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It's interesting how governments come to feel entitled to forms of surveillance. For thousands of years financial transactions were completely illegible to gove

by darawk 7y ago

It's interesting how governments come to feel entitled to forms of surveillance. For thousands of years financial transactions were completely illegible to government. They took place hand to hand, either in cash or barter. But now that transactions are digitized, it is actually illegal to conduct certain types of transactions anonymously (KYC/AML laws). This came about because governments got used to being able to peer into the financial lives of their citizens, and once they got used to it, they didn't like it when people circumvented that, so they made it a crime. The same is true here of private messaging. Governments got used to being able to read our messages. They have come to rely on it. And so now they want to make it illegal for us to keep them out. I guess what i'm saying is: We ought to be extremely careful what we allow our governments to get used to doing. There is an argument to be made that the original sin here was allowing wiretaps at all, even when the medium was un-encrypted.

lisper 7y ago
You talk about governments as if they were an alien sentient life form ("governments ... feel entitled"). They're not. They are groups of people who serve constituencies. You could tell the exact same story in reverse: the lack of surveillance technology made people feel entitled to anonymous financial transactions. The feelings of entitlement (if you want to call them that) follow the available technology. But ultimately these decisions are always trade-offs between one feeling of entitlement in one constituency and another feeling of entitlement in another. In this case, one side feels entitled to privacy, the other, to security (or the illusion of security, which some people find valuable even in the absence of actual security). I point this out not because I disagree with your baseline position that privacy is valuable. I don't. I point this out because i believe that arguing for it on the basis that government feelings of entitlement are somehow less legitimate than the feeling of entitlement of non-governmental constituencies is not going to be an effective strategy because it's based on a false premise.
- darawk 7y ago
  > I point this out not because I disagree with your baseline position that privacy is valuable. I don't. I point this out because i believe that arguing for it on the basis that government feelings of entitlement are somehow less legitimate than the feeling of entitlement of non-governmental constituencies is not going to be an effective strategy because it's based on a false premise. I am not arguing that. I was explaining the process by which the feeling of entitlement arose. The argument for the legitimacy of privacy rights is one I assumed I didn't have to make at all in this venue. I suppose we could have that debate if you want, but I was not trying to make that case here. If we assume as an axiom that privacy is a right, the question then becomes: how do we structure our governments and public institutions to protect those rights? And one answer to that is to be more intentional about which invasions of privacy we allow than perhaps we have been in the past. With the foreknowledge that governments and institutions will come to depend on any access they are given.
  - lisper 7y ago
    > If we assume as an axiom that privacy is a right But you can't assume that. For everyone who thinks that privacy is a right you can find someone else who thinks that safety and security is a right. Neither of these follows from the laws of physics. Which one ends up being a right (or which one ends up being the more "fundamental" right that ends up trumping the other) is a function of what we as a society decide. So you can't win this fight simply by standing up on a soap box and proclaiming that privacy is a right. You have to come up with an argument for why losing privacy is a greater evil than letting the bad guys get away.
    - nybble41 7y ago
      > For everyone who thinks that privacy is a right you can find someone else who thinks that safety and security is a right. You can't strip away people's privacy without violating their safety and security in the process. These positions are not in conflict. And "society" doesn't get to decide what is or is not a right. Individual people decide that for themselves.
    - darawk 7y ago
      Please read the rest of my comment. I'll say it again: None of what I am saying is an argument for privacy. We can have that debate if you want, but this is not it.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      Security from the things that the violations of privacy are meant to stop is already a right. Most governments hold that children have the right to not be molested. It’s the governments duty to uphold that right whether they can read communications or not. A right to security absolutely does not mean no right to privacy. That’s a false dichotomy.
- shakna 7y ago
  I've witnessed in the last couple of years several politicians arguing vehemently for something their constituency wants, such as safe access to encryption, and then they're taken aside and briefed on something by the intelligence service, and completely flip their views. The constituency hasn't changed their views. The politician was still elected on the same platform. But they no longer serve the constituency. I can well-understand the feeling that the government is a separate entity, and behaves differently.
  - ENGNR 7y ago
    And most likely what they're told is hey, do you really want to spend political capital on this and risk going against us, or do you want to pursue things you can change enough to get reelected
  - roenxi 7y ago
    It is very hard to put a finger on exactly why though. Politicians discover that their pro-good-ideas stance puts them at odds with powerful forces. Consistently. But it seems unlikely that there is an actual conspiracy afoot. There is some powerful incentive structure at work. Take war for example. It seems that consistently peaceful candidates are voted in then they end up invading somewhere. It may be military lobbying; but even then it seems a little strange that absolutely no progress gets made on issues that seem to have a remarkable amount of support from what must be most voters. People voting for humanity or economic reasons would agree that endless overseas wars are a mistake - that catches most voters. Realistically it should even catch the imagination of the foreign policy people; power projection is one thing, but killing foreigners doesn't put America in a great place for the next generation. It would almost be more helpful for politicians to honestly state why they keep flipping their positions rather than sending another smooth-talking politician in to see if they flip. Surely there must be some equilibrium where less people die but all the insiders are happy.
    - shakna 7y ago
      Some of the turnarounds are utterly baffling. I would understand to a certain extent if the national intelligence briefing informs the politician of a dozen programs that are reliant on the premise and have prevented x number of attacks and so on. But I've seen politicians flip completely after a single 20mins meeting. From fiercely against to fiercely for. For those cases, I've held my judgement, because I don't have a non-insane answer for why this happened, but everyone involved is presumably a somewhat-logical human being, and people don't let go of beliefs easily.
- mattigames 7y ago
  Is easy to see that the government is not in the hands of anything one may call constituency but in the pockets of the most wealthy, such thing is easy to see when you read how the wealthy pay less taxes than they have ever done historically and even less than the average american[0] despite being only a tiny amount of people in favor of such policies. [0] https://i.imgur.com/xhYCQh4.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/xhYCQh4.mp4 (from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...)
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  “constituencies” is a great untruth isn’t it, they largely serve themselves and the people who give them money.
  - lisper 7y ago
    > the people who give them money What do you think "constituency" means?
    - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
      In the UK at least it has a very specific definition relating to a population of voters living in a defined geographic area.
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    If politicians in democracies can survive without serving their constituencies, that means their constituencies are letting them get away with that. For example: the voters might have failed to vote for sensible campaign financing reform so that politicians serve financial interests more than voters. In the end these possibilities are always given by voters, and they can only be taken away by voters.
    - DocTomoe 7y ago
      ... which implies there is an option on the ballot that has a hypothetical, "good", surveillance-free candidate. There is not.
      - wsy 7y ago
        That is again something the constituency can easily change. It just needs one of the many anti-surveillance voters to be willing to run for office.
        leppr 7y ago
        Voters don't vote on particular decisions, or even on decision makers for particular issues, they vote on one decision maker for all issues. How likely is it that an anti-surveillance candidate also happens to satisfy more than 50% of voters on aspects other than surveillance? Since surveillance is low on the list of priorities of most people, it's a rational choice for them to ignore the candidates' stance on surveillance while choosing their preferred candidate. As such, the stance of republican leaders on low-interest, non identity-defining aspects like surveillance is mostly unaffected by democracy.
- personlurking 7y ago
  >You talk about governments as if they were an alien sentient life form ("governments ... feel entitled"). They're not. They are groups of people who serve constituencies. Lately, I've been thinking about what's happening in HK, and how the protesters were pulling down facial recognition towers. Without that, the social credit system is crippled (a bit). If enough people made it their business to take down a tower, here and there, with enough frequency, the govt would probably find a way around it but, still, that big, powerful government weakens when the right/wrong citizens get together. And even when the govt says no masks are allowed, there are ways around that, too [1] 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/ddu3eh/hong_kong_wearable_face_projector_to_avoid_face/ https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/ddu3eh/ho...
- ses1984 7y ago
  >They are groups of people who serve constituencies. They also exist to serve themselves. That is not their purpose but that is what ends up happening with most institutions.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Aren't you missing power hierarchy in those entitlement examples? If one entitled to something but has no power, does it really matter? It only matters if power is involved and the entitlement can be enforced.
visarga 7y ago
It's not that they got used, it's simply because they can do it with today's technology. They quickly got to using all sorts of atrocious things such as poison gas and nuclear bombs as soon as they were possible. Same with street surveillance. The cat's out of the bag now, can't turn time back and pretend we can't track every message anymore since we had cheap storage, cameras, internet and AI to sort through the collected data.
throwaway3392 7y ago
AML laws are nuts. They operate on the presumption of guilt. That is, the burden of proof is on you to prove the money's provenance is not illegal. It's pretty scary. I have some BTC I mined back when they weren't worth much and those AML laws make me worried to cash out.
headmelted 7y ago
There's nothing wrong in what you've said, but it doesn't help with the other side of the argument, which is catching child abusers/terrorists/baddies. The biggest problem (and my understanding is that it's much more widespread than the others we hear about) is the sharing of child abuse imagery. I think these governments and the EFF are both being willfully blind asses here. Governments don't see that their people don't trust them to have sound morals (because of their shitty morals) and the EFF is so laser-focused on privacy that it wants to wave it's hand about child abuse as the lesser of two evils. Someone needs to come up with a system that doesn't offer shelter to paedophiles, soon, or their going to lose the argument in the eyes of the public (and then legislatively). I don't think it's possible to do both of these things, so I think we're ultimately going to lose the argument. Would be nice to be surprised though!
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  I think you are right about the problems with the EFF arguments and the issues of providing easy shelter to criminals such as traffickers of child pornography (and many other, less emotional offenses). I'm not for legislation against end-to-end encryption. But Facebook does have to answer those questions about its policy. They will also have to answer for cases, where predators go free because the texts to their victims can't be recovered... No easy answers here!
- headmelted 7y ago
  I get the downvotes, but this gets ignored at our collective peril. E2E encryption, for all it's many benefits, does allow bad people to do bad things with impunity. Turning a blind eye to that because we want the privacy benefits isn't going to fly forever, and the solution that non-tech-savvy legislators will come up with if nothing is done will invariably be much, much worse than anything we can think of.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
It's not that "the government" feels entitled, but rather that surveillance - even and especially the very limited, court-approved, kind - is essential to law enforcement. As in dismantling organized crime and preventing terror attacks. For me it feels too easy to say "the government" has no legitimate interest in intercepting communications.
- fauigerzigerk 7y ago
  The problem is that governments themselves undermine this argument by constantly expanding those limits until everyone is subject to surveillance at all times. Surveillance powers that are introduced to fight terrorism or child exploitation end up in the hands of local authorities for their war against fly-tipping and dog fouling. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-councils-used-investigatory-powers-ripa-to-secretly-spy-on-public https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-counci...
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Then you better not argue about encryption with Facebook but about laws with your legislature...
    - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
      I don't think the law can be cleanly separated from the reality of politics or the economics and practicalities of law enforcement.
- missosoup 7y ago
  > surveillance - even and especially the very limited, court-approved, kind - is essential to law enforcement This is a meme that keeps getting repeated by proponents of dragnet surveillance, but they're all palpably quiet after each terror event. Because it wasn't caught despite perpetrators already usually being persons of interest and subject to said dragnet surveillance. We are far past the point of diminishing returns in terms of counter terrorism efficacy vs. surveillance cost and impact. 'Think of the children' and 'think of the terrorists' are quantifiable, provably, bullshit arguments. There is a very real cost to widespread surveillance, including financial. You can't justify that cost with preventing maybe 1-10 deaths per year when the same marginal increase in healthcare resources would save 10k-100k per year.
Animats 7y ago
Yes. After WWII, the US imposed a constitution on Japan. Here's Article 21: "Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed. No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated." All wiretapping was illegal in Japan until 1999.[1] Even today, it's very rare. 40 wiretaps in 2017.[2] [1] https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/world/japan-passes-controversial-wiretap-law-8417 https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/world/japan-passes-controversi... [2] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170217/p2a/00m/0na/013000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170217/p2a/00m/0na/01...
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  The Jakuza probably appreciated that! Now they have to be more careful.
  - Razengan 7y ago
    I have a suspicion you might be a criminal. Tell us the passwords to all your accounts to prove your innocence.
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      That is a very lame straw man argument. Are you sure you appreciate how many criminals got convicted because their phones have been tapped? Does your stance against lawful surveillance also mean that law enforcement must never try to look into a suspect's seized phone or computer?
      - lazyguy2 7y ago
        You speak of strawman, yet respond with more strawmen. Interesting tactic. But, ultimately, the security and safety of the American public is served best by actually using software and services that are safe and secure. When the Federal government works against that they are undermining the security of the American public. It's not very complicated. The interests of the government do not align with the interests of the American public.
afpx 7y ago
What we need are innovative ways for organizations to manage and organize themselves without relying on the traditional method of putting a few people or special interest groups “in charge”. Inevitably, the types of people who seek out those roles wreck the intentions of the organization that they lead.

by darawk 7y ago

lisper 7y ago

You talk about governments as if they were an alien sentient life form ("governments ... feel entitled"). They're not. They are groups of people who serve constituencies. You could tell the exact same story in reverse: the lack of surveillance technology made people feel entitled to anonymous financial transactions. The feelings of entitlement (if you want to call them that) follow the available technology. But ultimately these decisions are always trade-offs between one feeling of entitlement in one constituency and another feeling of entitlement in another. In this case, one side feels entitled to privacy, the other, to security (or the illusion of security, which some people find valuable even in the absence of actual security). I point this out not because I disagree with your baseline position that privacy is valuable. I don't. I point this out because i believe that arguing for it on the basis that government feelings of entitlement are somehow less legitimate than the feeling of entitlement of non-governmental constituencies is not going to be an effective strategy because it's based on a false premise.

darawk 7y ago
> I point this out not because I disagree with your baseline position that privacy is valuable. I don't. I point this out because i believe that arguing for it on the basis that government feelings of entitlement are somehow less legitimate than the feeling of entitlement of non-governmental constituencies is not going to be an effective strategy because it's based on a false premise. I am not arguing that. I was explaining the process by which the feeling of entitlement arose. The argument for the legitimacy of privacy rights is one I assumed I didn't have to make at all in this venue. I suppose we could have that debate if you want, but I was not trying to make that case here. If we assume as an axiom that privacy is a right, the question then becomes: how do we structure our governments and public institutions to protect those rights? And one answer to that is to be more intentional about which invasions of privacy we allow than perhaps we have been in the past. With the foreknowledge that governments and institutions will come to depend on any access they are given.
- lisper 7y ago
  > If we assume as an axiom that privacy is a right But you can't assume that. For everyone who thinks that privacy is a right you can find someone else who thinks that safety and security is a right. Neither of these follows from the laws of physics. Which one ends up being a right (or which one ends up being the more "fundamental" right that ends up trumping the other) is a function of what we as a society decide. So you can't win this fight simply by standing up on a soap box and proclaiming that privacy is a right. You have to come up with an argument for why losing privacy is a greater evil than letting the bad guys get away.
  - nybble41 7y ago
    > For everyone who thinks that privacy is a right you can find someone else who thinks that safety and security is a right. You can't strip away people's privacy without violating their safety and security in the process. These positions are not in conflict. And "society" doesn't get to decide what is or is not a right. Individual people decide that for themselves.
  - darawk 7y ago
    Please read the rest of my comment. I'll say it again: None of what I am saying is an argument for privacy. We can have that debate if you want, but this is not it.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Security from the things that the violations of privacy are meant to stop is already a right. Most governments hold that children have the right to not be molested. It’s the governments duty to uphold that right whether they can read communications or not. A right to security absolutely does not mean no right to privacy. That’s a false dichotomy.
shakna 7y ago
I've witnessed in the last couple of years several politicians arguing vehemently for something their constituency wants, such as safe access to encryption, and then they're taken aside and briefed on something by the intelligence service, and completely flip their views. The constituency hasn't changed their views. The politician was still elected on the same platform. But they no longer serve the constituency. I can well-understand the feeling that the government is a separate entity, and behaves differently.
- ENGNR 7y ago
  And most likely what they're told is hey, do you really want to spend political capital on this and risk going against us, or do you want to pursue things you can change enough to get reelected
- roenxi 7y ago
  It is very hard to put a finger on exactly why though. Politicians discover that their pro-good-ideas stance puts them at odds with powerful forces. Consistently. But it seems unlikely that there is an actual conspiracy afoot. There is some powerful incentive structure at work. Take war for example. It seems that consistently peaceful candidates are voted in then they end up invading somewhere. It may be military lobbying; but even then it seems a little strange that absolutely no progress gets made on issues that seem to have a remarkable amount of support from what must be most voters. People voting for humanity or economic reasons would agree that endless overseas wars are a mistake - that catches most voters. Realistically it should even catch the imagination of the foreign policy people; power projection is one thing, but killing foreigners doesn't put America in a great place for the next generation. It would almost be more helpful for politicians to honestly state why they keep flipping their positions rather than sending another smooth-talking politician in to see if they flip. Surely there must be some equilibrium where less people die but all the insiders are happy.
  - shakna 7y ago
    Some of the turnarounds are utterly baffling. I would understand to a certain extent if the national intelligence briefing informs the politician of a dozen programs that are reliant on the premise and have prevented x number of attacks and so on. But I've seen politicians flip completely after a single 20mins meeting. From fiercely against to fiercely for. For those cases, I've held my judgement, because I don't have a non-insane answer for why this happened, but everyone involved is presumably a somewhat-logical human being, and people don't let go of beliefs easily.
mattigames 7y ago
Is easy to see that the government is not in the hands of anything one may call constituency but in the pockets of the most wealthy, such thing is easy to see when you read how the wealthy pay less taxes than they have ever done historically and even less than the average american[0] despite being only a tiny amount of people in favor of such policies. [0] https://i.imgur.com/xhYCQh4.mp4 https://i.imgur.com/xhYCQh4.mp4 (from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...)
andy_ppp 7y ago
“constituencies” is a great untruth isn’t it, they largely serve themselves and the people who give them money.
- lisper 7y ago
  > the people who give them money What do you think "constituency" means?
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    In the UK at least it has a very specific definition relating to a population of voters living in a defined geographic area.
- alkonaut 7y ago
  If politicians in democracies can survive without serving their constituencies, that means their constituencies are letting them get away with that. For example: the voters might have failed to vote for sensible campaign financing reform so that politicians serve financial interests more than voters. In the end these possibilities are always given by voters, and they can only be taken away by voters.
  - DocTomoe 7y ago
    ... which implies there is an option on the ballot that has a hypothetical, "good", surveillance-free candidate. There is not.
    - wsy 7y ago
      That is again something the constituency can easily change. It just needs one of the many anti-surveillance voters to be willing to run for office.
      - leppr 7y ago
        Voters don't vote on particular decisions, or even on decision makers for particular issues, they vote on one decision maker for all issues. How likely is it that an anti-surveillance candidate also happens to satisfy more than 50% of voters on aspects other than surveillance? Since surveillance is low on the list of priorities of most people, it's a rational choice for them to ignore the candidates' stance on surveillance while choosing their preferred candidate. As such, the stance of republican leaders on low-interest, non identity-defining aspects like surveillance is mostly unaffected by democracy.
personlurking 7y ago
>You talk about governments as if they were an alien sentient life form ("governments ... feel entitled"). They're not. They are groups of people who serve constituencies. Lately, I've been thinking about what's happening in HK, and how the protesters were pulling down facial recognition towers. Without that, the social credit system is crippled (a bit). If enough people made it their business to take down a tower, here and there, with enough frequency, the govt would probably find a way around it but, still, that big, powerful government weakens when the right/wrong citizens get together. And even when the govt says no masks are allowed, there are ways around that, too [1] 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/ddu3eh/hong_kong_wearable_face_projector_to_avoid_face/ https://www.reddit.com/r/specializedtools/comments/ddu3eh/ho...
ses1984 7y ago
>They are groups of people who serve constituencies. They also exist to serve themselves. That is not their purpose but that is what ends up happening with most institutions.
zzzcpan 7y ago
Aren't you missing power hierarchy in those entitlement examples? If one entitled to something but has no power, does it really matter? It only matters if power is involved and the entitlement can be enforced.

visarga 7y ago

It's not that they got used, it's simply because they can do it with today's technology. They quickly got to using all sorts of atrocious things such as poison gas and nuclear bombs as soon as they were possible. Same with street surveillance. The cat's out of the bag now, can't turn time back and pretend we can't track every message anymore since we had cheap storage, cameras, internet and AI to sort through the collected data.

throwaway3392 7y ago

AML laws are nuts. They operate on the presumption of guilt. That is, the burden of proof is on you to prove the money's provenance is not illegal. It's pretty scary. I have some BTC I mined back when they weren't worth much and those AML laws make me worried to cash out.

headmelted 7y ago

There's nothing wrong in what you've said, but it doesn't help with the other side of the argument, which is catching child abusers/terrorists/baddies. The biggest problem (and my understanding is that it's much more widespread than the others we hear about) is the sharing of child abuse imagery. I think these governments and the EFF are both being willfully blind asses here. Governments don't see that their people don't trust them to have sound morals (because of their shitty morals) and the EFF is so laser-focused on privacy that it wants to wave it's hand about child abuse as the lesser of two evils. Someone needs to come up with a system that doesn't offer shelter to paedophiles, soon, or their going to lose the argument in the eyes of the public (and then legislatively). I don't think it's possible to do both of these things, so I think we're ultimately going to lose the argument. Would be nice to be surprised though!

bayesian_horse 7y ago
I think you are right about the problems with the EFF arguments and the issues of providing easy shelter to criminals such as traffickers of child pornography (and many other, less emotional offenses). I'm not for legislation against end-to-end encryption. But Facebook does have to answer those questions about its policy. They will also have to answer for cases, where predators go free because the texts to their victims can't be recovered... No easy answers here!
headmelted 7y ago
I get the downvotes, but this gets ignored at our collective peril. E2E encryption, for all it's many benefits, does allow bad people to do bad things with impunity. Turning a blind eye to that because we want the privacy benefits isn't going to fly forever, and the solution that non-tech-savvy legislators will come up with if nothing is done will invariably be much, much worse than anything we can think of.

bayesian_horse 7y ago

It's not that "the government" feels entitled, but rather that surveillance - even and especially the very limited, court-approved, kind - is essential to law enforcement. As in dismantling organized crime and preventing terror attacks. For me it feels too easy to say "the government" has no legitimate interest in intercepting communications.

fauigerzigerk 7y ago
The problem is that governments themselves undermine this argument by constantly expanding those limits until everyone is subject to surveillance at all times. Surveillance powers that are introduced to fight terrorism or child exploitation end up in the hands of local authorities for their war against fly-tipping and dog fouling. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-councils-used-investigatory-powers-ripa-to-secretly-spy-on-public https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/british-counci...
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Then you better not argue about encryption with Facebook but about laws with your legislature...
  - fauigerzigerk 7y ago
    I don't think the law can be cleanly separated from the reality of politics or the economics and practicalities of law enforcement.
missosoup 7y ago
> surveillance - even and especially the very limited, court-approved, kind - is essential to law enforcement This is a meme that keeps getting repeated by proponents of dragnet surveillance, but they're all palpably quiet after each terror event. Because it wasn't caught despite perpetrators already usually being persons of interest and subject to said dragnet surveillance. We are far past the point of diminishing returns in terms of counter terrorism efficacy vs. surveillance cost and impact. 'Think of the children' and 'think of the terrorists' are quantifiable, provably, bullshit arguments. There is a very real cost to widespread surveillance, including financial. You can't justify that cost with preventing maybe 1-10 deaths per year when the same marginal increase in healthcare resources would save 10k-100k per year.

Animats 7y ago

Yes. After WWII, the US imposed a constitution on Japan. Here's Article 21: "Freedom of assembly and association as well as speech, press and all other forms of expression are guaranteed. No censorship shall be maintained, nor shall the secrecy of any means of communication be violated." All wiretapping was illegal in Japan until 1999.[1] Even today, it's very rare. 40 wiretaps in 2017.[2] [1] https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/world/japan-passes-controversial-wiretap-law-8417 https://www.iol.co.za/mercury/world/japan-passes-controversi... [2] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170217/p2a/00m/0na/013000c https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170217/p2a/00m/0na/01...

bayesian_horse 7y ago
The Jakuza probably appreciated that! Now they have to be more careful.
- Razengan 7y ago
  I have a suspicion you might be a criminal. Tell us the passwords to all your accounts to prove your innocence.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    That is a very lame straw man argument. Are you sure you appreciate how many criminals got convicted because their phones have been tapped? Does your stance against lawful surveillance also mean that law enforcement must never try to look into a suspect's seized phone or computer?
    - lazyguy2 7y ago
      You speak of strawman, yet respond with more strawmen. Interesting tactic. But, ultimately, the security and safety of the American public is served best by actually using software and services that are safe and secure. When the Federal government works against that they are undermining the security of the American public. It's not very complicated. The interests of the government do not align with the interests of the American public.

afpx 7y ago

What we need are innovative ways for organizations to manage and organize themselves without relying on the traditional method of putting a few people or special interest groups “in charge”. Inevitably, the types of people who seek out those roles wreck the intentions of the organization that they lead.