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> How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state i

> How one goes from the idea that cryptography presents the opportunity for undefeatable privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, etc no matter how much the state is against it, to, voluntary use of Google is the death of privacy, I don't get. Because ordinary people don't understand the implications of using these services. Every single person is surprised at what the government gets access to with an NSL, subpoena, etc, as evidenced by the Petraeus case and the several cases investigating reporters.

cromwellian 13y ago
Again, the proper course of action is to educate people to demand changes in the state, not to call what Google is doing evil. It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept. Every technology has upsides and downsides. That the state exploits the downsides doesn't make the provider or inventor "evil".
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  Silicon Valley has its roots in serving the government in the war effort back in the 1940's, so I agree that it's not really realistic to hope for a separation between the two entities. They are very much in a symbiotic relationship.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    So, you think there is a logical connection between the companies of the .com era, who cut their teeth on the sharing of animated cat pictures, and those who built computers to calculate artillery tables? There's no denying that government military funding helped kick off Silicon Valley, as did DARPA and the Internet, but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best.
    - foobarqux 13y ago
      > but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best. They are as "apt" as anyone else, which is to say very; The government wields big carrots and sticks.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  "It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept." This is such an utterly disingenuous argument. I'm becoming more and more convinced as time comes on that analogies have no benefit whatsoever and just become a tool for people to warp the argument into something else.
  - cromwellian 13y ago
    I don't think it is disingenuous. Any company that creates a new communications channel increases the surface area for government to intercept. Any company that creates a service which you interact with, with high frequency, creates a log of behavior for the government to intercept. The only difference with modern web portals is centralization, which allows the government to seize it in one chunk, vs distributed amongst N different organizations, but that's really only marginally more secure, because the government has no problem bulk subpoena-ing all of the major service providers. The only real protection is to use pseudonymity everywhere and to never reuse a pseudonym between two different services.
lelandbatey 13y ago
At some level, we all just accept that there are things we don't understand, and we accept that we will just act in disregard of our lack of knowledge. Should we all be paralyzed to walk around because we may step on the last of some species, destroying something forever? Well, no. If it turns out that everyone did that pretty much on the daily, we'd all be surprised but we'd probably not stop walking places. Similarly, just because I walk in public without doing everything in my power to keep surveillance from seeing what I'm doing doesn't mean it's the death of privacy. It just means I don't care. For me, I and the rest (or the majority) of the world will gladly trade some information about the knowledge we seek for that same knowledge. It's just a no brainer.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  Again, the problem is that ordinary people do not understand what they are "giving up" and therefore can't make an informed choice. But we can get a sense of how they feel but the fact that they universally surprised when the data stored on them is made concrete in some way. My sense is that if that people were given a presentation about all the information stored about them specifically and what can be inferred they would come out "pro privacy".

cromwellian 13y ago

Again, the proper course of action is to educate people to demand changes in the state, not to call what Google is doing evil. It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept. Every technology has upsides and downsides. That the state exploits the downsides doesn't make the provider or inventor "evil".

hkmurakami 13y ago
Silicon Valley has its roots in serving the government in the war effort back in the 1940's, so I agree that it's not really realistic to hope for a separation between the two entities. They are very much in a symbiotic relationship.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  So, you think there is a logical connection between the companies of the .com era, who cut their teeth on the sharing of animated cat pictures, and those who built computers to calculate artillery tables? There's no denying that government military funding helped kick off Silicon Valley, as did DARPA and the Internet, but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    > but to say that means today's entrepreneurs in the valley are apt to serve military war interests is pure guilt by association, and a weak link at best. They are as "apt" as anyone else, which is to say very; The government wields big carrots and sticks.
ryguytilidie 13y ago
"It's like saying that a company that provides paper, pencil, and mail delivery is building the greatest instrument for evil and authoritarianism, because it becomes a channel the government can intercept." This is such an utterly disingenuous argument. I'm becoming more and more convinced as time comes on that analogies have no benefit whatsoever and just become a tool for people to warp the argument into something else.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  I don't think it is disingenuous. Any company that creates a new communications channel increases the surface area for government to intercept. Any company that creates a service which you interact with, with high frequency, creates a log of behavior for the government to intercept. The only difference with modern web portals is centralization, which allows the government to seize it in one chunk, vs distributed amongst N different organizations, but that's really only marginally more secure, because the government has no problem bulk subpoena-ing all of the major service providers. The only real protection is to use pseudonymity everywhere and to never reuse a pseudonym between two different services.

lelandbatey 13y ago

At some level, we all just accept that there are things we don't understand, and we accept that we will just act in disregard of our lack of knowledge. Should we all be paralyzed to walk around because we may step on the last of some species, destroying something forever? Well, no. If it turns out that everyone did that pretty much on the daily, we'd all be surprised but we'd probably not stop walking places. Similarly, just because I walk in public without doing everything in my power to keep surveillance from seeing what I'm doing doesn't mean it's the death of privacy. It just means I don't care. For me, I and the rest (or the majority) of the world will gladly trade some information about the knowledge we seek for that same knowledge. It's just a no brainer.

foobarqux 13y ago
Again, the problem is that ordinary people do not understand what they are "giving up" and therefore can't make an informed choice. But we can get a sense of how they feel but the fact that they universally surprised when the data stored on them is made concrete in some way. My sense is that if that people were given a presentation about all the information stored about them specifically and what can be inferred they would come out "pro privacy".