Comment by yubblegum
2 days ago
> technical literacy amongst the political establishment who consistently rely on the fallacy that having nothing to hide means you have nothing to fear.
That's an awfully generous assessment on your part. Kindly explain just what "technical literacy" has to do with the formulation you note. From here it reads like you are misdirecting and clouding the -intent- by the powerful here.
Also does ERIC SCHMIDT an accomplished geek (who is an official member of MIC since (during?) his departure from Sun Microsystems) suffers from "technical literacy" issues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=983717
Thank you in advance for clarifying your thought process here. Tech illiteracy -> what you got to hide there buddy?
I feel like the comment was clear, technical illiteracy leads politicians to believe that they'll be the only ones with access to this backdoor, which isn't true.
The comment's clarity was not questioned. You are passing around the same tired line that because politicians do not understand technology and how it can be used against anyone. Sure computers are new but communication technology is not. All a politician needs to understand is "capability". That is it. "We can read their communications", no degree in CS required. Also, they have power geeks advising them left and right. They know "capabilities" can be misused. They know this.
Is this clear?
>> Kindly explain just what "technical literacy" has to do with the formulation you note.
>> Thank you in advance for clarifying your thought process here.
> The comment's clarity was not questioned.
It isn't necessarily the case that they all care if criminals can get in to the average person's data so long as the authorities also can.
Yeah. Not buying it. They know, or someone smart enough told them that backdoors can be accessed by anyone with enough skill. They just don't care because the people that are asking for this are criminals already and wanting profit off of other people's data.
Let me offer a possible example that might be more in line with the HN commenting guideline about interpreting people's comments as charitably as reasonably possible:
My password manager vault isn't exactly something to hide in the political sense, but it's definitely something I would fear is exposed to heightened risk of compromise if there were a backdoor, even one for government surveillance purposes. And it's a reasonable concern that I think a lot of people aren't taking seriously enough due, in part, to a lack of technical literacy. Both in terms of not realizing how it materially impacts everyday people regardless of whether they're up to no good, and in terms of not realizing just how juicy a target this would be for agents up to and including state-level adversaries.
As for Eric Schmidt, he's something of a peculiar case. I don't doubt his technical literacy, but the dude is still the head of one of the world's largest surveillance capitalist enterprises, and, as the saying goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."