[tslug]

If I understand your question, the two options you've presented are: 1. Make a law to force governments and corporations to be more open, a la the Freedom of Information Act but turned into its live-casting modern equivalent, and 2. Not clear, but it sounds like a combination of adding more teeth to enforcement of our privacy laws and/or individually using much stronger crypto?

If that's what you meant, then neither path sounds easy. They both sound like a giant pain in the butt. However, Path #1 sounds a hell of a lot healthier in the long run to me. It's the one I advocate, because I believe more information is always better. You can certainly argue that it will be abused, but if everyone can see everything, then you can see the abuser doing the abuse as well. That's a key point that's easy to miss.

As to the diminished power, there's a similar argument to be made regarding wealth inequality. Hard to imagine the wealthy would agree to higher taxes if it hurts them, yet some of the most enlightened and even the very wealthiest do believe this, because they understand that while their individual wealth goes down if viewed in isolation, holistically, their true wealth goes up, because they improve the quality their country, its services, and the people they share their lives with.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

I didn't mean any specific strategy at all, I am just wondering why you think that achieving transparency of the kind that you seem to have in mind would be easier than maintaining/gaining back privacy. I read what you wrote as "gaining back privacy is hard, therefore, we should aim for transparency". What I didn't see was a justification for why that would actually be easier. And if it's equally hard, that argument kindof falls apart, doesn't it?

Also, I don't see why your suggested options are even necessarily in conflict? At least conceptually, I don't see any problem with transparency for governments and corporations, but privacy for individuals (unless they are acting in a role within those organisations)?!

> However, Path #1 sounds a hell of a lot healthier in the long run to me.

Do you mean that a society where noone feels the need to keep secrets would be a healthier society than what we have today, or do you mean that forcing everyone to publish all their secrets against their will would lead to a healthier society? Or something else entirely?

> It's the one I advocate, because I believe more information is always better. You can certainly argue that it will be abused, but if everyone can see everything, then you can see the abuser doing the abuse as well. That's a key point that's easy to miss.

Well, the one problem is, of course, whether that is actually any more realistic than strong privacy. Just because you hope that more transparency of the powerless will also bring more transparency of the powerful, doesn't mean one actually implies the other. You can actually have total lack of privacy for common folk and total secrecy of the elite at the same time. With power come the resources to maintain secrecy, whether legal or not.

But maybe more importantly: Do you actually see the abuser doing the abuse? How would you actually find that out, in practical terms? Would you personally read all the data that's being published by the government? Millions of pages every day? After all, the more data, the better? Or wouldn't you, for the most part, have to rely on others, like journalists or activists, to filter out the interesting stuff and to put it into context for you? What do you expect powerful groups to do when they can clearly see how those journalists and activists are preparing to report on their wrongdoing? Just sit there and hope for the best, like, say, Putin or Erdogan?

> As to the diminished power, there's a similar argument to be made regarding wealth inequality. Hard to imagine the wealthy would agree to higher taxes if it hurts them, yet some of the most enlightened and even the very wealthiest do believe this, because they understand that while their individual wealth goes down if viewed in isolation, holistically, their true wealth goes up, because they improve the quality their country, its services, and the people they share their lives with.

The question is: Do you therefore want to give the wealthiest the power to write the tax code that's being enforced on everyone?

Do you think that because some people have good intentions with all the data that's being collected, anyone who manages to collect data should therefore have the right to override the wishes of the people the data is about?

If you want to find out whether something is risky, it's no use to only look at the successes. There absolutely have been monarchies where the monarch was a wise and responsible person. What does that tell us about whether monarchy or democracy should be the peferred form of government?

[tslug]

Yes, it's harder to make something more private than it is to make it more transparent. Absolutely. You can go nuts trying to make your life as private as humanly possible, and then all it takes is one exception to the rules, like surveillance in the name of national security, followed by an unfortunate misuse of that data or an unfortunate hack, and now your eggshell defense of privacy has failed, and you have no cultural or legal infrastructure protecting your now very transparent life.

Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.

If you want to be more private, that means that no matter the level of encryption, you can never post your brutally honest thoughts in facebook or twitter or HN ever again. You can never let people know where you're visiting. What you're eating. What you're wearing. Who you're dating. You have to clam up. Because whether or not you've encrypted everything, you still leave fingerprints, not only in the IP addresses but in piecing together all the information you're sharing in order to home in on the identity of the poster.

It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.

To answer your question about watching the abuser, if all information is broadcast (like literally broadcast openly on 802.11ac, for example), then in all likelihood, the people closest to the sources of these broadcasts are going to be the folks who can make the best use of the data. Too far away, and you won't even be able to pick up the signal. If someone further away can see value for reviewing it, then it's going to make sense to incentivize someone closer to archive and host it.

Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.

And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.

Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.

And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Yes, it's harder to make something more private than it is to make it more transparent. Absolutely. You can go nuts trying to make your life as private as humanly possible, and then all it takes is one exception to the rules, like surveillance in the name of national security, followed by an unfortunate misuse of that data or an unfortunate hack, and now your eggshell defense of privacy has failed, and you have no cultural or legal infrastructure protecting your now very transparent life.

Correct me if I am wrong, but that boils down to "it's easier to publish your own information that to keep it secret", doesn't it?

How does that answer the question why you think that forcing the elite to be more transparent is easier than gaining/protecting the privacy of the common person?

Why is the eggshell defense of privacy an eggshell defense, but the enforced transparency of the elite is robust? (or is it?)

As far as I can tell, you are still simply assuming that enforcing transparency of the elite is comparatively easy, with no justification whatsoever, yet all of your argument seems to depend on that actually being true.

> Ask anyone famous how hard it is to maintain a private life. It's much easier to go in the direction of transparency than backwards towards more privacy.

I don't think that's actually accurate. There are plenty of famous people with a pretty private private life. There are many more factors at play when people's wealth is essentially in them being known, where "being known" necessarily implies that people know something about their private lives. The relationship between paparazzi and celebrities in particular is generally much more of a symbiosis than it's often being portrayed.

> It takes an enormous amount of effort to obfuscate your writing style and all your proper nouns, and it's not just effort. I think it costs you a piece of your humanity.

I am not sure what any of this has to do with the discussion at hand?!

> Putin and Erdogan get away with what they do because of asymmetric information. If their misbehaviour is similarly broadcast, then it levels the playing field.

So, Putin and Erdogan get away with killing and imprisoning journalists and shutting down newspapers only because there are no critical newspapers and journalists broadcasting their misbehaviour? Like, first there were no critical journalists and newspapers, and then Putin and Erdogan started killing and imprisoning and shutting down critical journalists and newspapers that didn't actually exist anyway? Could you explain?

> And it changes journalism from being about leaking information and more about better analysis of information, its veracity, its implications, etc, as information would go from being valuable to being a commodity.

Apart from the fact that it's still just a baseless claim of yours that that kind of transparency is in any way realistic to actually achieve: That's actually not as big a change as you make it out to be. It's akin to saying that building operating rooms in every school in the country would change medicine from being about having access to an operating room to being about performing a surgery. Millions of pages of government documents are about as useful to the public at large as operating rooms: Almost not at all. Without someone who has hard-earned specialized knowledge about how to use it, it might just as well not be there. The value comes from understanding the information, not from having overwhelming heaps of it at your fingertips. And the centralization that comes with the required expertise to be able to distill out the important bits comes the weakness where those in power can attack to keep information under control. If you put all surgeons in prison, the availability of operating rooms is of zero value to the public.

Or to put it more succintly: Just because books about everything that you could study at a university are readily available from amazon, in practice, not everyone is an expert in every academic field. Public availability of information does not automatically translate into the general public being well-versed in it by a long shot.

> Right now, the wealthiest do appear to be writing the tax code.

May I suggest you think about what the tax code would look like if it indeed were being written by the wealthiest? Just because it is giving the wealthiest an advantage doesn't mean it's as bad as it would be, were it to be written by the wealthiest.

> And no, I do not think you should override the wishes of the people the data is about (within reason). That's central to my point. It turns knowledge into responsibility instead of power.

Would you agree then that the state should protect the citizens' privacy and give them the legal tools to force others to respect their wishes?

[tslug]

I'm not overly focused on the concerns of a small minority of the population. The elite have their own challenges, but they have enormous resources with which to tackle them, and while some of them would not be thrilled about high transparency, some would embrace it, just as long as there were better protections for the transparent, which there currently aren't.

I get the sense that I'm upsetting you, and I don't mean to do that. I'm sorry if I said something to offend. I want only to engage in an open discussion about this and to offer a different point of view. I believe in it very strongly, and I have given it a great deal of thought and even given talks on how to operate an economy within such a system. I by no means think it's foolproof, nor Utopian- just better.

I'm currently under deadline and a bit pressed for time, and I feel like we might have a more effective conversation over skype. Feel free to email me at [e-mail] if you'd like to swap contact info and chat about it further.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

Well, you might be upsetting me, but not because you are saying something that offends me, but because you don't seem to address my objections, instead just repeating your claims in some form or another, which makes for a very frustrating experience.

It's not that everything you say is wrong, but your conclusion crucially depends on this one central question of whether it is actually more effective at achieving the (implied) goal if you were to try and actually implement it, which seems highly questionable to me, but which you don't even acknowledge is your burden to show. You seem to assume that universal transparency is easier than universal privacy, and based on that you put forward arguments for why a transparent society would be better if it did exist. I might even agree with that conclusion based on that assumption. The part that's missing is how that applies in the real world, how that assumption is actually true in the real world--and my strong suspicion is that that's where your whole idea falls apart in practice, because you are simply ignoring how human psychology and power structures actually work, arguing instead from a completely unrealistic model of power structures that happens to support your conclusions.

I'm sure you believe it very strongly, and even that you have given it a great deal of thought. But have you tried to tear it apart? Do you know how to falsify your idea, do you know what it would take for you to accept that it's all wrong? If not, you might just be reinforcing your own biases without any connection to reality.

As for taking this outside HN, this is unfortunately a pseudonymous account, and as such, I don't connect it to any other identities. But feel free to take some time, chances are I will notice it ;-)