Humans are mortal. It doesn't matter if you are a dictator or a janitor - you will die anyway. But the institutions, the system, the culture - will stay for much much longer.
Those who build a centralized system that can control every aspect of humans life just don't realize they are building Hell on Earth.
Decentralization and fairfull consensus between every acting party, no matter how much power they have - this is the only way to build a great culture and a system.
Unfortunately, we are still too far from this. Too much people are still trying to build this ugly human pyramid of subordination, just like in a primal tribe or mafia organization.
Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime. 75, and you'll have lived for a third of its existence.
Those institutions which are longer lived are usually subject to tons of change. Think of the imperial Chinese system with its many dynasties or the church with its schisms. And despite behaviourally modern humans having lived on this planet for tens of thousands of years, thousands of generations, you won't find any institution that has survived longer than a few hundred generations.
> Note that institutions are shorter lived than one might think. If you have become 25 this year, you'll have lived for more than 10% of the US's entire lifetime. 75, and you'll have lived for a third of its existence.
Note also that the US has one of the longest lived current governments in the world. There are plenty of countries that have been around longer, but most of them have forms of government that came into effect there later than when the US got its current form of government.
Institutions may change their form, but not their purpose. For example, in USSR the judicial system was basically a tool to justify decisions of prosecutors and party leaders. Nowadays the judicial system of the Post-Soviet countries remains the same. It's a servant of the current political elite.
I don’t know if that’s a great example because that just seems like all judicial systems across all of human history. The protoconcept of judicial process probably arose from subsistence farmer communities needing a way to hypocritically expel or kill people who did not conform to religious decrees, but without losing any social status, and in fact gaining social status by association with the judicial system.
What we have today is a tiny, tiny, tiny modification of that, where our savanna-adapted meat brains put in accoutrements of due process and fair trials, but it’s all just for show so that political elites can say one thing (freedom, due process, fairness) but do another (court packing, systemic racism, regulatory capture, corporate shilling).
there is the icelandic althing which has been around since 930. but as per your point, no matter what, growth and change is necessary for the survival of an institution - especially one determined to last.
I think heirarchy is a natural human inclination. It's observed in every part of the animal kingdom. But it is possible to simultaneously have hierarchy and autonomy at the lowest level. Subsidiarity and distributism are the only things I am convinced will work. Every other endeavour ends up being a free-for-all (that ultimately is self destructive) or a dictorship (that eventually implodes).
> I think heirarchy is a natural human inclination. It's observed in every part of the animal kingdom.
I have two main objections to this line of thinking:
1. Even if a tendency or behavior can occur in "nature", that doesn't necessarily make it correct. By that measure murder, infanticide, rape etc. should also be considered acceptable since they occur in nature (both with humans and animals).
2. If you take a look at smth like The World Until Yesterday or other similar work it will become apparent that the kind of large scale hierarchies of power present in the modern world are relatively recent constructions. To me they're more a hallmark of contingency and deliberate human choices, not of "nature". If we want to make a less hierarchical society we can, it's in our power to change the design of society (to a significant extent at least).
1. Yes, agree, but this just depends on your opinion of what is "correct". Nature selects for survival, not correctness. I think rigid hierarchy is more advantageous for overall survival, but I am not advocating for that. I think there is something significant about the fact that humans almost always tend towards hierarchy (Lord of the Flies illustrates this).
2. I agree that large scale beauracracies are not in the best interests of humanity. I would argue for hierarchy, with less power the higher up the chain you go. E.g. Local governments should have more power than federal/national governments. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be a national government.
> I think rigid hierarchy is more advantageous for overall survival
I can see how one can see it that way, it is probably what those who rigging the game were thinking when they first started, and like the saying goes "those who play a rigged game gets stupid over a long period of time". That's probably why empires collapse, too much corruption and too many people playing the rigged game. A rigged game kinda corrupt workability of the whole system. The short term advantage may not be so good in the long run.
Hierarchies are natural to everything, it's pointless to fight just them. I'm specifically against subordinate relations like master-slave. In a typical firm there is a boss that commands managers, workers etc. The boss has the most power. But he is still accountable to an agreement between him and workers. He can't do "whatever he wants".
In a very centralized government systems you can't make top management accountable. Moreover, in such systems top management actually support master-slave relations between people, like between men-women, rich-poor, etc. It's then easier to hold power.
> In a typical firm there is a boss that commands managers, workers etc. The boss has the most power. But he is still accountable to an agreement between him and workers. He can't do "whatever he wants".
This isn't really true for most large firms. Since people are dependent on their wages, they are generally subjects to their boss' whims. You just have to look at Amazon workers wearing diapers to realize that workers don't generally get a say, even if they are not technically slaves.
This is what I'm talking about. There used to be labor unions, also the right to strike and protest is a prominent part of democracy. But nowadays all those freedoms are oppressed. Those who are in power are trying to divide labor people and gain even more power over them.
I would be more specific and say that every worker should be at autonomous as possible. I am a big proponent of distributism. The means of production should be as widely distributed as possible. This does not mean they should be concentrated in the hands of a small number of individuals (capitalism), nor should they belong to the state (communism). A good example of distributism is workers who own their own tools (the means of their own production). Software engineers have it pretty good in this regard. But this can apply to tradespeople, factory workers that collectively own shares in machinary, etc.
Like I replied elsewhere, I think because nature selects for survival, there is something to be learned from the fact that human societies always tend towards hierarchy. I am not saying we should there have as much hierarchy as possible, but I am certainly opposed to any form of anarchism (which I don't believe would last long anyway). Give anarchy a month at most, and you'll have leaders with followers popping up everywhere, which will eventually combine into a smaller number of large hierarchies.
"are still trying to build this ugly human pyramid of subordination, just like in a primal tribe"
Well, there is a argument, that this is the case, because having leaders and followers is somewhat build in our DNA, if our ancestors lived like that for millions of years.
But the power structure in primal tribes were seldom true pyramidical. (That developed later in civilisation.)
You had council of elders, the shamans, priests, etc. different kinds of power balance. Also the very important difference to civilisation power pyramids: in primal societies power was based much more on merit, not inheritance.
I thought that consensus rule was the dominant form of organanisation up to fairly recently, maybe 200000 years ago. This seems to work well for groups of about 50-70 individuals. Leaders and followers by that theory is something that comes with agriculture and trade and the larger groups needed for that. So I wouldn't be so sure that it's "in our dna".
If anyone is curious why some senator called Graham seems to be popping up in every bill that poses a threat to the internet, its because he sponsors or co-sponsors most of them. On congress.gov you can get a nice listing of everything he's done recently [1]. In summary, he either sponsored or co-sponsored this encryption act, the EARN-IT act (more anti-encryption), the OCPA (make websites liable for moderation errors), and another seperate law to amend section 230.
He has also co-sponsored legislation in support of privacy of personal identifiable information, but not for the general population or anything just US Federal judges [2].
> Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, email, and voice and data applications.
I am very confused by this statement from Barr.
Protecting consumer data is protecting a business' operations.
If user data is properly encrypted, then a dataleak is necessarily less of a liability. You cannot lose what you do not have access to. Protecting the customer, protects the business.
Allow me to put some words in Barr's mouth for you:
"I work in law enforcement, and I am uncomfortable with the idea that the public might have effective tools to communicate privately. But I can't say that directly because then people who aren't paying attention will be upset. So instead I'll be a bit confused about what my point is and draw some distinctions that don't make sense"
There is a very compelling case that law enforcement should be denied some powers even at the risk of criminals escaping justice. That case is complicated and takes several pages to explain. It is rare that law enforcement officials will make that case, and rare that the public understands when law enforcement is too powerful.
IDK if it's rare that they make this case. It depends on what the are promoting or defending.
Or rather, it's rare that anyone (including people against this war on encryption) makes a blunt argument that criminals will escape because the police are constrained. The blunt tradeoffs argument is from a classroom or bar. It's not the kind of argument that will be made (bluntly) in a legal, policy or legislative setting.
In any case... I don't think "denied some powers" should be assessed against "risk of criminals escaping justice." One is abstract and the other concrete. The actual tradeoff is between criminals escaping and actual abuse of power by law enforcement. Some amount of both is guaranteed. This tips the scale.
> Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, email, and voice and data applications.
Do "large business enterprises" use exclusively "customized encryption", or do they use the same encryption "consumer products" use? In my experience, it's the later. The biggest example is TLS: for instance, every business which uses Microsoft Office 365 relies on the same TLS used by "consumer products". The same applies to full disk encryption (BitLocker and/or LUKS), smart phones (large business do use smart phones, and they are the same smart phones everyone else uses), email, and so on.
As a personal example, the software we develop at work is used by "large business enterprises". When we added encryption to it, we didn't use "customized encryption"; we used standard TLS.
Like “warrant-proof” rooms and houses that, even with a valid warrant, won't record conversations and send them to the police.
And just like encryption, those “warrant-proof” protections can be circumvented by planting physical or software bugs on target houses or computers.
They're not complaining that law enforcement can't subvert privacy protections - they're complaining that they're not already subverted, ahead of time, for everyone.
Scotland's proposed new Hate Crime Bill would pretty much take care of that angle.[0]
>Scotland’s proposed hate crime bill will penalise anyone whipping up hatred against “protected groups.” That includes people making “insulting” remarks within their own home, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf has revealed.
We've already seen many examples of how pwople's phone data has been used in prosecutions. How long before someone is taken to court for an un-PC remark which they made in the [supposed] privacy of their own home, but which was then picked up by their Alexa, transcribed at Amazon HQ and then reported to the authorities as a "hate crime"?
I know using the phrase "virtue signalling" tends to merit a bucket load of downvotes here on HN. But I really do think we've arrived at a farcical situation in the West [especially in Europe] where legislators are falling over themselves to draft ever more idiotic laws intended to show how much more "liberal" and "progressive" they are than the next guy.
With, ironically, the consequence that these same laws are actually making society less free and more controlled, as people are becoming too frightened to express opinions that don't conform, for fear of being branded a bigot / racist / sexist/ <alphabetti-spaghetti>phobe
Ironic that so few people in the West can see that we're mirroring exactly the same kind of 'dissenting viewpoint not tolerated' society that we used to deride the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for and continue to condemn China for today.
> I know using the phrase "virtue signalling" tends to merit a bucket load of downvotes here on HN.
Perhaps because it is an unfalsifiable claim. If someone does something that they think is good, and someone else notices, were they "virtue signalling"? In the case of public figures, especially legislators, many of their actions are broadcast to the public, so condemning "virtue signalling" is like condemning virtue itself, or merely stating that you disagree on which acts are virtuous (as is expected in a society where we are free to disagree).
> legislators are falling over themselves to draft ever more idiotic laws intended to show how much more "liberal" and "progressive" they are than the next guy.
I imagine that legislators think "Violent people often have a history of saying bigoted things, but none of my friends say things that I think are bigoted, so locking up the people who say bigoted things will only have a positive outcome on society." Unfortunately there are enough people who can't imagine any bad consequences of such a law (even to themselves, eventually) that there is a genuine democratic mandate for it in some places.
I think it becomes "virtue signalling" when you go beyond acceptance of difference and enshrinement of equality, to the point where you actually seem to be suggesting that rights and feelings of the minority sections of society which you are trying to protect, trump* those of the majority.
If you think that these legislators are being disingenuous and are hiding a conscious aim of trying to hurt people in majority groups then perhaps we need a new term like "virtue washing", i.e. using empathy for one group to mask a harmful agenda against a different group.
I personally don't believe that most supporters of such policies are consciously motivated by a desire to harm those in majority groups, as many of these supporters are themselves in majority groups. They probably just don't think that the policies will affect them, or realise that the policies could backfire and be used against minorities.
Reminds me of the discussion about the big tech companies filtering content...
"Last October, Facebook, Google and Twitter were asked by Hawaii Senator Mazie Hizono to draw up a “mission statement” to “prevent the foment of discord.”"
As a matter of strategy, I doubt that developers aren't already downloading key cryptographic libraries out there in order to host them outside the USA. I think news like this might also encourage more people to program encrypted messaging and file transfer applications. I mean, who in here hasn't at least made a small cryptographic test with widely known libraries? The irony is that the more technology like this is outlawed, the more valuable it becomes to those who might find it useful, the flipside being that the less encrypted traffic there is, the easier it becomes to find those who use it. The only antidote to that, is more encrytped traffic.
I don’t understand how they could ban strong encryption when everyone is gearing up for quantum resistance for blockchain technology. Once you have a distributed quantum resistant system good luck on that. There are so many ways this isn’t practical. If everyone just traded back and forth weakly encrypted garbage data chunks it would be indistinguishable from strong encryption. Also you can encrypt something with weak encryption, chunk the file then send them out in two directions and unless you have both or the chunking mechanism is really shitty that would be just as good as one single strong encryption stream. There’s just too many factors to cover for this to be practical. It’s fighting with mathematics and it’s a losing battle
If anything strong encryption gives better support of outlawing it, from a governments perspective.
The fact that you can be a lawless individual and ignore it and obfuscate everything has no bearing on the legality of it. But it does mean that if they suspect you are doing anything illegal they don't have to figure out if you and what you are doing, since your obfuscation is enough to send you to jail.
I think you missed my point. Unless they make it illegal to transmit garbage data then there is no legal leg to stand on for prosecuting the use of encryption
You can’t ban algorithms and ideas in practice. The output of an algorithm doesn’t prove that a particular algorithm has been used. Even then, anyone can modify and code algorithms.
You can force companies to put backdoors in their encryption products, but the governments already do that (even though using them may not be convenient for them). Further, this will push crypto in the hands of people, and to outside US, to outside cloud, push for decentralization, which the US government doesn’t like.
The security by and large lies in end points. Back-door in hardware, operating systems etc for access to key material seems to be the focus of the governments.
It’s a golden age for intelligence agencies; they probably want a handle on the cloud.
The US constitution should be amended with a right to encryption, making laws such as this one impossible. This is the only long-term way out of this mess.
The Roe v Wade decision was based on an implied, if not explicit, right to privacy in the constitution.
If the court is basing decisions like abortion access on a right to privacy, then they should also start enforcing an actual right to privacy, including access to encryption.
Carpenter v. United States was 5-4, with Ginsburg in the majority. The textualists stacked up firmly against it. I wouldn't expect any help from SCOTUS for the next... ever.
The textualist theory on privacy is basically: "no trespass, no problem". The trespass theory of privacy is why Scalia was in the majority on United States v. Jones (cant attach a GPS tracker to a car without a warrant) and Kyllo v. United States (cant invade the house with an IR camera without a warrant). The lack of a physical trespass explains why his intellectual bedfellows dissented in Carpenter.
If you are going to cite a central argument to Roe v. Wade related to privacy, then you might as well mention the other argument in Roe v. Wade regarding the government’s interests in protecting an individual’s (in this case, the woman and fetuses’) health. The court balanced their decision between those two interests, hence why states are able to impose some restrictions against abortion after the first trimester.
You could argue that it does; up until 20 years ago it was treated like a munition (at least for export controls) until pressure from the tech boom got it reclassified as software.
Might make an interesting constitutional rights case before the supreme court.
I am amused by the fact the country where guns are legal and used by many bad people doesn't ban it. But they are trying to ban encryption used by every people that used internet.
Good comparison! One is viewed as a tool for people to protect themselves and their families, while the other is viewed as a tool for bad people to hurt other people and their families.
To expound on that distinction, I think it is easy for people to imagine a scary armed criminal, perhaps breaking into their house, and imagine being able to stop them by brandishing or shooting a gun at them.
It is comparatively harder for people to build a mental model of how encryption stops an unseen hacker accessing their data, and obviously most people value their life more than their data.
The difference in threat models applicable to end-to-end encryption versus hop-by-hop encryption is even more subtle, allowing disingenuous politicians to claim to support encryption while simultaneously weakening it.
Interesting read thanks for bringing the topic to attention.
I seriously doubt governments lack the surveillance tools and require more access with backdoors or breaking encryption. For example AES encryption calls CPU instructions to hardware that exists only by a few companies. DNS is either through a handful of public cache servers or captured at the OS level. The network backbone is by a handful of companies world wide. Of course the US is world leader of breaking privacy but this is theater
This is entirely anedotal. But the vast majority of my co-workers I've spoken to don't seem to care about too much about things like privacy, free speech, open specs, source code availability and think I am a wacko for self hosting and running (mostly) applications and operating systems. However I am a .NET dev and the fact I am decent with a command line is seen as a bit odd.
The general attitude I've encountered is well "it only happens to the bad people and nobody cares about what I do, so I don't need to worry about it and you must be a weirdo for worrying about it"
> Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and U.S. Senators Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) today introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act
I find three things about the encryption debate really weird.
#1 Split brain
The "same" government that gave us Tor (onion routing) wants to take it away. So at least some of the players understand the practical need for encryption. I'd rather those pro and con insiders fight it out, instead of fighting by proxy thru us citizens and consumers.
#2 Fishing expeditions
What possible value does unlocking, decryption have after the fact?
Does the FBI really need to unlock a spree shooter's iPhone? Why? What could they possibly learn? They already have all the meta data like FOAF, location, purchases. What more are they looking for? To better establish guilt?
And any one already under surveillance has already had their entire life rootkitted. So again no need for after the fact unlocking.
#3 Trusting trust, time boxed secrecy
I've had many, many fruitless conversations about computer security (wrt election integrity) with non-tech policy makers. I have yet to figure out how to convey the understanding that backdoors and security thru obscurity is no security at all.
The best policy compromise proposal that I can imagine, and I'm spitballing here, is formalizing some kind of temporal privacy.
Using voting and secret ballots as an example:
I absolutely do not want any one any where to know anyone's votes during an election. I don't even want precounts, so that pols and admins can preview tabulations. But I also don't care at all if someone knows how I voted after the election is certified. (Sure, there's still some risk of coercion and vote buying. But there are easier attack vectors for which we have no mitigation, so it's comparatively minor.)
So instead of trying to protect all secrets for all time, I think all the players might be able to chill a bit if we time boxed most secrets.
(I have other proposals for protecting personal privacy, like with medical records.)
> The "same" government that gave us Tor (onion routing) wants to take it away.
This is probably why "same" is in quotes, but it's clear that this is higher-up political players wanting more power to spy on the people in the name law enforcement - tor came from the military who made the tech to fix an actual problem they had (encrypted communication).
The widespread deployment of some math can be regulated, and this would have the same effect. Most consumers won't know the difference whether their Whatsapp encryption has a lawful access mechanism.
For a small percentage of users with the means and motivation, this may be true, but "making a deal with math/science" likely isn't the goal.
You can make deals with the companies that run app stores, however, and that’s the only tool the government needs in order to crush mass-adoption of encryption. I wish that Google and Apple would both recognize the threat that their business model poses to our freedom.
It's a real shame that far too many people's opinions can be made by simply arguing the four horsemen of the infocalypse[0]. These are the same types of arguments used by certain groups to promulgate their own agendas at the cost of individual liberties.
I dont feel particularly strongly one way or another on the encryption debate but everyone always points at the fact that crimes like child exploitation have existed for forever or that bad actors will just move to encrypted platforms. That ignores the fact that 1. things like Facebook are still relatively new and greatly enable these bad actors and 2. as the times article presents these platforms report a shit ton of this stuff so while I am sure there are plenty of bad actors moving to say signal there are plenty of others who aren't.
It will be interesting to see how things play out though since section 230 reform seems pretty bi partisan. While that doesnt necessarily mean the reform needs to address encryption I would be surprised if it doesn't
Speaking of spying on the populace, does anyone know why Palantir stock is on a tear for the past couple of days? There's nothing publicly known that would cause this. Is the new administration planning to tighten the bolts / expand the police state?
Biden is a very pro-war, tough on crime politician. He voted to authorize the Iraq war in 2003, and drafted and sponsored the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, the largest crime bill in American history. Biden’s win is a great signal for defense and law enforcement companies that spending will increase, so it makes sense. It’s likely a really great time to invest in these companies now that Trump has no chance of winning.
I would. Spying and warmongering are those very few things that both major party establishments readily agree on, and I hate to pay for either of those things, or being spied upon even more than I already am.
I wonder whether we're going to get a temporary break from this encryption surveillance ratchet with Biden as president, or if it'll continue regardless. This seems to be one of Barr's pet issues, and he's about to be shown the door. Still, opposition to encryption rights has historically not been partisan, so I'm not optimistic.
It depends. Biden is from an older generation and likely doesn’t view digital communication as an extension of “real life”. It’s just a convenient toy and when the “think of the children” arguments come out he’ll roll over like the rest of the boomers. Source: the many debates I got into with a bunch of old people angry that Apple wouldn’t unlock “a terrorist’s iPhone”.
Those who build a centralized system that can control every aspect of humans life just don't realize they are building Hell on Earth.
Decentralization and fairfull consensus between every acting party, no matter how much power they have - this is the only way to build a great culture and a system.
Unfortunately, we are still too far from this. Too much people are still trying to build this ugly human pyramid of subordination, just like in a primal tribe or mafia organization.