Comment by viktorcode
1 day ago
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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Was your short term safety at the expense of long term safety? (assuming rights erosion and government failures ultimately harms safety long-term).
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If they had administered properly people wouldn't have been to the streets and spread the virus in the first place!
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.
Was that 30 second bluetooth beacon ever switched off again?
> 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.
> 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
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.
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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.
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...
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Hobbes's Leviathan wants to have a call with you.
Sorry, I’m already on the line with Society. She’s telling me how her signature has been forged on some scam contract.
This is an absurd claim.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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We already have that, except for half of real life.
They used to call it gawd and s4nta
> 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
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.
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?
It's fine for the smart kids, because they are on the side of the well off and cushy, luxurious lifestyles with high rewards from this work.
The majority of people though may not be as well off.
If you're so well off, what criticism do you have to share and to worry about?
“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.
Instant, wide-range (mesh) private comms are rather different than a couple of people out in a field at night talking.
and vote out incompetent persons in power.
How you can vote someone out?
Recall elections. California loves them.
So when are we recalling Trump?
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.
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.
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?
tapping the sign https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48922409
you are being too charitable in your evaluation.
>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.
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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).
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.
>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.
Most nations with gun control apply gun control to the street police also.
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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.
Playing Devils Advocate... isn't this the government taking action?
Yes, misinformed and counterproductive action.
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"
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.
The article is about India, not the US.
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.
"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.
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.
How is private messaging causing people to become unsafe? If you're saying privacy = unsafe environment, then your right to privacy is meaningless.
That's not what I'm saying at all. If you've taken that from my comment you've misread it.
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and in this argument we pre-suppose that loss of privacy equates to an increase in safety, right?
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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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....