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Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder. Email isn't traditionally encrypted (don't br

by ronsor 4y ago

Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder. Email isn't traditionally encrypted (don't bring up the mess that is PGP); IRC wasn't; neither was AIM, ICQ, or MSN; Twitter DMs aren't; XMPP isn't; before the Internet, phone calls could be wiretapped by the government. Physical mail, while not encrypted, could be considered an exception, seeing as it's illegal to open in the majority of cases. "Private" communications have never really been that private, unless you're speaking face to face alone in a room or passing notes to each other. Not to say I'm in favor of it being that way, but that's what people have long adjusted to.

MichaelCollins 4y ago
Encyption isn't traditional, but neither is it traditional for common people to have records of the conversations they had with friends and family, least of all records that are possessed and preserved indefinitely by any third party. Even if you consider letter writing; letters might be intercepted by the government but even then the postal service wasn't maintaining an archive of the contents of all the letters everybody ever sent.
jjav 4y ago
> Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder. Not at all. For nearly all of human history, privacy of communication was the norm with a few understood exceptions. If you had a conversation with someone it was just about always private forever. Unless the location was bugged with microphones, but that wouldn't be the case unless you were already under investigation. Most importantly, it wasn't possible to go back in time and bug the room for a conversation last week. Phone lines could be tapped but not all phone lines were recorded all the time, wasn't yet technically possible. So again you'd be private unless already under investigation and the tap couldn't happen retroactively. It's only now that reality has changed dramatically and all messaged are recorded (e.g. here by facebook) and are available retroactively and across the whole population (i.e. they don't need to target someone specific, just run a query for phrases and see who pops up).
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I disagree, privacy was the norm. Never did government have as much access to communication. Even ICQ, AIM were private because government usually didn't have interest in spying here because the demographics were mostly not of interest. Today we have a protocol about a lot of things, text, locations, group memberships. Surveillance is vastly greater than anytime before with a few magnitudes.

by ronsor 4y ago

MichaelCollins 4y ago

Encyption isn't traditional, but neither is it traditional for common people to have records of the conversations they had with friends and family, least of all records that are possessed and preserved indefinitely by any third party. Even if you consider letter writing; letters might be intercepted by the government but even then the postal service wasn't maintaining an archive of the contents of all the letters everybody ever sent.

jjav 4y ago

> Honestly, encrypted communications for the average person, being a relatively recent development, is much weirder. Not at all. For nearly all of human history, privacy of communication was the norm with a few understood exceptions. If you had a conversation with someone it was just about always private forever. Unless the location was bugged with microphones, but that wouldn't be the case unless you were already under investigation. Most importantly, it wasn't possible to go back in time and bug the room for a conversation last week. Phone lines could be tapped but not all phone lines were recorded all the time, wasn't yet technically possible. So again you'd be private unless already under investigation and the tap couldn't happen retroactively. It's only now that reality has changed dramatically and all messaged are recorded (e.g. here by facebook) and are available retroactively and across the whole population (i.e. they don't need to target someone specific, just run a query for phrases and see who pops up).

raxxorraxor 4y ago

I disagree, privacy was the norm. Never did government have as much access to communication. Even ICQ, AIM were private because government usually didn't have interest in spying here because the demographics were mostly not of interest. Today we have a protocol about a lot of things, text, locations, group memberships. Surveillance is vastly greater than anytime before with a few magnitudes.