[Affric]

It’s interesting.

This gigantic legislation is misconceived at the same time I think it’s easy to see why it has been deemed electorally popular enough for the government to proceed with.

Tech companies do not provide a carriage service. It’s something more than that. The behaviours they permitted, and even encouraged, on their platforms have incurred large amounts of harm on individuals and society as a whole.

There can be no compromise on the government with encryption but they are able to do this because online companies are yet to figure out how to best protect the vulnerable that use their services.

With that said I think the existence of the unregulated internet was likely anomalous. If ever you wanted privacy, you always have had to ensure the only two beings with access to the information communicated were yourself and the intended recipient. Is it really possible for a society to permit the existence of any large organisation for private communication without eavesdropping?

[logicchains]

>With that said I think the existence of the unregulated internet was likely anomalous. If ever you wanted privacy, you always have had to ensure the only two beings with access to the information communicated were yourself and the intended recipient. Is it really possible for a society to permit the existence of any large organisation for private communication without eavesdropping

Encrypted communication is always going to exist, even the Chinese government can't prevent two technically capable people (or people with technically capable friends) from communication securely, and it has the most powerful internet filtering system in existence. If you ban encryption, then only the criminals will have encryption, and that's much truer for encryption than guns because anyone with a bit of knowledge and a few kilobytes of source code can setup encrypted communication that's mathematically unbreakable.

[Affric]

Sure, two technically capable people that control their whole stack including hardware that they can ensure has not been backdoored and that it’s in no other way being monitored for unencrypted versions of the data.

100% banning encryption is stupid. But encryption not being banned doesn’t mean they can’t know what’s in those messages. There are other attacks.

[mattnewton]

> With that said I think the existence of the unregulated internet was likely anomalous. If ever you wanted privacy, you always have had to ensure the only two beings with access to the information communicated were yourself and the intended recipient. Is it really possible for a society to permit the existence of any large organisation for private communication without eavesdropping?

It wasn’t feasible to open up every letter and scan it before resealing it outside of prisons then or now, but it is for electronic communication, and it will be done in the name of safety. The same is true of monitoring every conversation you have with friends; impossible before outside prisons, easy now electronically. This is what is entirely anomalous.

[Affric]

We have seen large letter censorship apparatus before. We have seen mass spying before. Implementing these systems (with just humans) has been done more than once at large scales (think Second World War, East Germany).

But regardless secure communication had to be undertaken between individuals. If the state wished to spy on people who did not have the ability to encrypt and decrypt their communication securely all they had to do was target them. Now the computer has made encryption into a technology rather than a skill.

I would suggest that’s just as anomalous as the ability to monitor electronic communication.