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We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they

We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" etc, whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. This will only hurt people actually fighting for their rights, and this needs to stop.

msm_ 4y ago
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.
- kragen 4y ago
  here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did "if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers
  - dtech 4y ago
    All those things are enjoyable and have no legal alternative. A chat application would have.
    - kragen 4y ago
      uber cab is not especially enjoyable, and the legal alternatives (for riders) include taxis and remises (not to mention buses, trains, bicycles, private cars, private motorcycles, and electric scooters; buenos aires is pretty dense and public transport is pretty good) uber was just better the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them, geez the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex, which many people actually preferred; possibly you haven't heard, but it's a more popular alternative even today you're right about heroin and meth though, so, one out of four i guess
      - deedree 4y ago
        Did you forget about alcohol, nicotine, caffeine? Totally legal addictive alternatives.
        kragen 4y ago
        arguably caffeine and alcohol are even less adequate as a replacement for heroin than a bicycle is as a replacement for uber cab i mean if the objective is just 'euphoria' (as opposed to avoiding opiate withdrawal or having a 60-hour-long orgy) there are a lot of ways you can get it: hyperventilation, falling in love, roller coasters, exercise, praying, etc., and i thought about saying this, but i think that this really is a pretty weak counterargument to dtech's claim that heroin and meth have no legal alternatives; they're pretty much right about that
      - dtech 4y ago
        Only Uber had an alternative, the rest you either didn't address or are incorrect > the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex Unless you're subscribing to a unscientific "people choose to be gay" philosophy, having sex with a gender you're not attracted to is not at all an alternative. > the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them You mentioned surviving today, currently a lot of those games cannot be bought legally, which is what I meant with no alternative. Back then also a lot of people didn't pirate, and a lot of people who did did so because they had little money. I would count that situation as having no available alternative. We were discussing a hypothetical chat application which currently are offered for free, so money is not an issue there.
  - bccdee 4y ago
    This draws a false dichotomy between "people use X" and "nobody uses X." There's actually a sliding scale of how many people use X. When a thing is illegal, fewer people will use it and the people who do use it will be at risk. If we thing a thing is important and that people should be able to use it, it's bad if that thing is illegal. There's a reason why people fought so hard decriminalize gay sex—not because laws against gay sex made it impossible, but because those laws were nevertheless really bad for gay people.
    - kragen 4y ago
      i don't agree that i subscribe to that dichotomy i think it is incorrect for precisely the reason you state
  - watwut 4y ago
    It is fairly easy to argue that people have more gay sex now that gay marriages are legal.
    - kragen 4y ago
      plausibly, and plausibly making private communication illegal would result in less private communication successfully taking place, but it certainly wouldn't result in private communication dwindling to an insignificant activity, which is the most charitable interpretation i could come up with for the obviously absurd claim i was rebutting, 'if it's illegal people just won't use it'
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  > It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Bittorrent still exists. Plenty Gen-Zers use it too.
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      Thank you for illustrating the point!
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    Gen-Xer here: Napster was never made illegal Napster lost several lawsuits in the US and filed for bankruptcy But Napster the brand was sold to Roxio and continued operations it's still active today https://www.napster.com/ https://www.napster.com/ Anyway, in retrospective, Napster times were fun, university networks were clogged by students downloading music all day long and, at least in my country, many people bought a dial up internet connection just to use it. But it had serious unexpected consequences, it gave birth to new generations of listeners that do not buy music, because they never had to, and the musicians are now paid virtually nothing for the music they create, while majors still make a lot of money, which isn't exactly what we hoped for when we hated on Metallica for suing Napster. People were not using it because it was illegal, people were using it because it was cool. It was mostly young people. Chats are a different beast, if they were ever made illegal, a lot of people would stop using them, because they would disappear from app stores and a prominent smartphone manufacturer we all know would probably delete the app remotely from the users' devices and report to the authorities whoever would dear to sideload it. I feel sometimes a little bit conflicted about those years when I see my musician friends touring over and over because selling records and make a living of it it's not a thing anymore, and now I buy a lot more music than I did in the past (which was already a decent amount), directly from artists when I can.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  Once a decentralized system becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, banning it becomes tantamount to imposing economic sanctions on yourself. That's basically what happened with the internet. That might have just been a fluke, but it would be awesome if we could somehow manage to create more systems like that.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    The problem is that when political elites are faced between the choice of ruling an impoverished population and losing power, they will always choose the former.
- barnabee 4y ago
  It is necessary both to try to get rid of bad laws and to encourage, facilitate, and protect mass civil disobedience.
bartislartfast 4y ago
> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. I'm not for more surveillance, but this is the exact argument that people give against gun control
- gherkinnn 4y ago
  So?
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.
  - oauea 4y ago
    Don't call encryption illegal. That's letting them shape the narrative.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      Isn't the whole point that they're trying to make mathematics illegal? To my knowledge, encryption is currently legal. To those who say "it's impossible to make encryption illegal": there have been sillier laws. George Orwell once imagined a society where 2+2=5 was a law. While they usually do, laws don't have to make sense.
      - bartislartfast 4y ago
        My favourite example in the world of "silly" laws - Saudi Arabia invests massive money in scientific research, and still executes people for Sorcery and Witchcraft
      - giobox 4y ago
        We don't need to look to fiction in the US to see examples of encryption controlled by the State with laws, it was literally US government policy in the 90s/early 2000s. Examples include banning export of encryption keys longer than 40 bits etc to make it easier for US secret services to crack the foreign purchaser's systems, the debate during the Clinton administration on what should be permitted encryption-wise was intense at times. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
ethbr0 4y ago
> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state. In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done. Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem. A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement. TFA rightly calls on citizens to instead be that group, on the side of freedom.
- mach1ne 4y ago
  Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”. Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.
    - Hizonner 4y ago
      I believe the idea is not that they hide their motives, but that they hide from their motives. May or may not be true, but still...
      - brookst 4y ago
        That’s fair, but it’s still an unsavory argument style. “I know the secret motivations of those in power, which even they don’t know”. It’s a weird way to remove agency from the powerful in the name of, IDK what.
tomxor 4y ago
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out: 1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next? 2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what? 3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement? Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud. If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate and access information freely.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Agreed. Just like every fight for freedoms, it is a constant battle, and one that will never end.
  - masterof0 4y ago
    The alternative would be China-style surveillance state, and be cool with it? Nice
- staunton 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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stagas 4y ago
I've always wondered behind the rationale on privacy being a human right. What if it wasn't? What if instead we were enforcing transparency? Force everything to be public, starting from the government down to the local coffee shop. All transactions, all communications, everything. Make privacy a crime for everybody, including the government and the military. Just as a thought exercise, it would be a remarkably different world. I think the problem privacy is solving enables a different set of problems to emerge that would have otherwise been impossible. And one could argue that these new problems are those that enable the necessity for privacy to be established as a human right in the first place.
- masterof0 4y ago
  Sure, let's make everyone to walk around naked. Let's also make sure, that everyone knows what is going on in your life, where you and your loved ones live, what they buy, how much money they make, what they say, ....... Your argument is ridiculous.
- rrsmtz 4y ago
  The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively). Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.
  - stagas 4y ago
    Privacy though is perpetuating that priviledged class because they can do their shady business in secret. If everything was transparent, that would be harder to achieve. Also the "every human society that's ever existed" isn't true, because for sure when humans were nomads, you basically knew what's happening with everybody in your tribe, transparency was at 100%, privacy at 0. It's also the case today in many places such as small villages where everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it seems to be ok.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen. Though, part of this deal is that we take control on when they go too far, and do stupid things. Which seems to be the case in this case, because of which we push against it, because that's how we hope to get a healthy world. > Privacy is a human right. So is security. It's all about balancing interests and abilities. > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS. > Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. No, they are not. The majority of criminals are not some organized super villains. They are usually also depending on the same tools and networks as everyone else. And they are also just flawed humans, making errors.
- pokepim 4y ago
  [dead]
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  > > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. > That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS. Are you familiar with a country called China?
  - detaro 4y ago
    "All leaders want their countries to be like China" is conspiracy BS, yes.
idlewords 4y ago
Systems outside the control of any government entity devolve into a familiar cavalcade of horrors. You need a better answer for the fact that those horrors exist, and that many people who draw government paychecks devote their careers to fighting them in good faith, with good results. You'd think that after twenty years the debate would have moved past advocating for complete lawlessness, but we get stuck in the same puerile tropes. The fact that bad state actors exist does not change the fact that horribly abusive material, with real victims, will be shared on any platform those abusers consider safe, and that the existence of such platforms will encourage further abuse. Anyone who has worked on child sexual exploitation material on any platform knows this, and any privacy advocate has to have a better answer for it than 'nuh-uh'.
notepalf 4y ago
> We certainly need decentralized systems Matrix and XMPP exists, what should we do to make this more popular?
- seanw444 4y ago
  Make it accessible.
ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago
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AlbertCory 4y ago
There are a lot of people objecting to the "real motivation" argument (it's just bureaucratic incompetence, they don't know what they're doing, etc. etc.) Usually those are good arguments. Not this time. This proposal is Pure Evil. Hardly anyone is willing to come out and say they admire the Chinese social credit system. But when their every action leans towards replicating it, it's more than fair to drag them out into the sunlight.
atmosx 4y ago
> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place. Trying to fight legal frameworks with technology, failed in the past with some notable but hardly repeatable exceptions. In the 90s a few geeks tech awareness could match the resources of a small state, non tech-savvy state. Nowadays it is impossible because the discrepancy in resources is huge. There are countries that force you to download their own "secure" SSL certificate, so they can sniff all traffic. China is the worst and most prominent example. This battle need to be fought on the street, with votes, by raising awareness, etc. If we want to be "free" we need to take-over the political battle, not the tech battle because if we win on that front, most likely won't matter. I don't want to risk jail for using an open source encryption tool.
- humanizersequel 4y ago
  >No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place. I'm reminded of the EMH joke about the economist walking by a 100 dollar bill on the street, assuming that it must be fake because if it were real, someone already would have picked it up.
  - atmosx 4y ago
    What is EMH? Sounds like a crypto convention to me.
    - boring_twenties 4y ago
      Efficient Markets Hypothesis
ComodoHacker 4y ago
>Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. That's the hard part, IMO. Imagine that we really got that "decentralized system that cannot be controlled" going and everyone is using it. Everyone, including those who is into illegal things. And they don't get caught. Now the government starts to push their "this decentralized shit is doing more harm than good" agenda. Whatever their motivation is, it would be easy to sway public opinion against surveillance-free communications, because the harm is real, not hypothetical, like it is now.
- loup-vaillant 4y ago
  Criminals are using encrypted communications right now, though. The harm is already real. Now, I have a cryptography library to polish.
  - ComodoHacker 4y ago
    They are not widespread now, though. The government is keeping their communications under control, more or less. Only most educated criminals have good enough opsec. The gov can subpoena whatever service they use today and disrupt their communications without disrupting everyone else's. They don't have so called collateral privacy. The 'encrypted' part doesn't really add much harm. With truly decentralized system things would be different.
pelasaco 4y ago
> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. Thats the same argument for less gun control.
stiltzkin 4y ago
Nostr has been with good development lately.
thefz 4y ago
> Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" The four horsemen of the Infocalypse > The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
1337shadow 4y ago
Who is "actually fighting for their rights in the UE" exactly? care to share some examples?
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> Privacy is a human right I believe you where talking about secrecy. WhatsApp chats are secret, but not necessarily private. Authorities can ask Meta to release the meta data and they can inspect phones to retrieve the chat logs. Private communications have never been secret, it was always possible for the people with the necessary authorizations to access them. Privacy is consensual, secrecy is not. But there is no right to secrecy. As much as I love mullvad and their excellent products, they never link the proposal they talk about in that page, which hinders the people' ability to form their own opinion. All the material we can find revolves around the same actors, quoting each other, some like the Pirate party, say it was leaked Leaked Commission paper EU mass surveillance plans https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commission-paper-eu-mass-surveillance-plans/ https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commissi... But it's not true, it's officially published on the EU website, it wasn't being kept hidden, it had to be translated to all the EU official languages before being published. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2022%3A209%3AFIN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20... I understand being concerned, what I do not understand is being catastrophic. Even if everything they wrote was true, a proposal is not a law, so whatever happened in the Swedish parliament, was not influenced by the EU proposal. p.s. the system is similar to CSAM, which I don't like either, but sooner or later such systems will be everywhere, like it or not. The discussion must be held in a way or another. Apple too considered scanning the users' devices to match CSAM pictures, they dropped it, for now, but probably only because they are developing their own system, independent from the government, so they don't have to give them any kind of access. Here the discussion is being held in public, by people elected by European citizens directly with their vote, these people are paid exactly to discuss these matters, theya re doing their job. You wrote "the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it." but the they you mention are elected officials, not SP.E.C.T.R.E. evil agents

msm_ 4y ago

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. I agree in principle, but controlled != regulated. It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. It's a human problem, not a tech problem.

kragen 4y ago
here in argentina uber was very illegal for several years and people used the fuck out of it in the usa heroin and meth are super illegal and people are using the fuck out of them many 80s pc video games only survive in a playable form because of a very illegal system of organized copyright infringement that removed copy protection mechanisms; people used the fuck out of that too in the usa gay sex was super illegal until, in many locations, 20 years ago. guess what gay people did "if it's illegal people just won't use it" is clearly not correct; i think it's what dave chappelle would describe as an extremely white thought the problem is if the design of the system provides law enforcement a bottleneck they can use for leverage against righteous lawbreakers
- dtech 4y ago
  All those things are enjoyable and have no legal alternative. A chat application would have.
  - kragen 4y ago
    uber cab is not especially enjoyable, and the legal alternatives (for riders) include taxis and remises (not to mention buses, trains, bicycles, private cars, private motorcycles, and electric scooters; buenos aires is pretty dense and public transport is pretty good) uber was just better the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them, geez the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex, which many people actually preferred; possibly you haven't heard, but it's a more popular alternative even today you're right about heroin and meth though, so, one out of four i guess
    - deedree 4y ago
      Did you forget about alcohol, nicotine, caffeine? Totally legal addictive alternatives.
      - kragen 4y ago
        arguably caffeine and alcohol are even less adequate as a replacement for heroin than a bicycle is as a replacement for uber cab i mean if the objective is just 'euphoria' (as opposed to avoiding opiate withdrawal or having a 60-hour-long orgy) there are a lot of ways you can get it: hyperventilation, falling in love, roller coasters, exercise, praying, etc., and i thought about saying this, but i think that this really is a pretty weak counterargument to dtech's claim that heroin and meth have no legal alternatives; they're pretty much right about that
    - dtech 4y ago
      Only Uber had an alternative, the rest you either didn't address or are incorrect > the legal alternative to gay sex was heterosexual sex Unless you're subscribing to a unscientific "people choose to be gay" philosophy, having sex with a gender you're not attracted to is not at all an alternative. > the legal alternative to pirating games was to buy them You mentioned surviving today, currently a lot of those games cannot be bought legally, which is what I meant with no alternative. Back then also a lot of people didn't pirate, and a lot of people who did did so because they had little money. I would count that situation as having no available alternative. We were discussing a hypothetical chat application which currently are offered for free, so money is not an issue there.
- bccdee 4y ago
  This draws a false dichotomy between "people use X" and "nobody uses X." There's actually a sliding scale of how many people use X. When a thing is illegal, fewer people will use it and the people who do use it will be at risk. If we thing a thing is important and that people should be able to use it, it's bad if that thing is illegal. There's a reason why people fought so hard decriminalize gay sex—not because laws against gay sex made it impossible, but because those laws were nevertheless really bad for gay people.
  - kragen 4y ago
    i don't agree that i subscribe to that dichotomy i think it is incorrect for precisely the reason you state
- watwut 4y ago
  It is fairly easy to argue that people have more gay sex now that gay marriages are legal.
  - kragen 4y ago
    plausibly, and plausibly making private communication illegal would result in less private communication successfully taking place, but it certainly wouldn't result in private communication dwindling to an insignificant activity, which is the most charitable interpretation i could come up with for the obviously absurd claim i was rebutting, 'if it's illegal people just won't use it'
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
> It's (technologically) relatively easy to create a private, censorship-resistant distributed system, but if it's illegal people just won't use it. Ask a Gen-Xer about Napster and Bittorrent sometime.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Bittorrent still exists. Plenty Gen-Zers use it too.
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    Thank you for illustrating the point!
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  Gen-Xer here: Napster was never made illegal Napster lost several lawsuits in the US and filed for bankruptcy But Napster the brand was sold to Roxio and continued operations it's still active today https://www.napster.com/ https://www.napster.com/ Anyway, in retrospective, Napster times were fun, university networks were clogged by students downloading music all day long and, at least in my country, many people bought a dial up internet connection just to use it. But it had serious unexpected consequences, it gave birth to new generations of listeners that do not buy music, because they never had to, and the musicians are now paid virtually nothing for the music they create, while majors still make a lot of money, which isn't exactly what we hoped for when we hated on Metallica for suing Napster. People were not using it because it was illegal, people were using it because it was cool. It was mostly young people. Chats are a different beast, if they were ever made illegal, a lot of people would stop using them, because they would disappear from app stores and a prominent smartphone manufacturer we all know would probably delete the app remotely from the users' devices and report to the authorities whoever would dear to sideload it. I feel sometimes a little bit conflicted about those years when I see my musician friends touring over and over because selling records and make a living of it it's not a thing anymore, and now I buy a lot more music than I did in the past (which was already a decent amount), directly from artists when I can.
Ajedi32 4y ago
Once a decentralized system becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, banning it becomes tantamount to imposing economic sanctions on yourself. That's basically what happened with the internet. That might have just been a fluke, but it would be awesome if we could somehow manage to create more systems like that.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The problem is that when political elites are faced between the choice of ruling an impoverished population and losing power, they will always choose the former.
barnabee 4y ago
It is necessary both to try to get rid of bad laws and to encourage, facilitate, and protect mass civil disobedience.

bartislartfast 4y ago

> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. I'm not for more surveillance, but this is the exact argument that people give against gun control

gherkinnn 4y ago
So?
wizzwizz4 4y ago
Unless you're a gunsmith, it's not really comparable. Anyone with a sufficiently-powerful desk calculator can use illegal encryption, but not everyone can procure an illegal firearm.
- oauea 4y ago
  Don't call encryption illegal. That's letting them shape the narrative.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    Isn't the whole point that they're trying to make mathematics illegal? To my knowledge, encryption is currently legal. To those who say "it's impossible to make encryption illegal": there have been sillier laws. George Orwell once imagined a society where 2+2=5 was a law. While they usually do, laws don't have to make sense.
    - bartislartfast 4y ago
      My favourite example in the world of "silly" laws - Saudi Arabia invests massive money in scientific research, and still executes people for Sorcery and Witchcraft
    - giobox 4y ago
      We don't need to look to fiction in the US to see examples of encryption controlled by the State with laws, it was literally US government policy in the 90s/early 2000s. Examples include banning export of encryption keys longer than 40 bits etc to make it easier for US secret services to crack the foreign purchaser's systems, the debate during the Clinton administration on what should be permitted encryption-wise was intense at times. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

ethbr0 4y ago

> We probably all know that they will show reasons [...], whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. I don't think this is how it works, absent an already existent police state. In democracies, it really is pushed for {good reasons}. Once built, it's then used by law enforcement, because it exists and gets the job done. Pretending there's a sinister, organized New World Order (aka "them") with decades-long plans to restrict freedom is fantasy, and doesn't help us target the actual problem. A lot of bureaucrats and legislators are instead just disorganized, technically clueless, and listen to the loudest and most organized group. Which tends to be intelligence or law enforcement. TFA rightly calls on citizens to instead be that group, on the side of freedom.

mach1ne 4y ago
Even though something has a benevolent rationalization, it doesn’t mean the true motives are benevolent. It doesn’t need any New World Order conspiracy either. People in ruling positions often enjoy power, and they may be clueless as to how this desire is affecting their decisionmaking.
- brookst 4y ago
  I’m always skeptical of phrases like “true motives”. Sometimes people can do the wrong thing for the right reasons, or totally amorally. There doesn’t have to be a secret agenda. Framing things in terms of shadowy cabals that hide their secret motivations weakens the argument and reduces odds of successful resistance to these programs by misunderstanding the opposition.
  - Hizonner 4y ago
    I believe the idea is not that they hide their motives, but that they hide from their motives. May or may not be true, but still...
    - brookst 4y ago
      That’s fair, but it’s still an unsavory argument style. “I know the secret motivations of those in power, which even they don’t know”. It’s a weird way to remove agency from the powerful in the name of, IDK what.

tomxor 4y ago

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. I used to think this way, and still do to a degree... but it's not enough. The idea of zero trust as an absolute is flawed, because if the adversary is your own government they will just keep shifting targets. Lets play this out: 1. Gov start monitoring all proprietary messaging platforms and services. So lets assume that in response, decentralised FOSS based e2e encrypted private messaging services flourish, and everyone actually adopts them... All proprietary messaging platforms/services die off. Great, what next? 2. Now gov mandate that all hardware must have have backdoors to circumvent those measures. So lets assume in response, consumer hardware transforms into IBM PC style open standard and people start assembling their own smart phones and tablets out of interchangeable components so that they can avoid those pesky backdoor chips... and miraculously everyone does this and proprietary handset manufacturers all die off. Now what? 3. Gov mandate all fabs must etch an additional microcontroller onto every CPU/microcontroller with > n gates, with full memory and network access. Do we all start running local fabs in our basement? Hopefully you get my point, the reality is that there is friction in both directions and neither end has absolute power, but we must push back against policies like this to prevent erosion of our values, do not "give them an inch" so to speak. We cannot trust all of society, but we also cannot afford to not trust civilisation in it's entirety, it's just not possible, we cannot build our own computers out of sticks and mud. If you want an example of what a technological arms race with your own government looks like, it's happening in China right now. They aren't even fighting for privacy, they are fighting to just communicate and access information freely.

seanw444 4y ago
Agreed. Just like every fight for freedoms, it is a constant battle, and one that will never end.
- masterof0 4y ago
  The alternative would be China-style surveillance state, and be cool with it? Nice
staunton 4y ago

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stagas 4y ago

I've always wondered behind the rationale on privacy being a human right. What if it wasn't? What if instead we were enforcing transparency? Force everything to be public, starting from the government down to the local coffee shop. All transactions, all communications, everything. Make privacy a crime for everybody, including the government and the military. Just as a thought exercise, it would be a remarkably different world. I think the problem privacy is solving enables a different set of problems to emerge that would have otherwise been impossible. And one could argue that these new problems are those that enable the necessity for privacy to be established as a human right in the first place.

masterof0 4y ago
Sure, let's make everyone to walk around naked. Let's also make sure, that everyone knows what is going on in your life, where you and your loved ones live, what they buy, how much money they make, what they say, ....... Your argument is ridiculous.
rrsmtz 4y ago
The point of human rights is to protect the underprivileged - the privileged of any given society don’t need to have these protections because they are at the top of the social hierarchy and get to call the shots. They would simply use their influence to get an exception for themselves. That’s why the US constitution is great, because it’s such a pain in the ass to change (unfortunately the privileged invent “interpretations” to change it retroactively). Your thought experiment exists in a utopia where the above isn’t the case, which isn’t really applicable to any human society that’s ever existed. The top of the food chain will Until humans stop forming hierarchies, we need rights.
- stagas 4y ago
  Privacy though is perpetuating that priviledged class because they can do their shady business in secret. If everything was transparent, that would be harder to achieve. Also the "every human society that's ever existed" isn't true, because for sure when humans were nomads, you basically knew what's happening with everybody in your tribe, transparency was at 100%, privacy at 0. It's also the case today in many places such as small villages where everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it seems to be ok.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. No, not really. A World with controlled controllers is better than a world without any control. See the awful space which is the crypto community ATM. EU and US so far are fair and tame (to their own citizen). They are not always good, but not bad. And that's fair enough for any decent citizen. Though, part of this deal is that we take control on when they go too far, and do stupid things. Which seems to be the case in this case, because of which we push against it, because that's how we hope to get a healthy world. > Privacy is a human right. So is security. It's all about balancing interests and abilities. > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS. > Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. No, they are not. The majority of criminals are not some organized super villains. They are usually also depending on the same tools and networks as everyone else. And they are also just flawed humans, making errors.

pokepim 4y ago
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jokethrowaway 4y ago
> > whereas the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it. > That smells like QAnon-level of conspiracy BS. Are you familiar with a country called China?
- detaro 4y ago
  "All leaders want their countries to be like China" is conspiracy BS, yes.

idlewords 4y ago

Systems outside the control of any government entity devolve into a familiar cavalcade of horrors. You need a better answer for the fact that those horrors exist, and that many people who draw government paychecks devote their careers to fighting them in good faith, with good results. You'd think that after twenty years the debate would have moved past advocating for complete lawlessness, but we get stuck in the same puerile tropes. The fact that bad state actors exist does not change the fact that horribly abusive material, with real victims, will be shared on any platform those abusers consider safe, and that the existence of such platforms will encourage further abuse. Anyone who has worked on child sexual exploitation material on any platform knows this, and any privacy advocate has to have a better answer for it than 'nuh-uh'.

notepalf 4y ago

> We certainly need decentralized systems Matrix and XMPP exists, what should we do to make this more popular?

seanw444 4y ago
Make it accessible.

ChewFarceSkunk 4y ago

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AlbertCory 4y ago

There are a lot of people objecting to the "real motivation" argument (it's just bureaucratic incompetence, they don't know what they're doing, etc. etc.) Usually those are good arguments. Not this time. This proposal is Pure Evil. Hardly anyone is willing to come out and say they admire the Chinese social credit system. But when their every action leans towards replicating it, it's more than fair to drag them out into the sunlight.

atmosx 4y ago

> We certainly need decentralized systems that cannot be controlled by EU, US, or any government/entity. No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place. Trying to fight legal frameworks with technology, failed in the past with some notable but hardly repeatable exceptions. In the 90s a few geeks tech awareness could match the resources of a small state, non tech-savvy state. Nowadays it is impossible because the discrepancy in resources is huge. There are countries that force you to download their own "secure" SSL certificate, so they can sniff all traffic. China is the worst and most prominent example. This battle need to be fought on the street, with votes, by raising awareness, etc. If we want to be "free" we need to take-over the political battle, not the tech battle because if we win on that front, most likely won't matter. I don't want to risk jail for using an open source encryption tool.

humanizersequel 4y ago
>No. If such a system could work in any meaningful way, it would be already in place. I'm reminded of the EMH joke about the economist walking by a 100 dollar bill on the street, assuming that it must be fake because if it were real, someone already would have picked it up.
- atmosx 4y ago
  What is EMH? Sounds like a crypto convention to me.
  - boring_twenties 4y ago
    Efficient Markets Hypothesis

ComodoHacker 4y ago

>Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. That's the hard part, IMO. Imagine that we really got that "decentralized system that cannot be controlled" going and everyone is using it. Everyone, including those who is into illegal things. And they don't get caught. Now the government starts to push their "this decentralized shit is doing more harm than good" agenda. Whatever their motivation is, it would be easy to sway public opinion against surveillance-free communications, because the harm is real, not hypothetical, like it is now.

loup-vaillant 4y ago
Criminals are using encrypted communications right now, though. The harm is already real. Now, I have a cryptography library to polish.
- ComodoHacker 4y ago
  They are not widespread now, though. The government is keeping their communications under control, more or less. Only most educated criminals have good enough opsec. The gov can subpoena whatever service they use today and disrupt their communications without disrupting everyone else's. They don't have so called collateral privacy. The 'encrypted' part doesn't really add much harm. With truly decentralized system things would be different.

pelasaco 4y ago

> Anyone who is really into something illegal will use something alternative anyway. Thats the same argument for less gun control.

stiltzkin 4y ago

Nostr has been with good development lately.

thefz 4y ago

> Privacy is a human right. We probably all know that they will show reasons like "fighting terrorism", "preventing national threats" or "hunting down child pornography" The four horsemen of the Infocalypse > The phrase is a play on Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There does not appear to be a universally agreed definition of who the Horsemen are, but they are usually listed as terrorists, drug dealers, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

1337shadow 4y ago

Who is "actually fighting for their rights in the UE" exactly? care to share some examples?

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

> Privacy is a human right I believe you where talking about secrecy. WhatsApp chats are secret, but not necessarily private. Authorities can ask Meta to release the meta data and they can inspect phones to retrieve the chat logs. Private communications have never been secret, it was always possible for the people with the necessary authorizations to access them. Privacy is consensual, secrecy is not. But there is no right to secrecy. As much as I love mullvad and their excellent products, they never link the proposal they talk about in that page, which hinders the people' ability to form their own opinion. All the material we can find revolves around the same actors, quoting each other, some like the Pirate party, say it was leaked Leaked Commission paper EU mass surveillance plans https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commission-paper-eu-mass-surveillance-plans/ https://european-pirateparty.eu/chat-control-leaked-commissi... But it's not true, it's officially published on the EU website, it wasn't being kept hidden, it had to be translated to all the EU official languages before being published. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2022%3A209%3AFIN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20... I understand being concerned, what I do not understand is being catastrophic. Even if everything they wrote was true, a proposal is not a law, so whatever happened in the Swedish parliament, was not influenced by the EU proposal. p.s. the system is similar to CSAM, which I don't like either, but sooner or later such systems will be everywhere, like it or not. The discussion must be held in a way or another. Apple too considered scanning the users' devices to match CSAM pictures, they dropped it, for now, but probably only because they are developing their own system, independent from the government, so they don't have to give them any kind of access. Here the discussion is being held in public, by people elected by European citizens directly with their vote, these people are paid exactly to discuss these matters, theya re doing their job. You wrote "the real motivation is to control people's freedom of speech and communication even though they will 100% deny it." but the they you mention are elected officials, not SP.E.C.T.R.E. evil agents