Almost everyone in any kind of power wants this except for themselves of course. It has nothing to do with 'the children' or 'crime'; they are not that naive. But some politicians who believe the crime & children narrative while not being in the same court as the censoring crowd might be naive enough to vote for it. It's a world wide illness and it should be prevented.
I feel your vibe as I also distrust authority, but no, it's not "nothing" to do with kids and crime — calls for an end to crypto are foolish and misguided, crypto tech is too simple to inhibit and blocking access to it creates opportunities for criminals to do crimes, any competent criminal group can roll their own crypto from open source projects… but there's a lot of non-competent criminal groups out there too, just like there are plenty of non-competent legally operating corporations.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, organised criminals for one, that way they know what they can get away with.
I know where I want to end up, but not how to get there from here: The Culture (Iain M Banks) is a surveillance anarchy where everyone is able to watch anyone at any time, and yet nobody really cares what you do.
The Culture's not an anarchy, it's just a standard "liberal" (not exact on definitions) surveillance state. A lot of what's shown is 2003 Iraq war style preventative policing, but that's obvious selection effects to make the books interesting, and happens mostly away from central regions.
I'm not sure how you can say The Culture isn't an anarchy given its only rules are "don't force someone to do something they don't want to", "don't kill someone permanently or we will watch you closely to make sure you don't do it again", and "don't literally read someone's mind or we will call you names and not invite you to parties".
That said, I do agree that there's a necessary selection effect to make the books interesting, as the fundamental problem of writing about a good day in a utopia is that the writer's idea of what that even means is unlikely to sell any copies — so I think of these books in a similar vein to how others say that Asimov's robot books are a demonstration of all the ways that the premise (in the latter's case, the Three Laws) don't really work as well as one might hope.
As I say, what I hope for is the promise of The Culture, but I don't know how to get there… or even if one can.
There are several lenses through which to view anarchy.
My prior point was to illustrate the essential lack of enforcement of any rules, hence by the definition of anarchy as a "society without coercion".
From the lens you are using, that of governance, The Culture definitely matches "stateless society based on voluntary free association" — this is, as shown though historical real-world usage, compatible with "direct democracy", where votes have no intermediaries.
This voting structure was demonstrated in the books: there was a direct-democratic decision about "should we have a war?", most said yes, those who voted "no" were free to disassociate, and not merely in a purely theoretical fashion as the technology at their disposal enabled complete independence to a degree utterly impossible for any human on Earth. In the author's own words, "the Culture kind of fades out at the edges", rather than having a discrete boundary in the way we are used to on Earth today.
> but there's a lot of non-competent criminal groups out there too,
Who get swept up by authorities and out-competed by their technologically savvy adversaries. There's strong selective pressure on technologically inept criminals that doesn't necessarily exist for traditional businesses. There's no government organization out there every night rounding up Walmart employees in a bid to bring down the Walton family.
There's also way more crime than the police have the resources to manage.
My go-to example of this is heroin in the UK: the substance is the most severe level of classification, nobody speaks in its favour even when they regard the war on drugs to be an abject failure ("war on drugs over, drugs declare victory" that kind of thing), yet the number of users of just that one substance exceeds the total UK prison population by a factor of 3.
If you broaden this to all UK users drugs of the same classification, it's around 10 times the total UK prison population. All illegal drugs, 32 times the total UK prison population.
No one will ever have resources to suveil everyone and everything, given the rate at which info is exploding. People dont talk about the info explosion problem, cause there is no solution.
Almost everyone carries at least one microphone and two cameras on their person at all times, along with a WiFi system that researchers have demonstrated can be used as a wall-penetrating radar capable of pose estimation, heart-rate sensing, and breath sensing.
Monitoring with all these things can be done at low-quality in real-time using the compute attached to those sensors, anything that might be interesting can be automatically passed on to a higher level system.
Smart dust was discussed quite widely until very recently, and as all the parts of that are now basically ready, I think the stuff has actually been made and is currently being actively (but quietly, under NDA) investigated by intelligence agencies both for potential uses and potential countermeasures.
A few years ago, I did a Fermi calculation and my conclusion was that a laser microphone pointing at every window in Greater London would cost about the same as the annual budget of the Met Police.
At 128 kbit/s (e.g. for decent compressed audio), recording all 8 billion humans on Earth for a year (24 hours a day so even while asleep) would require about 4 ZB of storage; current storage prices were around $14/TB in 2022, which would thus cost $56 billion compared to $73.4 billion the US Director of National Intelligence requested for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program.
We don't talk about the information explosion "problem" because there isn't actually a problem: all the data on the internet has to be processed anyway just for people to be able to see it in the first place, and for quite some time now all the data we care about is on the internet anyway.
Once the encryption is banned, the next step will be for online safety czars to censor speech they disagree with, even in private communications. No thanks.
In France, there are many laws against free speech (lois mémorielles, anti haine en ligne, anti Le Pen, anti fake news (including criticizing the government), etc...).
I read this as "European Police Chiefs want everyone to leave their digital keys under the doormat". I always have the idea that police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize that their way of thinking about security is still somewhere last century.
I mean, I don't even mean it to be insulting or anything. People can't be good at everything. It seems that police I've met so far (n<10) are pretty awesome people, but they don't seem to be particularly security conscious qua electronic security.
Else the police chiefs would (for one) realize that they need that end-to-end encryption themselves. It's a fairly basic building block, you'd think.
OTOH, maybe my impression is wrong, and there are exceptionally skilled police people who I've just never met? But why would they be advising their chiefs so badly then?
> police are late to this particular arms race and don't realize
It is smarter and simpler than that: Once the use of encryption keys is banned, everyone using one will label himself "I am a terrorist" and will be at least annoyed endlessly by the judicial system.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. In other words, I don't think they're being ignorant at all. They've been pushing this angle from different places in the EU and this is one more. They won't stop until it's a reality.
They are trying to maximize their power to their own advantage, just like everyone else. (Un)fortunately it’s way too late to ban e2e encryption for anyone who really wants it (i.e. nerds and criminals), but they might end up banning it for the general public out of spite.
Yes, they're trying to make their jobs easier, even if it undermines everything else. In fact that is such a big part of their lives that they'll be done and retired without ever experiencing the fallout, so they do not care.
I've met some very nice literal communists, who wanted to abolish money.
I think that's about the same level of wrong as cops trying to abolish encryption — I can see what they're saying and why, but the world can't be as they want it to be.
The aim might actually be innocent, but it leads to abuse of power.
The imbalance of power is common and inevitable, the abuse of power needs some prerequisites. One of those is knowing so much that you know you can get away with the abuse.
to start of the officer that proposed this is from belgium, same country where a dude that gets caugth with csam gets no punishment to make matters worse i know of at least 2 whistleblowers that try to make this known to the public one of them was the officer that a victim testified to... the officer that took that testimony is not alowed by order of court to not mention the victim if he does so he will get imediatly put behind bars... if you do the research you'll quickly see what is going on and if that is not a good reason for it to end i rather end myself than having to witness all this for much longer
> Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle, said:
> Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. To keep our society and people safe, we need this digital environment to be secured.
Well yeah, as per the traditional definition of "to be secured", that's exactly what stuff like end-to-end encryption is for. Seems like the problem is just that the European Police Chiefs apparently have a different definition of "to be secured".
So tell me, dear European Police Chiefs, whom do you think I should want my communications to be secured from? Aha, not you, you say? Well, sorry, I beg to differ.
