Why stop with monitoring people’s online activities? Why not require always on microphones, cameras, and location tracking on our phones/baby monitors/alexas? Future history books won’t talk about the death of human freedom in the late 21st century because such books will be censored by future governments that have a million times more power to control their populations than was historically the case.
Traditionally the first thing they do is not to follow their own rules. Happened already in this crisis with politicians going to the gym or hair dresser while locking down everybody else.
You don't get it. It's not about just the people in power directly. It's about power. Power in the West is very limited, even with high office. That's what they want fixed "because they're powerless". Powerless to fix drugs. To fix youth disturbances. To fix jobs "stolen". To entice their enforcers. To ... It's about letting the people the government employs interfere to an ever larger extent in your life. What you eat. Whether you smoke. Who you're with (contact tracing, except not just for covid-19, but for crimes in general).
The thing is, the powers of the government, in reality, are pitiful. The vast majority of crimes go unsolved. 80% in the best of places. For murders, a little over half (BUT, keep in mind that most murders are passion murders. Unplanned, heat of the moment, at least somewhat unplanned. E.g. someone brings a weapon to extort someone, but ends up killing them not-quite-accidentally-but-certainly-was-trying-to-avoid-it. "Real", planned, thought out murders mostly go unsolved).
Once we start talking theft, solve rates drop below 15%, and drop fast. It's also just not worth it to anyone to pursue those. Not that you get your stuff back if the police does solve the crime so I'm a bit unclear why anyone would want the police to solve most crimes. It doesn't help victims except perhaps in the revenge department.
And of course, this is actual, physical, what some people would call "real" crimes. Many other types of crimes ... An example: when it comes to tax evasion (sales tax evasion in California, for example, which is definitely illegal) they essentially catch 10 culprits per year, no more.
They want their power to actually apply, and ask the police brass how to do that. The answer is predictably: more surveillance, more automated access to private info for the state, more ways to attack individuals, more ways for the police/state to "do something" while avoiding the court system (or going through a court system without any rights for defendants, like youth courts. Did you know, kids can get legally locked up for decennia (yes, plural) for a crime they can prove they didn't commit).
For example, now there's a solid 30-40% of people flouting covid-19 restrictions. But in general people totally disregard most laws most of the time, especially youths (never mind that that's allowed for most laws: as long as there's no damage to anyone you're actually allowed to violate the law, or at least cannot be punished for it).
Everybody in the police force, justice system, FBI, NSA, ... wants these statistics to change drastically. They never do. Everywhere the police steps up enforcement, people immediately want them to stop. So the police brass wants automated enforcement, automated gathering of evidence. They want contact tracing so they can just charge the nearest suspicious individual and have something in court, like location. Or that "the suspect lied" about location to the police, for instance. Never mind that this can be defeated by someone planning a crime with a level of ease that's absurdly low.
They want a spy state so they "solve" crimes (that means they have an arrest, and a conviction, they do NOT mean solve, and certainly do not mean making victims whole, anyone with half a brain knows that criminals as a rule cannot make victims whole, and certainly cannot do so with the american justice system imposed on them).
Furthermore, under the table, they want to present these systems as a reward for their people, the people they hire, people in their department, etc. Ideally just for them to be "cool" (and not, like keeps happening, to enable police officers to stalk and rape their ex-girlfriend for years). They want to use it to get rid of "disturbances" (people that live close to "nice" people who act weird, or are noisy, but within the law, or ...). They want to use it to punish people who don't do things the right way, e.g. making a lot of money without a "proper job".
And of course they want to use this for racist purposes.
Surveillance is just one component of this. They also want ways to convict and lock up people without having to go through proper justice channels, where actual proof is required, and there's 10 layers checking if what people "in power" do is entirely legal. They want protection for themselves, and government itself, against the justice system (just look up damages and punishment for locking someone up with a wrongful conviction ... does that seem reasonable to you? Now compare to a private person imprisoning someone they don't like ...)
These people want power. So their "superiority" cannot be challenged in any way whatsoever, to enforce it using brutal violence. And the big problem always turns out to be the same: they're not actually superior. And then some kid born to a divorced ex-drug addict mother has a commercial success and seriously threatens the "decent" business interests of the local politicians ... Or has a relationship with their daughter "that will destroy her". Or ... That's what power is for.
There does seem to be a type of person who just wants power due to some deep psychological drive, and won’t or can’t look at the bigger picture to consider the cost to society for them to get it.
I guess my point is, if you're this unhinged that your end game is just doing whatever you want, surely it's going to fall to pieces eventually.
One can't control all circumstance, even if you're in-charge of the ultimate surveillance state. You can't surveillance away suddenly dying of a brain hemorrhage. In-fact, you'd be more likely to die in this case due to the fact you've not probably created a less honest, collaborative world where you'd have less bias an evidence based medical research occurring.
Being in-charge of a surveillance state seems like it's only good for the first half of the states life, until things like what happened in Wuhan recently occur, the coverups and lies catch up to the great leaders eventually.
we, the people of the united states, need to forcefully push back on this encroachment. we lost the advantage when politicians fell all over themselves rushing to grab emergency powers, and the timid majority not only did not take pause at this, but begged for more.
instead of allowing millions of entities the freedom to tackle the crisis from millions of vantage points, we let politicians collapse that down to essentially a few dozen governmental entities in charge, amassing power in people who have adverse incentives to the populace. we willingly gave up most of our optionality and diversity in tackling the challenge.
the better configuration, imho, is a set of governments primarily organized around gathering and disseminating crucial information openly and transparently for all (which they currently do as well). as the nexus of critical information, those governments would then also focus on connecting people and businesses who can advance the democratic goals of the polity. politicians are leaders of their departments and representatives of the electorate, not the other way around (as currently acceded).
I wonder if the same people that are out, armed, in front of state capitols just so they can get their hair done or go out to a restaurant will show up, equally armed, equally angry, and equally willing to vote against politicians invading their privacy by requiring electronic surveillance on every part of their lives as a condition of opening up again.
The debate about this bill has been going on for a while now.
Riana Pfefferkorn of CIS did a lot better job objectively addressing the issues (sans the overt political cheap shots) in her article. It lays out why it may be unconstitutional on several grounds. I'd recommend reading it if you want more detail on the bill:
THE EARN IT ACT: HOW TO BAN END-TO-END ENCRYPTION WITHOUT ACTUALLY BANNING IT:
Thank you for posting that link. That post was far more informative and, as you mentioned, avoided "cheap shots". This subject is best discussed without politically partisan language; all of us are affected, regardless of how or even whether we vote. Thanks again.
We need more decentralized software, like skype was originally, where there is no tech company with access that would have to 'earn it'. Taking away our right to privacy while telling me your are saving children makes my skin crawl - I can't think of a more anti-american act.
Off the top of my head. OMEMO running on good old XMPP. OpenPGP running on older but gooder SMTP, the only decentralized system that ever got really popular. Heck, OpenPGP running on XMPP for the mashup.
All with lots of implementations both server and client. All more or less ignored. Before suggesting we need new systems you pretty much have to figure out what isn't working with the ones we have ... and real stuff, not unlikely technical reasons that no one cares about ... and no, it isn't just bad user interfaces. People will overcome any user interface if they actually care enough.
OK, but this always happens. There are always problems with the old stuff (different problems for each) and all we have to do is overcome those problems and everything will work. But identifying what is wrong with something does not let us know what we should do going forward.
So what about the new thing: Matrix? What do we need to do there to make it so it does not fall into obscurity like everything else?
I wonder how this will affect American tech companies, will they relocate their HQ out of USA? I guess every company operating in the USA will have to implement this, I’m thinking about regionally dividing my customer base just to leave Europeans higher amount of security with encryption but this is costly for me as well.
Massive surveillance will be a boon for the big tech companies. They already do everything they can to get as much data as possible. Even better, if it’s government sanctioned.
i doubt it, for big tech anyway. those larger tech companies get a fair chunk of change from .gov (e.g. US DoD cloud JEDI contract as well as lord knows whatever classified/black projects); they also aren't subject to NSA offensive attack as are companies outside of the US, and may benefit from NSA/homeland security/FBI defensive information.
the only tax seems to be, according to snowden, a /intelligence-community endpoint of some sort. that doesn't seem like a huge ask as i'm sure those endpoints largely exist anyway.
That’s one thing I don’t get. There are a lot of very impressive people like Wyden out there but when it comes to running for president it seems the best the country can come up with is Biden or Trump. Is running for president so unpleasant that anybody halfways sane will not do this to themselves ? Or what else is going on? How could the Democrats come up with a washed up 78 year old and skip a lot of very capable younger people?