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History has shown us time and time again that when privacy is given away because "bad people can use it", without fail turns out to be detrimental to the law ab

History has shown us time and time again that when privacy is given away because "bad people can use it", without fail turns out to be detrimental to the law abiding citizens, with little to no impact to criminals. In many cases it further pushed the government into a dictatorial, even totalitarian regimes. This has happened with speech, journalism, gatherings, associating with people, religion, self defense, and many more. The very definition of a criminal is someone who ignores some laws, performs illegal (not legal) acts, including the laws that supposed to correct them. People need to stop voting on purely emotion, and vote more with logic and ethics. edit: add qualifier of "purely" & "more", as to acknowledge the responses and the nuanced problem around the overall topic.

Xeoncross 4y ago
Who's logic and ethics? I think that is the heart of the issue. Hard for all of us to stand together apart.
whakim 4y ago
I don't think blanket statements like this are true, and I don't think they're a healthy way to frame the debate. To take a non-trivial example, requiring cars to bear license plates - something almost everyone accepts, at least in the United States - has a lot of upsides like enforcement of traffic laws. Sure, perhaps traffic cameras aid totalitarian states in tracking the movements of citizens, but I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy. This is a long way of saying that, even as a strong privacy advocate, it's worth noting that the tradeoff is real and the terms of debate ought to be over whether the tradeoff is a good one or not. In the case of encryption, this is a difficult question for us to answer because we're essentially asking how many crimes might have been prevented or might have gone unpunished had the perpetrators used encrypted communications. That being said, I think the security state would be hitting us over the head with these statistics if they could actually make a coherent case - the fact that Reid Blackman is instead making a fallacious comparison between encryption and the nuclear launch codes suggests that the figures don't add up.
- FigmentEngine 4y ago
  false and dangerous analogy. knowing your number plate is comparable to knowing your phone number, rather than the real analogy of bugging your converation in the car. the number plate yields metadata about journeys, not the actual conversation. "i mean people who argue for privacy would never have a problem with barcodes on milk"
  - w0m 4y ago
    > "i mean people who argue for privacy would never have a problem with barcodes on milk" I mean; unless you pay cash for ~everything your spending habits have generally been wide open since the 50s in the name of convenience.
    - novok 4y ago
      Vast majority of transactions were still mostly cash beyond some basic "pay my rent and utility bills and buy a car" until maybe starting at the 80s / 90s, and using credit cards back then was done wayyyy less than even the early 2000s.
      - w0m 4y ago
        True. For some perspective, half my work group wasn't yet born in the time periods you're referencing.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy. I think most people have never even considered the matter in those terms; they just accept that license plates are how we do things and don't bother asking why. When you actually ask why, your claimed upsides don't, IMO, actually amount to much. Enforcement of traffic laws? Most of those are revenue sources for local jurisdictions, not improvements in safety. If someone does no harm when violating a traffic law, there's nothing actually worth enforcing from a safety perspective; and if someone does do harm, how much help is a license plate in tracking them down? What fraction of people who are in traffic accidents leave the scene in their vehicle before the police get there, but get found later because their license plates were known? A large enough fraction that license plates for everyone are justified taking into account the privacy downsides? This, btw, is the same logic you apply yourself in the latter part of your post. And your conclusion? > I think the security state would be hitting us over the head with these statistics if they could actually make a coherent case Which means that, since they're not, there actually isn't a case. And I agree with that--both for license plates and for encryption backdoors. And for other claims that we need to give up our privacy for some other supposed benefit.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
> People need to stop voting on emotion, and vote with logic and ethics. There is no purely logical reason to vote at all that isn't fundamentally rooted in emotion. This is typically a desire for something to change in one way, a fear that it will change in another, or anger or indignation that it has already changed in some detrimental way. Indeed, your own argument is based on the fear of dictators, the looming threat freedom being taken away. Ethics too is rooted in emotion. When we look at something we consider unethical, something unjust perhaps, we feel anger and indignation. If we perceive such an event is about to happen, we feel fear. If we perceive it has been averted, we feel happiness.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Yes, goals re ethics are rooted in emotion. The actual problem, which is definitely occurring on this topic, is when acting on snap emotional judgements compromises the longer term emotional desires that matter more. It's using emotions to work forward from your emotional goals, instead of logic that would actually acheive them. This is definitely still a case of (specific and qualitatively different) emotions triumphing over logic, so I don't think it's crazy to talk about it that way. I mean, you're right in the big picture, but in a practical sense with the way people usually think about "emotion", it's not a terribly effectual perspective.
- spritefs 4y ago
  > Ethics too is rooted in emotion. Says who? Can you prove it? This is a pretty big claim to make
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    One can construct an argument based on the is-ought problem. As a brief recap: Statements about how things ought to be can not be derived solely from statements about how things are. For example, from "my house is on fire" (what is) alone does logically not follow "I should try to extinguish the fire" (what should be), without a quiet assumption something like "my home and belongings should not go up in flames" (what should be). Ethics are obviously within the category of how things should to be, and thus it cannot be derived in its entirety from the state of the world as it is. Thus ethics must be derived from some other notion about how the world should be. If you take account of the sources of our fundamental notions about how the world should be, you'll find they're all some variant of emotions, or possibly something like aesthetics, which unfortunately again cooks down a desire for that which is pleasant to the mind and senses. All other notions about how the world should be are so-that something else, which if you keep following the reasons so-that, all land in emotions. For example, the reason why we seek things like truth and justice is because we like how they feel, we feel content, as though things are the way we think they should be. We dislike lies and injustice because they make us angry when it happens to others, sad or indignant when they happen to us. If we did not feel this way, surely we would have no reason to prefer justice to injustice, or truth to lies. It would by definition be all the same to us. Alternatively, one may argue that God has decided how things should be. But that is just replacing human emotion with the moods of God. God may get angry if you marry your daughter and ransack the temple and will be happy if you offer libations. An ethics based on piety is a system of ethics based on whatever makes God happy.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
History has also shown us time and time again that absolutism isn't orthogonal with reality. Absolute privacy still results in tyranny, you just won't see it coming until it's far too late.
- from 4y ago
  I don't know what to tell you other than the fact that "lawful intercept" only became lawful in the 1970s and that the laws/modern law enforcement techniques you think are saving us from anarchy are relatively new. In the UK wiretap evidence isn't even admissible.
- FigmentEngine 4y ago
  > Absolute privacy still results in tyranny, what are the examples of this, can't think of any?
wolverine876 4y ago
> History has shown us time and time again that when privacy is given away because "bad people can use it", without fail turns out to be detrimental to the law abiding citizens, with little to no impact to criminals. In many cases it further pushed the government into a dictatorial, even totalitarian regimes. I agree with the conclusion, but I wonder about the claims and reasoning. Can you give us examples? I don't recall that many 'bad people can use it' arguments that led to what is described. I doubt it's led a liberal democracy to become authoritarian, and under existing authoritarian regimes, there is little or no privacy to give away. Finally, the biggest privacy threat in free countries now isn't government but corporations.
- datagram 4y ago
  As far as privacy goes, the USA Patriot Act is probably one of the better examples of "we have to erode privacy to catch criminals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_the_Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_t... As for general "bad people can use it" scenarios, US airport security would be my go-to example. Everyone has to take their shoes off at airport security, even though the Deparment of Homeland Security's own tests have shown that that terrorists could still still easily sneak weapons and explosives through security: https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners-20150602-story.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners...
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Those are alleged examples of privacy eroding, but not of it leading to authoritarian government.
schappim 4y ago
I generally agree with you; governments have c̶h̶i̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶w̶a̶y̶ taken a sledge hammer to privacy with The Patriot Act, NSA's mass surveillance program, PRISM, and the UK's Investigatory Powers Act etc. It is hard to quantify the chilling effects of losing privacy, similar to being impossible to prove a negative as there is no conclusive way to prove that something does not exist or did not happen.
clnq 4y ago
The argument that privacy is terrible because it can facilitate crime also neglects to consider that many other ways exist to encourage and obstruct crime and that nearly everything facilitates crime to a degree. For example, car ownership enables hit-and-runs, you can't have burglaries without homes, and gun ownership... is a topic for another thread, but you get the point.
- LightHugger 4y ago
  If you consider violating people's privacy a crime then... well... it'd be like stealing someone's car so that it can't be stolen.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> People need to stop voting on purely emotion, and vote more with logic and ethics. Ultimately, though emotion–or at least, subjective preference–is the root of ethics; logic can get you from that root (plus, where relevant, observations about the world) to more complex non-root ethical statements, but it gets you nothing without the root preferences, which it cannot generate.
anothernewdude 4y ago
I usually just ask for their credit card numbers if privacy is so unimportant.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Xeoncross 4y ago

Who's logic and ethics? I think that is the heart of the issue. Hard for all of us to stand together apart.

whakim 4y ago

I don't think blanket statements like this are true, and I don't think they're a healthy way to frame the debate. To take a non-trivial example, requiring cars to bear license plates - something almost everyone accepts, at least in the United States - has a lot of upsides like enforcement of traffic laws. Sure, perhaps traffic cameras aid totalitarian states in tracking the movements of citizens, but I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy. This is a long way of saying that, even as a strong privacy advocate, it's worth noting that the tradeoff is real and the terms of debate ought to be over whether the tradeoff is a good one or not. In the case of encryption, this is a difficult question for us to answer because we're essentially asking how many crimes might have been prevented or might have gone unpunished had the perpetrators used encrypted communications. That being said, I think the security state would be hitting us over the head with these statistics if they could actually make a coherent case - the fact that Reid Blackman is instead making a fallacious comparison between encryption and the nuclear launch codes suggests that the figures don't add up.

FigmentEngine 4y ago
false and dangerous analogy. knowing your number plate is comparable to knowing your phone number, rather than the real analogy of bugging your converation in the car. the number plate yields metadata about journeys, not the actual conversation. "i mean people who argue for privacy would never have a problem with barcodes on milk"
- w0m 4y ago
  > "i mean people who argue for privacy would never have a problem with barcodes on milk" I mean; unless you pay cash for ~everything your spending habits have generally been wide open since the 50s in the name of convenience.
  - novok 4y ago
    Vast majority of transactions were still mostly cash beyond some basic "pay my rent and utility bills and buy a car" until maybe starting at the 80s / 90s, and using credit cards back then was done wayyyy less than even the early 2000s.
    - w0m 4y ago
      True. For some perspective, half my work group wasn't yet born in the time periods you're referencing.
pdonis 4y ago
> I think most people agree that license plates are a good societal tradeoff in terms of privacy. I think most people have never even considered the matter in those terms; they just accept that license plates are how we do things and don't bother asking why. When you actually ask why, your claimed upsides don't, IMO, actually amount to much. Enforcement of traffic laws? Most of those are revenue sources for local jurisdictions, not improvements in safety. If someone does no harm when violating a traffic law, there's nothing actually worth enforcing from a safety perspective; and if someone does do harm, how much help is a license plate in tracking them down? What fraction of people who are in traffic accidents leave the scene in their vehicle before the police get there, but get found later because their license plates were known? A large enough fraction that license plates for everyone are justified taking into account the privacy downsides? This, btw, is the same logic you apply yourself in the latter part of your post. And your conclusion? > I think the security state would be hitting us over the head with these statistics if they could actually make a coherent case Which means that, since they're not, there actually isn't a case. And I agree with that--both for license plates and for encryption backdoors. And for other claims that we need to give up our privacy for some other supposed benefit.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

> People need to stop voting on emotion, and vote with logic and ethics. There is no purely logical reason to vote at all that isn't fundamentally rooted in emotion. This is typically a desire for something to change in one way, a fear that it will change in another, or anger or indignation that it has already changed in some detrimental way. Indeed, your own argument is based on the fear of dictators, the looming threat freedom being taken away. Ethics too is rooted in emotion. When we look at something we consider unethical, something unjust perhaps, we feel anger and indignation. If we perceive such an event is about to happen, we feel fear. If we perceive it has been averted, we feel happiness.

andrewflnr 4y ago
Yes, goals re ethics are rooted in emotion. The actual problem, which is definitely occurring on this topic, is when acting on snap emotional judgements compromises the longer term emotional desires that matter more. It's using emotions to work forward from your emotional goals, instead of logic that would actually acheive them. This is definitely still a case of (specific and qualitatively different) emotions triumphing over logic, so I don't think it's crazy to talk about it that way. I mean, you're right in the big picture, but in a practical sense with the way people usually think about "emotion", it's not a terribly effectual perspective.
spritefs 4y ago
> Ethics too is rooted in emotion. Says who? Can you prove it? This is a pretty big claim to make
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  One can construct an argument based on the is-ought problem. As a brief recap: Statements about how things ought to be can not be derived solely from statements about how things are. For example, from "my house is on fire" (what is) alone does logically not follow "I should try to extinguish the fire" (what should be), without a quiet assumption something like "my home and belongings should not go up in flames" (what should be). Ethics are obviously within the category of how things should to be, and thus it cannot be derived in its entirety from the state of the world as it is. Thus ethics must be derived from some other notion about how the world should be. If you take account of the sources of our fundamental notions about how the world should be, you'll find they're all some variant of emotions, or possibly something like aesthetics, which unfortunately again cooks down a desire for that which is pleasant to the mind and senses. All other notions about how the world should be are so-that something else, which if you keep following the reasons so-that, all land in emotions. For example, the reason why we seek things like truth and justice is because we like how they feel, we feel content, as though things are the way we think they should be. We dislike lies and injustice because they make us angry when it happens to others, sad or indignant when they happen to us. If we did not feel this way, surely we would have no reason to prefer justice to injustice, or truth to lies. It would by definition be all the same to us. Alternatively, one may argue that God has decided how things should be. But that is just replacing human emotion with the moods of God. God may get angry if you marry your daughter and ransack the temple and will be happy if you offer libations. An ethics based on piety is a system of ethics based on whatever makes God happy.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

History has also shown us time and time again that absolutism isn't orthogonal with reality. Absolute privacy still results in tyranny, you just won't see it coming until it's far too late.

from 4y ago
I don't know what to tell you other than the fact that "lawful intercept" only became lawful in the 1970s and that the laws/modern law enforcement techniques you think are saving us from anarchy are relatively new. In the UK wiretap evidence isn't even admissible.
FigmentEngine 4y ago
> Absolute privacy still results in tyranny, what are the examples of this, can't think of any?

wolverine876 4y ago

> History has shown us time and time again that when privacy is given away because "bad people can use it", without fail turns out to be detrimental to the law abiding citizens, with little to no impact to criminals. In many cases it further pushed the government into a dictatorial, even totalitarian regimes. I agree with the conclusion, but I wonder about the claims and reasoning. Can you give us examples? I don't recall that many 'bad people can use it' arguments that led to what is described. I doubt it's led a liberal democracy to become authoritarian, and under existing authoritarian regimes, there is little or no privacy to give away. Finally, the biggest privacy threat in free countries now isn't government but corporations.

datagram 4y ago
As far as privacy goes, the USA Patriot Act is probably one of the better examples of "we have to erode privacy to catch criminals": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_the_Patriot_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_invocations_of_t... As for general "bad people can use it" scenarios, US airport security would be my go-to example. Everyone has to take their shoes off at airport security, even though the Deparment of Homeland Security's own tests have shown that that terrorists could still still easily sneak weapons and explosives through security: https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners-20150602-story.html https://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-tsa-screeners...
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Those are alleged examples of privacy eroding, but not of it leading to authoritarian government.

schappim 4y ago

I generally agree with you; governments have c̶h̶i̶p̶p̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶w̶a̶y̶ taken a sledge hammer to privacy with The Patriot Act, NSA's mass surveillance program, PRISM, and the UK's Investigatory Powers Act etc. It is hard to quantify the chilling effects of losing privacy, similar to being impossible to prove a negative as there is no conclusive way to prove that something does not exist or did not happen.

clnq 4y ago

The argument that privacy is terrible because it can facilitate crime also neglects to consider that many other ways exist to encourage and obstruct crime and that nearly everything facilitates crime to a degree. For example, car ownership enables hit-and-runs, you can't have burglaries without homes, and gun ownership... is a topic for another thread, but you get the point.

LightHugger 4y ago
If you consider violating people's privacy a crime then... well... it'd be like stealing someone's car so that it can't be stolen.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> People need to stop voting on purely emotion, and vote more with logic and ethics. Ultimately, though emotion–or at least, subjective preference–is the root of ethics; logic can get you from that root (plus, where relevant, observations about the world) to more complex non-root ethical statements, but it gets you nothing without the root preferences, which it cannot generate.

anothernewdude 4y ago

I usually just ask for their credit card numbers if privacy is so unimportant.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]