[viktorcode]

> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions.

This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the country.

Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens. They can blame Dorsey, Telegram, WhatsApp and what not, but it is their failure. Things will not change until people notice the obvious and vote out incompetent persons in power.

[adityaathalye]

Hilariously (darkly), during the pandemic, the very same reason is why the very same administrators were hell-bent on forcing Bluetooth-always-on contact tracing on the whole country's smartphone-carrying population.

(edit: viz. that forcible peer-to-peer bluetooth networking works. One man's unrestricted mass-surveillance is another person's "terrorist activity". Oh how the turntables turn and turn.)

[KitN]

But that did save lives; I was able to know my family had Covid before the symptoms showed up. Happened with a lot of other people too.

[aeternum]

Indeed, and it would have saved far more lives if leveraged the app to have hazmat crews come in a forcibly carry the infected to quarantine zones.

[justthehuman]

Didn't actually this happen in China?

Maybe the videos were fake, but I saw at least a couple of this happening.

[wrycoder]

That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.

[Henchman21]

Can we perhaps agree the that the response to COVID, worldwide, was essentially shit. When faced with a true crisis, the People in Charge fucking lost their minds. It’s laid bare for all to see:

Our governments have failed us worldwide.

I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.

[aand16]

Australia just used police to move "close contacts" into "internment camps". Any wrong move inside would get punished by a $5000 fine.

> Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter.

> spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility

> "Police officers blocked my driveway. ’What’s going on, are you guys testing me for Covid? What’s happening?’ They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a Covid cab.’

> they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘We will extend your time in here.’”

> Ms Hodgson said she told police “I don’t consent to this”, and asked why she couldn’t “just self-isolate at home”. Police responded ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is,’”.

> She was told to pack her bags and that she would be released when she tested negative. During her two-week stay she was tested three times, and each time tested negative.

> The video includes footage filmed by Ms Hodgson during her stay as she argues with a police officer at the facility, who reprimands her for leaving her cabin without a mask and threatens her with a $5000 fine.

> “I’m gonna give you a warning, yeah?” he says to her as she sits on the balcony. “It’s an official warning that you have to stay on your balcony and obey the rules while you’re here.” When she argues with the officer that the rules don’t make sense, he replies that “it doesn’t have to make sense”. [...] “Highly infectious when all of us people are negative?” she asks. “So far. The risk is still very high,” he says.

> She said at one point when she was distressed and asking to be let out of her room to go for a walk or a run, facility staff instead offered her Valium to calm down.

> Ms Hodgson said as a result of her two-week stay she had lost her casual retail job. “They compensated me $1500 for the two weeks, and that was all,” she said. “Now I’m currently unemployed because of this situation”

Full interview with recordings from inside the Australian "internment camp" https://unherd.com/newsroom/inside-australias-covid-internme...

Mirror: https://archive.ph/GQDkN

[nhinck3]

Really? I suppose you'll be able to provide proof that people were forcibly taken?

[cutterl6]

I doubt it, unless their hazmat suits are bullet-proof.

[aeternum]

Agreed, and I'm happy to live in a country where this is likely true. The only thing more deadly than pandemics are governments that gained sufficient power to round up their citizens systematically in the name of the public good.

[mdgld]

If you think that the 1:30 ratio of guns to people in the US is going to stop the government from doing whatever the fuck they want, you are suffering from a potentially terminal case of optimism. I am an ardent believer in “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”(even though the context was the Penn family bribing the governor to avoid taxation, I still align with both the original and modern meanings), but a “well-armed militia” isn’t doing jack against an FBI task force or god forbid the military, which has recently been deployed in ever more dubiously-justifiable ways domestically.

[joering2]

Please. You could defend yourself from first or second hazmat wearing person that comes to your house, it would be very much different story defending yourself from SWAT team, then remotely detonating drones, finally if it all fails, try to defend yourself against B52.

[markdown]

Sadly that wasn't possible in the US political climate and maybe a million people lost their lives as a result.

[bacheaul]

I think they're being facetious, this is basically a distopian movie plot point.

[mannanj]

Was your short term safety at the expense of long term safety? (assuming rights erosion and government failures ultimately harms safety long-term).

[dredmorbius]

Medicine is literally the source of the concept of side effects, the idea that some helpful interventions have simultaneous harmful impacts.

For large-scale infectious disease --- epidemiology and public health --- quarantine and infection/contact tracing are very tried and true containment methods. Yes, these impose costs, particularly on individual liberties. What's key is having a well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy government which makes clearly-justified decisions as to when to impose such restrictions, and when to lift them. Sadly, this has become more difficult in recent years.

[mannanj]

Agreed. The theory is there, and even then sounds like it would work like you said if the government was "well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy". Theory rarely works according to the plan in practice, so as we see today, even if those qualities had been a priority of the government (which I don't think they really are - I think the government in USA acts more like a rich-man's proxy tricking you a lot) we need the plan that accounts for some rough spots or edge cases.

[opem]

If they had administered properly people wouldn't have been to the streets and spread the virus in the first place!

[GeekyBear]

The most consequential public health failure during COVID was the denial that COVID was airborne, based on no scientific evidence.

The infection spread based on being in the same enclosed space as an infected person, and was not based on being only a few feet apart.

[felooboolooomba]

Was that 30 second bluetooth beacon ever switched off again?

[hamper653]

> Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens.

Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but "providing safety for its citizens" is not, has never been, and never will be a "goal" of any government on this planet.

[nektro]

> is not, has never been, and never will be a "goal" of any government on this planet.

this is not a productive outlook to have

[jimz]

Your "productive outlook" in this case is mere wishful thinking and campaign rhetoric. It will never come to pass in a meaningful way. The legitimacy of the state is defined by its monopolistic right to use force without meaningful consequence to the institution. It's a difference of degree, but since a government would lose a great deal of its supposed raison d'etre if they actually accomplish the goal, there isn't even an incentive to act on it.

[throwawayqqq11]

They act on keeping the institutions running, which implies partial citizen safety. With spare resources / generous budget and benevolent politicians, these services can be extended to cover more welfare, with shouldnt exist in the first place, according to you?

[nektro]

the legitimacy of the state is defined by the citizen's willingness to not replace it

[mx_03]

You are just very pessimistic and cinic person.

Governments DO HAVE to try to protect its citizens against internal and external threats. Otherwise people will "abandon" the government up to a certain point.

Case in point: When cartels dominated small towns in Mexico, people gathered in small armies (Auto defensas).

Same thing with Zapatistas.

[AyyEye]

The only purpose of any government, anywhere, is to protect the ruling class (whether they are internal or external to said government).

The US supreme court has explicitly ruled, on several occasions, that the government has no duty to protect its citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...

[ganzsz]

> any government

Proceeds to give example of one of the most oligarchical countries that ignore financial transparency laws on an industrial scale.

[ranyume]

Hobbes's Leviathan wants to have a call with you.

[hamper653]

Sorry, I’m already on the line with Society. She’s telling me how her signature has been forged on some scam contract.

[mitthrowaway2]

This is an absurd claim.

[noncoml]

“incompetent persons in power”.

The fact that they can get away with shit like this makes them pretty competent in my book.

To me it’s the opposition that’s incompetent, not being able to put an end to the circus.

[tavavex]

I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.

[transcriptase]

That went live about a decade ago. Heck, a lot of the people who built it and maintain it are here on HN, each getting paid so well and contributing only so little that if they can even admit it to themselves, they would never do it publicly.

[tavavex]

What went live a decade ago? I feel like the monitoring technology we have now (let alone what we had in 2016) is still just scratching the surface, it can (will) get so much worse.

My post was talking about things like discreet microphones in public spaces that can automatically separate and recognize multiple voices, smartphones recording and sending every word (or, even better - 24/7 camera footage) to the relevant authorities. But it's not just recording - we still lack the deep level of organization to automatically and fully correlate and organize ALL these types of data from countless sources for everyone. All of these are things that we already have to limited extents, but they're still not taking full advantage of, yet.

[selectodude]

I’ve heard mixed things about the efficacy of Palantir’s software but it’s certainly something that they’re working very hard on doing.

[mannanj]

Doesn't the NSA technology already do all of this?

[inigyou]

We already have that, except for half of real life.

[conorcleary]

They used to call it gawd and s4nta

[palmotea]

> I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.

There's a lot that scary about AI, but this is one of the scariest. Even if new good jobs pop up to employ all the people who work on things LLMs can do, governments and other powerful organizations now have this ability to analyze surveillance at scale that was unimaginable even by the East German Stasi.

It's conceivable we'll soon have a machine that can listen in on every phone call, read every text message and email, understand them, and flag dissident concepts and content. The manpower limit on oppressive surveillance will be gone. It'll be like having a spy following you around all the time, taking notes. All the guys who's job it is to listen can be redeployed as thugs to beat out the wrong-think.

It so great these smart kids invented all this. Truly for the benefit of mankind. /s

[dave7]

A scenario explored in the prescient and excellent TV show Person of Interest (2011). We're comfortably able to build The Machine and/or Samaritan by now.

[slopinthebag]

I think you should blame the existence of authoritarian governments and not the technology. Seems odd to give them a pass. It's like blaming the gun instead of the shooter, and nobody does that. Right?

[palmotea]

> I think you should blame the existence of authoritarian governments and not the technology. Seems odd to give them a pass.

I think you're confused. Those things aren't mutually exclusive, and it's a significant cognitive error on your part to think I'm giving "authoritarian governments" a pass.

And I'm not blaming the technology itself, but the people who are choosing to build it.

[cucumber3732842]

>This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the government.

Fixed that for you. It's a subtle but important difference.

There is only partial overlap between what's good for the government and the country. At some times in some countries the overlap may be substantial, or it may be scant if at all.

[Avicebron]

> Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens.

Exactly. How about doing something for people instead of trying to control them, people aren't becoming radicals when their basic needs are met, they have a well paying jobs, housing, and health insurance.

[martin82]

Voting has never worked to bring competence into the government. Exhibit A: All governments of the world, right now.

[port11]

Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.

We could try that one, since the MBAs-and-lawyers clique with money/influence have been doing a poor job lately.

[wolvesechoes]

> Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.

Not only that, but that would be actually democratic concept. Greeks long ago found that elective systems are in the end oligarchies.

[mothballed]

Those "protections" are in place for the protection of the government, not the citizens. That's also why the US tried to classify encryption as arms and why they passed the gun control act (people nowadays might think modern gun control was passed to help school kids, no lmao, it was passed in response to the killing of JFK).

[wiskinator]

I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.

I used to be an obnoxious gun control advocate until I learned that California's gun control legislation was brought about in response to the Black Panther's patrolling predominantly black neighborhoods while armed to protect the people of the neighborhood from state sponsored (police) violence.

Reference to start from: https://www.kcra.com/article/liberty-limits-black-panther-pa...

This topic is full of subtlty so recommend reading the sources from that article and so on.

[cucumber3732842]

>I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.

Were they what precipitated it or were they one of the many factors used to get the public on board?

9/11 didn't write the patriot act.

[gowld]

Most nations with gun control apply gun control to the street police also.

[em-bee]

most nations with gun control do not need people to protect themselves against police violence. that's the real problem here.

[inigyou]

Only two countries in the world have police who don't carry guns in regular service. Those are UK and NZ. In all other developed countries, the police may carry a gun, but there is a thorough investigation if it is ever fired.

[em-bee]

Only two countries in the world have police who don't carry guns in regular service. Those are UK and NZ.

and china. police in china generally is not armed. (china may or may not be considered a developed country, but i think that distinction is irrelevant. i am pretty sure there are more than three countries in the word where police is not armed, or where armed police is a distinct unit used only for specific tasks where arms are needed). but that wasn't the point i was making, rather, in most countries police simply does not get violent, nor do they have to fear being shot at, because of gun controls.

[rolph]

that doesnt apply to the U.S.

[duncan-donuts]

I don’t think anyone thinks gun control was passed to help school kids. People have been begging the govt to pass stricter gun control laws to protect kids for decades with very little success.

[sharts]

How can you vote out incompetence when only the incompetent gravitate toward controlling the levers of power?

[t0bia_s]

and vote out incompetent persons in power.

How you can vote someone out?

[platevoltage]

You vote against them when they're up for re-election. If they're not up for re-election, you vote against anyone who allies themselves with said person.

[t0bia_s]

So main driver is frustration? Why not remove immunity to electorate and keep them responsible for their decisions?

Or, even better, don't give our responsibility to uknown electorate at all.

[platevoltage]

Sure, I'll get right on that.

[derwiki]

Recall elections. California loves them.

[mlmonkey]

So when are we recalling Trump?

[wrycoder]

Instant, wide-range (mesh) private comms are rather different than a couple of people out in a field at night talking.

[mlmonkey]

It's easy to criticize others when your own government basically mandates backdoors into all comm devices, thereby obviating the need for hamfisted maneuvers like blocking apps, etc.; after all, who needs to block apps when there are backdoors farther down which allow the reading of all keystrokes and characters displayed?

[tensegrist]

tapping the sign https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48922409

[rolph]

you are being too charitable in your evaluation.

[darreninthenet]

Playing Devils Advocate... isn't this the government taking action?

[danw1979]

Yes, misinformed and counterproductive action.

[viktorcode]

Blocking communications is basically sweeping the issue under the rug in the hopes that it dissolves on its own. This is closer to avoiding of "taking action"

[stanfordkid]

I mean one could say they are taking action when they lock up and kill random immigrants... or getting into unnecessary wars in the middle east. I would hardly call that a measure of competence. In fact, I would love a government that did absolutely nothing at all ahead of this one.

[amanaplanacanal]

The article is about India, not the US.

[ifh-hn]

I'm not condoning this but what would you suggest they should be doing to keep people safe?

I'm fairly sure whatever they do you'd likely be complaining about it. Glad to be wrong though.

[imglorp]

"Do you consider your position so weak that it cannot withstand debate?" -- Data, STNG

They're afraid of people communicating. That's not a safety thing.

[ifh-hn]

I'm not at all saying private messaging makes people unsafe. I was interested in what the OP thinks governments should be doing to keep people safe.

Clearly I have not worded my reply carefully enough, so for clarity: I am all for private messaging and against mass surveillance.

[infinite_spin]

How is private messaging causing people to become unsafe? If you're saying privacy = unsafe environment, then your right to privacy is meaningless.

[ifh-hn]

That's not what I'm saying at all. If you've taken that from my comment you've misread it.

[infinite_spin]

care to clarify yourself then? It's hard to see what other conclusion I should arrive at, because it seems like you're implying that privacy interferes with safety.

[ifh-hn]

No. I have done so already in other comments.

[serf]

and in this argument we pre-suppose that loss of privacy equates to an increase in safety, right?

[ifh-hn]

I've replied to other comments but to reiterate I am not saying that at all. I was simply trying to ask what the OP considers an appropriate form of safety a government might take.

[tejohnso]

You don't have to presuppose, you can choose any one of the common positions that work well. Like, it shouldn't matter if you have nothing to hide and are law abiding, or, it's safer for the children, or, it's for the greater good and you're being selfish, etc.

[subscribed]

Are you suggesting that taking down an application is making people safe?

People are making independent communication networks using reticulum, LORA devices and hold tight - unregistered radio transmitters.

You can't seriously argue trying to take down ONE app is acting in the interests of national security?

[ifh-hn]

> Are you suggesting that taking down an application is making people safe?

No I'm not.

> You can't seriously argue trying to take down ONE app is acting in the interests of national security?

Again I'm not.

See my replies to all the other comments. I'm only interested in what the OP of the comment I was replying to think governments should be doing.

They implied that if this goes on (TFA) then the government is incompetent and all the people should be fired. Seems to me this sort of thing is the focus of most world governments (chat control, online identity checks, etc). These are all the same thing and as the op states indicates that all these governments are incompetent. So what does a competent government look like? What acceptable stuff should they be doing to solve the issues these measures are attempting to solve (however badly).

Maybe my wording lead to misunderstanding but there you go.

[subscribed]

Ah, okay.

> I'm not condoning this but what would you suggest they should be doing to keep people safe?

That led me to believe you consider request to ban the app as an action in the interest of the general public, making them safe.

I appreciate your response, thanks!

[permalac]

Very similar argument to those who want to ban encryption.

Why do you need to encrypt your network traffic with ssl, is you have nothing to hide....