There should be no difference with usual botnet owner/ransomware gangs and such companies. Management should go to prison for good 20-30 years for that and being extradited worldwide. Considering that ransomware gangs are probably less harmful to the society than guys who hack journalists and politicians, putting their lifes at literal risks, not just their pockets.
There should be no "legal" hacking of someone's devices apart from extraction of data from already convicted people in public court with the right to defend themselves
Its not like this is that different than traditional "weapons" (i hate the "cyberweapons" analogy, but if the shoe fits).
Sell guns to governments, even unsavoury ones, it is very rare anything will happen to you except in pretty extreme cases. Sell guns to street gangs, well that is a different story. Like i don't think this situation is different because it is "hacking".
The NSO created/ran cloud instances for each client country and reviewed and approved every target. The didn’t sell weapons like in your analogy. They were effectively assassins for hire.
The problem with selling exploits is you want to maintain “ownership” of the exploit details, lest your customer just take the exploit and sell/use it without paying more or use it to attack you or your friends. This means you end up with veto power. I.e. culpability.
And meanwhile, if the government sells guns to cartels... no big deal. Rarely throw a fall guy under the bus. Or often not even that.
Trying to remember the quote I last heard, something to the tune of "we don't want to punish, we want to educate", which was about "educating" LEOs and entire police departments they shouldn't be selling fun switch guns illegally to gangs and private buyers.
(And do I even have to mention "fast and furious?" Hah! Feds get it the easiest.)
The second part though doesn't make sense. If the US president can send drones to kill terrorists without taking them to court, surely he can order hacking their phones. If you think that there's no case where the latter is ok you shouldn't you fight against the former first?
The part that you miss is, are they only killing "terrorists" extrajudicially? To take that propaganda at its face value is to ask, what else could they be killing brown people for, if not terrorism?
I didn't say if I think that drone killing is justified or not, since I have no opinion on that - I don't know enough to form an opinion. I only say that since the government have the right to send killing drone it doesn't make sense to raise pitchforks against phone hacking
The thing is, extrajudicial murder justified by labeling the victim “terrorist” is illegal and should not be accepted in a free and open society.
The ‘terrorist’ label was invented as a means of abrogating human rights by governments who felt they were encumbered by the obligation to protect human rights. “Terrorist” labeling is a totalitarian-authoritarian apparatus to avoid culpability for its actions when a government decides the easiest solution to its problem is outright murder.
Do you not think that terrorism exists, that the label has been co-opted for other purposes, that terrorists cannot be treated as combatants, that non-declared-war conflicts should not have deliberate strikes or something else?
It seems to me like terrorism has a pretty plain definition: Using violence against civilians/non-combatants to further a ideological goal, primarily via fear.
It's often misused as an excuse, but there are actual terrorists, the word has a meaning and we should not let it be watered down by either the people wanting to use it as an excuse or the people trying to shroud terrorism in something else.
I don't get what's happening in this thread. This is a pretty clear statement: hacking isn't worse than the killing that the government is already allowed to do. It's a pretty straightforward argument which for some reason seems to be being misunderstood.
I'll gently push on the premise though: hacking isn't worse for the victims than death, obviously, but I think it's possible weaponizing of exploits does more total damage. Both collateral, due to the manufacturing of exploits which ultimately leak and harm a bunch of unrelated actors, and because the marginal hacking is lower cost, practically and politically. So a given attack is likely to be used against groups we'd recognize less clearly as "terrorists" / deserving of the harm / etc.
It is not hypothetical, the fact is that killing drones are used in practice, and it just doesn't make sense to oppose lesser measures that are being used without judgement when killing is allowed.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Ok is a value judgment which I didn't state. Allowed is a fact. Are you arguing with what I'm saying or with an opponent in your mind?
If the US president can send drones to kill terrorists without taking them to court, surely he can order hacking their phones. If you think that there's no case where the latter is ok you shouldn't you fight against the former first?"
Pretty clear from your rhetoric what your position is. Folks here are not dumb.
> Ok is a value judgment ... Allowed is a fact
Factually, genocidaries are worse than terrorists.
Also by now the number of people killed in Gaza by Netanyahu is very close to the number of Ukrainian people killed by Putin. Did anyone suggest sanctions against Israel for that genocide? Nope, they enjoy their full immunity and keep going forward with a massacre that has the same exact motivation as the Russian invasion: rob other people of their territory and resources.
Two war criminals, two rogue terrorist states, yet two completely different weights.
Flip that statement on it's head. What respectable nation would fire upon a suspect in a press jacket without actually knowing who it is first? Who orders artillery and airstrikes on known press positions? Soviet doctrine? Countries with WWII logistics?
Seems clear to me that this is a deliberate campaign of terror constructed by the IDF to deter any form of independent journalism in Gaza. No different than hasbara or the Hannibal Directive - orders passed down from the top get obeyed, even if it costs the truth or innocent lives.
Sounds pretty logical in a world where banking secrecy doesn't exist and most banks are compliant with a single jurisdiction which doesn't respects other ones.
Don't see what's wrong to preserve your property outside of the modern banking system if you are against the US.
I’m not even necessarily agreeing that it’s suspicious (ok, it is a bit suspicious but not so weird that I would immediately proclaim that he’s guilty), I just don’t think it’s productive to post sarcastic comments rebutting strawman arguments. If the commenter wanted to say that having a lot of cash isn’t suspicious, they should have just said that instead of making a point about google making a lot of money, too.
Because law enforcement must be costly and non-automated to avoid the unbalanced power distribution between an individual and the gov, which only serves the individual and not rules them.
A cost to catch a criminal should be a manual and expensive work from an agent and thus provide no ability to mass abuse human rights on scale. Only on actual criminals when needed.
> "A cost to catch a criminal should be a manual and expensive work from an agent and thus provide no ability to mass abuse human rights on scale. Only on actual criminals when needed."
The problem is that we're expending huge amounts of engineering power to avoid the issue when we could instead be using it to provide a privacy-first option that still safely enables law enforcement efforts to track down violent people whilst not enabling this hypothetical power-inbalance of government over individuals.
Let's be honest though, it's a hypothetical boogeyman. The real problem is that we all secretly know that we don't live in a rainbow world where we all agree on what is "right". We can't even agree on supposedly simple concepts like protecting children's bodily autonomy and safety, so who's to say we will ever be able to agree on any other political issue which arguably pales in comparison.
This is something often implied but rarely stated, so thanks for spelling it out.
But I don’t think it’s an inherent tradeoff? In theory, anyway, the police work for us. They’re spending taxpayer money. It’s expensive. If there’s a way of making them more efficient then we should want them to use it. Maybe there are ways?
This doesn’t mean skimping on necessary safeguards, but that doesn’t mean we need to put up unnecessary obstacles about knowing where to look. We should still want them to win at finding criminals and we don’t want “game balance” because it’s not a game.
Catching the bad guys and not prosecuting the wrong people both involve having more accurate information. Bad information means more mistakes.
It doesn’t mean just trusting them. Defense attorneys, judges, and juries benefit from better information, too.
I think the most self-respectful and secure way is to have some encrypted cloud in a jurisdiction which doesn't cooperate with the country you afraid of. Wiping all data from the device and restoring it back after border control.
Hidden partition are definitely more dangerous. Also if these people took your device out of your view point, you need to sell the device and buy a new one before restoring anything.
but this still requires trusting a third party to not change their policies, or to not be hacked or coerced into releasing the data and a myriad other options that a state-backed actor has at their disposal
That's an espionage company which is openly violating privacy rights of other countries citizens outside of the US jurisdiction.
I would agree with you, if all companies and individuals in the world could openly violate right of US citizens outside of the US without the extradition and sanctions risk.
It would be fair to drop all extradition agreements with the US if the US allows such behavior from their companies or enforce the extradition and jail time for C-level management of such companies based in the US if they leave the country anywhere (like it happens with others).
I live in a country with fast enough 5MB/s and huge ping (300ms+) internet. There is no problem with installing packages, downloading deps and so on, but realtime remote typing or gaming could be really clunky.
Don't forget that you don't need a fast ping for development (with local env). "Good internet" is a very broad definition.
And what if I don't trust and don't want to rely on my citizenship government?
Being a Russian passport holder who lives abroad for years, I don't want to be in touch with my gov in any way possible, and moreover depend on it.
That's actually the case for millions of people from different countries with dictatorships, do you propose just to discriminate everyone outside of 20-30 countries with more or less democratic systems ? Those countries don't care about "citizen privacy".
Apart from that, we all see the bill in the UK which is as much a disaster to human freedoms as Russian and Chinese laws, for example. So even being a citizen of a more modern country is not a guarantee.
People don't always live in their country of citizenship, they don't always live in one place (see digital nomads) and have a residence, they don't always trust their government and they should not be discriminated on internet usage because of that. That makes a person more of a government property rather than a human being.
> Being a Russian passport holder who lives abroad for years, I don't want to be in touch with my gov in any way possible, and moreover depend on it.
Real identity doesn't necessarily mean passport. It can mean, for example, a visa issued by your host government; being a valid visa holder therefore grants you a valid digital identity issued by that country.
> People don't always live in their country of citizenship, they don't always live in one place (see digital nomads) and have a residence, they don't always trust their government and they should not be discriminated on internet usage because of that. That makes a person more of a government property rather than a human being.
Then let's get rid of passports. Sounds like the deeper issue, no? Wouldn't you agree that freedom of movement and immigration is a higher and more important freedom than freedom of internet access?
This is the world we live in. Immigration concerns exist. Government-issued identity is real. It just hasn't caught up to the 21st century.
That's true, I also don't understand why some people are "better" by the right of birth and not by things they did in life and pure merit.
There is basically no reason for, for example, African young person to be more restricted in his freedom of movement than European one, but we are where we are.
Though I believe while we have outdated and unfair system of belonging to some borders, it's better not to make it even worse by adding new layers of dependency on these IDs.
Wouldn't be better to add more opportunities equality instead of hardening it?
> Wouldn't be better to add more opportunities equality instead of hardening it?
I couldn't agree more, but you gotta apply the right leverage to the right problem, put the round pegs in the round holes and the square pegs in the square holes. Real digital identity does for the digital economy what credit cards did for the retail economy: dramatically reduce the cost of friction, and therefore dramatically expand, how much activity there will be. It is this reduction in friction which opens additional opportunities even to people with identities issued by less-favored governments. Separately, we can and should push to make qualified immigration simpler, faster, and for more applicants.
Digital (not strictly connected to real) identity is a not a bad thing in itself. But I honestly don't think that digital identity should be managed by governments or corporations, they already have too much leverage over individuals.
I am a bit opinionated about that, because I already saw lots of that in Russia with all these fancy "security" and "convenient" digital tools and how it ended.
Digital Id should be solved by some kind of WebOfTrust, private DIDs and somehow distributed reputation systems, not by centralized government databases. It's a straight way to tyranny.
> I honestly don't think that digital identity should be managed by governments or corporations, they already have too much leverage over individuals
The reason why it needs to be managed by the government is because legal contracts are ultimately enforced by government courts. Many things that, today, rely upon pen-and-paper signature (and Docusign-style electronic variants, which are just digital facades to the pen-and-paper reality), to get them enforced, require submitting more mountains of paperwork and physical appearances etc. We can't get out from behind that paper legacy, really start to explore contracts that can be disputed and enforced with simple online forms and no in-person appearances (everything from employment, to real estate / housing, to credit...) until the courts have a trustworthy to say, for this digital identity that signed that agreement, we know that it really was such-and-such a real person.
> It's a straight way to tyranny.
You'll disagree, but I would argue that it isn't more powerful tools that make government tyrannical, but a lack of education, poor culture, and a lack of checks-and-balances on government power. The government is supposed to have a monopoly on various parts of life, first and foremost a monopoly on violence (police, courts, and justice). "Democratic" but weak governments (consider e.g. Mexico, in the context of the drug wars) are ineffective at securing the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; America has a history of strong governmental institutions that protect these rights. "Technology is neither good, nor evil, nor neutral, it simply is," and indeed, improving governmental strength by pushing past technical barriers is simply an orthogonal concern (IMO) to whether or not governments are just or tyrranical.
Pushback against voter ID laws would be ridiculous if those laws were accompanied with measures to make it cheap and easy for citizens to obtains the necessary ID. If those laws were accompanied by such measures most of the pushback would go away.
But in most of the states that have been pushing such laws that is very much not the case. The deliberately pick forms of ID that are less prevalent among poor and minority voters and that for many are expensive to obtain. In several they have also taken measures to make it even more difficult for those people to obtain ID.
For example if they require an ID that you get from the state's department of motor vehicles (DMV) they (in the name of budget cuts) close many DMV offices, and in the ones that remain open the cut back on the hours during which they will issue licenses to a few hours on weekdays. The closures mostly hit in poor and minority districts.
Yes, some of those laws do make some forms of acceptable ID free, but only in the sense that there is no fee to obtain that ID. Obtaining the documents necessary to obtain the ID will still have fees.
I’ve seen this argument repeated ad infinitum by opponents of voter ID. The idea that minorities and poor people are incapable of acquiring proper identification is so prejudice. Proper ID is essential for so many things. Almost everyone has one and can acquire one.
OP offered a bunch of reasons why the law proposals are discriminatory and insidious things they do to make it hard to obtain an ID.
You claim to believe it's not and offer no counter point outside of you feel it in your gut and a desire to deflect and attack OP for making the point by calling the poster prejudice.
I just read through each link and now fully understand the point you were making based on facts and evidence. You are right. I stand corrected. Thank you for taking the time to include so many sources. I really appreciate it.
It disenfranchises more people than fraudulent votes it prevents. Like, orders of magnitude more. If your goal is to accurately assess the opinion of the electorate, voter ID laws get you further from that goal, not closer to it.
It's theoretically possible, but for a year of my life, for example, I didn't have a residence and moved around. Lots of people do that to optimize their taxes. Why would you require to be a resident from a person to use an internet in the first place?
Being nobody's resident doesn't mean that you're not a human.
And anyway, there are a lot of people inside Russia, China, Iran, etc. And instead of helping them to use services with better privacy and consume uncensored views from outside id based system will give an impressive way to censor internet usage by government attesters. Have wrong views - say goodbye to the internet.
Dodging is illegal, being nobody's (or some low/zero tax country) tax resident and not paying anyone is perfectly fine, nothing wrong with that. Apart from maybe US with their specific global tax residence regulation.
You can stay in UAE for half a year, start being their resident with 0% tax and then moving around stayng less than 183 days anywhere. It's of course better to be connected to UAE or other low tax jurisdiction in case of "personal connection" taxes requirements. Nothing unethical, illegal or bad in that. As far as it's perfectly legal in lots of countries, that's optimizing and not dodging or avoiding.
If you are staying UAE resident this way, you probably will have some troubles receiving gov services, because you don't live there in fact most of the time (and you are still just a tax resident and not always resident in terms of long-term living permit).
Anyway, placing a person to be "managed" by some government is a really dystopian concept.
Bear in mind as well, you need to be earning a ton for the tax savings to offset the price of flights + price differential of short-term housing compared to long-term housing. You may have moral reasons for not wanting to pay taxes to a particular government, and there are of course quality-of-life benefits to being able to travel to so many places that can make it worth the cost, but I'm wary of claims that such nomadship actually saves anyone money.
Yeah, it's more profitable to reside in a low tax jurisdiction as I do, for example, but he asked me to elaborate on the idea and I know that such way of life exist and works perfectly fine for lots of people.
Th main idea as that I strongly disagree that a person must have an ID outside of some questionable country and that's more of an example. I personally traveled just because I wanted to travel a lot, it was before the war and stuff, but as I know currently lots of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians are changing countries to find the best for them. When you don't have home anymore, there is no reason to settle to the first place you visited.
BTW, 3 flights per year with 2-3 bags will cost you around 3k USD, you will probably overpay around 300-400 USD per month staying in Airbnb in low-cost of living countries like Thailand, so in fact the whole cost of moving will be around 7-10k USD per year. If you earn IT remote salary, you will probably save a lot.
Though you'll need a tax consultant to avoid breaking any tax law accidentally, but that's not so expensive outside of the EU and the US.
The literal attempt to censor web usage of Linux and BSD desktops, other FOSS clients, custom Android ROMs, etc with an open reasoning "to sell you ads".
Yeah I mean the first of their examples is literally:
> Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
I find it quite cute that they start with "users" as if it's a user demand but in the next sentence switch to "advertisers" --- the real target population.
Why stop there. Let's see who is behind the problem they're solving with item 2:
Some examples of scenarios where users depend on client trust include:
1. Users like visiting websites that are expensive to create and maintain, but they often want or need to do it without paying directly. These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots. This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they're human, sometimes through tasks like challenges or logins.
2. Users want to know they are interacting with real people on social websites but bad actors often want to promote posts with fake engagement (for example, to promote products, or make a news story seem more important). Websites can only show users what content is popular with real people if websites are able to know the difference between a trusted and untrusted environment.
Not written in item two: And the people paying to promote the posts funding these sites want to know the promotions are landing on real consumers' screens.
It’s not impossible that google people who work there long enough are under a corporate delusion that users need something ads related that is aligned with business model of their paycheck issuer. They may sincerely believe it’s the only way forward, because otherwise it’s ruined for everyone.
As someone who lived in a city fully controlled by organized crime, I can tell you that eventually some people become fanboys of gang-law and start to unironically teach everyone how it’s better and more moral than actual law.
I'm worried about this too, as we run a company that invests heavily in developing browsing technology that is powered by these browsers (like chromium) but liberates them in various ways (such as running headless in the cloud, and then having users connect to it remotely), or running in a "semi automated". Both of these things would possibly be flagged by these attestation guards, and would not be environments that "preserve the integrity of the ad business model and the dominant browser market". If you want to get involved in doing something about it, come and check out our open source browser work at: https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserBoxPro and get involved
I mean, to be fair, that's their entire modus operandi.
You don't berate a kitchen for serving food, why would you look at any Google contraption from HTTP/3 to Chrome as anything but a vehicle for selling ads and/or mining data?
Google are clearly trying to add levels of indirection here to pretend it’s some kind of standards forming, instead of a dictatorship. There’s nothing “to be fair” about.
The largest subsection of the document is spent discussing how to prevent specifically this situation, and this is called out explicitly as a non-goal.
They didn't try hard enough. That section concludes "Established browsers would need to only use attesters that respond quickly and fairly to new browsers' requests to be trusted," so in the end, Chrome's monopoly lets it call all the shots.
As well as thousands of Russians outside of Russia got their banks accounts blocked and sanctions restricted our money to be 100_000 EUR max per person.
Hundreds of years of liberal ideas of individual rights just crushed below collective responsibility idea for some dictator actions.
People moved billions out of Russia with bitcoin and other currencies. They saved their money after sanctions with passports based discrimination and their whole country actions against them. But rich people from first world country will still push these ideas, that's it all scams and casinos.
And the only alternative they provide as "real money" is something like "give all your money to our banks, sign some contract with humiliating visa conditions, pay us 40% taxes and pray we won't take it back". Yeah, sure, thank you very much!
If you are interested, me, personally, was partially affiliated with libertarian party and left Russia after first police visit in early 2021 (so a year before the war, even better in your terms). But that's just an ad hominem and doesn't matter in fact.
Talking generally, that's true that most people didn't leave, and that's totally fine. People don't deserve to play heroes and suffer in prisons because they were unlucky enough to born in wrong place in wrong time. Everybody deserve to have a peaceful life with their families, hobbies and jobs. Wanna play hero - get a visa, go to Russia, give your life, get shit done, if that's so easy. Humanity will be grateful for you.
If you don't - don't say people to do that just because they have different color of passport or speak other language. There is nothing wrong in being a "coward", people just want to live their lives, it's not a game, there is no savepoints.
Each person in the world can be only judged by his own actions, not by others'. Simple, but extremely important, idea which was an outcome of 2 world wars. If you create more hate by nationality or citizenship - you are just like Putin with his "bandera" fetish. Just different objects, really.
There should be no "legal" hacking of someone's devices apart from extraction of data from already convicted people in public court with the right to defend themselves
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