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I have a mild rant on the notion of legal authority. I think it should come down to intent. If this is an action purely done for the benefit of end-users with

I have a mild rant on the notion of legal authority. I think it should come down to intent. If this is an action purely done for the benefit of end-users with an honest-to-goodness attempt at no snooping around, I fail to see this as a problem. This is an example of government doing it's job to protect it's citizens. I'd like to see this go a step further. I'd love to get an email or phone call saying that they noticed my router was part of a botnet, they remoted in to fix the issue, and (if applicable) run a software update to permanently apply the fix. It concerns me that we possess so much skepticism around the idea that government _can_ act benevolently. This is extremely harmful as it prevents us from putting forth any meaningful guardrails around these kinds of activities. We defer too much to the false idea that we're protected from tyranny by refusing to acknowledge we can have a government work for us.

chmod775 3y ago
You're attacking a strawman. Nobody "refuses to acknowledge" any of that. To many, missing out on the upsides is simply preferable, because they consider those powers falling into the hands of a bad government an unacceptable risk. They recognize that taking power away from the government is infinitely harder than not bequeathing power in the first place and also that they might not trust next year's government - even if they trust the current bunch. Personally I'd prefer there be so many limitations, checks, and balances, that no trust in my government is necessary at all, but as a German I'm strongly biased.
qingcharles 3y ago
This is called "the ends justify the means" in legal terms. It is used (illegally) regularly in criminal cases and 99% of the time the government gets away with it. It is technically frowned upon though for the possibility of it running away with itself -- where is the line drawn once you say the line we have (laws) can be crossed.

chmod775 3y ago

You're attacking a strawman. Nobody "refuses to acknowledge" any of that. To many, missing out on the upsides is simply preferable, because they consider those powers falling into the hands of a bad government an unacceptable risk. They recognize that taking power away from the government is infinitely harder than not bequeathing power in the first place and also that they might not trust next year's government - even if they trust the current bunch. Personally I'd prefer there be so many limitations, checks, and balances, that no trust in my government is necessary at all, but as a German I'm strongly biased.

qingcharles 3y ago

This is called "the ends justify the means" in legal terms. It is used (illegally) regularly in criminal cases and 99% of the time the government gets away with it. It is technically frowned upon though for the possibility of it running away with itself -- where is the line drawn once you say the line we have (laws) can be crossed.