7 ms·
If you are still using GMail (or Yahoo, or arbitrary US-based email company) in August, your right to complain about the NSA spying on you is revoked. If you’re
by brown9-2 13y ago
If you are still using GMail (or Yahoo, or arbitrary US-based email company) in August, your right to complain about the NSA spying on you is revoked. If you’re complaining about government spying on the Internet, or in a gathering of programmers, and you won’t take basic steps to do anything about it, then you’re a hypocrite, full-stop.
I don't understand this point of view. Your opinion on how fair or legal or morally right a law is has nothing to do with the steps you've taken to avoid that law.
Why do the "basic steps to do anything about it" stop at protections that the technically-skilled can take, rather than contacting and complaining to your Congressperson or otherwise actual attempts to have the law changed?
And how useful is it to run your own encrypted email server if the email message itself isn't encrypted in transit?
- adventured 13y agoYou're spot on, the argument is completely invalid. It's the same premise used when people claim you have no right to voice your opinion about an election if you don't vote. It's an argument form of attempting to intimidate the reader, and very lowbrow intellectually. It's a pretty comically police state'y attitude to say that anyone's right to complain is ever revoked under any circumstances. The author apparently is immune to being aware of his own hypocrisy.
- specialist 13y agoAbstaining != apathy. If you vote "none of the above", or spoil your ballot, you have my respect. Heck, if you sit it out and chill, that's cool too. But if you can't be bothered to participate, or worse discourage others with cynicism (Trey Parker, Matt Stone), and then complain, I have nothing but contempt for you. That said, running one's own email server is nothing like voting.
- eli 13y agoJello Biafra once proposed a system where every ballot has a "None of the Above" and if that option wins, you do the election over with all new candidates.
- icebraining 13y agoHere in Portugal we can just submit a blank ballot, and it gets counted separately from the spoiled ballots. Seems easier than adding a new option to every ballot.
- eli 13y agoSure, you can do that in most American elections too, but do the blank ballots have any effect besides registering your discontent in a tally. (For what it's worth, I think that if you don't like anyone on the ballot, you're much better off encouraging better people to run or running for office yourself.)
- specialist 13y agoGreat idea. Good for election integrity too. "Under votes", common down ticket, allows someone to helpfully making a choice for you. Those down ticket races like sheriff, auditor, judge are pretty high stakes, often decided by just a few votes.
- stephengillie 13y agoElections aren't cheap. Who pays for the redo?
- vacri 13y agoThey're also not cheap to campaign for - politicians will want to avoid do-overs.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jlgreco 13y agoI think that speeding laws should be abolished on highways and interstates, road surface permitting. I really do. I also don't surpass 10% over the limit. Neither do I have a radar detector, nor a GPS unit that maps speed traps. Does this make me a hypocrite? Of course not.
- finnw 13y agoBut you would be a hypocrite if you also complained about people speeding in the street where you live.
- jlgreco 13y agoWould I necessarily be? Perhaps I believe that speeding is particularly unsafe when it is not permitted and therefore not expected. However I think this analogy has strayed too far and broken down. I'm not sure how complaining about others speeding maps back to encrypting email. (Also, I don't actually care when other people speed, so long as they don't do it recklessly ;)
- tbrownaw 13y agoResidential streets are not at all the same as highways and limited-access interstates.
- cabalamat 13y ago> And how useful is it to run your own encrypted email server if the email message itself isn't encrypted in transit? It isn't, of course. The proportion of mail that is encrypted is the square of the proportion of email users who have encryption set up (assuming all email users are equally likely to mail any other user). So if 1% use encryption, only 0.01% of emails will be encrypted. If we want most mail to be encrypted we need 70% of people to use encryption. This means it has to be REALLY EASY TO SET UP AND USE. Ideally, when someone buys a PC/phone/tablet, and uses it to communicate with others, it should do strong encryption out of the box, so that the user would have to take explicit steps to not encrypt. Most of these devices run software controlled by Microsoft, Apple or Google, all of which are deeply implicated with the NSA. So it's futile to expect that they will willingly protect their users' privacy. Therefore the next best thing is to write software that once installed will be really easy to use, that is to say in normal operation it will take no effort at all to use (zero user interface).
- pjungwir 13y agoJust why isn't key distribution an SMTP extention? I'd expect there to be an RFC for it, but I couldn't find anything. (I'm not talking about DomainKeys. I'm asking why an SMTP client can't ask for a recipient's public key, and if it exists do the encryption.) Here is a blog post about it: http://www.illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2013/07/public-keys-via-smtp/ http://www.illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2013/07/public-key...
- specialist 13y agoI've always assumed that encrypting my communications is akin to demanding the authorities pay special attention to my activities.
- lucisferre 13y agoYeah this type of logic regarding the NSA spying has been driving me nuts. It is illegal regardless of what I choose to do or use. The applicability of these laws does not depend on what I or anyone else buys, uses or patronizes and neither does our right to complain about it.