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I disagree. This is a political fight. Technical means can drag the resistance longer, which is helpful, but the political system needs to be put in checks and

I disagree. This is a political fight. Technical means can drag the resistance longer, which is helpful, but the political system needs to be put in checks and balances against becoming a police state. There is no substitute of "taking roads and doing peaceful protests" as out of comfort zone they might be. We sometimes fall in love with our methods because that is what _we_ are good at, not what is necessarily the best course of action. Again, I am not discounting the importance of improving technical measures, I am just cautioning against losing the sight of the forest for a tree. I repeat, This is a political fight! Edit - Added explanation.

devx 13y ago
I agree it's primarily a political fight, but I think we should work on both. But it's true that with absolute government power where they can justify anything, and with so many partner countries willing to play along with them - encryption won't get you very far, no matter how good it is and where you are in the world. They'll find a way to put a backdoor into the systems somehow with or without the service provider's knowledge.
- 001sky 13y ago
  One needs to organize to fight politically. if you cant speak, you cant organize. that's why they are going after e-mail...they are desperate to keep themselves in power...
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Blimey, what did we do before email?
    - 001sky 13y ago
      Printing press: now digital files, copiers make copies, record metadata of files Telephone: GPS, trackable, recordable, micropohone, imaging system. wirelines rarely used. Snail Mail: every parcel is imaged digitally Cafe, walks, parks: CCTV on every streetcorner, remote acees to all wireless devices Driving: Licenseplate scans (passive) of interstate traffic MOSAIC.
rlpb 13y ago
I agree, but I'd also like to add a more specific cause to this idea. Like you say, technical measures aren't a bad idea either, but only drag things on. My political view is this: both the right to communicate and the privacy of communications need to be treated as a fundamental human rights, just as freedom of speech is currently treated. Then there are subjective measures. Breaching these rights may be warranted in certain specific situations (just as free speech is), but the current processes don't seem to go far enough to protect us. Even freedom of speech seems to have been curtailed too far in recent years. We need to have the political will to push back on this. But this can only happen if, first, we add freedom of communications and privacy of communications to our list of fundamental human rights.
- walshemj 13y ago
  but in the us freedom of speech is not universally applied ie you employer can sack you for what you say for example "oh maybe we should organize a union" or maybe "the NHS model is a good idea" Any changes need to apply universally and not just to the government.
  - rlpb 13y ago
    I don't think this matters. Since I'm advocating privacy of communications, you could arrange to use trusted third parties and encryption such that others would not know what you've been saying, or with whom you've been communicating. It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to monitor communications while on their premises, and it is generally illegal for them to wiretap your home without you knowing about it.
  - lmickh 13y ago
    That is pretty much the definition of freedom of speech universally applied. You are free to say what you want and your employer is free to say things like "you're fired." Freedom of speech != speech without consequence.
    - walshemj 13y ago
      You would be fine with the Government throwing you in jail for what you said then. By that argument the Weiße Rose in ww2 Germany had free speech but they still got beheaded for it. the UNHC defination is "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Note the "without interference"!
c3d 13y ago
We need technical tools to be able to communicate. If these tools are subverted, the political fight is harder to organize. So both go hand in hand.
- dobbsbob 13y ago
  They've been trying to subvert these tools worldwide especially after the Arab spring. Just google 'Smartphone kill switch' every government is lobbying handset manufacturers for one in order to prevent theft of devices so they can push a button and brick the device with a hardware backdoor, but of course that's not the real reason they want a kill switch for every phone in their country. They want it to blackout comms during social unrest. Same reasons why the UK would want a powerful pf filter implemented by a Chinese corporation at every single one of their ISPs. It's not to block dirty pictures, it's to shut off everything during social unrest. If they just wanted to block porno they could do simple DNS censorship, but they dropped in serious filter controls. Currently my country is looking into regulating all wi-fi APs. They already have a kill switch for phones and ISPs, now they want to make sure you can't even make an adhoc or mesh network for social unrest. Of course it isn't to kill communications, it's to prevent crime because some criminals broadcast MITM networks inside cafes, so we need sweeping regulations to stop them.
prawn 13y ago
I wonder if it's more about influence and money beyond the politics. Bit more of an explanation in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243392
ballard 13y ago
The two are not mutually exclusive and there is overlap. Personally, I don't care whom is in office or how ostensibly benign they portray themselves to be during campaign cycles. Governments are large, uncoordinated, stupid animals capable of arbitrarily ruining people's lives when it's politically convenient. PHK is wrong; You don't leave your doors unlocked because the mayor seems nice.
luscious 13y ago
This, this, this. You can't let yourselves lose a power war by wasting all your time losing tactical battles. It's a tragedy if we all spend any time trying to protect our LOLs and OMGs to-from each other. If you are working on means for tracking behavior and extracting value (monetary, political, etc.) you are doing something less good than you could be. Don't get caught by rope-a-dope when you could just cut funding for all this. We don't need protection from 20 terrorists who can kill 3,000 people. We can deal with them together. Somehow (fear, greed, stupidity?) we've lost our collective front. We need a 'We' now. When Bush and some war-nat-resource-industry profiteers stack the deck, it's awful, but expected. At least the actions are rational. At this point, it's pretty obvious (not that it hasn't been for 50+ years) that we have a problem. The organizations at the heart of this are willing to act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of US law. The political factions riding power act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of our law and founding documents. Our government is not behaving towards the world or our own citizens in the way that inspired generations to come here to build a better life for themselves. The baby boomers frittered everything away. Lazy asses. Now, it's time to make amends. It's time to FORK THE USs REPO!!!
- ganeumann 13y ago
  We need a plan B. It may be that the citizens have already lost this power war. Certainly the reaction of the UK police to the uproar (if it's that) of the Miranda detention and the snarkiness of the White House Dep. Press Secretary about being informed says to me that they don't really care what we think. And if they don't care it's either because they know they don't have to care (because we're not powerful enough), or they can't care because they are getting even more pressure from the other side, the intelligence community (who are thus more powerful than we are.) Yes, political pressure. But what if that doesn't work?
  - luscious 13y ago
    Sorry. The analogy breaks down. Once you fork a government, there really isn't a mechanism to submit a pull request. Anyways... No, you don't work within the system. You can't move fast enough to grassroots the elimination of funding for CIA and NSA and ancillary groups within military and war contractors. Any amount of traction will fail since there would be an asymmetrical and tactical-heavy process. You will lose against the financial and political interests of the ruling class. If the financial and political ruling class sees such a crowning jewel get it, they will FTFO and see it as a portent for things closer to their own power. The intelligence groups are the necessary brain to the necessary brawn that keeps the geopolitics in line with their bottom line. The chasm between rich and poor is getting so far in the US that this is the beginning... you can't trust the poor. There's too many of them!
DennisP 13y ago
The two fights don't conflict. In fact, they complement each other. When all email is getting stored in plaintext on NSA computers, it's going to be hard to get the government to give up all that juicy data. Reduce the value of the data they're getting, and it's easier to reach a point where the political heat just isn't worth it to them. At the same time, the political effort helps prevent new laws that make the technical solutions more difficult. And it helps encourage people to actually use our fancy technical solutions. If ever there were a time when we can get people on board with using crypto, it's now.
- cLeEOGPw 13y ago
  I think it's not the value of data should be reduced, it's the cost of access to the data should be increased. If it would be too expensive to watch everyone, they would naturally stop doing that.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    They would just find more contractors eager to bill the increased expenses.
    - dobbsbob 13y ago
      Or they would force even more backdoors into proprietary hardware than they do already. For all we know Intel and AMD could have microcode to sabotage RNG and they can already decrypt anything with ease using a skeleton key to predict the randomness.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        I've always (probably very naively) hoped that competition keeps chip makers honest. If anyone does something naughty then their competitors would probably discover it while reverse engineering the other's product. Now that I say that, it sounds even more naive than I previously thought. All bets are probably off.
- ihsw 13y ago
elisha 13y ago
So what are the political/social solutions? And particularly, what are those solutions that might be actionable by this audience? Let's take a few things off the table first. Voting is out for obvious reasons. Same goes for holding up signs in an approved free speech area. The occupy protests were a bit more effective at least in raising awareness but didn't upset the system much. Violence is a no for me personally on ethical grounds and also because history has shown violent revolution to achieve nothing but swap one form of tyranny for another. What has actually worked in the past? Some examples that come to mind are the fight for Indian independence, the US labor movement and the US civil rights movement. These were mostly non-violent movements that deeply disrupted the status quo and created somewhat lasting change. They offer lots of practical examples. Basically, we need to organize and act in a way that makes it impossible for bully governments and corporations to transact business as usual. Until that happens, there is no leverage, no opening for change. Here's an idea: let's start a tech workers union. Imagine what a large scale tech worker strike would do to the economy. Now imagine if we were to participate in a general strike with industrial workers. It would be most advantageous to organize now, while we still have a privileged status within the system. Let's not rest on that status and accept it as the bribe it is. Any takers?
- random42 13y ago
  Quoting myself from another thread — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242567 | One of the tactical mistake is not to "name" people on the other side this asymmetric warfare against the world police states, and put the individuals in the spotlight. The of agencies and governments is abstract and non-tangible. Unlike the "Snowdens, Mannings, Greenwalds and Mirandas" they do not have fear, and hence accountability. | At the end of the day, these agencies are made of people, who make decisions. While the aim should be to keep the 'agencies' under check, the general population resisting them need to target (and I do not mean attack their home or family members or something like that, I only mean to put the individuals under the spotlight) to "name and shame" the entity with feelings, family, emotions, weaknesses etc. under scrutiny. Just as the Snowdens and the greenwalds choices come with with the consequences, so should be the case for the british officials who chose to take a stand.
LoganCale 13y ago
Email is inherently insecure and leaks all sorts of data even when the message content is encrypted to not just the government but everyone the message passes through on its way to the destination. This is a technical flaw. The ability of the government to warrantlessly look at it is a political flaw and should also be corrected, but that doesn't mean the technical flaws should also be corrected.

devx 13y ago

I agree it's primarily a political fight, but I think we should work on both. But it's true that with absolute government power where they can justify anything, and with so many partner countries willing to play along with them - encryption won't get you very far, no matter how good it is and where you are in the world. They'll find a way to put a backdoor into the systems somehow with or without the service provider's knowledge.

001sky 13y ago
One needs to organize to fight politically. if you cant speak, you cant organize. that's why they are going after e-mail...they are desperate to keep themselves in power...
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Blimey, what did we do before email?
  - 001sky 13y ago
    Printing press: now digital files, copiers make copies, record metadata of files Telephone: GPS, trackable, recordable, micropohone, imaging system. wirelines rarely used. Snail Mail: every parcel is imaged digitally Cafe, walks, parks: CCTV on every streetcorner, remote acees to all wireless devices Driving: Licenseplate scans (passive) of interstate traffic MOSAIC.

rlpb 13y ago

I agree, but I'd also like to add a more specific cause to this idea. Like you say, technical measures aren't a bad idea either, but only drag things on. My political view is this: both the right to communicate and the privacy of communications need to be treated as a fundamental human rights, just as freedom of speech is currently treated. Then there are subjective measures. Breaching these rights may be warranted in certain specific situations (just as free speech is), but the current processes don't seem to go far enough to protect us. Even freedom of speech seems to have been curtailed too far in recent years. We need to have the political will to push back on this. But this can only happen if, first, we add freedom of communications and privacy of communications to our list of fundamental human rights.

walshemj 13y ago
but in the us freedom of speech is not universally applied ie you employer can sack you for what you say for example "oh maybe we should organize a union" or maybe "the NHS model is a good idea" Any changes need to apply universally and not just to the government.
- rlpb 13y ago
  I don't think this matters. Since I'm advocating privacy of communications, you could arrange to use trusted third parties and encryption such that others would not know what you've been saying, or with whom you've been communicating. It's perfectly reasonable for an employer to monitor communications while on their premises, and it is generally illegal for them to wiretap your home without you knowing about it.
- lmickh 13y ago
  That is pretty much the definition of freedom of speech universally applied. You are free to say what you want and your employer is free to say things like "you're fired." Freedom of speech != speech without consequence.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    You would be fine with the Government throwing you in jail for what you said then. By that argument the Weiße Rose in ww2 Germany had free speech but they still got beheaded for it. the UNHC defination is "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Note the "without interference"!

c3d 13y ago

We need technical tools to be able to communicate. If these tools are subverted, the political fight is harder to organize. So both go hand in hand.

dobbsbob 13y ago
They've been trying to subvert these tools worldwide especially after the Arab spring. Just google 'Smartphone kill switch' every government is lobbying handset manufacturers for one in order to prevent theft of devices so they can push a button and brick the device with a hardware backdoor, but of course that's not the real reason they want a kill switch for every phone in their country. They want it to blackout comms during social unrest. Same reasons why the UK would want a powerful pf filter implemented by a Chinese corporation at every single one of their ISPs. It's not to block dirty pictures, it's to shut off everything during social unrest. If they just wanted to block porno they could do simple DNS censorship, but they dropped in serious filter controls. Currently my country is looking into regulating all wi-fi APs. They already have a kill switch for phones and ISPs, now they want to make sure you can't even make an adhoc or mesh network for social unrest. Of course it isn't to kill communications, it's to prevent crime because some criminals broadcast MITM networks inside cafes, so we need sweeping regulations to stop them.

prawn 13y ago

I wonder if it's more about influence and money beyond the politics. Bit more of an explanation in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6243392

ballard 13y ago

The two are not mutually exclusive and there is overlap. Personally, I don't care whom is in office or how ostensibly benign they portray themselves to be during campaign cycles. Governments are large, uncoordinated, stupid animals capable of arbitrarily ruining people's lives when it's politically convenient. PHK is wrong; You don't leave your doors unlocked because the mayor seems nice.

luscious 13y ago

This, this, this. You can't let yourselves lose a power war by wasting all your time losing tactical battles. It's a tragedy if we all spend any time trying to protect our LOLs and OMGs to-from each other. If you are working on means for tracking behavior and extracting value (monetary, political, etc.) you are doing something less good than you could be. Don't get caught by rope-a-dope when you could just cut funding for all this. We don't need protection from 20 terrorists who can kill 3,000 people. We can deal with them together. Somehow (fear, greed, stupidity?) we've lost our collective front. We need a 'We' now. When Bush and some war-nat-resource-industry profiteers stack the deck, it's awful, but expected. At least the actions are rational. At this point, it's pretty obvious (not that it hasn't been for 50+ years) that we have a problem. The organizations at the heart of this are willing to act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of US law. The political factions riding power act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of our law and founding documents. Our government is not behaving towards the world or our own citizens in the way that inspired generations to come here to build a better life for themselves. The baby boomers frittered everything away. Lazy asses. Now, it's time to make amends. It's time to FORK THE USs REPO!!!

ganeumann 13y ago
We need a plan B. It may be that the citizens have already lost this power war. Certainly the reaction of the UK police to the uproar (if it's that) of the Miranda detention and the snarkiness of the White House Dep. Press Secretary about being informed says to me that they don't really care what we think. And if they don't care it's either because they know they don't have to care (because we're not powerful enough), or they can't care because they are getting even more pressure from the other side, the intelligence community (who are thus more powerful than we are.) Yes, political pressure. But what if that doesn't work?
- luscious 13y ago
  Sorry. The analogy breaks down. Once you fork a government, there really isn't a mechanism to submit a pull request. Anyways... No, you don't work within the system. You can't move fast enough to grassroots the elimination of funding for CIA and NSA and ancillary groups within military and war contractors. Any amount of traction will fail since there would be an asymmetrical and tactical-heavy process. You will lose against the financial and political interests of the ruling class. If the financial and political ruling class sees such a crowning jewel get it, they will FTFO and see it as a portent for things closer to their own power. The intelligence groups are the necessary brain to the necessary brawn that keeps the geopolitics in line with their bottom line. The chasm between rich and poor is getting so far in the US that this is the beginning... you can't trust the poor. There's too many of them!

DennisP 13y ago

The two fights don't conflict. In fact, they complement each other. When all email is getting stored in plaintext on NSA computers, it's going to be hard to get the government to give up all that juicy data. Reduce the value of the data they're getting, and it's easier to reach a point where the political heat just isn't worth it to them. At the same time, the political effort helps prevent new laws that make the technical solutions more difficult. And it helps encourage people to actually use our fancy technical solutions. If ever there were a time when we can get people on board with using crypto, it's now.

cLeEOGPw 13y ago
I think it's not the value of data should be reduced, it's the cost of access to the data should be increased. If it would be too expensive to watch everyone, they would naturally stop doing that.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  They would just find more contractors eager to bill the increased expenses.
  - dobbsbob 13y ago
    Or they would force even more backdoors into proprietary hardware than they do already. For all we know Intel and AMD could have microcode to sabotage RNG and they can already decrypt anything with ease using a skeleton key to predict the randomness.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      I've always (probably very naively) hoped that competition keeps chip makers honest. If anyone does something naughty then their competitors would probably discover it while reverse engineering the other's product. Now that I say that, it sounds even more naive than I previously thought. All bets are probably off.
ihsw 13y ago

elisha 13y ago

So what are the political/social solutions? And particularly, what are those solutions that might be actionable by this audience? Let's take a few things off the table first. Voting is out for obvious reasons. Same goes for holding up signs in an approved free speech area. The occupy protests were a bit more effective at least in raising awareness but didn't upset the system much. Violence is a no for me personally on ethical grounds and also because history has shown violent revolution to achieve nothing but swap one form of tyranny for another. What has actually worked in the past? Some examples that come to mind are the fight for Indian independence, the US labor movement and the US civil rights movement. These were mostly non-violent movements that deeply disrupted the status quo and created somewhat lasting change. They offer lots of practical examples. Basically, we need to organize and act in a way that makes it impossible for bully governments and corporations to transact business as usual. Until that happens, there is no leverage, no opening for change. Here's an idea: let's start a tech workers union. Imagine what a large scale tech worker strike would do to the economy. Now imagine if we were to participate in a general strike with industrial workers. It would be most advantageous to organize now, while we still have a privileged status within the system. Let's not rest on that status and accept it as the bribe it is. Any takers?

random42 13y ago
Quoting myself from another thread — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6242567 | One of the tactical mistake is not to "name" people on the other side this asymmetric warfare against the world police states, and put the individuals in the spotlight. The of agencies and governments is abstract and non-tangible. Unlike the "Snowdens, Mannings, Greenwalds and Mirandas" they do not have fear, and hence accountability. | At the end of the day, these agencies are made of people, who make decisions. While the aim should be to keep the 'agencies' under check, the general population resisting them need to target (and I do not mean attack their home or family members or something like that, I only mean to put the individuals under the spotlight) to "name and shame" the entity with feelings, family, emotions, weaknesses etc. under scrutiny. Just as the Snowdens and the greenwalds choices come with with the consequences, so should be the case for the british officials who chose to take a stand.

LoganCale 13y ago

Email is inherently insecure and leaks all sorts of data even when the message content is encrypted to not just the government but everyone the message passes through on its way to the destination. This is a technical flaw. The ability of the government to warrantlessly look at it is a political flaw and should also be corrected, but that doesn't mean the technical flaws should also be corrected.