3 ms·

The most revealing thing about all these calls for back doors "for the children" and "to stop terrorists is that I never truly realized that child exploitation

The most revealing thing about all these calls for back doors "for the children" and "to stop terrorists is that I never truly realized that child exploitation and terrorism were invented around 1996. It is also interesting that we never caught any criminals involved in these things before 1996. Pay phones were a pretty hard thing to track and monitor back in the day and we never had calls to outlaw them. Solarwinds gives me no incentive to trust in the technical competence of any law or government group.

dan-robertson 5y ago
This is nonsense. The word terrorism dates back to the French Revolution and Britain dealt with many bombings from the IRA before 1996 (as well as earlier Irish republicans, militant suffragettes, etc.) Child exploitation has been a known problem for a long time too. I think it is easy to brush off as a problem that doesn’t really exist if it is very distant from your experience of the world (eg how many paedophiles do you know?) but my understanding is that tech companies with user-generated-content deal with an absolutely horrific amount of CSEM. I don’t think it is reasonable to simple talk about liberty and brush the problem away when it comes up. Internet-based communication and encryption change the possibilities for communication and it seems hard for laws to be particularly helpful in achieving a state that is good for liberty and good for society. Personally, I think it is a good thing that, end-to-end encrypted group chats are somewhat limited in size, 256 for WhatsApp and 1000 for signal. I think 1000 is too many. In liberal democracies, I think at some group size, free speech ought to be semi-public speech too (though I guess it can be with informants within the group)
- rektide 5y ago
  while i agree that these are not new concepts entirely, them being wheeled out incessantly to support the developmemt of a much much wider survelliance state does seem semi novel in the 90's. the miltary-industrial-congressional complex needed new boogeymen to scare the nation with, to justify their existence over, after the collapse of the soviet union. terrorism & child molestation feel like a replacement terror, after the old one fell.

dan-robertson 5y ago

This is nonsense. The word terrorism dates back to the French Revolution and Britain dealt with many bombings from the IRA before 1996 (as well as earlier Irish republicans, militant suffragettes, etc.) Child exploitation has been a known problem for a long time too. I think it is easy to brush off as a problem that doesn’t really exist if it is very distant from your experience of the world (eg how many paedophiles do you know?) but my understanding is that tech companies with user-generated-content deal with an absolutely horrific amount of CSEM. I don’t think it is reasonable to simple talk about liberty and brush the problem away when it comes up. Internet-based communication and encryption change the possibilities for communication and it seems hard for laws to be particularly helpful in achieving a state that is good for liberty and good for society. Personally, I think it is a good thing that, end-to-end encrypted group chats are somewhat limited in size, 256 for WhatsApp and 1000 for signal. I think 1000 is too many. In liberal democracies, I think at some group size, free speech ought to be semi-public speech too (though I guess it can be with informants within the group)

rektide 5y ago
while i agree that these are not new concepts entirely, them being wheeled out incessantly to support the developmemt of a much much wider survelliance state does seem semi novel in the 90's. the miltary-industrial-congressional complex needed new boogeymen to scare the nation with, to justify their existence over, after the collapse of the soviet union. terrorism & child molestation feel like a replacement terror, after the old one fell.