5 ms·

Hmm, this definitely brings up an interesting discussion I don't think HN has had before, especially something in a similar vein since Apple+San Bernardino fias

by ktta 10y ago

Hmm, this definitely brings up an interesting discussion I don't think HN has had before, especially something in a similar vein since Apple+San Bernardino fiasco. Obviously privacy is something that HN holds very close to its heart. But I'm interested in what do people here have to say about the privacy features are used by terrible people to do terrible things. And I want to share something that I think is one of the best arguments for privacy, complete privacy. I do agree with this completely: https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/ https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

fwn 10y ago
I strongly believe that tools are ethically neutral. A hammer, a knife or a government can be pretty useful, or pretty violent - depending on how you use it. This alone does not imply that a hammer, a knife or a government should not exist or be banned. edit: words
- tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  It's interesting when you extend that discussion to guns, in the UK guns are quite difficult to get hold of, I wonder what the incident at Westminster would have looked like if they were as available as they are in the US. As always it's a trade off, some people loose the right to arm themselves at home but that means other people may not loose their life to a shooting.
  - darfs 10y ago
    There is no other way to use a gun than shooting with it. (Useful! Of course you could use it like a hammer, but... Srsly.) It's whole purpose is, to hurt someone; i think that's some point to acknowledge first.
    - ajmurmann 10y ago
      You can go hunting with it or shoot for fun or make yourself feel safer. What can I do with encryption other than encrypt messages I want to hide? //Playing devil's advocate
      - danieldk 10y ago
        Well, there are very good reasons to hide messages. First of all, I don't want any company in transit, from my ISP, to the message broker, to the receivers ISP to mine my data and use/sell it for profit. Secondly, there are a lot of messages which are not illegal, but can be personally embarrassing if they were to become public. Think of sexually-tinted messages, psychological help, a kid who lives in a very conservative community and has doubts about their religion, discussions about a candidate for a job position, etc. The problem with backdoor is that the question is not if they are exploited, but when they are exploited. And this is all assuming that the organization that has backdoor access is not of ill will.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    I had this thought as well. However, the comparison to knives seems better. It's pretty hard to make your own gun. It's pretty straight forward to make your own encryption app on top of existing OSS libraries. Like it's pretty easy to make your own makeshift, large knife. Maybe I just see it like that because I'm a software developer though.
    - Neliquat 10y ago
      It is not. Smash "home made gun" into youtube sometime. $30 at any hardware store and you have a functioning shotgun.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    That would mean the 1st cop he stabbed, who was unarmed, might have stopped it. Its dumb to play whatif in these situations.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  What about guns, tanks or hydrogen bombs?
  - goodplay 10y ago
    tools designed to directly cause destruction are not similar to tools designed to provide privacy.
    - petre 10y ago
      However they were treated as such by US export regulations.
      - goodplay 10y ago
        How does does this counter my point?
- ktta 10y ago
  > I strongly believe that tools are ethically neutral. Well, that's a very evasive argument in my opinion. It's absolutely true that objects are neutral, but you can't make a blanket argument with topics like these. That argument has been made lots of times by many (including me). But it eventually breaks down. You can't give a child a gun and when the kid shoots someone say it was the kid's fault. Whose fault is it? I'm guessing you're going to say the adult responsible for putting the gun within the reach of a child. You're still taking away an object from the kid. In this case it was a kid who didn't know better. Now this isn't a narrow argument. This becomes interesting when you get to powerful things, like say nuclear weapons. They aren't inherently evil too. But if you look around, UN is trying to ban them[1]. Shouldn't UN ban them? What I'm trying to get at is that you can't always but the blame on people. Just like you can't blame a child for not knowing better, you can't blame a person for knowing better (although people do). Sometimes you just have to take the gun (or nuclear weapons or encryption) away. [1]: https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/ https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/
  - LoSboccacc 10y ago
    on the other hand a huge nuclear arsenal maintained a long period of peace during a troubled time, so there's that
    - ktta 10y ago
      > long period of peace What if the huge nuclear arsenal was in the wrong hands? That begs the question, what is 'wrong'? Your definition of peace was probably characterized as oppression/dominance by the people who did want to revolt. You don't account for the extremely subjective nature of things, especially when it comes to nationalistic actions of people.
    - natch 10y ago
      It arguably has so far, but let's not get too smug about it. The end of that story has not yet been written.
  - fwn 10y ago
    I always thought that putting the blame on actual agents instead of stuff is the direct opposite of being evasive. You rightly said that I will answer that it was the adults fault. The bad act done with the weapon was giving it to a child, not the childs shooting someone. It gets clearer if the adult hands the weapon to a monkey or a randomized shooting machine. All three scenarios change nothing in regard to the moral responsibility of the adult. I do not know whether the UN should ban nuclear weapons, but if someone uses a nuclear weapon and we would check out who might be morally responsible for the attack, I'd point at the attacker.
- jansho 10y ago
  I believe the same. But what if these tools have too great impact if everything goes south? It happened with dynamites before, now look how jittery we are about nuclear. You can flip this for privacy too. The more governments can spy on everyone, well sure we may catch more terrorists and terrorism might even decrease. But at what cost? Totalitarianism? Shudder.
- ue_ 10y ago
  >or a government should not exist or be banned. I was with you up until 'government'. I regard states as exercising unjust authority over people and defenders of private property which is why I'm an anarcho-Communist. The way in which the modern world is divided up means that one must be a subject of some state, which I believe makes there no way to provide proper consent to be governed.
goodplay 10y ago
The thing is, banning encryption to fight terrorism makes as much difference as banning knifes to fight murder. Encryption is simple enough (in theory at least) and prevalent enough that banning it will only stop legitimate usage (e.g. personal privacy) without having any real impact on those who want to break the law. Modern steganography techniques make it easy for enterprising individuals to tunnel encrypted data over unencrypted channels; there is just too much randomness in the real world to exploit. Regardless of what delusional politicians want, encryption is here to stay. It's just a matter of how much people are willing to give up to feel safe.
guilhas 10y ago
I personally think if there is a warrant the company should provide information. The same way my house is private but if there is any kind of problem police has access to it. Although we should have mechanism to protect from mass random surveillance.
- natch 10y ago
  So, no matter how bad the government, and how ridiculous its laws (let's say they ban music, and dole out harsh punishments to people who dare listen to music), then we as technology providers should enable them to catch such people and punish them for their "crimes"? Saudi Arabia punishes rape victims. We should help with that? China punishes people who try to air grievances about government abuse and corruption. Again, we should enable them to be more effective in their invasive prying into those individuals than they already are? In North Korea, your entire family can be punished if you dare be disobedient to the government. In the US, we recently elected Donald Trump. Etc. etc... why do you think governments can be trusted with this power? On top of all that, once the technical means exist, they will also be discovered, cracked, and used by fraudsters, extortionists, and anyone else who can figure out a way to abuse the information.
  - guilhas 10y ago
    I can ask the same. Why should a suspected rapist, assassin, drug dealer, corrupt politician, be free or unjustly imprisoned, because of lack of evidence? Do you think we should help criminals? Nowadays here are other more efective ways, than encrypted WhatsApp (secrecy), to fight bad governments and ridiculous laws. North Korea and Saudi Arabia are obviously very extreme examples. Internet encryption must be the least of their worries. Governments with working justice systems should be trusted with power to provide security. There should be No technical means or backdoors globally accessible. Information should be provided on request basis, based on a warrant for that suspect. And data stored should follow data protection laws. If you think you country justice system is not working properly there are ways to fight that. And probably there will be people and institutions already doing.
    - 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
In some sort of abstract theoretical vacuum I might be persuaded to support some form of limited targeted warrant-based intercept. However, this is the real world, and I'd want the serious trust issues fixed first. Surveillance of journalists. Invasion of privacy by journalists with the complicity of corrupt police. Surveillance of peaceful left-wing and environmentalist groups. Let's not be ignorant of history either, of secret prisons and unaccountable courts. Let Martin McGuinness' death remind us of H block and the Maze. Who here is old enough to remember the bizarre compromise where Gerry Adams appeared on TV with his words read by an actor, because he was deemed too dangerous to listen to? Then there is the business of foreign intelligence agencies. If some communication isn't completely private, can it be compromised by the Russians? Remember the US election? We need to have a conversation about radicalisation, but much of it happens in public or verbally, and it's not at all limited to Islamic fundamentalism. It needs to include the far-right too.
- ktta 10y ago
  We all hope for a perfect world. But the problem is none of our perfect worlds are the same, so everyone of us end up living in our imperfect world. The expectations you have are something I'd agree with too, but many other don't. So how do you reconcile this? Again the reconciliation process you will come up with is perfect according to you but most likely not according to others. No one can ever win I guess.
cm2187 10y ago
Terrorism, and crime in general is a nuisance that we have to live with. You can have a society with no crime. All you need is a super repressive totalitarian state, total transparency with citizens reporting on each others, state surveillance everywhere. It will work. But first I don't want to live in such a state. And second these totalitarian states slide invariably toward corruption and state crimes. So we have to live with some level of crime. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be tough on criminals, but we have to accept that it is not possible in a free society to reach zero criminality. I think the paradox is that people are reasonably relaxed with some level of criminality but are absolutely intolerant to any form of terrorism. And this intolerance is a new phenomenon. Terrorism isn't new. There isn't more terrorism in Europe than 20 or 40 years ago. In fact a few months ago I compiled the number of incidents and victims from a wikipedia page [1]: https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Deads.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Deads.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Injured.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Injured.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Incidents.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Incidents.png As you can tell, the 70s and 80s were rather more brutal, with far-left, IRA and Palestinian terrorism. And our democracies resisted much better the temptation to introduce more surveillance. Now why have we become intolerant to terrorism? There are literally tens of thousands of knife attacks every year just in London. Most don't even make it to the local news. Why would this particular incident be treated as a state affair? Terrorism is the buzz of a mosquito. In itself pretty much harmless. But most people will not sleep in a room where they can hear the buzz. I don't have a good explanation. The only thing I can think of is the 24h news cycle where the media will make a big deal of anything that can push the audience up. But that doesn't explain everything. They do the same with plane crashes, but still repeat over and over that though spectacular, plane crashes are extremely rare and flying is extremely safe. Whereas when there is a terrorist attack, the message is "this could happen to YOU!" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe
- ktta 10y ago
  I completely agree. You are one of the very few! I have to ask, what's up with the domain name? Is that some sort of public windows share folder?
k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> But I'm interested in what do people here have to say about the privacy features are used by terrible people to do terrible things. Giving up such a valuable right to possibly stop attacks which, in the grand scheme of things actually harm very few people, is idiotic. Terrorism is obviously awful but the number of people in the UK actually affected by it is far, far too small to consider forgoing such an important right. And IMO, once you do that, the terrorists have won. Take the attack in London last week for example. It doesn't require planning. Anyone could get in a car and mow down a lot of people in seconds. It doesn't need discussion on WhatsApp. It doesn't require purchase of weapons. It doesn't require you to do anything shady that could give you away more than a second before you do it. No amount of intelligence gathering could figure it out. You could force every citizen to wear a mic and body cam and you still wouldn't be able to stop it. How about tackling the actual problem - terrorists seem to have resorted to using cars and trucks to kill people. Lets put up some metal/concrete bollards alone the edge of pavements that have no 'escape route', such as the one on Westminster Bridge.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  > How about tackling the actual problem - terrorists seem to have resorted to using cars and trucks to kill people. Lets put up some metal/concrete bollards alone the edge of pavements that have no 'escape route', such as the one on Westminster Bridge. Nice post. I agree almost entirely with you, but you can't put a bollard everywhere, and even if you could, bad people would find a way around or between the bollards, or simply another way to hurt people. It would be like playing a futile game of whack-a-mole. At the end of the day, there are people who are so mean-spirited that they want to hurt innocent people for no reason, and they will find a way to do that no matter what we do. Honestly I think a lot of it is mental health more than anything we can really protect against. It's not possible to wrap everyone in cotton wool, and in order to have some freedom we risk a small percentage of harm. There is no way around that. Without that freedom, there's also the IMO much larger risk of harm from the authorities themselves. There's no way around it, living in the world involves some risk. It's unrealistic to not accept that risk and fantasize that all outcomes are preventable. Like another comment mentioned, there are literally tens of thousands of stabbings in the UK every year. Why are we even talking about removing fundamental freedoms (the right to privacy) in order to probably not prevent a few unfortunate deaths per year? The payoff is so small and the cost is much too great.

by ktta 10y ago

fwn 10y ago

I strongly believe that tools are ethically neutral. A hammer, a knife or a government can be pretty useful, or pretty violent - depending on how you use it. This alone does not imply that a hammer, a knife or a government should not exist or be banned. edit: words

tonyedgecombe 10y ago
It's interesting when you extend that discussion to guns, in the UK guns are quite difficult to get hold of, I wonder what the incident at Westminster would have looked like if they were as available as they are in the US. As always it's a trade off, some people loose the right to arm themselves at home but that means other people may not loose their life to a shooting.
- darfs 10y ago
  There is no other way to use a gun than shooting with it. (Useful! Of course you could use it like a hammer, but... Srsly.) It's whole purpose is, to hurt someone; i think that's some point to acknowledge first.
  - ajmurmann 10y ago
    You can go hunting with it or shoot for fun or make yourself feel safer. What can I do with encryption other than encrypt messages I want to hide? //Playing devil's advocate
    - danieldk 10y ago
      Well, there are very good reasons to hide messages. First of all, I don't want any company in transit, from my ISP, to the message broker, to the receivers ISP to mine my data and use/sell it for profit. Secondly, there are a lot of messages which are not illegal, but can be personally embarrassing if they were to become public. Think of sexually-tinted messages, psychological help, a kid who lives in a very conservative community and has doubts about their religion, discussions about a candidate for a job position, etc. The problem with backdoor is that the question is not if they are exploited, but when they are exploited. And this is all assuming that the organization that has backdoor access is not of ill will.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- ajmurmann 10y ago
  I had this thought as well. However, the comparison to knives seems better. It's pretty hard to make your own gun. It's pretty straight forward to make your own encryption app on top of existing OSS libraries. Like it's pretty easy to make your own makeshift, large knife. Maybe I just see it like that because I'm a software developer though.
  - Neliquat 10y ago
    It is not. Smash "home made gun" into youtube sometime. $30 at any hardware store and you have a functioning shotgun.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  That would mean the 1st cop he stabbed, who was unarmed, might have stopped it. Its dumb to play whatif in these situations.
nileshtrivedi 10y ago
What about guns, tanks or hydrogen bombs?
- goodplay 10y ago
  tools designed to directly cause destruction are not similar to tools designed to provide privacy.
  - petre 10y ago
    However they were treated as such by US export regulations.
    - goodplay 10y ago
      How does does this counter my point?
ktta 10y ago
> I strongly believe that tools are ethically neutral. Well, that's a very evasive argument in my opinion. It's absolutely true that objects are neutral, but you can't make a blanket argument with topics like these. That argument has been made lots of times by many (including me). But it eventually breaks down. You can't give a child a gun and when the kid shoots someone say it was the kid's fault. Whose fault is it? I'm guessing you're going to say the adult responsible for putting the gun within the reach of a child. You're still taking away an object from the kid. In this case it was a kid who didn't know better. Now this isn't a narrow argument. This becomes interesting when you get to powerful things, like say nuclear weapons. They aren't inherently evil too. But if you look around, UN is trying to ban them[1]. Shouldn't UN ban them? What I'm trying to get at is that you can't always but the blame on people. Just like you can't blame a child for not knowing better, you can't blame a person for knowing better (although people do). Sometimes you just have to take the gun (or nuclear weapons or encryption) away. [1]: https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/ https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  on the other hand a huge nuclear arsenal maintained a long period of peace during a troubled time, so there's that
  - ktta 10y ago
    > long period of peace What if the huge nuclear arsenal was in the wrong hands? That begs the question, what is 'wrong'? Your definition of peace was probably characterized as oppression/dominance by the people who did want to revolt. You don't account for the extremely subjective nature of things, especially when it comes to nationalistic actions of people.
  - natch 10y ago
    It arguably has so far, but let's not get too smug about it. The end of that story has not yet been written.
- fwn 10y ago
  I always thought that putting the blame on actual agents instead of stuff is the direct opposite of being evasive. You rightly said that I will answer that it was the adults fault. The bad act done with the weapon was giving it to a child, not the childs shooting someone. It gets clearer if the adult hands the weapon to a monkey or a randomized shooting machine. All three scenarios change nothing in regard to the moral responsibility of the adult. I do not know whether the UN should ban nuclear weapons, but if someone uses a nuclear weapon and we would check out who might be morally responsible for the attack, I'd point at the attacker.
jansho 10y ago
I believe the same. But what if these tools have too great impact if everything goes south? It happened with dynamites before, now look how jittery we are about nuclear. You can flip this for privacy too. The more governments can spy on everyone, well sure we may catch more terrorists and terrorism might even decrease. But at what cost? Totalitarianism? Shudder.
ue_ 10y ago
>or a government should not exist or be banned. I was with you up until 'government'. I regard states as exercising unjust authority over people and defenders of private property which is why I'm an anarcho-Communist. The way in which the modern world is divided up means that one must be a subject of some state, which I believe makes there no way to provide proper consent to be governed.

goodplay 10y ago

The thing is, banning encryption to fight terrorism makes as much difference as banning knifes to fight murder. Encryption is simple enough (in theory at least) and prevalent enough that banning it will only stop legitimate usage (e.g. personal privacy) without having any real impact on those who want to break the law. Modern steganography techniques make it easy for enterprising individuals to tunnel encrypted data over unencrypted channels; there is just too much randomness in the real world to exploit. Regardless of what delusional politicians want, encryption is here to stay. It's just a matter of how much people are willing to give up to feel safe.

guilhas 10y ago

I personally think if there is a warrant the company should provide information. The same way my house is private but if there is any kind of problem police has access to it. Although we should have mechanism to protect from mass random surveillance.

natch 10y ago
So, no matter how bad the government, and how ridiculous its laws (let's say they ban music, and dole out harsh punishments to people who dare listen to music), then we as technology providers should enable them to catch such people and punish them for their "crimes"? Saudi Arabia punishes rape victims. We should help with that? China punishes people who try to air grievances about government abuse and corruption. Again, we should enable them to be more effective in their invasive prying into those individuals than they already are? In North Korea, your entire family can be punished if you dare be disobedient to the government. In the US, we recently elected Donald Trump. Etc. etc... why do you think governments can be trusted with this power? On top of all that, once the technical means exist, they will also be discovered, cracked, and used by fraudsters, extortionists, and anyone else who can figure out a way to abuse the information.
- guilhas 10y ago
  I can ask the same. Why should a suspected rapist, assassin, drug dealer, corrupt politician, be free or unjustly imprisoned, because of lack of evidence? Do you think we should help criminals? Nowadays here are other more efective ways, than encrypted WhatsApp (secrecy), to fight bad governments and ridiculous laws. North Korea and Saudi Arabia are obviously very extreme examples. Internet encryption must be the least of their worries. Governments with working justice systems should be trusted with power to provide security. There should be No technical means or backdoors globally accessible. Information should be provided on request basis, based on a warrant for that suspect. And data stored should follow data protection laws. If you think you country justice system is not working properly there are ways to fight that. And probably there will be people and institutions already doing.
  - 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

In some sort of abstract theoretical vacuum I might be persuaded to support some form of limited targeted warrant-based intercept. However, this is the real world, and I'd want the serious trust issues fixed first. Surveillance of journalists. Invasion of privacy by journalists with the complicity of corrupt police. Surveillance of peaceful left-wing and environmentalist groups. Let's not be ignorant of history either, of secret prisons and unaccountable courts. Let Martin McGuinness' death remind us of H block and the Maze. Who here is old enough to remember the bizarre compromise where Gerry Adams appeared on TV with his words read by an actor, because he was deemed too dangerous to listen to? Then there is the business of foreign intelligence agencies. If some communication isn't completely private, can it be compromised by the Russians? Remember the US election? We need to have a conversation about radicalisation, but much of it happens in public or verbally, and it's not at all limited to Islamic fundamentalism. It needs to include the far-right too.

ktta 10y ago
We all hope for a perfect world. But the problem is none of our perfect worlds are the same, so everyone of us end up living in our imperfect world. The expectations you have are something I'd agree with too, but many other don't. So how do you reconcile this? Again the reconciliation process you will come up with is perfect according to you but most likely not according to others. No one can ever win I guess.

cm2187 10y ago

Terrorism, and crime in general is a nuisance that we have to live with. You can have a society with no crime. All you need is a super repressive totalitarian state, total transparency with citizens reporting on each others, state surveillance everywhere. It will work. But first I don't want to live in such a state. And second these totalitarian states slide invariably toward corruption and state crimes. So we have to live with some level of crime. It doesn't mean we shouldn't be tough on criminals, but we have to accept that it is not possible in a free society to reach zero criminality. I think the paradox is that people are reasonably relaxed with some level of criminality but are absolutely intolerant to any form of terrorism. And this intolerance is a new phenomenon. Terrorism isn't new. There isn't more terrorism in Europe than 20 or 40 years ago. In fact a few months ago I compiled the number of incidents and victims from a wikipedia page [1]: https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Deads.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Deads.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Injured.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Injured.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Incidents.png https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/Incidents.png As you can tell, the 70s and 80s were rather more brutal, with far-left, IRA and Palestinian terrorism. And our democracies resisted much better the temptation to introduce more surveillance. Now why have we become intolerant to terrorism? There are literally tens of thousands of knife attacks every year just in London. Most don't even make it to the local news. Why would this particular incident be treated as a state affair? Terrorism is the buzz of a mosquito. In itself pretty much harmless. But most people will not sleep in a room where they can hear the buzz. I don't have a good explanation. The only thing I can think of is the 24h news cycle where the media will make a big deal of anything that can push the audience up. But that doesn't explain everything. They do the same with plane crashes, but still repeat over and over that though spectacular, plane crashes are extremely rare and flying is extremely safe. Whereas when there is a terrorist attack, the message is "this could happen to YOU!" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_Europe

ktta 10y ago
I completely agree. You are one of the very few! I have to ask, what's up with the domain name? Is that some sort of public windows share folder?

k-mcgrady 10y ago

>> But I'm interested in what do people here have to say about the privacy features are used by terrible people to do terrible things. Giving up such a valuable right to possibly stop attacks which, in the grand scheme of things actually harm very few people, is idiotic. Terrorism is obviously awful but the number of people in the UK actually affected by it is far, far too small to consider forgoing such an important right. And IMO, once you do that, the terrorists have won. Take the attack in London last week for example. It doesn't require planning. Anyone could get in a car and mow down a lot of people in seconds. It doesn't need discussion on WhatsApp. It doesn't require purchase of weapons. It doesn't require you to do anything shady that could give you away more than a second before you do it. No amount of intelligence gathering could figure it out. You could force every citizen to wear a mic and body cam and you still wouldn't be able to stop it. How about tackling the actual problem - terrorists seem to have resorted to using cars and trucks to kill people. Lets put up some metal/concrete bollards alone the edge of pavements that have no 'escape route', such as the one on Westminster Bridge.

brokenmachine 10y ago
> How about tackling the actual problem - terrorists seem to have resorted to using cars and trucks to kill people. Lets put up some metal/concrete bollards alone the edge of pavements that have no 'escape route', such as the one on Westminster Bridge. Nice post. I agree almost entirely with you, but you can't put a bollard everywhere, and even if you could, bad people would find a way around or between the bollards, or simply another way to hurt people. It would be like playing a futile game of whack-a-mole. At the end of the day, there are people who are so mean-spirited that they want to hurt innocent people for no reason, and they will find a way to do that no matter what we do. Honestly I think a lot of it is mental health more than anything we can really protect against. It's not possible to wrap everyone in cotton wool, and in order to have some freedom we risk a small percentage of harm. There is no way around that. Without that freedom, there's also the IMO much larger risk of harm from the authorities themselves. There's no way around it, living in the world involves some risk. It's unrealistic to not accept that risk and fantasize that all outcomes are preventable. Like another comment mentioned, there are literally tens of thousands of stabbings in the UK every year. Why are we even talking about removing fundamental freedoms (the right to privacy) in order to probably not prevent a few unfortunate deaths per year? The payoff is so small and the cost is much too great.