Item — HN Reader

> "It's in nobody's interests that terrorists should be able to [...] communicate out of the reach of authorities."

Since you can't distinguish between 'terrorists', and anybody else, this effectively reduces to our old favourite:

> "It's in nobody's interests that people should be able to [...] communicate out of the reach of authorities."

4 comments

Even that first premise is wrong in any state with the rule of law. Only crimes have to be prosecuted, not "people" or "communications" and prosecution is always something done "a posteriori."

The above must be understood correctly: I am not advocating that one should not investigate possible criminal plans: because planning some kind of crime (like killing someone) with intent is, ipso facto, a crime.

It is not PEOPLE that the law applies to. It is CRIMES.

We incarcerate people because we do not know a better way to punish them for their crimes, not because we do not want them to be human beings. CRIME-PUNISHMENT, not MAN-JAIL.

The trouble with this principle is that there is some damage you simply can't put right retrospectively, and in this case we really are talking about the government agencies whose remit is to try to prevent those things from happening in the first place. They do have a legitimate need to take preemptive actions in some cases, because otherwise people will quite literally die. The useful questions are about how we can help them to do their job and keep people safe from whatever real dangers are out there, but without doing more harm than good.

In the case of encrypted communications, I'm not sure that will ever be possible, because the dangers of preventing everyone from communicating privately may far outweigh the danger from otherwise unanticipated acts of terror. The politicians want a middle ground solution where only good people have access to the information, but the technologists understand that no such ideal solution can exist here.

You are right. But.

Suspicion about the existence of a crime (and plotting a crime with intent is by itself a crime) is (given enough evidence) reason enough to investigate. That is what you call "preemtive", I guess.

And yes, I am willing to run more risks for the benefit of freedom. Because there are things which are more important than life. And freedom is one of them.

By freedom I mean freedom of coertion, in this context.

It seems like we agree on the general principles here, but I think you have to be pragmatic about applying them.

We all live together in the same society, so we can never have complete freedom and universal rights. If nothing else, sometimes the rights and freedoms we value come into conflict.

A classic example is that in general we might want to protect freedom of expression and we might also respect a right to privacy. However, at some point those competing interests are incompatible, and so we have to try to balance them as fairly as we can.

Finding that balance is particularly difficult in cases where the damage caused from a violation may be very high but such violations are rare in practice. This is probably true, at least in countries like mine, both of fighting real violent terrorism and of real damage from blanket government surveillance. In both cases, we're also concerned about the potential future harm, not just the actual risk of harm today.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone is in a position to realistically assess the risk and make an informed personal judgement about what they think a good balance should be in an ideal world, even before we consider legitimate differences of opinion or the complications of not living in an ideal world.

Ultimately that's their biggest fear. That certain elements that are not friendly to their interests organize either themselves, or organize at the behest of a foreign government to undermine their control over the system. And it's a valid concern. Governments want to maintain their control. It doesn't take much to destabilize a State, they have done it many times they know this to be the case.

I think that largely depends on the State and Government.

Growing up in England, I'd largely say that people have a sense of freedom [how true that is vs. media tainted perspectives is anyone's guess], that despite (allegedly) one of the most extensive surveillance networks in the world, people there don't generally sense a fear of being watched or oppressed... and it's not that people don't know they're on camera somewhere, we're all well aware that someone could be [albeit after the fact] watching our every [public] move, it's just that they don't tend to give it a second thought or care.

I can't say this doesn't affect anyone's behaviour, but I don't feel that my feelings are atypical and it doesn't affect mine.

It's only once there's a tipping point in the volume of people feeling of oppressed that revolutions arise and States destabilized...

...or bad actors use dirty politics to throw countries into financial turmoil, inject a sense of panic into the population and overthrow regimes that are not friendly to their agenda... or back the wrong frenemies and leave a pile of rubble and a want for revenge where there was once [reasonable] stability; even if that stability didn't look like they thought it should or didn't align with their own economic/political agenda.

On another note, pencil & paper never got a virus that tunneled its way around the internet taking over thousands of computers to be used as a bot network for cyber attacks on industry... and when the power went out, I could still use my credit card to pay for things. Most stores appear to have forgotten that ability.

All you have to find is a disgruntled minority with ideological differences and get them to do your bidding. There does not have to be a majority discontent for anything to actually happen. And often it's not really about some sort of change, but rather tying up the government of such countries in local affairs so that they don't have time to contemplate other affairs.

It's worse than that. It's anything else

> "It's in nobody's interests that anything should be able to [...] communicate out of the reach of authorities."

Forcing encryption backdoors compromises systems that do nothing but talk to systems. How'd you feel about a smart grid now that has knowingly insecure crypto.

Further, how do you feel about that knowing that the government has been compromised more than once. It's like let us install backdoors, but how do you know the government is actually secure. In Canada for instance we have had CSIS (our MI5) agents leave important documents in laptops which were then stolen. If backdoors exist anyone can potentially get to them by stealing information from the government.

I saw a catchy sound-bite about this the other day, I think from a US politician:

If you can't protect it, don't collect it.

To me, that seems like a pretty good attitude to handling personal data responsibly.

The absolute most idiotic part is that any slightly intelligent person would use one of the multiple secure algorithms for encryption not controlled by authorities.

In other words, there is nothing they can do short of making encryption illegal; good luck with that.