[badRNG]

I feel that arguments along the lines of "why should we have governments protect consumers on 'x' if they willingly do 'y'" aren't really helpful, and feel akin to whataboutism.

For example, yes, I expect "The Government's OSHA" to enforce worker safety laws, even if "The Government's Police" later winds up brutalizing workers during a strike.

The Government isn't this unified entity, it's more a collection of disparate organizations often embroiled in disputes with each other, each representing various stakeholders who's interests are often in contradiction with one another.

[nickff]

I think you're right that my point is something close to whataboutism (though not exactly whataboutism), but yours suffers from something similar to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.[1]

[1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

[badRNG]

Thanks for the recommendation, interesting read. I suppose how one lands on this topic is based on how much continuity one believes there is in a "government."

If a government is simply a large institution or cluster of institutions that perform many roles and have a purpose towards the same end, then the claim of "whataboutism" is simply nonsense and trusting one portion of a government and not another is at least somewhat inconsistent, and this "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" seems clear when a person can go straight from criticizing the government's treatment of striking workers to advocating for workers protections from this same government.

I think "the government" doesn't exist as a unified entity in any meaningful way aside from maybe linguistically. The government, in my view, is more a collection of organizations that often have outright antagonistic relations to each other, and interests that are fundamentally in contradiction. I don't really view a regulatory body and the NSA to be meaningfully part of the same organization (I'd say there are plenty of private businesses that are more closely "part of the NSA" than some oversight board.) Claiming that the perceived misbehavior of the NSA should prevent us from advocating for consumer protections is clearly whataboutism according to this frame. This view would make this "Gell-Mann amnesia" accusation appear incoherent, since we are talking about disparate organizations with no meaningful connection to one another.

[nickff]

You could make the same argument about different subject areas in a newspaper; saying that the different editors are antagonistic towards each other, and have varying levels of competence. In the cases of both newspapers and governments, there is a similar oversight and management structure across the organization, as well as unity in source of funding.

Perhaps we should expect different parts of the government to act with varying motives, but similar competence.

I think the government organizations attempting to ensure backdoors in encryption are acting deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of easing investigations. Thus, I think the privacy regulators will act deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of protecting consumers.

[badRNG]

I think we'll need to agree to disagree about the government's organization then. A newspaper is a far more cohesive organization that exists to a single end and has a largely uniform consistency, regardless of the beliefs of individual editors.

> I think the government organizations attempting to ensure backdoors in encryption are acting deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of easing investigations. Thus, I think the privacy regulators will act deceitfully, malevolently, and incompetently, with the stated motive of protecting consumers.

I just don't see any good reason to make this leap. Furthermore, I don't see the utility of arguing against consumer protections simply due to the perceived misbehavior of an intelligence agency. Europe passed the GDPR, and despite its many inadequacies, it has positively impacted the privacy of European citizens, and proves that some ground could be made by way of consumer protection.

Privacy regulations aren't so pie-in-the-sky that they aren't worth fighting for. That's simply an unreasonable concession in my view.

[nickff]

My view on privacy is simply that it's too important to trust to the government. If we care about what a web browser sends out, it's a problem that should be solved by the browser, not the government. You don't trust the government to ensure the privacy of your communications; you shouldn't trust them to ensure your privacy in any other respect.