[snowwrestler]

God I'm sick of reading stuff like this.

The truth is that a large number of Americans believe that the FBI should have access through consumer encryption. Agree or disagree, but the existence of that public sentiment is a fact easily observable in public polling.

Security vs. freedom is a tradeoff. Different people have different opinions of what makes an acceptable trade.

The role of representative government is to adjudicate between differing opinions. That is why this is still an issue, and will continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future--not because there is some secret cabal who is working counter to the wishes of all Americans.

[duaneb]

> The truth is that a large number of Americans believe that the FBI should have access through consumer encryption.

This is not a democracy, this is a republic. We should hold our elected (and appointed) officials to higher standards than we hold our voters. Just because our public is uneducated does not excuse the elected government taking advantage of an uneducated public to seize powers they did not have before.

[snowwrestler]

> This is not a democracy, this is a republic.

I'm sick of reading this too.

We have a representative democracy in the U.S. We also have a republic. The two terms are not contradictory.

"Representative democracy" tells you how decisions are made--we select a few citizens to make decisions on our behalf. "Republic" tells you who is sovereign--in the U.S. the individual citizens have the right and power to rule, and have used that to construct our own government.

Counter examples:

The U.K. is a representative democracy, but not a republic. It's a monarchy.

North Korea is a republic but it's not a democracy. It's an autocracy.

[duaneb]

Just because you call something a democracy doesn't mean it is so. If something is a republic, you can call it a representative democracy analogously, but not literally. Just like a zebra is a striped horse but not, you know, a horse.

Can you address anything I wrote that had substance?

[snowwrestler]

I don't call the U.S. a democracy, it is a democracy. The only way to say that it is not, is to change the definition of the word "democracy."

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define+democracy

> Can you address anything I wrote that had substance?

That our elected officials represent the disparate opinions of the people they serve might be their personal failing, in your view, because you disagree with them on this issue. I disagree with them too! Encryption should not be backdoored, the FBI is wrong--I agree on all those scores.

I just don't think that the only reason the encryption conversation continues is because of corrupt political elites. It's not. The conversation continues at the public level too.

The reason that matters, is what we can do about it. If public opinion is the problem, then a public campaign can try to move it. If corrupt political elites are the problem then... we throw up our hands? Isn't that just rationalizing despair and inaction?

edit: clarity

[duaneb]

> http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define+democracy

This definition is meaningless. Under this definition, every government is a democracy. People technically voted for Kim Jong Un.

> That our elected officials represent the disparate opinions of the people they serve might be their personal failing, in your view, because you disagree with them on this issue.

No, their personal failing is not thinking for themselves.

> I just don't think that the only reason the encryption conversation continues is because of corrupt political elites. It's not. The conversation continues at the public level too.

I do agree—however, the elected officials are still failing their constituents by not actually understanding what encryption is. They have a responsibility to be educated when their constituents are not.

[snowwrestler]

> the elected officials are still failing their constituents by not actually understanding what encryption is. They have a responsibility to be educated when their constituents are not.

I totally agree with you on this. Here's a sliver of hope that progress is possible...

http://fortune.com/2016/03/10/apple-fbi-lindsay-graham/

[mindslight]

> truth is that a large number of Americans believe that the FBI should have access through consumer encryption

Yes, they've been led to believe this by the "corrupt elite" you so casually brush aside. It's better characterized as a gradient of out-of-touchness rather than a well-bounded "elite" class [0], but the net effect is the same.

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship" and all that.

[0] eg the skinjobs parroting the message on TV aren't directly reliant on the propaganda, but thinking too hard about it would lose them their employment.

[fixermark]

They've been led to believe this by a common-sense assumption that police are there to police. The notions of the FBI acting counter to the interest of the public or the FBI lacking the competence to protect the weakened access points they would desire are counter to basic education; people must be taught to think in those lines.

When thinking about politics, remember: most hackers are more paranoid than the average person. A lot more. Because our training tends to show us what damage can be done, and that people will do damage for the hell of it [https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...]. When the Boston Marathon was bombed, the police put the city on basically a full-panic lockdown to catch two men; a lot of people were okay with this because it made them feel viscerally safer, not because they were trained wrong by a corrupt elite. You disregard the actual state of human nature to assume otherwise, which is probably disadvantageous.

[mindslight]

And yet many facets of the government were designed from an assumption that organizations do develop ulterior motives. Checks and balances, the adversarial justice system, and the Bill of Rights, to name some fundamental meta-topics. An abstract "don't tread on me" is deep within the American psyche, yet it very easily remains abstract, especially when steered that way.

I agree with your general point about human nature of blindly trusting the biggest stick, but that doesn't mean we should avoid blaming the scumbag mass media for abdicating their traditional duty of critical analysis and turning into pravda.us. If someone wants to ascribe this to an explicit conspiracy with an evil cabal while I simply see panicked well-to-do ignorants promulgating their bubble, I'm not going to let disagreements about details get in the way of agreeing on the commonalities. Any such dissenting viewpoint is a step on the path of extricating oneself from the infopocalyptic centralization we're finding ourselves being pushed into.