted taps and intercepts, though expensive, used to be more straightforward in terms of process.
Targeted taps and phone calls don't scale. Even police states that wanted to surveil their entire population could only directly monitor a small portion of the population at any time. These barriers no longer exist.
> Messenger service seems about as old as the written word.
Widespread literacy is a 19th/20th century invention. The telephone and telegraph became popular for non-essential communications only in the 20th century. Asynchronous "store and forward" electronic communications became a primary channel for communications (as in, nearly everyone in your family uses it in place of phone calls and paper letters, or even private conversations) only in the 2000s.
There's nothing inherently wrong with anarchy, but there are plenty of things inherently wrong with totalitarianism. I really don't care how many pedophiles we catch if we continue to expand the definition of pedophiles to "everyone we don't like". Similarly, I don't care how many terrorists we catch if we motivate everyone to become a "terrorist" in the process.
That's what they say every time - "it's just to catch the REALLY bad guys, pinky promise". Then five years later we find out that it's routinely used for other things. And ten years later, when the law needs to be renewed or whatever, the same politicians who originally argued that it was a very narrowly tailored measure claim that it became such an important tool in law enforcement arsenal that sky would literally fall if we don't allow them to keep it.
Law enforcement gonna exploit outrage. Evidently so will encryption fans. Both are politicians, in the sense that matters of state powers are of interest to both; and thus both wield hyperbole: "down with terrorists" vs "down with Big Brother".
Maybe let's not fall to 10-foot tall syndrome in either direction. Two things can be true: law enforcement is overstating terrorism and criminal dangers that it's facing, and encryption advocates are overstating totalitarianist danger.
Maybe the problem is that in many Western countries there isn't a huge smoking gun where surveillance powers are "routinely used" for visibly nefarious things. Even things as bad as Snowden exposed (and they were shocking) don't seem to resonate with a lot of folks, maybe because it doesn't seem like the govt was actually able to do anything with all the data that they grabbed anyways. In the US, I haven't really heard of cops blackmailing people over intercepted data, for example. Or jailing of political opponents based on their online habits.
I'm not sure if encryption fans are either not looking to be in office, or not popular enough to be elected. But if it's an issue people care about a lot, there should be no problems getting elected on that issue. Don't be on HN taking to me, go talk to some random people and see how they want to vote on that issue or if they even care. But maybe, just maybe, you'll find that there are other things on their mind right now.
I think most "encryption fans" understand quite well that the current sociopolitical zeitgeist is broadly authoritarian, and legal strong encryption will fall victim to that eventually. As will many other things - e.g. a Chinese-style social credit system with the "right" targets is also likely to get considerable popular support in the long run, and some Western countries have already experimented with similar ideas (e.g. asbo in UK).
So as far as I'm concerned, the political angle is mostly about dragging our feet to buy us more time to develop the anti-surveillance tech like encryption as far as possible in the open before it is heavily regulated.
This view doesn't seem to reflect the reality that Gov/LEO have access vastly more (direct and up-to-date) personal information about us than at any time in history.
I find I am not in a hurry to hand over what little space is left.
> I'm afraid it's not going to be hard, over the years, to find enough pedophiles and terrorists to make a compellingly popular case for more regulation of encryption.
You're going to oppress the world's entire population of human beings with warrantless global surveillance because of a few "pedophiles and terrorists"? What a tiresome argument, seriously. Go ahead and find us thousands of "pedophiles and terrorists". It won't matter how many you find because what you're proposing as the cure is the tyranny of a government panopticon.
>freedom exists only to the extent that there is a government enforcing boundaries on freedom to prevent it from turning into anarchy
No, it doesn't. Which is trivial to prove, considering we have had widely available encryption for two decades now with no anarchy or encryption fueled societal collapse in sight. Actually, countries without backdoor laws are some of the most prosperous and safe places on earth. And even western countries that have decided to chase after the encryption boogeyman (Australia, for example) didn't experience a drop in crime rates.
>>freedom exists only to the extent that there is a government enforcing boundaries on freedom to prevent it from turning into anarchy
>No, it doesn't. Which is trivial to prove, considering we have had widely available encryption for two decades now with no anarchy or encryption fueled societal collapse in sight.
Hold on. I'm not arguing that encryption causes anarchy. I'm just making a general point about the idea that effective freedom requires a government to intervene to restrict freedoms, in at least _some_ matters. For example most people would agree that prisons are necessary to keep compulsively violent people from harming others. That doesn't mean everyone should be locked up at the government's whim. The question for encryption is, is there _a_ limit to what the government should allow.
> Actually, countries without backdoor laws are some of the most prosperous and safe places on earth.
Not sure about either the correlation or the causation. I'm not sure what countries you have in mind, but just to share two examples:
- China seems to be increasingly safe and prosperous and has backdoors. (And it's totalitarian, but I'm just going by the safety and prosperity characteristics that you mention.)
- In the US, Signal was featured prominently as the communication medium of choice for people convicted of a seditious conspiracy case. Only thanks to human infiltration was the government able to obtain these communications. I think it's reasonable to expect the government to have the ability to legally intercept the communications of people planning violent regime overthrow.
So, governments are actively colluding to obstruct Democratic ways of life. They're now in the actively propogandize phase, where they outlaw talking to other people in privacy. Weaponizing tech against the coremost nature of Democracy.
The tech-empires are letting whichever country wants to come in & start dictating terms, step all over people. We no longer even have the spine to call out journalism done in un-Free areas, we've decided Government-sponsored is too risky to even inform people about. https://rsf.org/en/index
With online platforms being cajouled every which way, one would hope the US Government could find some scant resemblance of a soul & do the right thing, which would be to help wage this culture war for a moral & ethical cause, to actually help our Democratic values, instead of psychological assaults on them. The government should be pushing back, demanding more encryption, more privacy, especially more privacy, privacy that even the tech bossess can't access much less the government.
Alas instead of helping fight the good fight, here we see the US-EU is playing the jealous rival, trying to steal some of the same advantages the data-slurping panopticon totalistic information-societies.
We need legal stands from governments to protect & advancing freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of ideas, freedom to think. We ought recognize & attend to open society & other essential liberty.
It's been such a ride. A lot of people are pretty grimdark on what Social Media is & means & the fate of interconnectivity, but my word, how can anyone feel so jaded & old at this point? We are so young, we have explored so few & such narrow options for how we might gather & share & communicate across the internet & it's many sites. I can acknowledge that folks are unhappy, that we are scared of what lies beyond the now tarnishing gilded Creator age, and you're all right, but man, the internet is so phenomenal. This is such an amazing creative ability to create & connect, to explore thought, expands the Rhizomatic / Assembly theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblage_(philosophy)) view of the world so deeply. There is so much to learn & figure out.
If we can keep this democracy. If we can maintain a vector where we can keep creating new interconnection, new people-figuring-out-what-protocols-people-want-to-use between us. We can combat so much shallowness by owning our speech, by owning our relays, by opting into being our own more selctive amplifiers, picking for ourselves what is signal and what is noise, calling out the short fun & what has real lasting value. Keep making the world more seen, keep sharing & thinking ourselves out loud, in public. And together in private.
I wouldn't however consider that enough evidence to say Democrats "opposed" the Patriot Act. They aren't "Both sides the same", but on this issue, Democrat politicians largely buy into the law enforcement POV that "bad people" are doing things and there must be an easy way to stop them, instead of making cops do actual work to solve crimes.
If one reads the linked Wikipedia entry, one would learn that OTP is the only uncrackable form of encryption. It’s not something a government can easily block nor decrypt regardless of technology.
I've come to the conclusion that Taxes are incompatible with Encryption and Free Speech. If we're ever going to progress as a civilization, something other than ancient and frankly barbaric practice Taxes has to designed and implemented.
Every justification for usage or backdoor encryption is eventually rooted in monitoring financial transactions, or preserving the means in which a state can collect them. The "War on Terror" and "War on Drugs" are perfect examples of this.
Income tax is the problem. I wish governments solely relied on property taxes and user fees for funding, even if they had to increase them a lot to make up for the loss of income tax revenue.
A major argument for income tax is that it's naturally countercyclical, which means that governments tax more when incomes are high and less when they are low. The 'progressive' — concave upwards — income tax is even more so. Per Keynesian theory, countercyclical fiscal policy acts to stabilize the economy, and the US has been more stable since the tax base shifted from property tax and tariffs towards income taxes. Tariffs, in particular, can be disastrously procyclical — a failure of a domestic manufacturer may lead to a decline in economic performance and an uptick in imports, which is then exacerbating. It might be possible for a land tax or property tax to be countercyclical, but this would likely depend on the centralized adjustment of valuations, since there is not so far any automatic technique for valuing real property other than immediately after a sale. History has taught us to be cautious about centralized economic micromanagement.
The temporal effects of income tax are often lost in colloquial debates among non-economists who have the impression that they exist primarily for moral reasons — however, the wealthy, in practice, are very good at avoiding them.
> It might be possible for a land tax or property tax to be countercyclical, but this would likely depend on the centralized adjustment of valuations, since there is not so far any automatic technique for valuing real property other than immediately after a sale.
Yeah, this is a problem that would need to be solved.
Agree that income tax is a problem, but do not agree with your solution using property tax.
I believe consumption tax is a better approach, in my opinion.
Consumption tax is immediate, indiscriminate at the time we spend the money, while property tax tends to be applied at various times throughout the life of the property.
Consumption taxes have a lot of the same privacy-invading problems that income taxes do. To enforce them, the government has to have the ability to audit the financial records of at least one of the parties in a transaction.
If there are consumption taxes, they should only be for the raw materials and energy (as part of mineral rights).
As long as wealth is counted as property. Most people I hear suggesting this expect personal wealth to inhabit a magical class of things that are definitely owned but are somehow not property.
edit: i.e. when wealthy people say this, it is usually just a euphemism for lowering their personal tax burden.
Wealthy people require more protection (as they are excellent targets) and more scrutiny (because their financial affairs are complicated, and they can take advantage of criminal opportunities that require large amounts of capital), so taxes should rise with wealth.
edit 2: When people believe that both income and wealth taxes should be discarded for taxes on consumption, you can be sure that they are wealthy with a high income.
Taxing financial assets has a lot of the same privacy-invading, subjective-enforcement, and loophole problems as taxing income.
However, most corporations own a lot of other assets that are already registered with the government, or pay rent to other corporations that do: real estate, mineral rights, and intellectual property. If we can figure out how to tax these things, that could help.
But that would mean the “pay your fair share” people would actually have to pay their fair share, which they will never support. We all know that the fair share is a percentage of someone else’s income you feel entitled to and not a fee proportional to the amount of state services you use.
You wouldn't necessarily need to shut down social programs. Rich people and their companies own lots of property, spectrum, water rights, intellectual property, etc, and the funding from these taxes can still be used to fund a social safety net.
As a bonus, if property taxes (or better yet, land value taxes) were 5x what they are, we probably would fix the housing crisis as all the property hoarders unload their underutilized property onto the market.
Nobody said anything about shutting down social programs, you can still have those without forcing people that don’t use them to pay for it. Like I said, pay your fair share. The USPS for the most part is an example of a government service that operates only off of voluntary funding from its users.
I'm confused, are you suggesting that malnourished kids should pay for their own lunch (or for that matter, education?). There are some services we have to collectively pay for to live in a stable society.
But you aren't answering the question, if a program for people in poverty isn't funded by society as a whole, are you having the people in poverty fund it because they're the ones who use it? Your argument seems to break down under examination
I answered the question before it was asked. If you want such a program to exist, you pay for it. If your idea is to make me pay for it, you don’t believe in paying your fair share. Whether or not it is practical to follow my rule to the absolute is a different question. I’m just tired of hearing the fair share people justify not paying their fair share.
There are entire enterprises that operate by this principle. Private Insurance comes to mind first. The problem with insurance and with this philosophy in general is that there are a lot of catestrophic situations you can find yourself in for which you would likely purchase no insurance because you can't ever see yourself being there.
The reason government steps in in cases like loss of job and provision of welfare is because nobody ever expects to be in those situations. But when you end up in those situations, having not bought insurance prior to being there, you will naturally find them pernicious. In order to prevent that from happening, government programs provide a kind of nationwide or statewide insurance policy that you are bought into by default just in case you should happen to need it some day.
You're arguing that you never will, and that might be the case, but that's also strictly speaking a risky proposition if aggregated over the entire population of the US.
> We all know that the fair share is a percentage of someone else’s income you feel entitled to and not a fee proportional to the amount of state services you use.
So a kid with cancer needs to pay the government for Medicaid? After all, they are the ones receiving the benefit.
A law prohibiting child porn would make child porn illegal, not monitor my transactions and prevent encryption. That’s called the redistribution of consequences.
Generally merely declaring something to be illegal does not stop it. In most cases it also requires catching people that are doing it and successfully convicting them.
Invading random people's lives with dragnet spying to see if they have committed a crime was specifically forbidden by the fourth amendment of the US constitution for good reason, even if everyone in our government willfully forgot that amendment exists.
The mistake they make is a classic short-run vs. long-run miscalculation. In the short-run, you can get away with these kinds of tactics to increase compliance. For example, running talking points on the MSM works well. They run the talking points and in the next days, everyone is parroting what they heard on the news, as if it's their own views.
But in the long-run, people will become more familiar with these tactics, such that they will become less effective (e.g. waning trust in the media). They are burning through the cultural & social capital which sustain these institutions (like the MSM or academia), and don't realize that once it runs out, they will no longer have these levers and buttons at their disposal.
At that point, the only way to increase compliance is with force. And once you go down that road, it becomes extremely clear to those wielding that force, just how precarious their situation is (e.g. Maduro assassination attempts). That is how totalitarianism takes root, fear of the people.