3 ms·

And yet the same people complaining about classified by default as a de facto government policy are pushing for encryption by default everywhere.

by LLWM 12y ago

lentil_soup 12y ago
One thing is government which is supposed to answer to us, another is our own personal information. Way different things.
- LLWM 12y ago
  Neither of those are the thing. I'm talking about default states. You're talking about actual states.
wlesieutre 12y ago
I don't see anything unreasonable about that. I can file a FOIA on any topic I want for any reason I want, but the police can't just demand to search through my things without cause. Our relationship with the government is not intended to be symmetric.
- LLWM 12y ago
  That's not what I said. I'm talking about the default state of information being a more protected one. Not the state it ends up in after some negotiation. To tie it to your analogy, it would be as if you could initially decline any search demand, and then the police would have to go get a warrant.
exelius 12y ago
This is actually kind of the opposite thing. Individuals should be able to have privacy from the government; but the government works for the people and should be more transparent. There are definitely things that should be classified - but in classifying everything, you run the risk of the "classified" designation losing its meaning. In Citizenfour, this was something that Snowden explicitly stated: he was leaving it to the discretion of the reporters which information should be published and what should not, because his biases weren't necessarily correct. But this is because so much classified information shouldn't be classified that someone like Snowden can't really differentiate between what is important to keep secret and what isn't.
- LLWM 12y ago
  No more than encrypting information causes encryption to lose its meaning. Something that should be declassified still can be. It just means that the default state is different. Would you say that if your innocuous slashdot browsing was encrypted even though it "shouldn't be", someone like you or me would become unable to differentiate between what is important to keep secret and what isn't?

And yet the same people complaining about classified by default as a de facto government policy are pushing for encryption by default everywhere.

by LLWM 12y ago

And yet the same people complaining about classified by default as a de facto government policy are pushing for encryption by default everywhere.

lentil_soup 12y ago

One thing is government which is supposed to answer to us, another is our own personal information. Way different things.

LLWM 12y ago
Neither of those are the thing. I'm talking about default states. You're talking about actual states.

wlesieutre 12y ago

I don't see anything unreasonable about that. I can file a FOIA on any topic I want for any reason I want, but the police can't just demand to search through my things without cause. Our relationship with the government is not intended to be symmetric.

LLWM 12y ago
That's not what I said. I'm talking about the default state of information being a more protected one. Not the state it ends up in after some negotiation. To tie it to your analogy, it would be as if you could initially decline any search demand, and then the police would have to go get a warrant.

exelius 12y ago

This is actually kind of the opposite thing. Individuals should be able to have privacy from the government; but the government works for the people and should be more transparent. There are definitely things that should be classified - but in classifying everything, you run the risk of the "classified" designation losing its meaning. In Citizenfour, this was something that Snowden explicitly stated: he was leaving it to the discretion of the reporters which information should be published and what should not, because his biases weren't necessarily correct. But this is because so much classified information shouldn't be classified that someone like Snowden can't really differentiate between what is important to keep secret and what isn't.

LLWM 12y ago
No more than encrypting information causes encryption to lose its meaning. Something that should be declassified still can be. It just means that the default state is different. Would you say that if your innocuous slashdot browsing was encrypted even though it "shouldn't be", someone like you or me would become unable to differentiate between what is important to keep secret and what isn't?