[HN Gopher] The EARN IT act is back, and it's more dangerous tha...
___________________________________________________________________
The EARN IT act is back, and it's more dangerous than ever
Author : grappler
Score : 1234 points
Date : 2022-02-05 18:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (cyberlaw.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (cyberlaw.stanford.edu)
| prepend wrote:
| I wish they would address real problems like arbitrary
| enforcement of TOS that damages users with no recourse. There's
| no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or
| whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support.
|
| Child abuse is serious, but not that common and this law will do
| little to change that. The lack of a UCC-style law for big tech
| platforms affects way more people.
|
| This seems like BS that will squelch small players that can't
| afford to comply. And consolidate more power into a few small
| firms.
| ridaj wrote:
| > There's no regulation for what happens when Google or
| Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides
| no support.
|
| Yes there is, per the trade regulations you're entitled to a
| refund
|
| .
|
| Wait
|
| I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to
| anything provided as a free service then the problem starts
| there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of
| your subscription? Then made you pay for anything over 100 Mb?
| Then held your email address hostage if you wanted to switch
| providers? Hell no. But I also don't think government should
| force anyone to provide services to me for free.
|
| Edit: downvotes without replies do not help me understand where
| this feeling of entitlement to a free service comes from;
| insight would be appreciated.
| heartbeats wrote:
| These companies are providing critical infrastructure. If I
| run a business that's dependent on the phone lines and they
| cut me off, I'm entitled to a hell of a lot more than the
| monthly fee for my line. There's many businesses that are
| solely reliant on Facebook to earn a living. Should Facebook
| own them?
| prepend wrote:
| I pay for their services with money every month and year.
| Their customer service sucks. I'm worried about getting hosed
| by them one day.
|
| There are numerous stories of paying customers losing their
| account and getting no help.
|
| I didn't downvote you, but your response seems disengenuous.
| Even if the service was free, people depend on them
| substantially and losing that access disrupts businesses and
| lives.
|
| Google is a monopoly for search. Losing the ability to buy
| ads or broadcast on YouTube without any due process is a big
| deal and needs regulation. I'm not a fan of regulation and
| thinks there are many inefficiencies. But Google has had 20
| years without regulation and obviously won't change because
| it's profitable the way they have it now.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The service isn't free, you pay for it with your personal
| information. If they want to provide refunds by deleting our
| information, that seems like a fair trade.
| umbauk wrote:
| Well one could argue Google and FB services are not free.
| Those 2 companies are 2 of the most profitable, valuable
| companies in the world. If they are providing their services
| for free, how can that be? Our attention and information is
| what they profit from, and that should not be undervalued.
| They are certainly not providing these services to us out of
| the goodness of their hearts.
| kortilla wrote:
| Those services are the payment to you. You are selling your
| attention to google and Facebook for email/social network
| access and they then time slice that attention and sell it
| to advertisers.
|
| If you use Google's free email, you are not their customer.
| If you have an AdWords account, you are.
|
| If you don't like the deal, start charging them money or
| stop giving your attention to them for what you get in
| return. It's that simple.
| c0balt wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment but I don't
| think this will hold up in case of account deletions or
| bans.
|
| Let say your 'attention', using the service, is used to pay
| for 'goods', account/ access to service.
|
| How is the revenue derived fron 'attention'? By the
| attention being spent on preselected content, e.g. ads,
| that are choosen by the platform. One could argue that
| revoking access to a service from the platform side is okay
| since the attention is not being 'spent' after the removal
| or ban.
|
| It might be feasible to expect that services, like an email
| account, are not taken away abitrarly but 'just because
| it's profitable' is not a sound argument. Making yourself
| dependent on a platform is not the problem of the platform.
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Well one could argue Google and FB services are not
| free._
|
| I don't possibly see how. The services cost no money, thus
| they are unequivocally free. Perhaps one could reasonably
| argue that just because something is free doesn't mean the
| user isn't entitled to any rights, but torturing the
| definition of free to suit your argument strikes me as
| obviously fallacious.
|
| > _If they are providing their services for free, how can
| that be_
|
| Because advertisers pay them. This logic is like saying FM
| radio isn't free because it has ads, this is just not true.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| You pay with your data and your privacy.
| [deleted]
| zbrozek wrote:
| Paying for their services doesn't seem to make the customer
| service any better.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Squelching small players is the intent. Large institutions are
| easy to exert political control over. It's hard to exert
| political control over masses of individuals. It benefits the
| Republican party when you get your news from FOX. It benefits
| the Democratic party when you get your news from CNN. It does
| not benefit the Democratic or Republican party when any
| individual can broadcast their views to millions of willing
| listeners on a platform like Youtube. This is why you only ever
| hear about "misinformation" coming from small time players.
| When CNN/FOX et al. do it (which is constantly), they get a
| free pass. Both parties share an interest in monopolizing
| information flow to their followers, which is why they both
| support this law.
| cossatot wrote:
| FOX and CNN are constantly accused of spreading
| misinformation by huge swaths of the populace (but not
| necessarily the same swath for both networks).
| fallingknife wrote:
| I'm talking about the specific swath of the populace that
| can get you banned from YouTube, FB, etc.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Any examples of CNN misinformation? Not saying it doesn't
| happen, I'm just not aware of it. Meanwhile FOX
| misinformation is pretty well known.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Russiagate would be just one example. And of course when
| they said Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer.
| pksebben wrote:
| https://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/02/iraq.weapons/i
| nde...
| dsign wrote:
| Here is where we are going:
|
| https://dsignrandom.tumblr.com/post/675431677522329600/not-s...
|
| I think that these bills will have not only a chilling effect
| over free speech, but also reduce the overall safety of citizens,
| both of which are truly bad things. And make no mistake, many
| countries will follow the lead of USA, UK and Australia in taking
| these steps.
|
| On the plus side, moving free speech outside the moderation of
| big tech and, by extension, big-government, is a good thing. And
| that will happen the moment people realize that they are liable
| for CSAM crimes for posting photos of bread and having a stupid
| AI flag them, or referring to their cat as "my kid" in a tweet.
| People with a strong political opinion on bread or otherwise will
| need to find high-effort platforms to publish those opinions,
| i.e. magazines, books, and (eventually) face-to-face meetups. My
| perhaps over-optimistic hope is that this will attenuate the
| rage-by-tweet phenomenon, we will get back to thinking before
| publicly expressing something, and people will only get mobilized
| after informing themselves properly on a subject. Even if this is
| a "count your blessings" attitude.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| No matter your opinion on the issue, the firearm lobby would
| probably serve as an effective model for fighting legislation
| like this on a long term basis.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It would require people willing to be single-issue voters, the
| way many are on abortion or firearms.
|
| Would anyone here switch party votes to a candidate who sided
| their way on tech privacy -- even if they disagreed on other
| core principles like abortion, gun rights, religion in schools,
| etc?
|
| Maybe a few, but I'm not convinced many.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I wouldn't. That's the sad thing in the US with its
| entrenched two party system. You have to choose between two
| unlikeable options. I usually vote Green but it's sad that
| these votes are "lost".
| ryeights wrote:
| The UK, with its n-party system, still manages to pass some
| pretty zany anti-civil-rights legislation...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Tie it to existing wedge issues. "Do you want Facebook
| knowing every time you buy a gun/get an abortion?"
| strulovich wrote:
| Those single issue voters are the not present in many other
| countries besides the US.
|
| This might show that the right arguments and lobbying can
| turn what is not a big political debate into a wedge over
| time.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _the right arguments and lobbying_
|
| Firearms and abortion became The Issue for so many single-
| issue voters because of well-funded, relentless fear-
| mongering.
|
| You can do the same thing with tech privacy, but you're
| going to have to "play dirty" to accomplish the same thing,
| and it's going to take decades.
|
| It's also important to note that abortion successfully tied
| itself into religion, which is not something you're going
| to be able to do with cryptography.
| raziel2p wrote:
| they absolutely are - you'll find plenty of voters in
| Europe who care about nothing other than immigration, for
| example.
| strulovich wrote:
| I'm not saying there's no single issue voters, just that
| the single issues are not universal and depend on culture
| and geography.
| [deleted]
| logiczero wrote:
| If encryption is treated as a munition[0], does it mean that
| the Second Amendment could actually be used to protect the
| right to use it? If the intent of the Second Amendment is to
| protect citizens' ability to combat government overreach, it
| seems like it should...
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The second amendment, like abortion, is a political wedge issue
| used by politicians to wield against their opponents. You're
| not going to replicate that with issues requiring more nuance
| and that cannot be used as emotional cudgels.
| queuebert wrote:
| I _think_ the lack of nuance employed by both 1A and 2A
| communities has been a strength.
|
| Nuance allows compromise, and compromise allows
| incrementalism. It's a classic fascist play. It's also a
| classic politician play to get people lost in the details so
| that no one truly understands their intent, i.e. "never let a
| good crisis go to waste".
|
| I'm willing to be proven wrong, however.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> Nuance allows compromise, and compromise allows
| incrementalism.
|
| Correct. So-called "pragmatism" and constant compromise is
| how we got into a ton of the messes we are in right now.
| protomyth wrote:
| "Encryption is my absolute right protected by the 1st and
| 2nd amendment" - there is no nuance and you are correct,
| nuance diminishes your rights over time. Plus, nuance is
| bad for campaign slogans or beating politicians about the
| head.
| umvi wrote:
| The point though is that you can't afford minor losses here
| and there, because it's a war of attrition. Firearm lobby
| knows that the opposition's strategy is to just chip away at
| 2A rights slowly over the decades. Therefore, they can't
| afford to allow minor gun control victories here and there,
| or else a century later they are out of business and their
| supporters have no 2A rights anymore.
|
| Same with this. You can't allow minor anti-encryption
| victories here and there chipping away at
| privacy/mathematical rights or your great grandkids won't
| have those freedoms.
| natsup123490 wrote:
| If this bill passes, it will only weaken America's position as
| leader in the Internet space. The world will eventually benefit
| from that weakening. We will route around America.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Graham (R-SC)
|
| Blumenthal (D-CT)*
|
| Durbin (D-IL)
|
| Grassley (R-IA)*
|
| Feinstein (D-CA)
|
| Cornyn (R-TX)
|
| Whitehouse (D-RI)
|
| Hawley (R-MO)
|
| Hirono (D-HI)
|
| Kennedy (D-LA)*
|
| Casey (D-PA)
|
| Blackburn (R-TN)
|
| Masto (D-NV)*
|
| Collins (R-ME)
|
| Hassan (D-NH)*
|
| Ernst (R-IA)
|
| Warner (D-VA)
|
| Hyde-Smith (R-MI)
|
| Murkowski (R-AK)*
|
| Portman (R-OH)*
|
| * are up for re-election this year.
|
| Bit of a pain to find this information really - couldn't find a
| single news outlet with a list of who introduced the bill. Kinda
| seems like they don't want to be known.
| loteck wrote:
| By all means contact and organize on Senators, it's good
| practice. In my experience they are completely unresponsive to
| anything smaller than the largest and most funded groups.
| Still, making noise is only good.
|
| You may find your local house rep to be much more persuadable
| and willing to listen to your educated points of view. Getting
| their position stated publicly and on the record in either
| direction can be very meaningful.
| userbinator wrote:
| Exactly 10 on each side --- that's about as non-partisan as it
| gets.
| drilldrive wrote:
| Authoritarian abuse is second to war in being the most
| bipartisan issue.
| mrandish wrote:
| I think a lot of us are no longer convinced traditional two-
| party partisanship is a useful lens through which to
| understand politics. Regardless of party, the politicians
| pushing this bill are overwhelmingly pro-surveillance state
| and pro-big government as well as being invested in
| perpetuating the two-party machine. Personally, I now see
| things more through a lens of those who perpetuate the two-
| party machine and big federal government on one side and
| those who are skeptical of both the eternally growing central
| government for it's own sake and the reduction of local and
| individual autonomy.
|
| Neither big party really represents many of my viewpoints as
| much in recent years. Even when I do agree with one of them
| on something, I now suspect many of the inter-party battles
| are as staged as pro-wrestling where the eventual prevailing
| side was already predetermined by special interests,
| lobbyists and the party machines. It's weird how many votes
| on something I care about fail to survive committee or
| amendment by just _one_ vote. And the politicians who voted
| "against" the thing in the 'losing' party, all happen to be
| in very 'safe' districts or not facing reelection soon and
| those facing reelection in 'unsafe' districts happen to be
| the ones who voted "for" it.
|
| This happens far too often to statistically be random chance.
| I hate that this possibly makes me sound like a conspiracy
| nutjob but the math here says something's definitely going on
| behind the scenes.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > It's weird how many votes on something I care about fail
| to survive committee or amendment by just one vote. And the
| politicians who voted "against" the thing in the 'losing'
| party, all happen to be in very 'safe' districts or not
| facing reelection soon and those facing reelection in
| 'unsafe' districts happen to be the ones who voted "for"
| it.
|
| This concept has been identified before, and popularized by
| Glenn Greenwald, dubbing it the "rotating villain," which
| is a delightfully apt turn of phrase.
|
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=rotating%20
| v...
|
| https://www.salon.com/2010/02/23/democrats_34/
| mrandish wrote:
| > popularized by Glenn Greenwald
|
| Ah, interesting. That is a nice name for the phenomenon.
| Thanks for the pointer.
| yareally wrote:
| > Portman (R-OH)*
|
| He's retiring this year. Candidates running for his spot in his
| party are likely to support it though
| greenie_beans wrote:
| Hyde-Smith is from MS not MI
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| Really surprised Warner is on this list, and very unsurprised
| by the inclusion of both remarkable senators from Iowa
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Feinstein really needs to go. CA can do so much better.
| eikenberry wrote:
| This seems like it could have a significant upside if passed.
| That it would help promote federated and peer to peer free
| software systems with no centralized, commercial target to sue.
| Might even require some of the current giant social networks to
| pair back significantly to avoid liability.
|
| I'm not saying I want it to pass, just think the unintended
| consequences might be interesting and even beneficial in some
| ways.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Pretty sure the government won't view it that way. It'll be
| called a loophole and crushed if it gets mainstream. This is
| the country where sending an HTML GET and receiving response
| 200 can be prosecuted under the CFAA.
|
| We need a legal environment that explicitly protects encrypted
| communications, not one where they are are maybe tolerated on
| the fringe.
| eikenberry wrote:
| This is a different battle. The government has gone after
| general purpose encryption multiple times and has been beaten
| back so far. And while this would definitely be a win for
| that side of things it isn't the same battle and the Earn IT
| Act is not about encryption in general. It is about
| encryption in the context of commercial entities and their
| managed content.
| dchftcs wrote:
| With greater surveillance power and the precedence of
| passing this bill the government gains the ability to push
| a stronger one, including one that targets general
| encryption.
|
| Your intended effect is uncertain at best, I'm not even
| sure it's going to be a net benefit in the most ideal
| scenario (losing encryption in commercial setting is at the
| very least extremely inefficient), and there would
| certainly be high costs to the society until that
| materializes. At worst it would never materialize.
|
| You're effectively advocating to take a very high risk to
| liberty and privacy for some very wishful thinking.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I'm sorry I didn't make this clear enough. I don't want
| this to happen, I'm just speculation that it could have
| side effects that are helpful to parts of the community
| that would like to see less reliance on centralized
| systems. I'm not saying that is worth the tradeoff,
| because I don't think it is. Just interesting.
|
| Regarding the point that this could/would lead to an
| attack on general encryption, IMO I think they are doing
| this more because they are beginning to understand that
| they can't attack general purpose encryption head on. It
| is _needed_ in to many places to make it illegal. So they
| are attacking it from the sides, through corporate
| interests.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Decentralized does _not_ mean lack of liability. That 's a
| marketing ploy. P2P filesharers and tor hosted sites are taken
| to court on the daily because of this one little trick called
| the IP address. Everything you send has your external IP. It
| doesn't matter that they "can't prove it was you". Courts have
| continually upheld that an IP address is grounds for either
| civil discovery or further criminal investigation. And yes, the
| court can absolutely compel you to unlock your full disk
| encrypted MacBook/Linux/bitlocker whatever.
|
| The only reason people en mass can do decentralized is
| _because_ of the availability of encryption, because VPN 's,
| because companies and software can offer encryption. This
| legislation and it's precedent would kill the decentralized
| web. It's not as if Google is going to go broke - they'd be the
| first to be approved and go on their merry way.
| heartbeats wrote:
| Sites hosted behind Tor do not reveal your external IP
| address.
| eikenberry wrote:
| I said P2P, not TOR. With P2P systems you only host your own
| stuff. So if they want to take someone to court it would be
| the person with the illegal content on their system... IE.
| who you want to go after. There is no reason to have to prove
| anything. Those P2P filesharers that are taken to court are
| the ones sharing the files, not just random people on the
| network.
|
| With P2P and Federated systems (encrypted or not), the people
| hosting the content are breaking the law and are the ones you
| go after. Just like now (pre Earn-It), where they go after
| the people posting the files to the central servers and not
| the central servers themselves.
| clusterfish wrote:
| As a general rule it's unwise to hope for some unintended
| side effect of bad legislation to solve unrelated problems.
| The goal of this legislation is surveillance and control.
| If passed, it will achieve that goal. If it has a side
| effect of significant number of people starting to use
| encrypted P2P communication (doubtful imo), they will pass
| more legislation to make that illegal too, since "child
| abusers are obviously using P2P encryption now", and most
| "normal people" don't. And that time it will be even easier
| than passing the original EARN IT act.
|
| Government overreach must be fought every step of the way,
| otherwise by the time it finally gets you personally, it
| will be too late.
|
| Let's not get blinded by our dislike for centralized
| platforms. This is not the way to solve their problems,
| this way only creates more problems for people.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Never claimed to hope for the law to pass and that to
| happen. It was more speculation on what might happen if
| it did pass.
|
| Regarding them attacking P2P.. IMO they wouldn't be able
| to attack P2P specifically without attacking encryption
| in general. There are to many ways to implement P2P using
| standard encryption technologies. I think they are
| starting to realize they can't win that fight without
| losing the larger war and so are attacking privacy from
| the angles they can get away with. Like corporate
| interests to avoid lawsuits.
| clusterfish wrote:
| They can certainly, say, ban Apple and Google from
| hosting such P2P apps in their app stores, then any such
| apps are useless to most people. They could also go after
| developers, forcing them to either install backdoors or
| shut down - see what kind of laws Australia passed about
| that, as an example.
|
| Remember they only care about most people, they don't
| need to get every last one of us. Their point is to make
| default methods of communication unencrypted.
| iopq wrote:
| Only Rand Paul and Ron Wyden voted against FOSTA/SESTA, the
| legislation passing 97 to 2
| [deleted]
| totorovirus wrote:
| wow I am just utterly surprised how the politicians in US are
| trying to pass the bill via CSAM just like the politicians in
| korea. Korea already has a DNS surveilance on porn related
| websites because it may contain sexually abusive material that
| may harm teenagers' mental health (it is called children and
| teenangers act). They even passed a bill to monitor the videos
| shared in online chatroom because people may share sexually
| abusive material via messengers. They have a very strong ethical
| reason in that they are trying to protect children and teenagers,
| and it is difficult to overcome that by making a case for privacy
| protection.
| yakorevivan wrote:
| mrandish wrote:
| While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society,
| ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I've read don't get much into
| the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so
| forcefully. The pretext is, of course, "protect the children" and
| more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of "stop
| those awful social media giants." While these justifications are
| (hopefully) obvious misdirection to most, I'd like to see more
| mainstream discussion about who this bill benefits and why. The
| legislation 'coincidentally' achieves exactly the agenda proposed
| by the "surveillance state" (ie CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, law
| enforcement lobby, state prosecutors, etc). While it doesn't
| specifically prohibit public access to encryption, it seeks to
| create nearly the same effect by making it legally risky for
| large social media and platform companies to offer end-to-end
| encryption as a default to law-abiding citizens. It's no accident
| that almost every version of the bill creates this exposure to
| essentially bottomless legal liability for platforms offering
| secure communications.
|
| Frankly, this scares the crap out of me. These people seem
| incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society
| and democracy posed by limiting _everyone 's_ ability to
| communicate private thoughts. While not explicitly outlawing
| untappable communications, it's much easier to identify _who_ is
| choosing to use end-to-end encryption when it 's not the typical
| default. This will ultimately put all of us who care about secure
| communications under default suspicion, whether our interest in
| private comms is a moral ideal, political principle or simply
| proper technical architecture and data hygiene. In today's multi-
| national environment of nation-state, criminal and privateer (NSO
| etc) threat actors, insecure communications over Internet
| infrastructure should only be seen as an ill-advised risky
| behavior or a technical bug.
| noduerme wrote:
| I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow, by
| holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the
| content of every post on their platform, and letting them
| defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their
| users' false statements for profit. But that has nothing to do
| with government censorship, that's pure libertarianism and
| letting the publisher bear the cost. The entire notion of
| inching forward a general level of public disapproval for
| encryption is indeed terrifying. The template for government
| now is so well-worn, to take a 2/3rds opinion in the dumb
| populace and get them to go against the other 1/3rd in the name
| of safety; yet, we see it much more clearly now. It's easier to
| fight.
|
| The platforms that are the biggest targets of this are,
| unfortunately, extremely compromised already by their failure
| to regulate their own users. Take that and a dose of populist
| anger, and it's pretty easy to see how important freedoms will
| be eroded and ultimately, any kind of private speech will be
| held as grounds for suspicion, even though that speech has
| nothing to do with these platforms or this law.
|
| Private speech and personal files never belonged on those
| platforms in the first place, and to me it's hard to believe
| anyone doing anything illegal at scale would even be using
| those platforms. What we're concerned with here is how the
| demolition of their privacy regulations might turn public
| opinion against those of us who manage our own privacy.
|
| The one bright spot is that we all see it coming.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I 'd personally love to see social media shut down
| tomorrow_
|
| Yeah, ok, I'm with you there...
|
| > _... by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers
| for the content of every post on their platform, and letting
| them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish
| their users ' false statements for profit._
|
| Whoa there, hold on. If we hold Twitter and FB liable for
| that stuff, then that means we also have to hold every single
| web forum, support forum, mailing list, blogging platform,
| etc. liable as well. So those things essentially just
| disappear overnight, because no one is willing to expose
| themselves to that sort of legal liability.
|
| Eventually, the only things you can read on the internet come
| from big corporations that can afford big legal teams, or
| people who have the technical know-how to host their own
| blog. HN is gone. Slashdot is gone. The Raspberry Pi support
| forum is gone. Hell, the LKML is gone. That's not an
| internet-world I want to live in.
| noduerme wrote:
| No - I think there's a strong case to be made that FB and
| Twitter aren't like email providers or other forums like
| Reddit which are neutral in just showing content. Nor am I
| saying anything should be censored by the government. All
| I'm saying is that _to the extent Twitter increased the
| viewership of some piece of propaganda, they should be
| allowed to be sued for damages_. It 's their ability to
| amplify that's the issue, particularly to amplify
| horrendous lies to the most gullible (and to profit from
| that). It's not their simple transmission from peer to
| peer. They're explicitly _not_ just a forum, and they 're
| not a telecommunications service.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > All I'm saying is that to the extent Twitter increased
| the viewership of some piece of propaganda, they should
| be allowed to be sued for damages.
|
| With potentially infinite violations and incalculable
| damages, it's no wonder why no one who runs any kind of
| user-submitted content site wants what you suggest here.
| noduerme wrote:
| They don't want it, but I used to run a BBS, and a
| casino, and a forum, and I was aware I could be held
| accountable if I furthered the dissemination of something
| nefarious. Doesn't have to be CSAM, but the worse it is,
| the worse the penalty would be. It would be a hard pull
| to sue a provider over simple defamation that way if they
| did nothing to encourage or re-post it. But should Ron
| Watkins be made to answer for what's on 8kun? Fuck yea.
| And if he should, then why not Zuck?
|
| If you want to run a system that amplifies shitheads,
| you're a shithead, and if they can be sued, so should you
| be. We're past the point where we need stimulus to
| encourage people to start message boards by shielding
| them from liability for what their users post. Again,
| this isn't an argument for censorship whatsoever, just
| allowing private parties to apportion blame when
| aggrieved. So even then, the scale of allowing something
| on a baby message board is nothing compared to the
| network effect of Twitter or FB. Let them bear the social
| costs that they're so desperate to externalize. FB and
| Twitter made their explosive growth _exactly by
| exploiting their exemption from the thing that closed
| down publishers_ , namely, bearing responsibility for the
| content they publish.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I told you why I thought your idea was logistically
| unfeasible and politically incongruent with free speech
| and right to assembly.
|
| You called me a shithead.
|
| I don't think your argumentation strategy is convincing
| me, but I'll admit I'm not the smartest guy.
| noduerme wrote:
| I didn't call you a shithead! This may be a classic case
| of me using the general "you" and someone taking it to
| mean you, personally. I'm not talking about you
| personally. *unless you're Ron Watkins. I'm saying if
| (someone) wants to run a board for conspiracy theorists
| and it includes amplifying defamation, e.g. saying
| someone drinks the blood of babies and doxing people,
| then they should be held responsible for the content
| posted by the shitheads they allow to post. Very clear.
|
| Not about you.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I was mostly joking to prove a point, but I appreciate
| you saying that. I was just trying to cool the debate a
| bit, not stir the pot. I'll admit I may have inflamed
| tensions myself, and for that I apologize. You seem to be
| arguing in good faith, even if I disagree with your
| position. You seem like a decent person.
|
| I guess I'm more of a discordian, or a culture jammer
| type, and I view the kinds of conspiracies you're talking
| about as cognito hazards that spontaneously occur when
| you have a large enough target demographic for them to
| appeal to. I suppose I just find your cure worse than the
| disease. I'd rather take the bathwater and the baby than
| just the baby. Call me crazy, but I think that variety is
| the spice of life. Some conspiracies are true, and are
| only theories until proved. I look at them as pathogens
| that are endemic, yet without them, we would have no
| EICAR test files for validating legitimate points of view
| and nothing with which to compare the status quo.
| Outsider voices have free speech rights too, even if they
| use them for ends antithetical to our own; that we oppose
| them doesn't justify annihilating them, or their views.
|
| If discourse got us into this mess, I can't see how less
| of it is going to get us out of it. We need more spaces
| for productive discussions, and we need more outreach to
| the fringes. How else will we convince anyone? If all you
| want is compliance, then the law is a poor tool for that.
| It only incentivizes circumvention once ratified.
| noduerme wrote:
| I appreciate you saying that. And I'm a big ol' Robert
| Anton Wilson fan, a life-long ACLU contributor, and
| someone who views free speech as the only way to
| disinfect hate, racism and lies. And I am very much
| talking in good faith; this is what I believe. I just
| think that free speech doesn't have to be equally easy. I
| remember when news channels in the US had to give equal
| time to opposite political parties. I watched how that
| morphed into "fair and balanced" - giving 3 panelists a
| chance to beat up on the weakest member of the opposite
| group. I don't think Facebook or Twitter are in any sense
| Discordian or Erisian in the tidy bubbles they ferment. I
| agree it's foolish to go about trying to silence people
| on them. I'd say just shut the whole thing down. If you
| want real Eris, let a million websites bloom. The
| information ecosystem was much better when people had to
| go out hunting than when it was fed to them in a news
| stream on an app that was designed for nothing more than
| monetizing their attention span. And a lot fewer people
| were exposed to truly bad ideas.
|
| I do have a breaking point, as far as ideas and speech; I
| believe that some ideas are stalking horses for violence,
| and the people who spout them have no goodwill. Some
| ideas can't be reasoned with. I'm glad I live in a
| country that still allows people to speak those ideas,
| but very few people will defend that notion anymore. I'll
| defend their right to speak those ideas. I just don't
| think a private company should be immune from the result
| of providing them a platform.
|
| The right to free speech should be absolute. But there's
| no right to be _heard_. Somewhere along the line, people
| seem to have misconstrued that, because social media made
| it so easy to be heard that people assumed that was the
| definition of free speech.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > The right to free speech should be absolute. But
| there's no right to be heard.
|
| There's no right to be heard, true. Yet, these are users
| complying with TOS. Beyond that, do the users have any
| obligation to not spread content that they haven't
| validated? It seems an unreasonable burden to place on
| users who don't post content for consumption by folks who
| care about such things. Can you blame people for speaking
| their mind and playing to their audience? Maintaining the
| platform and only posting constructive, mainstream
| content only appeals to a certain kind of person, and
| they may never reach their intended audience with such
| messaging, warping and contorting their content into
| something else entirely, potentially alienating the very
| people they are trying to reach in the first place.
|
| I'm a descriptivist in the linguistic sense, and when it
| comes to free speech. More is better. Full stop.
|
| I remember when everything was hard online. I don't wish
| for those days to return, especially just to comply with
| misguided, ineffective government mandates at the behest
| of megacorps and special interest lobby groups.
| closeparen wrote:
| What you are proposing is that the only writers we should
| hear from are professionals at publishing institutions, who
| have editors to vet their work and lawyers to defend it.
|
| That is certainly a take on what The Discourse should be!
| Return to the print media era, basically. But it is weird to
| see this take expressed in the same form it wants to end.
| Hacker News is social media and YCombinator is surely not
| going to stand beyond everything everyone posts here, or turn
| it over to spammers.
| noduerme wrote:
| No, not exactly. Unlike in the print age, we all have the
| ability to set up a home server or distributed servers; we
| have the ability to reach anyone in the world. But we don't
| have a natural right to do that or extend our readership
| through someone else's platform. I can sit here and host
| whatever I'd like. In the BBS era, you _were_ responsible
| for people posting illegal stuff on your board, and you
| _were_ held responsible if your board was full of some
| bullshit propaganda, and it should still be that way.
| Zuckerberg should be treated like any asshole sysop who isn
| 't tending his domain.
|
| Hacker News does, to a large degree, moderate what people
| write here. Much more so than any social media platform.
| That's why it's still a functional platform. You can't just
| go on here and slander or espouse libelous conspiracy
| theories. You won't get far.
|
| I'm not saying the gov't should regulate it! Not at all.
| I'm saying the content distribution networks shouldn't be
| shielded from civil litigation. HN and Facebook and Twitter
| aren't general carriers. If they simply delivered messages
| from point A to B, they might not be liable; but the more a
| service like FB news feed chooses to re-distribute
| something, the more they should be held liable for content.
| Simply putting it on top and letting it be downvoted, like
| HN, is far less nefarious than re-targeting it and
| repeating it relentlessly to the most vulnerable 15% of
| dumbasses who'll believe it. One person posting and having
| it sink isn't a big deal. But re-targeting that post to
| others makes you a re-poster. They aren't the postal
| service. They aren't neutral. Re-posting lies has monetary,
| reputational and social costs. Facebook profits directly
| from massively re-posting lies, but bears none of the cost.
| All I'm saying is that no one in a position to determine
| what's re-posted or not should be allowed to profit from
| spreading disinformation with one hand while externalizing
| those costs onto society, without a neutral arbitration
| willing to reassess the cost to individuals they harmed.
|
| [edit] The current system _can 't_ support free speech,
| because shielding the re-printers of false speech makes it
| impossible to disentangle truth from propaganda; and in an
| asymmetrical field, propaganda always wins. Letting the
| courts sort it out and putting the social media networks on
| notice that they were responsible for veracity would solve
| this silly debate over whether "free speech" is being
| quashed on private networks, and also, encourage better
| forms of debate that conformed to certain standards of
| logic. And if you don't want to conform to any kind of
| logic, you can always set up your own server.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| The established social media sites have lawyers on
| retainer and will appeal every single case up to the
| Supreme Court if necessary, and as slowly as they like,
| just to slow roll those submitting civil suits.
|
| Opening up user-submitted content sites to civil damages
| would ensure that the largest social networks are the
| only ones that can afford to fight these cases in court.
| Smaller sites would become self-censored, even if they
| weren't likely to be a target of a civil suit. This would
| lead to a further entrenchment of the largest social
| media sites, as they would go to bat for their users at
| least some of the time. They have to be seen to support
| their users, or else they would just find an alternative
| host that isn't subject to the jurisdiction of the civil
| suits.
|
| This whole idea seems like a nonstarter, impossible to
| implement, and with a laundry list of unintended
| consequences and is counterproductive to your stated
| goals of reduced propaganda. Instead of being primarily
| on centralized social media, fake news would be relegated
| to smaller fringe sites where it can't be monitored as
| effectively as on the larger sites, further contributing
| to the echo chambers you argue against. Your intentions
| also seem antithetical to free speech between willing
| participants freely associating.
| noduerme wrote:
| I think you just jumbled up a lot of counter-arguments
| here, some of which are interesting and others purely
| speculative. But let's start where you wound up: The
| speculation that it's "dangerous" to push fake news to
| smaller fringe sites hasn't been proven. I've seen a lot
| of damage arise as a result of the mainstreaming of
| conspiracy theories _from_ fringe sites _onto_ major
| sites. I don 't see any evidence to support the idea that
| if the crazy grifters peddling those theories get shunted
| back to smaller sites, a significant portion of their
| audience will follow. The history of Facebook has been a
| pattern of people who _have no idea how to find
| information_ being _fed bad information_. Most of those
| people probably won 't find the fringe sites. They
| weren't there before. Their attention span is short.
| They're only dangerous as a herd.
|
| The original argument against pushing extremists onto
| fringe sites was that the fringe sites were dark to law
| enforcement. I also don't buy that argument. It's a weak
| anti-encryption argument, and I also don't believe
| they're anywhere near as dark as LEOs claim. There might
| be some chatter that existed in the clear, but no one is
| currently plotting terrorist attacks out in the open on
| Facebook who will suddenly switch to Telegram if Facebook
| becomes party to civil suits.
|
| Working back to your previous argument, the idea that the
| legal juggernauts of the big social networks will protect
| them while smaller sites self-censor is directly
| contradictory to what you say about fake news migrating
| to fringe sites. There's certainly less financial burden
| on a small site with less traffic to regulate what's
| posted, and as it stands, small sites _do_ have to
| regulate what 's posted, so it wouldn't be much more
| difficult. The only people who have broad _exemptions_
| over their liability for what 's posted, currently, are
| the big social media sites. So let them spend that good
| money on their lawyers.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| It's not clear that smaller sites would have fewer
| lawsuits if the civil suits were to proceed, as they
| would be flooded with new users, and with new lawsuits,
| as soon as the large sites became hostile to them. There
| are already web3 social media sites that require login
| with a crypto wallet instead of a traditional user
| account. It wouldn't be too difficult to create a site
| that would be immune to such lawsuits even on a small
| scale, so I'm not sure why you think that adding more
| lawyer paydays and violations of the right to freedom of
| speech and freedom to assemble are the answer. If the
| site doesn't want to censor first amendment protected
| speech on their platform, but the government demands it,
| that's a first amendment violation.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Its nice to see that the ACLU actually opposes something that
| stomps on american civil liberties these days!
| malwarebytess wrote:
| > These people seem incapable of understanding the existential
| threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting
| everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.
|
| I proffer instead that this outcome isn't a side effect but
| their ultimate goal.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| It's bad, but there is still some light.
|
| This bill, remember, removes Section 230 protections against
| civil lawsuits for noncompliance.
|
| The solution is fairly easy though. If your messaging app runs
| somewhere hard to sue (Russia, China), good luck bringing a
| lawsuit. Even better if it's decentralized with no clear leader
| to sue.
|
| If anything this may help get people further away from
| regulated tech companies.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Ending Section 230, incrementally or all in one go, has been
| increasingly on the minds of politicians (mostly but not
| exclusively conservative ones) for some time now. There's a lot
| more to EARN IT than just that, but some of them will vote for
| anything that increases the liability exposure of anyone
| hosting anything online.
| judge2020 wrote:
| All section 230 does is make it so that "platforms" can
| remove posts it doesn't like without needing to assume
| liability for every other posts. Unless they think Twitter is
| going to hire a few million employees to screen every post,
| Twitter and the rest would simply turn off the platform to
| anyone who isn't verified or doesn't otherwise sign a waiver
| releasing twitter of that liability (which was possible
| before CDA, as well, but nobody wanted to introduce that sort
| of barrier to social media/forums back then).
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Section 230 is from 1996. For reference myspace launched in
| 2003. It has been modified since, but not in a way relative
| to this discussion. Section 230 classifies providers such
| as Facebook and Twitter as "interactive computer services"
| and not "information content providers." This protects them
| from lawsuits based on the content they provide.
|
| I'm not arguing that Facebook should be held to the same
| standard as the person who creates the content. However,
| when Facebook services misinformation on COVID with
| negligent moderation or even intentional promotion, or they
| allow eighty thousand posts by Russian Internet Research
| Agency (IRA)-controlled accounts in two years near an
| election, reaching 126 million users [1 (Mueller Report)],
| maybe there needs to be some amendment. Perhaps not
| completely recategorizing Facebook, but adding some more
| responsibilities on these major platforms to at least not
| promote bad information, polarizing content, and
| information campaigns from foreign governments. When I did
| some research into how to disincentivize social media
| companies from spreading misinformation, reforming 230 was
| the best option I saw.
|
| Edit: I posted a more detailed version of this elsewhere on
| this thread to provide more background. Then I realized I
| couldn't delete this abridged version.
|
| [1] Mueller, R. S. M. (2019, March). Report On The
| Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016
| Presidential Election, Volume I of II. U.S. Department of
| Justice.
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
| pishpash wrote:
| If they curate and editorialize they are partly content
| providers. Where to draw the line is not clear.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| I agree. My final recommendation was to treat them with
| the same responsibilities as media companies which still
| have a lot of protection, but not as many protections as
| social media companies.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > These people seem incapable of understanding the existential
| threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting
| everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.
|
| Democracy only directly benefits the people, not those in
| power. The only difference between a democracy and a
| dictatorship in terms of leaders keeping key supporters happy
| (the people vs. just those that hold office and control the
| military) is that democracies tend to employ more creative
| people with society-enhancing goals, thus driving technology
| forward and maybe even extending our lifetimes (via better
| healthcare).
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> by making it legally risky for large social media and
| platform companies to offer end-to-end encryption
|
| I'm converted. I now totally support this legislation. Lack of
| secure encryption will bring down all the large social media
| companies. It happened to Blackberry during the London riots a
| decade ago. The kids quickly realized that someone associated
| with the police was reading their texts. From that point,
| Blackberry was doomed. Also Skype.
|
| So let the FBI have a free hand inside facebook. Let teachers
| inspect the social media posts of their students. Let cops
| track the location tags of clandestine highschool parties.
| Every teenager will dump facebook, creating huge new markets
| for other services. Facebook will be MySpace within the decade.
| eximius wrote:
| ... you realize it doesnt specify companies by name. If it is
| legally risky for Facebook, it will be legally risky for any
| replacement services.
| netcan wrote:
| I think on one side you have security. This means law
| enforcement, espionage and the increasingly relevant civil
| security industry. They have pretty straightforward "pro"
| interests. You also have child protection advocates. They,
| perhaps rightly, are focused on their own agenda, not the
| greater picture. It's "not their job" to worry about freedom of
| speech and association.
|
| This side, like any scrutinized company or government
| department insisting that "it's a resource thing." IE, their
| doing all they can with what they've got. Doing better requires
| something external. More resources, more power, etc. They
| deliver estimates of how many more children can be saved if
| only X.
|
| On the other side is more vague. Esoteric digital freedom
| advocates. Abstract, ideological general freedom advocates. The
| concentrated, directly interested parties are the social media
| companies themselves.
|
| So first, social media companies do not want to be stuck in a
| debate where it's them vs child advocates. They don't want to
| make esoteric freedom arguments that they don't believe in
| anyway, and use these to counter child protection arguments.
|
| Second, regulation like this is often beneficial to incumbents.
| The DMCA, for example. Large incumbents can influence details
| of legislation, enough that they can at least live with the
| legislation. It also makes it harder to disrupt them from the
| outside. Under DMCA, record companies and film studios got what
| they wanted & social media companies got what they wanted.
| csomar wrote:
| > the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why"
| behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully.
|
| I think, what most people are missing, is that Democratic (the
| free world) governments have lost control of the narrative.
| It's not that there wasn't corruption before, but people
| trusted the government more back in the day. Before the
| immersion of social media, information moved slowly. There
| wasn't free channels to transfer information (the Media
| controlled what can get out) and people couldn't take high-
| quality photos, videos and live stream to their fellow
| citizens.
|
| This changed now. This means the government and politicians
| can't control the narrative anymore (ie: almost all politicians
| are corrupt now!). This is doubly worse since young people
| disproportionately use social media. TV is still watched, but
| only by seniors. They'll be gone soon and the politicians will
| have to rule a ruly population.
|
| The next decade is going to be quite challenging to Democracy,
| Freedom of Speech, Privacy, Freedom of Movements and all
| freedoms and liberties really. Many of the liberties the West
| population take for granted are quite expensive; you better be
| ready for this change.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The Internet wasn't the first time we had free speech in both
| senses of the word, though. Before the era of broadcast
| television, the FCC running a de-facto censorship regime, and
| the Five Filters; everyone read newspapers to get their news.
| This prior era of media was a lot more like the Internet than
| I think a lot of people would care to admit. We had
| clickbait, they had yellow journalism; we had Trump, they had
| the Know-Nothings; etc.
|
| One other constant shared between the pre- and post-broadcast
| eras of media was an extremely high level of distrust towards
| politicians. Why? Well, the handful of companies that owned
| TV broadcast licenses weren't about to start biting the hand
| that fed them. Also, the FCC outright banned them from
| pushing overtly political narratives. This ultimately acted
| to reduce the total amount of information voters knew about
| their candidates.
|
| Let's say that you happen to have brainworms. And your local
| Senator promised on TV that every brainworm had a right to
| live in a person's head. You, obviously, vote for him.
| However, Congress then passes the Comprehensive Brainworm
| Mitigation Act of 1973. But you remember that your Senator
| fought for you and your brainworms, because that's all you
| saw of him on TV. In fact, he goes to the press and swears
| how he fought to tone down the brainworm bill, or included an
| amendment for brainworm sanctuaries.
|
| Today? Well, the moment that the Worm Free Children Act of
| 2023 passes, you're already getting pings on Facebook and
| Twitter about how your Senator betrayed you. You hear rumors
| about how he secretly agreed to pass the bill months ago.
| Someone's already spamming you with memes about how he sleeps
| with earplugs in his ears, constantly in fear that a
| brainworm might slither into his ear canal. You're talking in
| realtime with millions of other brainworm hosts, all of whom
| are angry and planning protests against your brainworm-hating
| Senator.
|
| Of course, all of that could be a complete and total
| fabrication. It does not matter. Defamation is dual to
| censorship, after all.
|
| This actually isn't a new condition, but regression to the
| mean. American politics in the 1800s was chock full of people
| with brainworms trading wild accusations around in similar
| fashions. The main difference between then and now was just
| the speed at which news travelled, but the effects were the
| same.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| This entire comment is the definition of FUD.
|
| It's not that complicated:
|
| Politicians don't know technology
|
| Politicians hear there's this thing that lets bad guys have
| fully secure conversations that even 3 letter agencies can't
| crack.
|
| Politicians see blocking that as a political win.
|
| -
|
| All of this nonsense about corruption... you think
| politicians are successfully going to get social media giants
| to intercept DMs that say bad things about them?
|
| Or this is the first step to a CPP-esque lockdown on free
| speech?
|
| That's fantasy at best and a disturbing level of paranoia at
| worst.
| csomar wrote:
| Stop trying to explain for Politicians. Ignorance is just
| as harmful and evil.
|
| > This entire comment is the definition of FUD.
|
| This would have been true if this was the first bill. But
| this bill (and variants of it) keep getting proposed again
| and again. From different and multiple angles. It's not a
| small political win here they are looking for.
|
| > you think politicians are successfully going to get
| social media giants to intercept DMs that say bad things
| about them?
|
| Yes. But you need the Technology there first. Once it's
| there, it's much easier to pass these things.
|
| > Or this is the first step to a CPP-esque lockdown on free
| speech?
|
| Yes. It worked for China. So it might work for us.
|
| > That's fantasy at best and a disturbing level of paranoia
| at worst.
|
| It's not. The amount of restrictions and surveillance we
| have today is unprecedented. Things can move fast once the
| technology is ready and the moment is there to seize.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| So you're saying your own comment is FUD except "they
| keep pushing the bill!"
|
| You agree your comment is FUD except... politicians keep
| pushing for a bill they see as a political win.
|
| Right.
|
| -
|
| And your entire comment is doing exactly what you said I
| shouldn't: explaining for politicians.
|
| Except you're taking this paranoid interpretation where
| elected officials are un-ironically intentionally trying
| to turn the US into the next CPP.
|
| Also I love the very well buried lede with "amount of
| restrictions". Might be related to the pandemic that
| killed millions but who knows...
| kragen wrote:
| > _These people seem incapable of understanding the existential
| threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting_
| everyone's _ability to communicate private thoughts._
|
| The existential threat this bill poses to free society and
| democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some
| accidental side effect.
|
| They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy
| because it limits government power, which means letting
| criminals and terrorists run free. They want the police to have
| all the power they can get because, as far as they're
| concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more
| power helps them win against the bad guys.
|
| Free society means limited government, and the only way for the
| government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote
| against its own interests. That requires the people in the
| government to identify more strongly with the people living
| under the government than with the government itself. This is
| precarious at the best of times. Why would the governing party
| want to make it easy to organize dissenting political parties
| and alternative centers of power? Power might fall into the
| wrong hands.
|
| I know that sounds sarcastic, but try to see it from their
| perspective, even if you don't agree with it.
| Joeri wrote:
| _Free society means limited government, and the only way for
| the government to be in favor of that is for the government
| to vote against its own interests._
|
| I would argue that a free society protects people's rights,
| and this is impossible without a strong government. As for
| voting against its own interests, the government in a true
| democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get
| what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with
| the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The
| solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the
| consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is
| to fix what's broken in the first place. In a healthy
| democracy the government will take up only the
| responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than
| that.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A government can be both limited and strong!
|
| Those are independent properties. If you don't see the
| distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these
| discussions.
| kragen wrote:
| That is the popular ideology that was used to justify most
| of history's worst atrocities.
|
| Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which
| was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even
| today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament)
| satirized the situation in this grook, entitled _Majority
| Rule_ , in 01969:
|
| _His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,_
|
| _and there were more of them than of the others._
|
| _That is, they constituted that minority,_
|
| _which formed the greater part of the majority._
|
| _Within the party, he was of the faction,_
|
| _that was supported by the greater fraction._
|
| _And in each group, within each group, he sought_
|
| _the group that could command the most support._
|
| _The final group had finally elected,_
|
| _a triumvirate whom they all respected._
|
| _Now of these three, two had the final word,_
|
| _because the two could overrule the third._
|
| _One of these two was relatively weak,_
|
| _so one alone stood at the final peak._
|
| _He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair_
|
| _which formed the most part of the three that were_
|
| _elected by the most of those whose boast_
|
| _it was to represent the most of most_
|
| _of most of most of the entire state --_
|
| _or of the most of it at any rate._
|
| _He never gave himself a moment 's slumber_
|
| _but sought the welfare of the greatest number._
|
| _And all the people, everywhere they went,_
|
| _knew to their cost exactly what it meant_
|
| _to be dictated to by the majority._
|
| _But that meant nothing, -- they were the minority._
|
| ***
|
| The idea of limited government I described, which is
| fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's
| _Two Treatises of Government_ in 01689. Rousseau responded
| in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute
| sovereignty of the "will of the people", in _The Social
| Contract_ , calling it "the general will": https://www.marx
| ists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau
| already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the
| grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of
| political parties.
|
| Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was
| incoherent in 01785:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox
|
| In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets
| of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest
| and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried
| out this Terror justified by Rousseau:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror
|
| In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive
| Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout
| the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending
| them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity
| had ever known, a system itself established by the will of
| the people of the Southern States:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A
| few short years later, the will of the people of the US
| decreed that those people should start killing one another
| en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four
| million delivered out of bondage.
|
| In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison
| camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through
| which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the
| will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikip
| edia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93
|
| In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling
| Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out,
| the will of the people would murder ten million people in
| concentration camps:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
|
| In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility
| Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people"
| was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than
| Condorcet had ever imagined:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
|
| In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the
| Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals
| to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history,
| or possibly the second largest, was the result.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
|
| In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in
| Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government
| institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much
| of the information needed to make the decisions that are
| optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can
| approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...
|
| ***
|
| The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people
| goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US
| system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the
| Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on
| and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in
| fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the
| people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In
| other cases the policy of establishing limitless state
| power was popular, but the atrocities in which it
| inevitably culminated were not.
|
| That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy
| you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that
| the will of the people could never err and would always
| promote the general welfare was an understandable error,
| but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in
| rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism--giving
| individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of
| the people--works less badly. I know it's not very
| inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but
| that's the best we can do so far.
|
| This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but
| it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of
| that government.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| There has to be protections for minorities defined as
| people having minority view points. Otherwise there is
| tyranny of the majority. A democracy protects the rights of
| minorities which includes preserving their speech. That may
| mean allowing opposing viewpoints to take root.
|
| If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban
| opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is
| the government doing the will of the people, that is
| undemocratic.
|
| To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions
| censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the
| law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably
| intentional.
| mantas wrote:
| Depends on definition of ,,people's rights".
|
| If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government
| is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz,
| then you'll need big government. That will likely abuse
| tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.
| [deleted]
| roenxi wrote:
| My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant
| percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from
| travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal
| for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a
| sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my
| wishes or wellbeing.
|
| Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could
| get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a
| nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my
| rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of
| their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail -
| possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from
| my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default
| and a weak government, please.
| aprinsen wrote:
| I'm probably making assumptions, so I'd like to clarify,
| which government prohibited travel to such a degree?
|
| In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive
| lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged
| gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to
| travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last
| more than a few months in private spaces. Although,
| certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a
| long time.
|
| I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US,
| however.
| roenxi wrote:
| Australia. NSW to be specific since each state had its
| own response. But US law affects a lot of services I use.
|
| And I wish our government had taken a light-touch
| approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a
| philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's
| rights by letting them make their own choices.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| roenxi wrote:
| That was pretty bizarre. Raging coronavirus pandemic,
| more cases than we could count, and we can't let Djokovic
| in because ... well, he didn't have COVID so I suppose we
| were worried he'd catch it here (ignore natural immunity
| because that must be misinformation!). Maybe they were
| worried it would impact his tennis career. It was
| outrageously petty; my theory is someone in immigration
| had a bet riding on Nadal, because that at least means
| they had a rational motive for their actions. It isn't a
| big deal in among all scary stuff going on but it was
| emblematic of the times. Bureaucratic. Pointless.
| Vindictive against scapegoats.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Well, since Nadal was let in only a week after he was
| tested positively and another healthy player processed
| ,,because people think he is against vaccination" that's
| the only rational explanation.
|
| BTW, I wish you guys luck in opposing your government.
| Hope our don't follow.
| bsaul wrote:
| If that can make you feel better, scapegoating has
| happened everywhere in europe, as well as canada. This is
| probably the most bizarre aspect of the whole thing (and
| can only encourage wild speculations): how did everyone
| loose their mind at the same time, everywhere.
| watwut wrote:
| The fact that they expect celebrity to follow the same
| rules as everyone else is not something bad. Especially
| since that athlete could have played, if he really wanted
| to.
| iso1210 wrote:
| The people of Australia get to vote in 4 months for a new
| government. If people really hated the covid restrictions
| as much as you, then they will get rid of the people who
| implemented them.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| Sorry for you, but your country's democratic process is
| probably broken. In my country covid measures were always
| just the bare minimum to keep things running and
| lifted/alliveated as soon as possible.
| bsaul wrote:
| You're the exception. Out of curiosity, what country is
| that ?
| radicalbyte wrote:
| My government has restricted travel in order to stop a
| pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are
| overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population
| dying instead of 0.5%.
|
| Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide
| vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is
| accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
| [deleted]
| Bancakes wrote:
| It was never going to be 10%. The virus is too localized
| on the elderly, who isolate and vaccinate themselves well
| anyway.
| roenxi wrote:
| With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a
| risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't
| that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out
| (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest
| that the risk of the hospital system giving out was
| oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to
| buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my
| eyes).
|
| If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically
| put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I
| might note that the government will only revoke my rights
| in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some
| of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue
| that strong governments will somehow protect me from a
| threat that only emanates from government. This "strong
| governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has
| ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong
| government.
|
| Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only
| applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges
| which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea"
| is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough
| to tell if the interventions worked.
|
| Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people
| clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of
| the population. And me.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| > Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as
| my strong government.
|
| Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own
| Government, either.
|
| I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as
| its Prime Minister. This means that while they were
| fining people for having Christmas parties, going
| outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a
| string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID
| rules.
|
| It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg
| video, too), and it's a great example of how the
| Government really doesn't stand by the people who _put_
| them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
| bsaul wrote:
| The thing happened everywhere. French prime minister met
| with mayors and had political meetings unmasked, shaking
| hands and stuff, at the peek of the pandemic, got covid,
| then blamed his 11 yo daughter for it.
|
| Macron had a huge party at the president office, with
| people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while
| people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.
|
| The only original thing about boris johnson is that he
| put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for
| as long as he could. For that you can thank him.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a
| risk of 10% of the population dying._
|
| There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with
| COVID can't get the medical care they need.
| roenxi wrote:
| Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high
| at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it
| were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care
| (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while
| for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it
| so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response
| short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which
| is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors
| and assumptions about how effectively community care
| could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6%
| might even be a country where the hospital system fell
| apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death
| _rates_...
| radicalbyte wrote:
| The USA has 900k covid deaths from 74M cases. The real
| number of cases are likely to be double that, but it's
| still a very high rate - from the richest country in the
| world.
| Zababa wrote:
| The USA may be the richest country in the world but it
| doesn't mean much when facing the virus, especially
| considering how widespread inequalities are.
| roenxi wrote:
| If the real number of cases is double that, then that
| would be a death rate of ... about 0.6%. And not everyone
| catches the disease in one pandemic wave, so the total
| population death rate in the US isn't going to reach
| that.
|
| And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug
| when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It
| is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that
| doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially
| worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly
| scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be
| especially useful in managing COVID.
|
| There are basic questions about whether the hospital
| system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People
| keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't
| any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where
| the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There
| were lots of instances I heard of where where some people
| didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that
| death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local
| area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished,
| an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't
| get death rates to 10% of the population.
|
| It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never
| a possibility although that was less clear in the opening
| months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in
| practice with the worst response policy response of any
| country in the world.
| lebuffon wrote:
| As long as their is oxygen support and health care people
| show up for work you are correct. In Mexico and other
| countries with less access to modern health care the
| death rate seems to be an order of magnitude higher. (if
| the CDC data is valid)
|
| This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where
| the children and young people are dying instead of
| seniors.
| kragen wrote:
| Amazingly, it's true, in countries like Mexico and the
| USA the death rate was an order of magnitude higher than
| in Australia: 0.23% and 0.27%, respectively, rather than
| 0.016%. But even in countries with good access to modern
| health care the rate was often pretty bad; Italy had
| 0.24%, the UK 0.23%, Spain 0.20%, and France also 0.20%.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rat
| es_...
| chaosite wrote:
| The hospital system literally vanishing is not really a
| possible failure condition. It just doesn't work like
| that, medical staff will always keep trying to treat
| whoever they can with whatever resources they have.
|
| The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you
| said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns
| resources to patients based on need, if there are more
| patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less
| resources (because medical staff are getting sick too),
| that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just
| that people who would have gotten treated sooner before
| now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of
| those people would die. People were worried about
| ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up
| in an emergency either.
|
| Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are
| _with_ the response.
| riedel wrote:
| The argument I think was never any concrete number of
| deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes
| quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life
| difficult (epidemiology can still inform political
| decisions).
|
| Normally the pandemic would have been considered an
| increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom
| would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw
| triage like situations in countries around us. At the
| beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people
| dying in elderly care because the hospitals were
| overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of
| their hospital system.
|
| Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game
| the situation is different. But I also see this slowly
| acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not
| excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often
| randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols
| for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when
| the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead
| of what was happening since.
|
| I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered,
| I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.
| bsaul wrote:
| I'm surprised you're happy about the pass. the only thing
| the pass does is insure the minority of people who didn't
| want the vaccine are _forced_ to be vaccinated. I suppose
| you didn't have to be forced, so why do you care ?
| danieldk wrote:
| _so why do you care ?_
|
| Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take
| up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to
| many postponed surgeries.
|
| E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people
| took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID
| patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-
| COVID-19-patiente...
| bsaul wrote:
| We had this statistic in france too, but it happens that
| ICU saturation occures every winter, for flu and such.
| it's been on the headlines for almost a decade every
| year. Mostly due to population getting older, and
| hospitals poorer. I wonder if it isn't the same
| everywhere.
| dijonman2 wrote:
| I'm not getting the vaccine and had covid twice. I have
| antibodies, which should be recognized in lieu of
| vaccine. I took no space in a hospital.
|
| It's a bit hyperbolic at this point, don't you think?
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I've lost a grandma, auntie and am about to lose a
| father-in-law. All have cancer that was either detected
| late or was not operable because of there being no IC
| spaces available.
|
| All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who
| chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for
| medical care.
| ramoz wrote:
| Perhaps the healthcare industry reacted poorly.
|
| The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but
| higher, than Covid.
|
| I'm more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients
| ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive
| treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed
| hospital well before there were vaccines.
| RustyConsul wrote:
| A democratic government is a government built and run for
| the 51%. Technically, pure anarchy is the only form of
| government that is for the people by the people because...
| theres only the people. Not some entity set above and
| beyond the reaches of 'The people', with authority over the
| people. Not that i believe in anarchy as the epitome of
| governance, but Bakunin has left me slightly jaded ever
| since i read him in high school.
|
| I would agree with you that a free society is one that
| protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines
| of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples
| right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to
| 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has
| stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws
| in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK,
| these power structures that we have put in place are not
| for the people but are for the politicians within that
| government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician
| showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your
| populace is the key path to power.
|
| in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the
| path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I
| think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution,
| it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that
| since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their
| moral responsibility to protect the people.
|
| Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and
| 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!
|
| While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly
| scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit
| on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!
|
| Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we
| might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor
| inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save!
|
| Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are
| deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since
| vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people
| we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh,
| Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this
| cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a
| company over 1!
|
| Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you
| think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans
| gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the
| population to agree with the "We have put a man on the
| moon, we can build a fence!"
|
| ... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic,
| irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")
| vel0city wrote:
| > Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the
| people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!
|
| Smoking is kind of a bad example here. Smoking has
| obvious secondary effects, i.e. secondhand smoke. I have
| no problem with tobacco smoking being banned from shared
| office spaces and other common public spaces. Sure, maybe
| make it possible to get somewhat easy permits to allow
| for things like smoking lounges, certain kinds of bars,
| etc. but overall I still consider it a positive that
| nobody is smoking at my office, movie theaters,
| practically all restaurants, on the train, etc.
|
| You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell you
| want. But you don't have the right to force me to breathe
| whatever you're wanting to inhale.
| kragen wrote:
| > _You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell
| you want._
|
| This position puts you far to the liberal side of any
| existing internationally recognized democratic
| government; all of them currently place restrictions on
| what you are allowed to inhale, and contrary to vkou's
| point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30230039,
| that doesn't seem to be the only alternative to ceding
| power over what you inhale to undemocratic, unelected
| oligarchs.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > They want the police to have all the power they can get
| because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys,
| and giving the good guys more power helps them win against
| the bad guys.
|
| But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys
| turns them rather reliably into bad guys.
| baremetal wrote:
| the one thing you can be certain of about giving someone
| authority over others is that they will abuse it. some
| more, some less. but everyone will abuse it to a degree.
| kragen wrote:
| Everybody thinks _they 're_ incorruptible, and they often
| extend that to institutions they identify with. Very, very
| few people have ever honestly grappled with their shadow
| side. Even if you do, you may still prefer your own shadow
| side to that of whoever your opponents are.
| bostik wrote:
| There is a simple rule of thumb: if you would not grant a
| power to your worst enemy, you do not grant it to your
| friends either.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Everybody thinks they're incorruptible
|
| It chafes me a little to see this so often phrased as
| something "everybody" thinks. There are enough people who
| feel otherwise in my social circles that it's pretty easy
| for me to consider this as a shockingly dumb assumption
| for a person to hold.
|
| Though I do acknowledge that you're probably close to
| right from a purely numerical perspective.
| kragen wrote:
| I agree.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Just to be clear, "shockingly dumb" is in reference to
| the incorruptibility belief, not to your claim that it's
| "everyone".
|
| Though from your response, I think you probably
| understood what I meant despite the ambiguous phrasing.
| kragen wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know! I thought you meant that the claim
| that there were literally zero people who thought they
| were corruptible was shockingly dumb, and I agreed, even
| though (construed literally) it's what I had said. Thanks
| for clarifying!
| joelbondurant0 wrote:
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Yeah but it always looks different if that power is going
| to be in your hands. Or maybe it doesn't and they just
| don't care, but I'd like to think it's the former.
| zdragnar wrote:
| > But we all know
|
| Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and
| residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN
| is littered with comments about how we need more regulation
| and laws to solve X or Y or Z.
|
| Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much
| the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier-
| including before I had signed up for an account- when HN
| was much more libertarian, compared to the relative
| minority it seems to be now.
| vkou wrote:
| > Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty
| much the default response on here nowadays.
|
| The alternative to giving a democratic government power
| isn't 'nobody has power'.
|
| The alternative to giving a democratic government power
| is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.
|
| When a democratic government has it, you get some say in
| how it is used.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think that view is a little too simplistic. There are
| some powers you probably just shouldn't give to
| governments, ever. There are some powers that are fine to
| give to governments, because they're unlikely to be
| abused, because abusing them confers little benefit to
| the abuser.
|
| Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful
| for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be
| really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse
| that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of
| people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and
| difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that
| power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot
| about how it is used ends up being public, so people can
| audit its use. And so on.
|
| But I think if there's a power that is likely to be
| abused by government, and really hard to put checks on
| that (ab)use, then the government just should not have
| that power, no matter how useful that power might be.
|
| The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal
| because they're the "good guys" is that even if they
| genuinely _are_ the good guys, you never know who is
| going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-
| next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be
| the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and
| certainly won 't pass laws to take that power away.
| [deleted]
| kragen wrote:
| Often the alternative to giving a democratic government
| power really is for nobody to have that power, and in
| many other cases the alternative is for the power to be
| decentralized, so that many people have some of it.
|
| For example, we might give a democratic government the
| power to tap everybody's phone calls at once, but if we
| don't, that doesn't necessarily imply that undemocratic,
| unelected oligarchs, or anyone else, is tapping
| everybody's phone calls at once. There might just be
| nobody who has the power to tap phone calls, as is the
| case with secure free software running on trustworthy
| hardware, or there might be many people who have the
| power to tap only a few phone calls.
|
| And we might give a democratic government the power to
| assign workers to jobs, for example, as the Soviets did.
| Alternatively, undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could
| assign workers to jobs, as in a coal-mining company town;
| but an additional possibility is that workers and
| employers, or unions and employers, negotiate with one
| another, each limiting the power of the other.
|
| We might give a democratic government the power to decide
| what's for dinner each day, which sounds ridiculous but
| is exactly the standard practice in kibbutzim and in
| school lunch programs in democracies. Conceivably,
| undemocratic, unelected oligarchs could decide what's for
| dinner each day, though I don't know of any examples; the
| usual alternative is for each family to decide what's for
| dinner each day independently, though in many cases this
| degenerates to an undemocratic, unelected head of
| household deciding. Often enough, some household members
| prefer school cafeteria foodoid products to the results,
| despite having no say in that decision-making process
| either.
| oblio wrote:
| So you're saying that HN has matured? :-)
| zdragnar wrote:
| There is certainly a whole lot less of "we could build an
| app to solve it!" But there is also more naivete in other
| ways. I think this is more broadly reflected in society
| as a whole.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| disclaimer: I am not American, and know nothing about
| American politics.
|
| I think all these start around Trump's administration.
| Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news,
| and some media/social media start censoring his
| supporter.
|
| After seeing the worse effects of misleading information,
| many free-speech-supporter back off alot.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > Trump...misleading information...free-speech-supporter
| back off alot.
|
| Trump is a correlation to (not cause of) both the left
| and right in America turning sharply populist and inward
| looking in recent years. Populists tend not to be
| concerned with principles like freedom of speech, or the
| concerns of the global community.
| [deleted]
| mantas wrote:
| > After seeing the worse effects of misleading
| information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.
|
| Rather democracy supporters back off...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Nah, there was a noticable shift already in the later
| Obama years, if not earlier.
|
| It is ironic that we should trust government to be an
| arbiter of truth, given that our government has been a
| source of "misinformation" for years (a.k.a. blatantly
| lying to support an agenda).
| iso1210 wrote:
| McCarthyism predates Trump, and I'm sure that social
| pressures of what you can and can't say in public date
| back far further
| smaudet wrote:
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Honestly ... times have changed. I was a optimistic
| liberterian once ... I still am... but look at reality.
| You give people and bussines to much freedome and they
| use it for things that harm society. Facebook and
| telegram for example. Snake oil sellers where allways a
| problem but now it seeems to explode and destroy my
| liberterian word view :(
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| Just interesting, how does Telegram specifically harm
| society? By letting right wing freaks have their echo
| chambers there, or do you mean something else?
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| I meant that. Telegram was symbolic for how the freedom
| of some can impair the freedom of others. I have nothing
| against e2e encryption or privacy but as I said my
| liberterian worldview starts to crumble ... toward what?
| I dont know
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| If you deny them Telegram, Facebook, Parler or any other
| online platform, people would gather offline and have
| their echo chambers there. Just as they did before
| Internet. So you're basically saying 1st amendment harms
| society, not online platforms.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Hmm no I am not saying that. The problem is that if they
| would meet offline they wouldnt be a group of 20.000
| people or so in one room with the easy possibility to
| spread their worldview. Free speech is something valuable
| but beeing able to downstream information to thousand of
| people instant that easy is a problem. There is a
| difference between free speach and lying with intent to
| spread a certain world view.
|
| Edit; As I said I'm a libertarian and a group of whatever
| people talking what ever where ever is totally fine with
| me but manipulating people with intent is not protected
| by the First Amendment And shouldn't be confused with
| free speech
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| >beeing able to downstream information to thousand of
| people instant that easy is a problem
|
| Was it a problem a couple centuries ago, when offline
| media emerged and blossomed? It was the same effect, just
| smaller scale. Yet, free press is valued as essential for
| democracy.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "manipulating people with
| intent", but certainly many kinds of manipulation are
| well within the bounds of freedom of speech as it is
| generally imagined, and especially within the bounds of
| what should be legally protected according to even
| minimal theories of civil liberties. So it sounds like
| you're less libertarian than even fairly non-libertarian
| people.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| As I said, how big the number is, is the problem. I dont
| say they should ban telegram or sth. The problem is how
| easy it is to misuse this platforms for malintent. Thats
| has nothing to do what someone is saying. It has somethig
| to do how the message is distributet and if the intent
| ist the articulating of ones free mind or manipulating
| the others for benefit....
| juanani wrote:
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Nobody ever said politicians were smart
| grapescheesee wrote:
| Its not like history tends to repeat in cycle regardless of
| the age and technology.
| akomtu wrote:
| The gov isnt worried about criminals or terrorists: those
| guys are easy to deal with. The gov is worried about
| organised protests, like those canadian truckers, because
| protesters are protected by laws. Encrypted communications is
| an obvious enabler of such protests.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > like those canadian truckers,
|
| I thought the protestors turned out to, by the numbers,
| prove to be not Canadian and not Truckers.
|
| Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example.
| There seem to be more relevant protests in the US you only
| have to go back a short while.
|
| Meanwhile, it's difficult to assess if the US government
| has a great track record at dealing with terrorists. We're
| unsure of how many incidents are prevented.
| vkou wrote:
| > Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that
| example.
|
| I think it's pretty clear why the parent poster choose
| _that_ protest as an example of government tyrrany, and
| not the, uh, couple of months of gassing, rubber-coated
| bullets, and beatings that preceded it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The individuals in the government are worried about all
| threats. Canadian truckers are certainly one of them, but
| not a very important one other than they gum up commerce
| and may eventually develop into a riot.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Criminals and terrorists don't use public comms to
| communicate (at least the smart ones). They use dead
| drops, trusted couriers, and in-person talking.
|
| Protestors by default must communicate in the open, and
| to each other. They are much more disorganized.
| kragen wrote:
| The smart criminals and terrorists are generally the ones
| working for the government.
| [deleted]
| kragen wrote:
| Of course they're worried about criminals and terrorists,
| as well as protests; nobody wants to watch their children
| die in a home invasion or a burning skyscraper, not even
| politicians, and nobody wants habitual violent criminals to
| repeatedly victimize innocent people (unless they identify
| strongly with the criminals). Peaceful protests _can be_ a
| powerful instrument for change, including taking away
| government power, but only when the protestors are willing
| to die for their cause.
|
| Every day, police officers and prosecutors go to work and
| spend much of the day worrying about criminals, and a few
| of them are assigned to worry about terrorists too. When
| they go home, they have to keep worrying about criminals,
| too, because their job makes them tempting targets for
| revenge. I'm not saying people don't seek employment as
| police officers and prosecutors in order to have free reign
| for their sadistic urges --- they do --- but that's not the
| majority and it's never the whole story.
|
| Terrorism can have extremely large effects, just not
| desirable ones. When the people think the government is
| doing a bad enough job of protecting them from criminals,
| terrorists, and protests, that government is at high risk
| of losing its power entirely, which is something almost
| nobody in the government wants.
|
| Even anarchists often don't want it, because there's no
| guarantee that what replaces the government will be better.
| You may not like the FBI, but if the alternative is the
| Proud Boys, better the devil you know. Remember who won the
| elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and
| the Tsar.
| vkou wrote:
| > Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of
| Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar.
|
| A mostly liberal-democratic provisional government that
| was violently overthrown eight months later by a
| Bolshevik coup because it refused to deal with the same
| problems (war and famine) that caused the Tsar to be
| overthrown?
|
| Have we all forgotten the February revolution..?
| vkazanov wrote:
| That's a very interesting definition of "liberal"! They
| were about as liberal as the british parliament at the
| time, and that I cannot call liberal in any sense of the
| word.
|
| And they did lose it in no time, yes
| emmelaich wrote:
| With the paranoidal view you're placing yourself outside the
| realms of sensible discussion.
|
| You can't really think that some politicians are knowingly
| and deliberating proposing an existential threat to "free
| society and democracy."
| beebeepka wrote:
| Interesting. How would you describe the situation?
| t-3 wrote:
| > You can't really think that some politicians are
| knowingly and deliberating proposing an existential threat
| to "free society and democracy."
|
| Why not? Many people oppose free society, and democracy has
| never been popular among elites.
| emmelaich wrote:
| OK I should have changed 'some politicians' to 'most of
| those politicians proposing this law'
| dotnet00 wrote:
| If you mean to say that the ones who aren't knowingly
| doing this to weaken democracy are simply useful idiots,
| yeah, you're right.
|
| Most of them probably aren't malicious, they're likely
| just entirely ignorant and easily manipulated, making
| them just as bad as the malicious ones, given their job
| is supposed to be to make informed decisions for the
| benefit of their constituents.
| bejelentkezni wrote:
| Why not?
| rgbrenner wrote:
| There are politicians that support the overthrow of US
| democracy and the instatement of a dictator. A really
| obvious example: Michael Flynn, the former national
| security advisor. He's said the US military should
| overthrow the government. Literally.. those are the words
| from his mouth.
|
| Im not going to list a bunch of politicians... but Flynn
| will say it outright. So your assumption is clearly wrong.
| kragen wrote:
| No, they're not knowingly and deliberately proposing an
| existential threat to "free society and democracy." That
| would be political suicide in the US. They're knowingly and
| deliberately proposing an existential threat to free
| society and democracy. That's not a paranoid view, just
| stating the obvious.
| treis wrote:
| We had a free society and democracy before the internet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There were many attempts by the same people to monitor
| phone and mail communications.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| The international standards do just fine for enabling
| spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller
| ID.
|
| Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can
| display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol
| facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regio
| nal_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23
|
| This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload
| malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup
| modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware
| space permitting!
|
| I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for
| example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over",
| but social media like reddit or twitter does not and
| regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is
| making the front page of reddit before moderators take it
| down.
|
| Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from
| the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is
| not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like
| jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode
| and other things like that.
|
| So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or
| mental health breakdowns on social media sites like
| Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the
| current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over"
| checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter,
| whatsapp and other social media platforms?
|
| I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its
| supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child,
| but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many
| parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post
| online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and
| religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of
| teaching people life lessons!
|
| The religious stance, at least new testament, is to
| prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health
| issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle
| age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this
| problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of
| knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt
| even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it
| possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable
| people, which isnt on in my books either.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit
| illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of
| reddit before moderators take it down.
|
| I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have
| never seen this happen.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Obviously I'm not going to be making copies of it to
| report because then I can get done for making illegal
| porn, that is the way the laws are written. Here is an
| example using whatsapp. https://www.theregister.com/2014/
| 08/05/whatsapp_smut_convict...
|
| Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal
| porn and because they were part of the group they got
| convicted of downloading.
|
| I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child
| porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the
| legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn
| distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to
| report it.
|
| Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the
| world in plain sight masquerading as good guys!
|
| The laws are not fit for purpose.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Ok but whatsapp and reddit are very very different. It is
| very easy to see how people can dissemnimate kiddie porn
| in an unmoderated WhatsApp group. But for a post to make
| it to the global reddit front page (not your personalized
| homepage) it would have to make it past the eyes of
| probably millions of people. Short of botting or hacking
| I can't see how it would even be possible.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| I do think there is an element of "botting" as you would
| put it.
|
| Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most
| people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking
| place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a
| resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR
| is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.
| throwhauser wrote:
| > We had a free society and democracy before the internet.
|
| But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would
| have debated something like this in the past.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, intermediating so much of our society through the
| internet has made it extremely vulnerable. The internet
| offers would-be totalitarians a temptation of pervasive
| surveillance that goes far beyond what the Stasi could ever
| have dreamed of. Free society and democracy are not likely
| to survive another decade, although they will probably be
| born again later in a new form.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Is this sarcasm?
| vkou wrote:
| Depends on whether or not one believes that we live in a
| free, democratic society today. In many ways, yes, we do,
| in many others, no, we don't.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Not really, no, not with the media deciding what everybody
| heard. We had as much of a free society as convenience
| combined with the interests of every individual running TV
| news allowed.
|
| It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it
| all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each
| other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far
| ahead of anything that existed then.
| treis wrote:
| >Not really, no,
|
| What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in
| 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society
| or democracy people think of when they say "we have a
| free society and a democracy."
|
| From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-
| war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put
| serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to
| the way the media largely operates by uncritically
| republishing press releases and communiques, I would say
| it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed
| society with a severely manipulated democratic process.
| kragen wrote:
| It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed
| suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't
| mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as
| Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's
| _CBS Evening News_ was no _Wikileaks_ , much less
| Wikipedia, but it wasn't _Pravda_ either. Serpico got
| shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the
| US, but you could still do business in New York without
| paying all your profits out to the cops. People in Peoria
| had enormous freedom in 01930, 01960, and even 01990 that
| people in Minsk, Shanghai, and Alexandria just didn 't.
|
| Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely
| thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably
| not going to last much longer, also thanks to the
| internet.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Just FYI the zero-padded date thing is incredibly
| distracting and weird. (Yes I know there's some
| "foundation" pushing this, but still).
| kragen wrote:
| You say that as if it's a bad thing.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| To be consistent, you should pad the other numbers you
| use too. Like money amounts. And I think you should pad
| dates out to eight digits, just to be safe.
| kragen wrote:
| I think I'll also pad out your name, Nate______.
| umanwizard wrote:
| It makes your post come off as an ad for this foundation
| that 99.9% of people don't care about and that has
| nothing to do with the topic being discussed; it's as if
| I inserted [DRINK MORE COCA-COLA] into random parts of my
| comment.
|
| Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally
| attracting attention to something completely unrelated is
| bad.
| kragen wrote:
| People who are looking for an excuse to give others grief
| for harmlessly violating social conventions probably
| should not be posting on a site named "Hacker News"--
| after all, hackers have always been weird, think of
| Turing. In any case they are not capable of engaging with
| my substantive points, should I have any, so I'm not
| losing anything by discomforting them. And it's good to
| know who they are before that becomes a life-or-death
| question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz,
| Assange, and so many others.
| 01acheru wrote:
| It is totally useless to zero pad a date in a sentence,
| it is human to human communication.
|
| BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.
| missingrib wrote:
| What foundation?
| umanwizard wrote:
| The Long Now Foundation
| pessimizer wrote:
| Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about when you
| say "free society." It sounds like a weird mantra.
|
| edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to
| have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a
| kid?
| [deleted]
| wayoutthere wrote:
| In 1990 school kids were pledging our fucking allegiance
| to an evil empire. Hell no we didn't have a free society
| then.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I remember it well. Hands on hearts, droning on between
| the food pyramid (wherein the USDA redefined "healthy" to
| mean "buy what the grain lobby sells") and a D.A.R.E.
| poster. Meanwhile, the CIA was getting caught selling
| crack.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Only they weren't getting caught because the media was
| censored and nobody knew about it. The people talking
| about it were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
| owly wrote:
| 100%
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Some of us did. America has never been a free and
| Democratic society for all, and we're actually closer to
| achieving that than ever if you're not
| white/straight/upper-middle class, which is why they're so
| desperate to push this bill through.
|
| The government had de-facto control of all mass media
| before the internet. They could control the narrative to a
| degree they didn't need tight surveillance. They lost
| control of that with the internet and are desperate to get
| it back.
| nirav72 wrote:
| You must not have been around when the government was
| pushing for backdoors on Telecom products in the 1990s.
| Before the internet was a thing for most people.
| oceanghost wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
| nirav72 wrote:
| Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being
| pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to
| have a backdoor.
| kragen wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_f
| or_... actually passed in 01994.
| kelnos wrote:
| In theory, but often the level of freeness, and your access
| to democracy, depended on the color of your skin or your
| gender. (Which is still the case today, to a great extent,
| but it was even worse 30, 50, 70, 100, etc. years ago.)
| EarlKing wrote:
| We had a society in which all media was controlled by a
| handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and
| thought. That is not by any means a free society. Then
| along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet,
| and all that changed. Legislation like the EARN IT Act is
| meant to turn back the clock to silence the voice of the
| people so that, once again, only the voice of the
| bourgeoisie can be heard.
| mgerdts wrote:
| I believe that the period you refer to had local
| newspapers, tv stations, and radio stations that were
| largely independent from this handful of corporations
| (ABC, CBS, NBC?). During this period, there was limited
| opportunity to perform population-wide surveillance on
| the discussion of this coverage. In those days your TV
| tended not to be equipped with technology that could
| report what you watched.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In those local markets you had reporters who were friends
| with those in power and very little got reported.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I think it's fair to say that pre-internet, there were
| fewer media voices _but_ there were a _lot, lot fewer_
| attempts at surveillance.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the
| Internet, and all that changed.
|
| No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had
| minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire
| comment just sounds like speculation about a time that
| is, in fact, fairly recent history. We
| had a society in which all media was controlled by a
| handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and
| thought.
|
| That only makes sense if you ignore all sorts of pivotal
| historical events (eg: uprisings and revolutions).
|
| Not that I disagree that populist internet media are
| really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the
| anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it
| from my brother who got it from a BBS.
|
| I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for
| making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--
| media outside of the machine.
|
| I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was
| like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but
| I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out
| to us for a reason.
| kragen wrote:
| That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free
| speech.
|
| _The Anarchist Cookbook_ is an interesting study: prior
| restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover
| 's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment,
| and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher
| as Charles Bukowski, _The Sensuous Woman_ , and _The
| Turner Diaries_ , selling some two million copies in all.
| But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists
| have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort
| aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves
| up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!
|
| In 01999 many people in the US could read _The Anarchist
| Cookbook_ entirely without leaving a government record
| simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and
| reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book
| out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that
| fact into a centralized database, and were famously
| reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance
| aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9 /11.
|
| Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much
| rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45
| seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy
| information on how to do many terrible things, but
| there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a
| permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center.
| (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once
| their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to
| the library, Verizon probably stores that fact
| permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if
| you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll
| systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact.
|
| We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI
| and the NSA.
|
| In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many
| cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than
| they were in the US.
| callalex wrote:
| Why are you writing years as if they are C octals?
| Standards in communication are important.
| 3np wrote:
| As can be seen here, it's really distracting. Writing
| years like that is a great way to have people ignore or
| forget what you're actually wanting to communicate.
|
| Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting
| thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own
| edgy year format.
| kragen wrote:
| #notallpeople
| abecedarius wrote:
| It seems like there was a time when these Long Now dates
| would prompt curiosity here on HN, without so much
| hostility as now. I don't care about the dates, but the
| aggressively conventional are something else.
| kragen wrote:
| It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out
| of the underbrush. That way we know who would have
| cheered on the court's sentence on Turing or Galileo
| before it matters.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a
| Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem
| instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking
| projects)
| bruce511 wrote:
| So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time
| it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for
| a human, or computer, to parse?
|
| While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible
| to most of us now...
|
| And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was
| worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.
| oblio wrote:
| Are you surprised that on HN, of all places, we find a
| date format pedant? :-D
| jacquesm wrote:
| And a wrong one, at that.
| kragen wrote:
| My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong
| than others.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD.
| Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding
| in daily communication.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999
| format where there wasn't one before by changing an
| arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares
| about the crisis of 9999.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Dear lord ... a while ago I had to integrate with a
| client database that had a required "end date" for
| indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum
| year - December 31, 9999.
|
| Our systems initially supported this. But we found an
| extremely popular and widely used date parsing library
| has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as
| part of its logic it checks something about the date
| _after_ the date it's parsing.
|
| So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999
| crisis will actually happen a day early.
|
| I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers
| that there was going to be a major crisis with their
| product in about 7000.
|
| They never got back to me.
| vel0city wrote:
| > That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free
| speech.
|
| As a student you have a far more limited right to free
| speech in school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393
| (2007), the famous BONG HITS 4 JESUS case. Those students
| weren't even technically on school grounds (across the
| street) but were a part of a school function. A school
| definitely has the right to suspend a student for
| distributing material deemed interruptive to the learning
| environment of a school.
| kragen wrote:
| No, they do not. The Supreme Court ruled incorrectly in
| Morse v. Frederick. Oppressive governments and other
| institutions infringe on people's free speech rights
| frequently; the fact that their administrative organs
| affirm those infringements does not annul the
| infringements, it merely adds insult to injury.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| > But it's so famously terrible that many actual
| anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-
| flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow
| themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an
| anarchist!
|
| Any links on reading more about this?
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| To the people that participated in the BBS's it meant a
| lot and changed everything, for them.
|
| I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of
| those around them even if in a small way.
|
| Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst
| for change.
| [deleted]
| EarlKing wrote:
| If you genuinely believe that people being able to engage
| in a frank exchange of views hasn't changed anything...
| how did Orange Man get elected? :D
| kragen wrote:
| BBSes weren't powerful enough to elect him.
| iopq wrote:
| 4chan/Reddit pretty much propelled his primary campaign.
| He was just one of the candidates before the memes
| [deleted]
| omeze wrote:
| Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US
| election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific
| candidate and a compromise between political parties on
| military presence sounds like a very precarious position
| for free society to be in.
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-
| robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu's The Master Switch)
| cnelsenmilt wrote:
| One way to look at it then is that we have dealt with
| similar issues before and survived.
| pooper wrote:
| Not really. I mean logically would you also play Russian
| roulette repeatedly with no payout just because you
| haven't died yet?
| vore wrote:
| Well, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of
| future returns".
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Actually, no one involved in the 1876 US election
| survived.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I heard a story that at the 1864 National Union
| (Republican) Convention, there was a bunch of haggling
| about who would be Abraham Lincolns VP.
|
| A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked
| military officer named William Rosecrans.
|
| Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the
| telegram never made it.
|
| It's assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship
| powers to prevent it from reaching its destination.
|
| The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.
| defiUs88 wrote:
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Yes, but if you shut down the most "free" information
| platform, and make it only free to those who are rich
| enough to pay for anonymity then you are doing aggregious
| harm to democracy and freedom. Perhaps moreso that anyone
| has ever done in human history. Look no further than China
| to see the wrong way of doing things and that is precisely
| what this bill seeks to do. It is not to "protect the
| children" it is to protect the elite power centers from
| criticism and transparency by forcing you to open up all
| your secrets and communications to them to judge and
| eliminate the challenges and criticisms of their power
| under the guise of "law and order".
| notriddle wrote:
| If the government has the benefits of the internet, and no
| one else does, isn't society less free than if no one has
| it?
| bambax wrote:
| > _Free society means limited government_
|
| Strong disagree. A good government protects freedom from big
| private companies that feast on it. Antitrust laws cannot be
| enforced by a weak government, and without those, there can't
| really be freedom.
| iopq wrote:
| Then you think China is more free than the United States.
| Some people disagree
| mastazi wrote:
| > A good government
|
| if only absolutely everyone could totally agree on one
| single definition of "good"...
| belorn wrote:
| > While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society,
| ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I've read don't get much into
| the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed
| so forcefully.
|
| The original bill was originally pushed because certain
| republican accounts was banned from certain social media
| platforms. It is explained pretty well on its Wikipedia article
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act#Events_leading_to_..
| .).
|
| One potential reason why it is still getting pushed is that
| politicians on both sides of the fence is still afraid of the
| power that social media have, and they are using the pretext of
| "protect the children" in order to get bipartisan support and
| getting some distance to the historical events that lead up to
| the creation of the bill.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society,
| ACLU, CDT, and EFF,
|
| It's worth noting that the companies destroying democracy that
| this bill regulates (Google, Facebook, etc.) are major donors
| to all of these organizations.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Seems the world isn't all black and white.
|
| It's not like those companies have "destroy democracy" as
| their mission.
| [deleted]
| ideashower wrote:
| And Mozilla Corporation's entire business model is built on
| Google's financial support. Does that make Mozilla's (or the
| ACLU etc.) work inherently suspect or anti-democratic?
| miketery wrote:
| Yes it does. One rotten apple spoils the bunch.
|
| That's not to say guilt by association, but yes it is
| suspect.
| E2EEd wrote:
| MZLA is building tbird for profit
| TameAntelope wrote:
| None of those companies are destroying democracy, that's
| needless hyperbole...
| goodpoint wrote:
| Never heard of Cambridge Analytica?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I disagree. Social media has played a huge part in the
| radicalization of various groups and allowed anti-
| democratic views to spread. The companies mentioned here
| have an outsized part in that because they prioritize
| engagement at all costs, which pushes people down rabbit
| holes of increasingly extreme views.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| No, the companies mentioned here are often targets of the
| abuse you're giving because they're very effective
| community builders.
|
| Your _real_ problem is with the people using those
| platforms, but I guess it 's harder to complain about
| democracy being ruined if it's literally the people
| participating in it who are ruining it.
| [deleted]
| jjulius wrote:
| "See, we donate to these organizations, we're not _that_ bad,
| promise! "
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Edit: See thread below, the EARN IT act does not in any way
| reclassify the designation of social media companies under
| section 230 or solve the issues mentioned in this post with
| 230. The change to 230 just provides exceptions for CSAM.
| However, keep reading if you want background on 230 and why
| many people are trying to change it.
|
| I want to provide some background on section 230 which the EARN
| IT act proposes to amend. I was against regulating social media
| companies, then I researched and wrote a paper on
| misinformation and changed my opinion on whether or not any
| policy action should be taken. I'm not saying the EARN IT act
| is correct (Edit: It's not), but here are some excerpts with
| sources on why I believe Section 230 should be amended in some
| way. I hope it makes more clear the reasons people want to
| change section 230.
|
| Social media companies currently enjoy protections from Section
| 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. For reference,
| Myspace was launched in 2003. Section 230 allows social media
| companies to be classified as interactive computer services and
| not information content providers (Gallo, 2021). Due to this
| designation, social media companies are not responsible for the
| content they distribute. Even media companies in America are
| still held responsible for libel or false information designed
| to incite immediate violence or public harm (FCC, 2021) which
| social media companies are not. The media is still provided
| many freedoms guaranteed by our constitution while being held
| responsible for gross negligence.
|
| Social media companies do not adequately moderate the content
| they promote to their users, allowing members of society to be
| presented misinformation by domestic and foreign actors
| resulting in polarization, the propagation of false facts, and
| the loss of faith in our democratic electoral process. Social
| media algorithms, motivated by financial gains, promote
| divisive content and have little incentive to prevent the
| distribution of false information. This false, divisive
| information comes from internal actors, such as those who want
| to discredit climate change and COVID facts. It also comes from
| external actors, such as Russia, who want to destabilize our
| democratic systems and influence our policy choices in their
| best interest.
|
| For example, YouTube shared videos containing COVID-19
| misinformation 20 million times, generating 71 million
| reactions in eight months (Gallo, 2021). Russia's Internet
| Research Agency (IRA) is a private organization funded by a
| close confidant of Putin (Bowen, 2021). Eighty thousand posts
| were made on Facebook by IRA-controlled accounts in two years,
| reaching 126 million users. The IRA even organized political
| rallies in the United States through these accounts (Mueller,
| 2019). Intelligence services have determined that Russia uses
| its cyber teams to "undermine public faith in the U.S.
| democratic process," as Russia's influence operations
| demonstrated in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton
| (Sayler, 2021).
|
| I'm not saying that social media companies should be held to
| the same standard as content creators or the media, or that the
| EARN IT act is right. I haven't looked at the implications of
| that. However, the current law is outdated and something needs
| to change the incentives of social media companies to prevent
| these externalities (influencing elections, misinformation,
| etc) from effecting our population.
|
| FCC. (2021, January 8). Broadcasting False Information. Federal
| Communications Commission.
| https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/broadcasting-false-info...
|
| Gallo, J. A. G., & Cho, C. Y. C. (2021, January). Social Media:
| Misinformation and Content Moderation Issues for Congress (No.
| R46662). Congressional Research Service.
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46662
|
| Mueller, R. S. M. (2019, March). Report On The Investigation
| Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election,
| Volume I of II. U.S. Department of Justice.
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download
|
| Sayler, K. M. S., & Harris, L. A. H. (2021, June). Deep Fakes
| and National Security (No. IF11333). Congressional Research
| Service. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11333
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Are you looking for the government to censor all "divisive"
| information or just "divisive information that is false"?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| EARN IT is tightly focused on the perceived issue of CSAM
| material, exploitive "grooming" of minors via the Internet,
| and the like. It would do _zilch_ to incent large social
| media companies against using algorithms that implicitly
| promote outrage-inducing content, much of it naturally being
| fake news and misinformation. It would also make it _harder_
| for smaller, more independent actors to counter these
| dynamics - because increased, more complex regulation and
| heavier liability always hinders smaller actors to the
| benefit of larger ones. You 're conflating two issues which
| have very little to do with one another.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| You are right. I just read the bill. I believe 230 needs to
| be amended and that the damage it provides is real. But,
| the EARN IT act does not fix that. I do think it's
| important for people to understand why 230 is bad. But
| again, this act does not remove the designation as an
| "interactive computer service." It just provides exemptions
| for CSAM. I added an edit up top.
|
| When I read in the article:
|
| > the EARN IT Act would, if passed, pare back online
| service providers' broad immunity under a federal law
| called Section 230, exposing them to civil lawsuits and
| state-level criminal charges for the child sexual abuse
| material (CSAM) posted by their users.
|
| I assumed it was reclassifying social media companies,
| which would have broad implications, under the stated
| purpose of CSAM. I wanted to provide background on why 230
| should be changed, not on the content of EARN IT. But I
| agree it conflates two separate things.
|
| Here is the bill for anyone else that wants to read it.
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-
| bill/6544...
| E2EEd wrote:
| E2EE is offered to all users, whether or not they are law-
| abiding. More precise is to say that E2EE is offered to users
| who are primarily law-abiding.
|
| Your points are well-heard, even by those in the IC. What isn't
| occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving the issues
| faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the growing
| entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of
| whom are engaging in criminal behavior. I strongly believe that
| fighting this issue with a hard-line no compromise response
| will result in an undesirable outcome for your agenda.
|
| I am not a fan of kneecapped cybersecurity in consumer
| endpoints, which is the elephant in the room. It's a compromise
| borne of the E2EE entropy problem, intentional or not. I don't
| support unchecked recoverable encryption in any centralized
| fashion, nor do I support covert backdoors or skeleton keys.
|
| Unfortunately, too many folks defend their position from
| libertarian ideals, a position which does have a technical
| justification. It just misses the bigger picture - that most
| folks in govt are just doing their job. A compromise will seek
| to enable those doing their job correctly while preventing
| abuses with technological means.
|
| Telling the govt "too bad, you can't stop math" will backfire.
| The law can be used to force tech companies to literally stop
| doing math at scale.
| mrandish wrote:
| > What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving
| the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC
|
| Public policy orgs like EFF etc have proposed modifications
| to limit the most disastrous elements of this proposal but to
| the extent those proposals fix or limit the 'accidental'
| limitless liability for communications platforms, they are
| met only with disingenuous cries of "think of the children."
| I think it's pretty clear the lack of "good-faith discussion"
| lies with the people who've never openly acknowledged what
| all this is _really_ about.
|
| > even by those in the IC.
|
| Hopefully the intelligence community, as opposed to the
| domestic law enforcement agencies, already understands how
| dangerous this legislation could be for U.S. national
| interests. The unintended consequences won't stop at social
| media. Platforms of all kinds will react to the liability
| exposure or merely the possibility of it. With other nations
| imposing their own in-country data requirements on trans-
| national platforms how many platforms (or their upstream
| technology providers) will maintain a separate insecure
| version for domestic tapping and a robustly secure version
| for international use? Just like our own backdoors being used
| against us, we've already seen how this kind of thing has a
| way of undermining our own security. Short-sighted
| bureaucrats are playing with fire here.
|
| > too many folks defend their position from libertarian
| ideals
|
| I don't see how this is tied to uniquely libertarian ideals.
| The 4th amendment prohibition on government search of
| citizen's "papers and property" isn't some aspirational ideal
| or partisan political viewpoint - it's always been at the
| very core of the nation. It's also been continuously endorsed
| by both liberal and conservative supreme courts for hundreds
| of years.
|
| > that most folks in govt are just doing their job.
|
| To the extent their actions undermine the constitution, it's
| no longer "law enforcement". Sadly, quite the opposite. If
| the law is the 'operating system', then the constitution is
| the 'secure kernel' - the last line of defense against both
| external AND internal threats capable of undermining the
| integrity of the entire system. Law enforcement has
| privileged accounts which are THE primary internal threat the
| secure kernel was designed to stop. From day one in the
| 1700s, the constitution has _always_ made the job of law
| enforcement MUCH harder. That 's not a bug. It's "As
| Designed" and perma-marked by the original designers (and the
| maintainers in SCOTUS) as "Won't Fix". Hell, it goes beyond
| just a feature - limiting the power of the government is the
| explicitly stated purpose of the thing - to the extent it
| puts a big fence around the few powers granted to government
| (with the barbs pointed inward) and grants _everything_ else,
| mentioned or not, as powers granted to citizens.
|
| It's always been well understood, as well as taught in
| elementary school, that the unique freedoms the country was
| founded on came with a cost - and sometimes that cost would
| be high, but... preserving these freedoms, including making
| things harder on law enforcement (and potentially easier on
| criminals), was worth the cost. I suspect congress is going
| to be surprised by how non-partisan (and non-negotiable) the
| fundamental integrity of the system is for most users.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Law enforcement issues don't override all other concerns. If
| life is difficult for them, good. That's the point. It
| _should_ be difficult in order to prevent abuse of power.
| Encryption is a perfectly reasonable reaction to governments
| that give themselves the right to surveil the entire planet.
| Nobody really cares that it makes their life harder. That 's
| exactly what it's supposed to do. It should be incredibly
| hard if not impossible for the NSA employee to spy on his
| spouse.
|
| If they want to investigate stuff, they should have to get
| warrants and literally send out operatives to physically
| compromise the targeted equipment. This puts a limit on the
| scale of government operations. This is how it's supposed to
| be.
| a-dub wrote:
| > If they want to investigate stuff, they should have to
| get warrants and literally send out operatives to
| physically compromise the targeted equipment. This puts a
| limit on the scale of government operations. This is how
| it's supposed to be.
|
| i think that's mostly right. i also take the controversial
| view that consumer encryption should have a front door for
| law enforcement. there should be a mechanism where if they
| are in possession of a valid warrant, and said warrant is
| validated by third party watchdogs, then they can enter
| into decryption protocol that will immutably log that the
| protocol took place in a public, yet cryptographically time
| embargoed location.
|
| i don't agree with the idea of mass-surveillance data
| mining dragnets, i think they're constitutionally
| problematic, but on the same token, if a valid warrant has
| been issued, investigators need to be able to do their jobs
| and we as citizens need to be able to audit that said
| powers are not being abused.
|
| but i will admit, this thinking is immature. the prevalence
| of information systems in our lives has resulted in the
| most detailed and rich records of human activity that have
| ever existed. this is new. on the flip side, advancements
| in communication have enabled all sort of new paradigms in
| crime that weren't really possible before. i suspect that
| getting all of this right will be quite difficult as we
| don't even fully understand how much the game has changed
| with these new technologies pervading our lives.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Skeleton keys are impossible to secure.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > This is how it's supposed to be.
|
| According to you, which is OPs point exactly. The
| discussion needs to be framed in a way that stakeholders
| are walking in common ground, not yelling at each other at
| a distance from their respective ideological ivory towers.
|
| FWIW I happen to agree with you, but IMO "this is how it's
| supposed to be" is not a productive argument.
| kelnos wrote:
| Perhaps not, but the parent did say that one purpose is
| to prevent the abuse of power.
|
| And sure, someone might follow up with "but I trust my
| elected officials/police/FBI/etc. not to abuse power".
| But then you can provide examples of times when that
| trust was misplaced. Or point out that elected officials
| are elected in and out and law enforcement officers
| quit/retire and are hired all the time, and the incoming
| people might not be so trustworthy.
|
| So yeah, "this is how it's supposed to be in order to
| prevent the abuse of power" may not be a complete,
| ironclad argument, but it's a good jumping-off point to
| further discussion.
| oceanghost wrote:
| You're exactly wrong.
|
| The Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in
| unswervingly-- was written at a time when privacy was the
| DEFAULT. Any person could walk into any building or any
| field and speak, anonymously to another person. It cost
| quite a bit to spy on someone and that was a natural
| limit to how much spying could be done.
|
| The argument from the other side is always-- the framers
| didn't imagine a world where everyone is carrying around
| a device that spies on them and they didn't happen to
| imagine a dystopian future where people are paying
| corporations to spy on them with unimaginable devices,
| so, we should be allowed to do that.
|
| Politely, _fudge_ that.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I think you misunderstand my position as well as who you
| need to convince. It's not angry people who vehemently
| believe that we need more surveillance. It's apathy. Why
| should I care?
|
| (I do care, and like I mentioned in my original comment,
| I agree with the parent).
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in
| unswervingly
|
| What does that mean?
|
| Meanwhile, I don't really feel like there was much
| privacy back when the constitution was written. What
| makes you think there was?
| salawat wrote:
| there wasn't even .uch in the way of federal law
| enforcement.
|
| Any type of eavesdroppi g would have to be done via tge
| post, which to this day has better confidentiality
| guarantees because USPS is one of the only service
| providers to which Third Party Doctrine does not apply
| for auto-negating expectations of privacy.
|
| if you were investigated, it would have to be by a local
| law enforcement official. There was no cross-referencing
| of biometrics, fingerprints, or driver's licenses across
| state lines.
|
| There were no license plates to track. When they were
| eventuallu implemented, it would be decades before data
| stores were implemented that allowed real-time tracking
| via ALPR.
|
| It was, in fact, not a given or even remotely a given
| that it was considered technically possible to localize
| or pin down an individual without one or more individuals
| being engaged in the act of tailing.
|
| There is no question that at the timeof the signing of
| the Constitution, the world had a much higher degree of
| privacy by default.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Why isn't it a productive argument? This is a question
| about what goals society should optimize towards. There's
| no amount of objective measurements that can determine
| the relative worth of cheaper policing compared with
| decreased privacy.
|
| The only way for such an argument to proceed is to
| convince enough people that such a trade results in a
| world not being how it is supposed to be.
|
| TL;DR: This argument lies on the "ought" side of Hume's
| is-ought distinction [0].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I wasn't familiar with the is-ought problem, thanks! I
| think in this case, I was commenting on the parents
| presumption that the their "ought" was a universally
| shared (or even widely shared) axiom. In that sense
| stating one's belief without defending it is not really
| an argument at all (in that it's not persuasive), and
| therefore (in my opinion) not as productive as starting
| from a more universally held common ground.
| MereInterest wrote:
| No problem, and I'm glad that it helped! It's a useful
| distinction for determining what type of arguments will
| be useful to make. If two people agree on goals, but
| differ on the ways to reach those goals, then "is"
| arguments are useful. If two people disagree on goals,
| then there isn't yet any common ground on which to have
| that conversation, and the first step is to have an
| "ought" conversation to find common ground.
|
| (This is also simplifying a bit, as there are cases where
| differing goals can have the same next steps. An
| apolitical example would be a temporary alliance in a
| board game, where you and I team up to stop a third
| player from winning. Our long-term goals differ, as each
| of us wants to win for ourselves, but our short-term
| goals align at stopping the third player.)
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Why should we give an inch to these people when they have
| been shown to violate the publics' trust many many times?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Nobody should have to walk common ground with the likes
| of the CIA and NSA. They should have to walk common
| ground with us. Whatever people decide, they should obey
| unquestioningly and without complaint. We don't want to
| hear about how encryption makes their job harder. They
| need to deal with it and stop trying to undermine our
| freedoms. It's honestly offensive that they're trying to
| regulate this stuff for the nth time despite public
| resistance.
|
| We owe no apology to anyone. They're the ones trying to
| undermine the whole world's security and freedom. They've
| grown addicted to total access and want to maintain their
| power which they frequently abuse. Nothing will ever
| justify it, certainly not their constant "but it makes
| our job harder" sob story.
| defiUs88 wrote:
| salawat wrote:
| >this is how it's supposed to be" is not a productive
| argument
|
| It is nevertheless, the correct argument that is at the
| heart of the issue.
|
| It needs to be had over and over again until it finally
| gets through the bureaucrats heads that no; your
| convenience does not outweigh fundamental freedom from
| panoptic surveillance.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| But we shouldn't be having this argument over and over
| because some people didn't like the way it turned out the
| first time. We need, as a society, to find a way to limit
| the ability of lawmakers to turn around a scant two years
| later with some new approach to pushing their shot down
| proposal through.
|
| It's a devious exhaustion tactic and it's unethical
| (without commenting on the bill itself, which I find
| abhorrent to a free and just society)
| mr_toad wrote:
| > What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving
| the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the
| growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large
| subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior.
|
| How about a good faith discussion of the fact that crime
| rates are at historic lows, or the fact that many crimes
| (burglary, car theft) are never investigated, or the fact
| that surveillance is never going to solve, let alone prevent
| the real issues that people care about, like domestic
| violence, gun violence, or the epidemic of prescription pain
| killer addiction.
|
| Focus on crime prevention, not more law enforcement empire
| building.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| > Telling the govt "too bad, you can't stop math" will
| backfire. The law can be used to force tech companies to
| literally stop doing math at scale.
|
| There is no practical scenario where those who want to use
| e2e will not have that capability. Even if technology
| companies are totally banned from producing it domestically,
| it's trivial for foreign companies to provide the e2e
| software and supply it over the internet.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Until that becomes illegal. After all, torrent indexes are
| illegal, and they aren't directly pirating anything.
|
| Thus, supporting an end around, can be attacked as well..
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Torrent indexes are illegal, and yet a lot of them exist
| very publicly. Pushing e2e encryption into the same
| category as them does not seem very effective.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The goal is to reduce common usage ; to make all which
| use encryption a criminal.
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > It just misses the bigger picture - that most folks in govt
| are just doing their job.
|
| Any office with excessive power will be a magnet for
| assholes. Excessive power _will_ be abused.
| quanticle wrote:
| >What isn't occurring, is a good-faith discussion on solving
| the issues faced by law enforcement and the IC related to the
| growing entropy of E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large
| subset of whom are engaging in criminal behavior.
|
| I think that the tech community has extended entirely too
| much "good faith" towards a law enforcement and intelligence
| community who feel entitled to review and record all
| communication at their own sole discretion. I know you think
| that you're the "good guys", trying to keep us safe from
| "adversaries", but you have to understand that after the
| Snowden leaks, many people in the tech. industry don't see
| you that way. They see you as the diet-Coke version of the
| Chinese Ministry of State Security, and feel that if you were
| able to slip your legal bonds, you'd attack free speech just
| harshly as the Chinese Communist Party does.
|
| Of course, from your perspective, it's not cracking down on
| free speech. It's "preserving democracy" by "suppressing
| misinformation" planted by "hostile adversaries" and "non-
| state actors".
| guy98238710 wrote:
| > E2EE wielded at scale by folks, a large subset of whom are
| engaging in criminal behavior
|
| You cannot really engage in criminal behavior exclusively via
| E2EE communication. Victim would use the communication as
| evidence. All the crimes you are talking about have an
| essential component outside E2EE communication, which means
| that detection and evidence gathering is possible without
| breaking E2EE.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Aren't there criminal acts which consist solely of
| communicating information to a willing third party? Eg
| sharing classified information with a foreign agent?
| maccolgan wrote:
| You'd just have deniable encryption.
| jmcnulty wrote:
| How secure is E2EE anyway when, like WhatsApp, it's
| implemented such that you blindly trust a 3rd party to
| distribute the public keys and instruct your client who it
| should be encrypting and sending your messages to? How do you
| know your mobile app isn't also sending encrypted copies of
| your messages to a ghost user you have no visibility of? A
| ghost user that could be WhatsApp, law enforcement or anyone.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Law enforcement and IC are starting with the assumption that
| they are entitled to the best access they've ever had. Yes,
| things are going dark that they had access to 20 years ago,
| but 20 years before that they didn't have access because most
| of the conversations were happening face to face. At that
| point they needed to rely on traditional boots on the ground
| police/intelligence work instead of electronic backdoors. Why
| is it impossible for them to go back to doing things that
| way?
| nyolfen wrote:
| they have more funding, power, and technology to perform
| their jobs than at any point in history, but cry about it
| because they can't spy on the entire planet by default.
| never compromise because the demands will never end.
| emmelaich wrote:
| > _Why is it impossible for them to go back to doing things
| that way?_
|
| Because symmetry. Criminals using e2ee are not going back.
|
| Not to support the act, but your comment doesn't really
| address the issue.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Why does that matter? Cops weren't listening to those old
| face to face communications. That was practically
| impossible which is analogous to the technical
| impossibility of listening in on E2EE connections.
| Instead they were cracking cases in other ways (physical
| evidence, confidential sources, etc.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| To play Devil's Advocate: people had to meet up for face-
| to-face communications, but they don't have to meet up
| for remote communication.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| That's a true fact but why does it make traditional
| policing impossible?
| zo1 wrote:
| What is "traditional policing" in your view?
| [deleted]
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Whatever it is, it isn't a dragnet.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I don't think it does. We've had encrypted communications
| for centuries; cases have been cracked before without
| decoding those messages.
| citruscomputing wrote:
| Does the devil need an advocate?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The Catholic Church seems to think so, and they've got a
| notorious anti-Devil bias. It's useful to put forward
| arguments against things, even if you don't agree with
| them, because it helps to put into words _why_ you don 't
| agree with them.
| splitstud wrote:
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I agree with your comment, but just to point out something
| counterintuitive:
|
| > privateer (NSO etc) threat actors,
|
| E2EE is actually a boon to NSO and friends. It's how they get
| to deliver their exploits to targets without the service
| operator being able to inspect them or filter them, or
| retroactively analyze them to plug the exploits. NSO doesn't
| have any traffic inspection capability, so their antics rely
| entirely on exploiting target devices, and E2EE
| counterintuitively _helps_ in that case.
|
| If iMessage weren't E2EE it would be _very_ easy for Apple to
| implement a heuristic to look for suspicious messages and keep
| a copy for further analysis, or automatically run them through
| their codebase in a sandbox and see if it results in any
| indicators of compromise. But they can 't do any of that, and
| that's how NSO sometimes goes on years exploiting the same iOS
| bugs before Apple figures them out. With E2EE, you have to rely
| entirely on endpoint security, and the provider can't help you
| server-side.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > E2EE is actually a boon to NSO and friends.
|
| I think you're right, but I don't think it's due to some
| first principles contradiction between E2EE and exploits as
| much as it is largely a historical anomaly that customers
| have looked to service providers for security. The track
| record shows pretty clearly that the service provider's
| interest in customer security only goes as far as not to be
| reputationally damaging - we've seen plenty of communications
| companies actively helping authorities to spy on their own
| customers.
|
| > If iMessage weren't E2EE it would be very easy for Apple to
| implement a heuristic to look for suspicious messages
|
| Indeed, it would at the very least be easier, but let's
| assume Apple did have this capability. The first order of
| priority would be stopping spam, which is orders of magnitude
| more common and problematic than targeted exploits. Simply
| taking a look at the app store kind of shows their ambition
| level. At best, Apple is going to want to be "more secure
| than Android", but beyond that.. it's simply not gonna be a
| priority (and Apple is even one of better ones).
|
| > NSO sometimes goes on years exploiting the same iOS bugs
| before Apple figures them out
|
| Yes, but I think this is temporary. Citizen Labs have been
| shortening this round trip time enormously simply by having
| analysis or software deployed on likely targets' devices.
| CrowdStrike and similar security companies operate on a
| similar model, acting as a counter-surveillance trusted third
| party. On medium-term time scales, I think such models are
| more ethical, have a superior incentive structure and, most
| importantly, will prove to be more effective than the usual
| half-assed service provider solutions. At least, I hope I'm
| right.
| kurthr wrote:
| I agree it's dangerous not only for civil society, but also
| against other nation states. I have wondered why the TLAs seem
| enamored of this sort of anti-encryption legislation (since
| presumably they are the likely only technical enough members to
| write and promote it). My best guess is not that they "hate
| freedom" or that they are "compromised agents of a foreign
| power", but simply that they are fighting the last battle. The
| older cold war generation has retired, and people in positions
| of power within the TLAs are simply so consumed by foreign
| terrorist threats, that they aren't thinking about the fact
| that if they can read (and forge) these communications, then so
| can our geopolitical adversaries. Furthermore, the possible
| disruption of our entire economic (banking) and political
| system are made possible by such a vulnerability.
| faangiq wrote:
| It's because all those orgs are co-opted by tptb. Thoughtcrime
| is already here, it was welcomed eagerly.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > These people seem incapable of understanding the existential
| threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting
| everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts
|
| Oh, they understand perfectly.
|
| Power-hungry people love authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is
| opposed by democracy.
|
| They are the threat.
| zamalek wrote:
| > These people seem incapable of understanding the existential
| threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting
| everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts.
|
| The truly idiotic thing about it is that they aren't really:
| cryptography knows no jurisdiction, it's just mathematics. They
| are limiting the power of law abiding citizens to communicate
| freely, nobody else.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| it's almost comical how politicians always use the same tactic
| for destroying online privacy too - "think of the children!"
| [deleted]
| noelsusman wrote:
| I'm reminded of when I was told for years that eliminating net
| neutrality would destroy the Internet as we know it. Then it
| was eliminated and the Internet is exactly the same as it was
| before. Point being, I am extremely skeptical that this bill is
| an existential threat to free society and democracy.
|
| Anyway, the text of the bill clearly states that offering
| encryption services cannot serve as a basis for liability under
| the new CSAM carveout. I haven't seen critics of the bill
| explain why that language isn't good enough to protect E2EE
| services from liability. Most critics just pretend that part of
| the bill doesn't exist.
| bitL wrote:
| Maybe those people absolutely understand the implications for
| free society. What if there was a power transfer on the
| background, over many years, unnoticed, and the winning group
| now doesn't want any disruptions coming from encrypted
| communication in the future?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's truly amazing how many people are conspiracy theorists
| these days.
| [deleted]
| secondaryacct wrote:
| But democracy existed before whatsapp, why cant it exist after
| ?
|
| I mean I agree with what you say it s convenient to anonymously
| communicate private thought over public telecom fibres, but...
| I mean... democracy and "freedom" as a Nation citizrns are
| unrelated to this, completely unrelated.
| indymike wrote:
| Taking away freedom of speech and freedom of press, just
| because it's no longer talking to my neighbor on the corner
| or smashing ink into paper is the issue.
| throwaway058527 wrote:
| shitpost wrote:
| ryeights wrote:
| Politicians are malignant tumors on free, democratic society. IMO
| anyone who would choose to run for a political office in today's
| society should be banned from ever holding a position of power.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| These assholes just keep trying and trying until they get their
| way. At least it's good to see there's some actual pushback in
| the United States. Here in Australia, this sort of legislation
| has bipartisan support, it gets rubberstamped and passed on a
| Friday evening before a public holiday with the media staying
| silent.
|
| Keep fighting against these bills, or else you'll get a
| government that happily runs roughshod over your civil liberties
| like ours.
| [deleted]
| Arubis wrote:
| Of course they do. They know the equation: we have to win every
| time; they only have to win once.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. Maybe there should be a law that makes it illegal to
| attempt to ban encryption.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| But what if they make it illegal to attempt to make it
| illegal to attempt to ban encryption?
| nichos wrote:
| Shouldn't it be covered under the 4th amendment?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| There is historical precedent classifying encryption as
| munitions, so arguably the 2nd amendment would also apply,
| in addition to the 4th.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| There's also historical precedent for classifying
| encryption software as speech (at least when printed in
| book form), so the 1st amendment should apply too. Then
| of course there are 5th amendment issues with requiring
| people to disclose their encryption keys.
|
| While we're at it, the 3rd amendment forbids the
| quartering of soldiers in homes, which, as others have
| pointed out, is at least analogous to requiring
| government-approved spying software on our phones.
|
| https://www.rstreet.org/2016/04/12/encryption-balancing-
| the-...
| ghoward wrote:
| If anyone needs a link to point politicians to, you can use [1].
|
| Suggestions welcome for improvements.
|
| [1]: https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/
| charcircuit wrote:
| We should design cryptosystems that include functionality that
| support warrants as opposed to being antiencryption and removing
| encryption.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Here's a thought. Private[0] keys could be held in escrow, with
| sss[1] being used to decrypt, publically. The sss shares could
| be held by different branches of government.
| (state,federal,exeecutive,legislative,judicial)
|
| Please shoot my idea down.
|
| [0] or 'backdoor' keys [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing (or
| similar)
| charcircuit wrote:
| Personally I think the company should also hold a key. They
| would use this key after verifying that a warrant is valid. I
| also think giving out hardware keys with rate limiting /
| logging features along with key rotation / revocation is
| essential to reducing abuse.
| notfed wrote:
| This is called a backdoor, whether you like it or not.
| Pinky-promising not to abuse the backdoor key doesn't make
| it not a backdoor. Backdoors _will_ be abused by
| governments. Have we learned nothing from the Snowden
| leaks?
| charcircuit wrote:
| >A backdoor is a typically covert method of bypassing
| normal authentication or encryption in a computer,
| product, embedded device, or its embodiment. >Wikipedia
|
| My suggestion isn't covert, nor does it bypass
| encryption.
|
| >2. A means of access to a computer system that allows
| unauthorized users to circumvent normal authentication
| procedures. >thefreedictionary
|
| People with warrants are authorized to access the
| messages.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Sounds like junk crypto.
| charcircuit wrote:
| There is utility to being are to prevent random people and
| companies from eavesdropping your conversations. Crypto has
| important security benefits that we can't just give up.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| No we shouldn't. Never. Get that idea out of your head. It can
| never be secure or safe. This path leads to bodies hanging from
| the town square.
| charcircuit wrote:
| So you want encryption so criminals who would have otherwise
| been hung to be able to evade the law? It is pretty clear to
| me how a government may not approve of encryption for this
| usage.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Yes. The state has no right to hang anyone. The state has
| no right to take a life. When you take away encryption, The
| Innocent and the Guilty are punished, the innocent
| disproportionately.
|
| That's the beautiful thing: we don't have to care what the
| government thinks. We are 30y into the encryption wars, and
| they cannot put the genie back in the bottle. It just is.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >The state has no right to take a life.
|
| Some states have the death penalty.
|
| >When you take away encryption, The Innocent and the
| Guilty are punished, the innocent disproportionately.
|
| More information allows people to make a more informed
| decision. Punishing innocent people is a different
| problem separate from encryption.
| Zak wrote:
| A cryptographically secure messaging system is either
| secure for terrorists and child molesters, or it isn't
| secure for anyone.
|
| Like most reasonable people, I want governments to try to
| prevent such crimes and to punish people who commit them. I
| do not, however wish to grant governments unlimited powers
| with which to pursue those goals. In particular, there are
| some bright lines which should never be crossed. Those
| include torture, punishment without a reasonable attempt at
| a fair trial, and outlawing tools for secure communication.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > functionality that support warrants
|
| A back door marked 'staff only' doesn't actually know who is
| staff and who isn't.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >A back door marked 'staff only' doesn't actually know who is
| staff and who isn't.
|
| Which is my you use cryptography instead of just a sign.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| What one can make, another can break. Skeleton keys are
| impossible to secure.
| charcircuit wrote:
| By that logic so is the two parties' decryption keys. Can
| we make a third party whose decryption key is more secure
| than the others? I suspect it is possible.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| It's a fool's errand chasing after a fool's reward.
| mullingitover wrote:
| The minute your system depends on good behavior from any of the
| parties involved, you've failed as a designer.
|
| It's like nobody learned anything from Snowden's revelations.
| The second those backdoors are available, they're going to be
| surrendered in secret to various three letter agencies in the
| name of national security. That's going to happen on day one.
| On day two they'll be breached by foreign intelligence
| services.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >The minute your system depends on good behavior from any of
| the parties involved, you've failed as a designer.
|
| Everyone is bad designers then. All of them rely on operating
| system providers not stealing your messages. Some with the
| people providing the chat application. Since they have to be
| able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere.
|
| Society needs trust to function.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > All of them rely on operating system providers not
| stealing your messages.
|
| You can compile your own operating system and control your
| hardware supply chain - you don't have to rely entirely on
| trust for those components.
|
| > Since they have to be able to display messages they are
| able to log them somewhere.
|
| If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people providing
| the chat application can't log anything except noise.
| That's what we're talking about outlawing here.
|
| Regardless of the above, when I say 'system' I'm referring
| to a cryptosystem, not the other parts of the software
| stack.
| legobmw99 wrote:
| Ken Thompson has something to say about trusting the
| compiler you use for that OS, or even the microcode the
| CPU running said compiler is using. It's functionally
| impossible to not trust an outside vendor for something
| on a modern computer
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_
| Ref...
| aspenmayer wrote:
| All the more reason for open firmware for everything.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >You can compile your own operating system and control
| your hardware supply chain
|
| It's unrealistic for everyone to audit their operating
| system and hardware.
|
| >If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people
| providing the chat application can't log anything except
| noise.
|
| Yes, they can. If you used a comprimised Element app your
| encrypted Matrix messages can be stolen.
| emkoemko wrote:
| then that's not encryption ... if it has a back door....
| charcircuit wrote:
| I'm not talking about a backdoor. I am talking about it being
| a part of the actual system design.
| notfed wrote:
| It's unclear what you're talking about then; edit and
| clarify. Even the most generous interpretation sounds like
| a backdoor.
| charcircuit wrote:
| You could imagine it as every chat having additional
| participant which is a person who has a valid warrant.
| There is nothing secretive about this, nor is it
| bypassing the cryptographic system somehow. If I send you
| an encrypted message, is it a backdoor if you are able to
| decrypt it? No, because that's how it's indented to work.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| Basically every professional cryptographer has been saying that
| it's impossible to build a secure system this way since the
| idea was floated by the US government in the 1990s.
| phatfish wrote:
| In a perfect world a agree with this. But the power this gives
| governments is so great that I don't see how it wouldn't end up
| abused.
|
| In the analogue days "wire tapping" regulated it's self because
| of the manual nature, and a warrant attempted to ensure enough
| evidence was required to actually target an individual.
|
| With digital communications the same thing can be done leaving
| almost no trace against an entire population.
|
| Governments have a LONG way to go to prove that "three letter
| agencies" won't abuse a system that is setup to provide legal
| wire taps for digital communications.
| mrobot wrote:
| What we need is positive privacy rights that are very well
| thought out and firm in preventing legislation such as this from
| even ever surfacing, as what's proposed in this policy should
| just be illegal in the first place. These privacy rights would go
| against what both Silicon Valley and NSA/CIA/Pentagon want, so we
| need a movement to fight it. I don't think i believe anyone with
| any power (including Silicon Valley big wigs) are actually
| opposed to any of this garbage.
|
| Anyway, I'm sick of just being reactive to this anti-human
| garbage. People need to get clued in and slay the demons instead
| of building stuff for them.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| urthor wrote:
| I feel like there's two big issues at war with this one.
|
| 1) The Web 2.0 war over how much legal liability internet
| platforms have to bear. This is the big one to me, ever since the
| DMCA this is the _pivotal_ issues about the internet.
|
| 2) The ongoing war against E2E encryption. This is a nonissue,
| the attempts of the authorities to restrict digital encryption
| are pointless and futile.
|
| I'm a big fan of reform in #1. The big internet platforms like
| Facebook absolutely need to face far more legal liability for
| their actions.
|
| But conflating the thing into one big bill that pushes forward
| E2E encryption restrictions is one of the issues with democracy
| in America.
|
| There is so much horse trading involved in Washington required to
| do anything, because of lobbyist vetos, the fact all these issues
| have to end up in an omnibus bill is ridiculous.
| jeegsy wrote:
| I'm not sure why a law is needed. These big tech companies do the
| government's bidding all the time.
| dmje wrote:
| I know it's wildly off-topic but can someone please explain to me
| why there are still sites like this that are clearly well funded
| and professional that fail to have spent - what - 2-3 designer
| hours time ($150?!) on a simple mobile stylesheet?
|
| They almost definitely get 50%+ mobile traffic. What gives?
| [deleted]
| aspenmayer wrote:
| I think they're hiring, if it's any consolation. I'm sure that
| HN staff does actually have work besides moderation.
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/y-combinator/jobs/7D3d...
| thrown_22 wrote:
| lstroud wrote:
| Will all government agencies be required to comply? I would think
| that would be an issue.
| NewMountain wrote:
| For those living in California:
| https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me
|
| A copy of my note if you would like a template:
|
| ``` Dear Senator Feinstein,
|
| I am deeply disappointed with your support of the EARN IT act and
| am expressing my deep concern and disapproval of such a bill.
|
| Congruent with the recent report released by Stanford, I am
| expressing my deep disappointment in your sponsorship of the EARN
| IT act. I believe it represents a fundamental undermining of
| citizens right to privacy through strong encryption under the
| extremely divisive framing of "protecting the children". As a
| Father of two children myself, I do not believe that whatever
| incremental improvement to their safety, if any at all, justifies
| the undermining of encryption of ordinary citizens. In my
| opinion, this law actively undermines the fourth amendment in the
| digital realm and I must state that if you believe this is in my
| best interest, you have lost both my vote and my trust. ```
| icelancer wrote:
| I write to all my Democrat reps (I live in a solidly blue
| state) and get shit all nothing in response to positions that
| go against the mainstream leftist positions. I still do it
| because... eh, why not, but I know it has zero value. It's sad.
| takeda wrote:
| So far for this type of laws she always have a canned response
| essentially saying "I know better than you".
|
| Anyway I emailed her, and encourage everyone do so. Not doing
| anything, by assuming it is pointless is a self fulfilling
| prophecy.
|
| I wish somebody younger would replace her :(
| chris_va wrote:
| Having peeked behind the political shroud on occasion (and
| still by no means an expert), I think people overestimate the
| complexity of the US political system.
|
| Most politicians are not imposing some personal beliefs, they
| are just representing whichever voice their staffers/office
| hears most often. And, even for a senator, there aren't that
| many people who actually call to talk to a staffer.
|
| The ones that do usually have a strong interest, so the
| staffers generally hear a skewed version of reality (and
| while these folks are often bright, deep domain experts they
| generally are not).
|
| Sooo... Calling/writing does quite a bit more than you might
| think, if you can get even a reasonable number of people to
| do it who the staffers believe actually have expertise and
| are within the district/state.
|
| The staffers will probably give a mostly generic response,
| but these are all tallied up internally and definitely drive
| policy.
| icelancer wrote:
| Small business owners banded together to lobby WA state
| offices, regional offices, etc in the form of letters,
| calls, emails, and social media, and what that amounted to
| was having the 2nd most harsh lockdowns / business closures
| with zero financial compensation from the state.
|
| Gov. Inslee and the Democrats below him had absolutely zero
| desire to engage in discussing concepts about how to safely
| keep small businesses open, even when we noted everything
| Gov. Polis (D-CO) was doing to try and balance things out.
|
| All Inslee cared about was driving one number (COVID cases)
| down as much as possible to the exclusion of everything
| else. No amount of lobbying mattered.
|
| If it drove any sort of policy... it had a backwards effect
| at best. All while huge corporations in our state like
| Microsoft and Amazon generated record revenues and drove
| their stock prices up.
| bsder wrote:
| Sadly, Feinstein doesn't give one iota of damn ... unless _she_
| is being wiretapped.
|
| And, at this point, I'm not sure that she actually even knows
| what she is doing. However, too many people are on the gravy
| train that are preventing her from resigning.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most. Even after she
| complained like a baby that the FBI had surveilled her (what
| did she expect?) it didn't affect her political positions one
| bit.
|
| She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA. She
| cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV
| shostack wrote:
| Really? You can't think of _any_ others who have done much
| worse things to our country?
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Well theres only 100 of them. For what I care for she's
| always on the other side.
|
| The only time I agreed with her was her torture work, but
| that revealed her hypocrisy.
|
| So, on the whole, I disagree with her and I believe her
| to be a massive hypocrite.
| bsder wrote:
| > She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA.
| She cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV
|
| It sounds like you need to do some research about
| California politics.
|
| Feinstein is by no means untouchable. And more of her
| support comes from Hollywood and old media than from SV.
| However, she does have a core in San Francisco given that's
| where she wound up as mayor stemming from the Moscone-Milk
| assassinations.
|
| California has jungle primaries so winning the primary
| isn't enough. In 2018, this meant that the main election
| was between two Democrats--Feinstein (54.2%) and de
| Leon(45.8%). This was actually a pretty solid result given
| that Feinstein is a strongly entrenched, party supported
| incumbent. And it was actually the closest election since
| her first.
|
| And 2018 was just the start of the progressive wing of the
| Democratic party getting started (that was the year that
| AOC got elected and surprised everybody), so a highly
| liberal challenger simply wasn't in the cards, yet.
|
| She will have a much tougher road in 2024, but I will be
| highly surprised if she even runs.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| Good point about CA's primaries, I forgot about that
| quirk. But that only makes her permanence worse. By 2024
| she might not be alive or too tiered, she's not young,
| but she's not in danger. Shes been senator since 1992!
|
| My SV comment is not that the proles (that includes tech
| workers) in San Fran care for her, but tech power in SV
| is allied with her from a decades long symbiotic
| relationship.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most
|
| You don't mind the senators that voted to disenfranchise
| the millions of voters in Arizona?
| nate_meurer wrote:
| This is the kind of comment that I fucking hate the most.
| You've attacked OP with a stupid, bad-faith presumption
| that has nothing to do with their simple and
| straightforward statement.
|
| In case I have to spell it out for you, yes, OP can
| simultaneously disagree with Feinstein and with multiple
| other politicians.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| > OP can simultaneously disagree with Feinstein and with
| multiple other politicians.
|
| That's not what they said. They said Feinstein was worse.
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| It follows from basic math that, if I dislike Feinstein
| the most, I dislike the other 99 senators less.
|
| However, it doesn't follow from:
|
| "Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most"
|
| That I don't mind the other 99, or any subset thereof.
| grammers wrote:
| Man that's bad. I wish if a bill was off the table once, it can't
| be simply brought back again and again. It feels like constantly
| treading water, no wonder people are frustrated with politics.
| loteck wrote:
| The 3 Techdirt links in the article are especially helpful for
| catching up.
|
| EARN IT is another skirmish in the 30+ year old Crypto Wars. For
| those who care about defending privacy and encryption, exhaustion
| is not an option.
|
| Power-hungry governments must be viewed similarly to an APT in
| this context. They are following their very nature, and they will
| never stop inventing new approaches.
|
| There is no other option except to stay organized and always
| ready to engage.
| snarf21 wrote:
| While I agree with you, I think the last 5 years have shown
| that exhaustion wins. It is just a matter of time. People won't
| stay vigilant. They just want to provide a life for their
| family. Life is hard enough without having to stop clueless and
| bribed politicians from ending freedom on a weekly basis.
| fsflover wrote:
| People who are busy with their own life can at least support
| EFF etc. with donations.
| nexuist wrote:
| Cynicism is obedience. We can and should beat this.
| xvector wrote:
| I don't think this doomer/fatalistic mentality helps anyone.
| History has also shown that even exhausted people can fight
| and win.
| McDyver wrote:
| > They just want to provide a life for their family.
|
| That's true, and keeping people worried about their next
| paycheck is a great way to control them.
|
| The good thing about this "great resignation" or "great
| renegotiation", is that some people are starting to take that
| fight into their own hands. They are shifting the power and
| taking control of their own lives.
|
| Eventually their focus will no longer be on short-term
| survival, and thry will take control of other aspects of
| their lives that currently are not so pressing.
|
| I'm hopeful that younger people will be more aware, and see
| through these boomer games.
| loteck wrote:
| I think the last 30 years of failed government efforts to
| effectively end the use of secure encryption contradict your
| opinion. Those battles were won by vigilant defenders. You
| can and should join them if it's important to you.
| icelancer wrote:
| The other way to look at your statement is that secure
| encryption is inherently unbeatable by its very nature, and
| attempts to legislate against it are like trying to say
| that 1+1=3 for very large values of 1.
|
| I believe in writing lawmakers and spreading awareness, but
| people who are skeptical of the legislative/voting path
| have a point: Building things that are ungovernable plays a
| critical role in this process. Likely we need to do both.
| bsder wrote:
| > For those who care about defending privacy and encryption,
| exhaustion is not an option.
|
| For those who care about _democracy_ , exhaustion is not an
| option.
|
| This is why people who believe that they can be "neutral" or
| "in the middle" make me so angry.
|
| "Two sides" doesn't hold when one side is actively trying to
| sabotage you.
| friendlydog wrote:
| Instead of just getting these shutdown how about an opposing act
| which puts penalties for lobbyists and politicians who back this
| kind of thing?
|
| I don't want to keep fighting zombie bills like these, because we
| will eventually miss one.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > penalties for lobbyists and politicians who back this kind of
| thing
|
| You want to make it illegal for people to propose and vote for
| policies that you don't like? What if they beat you to it and
| pass a law that stops you from getting your law passed?
| friendlydog wrote:
| Some parts of government should be immutable, and putting
| safeguards to ensure constants are constant makes a lot of
| sense to me.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| The idea that a part of the government could be
| unchangeable even if 100% of the people in the country
| oppose it, seems not just dystopian but philosophically
| absurd.
|
| As a compromise, though, how about having some rules about
| which laws the government is allowed to make, and requiring
| something like a two-thirds majority to be able to change
| those rules.
|
| Then you could have a rule saying that the government can't
| make any laws that cause the people to not be secure in
| their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
| unreasonable searches and seizures.
|
| Actually you're right, maybe that won't be sufficient.
| friendlydog wrote:
| Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but the facts on the
| ground are that the constitution is broken all the time
| without anyone being punished enough to stop them from
| doing it again. Unless you outline penalties or
| protections such as qualified immunity for defending the
| constitution it becomes meaningless.
| OGforces wrote:
| jmconfuzeus wrote:
| The return of Gestapo.
| [deleted]
| tehwebguy wrote:
| It's not just this specific legislation, there is no reason to
| give police any additional power and all the reason in the world
| to dial back the extraordinary power they already have.
| tomjonesey wrote:
| uejfiweun wrote:
| It seems like this Stanford page has clearly taken a side on the
| issue. Does anyone have a link to a solid unbiased discussion of
| the pros and cons of this? It's got bipartisan support, so
| clearly there are legitimate arguments in favor of these changes,
| would be interested to hear what they are.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| >It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate
| arguments in favor of these changes, would be interested to
| hear what they are.
|
| The safety of our children(tm)!
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Are there any issues that come up in Washington that _don't_
| have have legitimate arguments for them, regardless of the
| status of their partisan support?
|
| The "pros" are fairly straightforward, mass data collection
| makes it easier for law enforcement to do their jobs, or, at
| least, that's their opinion.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate
| arguments
|
| That doesn't follow. The worst laws passed (e.g. the Patriot
| Act) tend to have bipartisan support.
| [deleted]
| uoaei wrote:
| > It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate
| arguments in favor of these changes
|
| I don't see how the conclusion follows from the premise.
|
| It doesn't seem appropriate to assume that politicians are
| acting in good faith dialectical fashion, based on literally
| every observation we've ever made of their actions vs their
| rhetoric.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Issues like this are difficult as there are conflicting needs
| and people wearing blinders on the issue. There's really no
| correct answer, but there are at least 4-5 camps of true
| believers.
|
| Recall the HN community going apeshit over Apple's proposed
| methodology to address this issue. That solution was
| engineered to benefit Apple and was imperfect, but
| fundamentally addressed CSAM risk with a proven methodology
| and preserved strong crypto.
|
| That visceral, apeshit reaction was incited by a poorly
| written EFF article that blurred the lines between a parental
| control and CSAM.
|
| So yay, we won. Now broken encryption is back and may well
| pass, as both law and order moderates and batshit crazy
| conservatives can find common ground.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > It's got bipartisan support, so clearly there are legitimate
| arguments in favor of these changes
|
| Both parties have pretty wide dumb/authoritarian streaks, so
| it's not necessarily true that there are legitimate arguments
| in favor. The war on drugs, for example, had/has bipartisan
| support even though it is an ongoing demonstrable harm to
| society.
| loteck wrote:
| Let's have no fear to face down our opponents' claims. Senators
| pushing this bill laid down their claims in a document [0], and
| everyone should put on their critical thinking caps and grapple
| with it.
|
| [0]
| https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21194217-earn_it_act...
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Thank you, something like this is exactly what I was looking
| for. Balances out nicely with the original posted link.
| loteck wrote:
| There's likely to be strong bipartisan opponents to this
| bill in the Senate as well. Their issues are likely aligned
| with another senator's response.
|
| https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-on-
| re...
| mrandish wrote:
| Wyden (like Rand Paul) is the rare congressperson that,
| while I don't agree with all their views, tends to get
| certain fundamental freedom issues right, especially
| where other politicians don't on issues with a lot of
| money and special interest lobbying.
|
| On any particular issue where Wyden goes against his
| Democratic party leadership AND Paul goes against his
| Republican party leadership to agree with each other,
| that's likely to be an issue where I agree with both of
| them. Too bad there's no way to vote for a 'virtual
| politician' that's the logic-gate intersection of those
| two.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| > Too bad there's no way to vote for a 'virtual
| politician' that's the logic-gate intersection of those
| two.
|
| Now this is an intriguing idea.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thanks, This was helpful.
|
| > MYTH: Requiring companies to be on the lookout for child
| abuse will harm startups and nascent businesses.
|
| >FACT: No other type of business in the country is provided
| such blanket and unqualified immunity for sexual crimes
| against children.
|
| This jumped out out to me in particular. I can think of
| another similar industry that delivers private packets which
| may contain CSAM. What is the US Post office doing to
| evaluate the bits they deliver? What is the post man's legal
| liability?
| boppo1 wrote:
| I've said it before, I'll say it again. The only way this ends
| with the preservation of encryption as a standard is a bipartisan
| fappening-style leak of CEOs, politicians, lawyers, etc. Not just
| sexual content, but intimate content of any and all kinds:
| financial records, healthcare visits, everyday texts, etc.
| spacexsucks wrote:
| This is the only way.
| swinglock wrote:
| They would find a way to misinterpret the situation and double
| down, to fight the criminals at fault who did this to them.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'm in agreement, but how sad a commentary on the state of
| politics and 'the best governance society has developed so
| far'?
|
| All I hear from the people at the top is: Me, me, fucking me!
|
| (Would I be any better in a position of power? I don't know,
| but I'd like to think so).
| javajosh wrote:
| We have to give them something for CSAM, or they'll keep coming
| at free speech in general using CSAM as cover.
|
| I strongly recommend considering the invention of a sticky,
| client-side program that scans all images passing through your
| network interfaces. It is also allowed to send red flagged images
| to a jury that will be a first hurdle to doing anything:
| determining it's really a CSAM matter.
|
| I've proposed this before, and got shouted down. Partly because
| its client side and can be theoretically disabled. But I think it
| can be made as difficult as black box baseband firmware to
| undermine. I do not believe the argument that consumers are
| sophisticated enough to disable this scan, if implemented well.
| We have demonstrated the ability to force-run processes at every
| level of abstraction for general compute hardware.
|
| Our best hope is to implement something that has a reasonable
| chance of catching actual CSAM without generating false positives
| and without being exploited to prosecute people deemed
| problematic for arbitrary reasons. Otherwise we get what is
| probably happening now, which is the secretive scanning of all
| messages, prosecution limited only by the cost of parallel
| construction.
| nine_k wrote:
| Two questions: how do we know that the program only scans
| images, and only exfiltrates CSAM-suspect content?
|
| Otherwise looks fine, as long as the traffic is never
| encrypted.
| javajosh wrote:
| You hit on the feature that makes it viable: you would always
| know if an image is flagged, and as what. It doesn't stop
| your nation state from flagging you as a problem because
| you're gay, but it also doesn't hide the fact that they're
| looking for that. I think that's the best we can do right
| now.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > I think it can be made as difficult as black box baseband
| firmware to undermine.
|
| And once we've set the precedent in law that the government
| gets to force mandatory unauditable features onto all computing
| devices, what makes you think they'll stop at image scanning?
| You're basically saying that no Free and Open Source machine
| should ever be allowed on the internet again.
| javajosh wrote:
| If it can't be designed properly, then I withdraw the
| suggestion, but I think it's possible to design something
| that cannot hide from you the fact of a detection and the
| questionable content. That is, if they don't stop at image
| scanning for CSAM then you'll at least know it, even if you
| can't stop it. Not perfect, but its something.
| beebmam wrote:
| All it is going to take is one big violent event organized using
| end-to-end encryption and that's it, this bill (or something like
| it) will pass. So you should probably prepare for that political
| battle if this is an issue you care about
| ipnon wrote:
| What violent conspiracy hasn't incorporated encryption? Can you
| read in plaintext every email that cross the Web? I can't even
| access HN over HTTP. Encryption is the default for modern
| communication. That's the rub: it's a mass surveillance bill
| masquerading as an encryption bill.
| Spivak wrote:
| The bill isn't about encryption despite the messaging. It's
| about the design of communications systems that are
| "unwiretappable."
| [deleted]
| MatekCopatek wrote:
| To start, I absolutely don't think this bill is good, BUT I think
| there might be potential for some interesting silver lining.
|
| Let's say it's passed and big platforms such as FB need to start
| heavily policing their users because they become responsible for
| all published content. This level of moderation is nearly
| impossible to achieve, so they are forced to heavily limit
| participation (you can only post a limited amount, posts need to
| be confirmed before becoming public, AI filters auto-reject
| various topics etc.).
|
| Users are pissed and move to platforms with "more freedom", but
| nothing lasts - as soon as they grow, they all hit those same
| issues.
|
| Because all the responsibility is on the publisher, the only
| realistic solutions are smaller and more distributed communities.
| You can self publish your blog or create an invite-only
| forum/chatroom/Mastodon instance for your
| friends/family/neighbourhood.
|
| Because now everyone is doing this, hosting providers, ISPs and
| software publishers adapt by improving UX and reducing technical
| barrier to entry. It's basically a reneissance of oldschool
| internet.
|
| Whaddya say, too optimistic?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| shmerl wrote:
| Using encryption should be considered a right, this way such kind
| of bills will become impossible.
| [deleted]
| kweingar wrote:
| The main concern I have is the technological/administrative
| burden put on smaller platforms, which would cause further
| consolidation of the web.
|
| What obligations this would impose on an operator of a small web
| forum?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-02-06 23:01 UTC)