Item — HN Reader

Edward Snowden @Snowden This is not a drill.

Matthew Green @matthew_d_green Reminder to Silicon Valley: there’s an even chance that many governments in the world will be run by authoritarian movements in the future. Your window to deploy surveillance-resistant systems is running out.

1 comments

Ok, that's just a copy paste, but the message is: Encrypt all the things (no backdoors) so your civilians can't be spied on and their vital communications can't be disrupted. Right? That's the message (again)?

I mean I agree, and I use services accordingly (Signal, NextCloud, Home Assistant) but, is there a special reason why he is saying it now, with some urgency? Did something happen?

In terms of "Did something happen?" there's a fair number of examples of governments both failing and succeeding at strong arming tech companies for intelligence/defense/etc. However, the big event you seem worried about is a predicted near future event hasn't happened yet. Like a tech equivalent of climate change, all the little things over the years add up to one big urgent thing.

Dramatic escalation of the conflict between NATO and Russia is a matter of weeks. You can be sure governments in the west will use that 'good crisis' to crack down on civil liberties.

I don't think this is in response to anything specific. It's more an acknowledgement of an ongoing "boiling frog" problem.

I recently heard Eliezer Yudkowsky make this comparison in the (somewhat) related domain of AI safety: let's say you gained reliable intel that aliens were invading in exactly 30 years. Do you begin acting immediately, or do you wait? Anything you could do now, you could probably do next year. But the problem is, there's no obvious point at which to act; on any given day, you keep kicking the ball down the road.

The same logic applies even if the length of time is unknown (X years). There is a high probability of future crises regarding both AI safety, and authoritarian states leveraging surveillance and social algorithms. In both cases, if we wait for a clear instigating event, it may be too late.