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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
by 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.