[feanaro]

But who will formulate these laws that are supposed to give people freedom when we already have malicious state actors pushing for the complete opposite? Who will put pressure on governments to formulate just laws if people are so hopelessly misinformed and cannot possibly take the time to understand the issue of being parted with their freedom?

The suggestion is not that people need to continually invest large amounts of time to manually verify their freedom is being upheld. It is that they should inform themselves once in order to understand the issue and be able to ensure their governments are not secretly becoming totalitarian states.

[gjulianm]

> But who will formulate these laws that are supposed to give people freedom

I'd bet that most people in HN live in democracies.

> Who will put pressure on governments to formulate just laws if people are so hopelessly misinformed and cannot possibly take the time to understand the issue of being parted with their freedom?

You don't need to know biochemistry and medicine to know that you don't want carcinogenic elements in your food, right? In the same sense, you don't need to know how to check that a channel is private and secure in order to push for regulations that make your communication channels secure.

>It is that they should inform themselves once in order to understand the issue and be able to ensure their governments are not secretly becoming totalitarian states.

Which is exactly the same thing I'm proposing: push for regulations that align with their interests.

[feanaro]

> You don't need to know biochemistry and medicine to know that you don't want carcinogenic elements in your food, right? In the same sense, you don't need to know how to check that a channel is private and secure in order to push for regulations that make your communication channels secure.

Yes, but you need to be able to conceive what cancer is and (roughly) how and why it appears in order to understand and fight the concept of carcinogens. Most people today still haven't realized the cancer and the carcinogens in the story of privacy. This is despite the fact that this was widely known in a prior time (see Stasi).

> Which is exactly the same thing I'm proposing: push for regulations that align with their interests.

Yes, except it's not happening because people are complacent, which is why people are fuming when they see stuff like this here.