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To me, the big question is what a trustworthy political solution would look like. I see this desire raised a lot, in contexts from HN to Valley-mocking pieces

To me, the big question is what a trustworthy political solution would look like. I see this desire raised a lot, in contexts from HN to Valley-mocking pieces on how encryption is no substitute for advocacy. I completely understand the instinct, but every incarnation of it seems to struggle with the same question. Namely: how do you know when you've won? Restrictions against collecting data on US citizens didn't produce the expected results. Testimony to Congress didn't accurately depict what's collected, even in secret. In the early days, the existence of these agencies was classified to help go around restrictions on existing agencies. Years ago, back in the Puzzle Palace days, the DoJ cited systematic criminality but concluded that they were unable to prosecute it. So... what does winning look like? What regulation, what testimony, what promise could possibly convince people that a solution had been reached, even for the moment?

zigzigzag 10y ago
Genuine accountability. Rules that are enforced against the elites.
- lerpa 10y ago
  That would not happen with anything short of a revolution, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech.
ryandrake 10y ago
You never win. To use a controversial example: Who thinks abortion rights people "won" with Roe v Wade? Their opponents have been relentlessly chipping away at that "victory" ever since. When you make something a political issue, you are guaranteeing that it cannot be won with any kind of finality.
- rhizome 10y ago
  After Roe, antiabortion strategies had to change. You can say that this was a weakness of Roe, but I think it's complex enough of a situation not to attribute it to a root cause. I prefer to think of this in terms of the Red Queen Syndrome[1]: solving problems reveals new ones. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  I agree, but I'm talking about a scale even shorter than that. Roe v Wade was a clear and unambiguous advance for abortion rights, and the battle lines are now arrayed somewhere different than they were before Roe. The fight isn't over, but it's fairly clear who holds what. I'm talking about even knowing when you've made progress. If a federal directive came through tomorrow expansively forbidding the NSA from collecting data on US citizens, privacy advocates wouldn't even hope that bulk surveillance of citizens would stop. They know better, because it basically happened, and the definitions of words got rearranged until the program could continue unabated. Political issues aren't settled until they fade into consensus belief, but it's usually possible to make progress and then defend it. On surveillance and privacy, there's no law or court decision or whistleblower or even prosecution that can guarantee things aren't continuing exactly the way you didn't want them to.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    On the current situation on the US, you'll know privacy advocates made progress when people start going to jail. No sooner.
  - yuhong 10y ago
    I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where for example police departments compete for resources, basically to make their own department bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far as Ron Paul suggests, but....
    - lettergram 10y ago
      The current libertarian candidates are pretty moderate compared to Ron Paul (or either major party for that matter) I recommend looking into them.
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    Exactly. This is why the fight to maintain gun rights is a never ending battle as well. Arming yourself with a gun is the best defense against a violent attacker. Legally enshrining that right is important. But even if we didn't have that right, we could still defend ourselves clandestinely via illegal means and home made weapons. Similarly when it comes to security, privacy, and anonymity the best defense is to arm yourself with mathematical security.And to enshrine our right to those defenses in law. A subpoena only works if there is information that can be handed over in the first place. If strong and private encryption is made illegal then the best defense is still to use that technology clandestinely.
- eternalban 10y ago
  > Their opponents have been relentlessly chipping away at that "victory" ever since. There, the "opponents" are a subset of society that have a legitimate right to not to agree with the decision and they are acting within the public framework of our governance to overturn a decision. Here, the "opponents" of strict privacy rights are spooks and crooks in government and international corporations. It is entirely a differnet matter. Established inherent rights -- specifically the rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and protection from unreasonable search and seizures -- need to be protected in context of new capabilities afforded by modern communication, surveillance, and data retention technologies. Corporations will not pull a dissenting "Roe vs Wade" that would challenge citizen rights. Just let them try that. Overreaching elements and sub-systems of the government can try and present cases where our (updated) rights present obstacles to their performances of their legitimate legally mandated activities. And there is ample precedence for oversight for such matters. A technological cold war with government and industry on the technological field is not a realistic option. First of all, it is politically useless since that approach implies that the constitutional framework and our entire system is in effect broken. Second, the "mathematical" bit in the secure and private mediated communication systems is the only element where one could possibly argue for parity in terms of the contending parties' capabilities. Why pick a losing fight when there remains the constitutional field where we have the upper hand, by definition. [edit: minor cleanup]
  - aabaker99 10y ago
    Enacting laws under the guise of trying to improve women's health with the effect of closing abortion clinics is only surface level "acting within the public framework of our governance". These laws are ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I claim the legislators and their supporters knew this before they enacted the laws. Unfortunately they also know that it will take the Supreme Court time to make this ruling. And in that time the state laws will act to close many abortion clinics. It doesn't seem very legitimate to me.
- snowwrestler 10y ago
  > When you make something a political issue, you are guaranteeing that it cannot be won with any kind of finality. But you also set up the infrastructure to fight the good fight forever. Which is what it takes to make democracy work, and work well. Because everything important is a political issue, whether you want it to be or not. The Superconducting Supercollider, which was as clear a piece of pure science as you could imagine, was killed by politics. End to end encryption could be too. Honestly, a major reason we are in this mess now is that for decades Silicon Valley has avoided politics and tried to pretend that the federal government does not exist. Now that it can't be ignored anymore, the tech industry does not have any of the civic institutions needed to build broad public support for its issues.
  - lettergram 10y ago
    I don't think that it's Silicon Valley avoided politics.. They literally used to work solely for the government.
- meowface 10y ago
  Roe v. Wade was still a great start and major victory, relatively speaking. Change takes time. It's a bit more complicated here, though, since so much of this activity is clandestine. We can't know what rules they may be breaking (unintentionally or otherwise).
- wodencafe 10y ago
  >You never win. What about human slavery?
AJ007 10y ago
You can no longer decouple strong cryptography from the global economy, that could be considered a strong political solution because it represents a loss of political control.
curun1r 10y ago
> what does winning look like? At this point, winning looks like the people responsible for abusing their power and overstepping their constitutional authority going to jail. And for a long time. As long as the only consequence of illegal activity that violates the constitutional rights of citizens is being told to stop, there will be continued efforts to chip away and push the envelope for what they can get away with. If it were made apparent that there are personal consequences above and beyond the scope of their jobs, perhaps some of the people in those jobs would more carefully consider the constitutionality of their actions.
tempodox 10y ago
Essentially, there is no trustworthy political solution, because politics can always change. As long as the people say, “I've got nothing to hide”, surveillance fans and fear mongers will always find the necessary support.
- lettergram 10y ago
  I always ask, "what happens if it's suddenly illegal to be gay, drink, take selfies, or worse?" I don't think I've ever left a conversation where a person said that and they left not at minimum answering that question. What's scary, is some people seem to want that stuff - as long as it's not them getting taken away and thrown in a cell.

zigzigzag 10y ago

Genuine accountability. Rules that are enforced against the elites.

lerpa 10y ago
That would not happen with anything short of a revolution, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech.

ryandrake 10y ago

You never win. To use a controversial example: Who thinks abortion rights people "won" with Roe v Wade? Their opponents have been relentlessly chipping away at that "victory" ever since. When you make something a political issue, you are guaranteeing that it cannot be won with any kind of finality.

rhizome 10y ago
After Roe, antiabortion strategies had to change. You can say that this was a weakness of Roe, but I think it's complex enough of a situation not to attribute it to a root cause. I prefer to think of this in terms of the Red Queen Syndrome[1]: solving problems reveals new ones. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
Bartweiss 10y ago
I agree, but I'm talking about a scale even shorter than that. Roe v Wade was a clear and unambiguous advance for abortion rights, and the battle lines are now arrayed somewhere different than they were before Roe. The fight isn't over, but it's fairly clear who holds what. I'm talking about even knowing when you've made progress. If a federal directive came through tomorrow expansively forbidding the NSA from collecting data on US citizens, privacy advocates wouldn't even hope that bulk surveillance of citizens would stop. They know better, because it basically happened, and the definitions of words got rearranged until the program could continue unabated. Political issues aren't settled until they fade into consensus belief, but it's usually possible to make progress and then defend it. On surveillance and privacy, there's no law or court decision or whistleblower or even prosecution that can guarantee things aren't continuing exactly the way you didn't want them to.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  On the current situation on the US, you'll know privacy advocates made progress when people start going to jail. No sooner.
- yuhong 10y ago
  I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where for example police departments compete for resources, basically to make their own department bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far as Ron Paul suggests, but....
  - lettergram 10y ago
    The current libertarian candidates are pretty moderate compared to Ron Paul (or either major party for that matter) I recommend looking into them.
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  Exactly. This is why the fight to maintain gun rights is a never ending battle as well. Arming yourself with a gun is the best defense against a violent attacker. Legally enshrining that right is important. But even if we didn't have that right, we could still defend ourselves clandestinely via illegal means and home made weapons. Similarly when it comes to security, privacy, and anonymity the best defense is to arm yourself with mathematical security.And to enshrine our right to those defenses in law. A subpoena only works if there is information that can be handed over in the first place. If strong and private encryption is made illegal then the best defense is still to use that technology clandestinely.
eternalban 10y ago
> Their opponents have been relentlessly chipping away at that "victory" ever since. There, the "opponents" are a subset of society that have a legitimate right to not to agree with the decision and they are acting within the public framework of our governance to overturn a decision. Here, the "opponents" of strict privacy rights are spooks and crooks in government and international corporations. It is entirely a differnet matter. Established inherent rights -- specifically the rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, and protection from unreasonable search and seizures -- need to be protected in context of new capabilities afforded by modern communication, surveillance, and data retention technologies. Corporations will not pull a dissenting "Roe vs Wade" that would challenge citizen rights. Just let them try that. Overreaching elements and sub-systems of the government can try and present cases where our (updated) rights present obstacles to their performances of their legitimate legally mandated activities. And there is ample precedence for oversight for such matters. A technological cold war with government and industry on the technological field is not a realistic option. First of all, it is politically useless since that approach implies that the constitutional framework and our entire system is in effect broken. Second, the "mathematical" bit in the secure and private mediated communication systems is the only element where one could possibly argue for parity in terms of the contending parties' capabilities. Why pick a losing fight when there remains the constitutional field where we have the upper hand, by definition. [edit: minor cleanup]
- aabaker99 10y ago
  Enacting laws under the guise of trying to improve women's health with the effect of closing abortion clinics is only surface level "acting within the public framework of our governance". These laws are ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. I claim the legislators and their supporters knew this before they enacted the laws. Unfortunately they also know that it will take the Supreme Court time to make this ruling. And in that time the state laws will act to close many abortion clinics. It doesn't seem very legitimate to me.
snowwrestler 10y ago
> When you make something a political issue, you are guaranteeing that it cannot be won with any kind of finality. But you also set up the infrastructure to fight the good fight forever. Which is what it takes to make democracy work, and work well. Because everything important is a political issue, whether you want it to be or not. The Superconducting Supercollider, which was as clear a piece of pure science as you could imagine, was killed by politics. End to end encryption could be too. Honestly, a major reason we are in this mess now is that for decades Silicon Valley has avoided politics and tried to pretend that the federal government does not exist. Now that it can't be ignored anymore, the tech industry does not have any of the civic institutions needed to build broad public support for its issues.
- lettergram 10y ago
  I don't think that it's Silicon Valley avoided politics.. They literally used to work solely for the government.
meowface 10y ago
Roe v. Wade was still a great start and major victory, relatively speaking. Change takes time. It's a bit more complicated here, though, since so much of this activity is clandestine. We can't know what rules they may be breaking (unintentionally or otherwise).
wodencafe 10y ago
>You never win. What about human slavery?

AJ007 10y ago

You can no longer decouple strong cryptography from the global economy, that could be considered a strong political solution because it represents a loss of political control.

curun1r 10y ago

> what does winning look like? At this point, winning looks like the people responsible for abusing their power and overstepping their constitutional authority going to jail. And for a long time. As long as the only consequence of illegal activity that violates the constitutional rights of citizens is being told to stop, there will be continued efforts to chip away and push the envelope for what they can get away with. If it were made apparent that there are personal consequences above and beyond the scope of their jobs, perhaps some of the people in those jobs would more carefully consider the constitutionality of their actions.

tempodox 10y ago

Essentially, there is no trustworthy political solution, because politics can always change. As long as the people say, “I've got nothing to hide”, surveillance fans and fear mongers will always find the necessary support.

lettergram 10y ago
I always ask, "what happens if it's suddenly illegal to be gay, drink, take selfies, or worse?" I don't think I've ever left a conversation where a person said that and they left not at minimum answering that question. What's scary, is some people seem to want that stuff - as long as it's not them getting taken away and thrown in a cell.