5 ms·

I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body

by Laaw 11y ago

I have two unrelated thoughts. "Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well. There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that rarely gets addressed simultaneously, and I'd like to see it sussed out more in concert; what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? It's unacceptable to me that TOR gets used for child pornography, and it's unacceptable to me that my government finds out I'm gay before I come out to my family. I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law. We should talk about achieving both of these goals, but we generally don't.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? Evil is agnostic of location. Your question is of no significance. You might as well be perturbed over "Evil" people living in houses or eating food. Unsurprisingly, evil people are people and will tend towards the same activities people generally engage in.
- Laaw 11y ago
  Yours is a defeatist attitude, I think, and there is plenty of evidence that Evil can be stopped/averted in many cases. It's beyond obvious that there is no complete solution for Evil, but if you keep ignoring this question/problem, then people will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option over your "Evil/privacy" alternative, which is ultimately devastating to everyone. We need to talk about how to create "no Evil/privacy", or at least how to approach something of that kind, even if an absolute version doesn't exist.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    I'm really curious what you think evil is since you keep capitalizing and speaking of it as some spiritual essence that can be eradicated. You have not established the slightest bit of an operational definition, and resort to pathologizing neutral transmission channels as hosts of "Evil". This is a complete non-starter and not worthwhile to deliberate. "Evil uses Tor" is as useful as "Evil uses paper".
    - Laaw 11y ago
      Maybe not worthwhile for you, but there's a set of people out there who all agree on what Evil actually is (generally, obviously it's difficult to be exact), and we'd like to try and figure out how to limit its ability to act, while maintaining the shield of protection for the persecuted.
      - Nutmog 11y ago
        Many groups agree within themselves. But they disagree with other groups. Who can judge which group it right? What are the odds that it happens to be the group you're in, not all the others that previous generations were in or people in other cultures are in. Quick test - is looking at a photo of a naked child evil?
        Laaw 11y ago
        Quicker test - do you have a point, or are you just trying to bog down this conversation about privacy with a defeatist "we have to let murders/rapists get away with it" argument?
        Nutmog 11y ago
        I'm concerned that you seem to have made a clear distinction between good and evil when really there is none. Certainly we can apply our own society's general ideas, but it's not black and white in any way. Even murder is acceptable in many cultures. For example killing of soldiers during a war.
  - simonh 11y ago
    I think most people just don't think about online and communications privacy in the same terms that they think about physical privacy. Computer and information privacy should be a basic right just as much as privacy in your own home. The principle that governments should have covert back doors into our information and communications channels is no different from saying they should automatically get a copy of all of our physical keys, a way to secretly remotely activate and use every camera we own, or remotely activate and listen in on every microphone in our houses. In fact, as everything moves to electronic, always-connected internet of things platforms these things become increasingly not just equivalent but identical. Soon electronic privacy will be the foundation of every kind of privacy.
  - 6d0debc071 11y ago
    > [P]eople will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option If that was an available option, it would be fine. I'd choose no evil and no privacy because I'd know that my information, and more importantly the information of public officials and company leaders; folks who wield power; wouldn't be abused. But that's not an option that's on the table, and whatever it is they intend to pick it is not what people accomplish when they endorse surveillance. Our governments do some pretty evil stuff and those are the people who end up with the power in these sorts of arrangements. What people are being given the choice between is 'a dubious promise of safety; an evil that doesn't offend them personally; and no privacy' - or 'a perceived higher rate of evil that does offend them personally; you're under threat, they're coming for your kids, hate freedom etc; and privacy.' You seem to be taking the no evil part of things as essentially solved. But it's not. We do not have systems we can trust not to abuse this.
    - Laaw 11y ago
      Please in the future consider the concept of rhetorical license. It's not literally zero Evil, it's actually "less evil" and "less privacy", vs. "more evil" and "more privacy". This isn't a conversation about absolutes, it's a conversation about shifting degrees. I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow.
      - 6d0debc071 11y ago
        > Please in the future consider the concept of rhetorical license. I considered it, but I didn't grant it since it was not clear that it applied - nor for like discussions would it be clear in the future. You adopted an extreme position which is not analogous to the discussion you wished to have, and that is not an act of rhetoric; discussion as an art and a skill. It is simply poor communication - as evidenced by how widely your claims would imply you to be misunderstood. Rhetorical license doesn't cover that. The charity of understanding others extend a speaker is not an unlimited effort. > I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow. It does. You gave such an example yourself: TOR and child pornography. More widely speaking, it's possible to lessen the 'evil' in society through a great many means - better school, better welfare provision, stronger community links. More to the point many, even on this site, seem in favour of taking those steps: Strong encryption? Please. Better schools? Yes please. Better community organisations? Yeah. There are of course people who'd say no, but that does not change the fact that people in favour of them are easily found. Many of the steps that could be taken in that regard seem orthogonal to the larger discussion at hand, (encryption security - as structured by reasonable context,) mind.
meowface 11y ago
>I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law. I agree, but it's nearly impossible to have the best of both worlds.
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
Try this: Secrecy does not exist any more Privacy is the politeness of your neighbours. Now everyone is your neighbour As such we choose to not be polite to paedophiles However only a limited number of us choose to be polite to people still in closet. Others will impolitely sell pink insurance, others scrawl hate messages I am not sure where I am going other than politeness is hard to enforce.
- laotzu 11y ago
  >politeness is hard to enforce. Because it is a logical fallacy. To enforce something implies using violence which is considered mean and not polite. The same logical fallacy applies to gun control. Oh you want to ban or restrict access to guns? How are you going to do that? With guns of course.
mirimir 11y ago
Limiting privacy to stuff that's "not Evil" is unworkable, because there's no reliable way to distinguish "good" from "evil". For example, many Wahhabi Muslims consider homosexuality to be at least as evil as child pornography. And indeed, some decades ago, that was virtually the case in the US.
- DonaldFisk 11y ago
  That's moral relativism. It can be used to argue that blood transfusions are evil, or that slavery isn't. It would be better to ask whether someone, who is not a willing participant, is harmed by the activity. That's easier to establish.
  - mirimir 11y ago
    Yes, I agree. But still, there must be some entity that tests for non-aggression. And everything can be gamed. It's far safer to bake in privacy such that it can't be compromised.
  - Nutmog 11y ago
    That test allows child porn as long as the participants don't get harmed in real life. It does make sense but I think most anti-child-porn proponents would say that causing harm isn't needed for it to be evil. The fact is, our collective idea of good and evil is internally inconsistent. It's still skewed by our repulsion to sexual deviancy and our fear of being judged by our peers. We really can't distinguish right from wrong. We aren't even able to apply the simple test you proposed.
ohthehugemanate 11y ago
Does it bother you that national highways are used by kidnappers, and civic electricity is used by rapists? It's infrastructure, so it's all inherently neutral. SSL is used by banks, protesters, and criminals alike. You can't weaken it for one group without weakening it for everyone. It's also global: you can't backdoor an IRC client only for marijuana users in the US, for instance. So if you get to surveil pedophiles in the US, it means that Saudi Arabia gets to surveil homosexuals. We're on the same infrastructure. Also, it's important to recognize that illegal behavior is a critical part of Democratic change. If SSL could discriminate based on your intent to break a law so we could arrest them all, people campaigning for marijuana legalization would all be in jail, and the law would not be changingl. So would people in the 60s campaigning for civil rights, and every homosexual in the country. There is always a grey area period of time in which people break a law because they don't believe in it. That period of civil disobedience is how laws end up getting changed. Even (especially) morality laws against things like sexuality, drugs, or alcohol. It's important to a living democracy that the police are not a perfect force.
- Laaw 11y ago
  I'm not content simply throwing my hands in the air as everyone else seems to be. We should talk about other options. There might be a way to stop pedophiles and kidnappers, and rapists that we haven't thought of simply because we're not willing to talk about how we could do it. Highways have police. Where are the digital police? I'm not sure I prefer such a thing, but why don't we even discuss it?
blub 11y ago
I would like to see law enforcement focus on combating cases of child abuse in the real world instead of focusing so much on what happens online. The online component has been criminalized due to the argument that internet demand will spur abuse in the real world - I see the logic of that. However, the true wins will come by doing real-world police work, educating parents and children on how to protect themselves and what are the potential offender profiles (hint: not guys in an ice cream van). They will come on a diplomatic level by negotiating better laws in countries where such materials are produced (Japan was a recent success AFAIK) and where sexual tourism is rife. Finally, those individuals that haven't abused anyone should receive support from a mental health specialist if they come forward and admit to their urges, like in e.g Germany. I have the feeling that this is a taboo subject, that is not discussed frankly in most societies. The authorities focus mostly on harsh punishments instead of prevention through education and mental health treatment. Thinking about what happens on tor is mostly a reactive policy that doesn't do much to treat the causes.
nyan4 11y ago
> TOR "Tor"
marcosdumay 11y ago
Are you talking about physical - real world Evil, about digital real Evil, or about digital - inside of one's head Evil? About the first one, physical, what king of stupid incompetent secret service lets an entire terrorist organization train their people on physical training centers, physically dispatch them to their targets, get their hands on weapons and explosives, and successfully commits their crime, while doing nothing because they are really focused on breaking Tor? Universal surveillance is not just useless for fighting terrorism, it's actually harmful, in several ways. And most of those apply to almost any use you can came up for it. About the last one, digital - inside of your mind (that is, inside of the criminal mind), those people need help, not punishment. Stop punishing them and they'll seek you. Now, the real problem is the second set, digital - real Evil. I have no good answer for those, but the surveillance people also lacks this answer, and are almost completely useless against that too. I'm not willing to accept an argument claiming that mass surveillance needs to exist so those people may start doing that work in the future, when they discover some way to do it.
CurtMonash 11y ago
You always provide safety to bad guys along with the good. Seatbelts, airbags, traffic lights, food safety, drug safety, pollution control, national defense and many more benefit pedophiles just as they protect good people.
- Laaw 11y ago
  Why?

by Laaw 11y ago

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? Evil is agnostic of location. Your question is of no significance. You might as well be perturbed over "Evil" people living in houses or eating food. Unsurprisingly, evil people are people and will tend towards the same activities people generally engage in.

Laaw 11y ago
Yours is a defeatist attitude, I think, and there is plenty of evidence that Evil can be stopped/averted in many cases. It's beyond obvious that there is no complete solution for Evil, but if you keep ignoring this question/problem, then people will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option over your "Evil/privacy" alternative, which is ultimately devastating to everyone. We need to talk about how to create "no Evil/privacy", or at least how to approach something of that kind, even if an absolute version doesn't exist.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  I'm really curious what you think evil is since you keep capitalizing and speaking of it as some spiritual essence that can be eradicated. You have not established the slightest bit of an operational definition, and resort to pathologizing neutral transmission channels as hosts of "Evil". This is a complete non-starter and not worthwhile to deliberate. "Evil uses Tor" is as useful as "Evil uses paper".
  - Laaw 11y ago
    Maybe not worthwhile for you, but there's a set of people out there who all agree on what Evil actually is (generally, obviously it's difficult to be exact), and we'd like to try and figure out how to limit its ability to act, while maintaining the shield of protection for the persecuted.
    - Nutmog 11y ago
      Many groups agree within themselves. But they disagree with other groups. Who can judge which group it right? What are the odds that it happens to be the group you're in, not all the others that previous generations were in or people in other cultures are in. Quick test - is looking at a photo of a naked child evil?
      - Laaw 11y ago
        Quicker test - do you have a point, or are you just trying to bog down this conversation about privacy with a defeatist "we have to let murders/rapists get away with it" argument?
        Nutmog 11y ago
        I'm concerned that you seem to have made a clear distinction between good and evil when really there is none. Certainly we can apply our own society's general ideas, but it's not black and white in any way. Even murder is acceptable in many cultures. For example killing of soldiers during a war.
- simonh 11y ago
  I think most people just don't think about online and communications privacy in the same terms that they think about physical privacy. Computer and information privacy should be a basic right just as much as privacy in your own home. The principle that governments should have covert back doors into our information and communications channels is no different from saying they should automatically get a copy of all of our physical keys, a way to secretly remotely activate and use every camera we own, or remotely activate and listen in on every microphone in our houses. In fact, as everything moves to electronic, always-connected internet of things platforms these things become increasingly not just equivalent but identical. Soon electronic privacy will be the foundation of every kind of privacy.
- 6d0debc071 11y ago
  > [P]eople will continue to pick the "no Evil/no privacy" option If that was an available option, it would be fine. I'd choose no evil and no privacy because I'd know that my information, and more importantly the information of public officials and company leaders; folks who wield power; wouldn't be abused. But that's not an option that's on the table, and whatever it is they intend to pick it is not what people accomplish when they endorse surveillance. Our governments do some pretty evil stuff and those are the people who end up with the power in these sorts of arrangements. What people are being given the choice between is 'a dubious promise of safety; an evil that doesn't offend them personally; and no privacy' - or 'a perceived higher rate of evil that does offend them personally; you're under threat, they're coming for your kids, hate freedom etc; and privacy.' You seem to be taking the no evil part of things as essentially solved. But it's not. We do not have systems we can trust not to abuse this.
  - Laaw 11y ago
    Please in the future consider the concept of rhetorical license. It's not literally zero Evil, it's actually "less evil" and "less privacy", vs. "more evil" and "more privacy". This isn't a conversation about absolutes, it's a conversation about shifting degrees. I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow.
    - 6d0debc071 11y ago
      > Please in the future consider the concept of rhetorical license. I considered it, but I didn't grant it since it was not clear that it applied - nor for like discussions would it be clear in the future. You adopted an extreme position which is not analogous to the discussion you wished to have, and that is not an act of rhetoric; discussion as an art and a skill. It is simply poor communication - as evidenced by how widely your claims would imply you to be misunderstood. Rhetorical license doesn't cover that. The charity of understanding others extend a speaker is not an unlimited effort. > I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow. It does. You gave such an example yourself: TOR and child pornography. More widely speaking, it's possible to lessen the 'evil' in society through a great many means - better school, better welfare provision, stronger community links. More to the point many, even on this site, seem in favour of taking those steps: Strong encryption? Please. Better schools? Yes please. Better community organisations? Yeah. There are of course people who'd say no, but that does not change the fact that people in favour of them are easily found. Many of the steps that could be taken in that regard seem orthogonal to the larger discussion at hand, (encryption security - as structured by reasonable context,) mind.

meowface 11y ago

>I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law. I agree, but it's nearly impossible to have the best of both worlds.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

Try this: Secrecy does not exist any more Privacy is the politeness of your neighbours. Now everyone is your neighbour As such we choose to not be polite to paedophiles However only a limited number of us choose to be polite to people still in closet. Others will impolitely sell pink insurance, others scrawl hate messages I am not sure where I am going other than politeness is hard to enforce.

laotzu 11y ago
>politeness is hard to enforce. Because it is a logical fallacy. To enforce something implies using violence which is considered mean and not polite. The same logical fallacy applies to gun control. Oh you want to ban or restrict access to guns? How are you going to do that? With guns of course.

mirimir 11y ago

Limiting privacy to stuff that's "not Evil" is unworkable, because there's no reliable way to distinguish "good" from "evil". For example, many Wahhabi Muslims consider homosexuality to be at least as evil as child pornography. And indeed, some decades ago, that was virtually the case in the US.

DonaldFisk 11y ago
That's moral relativism. It can be used to argue that blood transfusions are evil, or that slavery isn't. It would be better to ask whether someone, who is not a willing participant, is harmed by the activity. That's easier to establish.
- mirimir 11y ago
  Yes, I agree. But still, there must be some entity that tests for non-aggression. And everything can be gamed. It's far safer to bake in privacy such that it can't be compromised.
- Nutmog 11y ago
  That test allows child porn as long as the participants don't get harmed in real life. It does make sense but I think most anti-child-porn proponents would say that causing harm isn't needed for it to be evil. The fact is, our collective idea of good and evil is internally inconsistent. It's still skewed by our repulsion to sexual deviancy and our fear of being judged by our peers. We really can't distinguish right from wrong. We aren't even able to apply the simple test you proposed.

ohthehugemanate 11y ago

Does it bother you that national highways are used by kidnappers, and civic electricity is used by rapists? It's infrastructure, so it's all inherently neutral. SSL is used by banks, protesters, and criminals alike. You can't weaken it for one group without weakening it for everyone. It's also global: you can't backdoor an IRC client only for marijuana users in the US, for instance. So if you get to surveil pedophiles in the US, it means that Saudi Arabia gets to surveil homosexuals. We're on the same infrastructure. Also, it's important to recognize that illegal behavior is a critical part of Democratic change. If SSL could discriminate based on your intent to break a law so we could arrest them all, people campaigning for marijuana legalization would all be in jail, and the law would not be changingl. So would people in the 60s campaigning for civil rights, and every homosexual in the country. There is always a grey area period of time in which people break a law because they don't believe in it. That period of civil disobedience is how laws end up getting changed. Even (especially) morality laws against things like sexuality, drugs, or alcohol. It's important to a living democracy that the police are not a perfect force.

Laaw 11y ago
I'm not content simply throwing my hands in the air as everyone else seems to be. We should talk about other options. There might be a way to stop pedophiles and kidnappers, and rapists that we haven't thought of simply because we're not willing to talk about how we could do it. Highways have police. Where are the digital police? I'm not sure I prefer such a thing, but why don't we even discuss it?

blub 11y ago

I would like to see law enforcement focus on combating cases of child abuse in the real world instead of focusing so much on what happens online. The online component has been criminalized due to the argument that internet demand will spur abuse in the real world - I see the logic of that. However, the true wins will come by doing real-world police work, educating parents and children on how to protect themselves and what are the potential offender profiles (hint: not guys in an ice cream van). They will come on a diplomatic level by negotiating better laws in countries where such materials are produced (Japan was a recent success AFAIK) and where sexual tourism is rife. Finally, those individuals that haven't abused anyone should receive support from a mental health specialist if they come forward and admit to their urges, like in e.g Germany. I have the feeling that this is a taboo subject, that is not discussed frankly in most societies. The authorities focus mostly on harsh punishments instead of prevention through education and mental health treatment. Thinking about what happens on tor is mostly a reactive policy that doesn't do much to treat the causes.

nyan4 11y ago

> TOR "Tor"

marcosdumay 11y ago

Are you talking about physical - real world Evil, about digital real Evil, or about digital - inside of one's head Evil? About the first one, physical, what king of stupid incompetent secret service lets an entire terrorist organization train their people on physical training centers, physically dispatch them to their targets, get their hands on weapons and explosives, and successfully commits their crime, while doing nothing because they are really focused on breaking Tor? Universal surveillance is not just useless for fighting terrorism, it's actually harmful, in several ways. And most of those apply to almost any use you can came up for it. About the last one, digital - inside of your mind (that is, inside of the criminal mind), those people need help, not punishment. Stop punishing them and they'll seek you. Now, the real problem is the second set, digital - real Evil. I have no good answer for those, but the surveillance people also lacks this answer, and are almost completely useless against that too. I'm not willing to accept an argument claiming that mass surveillance needs to exist so those people may start doing that work in the future, when they discover some way to do it.

CurtMonash 11y ago

You always provide safety to bad guys along with the good. Seatbelts, airbags, traffic lights, food safety, drug safety, pollution control, national defense and many more benefit pedophiles just as they protect good people.

Laaw 11y ago
Why?