14 ms·

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, because complaining about intrusions on our privacy and how ineffective they are, has become de rigeur on HN and Reddit

by blowski 10y ago

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here, because complaining about intrusions on our privacy and how ineffective they are, has become de rigeur on HN and Reddit without much dissent. There clearly is a security problem in Europe at the moment, and I'm assuming that the attacks are not being organised by the security services. So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? If not, then what would reduce the attacks and why are the authorities not doing it already? If it will reduce the attacks, how much does it have to reduce them before we accept the intrusion on privacy as a necessary evil?

lostlogin 10y ago
Is there a security problem now or has their always been one and we just hear about it now? Secondly, in some (many?) of the recent cases, the perpetrators were "known" to police and intelligence services. How does having more info help of they don't act on what's already held?
hobs 10y ago
Likely no impact, because no facility on earth has the capacity to filter and find information on this scale, especially when simple techniques are employed to hide the meaning of communication. The methods needed to reduce attacks (geopolitical unrest resolved) is probably not within the capacity of the police forces we have, and even pretty good safety is so expensive no one is willing to pay for it (even if we did all agree to register every action we took with the government.) There is no government action which can promise results when it comes to motivated attacks, so when you hear "oh if we allow this police action then terrorist attacks will stop." you are hearing purposeful naivete at the best, and power grabs at the worst.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising any flags. Buy bleach at one store and ammonia at another, say you're cleaning if anybody asks, then find a public place to mix the two. Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murder. A determined killer will always find a way. Nobody wants to soberly admit that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks are to keep people from wanting to do so in the first place, which is a long and imperfect process with absolutely no guarantee of success. A lot of America's mass shooters are simply deranged and hungry for national infamy.
  - blowski 10y ago
    It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.
    - throwawayawaya 10y ago
      I have a lock so that if I am burgled my insurance will pay out.
    - toyg 10y ago
      The lock on my door is basically a legal seal: the door itself is often so flimsy, you could probably kick it in, but because there is a lock, you can't then claim you entered by accident or that you assumed it was ok to enter. This is why effectiveness is relatively secondary. This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.
    - CWuestefeld 10y ago
      No, I think you're taking it too far. We only need to conclude that the minimal benefits from the proposal (i.e., few attackes would actually be averted) are vastly outweighed by the extreme cost to our civil liberties. There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases. But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.
      - blowski 10y ago
        Other people - probably the majority of the UK population based on opinion polls and elections - weigh the balance differently. We (HN readers) are probably in the extreme minority, and we are not necessarily right.
- blowski 10y ago
  So if it was technically possible to filter and find the information, and voters elected governments who said they were prepared to pay for it, would that make it a better idea?
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    It sounds like you are trying to use the foot-in-the-door technique. But you are looking at just one concern being very hypothetically alleviated, when there are many many other reasons that have been repeatedly discussed for years. So in practice, the answer to your question is no, and there is no reasonably considered theory where the answer would be yes.
    - blowski 10y ago
      I agree with you wholeheartedly. The risk of saying "we shouldn't do this because it won't work" is that it only has to work a little bit for the argument against it to fail. And it will certainly work a little bit at reducing one type of terrorism, just not enough to outweigh all the other negative effects. That said, I would also like to see more discussion of alternatives instead of just saying "it'll never work".
      - nitrogen 10y ago
        The alternatives I want to see discussed all involve cultural changes. Sometimes when I try to discuss these with people they get fixated on shifting 100% of blame onto the attackers and 0% onto culture/society/foreign policy/poverty/whatever, but assigning blame is a completely pointless activity and the question needs to be what will actually work, not what will feel good to our primitive instincts for vengeance. Some hypothetical approaches for discussion: - Convincing violent groups to be less violent; demonstrating that they can get more of what they want by participating in society than by attacking it (a multi-generational issue) - Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health - Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries - Accepting what remains of the problem as if it's a natural disaster (e.g. just as people accept or ignore the 1000x worse problem of traffic deaths)
- tjl 10y ago
  Back in the 90s, I was doing telecommunications standards and one operator proposed storing all the performance information right on the optical switches. Given that a large amount of performance metrics were being generated every second, the vendors all had looks of horror on their face. Seeing that nobody else from a vendor was going to speak up, I calmly explained just what he was asking for. We could theoretically do it, but the cost would be massive. He promptly dropped the proposal.
- nl 10y ago
  Likely no impact, because no facility on earth has the capacity to filter and find information on this scale, especially when simple techniques are employed to hide the meaning of communication This is a very naive argument. Of course it is possible. I can search all my Facebook messages now. We know the NSA can search a large proportion of the world's internet traffic.
morsch 10y ago
Europe doesn't clearly have a security problem. A few insane people committing political violence doesn't change the fact that Europe is among the safest places on the planet.
- blowski 10y ago
  At a data level, you are more likely to die or be injured in a politically-motivated attack today than you were 10 years ago. Attacks are now more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more deadly - even if only on a very small percentage level. Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.
  - yandie 10y ago
    Can you provide the source of your data about the risk of dying?
    - blowski 10y ago
      For most of the last 20 years, fatalities in terrorist attacks in (Western) Europe were in single figures. There were three exceptions - the Madrid trains in 2004, London bombings in 2005, and the Oslo shootings in 2011. See http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-chart-10 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-c... Last year, that increased to around 100, this time based on 2 attacks (both in Paris, France). So far this year, there have been nearly 300 fatalities over 9 separate incidents: http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-europe-terror-20160715-snap-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-europe-terror-2016... Correction: there were around 170 fatalities in 2015, and there have been around 150 so far in 2016.
      - morsch 10y ago
        That's nearly 300 (speficially, 278) fatalities over the last two years, not this year.
slg 10y ago
Taking this logic a step further, what is the effect of this intrusion on privacy? Is it a philosophical problem or a real world problem? To borrow a tech phrase, are we talking about free as in speech or beer? I think that is the stage in the debate that convinces most normal people. Losing privacy of their gmail account to some faceless government entity is a theoretical problem that has no real impact on their lives. Terrorism on the other hand is a real world problem with easy to see consequences. I think most pragmatic non-techy people are willing to make that trade. If you want to change their mind, focus on showing how loss of privacy has real world effects.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  > Terrorism on the other hand is a real world problem with easy to see consequences. No, it's not. Just as the risks of loss of privacy are much higher than generally perceived, the risks of terrorism are much lower than generally perceived. Terrorism is perceived as a problem, but it really isn't, in most parts of Europe. Car crashes are a real world problem. Terrorism isn't. (Now, I am obviously not saying that governments should simply blindly ignore terrorism risks--but overall, it really isn't a big problem, and there almost certainly are risks where most of the money would be better spent trying to reduce fatalities.)
  - blowski 10y ago
    > Terrorism is perceived as a problem, but it really isn't, in most parts of Europe Perhaps that's because the security services are doing such a fantastic job. To make sure it's not a problem in all of Europe and make sure no more children die, they can't fight the war with hands behind their backs. This is not what I believe, but it is how the argument gets phrased. How do you beat it? Not by extolling the virtues of end-to-end encryption and the importance of your civil liberties, that's for sure.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
      Which wouldn't change that they obviously don't need more powers to do a fantastic job.
zerebubuth 10y ago
> So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? Many of the recent attacks, particularly those in the past week in Germany and in Nice, France, don't appear to have involved extensive planning. If that's the case, then it would follow that there wasn't much communication to monitor. Therefore this bill would have no effect on the attacks or attackers. However, the increased access to information by the spying services may result in many more false positives and either an increase in resources needed to sustain the service, or a drop in effectiveness, perhaps leading to an increase in the number of successful attacks. [1] > If not, then what would reduce the attacks and why are the authorities not doing it already? The Aarhus model [2] appears to be effective, but perhaps is difficult to "sell" politically? Maybe bulk data collection and machine learning are being presented as a "silver bullet", and quicker than training up many police officers and giving the time for them to regain the trust of the communities they serve. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/new-snowden-document-reveals-uk-spy-agency-warned-of-too-much-data-risk-in-2010/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/new-snowden-document-revea... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/home-jihadi-denmark-radical-islamic-extremism-aarhus-model-scandinavia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/home-jihadi-de...
- blowski 10y ago
  I will definitely read about the "Aarhus Model" - it truly is what I believe we should be doing a lot more of. However, I'd be interested in seeing what critics say about it, and some authoritative data. You're probably right about the other stuff as well. Personally, I'm as worried about the links between the recent attacks, mental illness and poverty as I am about radical Islam. The governments are probably being oversold on what's possible with the technology, as well as how secure it will all be. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of quicker fix. These attacks are playing into the hands of the extreme right (and left), so something needs to be done quickly if only to prevent us electing Donald Trump and his ilk.
Sylos 10y ago
You're not going to get much else than comments explaining how ineffective these measures are when you are asking how ineffective they are. That being said, let me explain how ineffective they are: Your law-abiding citizen will give up their encryption, but this doesn't raise the bar much for a criminal to get it. It's still just a matter of minutes until you have an encryption-implementation which is not compromised. You might get the occasional idiot-criminal who doesn't think of getting proper encryption which you therefore might be able to stop, but that's about it. And on the other side, you expose your entire population to criminals who might steal their not-properly-encrypted information, as well as putting the country at risk of devolving into Totalitarianism. And even if none of that happens, you still have the Panopticon-effect which can have severe negative effects on mental health.
- blowski 10y ago
  If it reduced the number of attacks by, say, 20% would it be worth it?
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Where did you get that number? And "20% reduction" is meaningless without saying 20% of what. Like, 20% reduction of a 1/1000000 chance is not the same as a 20% reduction of a 1/3 chance. There are two common fallacies I see here. The first happens a lot with interpreting carcinogenicity or toxicity studies, where an X% increase/decrease is quoted without an absolute value. The second happens in the stereotypical startup pitch of "if only we could get just 20% of that market" -- it's a made-up number with no basis for why that is the right number.
    - blowski 10y ago
      It is a completely made up number. If your argument against increased surveillance is based on its ineffectiveness, then there has to be a level of effectiveness where you would agree that that it's acceptable.
      - 10y ago
grey-area 10y ago
A free society cannot stop attacks by (for example) driving a vehicle at a crowd. There is no magic solution but there are plenty of solutions proposed in fear and panic that would destroy the very things they purport to defend. Even if it would work, is it worth living under tyranny to defeat terrorism?
fweespeech 10y ago
> So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? If not, then what would reduce the attacks and why are the authorities not doing it already? If it will reduce the attacks, how much does it have to reduce them before we accept the intrusion on privacy as a necessary evil? France has the most draconian laws of any Western country atm and there is no evidence attacks in France have been reduced. They currently hold the false belief that the reason attacks succeed is because they are handled primarily via encryption. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after-endless-demonization-encryption-police-find-paris-attackers-coordinated-via-unencrypted-sms.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after... > The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use any encryption whatsoever (read: existing capabilities stopped the Belgium attacks and could have stopped the Paris attacks, but didn't). That's of course not to say batshit religious cults like ISIS don't use encryption, and won't do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe -- is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/europe/attack-in-nice-france-represents-terrorisms-new-reality.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/europe/attack-in-nic... > For all the years of worry that terrorists would develop more sophisticated methods, Thursday’s attack in Nice realized a fear that turned out to be far worse: a form of violence so crude that it renders many of our usual defenses useless. These aren't sophisticated people and they've correctly determined the government isn't capable of stopping attacks via communication mechanisms they actively monitor.
Blahah 10y ago
I appreciate you're playing devil's advocate, so I'm holding back. "There's a security problem in Europe at the moment". What are you talking about? The number of people harmed in terrorism-related events in Europe in any given year is dwarfed by the number of people who harm themselves by accident or stupidity in those same countries. And dwarfed to an even greater extent by the number of people killed by police in the USA, or killed in mass shootings that don't get attributed to terrorism in the USA. It is the media attention given to the situation, not the situation itself, that is terrifying. Europe is extremely safe and does not have a security problem. The entire western world has a problem with xenophobia. It can't control its own politicians who lead military assaults on middle eastern or north african nations for purportedly moralistic reasons. Assaults that are guaranteed to alienate entire generations of people and incite preditable retaliatory violence. Nothing about the proposed privacy intrusions helps protect people from 'terrorism'. It feeds a cycle of ineffectual security theatre and provocation of western-produced radical activism that makes us all less safe. With one hand we create and promote terrorism, and with the other we strip ourselves of our freedoms and march toward technological totalitarianism.
- tasqa 10y ago
  I simply cannot upvote your comment enough. Very consise and to the point IMHO.
  - sdoering 10y ago
    And I can only second this.
  - astronautjones 10y ago
    Indeed, you've put it better than most have. The voice of reason seems to be getting drowned out more each day
    - lettergram 10y ago
      #thankthemedia
- 10y ago
pmarreck 10y ago
An infamous country tried the "intrusion on privacy" route, with a result one could best characterize as "chilling." It was called East Germany. It would behoove everyone to watch the excellent dramatic film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others .
mrmondo 10y ago
If nothing else the last two decades have shown us that people planning harmful attacks tend not to use complex, digital methods of communication and innocent people tend to. I'm like a sardine on a train so I can't easily provide references now but that in itself should be enough to say 'YOU'RE NOT TARGETING VIOLENT CRIMINALS - YOU'RE TARGETING THE PUBLIC! (and likely corporate / political competition)' and that should be that.
tomjen3 10y ago
The security problem is lone wolfs, who by definition don't talk with others so this wouldn't have any effect on them. Even if it did you would get the same result by limiting the law to Muslims.

by blowski 10y ago

lostlogin 10y ago

Is there a security problem now or has their always been one and we just hear about it now? Secondly, in some (many?) of the recent cases, the perpetrators were "known" to police and intelligence services. How does having more info help of they don't act on what's already held?

hobs 10y ago

Likely no impact, because no facility on earth has the capacity to filter and find information on this scale, especially when simple techniques are employed to hide the meaning of communication. The methods needed to reduce attacks (geopolitical unrest resolved) is probably not within the capacity of the police forces we have, and even pretty good safety is so expensive no one is willing to pay for it (even if we did all agree to register every action we took with the government.) There is no government action which can promise results when it comes to motivated attacks, so when you hear "oh if we allow this police action then terrorist attacks will stop." you are hearing purposeful naivete at the best, and power grabs at the worst.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising any flags. Buy bleach at one store and ammonia at another, say you're cleaning if anybody asks, then find a public place to mix the two. Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murder. A determined killer will always find a way. Nobody wants to soberly admit that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks are to keep people from wanting to do so in the first place, which is a long and imperfect process with absolutely no guarantee of success. A lot of America's mass shooters are simply deranged and hungry for national infamy.
- blowski 10y ago
  It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.
  - throwawayawaya 10y ago
    I have a lock so that if I am burgled my insurance will pay out.
  - toyg 10y ago
    The lock on my door is basically a legal seal: the door itself is often so flimsy, you could probably kick it in, but because there is a lock, you can't then claim you entered by accident or that you assumed it was ok to enter. This is why effectiveness is relatively secondary. This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    No, I think you're taking it too far. We only need to conclude that the minimal benefits from the proposal (i.e., few attackes would actually be averted) are vastly outweighed by the extreme cost to our civil liberties. There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases. But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.
    - blowski 10y ago
      Other people - probably the majority of the UK population based on opinion polls and elections - weigh the balance differently. We (HN readers) are probably in the extreme minority, and we are not necessarily right.
blowski 10y ago
So if it was technically possible to filter and find the information, and voters elected governments who said they were prepared to pay for it, would that make it a better idea?
- nitrogen 10y ago
  It sounds like you are trying to use the foot-in-the-door technique. But you are looking at just one concern being very hypothetically alleviated, when there are many many other reasons that have been repeatedly discussed for years. So in practice, the answer to your question is no, and there is no reasonably considered theory where the answer would be yes.
  - blowski 10y ago
    I agree with you wholeheartedly. The risk of saying "we shouldn't do this because it won't work" is that it only has to work a little bit for the argument against it to fail. And it will certainly work a little bit at reducing one type of terrorism, just not enough to outweigh all the other negative effects. That said, I would also like to see more discussion of alternatives instead of just saying "it'll never work".
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      The alternatives I want to see discussed all involve cultural changes. Sometimes when I try to discuss these with people they get fixated on shifting 100% of blame onto the attackers and 0% onto culture/society/foreign policy/poverty/whatever, but assigning blame is a completely pointless activity and the question needs to be what will actually work, not what will feel good to our primitive instincts for vengeance. Some hypothetical approaches for discussion: - Convincing violent groups to be less violent; demonstrating that they can get more of what they want by participating in society than by attacking it (a multi-generational issue) - Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health - Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries - Accepting what remains of the problem as if it's a natural disaster (e.g. just as people accept or ignore the 1000x worse problem of traffic deaths)
tjl 10y ago
Back in the 90s, I was doing telecommunications standards and one operator proposed storing all the performance information right on the optical switches. Given that a large amount of performance metrics were being generated every second, the vendors all had looks of horror on their face. Seeing that nobody else from a vendor was going to speak up, I calmly explained just what he was asking for. We could theoretically do it, but the cost would be massive. He promptly dropped the proposal.
nl 10y ago
Likely no impact, because no facility on earth has the capacity to filter and find information on this scale, especially when simple techniques are employed to hide the meaning of communication This is a very naive argument. Of course it is possible. I can search all my Facebook messages now. We know the NSA can search a large proportion of the world's internet traffic.

morsch 10y ago

Europe doesn't clearly have a security problem. A few insane people committing political violence doesn't change the fact that Europe is among the safest places on the planet.

blowski 10y ago
At a data level, you are more likely to die or be injured in a politically-motivated attack today than you were 10 years ago. Attacks are now more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more deadly - even if only on a very small percentage level. Even if it's not a problem today (in your opinion), then either that trend has to be reversed or it will become a problem at some point.
- yandie 10y ago
  Can you provide the source of your data about the risk of dying?
  - blowski 10y ago
    For most of the last 20 years, fatalities in terrorist attacks in (Western) Europe were in single figures. There were three exceptions - the Madrid trains in 2004, London bombings in 2005, and the Oslo shootings in 2011. See http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-chart-10 http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-c... Last year, that increased to around 100, this time based on 2 attacks (both in Paris, France). So far this year, there have been nearly 300 fatalities over 9 separate incidents: http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-europe-terror-20160715-snap-htmlstory.html http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-europe-terror-2016... Correction: there were around 170 fatalities in 2015, and there have been around 150 so far in 2016.
    - morsch 10y ago
      That's nearly 300 (speficially, 278) fatalities over the last two years, not this year.

slg 10y ago

Taking this logic a step further, what is the effect of this intrusion on privacy? Is it a philosophical problem or a real world problem? To borrow a tech phrase, are we talking about free as in speech or beer? I think that is the stage in the debate that convinces most normal people. Losing privacy of their gmail account to some faceless government entity is a theoretical problem that has no real impact on their lives. Terrorism on the other hand is a real world problem with easy to see consequences. I think most pragmatic non-techy people are willing to make that trade. If you want to change their mind, focus on showing how loss of privacy has real world effects.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
> Terrorism on the other hand is a real world problem with easy to see consequences. No, it's not. Just as the risks of loss of privacy are much higher than generally perceived, the risks of terrorism are much lower than generally perceived. Terrorism is perceived as a problem, but it really isn't, in most parts of Europe. Car crashes are a real world problem. Terrorism isn't. (Now, I am obviously not saying that governments should simply blindly ignore terrorism risks--but overall, it really isn't a big problem, and there almost certainly are risks where most of the money would be better spent trying to reduce fatalities.)
- blowski 10y ago
  > Terrorism is perceived as a problem, but it really isn't, in most parts of Europe Perhaps that's because the security services are doing such a fantastic job. To make sure it's not a problem in all of Europe and make sure no more children die, they can't fight the war with hands behind their backs. This is not what I believe, but it is how the argument gets phrased. How do you beat it? Not by extolling the virtues of end-to-end encryption and the importance of your civil liberties, that's for sure.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
    Which wouldn't change that they obviously don't need more powers to do a fantastic job.

zerebubuth 10y ago

> So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? Many of the recent attacks, particularly those in the past week in Germany and in Nice, France, don't appear to have involved extensive planning. If that's the case, then it would follow that there wasn't much communication to monitor. Therefore this bill would have no effect on the attacks or attackers. However, the increased access to information by the spying services may result in many more false positives and either an increase in resources needed to sustain the service, or a drop in effectiveness, perhaps leading to an increase in the number of successful attacks. [1] > If not, then what would reduce the attacks and why are the authorities not doing it already? The Aarhus model [2] appears to be effective, but perhaps is difficult to "sell" politically? Maybe bulk data collection and machine learning are being presented as a "silver bullet", and quicker than training up many police officers and giving the time for them to regain the trust of the communities they serve. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/new-snowden-document-reveals-uk-spy-agency-warned-of-too-much-data-risk-in-2010/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/07/new-snowden-document-revea... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/home-jihadi-denmark-radical-islamic-extremism-aarhus-model-scandinavia https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/23/home-jihadi-de...

blowski 10y ago
I will definitely read about the "Aarhus Model" - it truly is what I believe we should be doing a lot more of. However, I'd be interested in seeing what critics say about it, and some authoritative data. You're probably right about the other stuff as well. Personally, I'm as worried about the links between the recent attacks, mental illness and poverty as I am about radical Islam. The governments are probably being oversold on what's possible with the technology, as well as how secure it will all be. However, I do think there needs to be some kind of quicker fix. These attacks are playing into the hands of the extreme right (and left), so something needs to be done quickly if only to prevent us electing Donald Trump and his ilk.

Sylos 10y ago

You're not going to get much else than comments explaining how ineffective these measures are when you are asking how ineffective they are. That being said, let me explain how ineffective they are: Your law-abiding citizen will give up their encryption, but this doesn't raise the bar much for a criminal to get it. It's still just a matter of minutes until you have an encryption-implementation which is not compromised. You might get the occasional idiot-criminal who doesn't think of getting proper encryption which you therefore might be able to stop, but that's about it. And on the other side, you expose your entire population to criminals who might steal their not-properly-encrypted information, as well as putting the country at risk of devolving into Totalitarianism. And even if none of that happens, you still have the Panopticon-effect which can have severe negative effects on mental health.

blowski 10y ago
If it reduced the number of attacks by, say, 20% would it be worth it?
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Where did you get that number? And "20% reduction" is meaningless without saying 20% of what. Like, 20% reduction of a 1/1000000 chance is not the same as a 20% reduction of a 1/3 chance. There are two common fallacies I see here. The first happens a lot with interpreting carcinogenicity or toxicity studies, where an X% increase/decrease is quoted without an absolute value. The second happens in the stereotypical startup pitch of "if only we could get just 20% of that market" -- it's a made-up number with no basis for why that is the right number.
  - blowski 10y ago
    It is a completely made up number. If your argument against increased surveillance is based on its ineffectiveness, then there has to be a level of effectiveness where you would agree that that it's acceptable.
    - 10y ago

grey-area 10y ago

A free society cannot stop attacks by (for example) driving a vehicle at a crowd. There is no magic solution but there are plenty of solutions proposed in fear and panic that would destroy the very things they purport to defend. Even if it would work, is it worth living under tyranny to defeat terrorism?

fweespeech 10y ago

> So will this bill reduce, increase or have no effect on the attacks? If not, then what would reduce the attacks and why are the authorities not doing it already? If it will reduce the attacks, how much does it have to reduce them before we accept the intrusion on privacy as a necessary evil? France has the most draconian laws of any Western country atm and there is no evidence attacks in France have been reduced. They currently hold the false belief that the reason attacks succeed is because they are handled primarily via encryption. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after-endless-demonization-encryption-police-find-paris-attackers-coordinated-via-unencrypted-sms.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151118/08474732854/after... > The reports note that Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the "mastermind" of both the Paris attacks and a thwarted Belgium attack ten months ago, failed to use any encryption whatsoever (read: existing capabilities stopped the Belgium attacks and could have stopped the Paris attacks, but didn't). That's of course not to say batshit religious cults like ISIS don't use encryption, and won't do so going forward. Everybody uses encryption. But the point remains that to use a tragedy to vilify encryption, push for surveillance expansion, and pass backdoor laws that will make everybody less safe -- is nearly as gruesome as the attacks themselves. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/europe/attack-in-nice-france-represents-terrorisms-new-reality.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/world/europe/attack-in-nic... > For all the years of worry that terrorists would develop more sophisticated methods, Thursday’s attack in Nice realized a fear that turned out to be far worse: a form of violence so crude that it renders many of our usual defenses useless. These aren't sophisticated people and they've correctly determined the government isn't capable of stopping attacks via communication mechanisms they actively monitor.

Blahah 10y ago

I appreciate you're playing devil's advocate, so I'm holding back. "There's a security problem in Europe at the moment". What are you talking about? The number of people harmed in terrorism-related events in Europe in any given year is dwarfed by the number of people who harm themselves by accident or stupidity in those same countries. And dwarfed to an even greater extent by the number of people killed by police in the USA, or killed in mass shootings that don't get attributed to terrorism in the USA. It is the media attention given to the situation, not the situation itself, that is terrifying. Europe is extremely safe and does not have a security problem. The entire western world has a problem with xenophobia. It can't control its own politicians who lead military assaults on middle eastern or north african nations for purportedly moralistic reasons. Assaults that are guaranteed to alienate entire generations of people and incite preditable retaliatory violence. Nothing about the proposed privacy intrusions helps protect people from 'terrorism'. It feeds a cycle of ineffectual security theatre and provocation of western-produced radical activism that makes us all less safe. With one hand we create and promote terrorism, and with the other we strip ourselves of our freedoms and march toward technological totalitarianism.

tasqa 10y ago
I simply cannot upvote your comment enough. Very consise and to the point IMHO.
- sdoering 10y ago
  And I can only second this.
- astronautjones 10y ago
  Indeed, you've put it better than most have. The voice of reason seems to be getting drowned out more each day
  - lettergram 10y ago
    #thankthemedia
10y ago

pmarreck 10y ago

An infamous country tried the "intrusion on privacy" route, with a result one could best characterize as "chilling." It was called East Germany. It would behoove everyone to watch the excellent dramatic film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others .

mrmondo 10y ago

If nothing else the last two decades have shown us that people planning harmful attacks tend not to use complex, digital methods of communication and innocent people tend to. I'm like a sardine on a train so I can't easily provide references now but that in itself should be enough to say 'YOU'RE NOT TARGETING VIOLENT CRIMINALS - YOU'RE TARGETING THE PUBLIC! (and likely corporate / political competition)' and that should be that.

tomjen3 10y ago

The security problem is lone wolfs, who by definition don't talk with others so this wouldn't have any effect on them. Even if it did you would get the same result by limiting the law to Muslims.