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> Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer p

• jayd16 7y ago
  Ironic considering corporations are people.
  • roywiggins 7y ago
    They've always been legal persons, otherwise they couldn't be on either end of a court case. They can even be charged criminally. That's what corporate personhood generally used to mean.
    • jayd16 7y ago
      You don't find OP's wording ironic in light of that fact? I do.
      • roywiggins 7y ago
        Corporations are legal persons, which is a legal designation and a sort of fiction. Humans are natural persons, which is both a legal reality and an actual reality. If someone says "I'm a person, corporations aren't" they're definitely talking about natural personhood, in which case they're completely correct. "Humans and corporations are both persons" is kind of facile- corporations don't have quite the same set of rights that humans do.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
    • davidw 7y ago
      Very importantly, it also means that a corporation's assets are separate from those of its owners, so if you own a piece of a company and it gets sued, you don't lose your own home and assets if the company loses.
      • vkou 7y ago
        Perhaps the hope is that corporations would behave more ethically if their owners were personally liable for them, for more then just their initial investment. A liability shield is a fantastic invention for capital owners, because when things go pear shaped, they can leave the rest of us holding the buck. Most of us aren't capital owners, in any meaningful sense, though.
        • davidw 7y ago
          If only the super wealthy could create large companies... I'm not sure things would be a lot better. Indeed, I could imagine things being significantly worse. This is an interesting book looking at how legal structures may have held back otherwise very advanced cultures in the middle east: https://www.economist.com/business/2011/01/27/the-crescent-and-the-company https://www.economist.com/business/2011/01/27/the-crescent-a... It refers to this book: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9273.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/9273.html
        • abakker 7y ago
          Retirement savings, IRAs, and pensions tend to make many people minor owners of capital.
          • vkou 7y ago
            Most Americans have less than a year's wages invested into capital, and won't be receiving a lick of pension upon retirement. If you look at the developing world, the situation is even bleaker. So, as far as ownership structures of capital go, for 95% of the population, it is a rounding error. Also, damages that required liability doesn't just magically disappear, if you fail to pass it on to a company's owners. The harm that caused the liability has already been done, the shareholders have already been paid from the profits of it - but the victims aren't getting compensation for it. In any just world, these profits would be clawed back.
    • ineedasername 7y ago
      I think it's the use of the word "person" in any sense that is confusing and foments anger. Better to call them "legal entities" or something. It's a very weird contortion of logic to say something like, "Only people can be the subject of a legal instrument; We need corporations to be the subject of a legal instrument; We must make corporations people." I mean, we have control over the underlying premise here. We can change it. Maybe that makes some people less angry. Maybe that makes it easier to reason about corporate issues without accidental conflation of the subtly different aspects of "person".
      • roywiggins 7y ago
        I think it's a kind of path-dependency in how Anglo-American common law was agglomerated. It was easier to patch in corporations as "legal persons" than to create a parallel designation.
        • ddingus 7y ago
          Easy is not always appropriate or best. That patch in has had grave consequences.
• peterlk 7y ago
  > This very American attitude of separating "business enterprises" from "consumers", which to me sounds like separating the noble and important from peasants or cattle, is utterly sickening I'm kind of on the fence about this. My counterargument to your comment is that the iPhone, Google search, global shipping, oil production, etc. could not be created by individuals. These things exist because huge groups of humans organized into things called "businesses". Protecting businesses is like protecting the economies of states. There are massive effects for lots of people if businesses are not treated well. So yes, businesses get special deals sometimes. Unfortunately, this is a slippery slope, and people often fall down it. To me, the truth in your comment is that US culture tends to give credit to CEOs for the efforts of all the other people in the organization. And this can be easily conflated with all kinds of other issues like "fines are just things that are illegal for poor people".
  • techntoke 7y ago
    Based on your argument then, Linux is a business and not created by an open-source community.
    • rayiner 7y ago
      More than 90% of contributions to Linux now are from developers sponsored by corporations: https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel.
  • feanaro 7y ago
    My counterargument to that is that businesses do not need protection to function, certainly not as much as they are given. In fact, the amount of "protection" given to large businesses today is nothing more but the result of a runaway process of allowing businesses to acquire too much power, which they can use to rig the system in order to acquire even more. Businesses are a good and necessary concept, but that does not mean they are above the people. Businesses are servants of the people and of society. To get back on the topic at hand, businesses should definitely not get special allowance to use some technology that "ordinary" people are outlawed from using. That is a path to disaster.
• sb057 7y ago
  Don't you know the Fourth Amendment?: >The right of large business enterprises to be secure in their employees, locations, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the large business enterprises or things to be seized.
  • jjoonathan 7y ago
    They broke the 4th Amendment into 300 million pieces, lied about it to congress, got caught by Snowden, got locked out by the nerds, and now they don't merely want back in, they want a key to the back door for the express purpose of continuing to break the rules they swore to uphold! The mind boggles. Who do I (continue to) donate to in order to express my opinion that this is inexcusable? EFF?
    • logfromblammo 7y ago
      The dialogue has been dual monologues for so long that buying more strongly-worded letters is unlikely to help anyone but the ink-sellers. Donate directly to the open-ecosystem cryptographers, and seek a technical solution whenever a political solution is impossible.
    • ChrisAntaki 7y ago
      EFF, Demand Progress, and FFTF are great ones
      • AsyncAwait 7y ago
        And by extension the FSF and free software in general.
• checktheorder 7y ago
  >We are not consumers, we are people. I often base my vote, when all the candidates in a given election have similar policies, on how they refer to people. Use of "Consumers" loses my vote instantly. "Taxpayers" is a yellow flag - if used in specific situations that involves concern over major public funds going to private businesses (like building a stadium for a pro sports team) I'll let it slide but otherwise it only raises suspicion in me. But if a politician consistently uses "citizen", I'll give them a little mental gold star.
  • mehrdadn 7y ago
    Citizen sounds like a pretty awful word choice in a country with so many non-citizen immigrants though (and non-immigrants for that matter). It's sound like they're deliberately being excluded. I used to hate the word consumer too (I don't love it now either) but honestly basing your vote on it seems like a really coarse way to distinguish between good and bad candidates...
    • checktheorder 7y ago
      >Citizen sounds like a pretty awful word choice in a country with so many non-citizen immigrants though (and non-immigrants for that matter). It's sound like they're deliberately being excluded. I was referring to its use in the context of an election, which is often limited to the citizenry (in any democracy). Also, where I live, public figures who use the word "citizen" to refer to ordinary people often don't use it in the literal sense of the word when discussing public-interest matters. They're often using it to emphasize the responsibilities and rights that all people have in relation to the broader society. In other words, where I live it's not often used in an exclusionary xenophobic way, but instead in an inclusive common-purpose way that emphasizes our shared humanity. The xenophobes here tend to prefer "taxpayer".
      • InitialLastName 7y ago
        > The xenophobes here tend to prefer "taxpayer" The irony, I guess, being that the xenophobes probably intend to raise a distinction better delineated by the word "citizen".
• Lukeas14 7y ago
  So we need backdoors to catch a subset of consumers who commit crime. Is there not a subset of corporations that also commit crimes? Are those crimes not important enough for us to investigate using the same tools?
• somesortofsystm 7y ago
  The only way you (the person) will ever gain freedom from them (any large group organized well enough to consider your person worth exploiting for profit), is to keep making a new world for yourself, creatively, artistically, formatively and personally - i.e. become the non-consumer and build your own things. Corporations are people too. Groups of people, ganged together and agreeing to do big and enormous things to other big, enormous groups of people, is how we get into the corporate nightmare. The spirit of the individual is what needs to persist in all of this. If you want privacy, you have to be willing to gain it and maintain it yourself. We are not consumers, we are people - but we can be consumed as well as any other resource. To stay ahead of that, produce!
  • feanaro 7y ago
    I agree with this, but it is essential to realize that everyone (except perhaps a handful of hermits) is a consumer in most situations, even if they are a producer. There is no running away from being a consumer in modern society and this is not a bad thing: it means we are cooperating for mutual benefit, so that we don't have to build our own mud shacks and pottery. However, when I read the word "consumer" in pronouncements like this, it seems like something else. The people using it usually don't mean it in a way that implies they are themselves consumers. They mean it in a class-forming way. The only way I would personally be able to refer to other people in this way would be to become the controller of a large global corporation and to be willing to exploit and submit others for my personal gain. This is not something I would ever want to do.
• snowwrestler 7y ago
  It's also incredibly outdated, as business enterprises today rely on the exact same computing and encryption technologies that consumers do. We all carry iPhones, use chat applications to have business conversations, etc., and of course TLS is TLS. Heck, the President and many members of Congress, the military, intelligence services, etc. use an iPhone. Maybe let's think about that before we stick a backdoor in that piece of "consumer" technology.
  • pdonis 7y ago
    > the President and many members of Congress, the military, intelligence services, etc. use an iPhone But with extra software that isn't on the iPhones ordinary consumers get, to implement and enforce the government's security policies for its officials.
• dang 7y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not indignant riler-uppers. Those lead to noticeably worse discussion, and we're trying to drive in the other direction. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • feanaro 7y ago
    Noted, but in what way was this not substantive? I'm expressing my opinion on a particular subpoint which is quite relevant to this discussion. If Barr was was not pushing for an artificial separation between the corporations and consumers, there wouldn't be any discussion to have, since taking encryption away from corporations is a non-starter. Just as a disclaimer, I've read the guidelines and know them well.
    • dang 7y ago
      If I take out the nationalistic slight ("This very American attitude"), the sarcastic rhetoric ("separating the noble and important from peasants or cattle"), the denunciatory venting ("utterly sickening") and megaphone language ("demand"), it's not clear to me what information is left. What is the comment really saying? Something about how businesses aren't people? To me it reads like an angry reaction to some shallowly triggering phrasing in the article. Angry reactivity is the opposite of thoughtful reflection, which is what we're hoping for here. It's also off topic. Whimsical off-topic digressions can be interesting, but generic rhetorical ones are never interesting. Those discussions have been repeated countless times already, thus are predictable, thus are tedious, so we ask people to avoid them. The more generic a subject, the more shallow its discussion—and when it's angry as well, that's much worse. Angry plus shallow equals riler-upper, which is close to flamebait.
      • DangitBobby 7y ago
        You can mentally tone down the rhetoric and easily see the point. Corporations do not deserve more rights than people.