[agwp]

The absurd thing is that the amendment only covers smartphones and tablets - which means those who the bill aims to target can easily break the law by using a laptop, desktop, camera, smart TV etc.

In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open.

[matheusmoreira]

Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to.

Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.

Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.

They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.

[bamboozled]

The other side of this coin is that, disgusting horrific pedophiles, terrorists and drug smugglers also have access to this stuff too.

I'm not in support of this bill, I'm just saying whenever I read these arguments, it's almost like you're entirely discounting the challenge the very tech your praising incurs for law enforcement and society.

For me the paradox is simple, one the one hand people want everything to be "open and transparent" including their computers, but those same people often want the ability to completely hide everything in cryptography. Which one is it? If you were for openness and transparency in it's entirety, why wouldn't you by default be against cryptography ? This paradox is where the rubber hits the road on legislation like this and likely why the average Joe Smith doesn't really care about the cause. Because realistically, it all sounds suspicious. To a law abiding citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

[matheusmoreira]

There is no paradox. The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. You must tolerate some crime in order to keep your humanity and dignity. Orwellian dystopias with omniscient surveillance can reduce crime to zero but you wouldn't want to live in one.

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

This is just something people need to accept no matter how angry they get about it. If they don't, they will be manipulated through their fears into trading away their freedom for a false sense of security.

[beeflet]

I support transparency for institutions and privacy for individuals. Not the other way around.

[inference-god]

What about when a group of individuals forms an institution that's self serving and harmful to other citizens, and they're able to do a lot of this under the guise of "privacy"?

[beeflet]

All operations as a public institution should be transparent. We fund them through taxes, we have a right to know what is going on.

I don't know what you are getting at with "self serving and harmful to other citizens"? Like a private institution? a company? Of course private companies are self-serving. All of them could be described as perpetrating some subjective and nebulous "harm". There are already transparency requirements for businesses, and they are subject to warrants. To the extent that they are public institutions (monopolies, publicity-traded companies), there are increasing demands for transparency and vice-versa.

Individuals have a right to privacy and protection from undue search, regardless of scare quotes employed, unless they are living on a prison island such britan.

[bamboozled]

The institutions you're talking about are under attack by online propaganda and smear campaigns by countries that want to see them taken down. Open online speech is important but it's also been hijacked to do a lot of harm.

Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail server and people would leave it a lone, but we don't.

Maintaining the status quo means western democracy is fucked. There is no anti-dote to propaganda and lies being spread through social media. Maybe getting rid of online anonymity would help but I understand why people don't want a digital ID either.

[pca006132]

If what they did is never revealed to someone else, what is the problem here? It is not like we have no way to hide stuff without cryptography, and people are not advocating for police to search every apartment once in a while to look for illegal stuff.

[pca006132]

Authorities cannot tap into your brain, cannot tap into physical face-to-face conversations, and people can plan out crimes using these means. It is not like there is no way to hide stuff before the born of modern cryptography.

And who want everything to be open and transparent? I am not aware of anyone who wants this.

[Duwensatzaj]

You already gave up your arms. Why are you surprised they’re coming for anything else they want?

[pixxel]

The US was tested for tyranny during Covid, election interference, and BLM burning down cities. You sat at home, utterly impotent. You're gonna stop VPN bans? Please.

[qcnguy]

This post shouldn't have been dead. It's right. There's an American meme that sidearms create freedom. When has that actually been true in practice in the past 100 years?

For HNers who just automatically flag anything right wing and want left wing examples instead, right now leftists are outraged by deportations. And a tiny number have tried to assassinate ICE agents using sniper rifles, indeed. But it's making no difference, not even when they're protected by corrupt local prosecutors and juries. They have even accidentally shot migrants instead of ICE.

Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Whether it's COVID or ICE, there's been no meaningful armed resistance.

The reason the US seems to be less totalitarian is purely because the constitution and the culture that supports it stops Congress from passing the same kind of restrictive speech laws the rest of the world has. If it weren't for the Constitution the Democrats would have already passed lots of speech laws under Obama and Biden, then used them to harass and illegalize the Republicans to maintain a majority. For example they'd have banned Trump's campaign on the basis that it encouraged "hate" against immigrants, and then they'd have forced big tech to do what Europe is now trying already, to strip all anonymity from the internet so they can harass random individual voters who disagree with government policy online, Germany style.

What protects America isn't guns, it's respect for the voting thresholds in the constitution and a right-leaning SCOTUS.

[matheusmoreira]

In the end, effectiveness is irrelevant. Basic human dignity requires that you always have the option to resist.

> Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it?

Drug gangs in latin america.

In my country, drug traffickers have become so organized they have established control over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory. They have armies, laws, tribunals, even taxes. They have essentially pulled off a stealthy unannounced secession. It's theorized that they control politicians, judges.

All thanks to the fact they were willing to arm themselves and die in order to achieve their own ends. The rest of the brazilians constantly prove unwilling to do either, and as a result they are dominated by the people with guns. Police state, military dictatorship, drug gangs, makes no difference.

[orangecat]

Give it time. The natural end state is that all computing devices available to the general public are dumb framebuffers that are only capable of displaying a UI running in the cloud. No more privacy for anything; even if the cloud OS lets you run Linux in a VM, everything you do will be visible and constantly monitored for suspicious activity.