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Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessor

Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated. It’s sad that precedents should only accrue to one side’s benefit.

safety1st 3y ago
Then these governments have forgotten that they serve at the pleasure of the people. We permit them to exist specifically for the purpose of protecting our rights, not expanding their own. The rights we possess are inherent and automatic because we're human beings, they are not granted by government or anyone else, and if a government fails to aid us in preserving them, that government is no longer legitimate. Jefferson said all this far better than I ever could: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  We live in an era where increasingly it is the government who picks the voters rather than the voters picking the government. Whether it is through immigration policy, favoring certain areas over others, or trying to throw up restrictions on voting, across the political spectrum there is a dedicated effort to shape the electorate to be friendly to those in power remaining in power.
  - raincom 3y ago
    Selectorate theory (which is described for the lay people in "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics") talks about your points: picking voters through (a) immigration policy (b) restrictions on voting, etc.
  - p1esk 3y ago
    Increasingly? When and where it was ever any better?
jstummbillig 3y ago
Well yes, they do. Encryption is a real issue for the mandate of a government, and also a real solution for other parts of the mandate of a government. It's not like we (as the broad community) are engaging with empathy. Even if there is maybe no great solution to the whole dilemma, it would help the entire thing, if we stopped camping on one side so entirely.
- int_19h 3y ago
  Empathy is for persons, not for legal entities.
  - frabbit 3y ago
    Corporations are legally recognized to have personhood in the USA. They are also legal entities. Anyway is a "person" not also a legal entity in some way? In short, I understand what you are saying but I don't think it is precise enough.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      "Legal person" is not the same thing as "person", not even in law. But to be pedantic, empathy is for those who are capable of expressing empathy in return.
      - frabbit 3y ago
        Agreed. My attempt at a quibble was foolish.
AmericanChopper 3y ago
All governments will trend towards tyranny if left unsupervised. Imo western democracies have been entirely subverted by an imaginary left/right conflict, where you end up with exactly the same thing no matter who you elect. The voting population is so completely engrossed with their contempt for either the detestable “left wing” tyrants, or the detestable “right wing” tyrants that they can’t see the side they end up supporting is just as corrupt as the side they hate, and almost identical in every way except rhetoric.
- DaSHacka 3y ago
  Its really quite surprising just how many American issues come down to this. Much of the identity-politics driven discussion of late can really just be boiled down to liberal vs conservative / right vs left.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    I have noticed that people who are steadfast in positions and don't listen to reason and subscribe to 'identity' politics on both the left and right differ mainly in where they were raised and by who raised them. The Berkeley folk who mandate it illegal to burn wood in your own fireplace have more in common with people who think trans people should be forced to live as the gender defined at birth than they do with people who think we should listen to each other reasonably and have empathy. The problem is that when one set of people get weaponized by folks who are legitimately nefarious and or criminally stupid and mentally ill, there is not no moral stance which is effectively 'I don't like some people on one side so I will let the demonstrably dangerous people take the power and do what they want'. Do you have a solution to this? Because otherwise giving 'both sides are just as bad' speech is borderline negligent.
    - jdechko 3y ago
      “Don’t tell me what to do.” Brought to you by the party of telling people what they should do.
    - kelnos 3y ago
Barrin92 3y ago
>It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars They didn't, and for what it's worth public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the law. I think anyone discussing a British law ought to keep that in mind (https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBill_230427_W.pdf https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBil...). Even on the most contentious parts of the bill: Do you believe it should or should not become a legal requirement for the following to scan messages and posts on their platforms for child sexual abuse? [Private messaging services] This should be a legal requirement -> 60; This should not be a legal requirement -> 21; Don’t know -> 18 [Social media sites] This should be a legal requirement -> 79; This should not be a legal requirement -> 10; Don’t know -> 10 Likewise on E2EE over 70% of respondents agree that ability to access them is warranted. So the framing in the discussion as if this is solely the British government against technologists is completely off, it's also taking a position against the British public.
- immibis 3y ago
  The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    Given that according to the last question on that survey the public also overwhelmingly (~90%!) supports holding senior managers personally accountable and punishable by law should firms fail to comply I think it's fair to say they want authorities to have the ability to enforce these measures. The GCHQ has nothing to do with it.
    - immibis 3y ago
      If you ask people "Should CSAM be caught?" they'll say "yes" because, duh. If you ask people "Should phones scan their files for CSAM?" a good part will say "yes" because it doesn't sound like it affects anyone outside of child pornographers. If you ask people "Should phones send your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM?" most people will say "no". If you ask people "Should phones send your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM, and should we send Apple executives to prison if they don't make their phones do this?" most people will still say "no".
windexh8er 3y ago
The best part is that the US of A is cool with allowing organizations to encrypt things that should be freely available to the public (OTA broadcast TV & public services radio networks). In the case of OTA broadcast the American taxpayer is being abused by having to deal with corporate America using open airwaves for profit while those same corporations hoover up all kinds of hand outs in subsidies. Yet when encryption is in the best interest of the American citizen, and there's no lobbyist in some politicians pocket - well, then... Then it's not acceptable because: enter national security / child porn / drugs as an inarguable rationale.
godelski 3y ago
> Governments seem to want to have it both ways I think it even goes a bit deeper. Surveillance in a democracy is a double edged sword and arguably the edge facing yourself is sharper. You want it so you can keep a close eye on your citizens and manipulate or adapt to their moods. But on the other side, adversaries are also equally capable of doing this (as NK demonstrates, software is a cheap form of warfare). Often adversaries who are more than happy to team up and pool resources. They're just sharpening the edge pointing at yourself. It really is a dangerous game to play. I know red teaming is harder than blue teaming, but I really believe that the NSA's primary objective should be defense rather than offense. Especially as we're talking about the modern era of LLMs which will be used to convincingly sound like humans and influence people at mass scale, defense just becomes even more important. The mice are running wild and our cat is too fat and lazy to catch them. That was fine when we were ahead of everyone else, but now that they've caught up our cat needs to get off its lazy ass and do its job. > anonymous cash transactions => ??? This was actually the first hint that I had that cryptocurrencies were a scam. That people were more interested in flashy than secure (e.g. zcash). I'd love to live in a world with fast anonymous digital _cash_ but I'm not sure that'll happen and not sure it'll be blockchain based.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
All kinds of advantages go to one sides benefit. Can we set up an automated monitor on all the traffic cams and licence plate readers and facial recognition systems just to catch cops and politicians breaking laws or just to track their movements and associations the way they do to everyone else? Can we access the same cam footage that the state uses to accuse you of something, to clear you instead? Only occasionally and incompletely. For instance you might have access to whatever they submit as their proof, but they had access to the full footage and from many sources, and if you had that same access, maybe you'd find proof that you were elsewhere at the same time, or that the subject came from somewhere that isn't your house, or see them getting dressed just before going to commit the act, or was even the very cop bringing the charge, or show the greater context that when you drove through that red light, you had already waited 10 minutes and the light was actually broken, or the lights were out but the timer/switing mechanism was still ticking over so the cam just assumed the driver was shown a red light, etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- flir 3y ago
  Ambient sousveillance. You'd have to get a critical mass of people who care enough to buy the hardware, deploy it, and release the video though.
  - semiquaver 3y ago
    I wish that I could believe this was possible. In pretty much every government on earth such a scheme would be made illegal on some pretext well before attainment of said critical mass.
    - flir 3y ago
      Plenty of private entities are already recording like crazy, so I assume it's the publication bit that you're thinking would be made illegal?
  - 3y ago
matthewdgreen 3y ago
What’s happening right now is much worse than the first crypto wars. In that case the government was just trying to gain occasional access to suspected criminal communications, usually with a warrant. Systems like the Clipper chip even codified mechanisms to limit access to communications. What’s happening this time around is very different: policymakers are demanding the ability to perform real-time scanning of messages, without a warrant. This is technically very different and also has very different implications for privacy down the line.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
frankfrankfrank 3y ago
[dead]
zirgs 3y ago
Wire-tapping didn't happen automatically. A judge had to authorise it during an active criminal investigation. Client side scanning would be equivalent to wire-tapping everyone at all times. This was something even totalitarian regimes could not do.
dominojab 3y ago
[dead]
ben_w 3y ago
> I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated. I'm thinking of the fact that GCHQ invented RSA in 1973, four years before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman publicly described the same system, and only got around to declassifying this in 1997.
- frabbit 3y ago
  There is no provable claim by GCHQ for any of this. They are professionally liars and deceivers. The first public, peer-reviewed publishers are the ones that get the credit. GCHQ claims are just unproven British government propaganda from people that have agreed on record that they will lie, deceive and hide the truth.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    It's certainly conceivable this claim was made by them just an attempt to look good. If so it was an inept attempt, not that "inept" rules it out. But I do generally assume that when organisations point at their mistakes, it is not a failed attempt to look good.
- Canada 3y ago
  Did it really invent RSA, such that there was any actual capability of performing asymmetric encryption or signatures? I thought it was more like, one guy there had a pretty good idea that it was possible that he wrote about, but never developed it into anything practical. Am I mistaken, and the whole working system was described?
  - derefr 3y ago
    The "pretty good idea" (Ellis' "non-secret encryption") was published about in 1969. Clifford Cocks found a workable algorithm for it — using prime factorization as the trapdoor function — in 1973. No cryptosystem was ever developed around the idea, by Cocks or GCHQ in general; they just sat on it as a classified secret. Then, in 1977, RSA was independently invented and published as both an algorithm and a full cryptosystem. I would definitely say that Cocks and RSA both independently discovered what we refer to as the RSA algorithm. We should maybe call it the Cocks–RSA algorithm.
immibis 3y ago
Of course. It's a class war. When you say the words "class war" far too few people think about the isomorphism to "actual, real" war, but it's there. Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same.
- hkt 3y ago
  Far more people need to say this. Remember folks, this week Boris informed the covid inquiry he has "forgotten" the pin to the phone all his WhatsApp messages from that time are on. If it was one of us, they'd use the bit of RIPA that carries a minimum two year sentence for not giving up an encryption key or password when asked to by the police.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  When you say those words people think you are a building-burning store-looting far left hooligan, they call you a commie and shove their head into the ground like an ostrich, as if the last N or so years have not been an endless class war.
  - vasco 3y ago
    I don't even know what my class is! Where do I check? How do you know what class you are? I want to know who to help!
    - immibis 3y ago
      Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?
      - vasco 3y ago
        I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys. So I'm both? Who do I fight for?
derefr 3y ago
> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public under a certain circumstance. So if technology changes, the spirit that the original law was defined under is expected to be upheld by the court when interpreting the law to suit cases outside its original scope. The problem with "legacy" common law — things like "being able to transact anonymously using cash" — is that there is no clear "institutional memory" of the spirit that created the law. The people who invented "using gold coins as a common exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity — and so it's not clear whether anonymity is a necessary or desirable part of the spirit of cash transactions, something the public would desire to be preserved in a replacement system; or whether it's just an "implementation detail" of the way cash happened to need to work given technology, something that would make no sense to port over to the new system.
- 23B1 3y ago
  This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most important documents when understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and simultaneously the least read! I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended – I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' – I just mean that any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the public square discussion, nobody has read these very important contextual documents and it is maddening.
  - kmbfjr 3y ago
    What a wordy way to admit to dismissing anyone’s argument to which you do not agree because “they have not read the…”.
    - 23B1 3y ago
      I agree. Arguments from ignorance should be dismissed.

safety1st 3y ago

Then these governments have forgotten that they serve at the pleasure of the people. We permit them to exist specifically for the purpose of protecting our rights, not expanding their own. The rights we possess are inherent and automatic because we're human beings, they are not granted by government or anyone else, and if a government fails to aid us in preserving them, that government is no longer legitimate. Jefferson said all this far better than I ever could: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
We live in an era where increasingly it is the government who picks the voters rather than the voters picking the government. Whether it is through immigration policy, favoring certain areas over others, or trying to throw up restrictions on voting, across the political spectrum there is a dedicated effort to shape the electorate to be friendly to those in power remaining in power.
- raincom 3y ago
  Selectorate theory (which is described for the lay people in "The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics") talks about your points: picking voters through (a) immigration policy (b) restrictions on voting, etc.
- p1esk 3y ago
  Increasingly? When and where it was ever any better?

jstummbillig 3y ago

Well yes, they do. Encryption is a real issue for the mandate of a government, and also a real solution for other parts of the mandate of a government. It's not like we (as the broad community) are engaging with empathy. Even if there is maybe no great solution to the whole dilemma, it would help the entire thing, if we stopped camping on one side so entirely.

int_19h 3y ago
Empathy is for persons, not for legal entities.
- frabbit 3y ago
  Corporations are legally recognized to have personhood in the USA. They are also legal entities. Anyway is a "person" not also a legal entity in some way? In short, I understand what you are saying but I don't think it is precise enough.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    "Legal person" is not the same thing as "person", not even in law. But to be pedantic, empathy is for those who are capable of expressing empathy in return.
    - frabbit 3y ago
      Agreed. My attempt at a quibble was foolish.

AmericanChopper 3y ago

All governments will trend towards tyranny if left unsupervised. Imo western democracies have been entirely subverted by an imaginary left/right conflict, where you end up with exactly the same thing no matter who you elect. The voting population is so completely engrossed with their contempt for either the detestable “left wing” tyrants, or the detestable “right wing” tyrants that they can’t see the side they end up supporting is just as corrupt as the side they hate, and almost identical in every way except rhetoric.

DaSHacka 3y ago
Its really quite surprising just how many American issues come down to this. Much of the identity-politics driven discussion of late can really just be boiled down to liberal vs conservative / right vs left.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  I have noticed that people who are steadfast in positions and don't listen to reason and subscribe to 'identity' politics on both the left and right differ mainly in where they were raised and by who raised them. The Berkeley folk who mandate it illegal to burn wood in your own fireplace have more in common with people who think trans people should be forced to live as the gender defined at birth than they do with people who think we should listen to each other reasonably and have empathy. The problem is that when one set of people get weaponized by folks who are legitimately nefarious and or criminally stupid and mentally ill, there is not no moral stance which is effectively 'I don't like some people on one side so I will let the demonstrably dangerous people take the power and do what they want'. Do you have a solution to this? Because otherwise giving 'both sides are just as bad' speech is borderline negligent.
  - jdechko 3y ago
    “Don’t tell me what to do.” Brought to you by the party of telling people what they should do.
  - kelnos 3y ago

Barrin92 3y ago

>It also seems like there’s a tendency to relitigate battles that are lost. I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars They didn't, and for what it's worth public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of the law. I think anyone discussing a British law ought to keep that in mind (https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBill_230427_W.pdf https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/68pn2b6b57/NSPCC_OnlineSafetyBil...). Even on the most contentious parts of the bill: Do you believe it should or should not become a legal requirement for the following to scan messages and posts on their platforms for child sexual abuse? [Private messaging services] This should be a legal requirement -> 60; This should not be a legal requirement -> 21; Don’t know -> 18 [Social media sites] This should be a legal requirement -> 79; This should not be a legal requirement -> 10; Don’t know -> 10 Likewise on E2EE over 70% of respondents agree that ability to access them is warranted. So the framing in the discussion as if this is solely the British government against technologists is completely off, it's also taking a position against the British public.

immibis 3y ago
The public opinion being in favour of detecting CSAM does not necessarily mean the public opinion is in favour of sending all your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  Given that according to the last question on that survey the public also overwhelmingly (~90%!) supports holding senior managers personally accountable and punishable by law should firms fail to comply I think it's fair to say they want authorities to have the ability to enforce these measures. The GCHQ has nothing to do with it.
  - immibis 3y ago
    If you ask people "Should CSAM be caught?" they'll say "yes" because, duh. If you ask people "Should phones scan their files for CSAM?" a good part will say "yes" because it doesn't sound like it affects anyone outside of child pornographers. If you ask people "Should phones send your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM?" most people will say "no". If you ask people "Should phones send your photos to GCHQ to check if they're CSAM, and should we send Apple executives to prison if they don't make their phones do this?" most people will still say "no".

windexh8er 3y ago

The best part is that the US of A is cool with allowing organizations to encrypt things that should be freely available to the public (OTA broadcast TV & public services radio networks). In the case of OTA broadcast the American taxpayer is being abused by having to deal with corporate America using open airwaves for profit while those same corporations hoover up all kinds of hand outs in subsidies. Yet when encryption is in the best interest of the American citizen, and there's no lobbyist in some politicians pocket - well, then... Then it's not acceptable because: enter national security / child porn / drugs as an inarguable rationale.

godelski 3y ago

> Governments seem to want to have it both ways I think it even goes a bit deeper. Surveillance in a democracy is a double edged sword and arguably the edge facing yourself is sharper. You want it so you can keep a close eye on your citizens and manipulate or adapt to their moods. But on the other side, adversaries are also equally capable of doing this (as NK demonstrates, software is a cheap form of warfare). Often adversaries who are more than happy to team up and pool resources. They're just sharpening the edge pointing at yourself. It really is a dangerous game to play. I know red teaming is harder than blue teaming, but I really believe that the NSA's primary objective should be defense rather than offense. Especially as we're talking about the modern era of LLMs which will be used to convincingly sound like humans and influence people at mass scale, defense just becomes even more important. The mice are running wild and our cat is too fat and lazy to catch them. That was fine when we were ahead of everyone else, but now that they've caught up our cat needs to get off its lazy ass and do its job. > anonymous cash transactions => ??? This was actually the first hint that I had that cryptocurrencies were a scam. That people were more interested in flashy than secure (e.g. zcash). I'd love to live in a world with fast anonymous digital _cash_ but I'm not sure that'll happen and not sure it'll be blockchain based.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

All kinds of advantages go to one sides benefit. Can we set up an automated monitor on all the traffic cams and licence plate readers and facial recognition systems just to catch cops and politicians breaking laws or just to track their movements and associations the way they do to everyone else? Can we access the same cam footage that the state uses to accuse you of something, to clear you instead? Only occasionally and incompletely. For instance you might have access to whatever they submit as their proof, but they had access to the full footage and from many sources, and if you had that same access, maybe you'd find proof that you were elsewhere at the same time, or that the subject came from somewhere that isn't your house, or see them getting dressed just before going to commit the act, or was even the very cop bringing the charge, or show the greater context that when you drove through that red light, you had already waited 10 minutes and the light was actually broken, or the lights were out but the timer/switing mechanism was still ticking over so the cam just assumed the driver was shown a red light, etc.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flir 3y ago
Ambient sousveillance. You'd have to get a critical mass of people who care enough to buy the hardware, deploy it, and release the video though.
- semiquaver 3y ago
  I wish that I could believe this was possible. In pretty much every government on earth such a scheme would be made illegal on some pretext well before attainment of said critical mass.
  - flir 3y ago
    Plenty of private entities are already recording like crazy, so I assume it's the publication bit that you're thinking would be made illegal?
- 3y ago

matthewdgreen 3y ago

What’s happening right now is much worse than the first crypto wars. In that case the government was just trying to gain occasional access to suspected criminal communications, usually with a warrant. Systems like the Clipper chip even codified mechanisms to limit access to communications. What’s happening this time around is very different: policymakers are demanding the ability to perform real-time scanning of messages, without a warrant. This is technically very different and also has very different implications for privacy down the line.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

frankfrankfrank 3y ago

[dead]

zirgs 3y ago

Wire-tapping didn't happen automatically. A judge had to authorise it during an active criminal investigation. Client side scanning would be equivalent to wire-tapping everyone at all times. This was something even totalitarian regimes could not do.

dominojab 3y ago

[dead]

ben_w 3y ago

> I assume the UK had some equivalent to the 90s crypto wars in the US where attempts to weaken and backdoor crypto by legal means were pretty decisively defeated. I'm thinking of the fact that GCHQ invented RSA in 1973, four years before Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman publicly described the same system, and only got around to declassifying this in 1997.

frabbit 3y ago
There is no provable claim by GCHQ for any of this. They are professionally liars and deceivers. The first public, peer-reviewed publishers are the ones that get the credit. GCHQ claims are just unproven British government propaganda from people that have agreed on record that they will lie, deceive and hide the truth.
- ben_w 3y ago
  It's certainly conceivable this claim was made by them just an attempt to look good. If so it was an inept attempt, not that "inept" rules it out. But I do generally assume that when organisations point at their mistakes, it is not a failed attempt to look good.
Canada 3y ago
Did it really invent RSA, such that there was any actual capability of performing asymmetric encryption or signatures? I thought it was more like, one guy there had a pretty good idea that it was possible that he wrote about, but never developed it into anything practical. Am I mistaken, and the whole working system was described?
- derefr 3y ago
  The "pretty good idea" (Ellis' "non-secret encryption") was published about in 1969. Clifford Cocks found a workable algorithm for it — using prime factorization as the trapdoor function — in 1973. No cryptosystem was ever developed around the idea, by Cocks or GCHQ in general; they just sat on it as a classified secret. Then, in 1977, RSA was independently invented and published as both an algorithm and a full cryptosystem. I would definitely say that Cocks and RSA both independently discovered what we refer to as the RSA algorithm. We should maybe call it the Cocks–RSA algorithm.

immibis 3y ago

Of course. It's a class war. When you say the words "class war" far too few people think about the isomorphism to "actual, real" war, but it's there. Sure, the government isn't dropping bombs on London, but the ends are the same.

hkt 3y ago
Far more people need to say this. Remember folks, this week Boris informed the covid inquiry he has "forgotten" the pin to the phone all his WhatsApp messages from that time are on. If it was one of us, they'd use the bit of RIPA that carries a minimum two year sentence for not giving up an encryption key or password when asked to by the police.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
When you say those words people think you are a building-burning store-looting far left hooligan, they call you a commie and shove their head into the ground like an ostrich, as if the last N or so years have not been an endless class war.
- vasco 3y ago
  I don't even know what my class is! Where do I check? How do you know what class you are? I want to know who to help!
  - immibis 3y ago
    Do you get money by working (most people) or do you get money by making other people who work give you theirs (e.g. landlord, CEO, banker (not teller), politician)?
    - vasco 3y ago
      I've had a job all my life but with the proceeds from that job I've bought a house I rent to a local association, and I also have a retirement plan (as pretty much everyone else), so I'm a shareholder in almost all the biggest megacorps through the indexes my retirement account buys. So I'm both? Who do I fight for?

derefr 3y ago

> but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced When the government creates a law within recorded history — something like a wiretapping law — then the spirit of the law is well-known at time of creation. Usually, that "spirit" is that it's created to explicitly grant a capability to the government to do a thing for the benefit of the public under a certain circumstance. So if technology changes, the spirit that the original law was defined under is expected to be upheld by the court when interpreting the law to suit cases outside its original scope. The problem with "legacy" common law — things like "being able to transact anonymously using cash" — is that there is no clear "institutional memory" of the spirit that created the law. The people who invented "using gold coins as a common exchange for barter" weren't thinking about anonymity — and so it's not clear whether anonymity is a necessary or desirable part of the spirit of cash transactions, something the public would desire to be preserved in a replacement system; or whether it's just an "implementation detail" of the way cash happened to need to work given technology, something that would make no sense to port over to the new system.

23B1 3y ago
This is why the Federalist Papers are some of the most important documents when understanding the intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights – and simultaneously the least read! I'm not saying that case law isn't also an important aspect of the 'law' and that the constitution shouldn't be amended – I'm not really a hardcore 'originalist' – I just mean that any time a SCOTUS ruling comes out, it's clear that in the public square discussion, nobody has read these very important contextual documents and it is maddening.
- kmbfjr 3y ago
  What a wordy way to admit to dismissing anyone’s argument to which you do not agree because “they have not read the…”.
  - 23B1 3y ago
    I agree. Arguments from ignorance should be dismissed.