Comment by p0w3n3d
12 days ago
The problem is the people nowadays can be easily convinced that everything should be accessible, because
Ekhm
They have nothing to hide and...
Ekhm
They will be more safe
Thus the arguments about fighting terrorism and paedophilia...
And in reality it has nothing to do with terrorism, nor paedophilia.
What does it have to do with in reality?
Obedient workers.
15 replies →
The naive belief that having more data means the organization will be more effective at carrying out its goals.
Doesn't matter what data - the algorithms/AI will figure it out.
Doesn't matter how messy the data - the algorithms/AI will figure it out.
Post-9/11 governance is filled with the CYA view that if we collect enough data we can connect the dots before another event happens.
Privacy issues aren't important, as the organization's goals are good, with strong guards against corruption. (While DOGE accesses highly personal data entrusted to the IRS.)
While the world's data centers are smothered in unused data, collected because it's too hard to figure out what not to save and the Thiel and his malign ilk promise that their tools are good for us.
exerting control over powerful people who aren't as politically connected as the people who have access to this private data, in addition to finding excuses to spend money on military stuff (with kickbacks)
I find this argument incredibly frustrating.
My view is that wide access to strong encryption carries non-obvious trade-offs, in particular with regards to organized crime. And I don't particularly mean paedophile rings, scooter gangs in London and professional burglars are organized crime too.
It's not that I have nothing to hide, therefore want the government to have unfettered access to everything. I want to ensure that properly overseen law enforcement and justice have access to normal info they need to prosecute crime, and if I have to give up a bit of privacy for it, so be it.
OK but how exactly do you propose to make that work? With current encryption technology there is no way to give up a bit of privacy: it's all or nothing. Either you have the keys or you don't. If a government has the key then it will inevitably be leaked or misused. The UK government in particular has long been heavily penetrated by Soviet / Russian intelligence.
They can physically search a device (like silk road) put malware on a device, use encrypted metadata on who's calling who and so on.
If you really want to catch serious criminals like mafia you have to do something they are not really expecting.
I don't trust anyone to handle my private details properly, especially not an institution that will suffer no repercussions should it mishandle those data.
Bits on a storage device can never (in anywhere remotely resembling a free society) be a crime by itself. Therefore, there is no justifiable reason for unfettered access to it.
If someone has done a crime, they must have done something, other than store bits on a disk. So go catch them in that act, the way criminals used to be caught before computers existed. If there is no act, there is no crime.