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Could it possibly be that encryption does legitimately aid predators and it’s also useful for legitimate security needs? Mentioning the former doesn’t make it

Could it possibly be that encryption does legitimately aid predators and it’s also useful for legitimate security needs? Mentioning the former doesn’t make it an appeal to emotion. The emotional reaction you (and others) have to it is because it’s a legitimately emotional subject. Doesn’t make it less real.

standardUser 3y ago
> Could it possibly be that encryption does legitimately aid predators and it’s also useful for legitimate security needs? I never stated otherwise. > Mentioning the former doesn’t make it an appeal to emotion. No, mentioning that concept does not constitute an appeal to emotion. I described the specific language in the article that was an emotional appeal.
boomboomsubban 3y ago
You're ignoring the lengthy article before the part they quoted. They spent several paragraphs describing how there's a real problem that's hurting children. They then used the emotion that built up to attack something tangentially connected to that problem. That's what makes it an appeal to emotion.
rabite 3y ago
Infinite number of things are possible. This article is about Facebook and Instagram, where people make public posts, can be found by searches, and absolutely nothing is end-to-end encrypted. Law enforcement has complete and total access to every single message ever sent over those platforms, which even provide them with an API to query on essentially an honor system trusting that the warrant document LEO submits is legitimate. It would be equally irrelevant if the Guardian instead of encryption started talking about criminals are aided by guns and explosives in this article.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  Isn't Messenger now end-to-end encrypted?
  - nathanaldensr 3y ago
    It's opt-in per DM.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      Ah got it.
roenxi 3y ago
Hypothetically, any privacy of any sort whatsoever aids wrongdoers. The issues are that (1) governments sometimes go la Terreur, (2) there seems to be some sort of ethnic cleansing program every century or so without necessarily any warning and (3) governments regularly go off-the-rails and bring the hammer down on random small time people doing nothing much wrong all the time. It is baffling to me that some people can - in 3 breaths - condemn police violence, opine the the current/next US president is attempting to bring down democracy and then conclude that we just need to give government agencies control over one more aspect of life to make things better. The compartmentalising people are capable of is something to behold. We need a system of protections in place to slow down government overreach. There are things in the world much scarier than small-scale harm to children, it is likely to come out of the government and privacy is a key plank. Besides, we all read through the Jeff Epstien thing. Enforcement of this stuff is already a bit corrupt; I expect the people responsible for this system would be abusers themselves. The most systematic of abusers are almost certainly going to be involved in these spying programs. Some authoritarians are probably good people. A lot just get off on abusing their own power against weaker people. These are not the sort of people we should want going through our mailboxes.
- vkou 3y ago
  > to give government agencies control over one more aspect of life to make things better. Often but not always, it's not a tradeoff between government having control, and nobody having control. It's a tradeoff between a government that is in many ways democratically accountable having this control, and some rich guy who's not accountable to anyone having this control. Society abhors a power vacuum.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > ...that is in many ways democratically accountable... But in this case, the plan is to remove encryption so that officials can monitor everyone's messaging. And it has to be all mail, otherwise fairly obviously the horrible people will go use secure communication. So them being democratically accountable appears to mean they can just poke their nose into whatever they like and there isn't anything much voters can do about it. Using taxpayer money to enforce everything I might add. Some random rich guy couldn't do this. He can't force anyone to divulge their mail, and he can't force the people being targeted to fund it. And this idea of democratic accountability is a bit sus. The Nazi's were the plurality party when they took over (as far as I recall, anyway), the Communists were popular enough to win a war when they took over China. Popular support for a terrible idea doesn't change the nature of the idea, we're much better off with actual technical protections to give everyone time to figure out they're making terrible mistakes.
amiga386 3y ago
Encryption aids everybody's privacy, in the same way that roads aid predators to steal away with your children, and food aids predators by giving them nourishment. Ergo we need to ban encryption, ban roads and ban food. Anyone who doesn't want to ban food (and let me snoop on all their messages) is an evil predator - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYZo5yRVNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYZo5yRVNk Anything in the same sentence as "aids predators" throws context out the window and marks it as a vile and awful thing to anyone listening. Don't use that language, and don't let someone lead you by the nose into using that language. Instead, talk about how end-to-end-encryption improves the safety of all users, including children, because it gives them control over who sees their messages, and shields them from criminals who would gladly snoop and steal their personal data. Banning or breaking encryption will not make children safer. What will make them safer is parents supervising their young children's internet usage, and teaching them how to protect themselves online when they're older - how they should avoid giving out personal information (e.g. to Facebook or Instagram...), how to lock down access so only their verified friends can talk to them, etc.
- rubberband 3y ago
  I've been having a difficult time explaining why E2E encryption is, well, almost a moral imperative... Your metaphors, etc.., have made it easier. TYVM <3
- hackerlight 3y ago
  Everything is a double edged sword. Pointing that out isn't arguing in good faith. The question is the ratio of good to bad. Food and roads have an overwhelmingly positive good to bad ratio. Detractors are arguing that encryption on social media platforms have a worse ratio than food and roads. See, this is why I hate metaphors. It allows you to completely bypass the argument being made by comparing apples and oranges. Muddying the waters of the discussion with this rhetorical sleight of hand. Address the actual argument.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > Everything is a double edged sword. Pointing that out isn't arguing in good faith. The GP did much more than just point that out. The GP gave arguments for how encryption helps keep children safer, rather than detracts from that. > The question is the ratio of good to bad. But that is not something that can be judged in a vacuum, or by a single authority. Everyone's circumstances are different, and any policy dictated from the top down is going to do the wrong thing for a non-trivial number of people. That is why freedom is a better option: give people the tools they need to make their own individual decisions. That applies to people protecting their children as much as anything else. > Detractors are arguing that encryption on social media platforms have a worse ratio than food and roads. No, they're arguing that encryption in general is just bad. They're not recognizing any benefits to encryption (such as the ones the GP described).
cat_plus_plus 3y ago
Children also have legitimate security needs. Just wait for a massive service hack where all private information and racy texts/photos teens have been voluntarily sending to each other are made public for all to see. If server can't read messages, it can't leak them.

standardUser 3y ago

> Could it possibly be that encryption does legitimately aid predators and it’s also useful for legitimate security needs? I never stated otherwise. > Mentioning the former doesn’t make it an appeal to emotion. No, mentioning that concept does not constitute an appeal to emotion. I described the specific language in the article that was an emotional appeal.

boomboomsubban 3y ago

You're ignoring the lengthy article before the part they quoted. They spent several paragraphs describing how there's a real problem that's hurting children. They then used the emotion that built up to attack something tangentially connected to that problem. That's what makes it an appeal to emotion.

rabite 3y ago

Infinite number of things are possible. This article is about Facebook and Instagram, where people make public posts, can be found by searches, and absolutely nothing is end-to-end encrypted. Law enforcement has complete and total access to every single message ever sent over those platforms, which even provide them with an API to query on essentially an honor system trusting that the warrant document LEO submits is legitimate. It would be equally irrelevant if the Guardian instead of encryption started talking about criminals are aided by guns and explosives in this article.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
Isn't Messenger now end-to-end encrypted?
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  It's opt-in per DM.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    Ah got it.

roenxi 3y ago

Hypothetically, any privacy of any sort whatsoever aids wrongdoers. The issues are that (1) governments sometimes go la Terreur, (2) there seems to be some sort of ethnic cleansing program every century or so without necessarily any warning and (3) governments regularly go off-the-rails and bring the hammer down on random small time people doing nothing much wrong all the time. It is baffling to me that some people can - in 3 breaths - condemn police violence, opine the the current/next US president is attempting to bring down democracy and then conclude that we just need to give government agencies control over one more aspect of life to make things better. The compartmentalising people are capable of is something to behold. We need a system of protections in place to slow down government overreach. There are things in the world much scarier than small-scale harm to children, it is likely to come out of the government and privacy is a key plank. Besides, we all read through the Jeff Epstien thing. Enforcement of this stuff is already a bit corrupt; I expect the people responsible for this system would be abusers themselves. The most systematic of abusers are almost certainly going to be involved in these spying programs. Some authoritarians are probably good people. A lot just get off on abusing their own power against weaker people. These are not the sort of people we should want going through our mailboxes.

vkou 3y ago
> to give government agencies control over one more aspect of life to make things better. Often but not always, it's not a tradeoff between government having control, and nobody having control. It's a tradeoff between a government that is in many ways democratically accountable having this control, and some rich guy who's not accountable to anyone having this control. Society abhors a power vacuum.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > ...that is in many ways democratically accountable... But in this case, the plan is to remove encryption so that officials can monitor everyone's messaging. And it has to be all mail, otherwise fairly obviously the horrible people will go use secure communication. So them being democratically accountable appears to mean they can just poke their nose into whatever they like and there isn't anything much voters can do about it. Using taxpayer money to enforce everything I might add. Some random rich guy couldn't do this. He can't force anyone to divulge their mail, and he can't force the people being targeted to fund it. And this idea of democratic accountability is a bit sus. The Nazi's were the plurality party when they took over (as far as I recall, anyway), the Communists were popular enough to win a war when they took over China. Popular support for a terrible idea doesn't change the nature of the idea, we're much better off with actual technical protections to give everyone time to figure out they're making terrible mistakes.

amiga386 3y ago

Encryption aids everybody's privacy, in the same way that roads aid predators to steal away with your children, and food aids predators by giving them nourishment. Ergo we need to ban encryption, ban roads and ban food. Anyone who doesn't want to ban food (and let me snoop on all their messages) is an evil predator - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYZo5yRVNk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYZo5yRVNk Anything in the same sentence as "aids predators" throws context out the window and marks it as a vile and awful thing to anyone listening. Don't use that language, and don't let someone lead you by the nose into using that language. Instead, talk about how end-to-end-encryption improves the safety of all users, including children, because it gives them control over who sees their messages, and shields them from criminals who would gladly snoop and steal their personal data. Banning or breaking encryption will not make children safer. What will make them safer is parents supervising their young children's internet usage, and teaching them how to protect themselves online when they're older - how they should avoid giving out personal information (e.g. to Facebook or Instagram...), how to lock down access so only their verified friends can talk to them, etc.

rubberband 3y ago
I've been having a difficult time explaining why E2E encryption is, well, almost a moral imperative... Your metaphors, etc.., have made it easier. TYVM <3
hackerlight 3y ago
Everything is a double edged sword. Pointing that out isn't arguing in good faith. The question is the ratio of good to bad. Food and roads have an overwhelmingly positive good to bad ratio. Detractors are arguing that encryption on social media platforms have a worse ratio than food and roads. See, this is why I hate metaphors. It allows you to completely bypass the argument being made by comparing apples and oranges. Muddying the waters of the discussion with this rhetorical sleight of hand. Address the actual argument.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > Everything is a double edged sword. Pointing that out isn't arguing in good faith. The GP did much more than just point that out. The GP gave arguments for how encryption helps keep children safer, rather than detracts from that. > The question is the ratio of good to bad. But that is not something that can be judged in a vacuum, or by a single authority. Everyone's circumstances are different, and any policy dictated from the top down is going to do the wrong thing for a non-trivial number of people. That is why freedom is a better option: give people the tools they need to make their own individual decisions. That applies to people protecting their children as much as anything else. > Detractors are arguing that encryption on social media platforms have a worse ratio than food and roads. No, they're arguing that encryption in general is just bad. They're not recognizing any benefits to encryption (such as the ones the GP described).

cat_plus_plus 3y ago

Children also have legitimate security needs. Just wait for a massive service hack where all private information and racy texts/photos teens have been voluntarily sending to each other are made public for all to see. If server can't read messages, it can't leak them.