We need to vote out the people pushing for backdoors. They seem to want backdoors at any cost, without any technical understanding of why its a terrible idea. Vote them out!
I mean, yes. Feinstein is better than the alternative in the General. The Primaries are the way to get rid of her, I can't believe no one has booted her out yet.
You don't seem to understand the California Jungle/Blanket primary system... All candidates from any/all parties run against each other in the primary, and the top two are the contenders for the general election. Recently this has led to two Democrats always being facing each other in the general election.
The most recent general election was Dem vs Dem (due to the unique way that CA primaries work). Feinstein still won a strong majority of the statewide vote. :|
California is not as progressive as you might hope. The cities are full of progressives, but outside the cities is very conservative. You have to be fairly moderate to win statewide office.
Newsom was a reaction to Trump, but sort of an aberration. More than half of our governors have been Republicans, including Regan, who went on be President and a paragon of the GOP.
Since the 80s 14 out of 30 years has been Republicans, and Jerry Brown was 10 of the remaining 16 years, and he's pretty moderate as far as Democrats go.
Maybe OP means both the bailouts in 2008 plus the Iraq war in 2003? Or the fact that the US is still actively involve militarily in predator bombing seven nations?
Everyone vowed to vote out the representatives that bailed out Wall Street and left home owners holding the bag. Then whatever came along and poof, that didn't matter.
Same (and more importantly) with the Iraq war. IMO, you voted for it, you're out. Doesn't matter why, doesn't matter what you believed at the time, you're out.
There's been zero accountability on death and destruction on the grandest scale this century, so I don't expect anyone to remotely lift a finger about some IT bill.
In American politics, voting really doesn't make a difference as much as just having opinions alighted with those of the top 10% of income earners[0]. Making noise and protests are more effective in some ways, but the sad reality is that most of senate/congress is not beholden to the selectorate of all voters, but rather the smaller selectorate of influences that control the advertising and narrative that allows them to continue to be re-elected.
The video there talks about a study about how people feel about a policy and whether the policy gets passed or not. Then it goes on to extrapolate that to electing humans. The video is right that we have less influence over policy, policy that citizens do not vote on directly. We do directly vote for humans and those votes do count - electoral college is a special case.
Also, I'd bet there are a lot of folks that read HN that are already in the top 10% of income earners. So maybe I'm speaking directly to some of the 10% now.
Section 215 is the major one. Allows government to obtain secret warrants for surveillance via a secret court system(FISC, FISA).
Lindsey Graham(R) tried to extend this- but Trump has been somewhat vocally against this extension due to his own allegations that the FISA courts were misused to spy on him.
Trump threatened to veto the Patriot renewal bill, which includes the FISA court, despite bipartisan support. The bill is now withdrawn pending rewrite.
> As a european, I don't see any party that actually have american people's interest in mind.
To be fair, us Europeans have the same issues with our politicians, with the exception of socialists, communists and Greens. Just look for the article13 fiasco.
Exactly, we need way more political parties with direct representation. However, power seems to do a great job of consolidating itself so that won't be an easy task.
First past the post voting tends toward a two party system, because there are strong incentives for smaller parties to consolidate to get to a majority.
Since this is a subject I find fascinating, I'll add this link that I first encountered here on HN long ago: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
It's a mathematical model and accompanying explanation that shows that simple plurality (first past the post) voting produces bi-polarization, while other voting methods like approval voting do not. It also shows that the instant-runoff voting method that people are trying to replace FPTP with is non-monotonic, meaning that gaining a few points of support can actually hurt a candidate.
Define "regular people's interest". American values? Health and security? There are governments that are pro-people (as opposed to pro-money) but they are generally not big global players, or if they are, they are designated Enemies of the West and it is enormously politically incorrect to discuss critically about them.
You're correct, in the US we have two fundamentally right-wing parties, which allows them to effectively consolidate power by offering a controlled "resistance" party which disagrees on petty issues mostly regarding representation but which agrees on all major issues including those you mentioned, healthcare, military, foreign policy.
Major this. Also plug for CGP Grey's "politics in the animal kingdom" video series that explains exactly why we have that 'lesser of two evils' problem, and how exactly RCV and Alternative vote systems resolve that problem, in a very simple, understandable way.
What I, as a European from a country that elects proportionally (which isn't perfect, but anyway), cannot understand is the blank stare Americans give me when people point out that the two-party system and FPTP are the things that need to be fixed for the US to have a democratic future. It's like so many of them cannot wrap their heads around something being fundamentally broken. The same goes for Canadians and UKians.
We've literally been brainwashed from birth to believe that we have, by far, the best government that's ever been built. It's a major part of the school system.
Cognitive dissonance around the idea that there is room for improvement is inevitable.
I'm surprised that this attitude survives along side the attitude of "the government sucks at everything and it should be made as small as possible" that seems to be so pervasive in the US.
And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it still surprises me.
Most people who believe the “the government sucks at everything and should be as small as possible” probably still worship the Constitution and “the forefathers” and believe it’s completely compatible.
Well I guess I am not part of most people, as I believe Government is inherently inefficient, and should be microscopic..
I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
To be fair, the UK did have the "Alternative Vote Referendum" where we got the second-worst voting system proposed as an alternative to the worst voting system (FPTP). That might explain why nobody thinks "alternative voting systems" are any good; they just think of instant run-off.
This frustrates me to no end. IRV has a 6% improvement of VSE over plurality. But STAR and RP have 15% improvements. Not only that, but both are strongly resistant to spoiler effects and the trend to two coalitions dominance (in the States that's the two party system, outside the states that's two major parties being the dominant ruler over their coalitions).
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is because IRV doesn't effectively change things. The realist in me thinks it is just trendy.
For others: See me other comment (it is large, you can't miss it) explaining these topics in more detail (with links!)
Americans are deliberately and explicitly indoctrinated from a very young age to believe our system is the best system in every way: most democratic, most free, etc. It’s not surprising that even the slightest challenge to those beliefs would be met with blank stares by many Americans.
The problem with Fair Vote and the CGP Grey videos, while I like them for an introduction to the subject, both have two very misleading points.
1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods.
2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effects, IRV has a weak resistance. CGP actually hints to this when he talks about that IRV doesn't prevent a trend towards two party systems.
I think when people talk about RCV (in the context of single-winner elections), they're almost always talking about the same thing as IRV.
"Ranked voting" is the more general term.
> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]
> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.
I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.
There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).
For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.
They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)
For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.
The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.
I'm basically agreeing with literally everything you are saying, I just want to expand on certain things.
> RV vs RCV
These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people.
> STAR
Anyone who is advocating for STAR has my approval. It is the preferred system in my mind. I want to plug my longer post that has a lot of links and expands on all the topics you described
I think this is a style of argument that is increasingly becoming more common and is destructive. Pushing the your argument past the point of validity in an effort to make it stronger. Their use of broad classes is a gross mischaracterization. When they discuss Condorcet methods they discuss several types, lumping together the worst features from different ones. But they ignore the good methods like RP and Schulze. The comparisons are unfair. But then again, they aren't trying to appeal to people that are informed on the subject, they are trying to appeal to the masses which are completely unfamiliar with the subjects. But I do not think this justifies the outright lying and mischaracterizations.
> Spoilers and Strategy
In my other post I actually link an example of where IRV fails, and it is the specific type of spoiling that we are about: when similar candidates spoil (e.g. Bernie and Biden, not Stein and Biden). IRV doesn't solve this (but FV claims otherwise).
For strategy, this is the argument that I get into with the Condorcet camp (though we're clearly on the same side and these are nuanced friendly arguments not hostile). To me STAR is good because its range of VSE is more compact (i.e. resistant to strategies). The Condorcet camp claims that there is enough dis-incentivization to not vote strategically therefore just maximize VSE (VSE is only slightly different between STAR05 and RP). So for anyone listening on the sidelines, this is really what we're arguing, minutia. I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
> I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.
It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
This is fair and I won't really push back against it. This is the reason I push so hard against IRV. Because once IRV is the status quo it will be hard to continue moving forward. After all, we already have the capabilities. If you have to chose to eat acid, plain oatmeal, or chocolate pudding you don't eat the oatmeal then the pudding, you just jump straight to the pudding.
> It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
While I'm in this camp I do think it is unfair to completely rule out Condorcet methods. The interview I linked to with Dr. Arrow I think expands on this well. If asked to advocate for a system, advocate for score (STAR). But that isn't to recognize that there's so much uncertainty in Social Choice Theory that we can trust theory alone. There's smaller experiments that have been done, but nothing on the scale we are advocating for. Of course we expect the theory and experiments to be relatively accurate, but we must acknowledge the lack of empirical large scale data. Frankly, you can only get that by doing it.
> Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
I'm pretty similar. I like STAR and score about the same because I like simplicity, and don't see STAR as that huge an improvement over score. So maybe:
> This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them.
Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my preferred candidate to win more than I want any of the "fine I guess" candidates. And if I have to pick between "bad" and "horrible" I still want to vote for "bad".
With approval voting, I am forced to vote strategically, considering what point in my preference order to draw the line at in order to maximize my chance of causing the highest possible position in my preference order to win.
I realise that IRV isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than any non-ranked choice voting method as far as I can see, and honestly I think the risk of the situations where honest voting results in a sub-optimal outcome is massively overblown, though I don't have data to back that up.
I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine), and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV), so you can have systems like Australia where IRV is used in single-winner races and STV in multi-winner ones without the voting public needing to learn two systems.
STAR, the system we're advocating, solves a lot of these issues though. Score voting is "like" approval voting but with more precision (really approval is just the binary version of score). STAR05 is often suggested because experimentation shows that it has enough expressiveness to generate good winners but is simple. You can always add more expressiveness by increasing the range in which you can score candidates, but there's diminishing returns as you increase it and added complexity (I don't think people will have a problem rating 0-10 though since we actually do that a lot).
I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).
If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).
But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).
STAR sounds very reasonable. And yeah, I'm definitely open to ordinal systems besides IRV. I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (which is of course the whole point of voting systems to begin with). I'd consider IRV or MMP vastly better than FPTP, and something like STAR or Ranked Pairs only slightly better than that. Which is a good example of a preference that STAR would be good for expressing :P
> I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.
But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!
You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"
I'm a co-inventor of STAR voting. I explain it as, STAR voting is score voting on a 0-5 scale followed by an automatic ("instant") top two runoff. Whereas approval voting is score voting on a 0-1 binary scale. STAR voting performs a tiny bit better in computer simulations of voter satisfaction, but approval voting has the practical benefit of being super simple and requiring no voting machine upgrades. Both are superior to IRV.
Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :)
https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496
> and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV)
Score voting (and by extension STAR voting and approval voting) have a proportional multi-winner analog that's much simpler than STV and arguably better.
"Resistance to tactical voting" is a dumb, essentially nonsensical, concept. What we care about is how well the voting method performs given there is some amount of strategic voting. I made a simple chart here to visualize this fallacy.
Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.
Lesser evils aren't inevitable; they're a product of a bad voting system.
Other countries with other systems don't really do much better.
The fundamental problem is that the people who want this sort of power are the last ones who should ever be allowed to wield it. When people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get a job that pays $500K a year, you have to wonder what's really going on.
Does "select a president [senator, etc] uniformly at random from the voting population" count as a voting system? I feel like that's about the only way to fix things at this point.
(I'm partial to approval voting (vote "yes" or "no" for each cantidate separately and if the winner doesn't have at least 50% "yes", the office is vacant until the next election), but I suspect the party line would immediately become "you're a traitor if you approve anyone but the Party's candidate".)
Also, yes, approval voting is a great approach and we should absolutely use it. We'd still get people who vote party-line, and it'd take a while for people to truly internalize that they can safely vote for other candidates they like, but it'd be a massive improvement.
> Lesser evils aren't inevitable; they're a product of a bad voting system.
It's made much worse by the bad voting system, but it's perfectly possible that I simply disagree with enough of my fellow citizens that any compromise we can reach will be some "lesser evil".
I think that's probably the case. Nonetheless, I would claim "lesser evilism" would be greatly reduced due to RCV (and Approval) being better at capturing preferences: you get to vote for your favorite option, and against your least favorite option.
I think there's a strong argument that RCV/Approval would shift the incentives and game-theoretic landscape away from polarization and turnout, and towards big-tent coalition building, to appeal to the greatest quantity of left, right, center, and independent. That does mean compromise, and likely policy concessions; but i think that would be a huge improvement over (a) taking turns at obstructionism, and (b) a de-facto one-party system regarding corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, etc.
> would be greatly reduced due to RCV (and Approval) being better at capturing preferences
The problem is that IRV/RCV doesn't capture your preferences, because it ignores all your preferences except your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated. IRV is reasonably good at making sure that third-parties can't prevent first-parties from being elected, but very bad at actually allowing third parties to actually be elected even if they have widespread approval.
Approval is a good compromise, and fully ranked systems (e.g. Condorcet) would be even better but much harder to enact. I would happily support universal adoption of Approval.
While I’d take approval voting over FPTP, to me it exacerbates the issue of voting being highly tactical. Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins. If there’s someone I believe to be an existential threat to the country on the ballot, my best choice might be to check everyone other than them even if that means checking the box of someone I dislike. Essentially, you again have to choose how much you care about voting for your favorite option vs voting against your least favorite option. If I truly did check the box for anyone I was okay with being President then approval voting would be okay, but that would never be the right way to vote on the ballot given my preferences. In this way I prefer IRV, despite it’s shortcomings.
That all said, full ranking systems are definitely the superior option, and I’d certainly take approval over our current state.
> it exacerbates the issue of voting being highly tactical.
No. Approval voting has been extensively studied by game theory experts like NYU political science professor Steven Brams, and found to be one of the most resistant to tactical voting. Computer simulations show it performing exceptionally well even with highly strategic voters.
There's even a mathematical theorem (proof) that, given plausible strategic behavior by voters, approval voting always elects a beats-all "Condorcet winner" when one exists. This is mild (some would say GOOD) reaction to strategy.
> Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins.
Yes, this is beneficial not harmful. The alternative is that the voting method must ignore all preference data about the relative support of X vs. Y as long as the voter prefers X to Y. That causes big problems.
It is precisely why ranked voting methods like Instant Runoff Voting are so vulnerable to tactics. If I prefer the Green, my general best strategy is to tactically rank the Democrat in 1st place, thus "burying" the Green and making the mere appearance of un-electability a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The major moral of voting theory is to AVOID RANKED VOTING METHODS, favoring RATED voting methods like score voting, STAR voting, and approval voting. Here's a presentation I gave in 2015 to the Colorado League of Women Voters explaining more.
I would disagree about Condorcet. Score voting and variants, such as STAR voting and approval voting, are vastly simpler than any ranked method, and perform better in voter satisfaction efficiency calculations, and plausibly make better Condorcet methods than real Condorcet methods.
> I think there's a strong argument that RCV/Approval would shift the incentives and game-theoretic landscape away from polarization and turnout, and towards big-tent coalition building, to appeal to the greatest quantity of left, right, center, and independent.
I think most people wildly overestimate the popular appeal for compromise. Only about 20% of the population would support an opposite-side moderate over a near-side extremist. A true centrist party is doomed to lose in any system that knocks out unviable candidates, since it's the first choice of almost nobody.
It's almost as if you didn't even imagine what a "no 'opposite side' per se" would even look like.
I think there's a LOT more room for nuance than "this" or "that" even among the ignorant and/or unengaged. Just look at sports-team divides in the US for evidence.
Except there ARE two sides. Capital controlled means of production, and worker owned means of production. These two systems are diametrically opposed to each other. This just comes across as enlightened centrism. I am vehemently opposed to the economic system of capitalism, and I think that it stands in opposition to the very concept of democracy. How am I supposed to see the capitalist as "the same side"?
Workers owning the means of production is not in fact one of the major factions in US politics, regardless of how much Twitter leftists and Republicans would like you to believe that.
Then we're choosing the lesser of five evils, except now, none of the evil parties alone have a strong enough electorate to squash any sixth party that emerges from the disenfranchised of the other five. That's completely unlike the current two-party system, where no third party can gain any traction due to not having a sizable enough electorate to take on "the big kids".
> to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
I want to push back against this, and specifically fair vote.
- What they are referring to as RCV is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). IRV is a RCV, but RCV isn't IRV. Think "Rock and Roll is The Beatles" vs "The Beatles are a Rock and Roll group."
- IRV isn't that great when it comes to Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE)[0]. There's even other RCV methods like Ranked Pair[1] that are exactly the same for the voter. Essentially IRV is a 6% improvement upon plurality (what we currently use) but RP is a 15% increase from plurality. So I ask, why go to IRV when we can do twice as good? (or better! Keep reading)
- Fair Vote claims that IRV has a high resistance to spoiler candidates (a candidate that takes away votes from another similar candidate). This is actually why the distinction from RCV and IRV is important and why Fair Vote is misleading. While RCV is better than plurality in this respect, some RCVs are better than others. IRV doesn't adequately solve this issue (but there are other RCVs that do!). IRV fails when two candidates are similar in positions and similar in popularity. [2] This is specifically the kind of spoiling that we are trying to prevent. We're trying to prevent a candidate like Sanders from spoiling Biden (or vise versa) not Jill Stein spoiling Biden. IRV prevents the latter, but not the former. I am specifically upset with Fair Vote because they are misleading in this context. Because they claim IRV := RCV, they take all the things different RCV methods solve and claim IRV solves them. This is simply not true (and why I make the first bullet).
- There are just better methods besides ranking (also called "ordinal" methods). There's a class called Cardinal[3], that is actually simpler. The simplest is called approval. An example of approval is Netflix's rating system (binary). It does pretty well. Better yet is range/score voting. This would be the old Netflix system where you rated out of 5 stars. The difference in ranked vs cardinal is that you rate each candidate or policy independent of the others. This allows you to be more precise/honest (you may actually like two candidates equally!). It also reduces complexity because a common accident in ranking is rating two candidates the same. In ordinal systems this is a bug, in cardinal this is a feature.
- I want to specifically mention STAR voting[4]. While STAR isn't perfect, it much better handles various types of spoiler candidates, has a high VSE (similar to that of RP), and handles strategic voting well. The last is the major reason you should choose STAR over RP (and there's no reason you should choose IRV over RP, because RP is strictly better). While all three systems encourage honest voting (in a single agent scenario) strategic voting is always an issue. Under no circumstance is STAR worse than IRV because STAR handles strategic voting. Specifically the most important kind is the "1-sided strategy"[5] which is arguably very common.
- Lastly, I want to appeal to authority. Kennith Arrow (who you may be familiar with from Arrow's Impossibility theorem and Gibbard's extension) is a Nobel Laureate and said cardinal systems are "probably right."[6] And I think many of us know science speak into the confidence that conveys. That link is a full interview with him from Election Science. It is a good read/listen.
TLDR: We want a good voting system, use STAR, not IRV.
Most of what you write is good, but I want to point out that non-ordinal methods suffer from a problem that is at a level more fundamental than most analyses address, to wit, that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask, and thus no clear “correct” honest ballot marking given a set of voter preferences.
There are conditions which resolve this (e.g., when ballot markings in a method like score voting represent the amount of some valuable resource the voter commits to paying if the given choice is elected, or where markings in approval represent a binding commitment to not participate if an non-approved option is chosen and/or to participate if an approved options is chosen.) But these resolutions are typically not available or desirable in most public elections.
> that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask
I don't see this as an issue. I also don't see it as a problem to specifically non-ordinal, but to every system. I like to try to explain a STAR05 ballot simply to people with a forum they are very familiar with. A ballot might look like below
How do you feel about ___x___ candidate?
Very Unfavorably, unfavorably, neutral, favorably, very favorably
Those are your 5 options. Yes, this isn't exact, but we can't have an infinite score. But as we understand distributions, we know that the fluctuations won't matter much. If a group of people have an "honest" opinion that a candidate is rated "favorably" (or a 4) we'll see a distribution around this (a fairly tight distribution). So you'll get some 3's and 5's, but most people will give 4's and the average will be 4. So it isn't an issue. Similarly, if you are ranking people and view two candidates equally 50% of people will put candidate A in front of B and vise versa (well real world there'd be a bias for things like: who is listed first, "nicer" sounding name, familiarity, etc. But still, that's not too big of an issue because at the end we get pretty close to the optimal efficiency that the system can provide). You have to remember that there is no perfect system, Arrow and Gibbard showed that. But the question is if we statistically come close to the optimal (that the system can provide).
I want to point out that simple approval voting is VERY effective, even though it is low precision. You're literally choosing "like" and "dislike." Analysts aren't that concerned with the lack of objectivity in the difference between a 4 and 5 or a 3 and 4 because it is much more refined. If this is a major concern, then extend the expressiveness by increasing the range, e.g. 0-10.
I would also encourage you to listen to that interview that I linked. Arrow briefly discusses this topic. He makes some criticisms of score voting but also says it is the option he would push (question is which he'd advocate for). Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. There's always a trade-off. We're just trying to minimize the trade-offs.
And personally, if someone made RP popular I would gladly advocate for it. But because we're trying to trade one shitty system (plurality) for something only slightly less shitty (IRV) I am going to be vocal about the issues and lying that is happening. I don't really have an issue with RCVs, but specifically IRV. This is why I wanted to make a clear distinction between the two. Because when the discussions come up we end up using different languages, using the same words to describe different things. This may have been a smart move by Fair Vote, but we're on Hacker News and there's an expectation of more nuance than we'd have in other places like Reddit or in person.
Social Choice has been a hobby of mine ever since I saw the CGP Grey videos back when it first came out (2011!!!). The issues I have are that when you dig deeper you realize how much was lost.
So I am happy to try my best to answer questions and provide more resources. If you like game theory, this is a great subject to learn and has clear and immediate applications (even outside of elections).
Thanks for your post, I'll dig into your links. I hadn't heard of STAR in particular.
Two counterpoints:
- I'm aware of Arrow, but I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good". :) Whatever the flaws of IRV, it still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences. (We suffer so much status quo bias, it takes a lot of activation energy just to communicate to the average voter that better options exist at all!) But I happily cede the point: IRV is not the best choice of all the available options.
- My favorite is actually Approval, and I don't always bring it up because it has lower mindshare and is less self-descriptive / "sticky-branding" compared to Ranked Choice. My reasons for the preference:
(a) There's no nitpicking over counting methods: whoever gets the most votes wins.
(b) Easy to explain to voters (including the counting system), and degrades gracefully for those who still want to vote for only one candidate. (I've heard objections that some voters hit a cheater-detection trigger, that "some people get more votes than others"; this can be solved by reframing as "Y/N" per candidate, so X candidates = X Y/N votes per voter).
(c) I believe it largely sidesteps Arrow by redefining the success condition: rather than attempt to perfectly measure ideal preferences, it definitionally represents "Consent of the Governed": not who's your favorite, but who are you willing to live with? This would make it more difficult for bolder and more unconventional candidates, but at the benefit of rewarding coalitions and consensus-building. Polarization and sowing distrust would cease to be a viable strategy.
(As an aside, in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held.)
> I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good"
This is 100% how you should think about it. But what I'm trying to say is that we already have substantially better methods, so why not use them? Perfect is the enemy of good, but if I have the choice of eating acid, a bowl of oatmeal, and chocolate pudding, I'm going with the pudding. Perfect is the enemy of good when we don't already have the choices sitting right in front of us.
> [IRV] still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences
And here's where I'm disagreeing, but only slightly. It is definitely better, but not an order of magnitude.
> Approval voting
I love approval voting. It is great because of its simplicity. That's why they use it in systems like Netflix. Easy to collect and gather results from. Honestly I use it all the time. It is how I solve the "where do you want to eat" problem with friends. You just list things until you get a unanimous vote or if you exhaust your list you just take the most approvals. Simple and easy.
The reason I don't like it for elections is that it makes tying easy and I do not believe it has enough precision. The interview I linked Arrow talks about this so I'll deffer to him (he's clearly smarter than me). In elections you need a clear winner.
Why I like score voting (and Condorcet methods, like RP, which is again RCV) is because I actually hate party systems, but I recognize that they can't be destroyed. But these methods drastically reduce their power (I don't think IRV does).
And I highly encourage you to dig more into the subject and am happy to provide links. I also highly suggest looking deep into everything that the Fair Vote chart discusses, mainly because I believe you will be as frustrated as me (and others, like Condorcet proponents) when you learn what each of those topics are. Everyone I know that is well read in the subject is frustrated by Fair Vote's mischaracterizations.
> in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held
I think this, all by itself, would be a great thing to have in elections. If this had existed in every election in which I have voted, I think I would have used it at least half the time, quite possibly more.
I think the argument against would be pragmatic: the cost and time it takes to run a new election, and the mad scramble for new candidates, presumably leaving the incumbent in office in the interim. (For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%? What if literally no one else wants the job?)
At any rate, I'm very much in agreement, I think it's a sound policy across the board, even in the context of FPTP. One thing our election system fails to do is disambiguate between voter apathy, and the implicit protest vote of staying home (Australia's mandatory voting being another solution, albeit lacking the teeth of a "None of the Above" reboot).
> presumably leaving the incumbent in office in the interim
An alternative for many posts would be to have no one in the office once the incumbent's term expires. For example, suppose no one wins a race for a seat in the House of Representatives: when the incumbent's term expires, that seat could simply be vacant, and could be deemed to have voted "abstain" for all votes during the term in which it is empty (or until a new special election is held to hopefully fill the seat).
(For an office like the President, there might have to be some other provision made.)
This would also handle the other case you mention:
> For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%?
I would say yes: that counts as no one winning the election, so the seat remains vacant until a new special election is held (assuming someone does win that).
> What if literally no one else wants the job?
Then I would say the will of the people is that they prefer to have no one doing it, if they do not approve of anyone who wants it.
Just a quick reminder that in California, a bill allowing statewide ranked-choice voting in all cities (not just charter ones) was passed by both the state assembly and senate by a wide margin, before being vetoed by Gov. Newsom last year.
RCV or any voting system isn't better than what the current prescription is for CVRA lawsuits: having districts. It enables more local elections, lower cost of campaigning, and more minority representation. Edit: It's also easier to have neutral district lines drawn (like in CA and a few states by boards) than to pick a voting system that might not achieve the objectives of the CVRA.
If you're wondering why it was vetoed, maybe look at the history of CVRA lawsuits and how having districts has helped communities more than RCV. RCV is an apportioning method, which doesn't necessarily make it a good voting method.
I'm pretty sure it is designed that way on purpose. Nothing will ever change as long as both sides are fighting each other and no one is willing to fight the system.
The two major American parties have more in common than not. They agree on most political issues, particularly defense and economics, and make a big show of arguing over a tiny corner of issues in order to desperately try to differentiate themselves.
The two parties do not significantly differ on indefinite detention of American citizens on US soil.
The two parties do not significantly differ on domestic spying, dragnet-style data collection and warrantless wiretapping.
The two parties do not differ on their support for backdoors in encryption.
The two parties do not significantly differ on allowing extra-judicial targeted killings.
The two parties do not significantly differ on the use of unmanned drones, either for combat or domestic surveillance.
The two parties both support pre-emptive "cyber" war and non-defensive hacking.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for continuing the War On Terror and War On Drugs.
The two parties both support maintaining US military bases around the world.
The two parties do not significantly differ on favoring Keynesian economics.
The two parties support delegating monetary policy decisions to the Federal Reserve, including support for quantitative easing.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of earmarks and pork barrel spending.
Neither of the two parties have (recently) proposed plans for balancing the budget.
Neither of the two parties plans to significantly cut defense spending.
The two parties both favor taxpayer-funded foreign aid.
The two parties are largely backed by the same corporate sponsors and special interest groups, with a few key differences.
The two parties both backed TARP and in general favor bailing out companies too big to fail.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their general support of "economic stimulus" as a tool to prop up the economy.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for and allegiance to Israel.
The two parties both favor and continue sanctions on Iran.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited spending from corporations and special interest groups.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of gerrymandering to gain political advantage.
The two parties oppose any measures that would strengthen the viability of a third party.
As an American, I don’t see any country in the world that doesn’t have exactly the same problems.
The EU has been considering similar anti-encryption legislation for years. Primarily supported by France, UK and Germany. The main opponents to it in the EU have been NGOs, which mirrors the American experience on this issue.
The cynic in me speculates the reason the EU parliament hasn’t pushed the issue further is simply because it’s waiting for it’s influential members states (or the US) to pass the legislation required to gut these services, so that they won’t have the potentially unpopular task of doing so themselves.
EU doesn't have the authority to deal with things like encryption. American federal government is much more powerful and much less dependent on the states.
Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
> EU doesn't have the authority to deal with things like encryption.
It most certainly does. Security and Justice are very clearly established as areas of “shared responsibilities” in the EU, granting the EU parliament has full authority legislate.
> Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
The EU has also explored a number of backdoor-by-another-name options, including a very concerning Function Encryption initiative [0], and forcing E2EE service providers to refresh secrets to insert government actors into conversations.
My primary motivation for posting the parent comment was that any EU resident who thinks their governments are above this sort of thing is absolutely wrong, and if you’re complacent and fail to hold your governments to account, this is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to happen. You can’t just read the feel-good press releases and hope for the best. European politicians are politicians too, and if there’s anything politicians of all stripes have always been good at, it’s accumulating power and lying.
It literally doesn't. EU authority over the national security is very limited and the treaties only state that member states should cooperate amongst themselves.
Torture was heavily repelled by Democrats, and was only "legalized" in that John McCain intentionally put in loop holes into his own bill that allowed the CIA to continue it because Bush threatened to veto the bill otherwise. Those loop holes were later closed under Obama both by legislation and an executive order. This was very much a partisan issue.
We have bipartisan consensus[1] that tech companies have acted badly and that Section 230 should be repealed or significantly amended. I think EARN IT will probably kill Section 230, not strong encryption, so I think EARN IT is pretty great. Tech companies probably should be coming to the realization by now that it's only a matter of time (probably 4-8 years) before we close the 230 loophole: So if they're given a choice, they should choose to protect strong encryption, and forego Section 230 protection, since it's going away anyhow.
[1]Kind of, Democrats think tech companies got Trump elected, Republicans think tech companies are suppressing conservative viewpoints, but either way, they agree on the problem.
Can you clarify what you mean by the "230 Loophole"? Many believe that tech companies should be fully responsible for anything said on their platforms. If this were the case, I believe this would have an extraordinary chilling effect on speech.
There are already extraordinary chilling effects on speech -- try criticizing Black Lives Matter on any major social media, for example, and you will likely be censored, doxxed, and even receive death threats.
Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. The tech platforms have been shielded from lawsuits by 230. Once 230 is suspended or repealed, they will no longer be shielded from lawsuits.
As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob.
It dangerously goes two ways. Twitter tried to claim their banners on Trump's (and other public officials Tweets) were allowing because of 230! They're trying to have it both ways and it's a very very dangerous game to play. Viva Frei, a Canadian litigator, does a great breakdown of 230:
> Twitter tried to claim their banners on Trump's (and other public officials Tweets) were allowing because of 230
I doubt it (though feel free to link to a statement), because they aren't "allowed" to put labels on tweets because of Section 230, they're allowed to do so by the first amendment.
You are suggesting a technical solution to a cultural problem.
Speech is supposed to have consequences. How else could it be?
> Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists.
I guess nazis can be seen as conservative voices by definition. But isn't that the same thing as Fox in the other direction? Corporations suppress viewpoints they don't like. Have you read the ToS?
> As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob
So newspapers will be unable to report the news because people might lose their jobs? People lose their job all of the time when newspapers report on their crimes/actions.
Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.
> Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.
I started writing a reply to parent before I saw yours but I stopped when I saw this sentence because there's no way I could put it better.
So imagine 230 is repealed. Facebook can now be sued for what crazy people say on their platform. Do you think this will be better or worse for free speech on the internet?
To the extent that a cancel mob was created by the editorialization of a company (eg promoting specific posts), they can already sue the company for its part - section 230 does not apply to the data that the company itself publishes. And to the extent that the cancel mob organized itself organically, attacking a company for providing a conduit is a direct attack on free speech.
That said if this does pass, we can only hope that the attractive nuisances of webapps will fall out of fashion. User-advocating client software is the real anti-censorship future. Of course what will likely happen is the frog will slowly continue to boil, and the censorship regime will be extended to p2p communications as well.
Honest question, why do you think that Section 230 should be repealed?
I myself believe that companies should be doing a better job at moderating the contents they host in their websites, but also that by repealing such provision, smaller ventures with not enough money to enforce the rules, would either go bankrupt or simply suppress any third party content to avoid issues with the law enforcement.
Tech companies don't just host harmful content: They make money off of it. The fact that Google and Facebook take a cut off malware, scams, and fraud perpetrated over their advertising platforms, while bearing no responsibility or liability for them gives them an incredible disincentive to shut down bad actors.
A huge portion of Google Ad income is malicious content, and as long as they can't be sued or indited for it, they're going to continue to automatically approve and profit off criminal activity.
The problem with Section 230 isn't about one guy who posts something bad, the problem is with systemic abuse on platforms which are financially motivated to allow the abuse to continue.
> A huge portion of Google Ad income is malicious content, and as long as they can't be sued or indited for it, they're going to continue to automatically approve and profit off criminal activity.
Citation needed.
Also, wouldn't this also apply to broadcasting companies? Say, potentially harmful commercials airing on prime time.
I was going to challenge you to find me a company selling malware on CBS or NBC, but then I remembered Google runs TV ads, so fair point. /s
And importantly, broadcast television doesn't get Section 230 protections, and does just fine. A great example of why tech companies don't need immunity. Broadcast TV ads are sold on a smaller scale, such that humans are involved in the process and bad actors are caught early.
> Citation needed.
The general problem here is that Google is the only one with meaningful data, and obviously they're very motivated not to reveal how big a market illegal activity is on their platform. Note that even in legitimate verticals, scams push the bidding higher for advertising on their platforms. So not only does Google make money directly off scammers, they also make more money off legitimate advertisers because the bidding was higher. Google both claims that there's no data proving their business is illegitimate, while keeping all the data secret. So we have to rely on the evidence we can see.
A great example is what The Verge uncovered in 2017 with rehab scams: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... where they found some insane CPCs: "If you’re in Arizona, and you click on the top ad, you’ll cost that advertiser around $221", and Google was actively soliciting business in this extremely valuable market: "The search giant actively courts treatment centers, both online and off. In May, a Google “digital ambassador” was a featured speaker at the Treatment Center Executive & Marketing Retreat". They had multiple people directly focused on cultivating business in this particular market. Scammers were both harming consumers directly, and also pushing the CPCs up to insane levels for real drug rehab centers, hurting consumers indirectly as well.
You can also see an interesting way Google helps bad actors stay hidden here: "The 800 number was ephemeral. ...Google offers advertisers unique “tracking” phone numbers that forward to a company’s phones, so they can understand which ads are bringing in the most clients. The phone numbers only stay up as long as the ad does." So you can't even meaningfully trace out a phone number on a scam ad back to the company that pays for it. Everything is laundered through Google accounts.
After this piece, of course, Google finally acted and more or less shut down their entire drug rehab vertical for a while, and retooled it. I'm sure it's drastically less profitable now. But the problem is, they got to keep the millions and millions of dollars profit they got from engaging in a business practice that was directly harmful to people.
My long time example, which Google still refuses to address, is searches for "mapquest". MapQuest is a top search term for seniors, who don't realize that other directions sites exist. To it's credit, MapQuest is still pretty decent. Problem is, Google sells ads for "Maps Quest" that look like the real site, but redirect you to sites that require you install browser-hijacking add-ons in order to proceed (add-ons hosted in the Chrome Web Store, I might add). No matter how many times I've attempted to report them, these sites are allowed to continue doing this. A Googler actually had them removed once, and Google re-enabled the same sites' ads within a couple of hours.
Another fun part of this, is that if MapQuest wants to be presented above those malicious ads, MapQuest has to outbid them... for it's own trademarked brand name! Ad squatting is another way Google rakes in massive revenues via essentially blackmail: Pay us or we'll let scammers place higher than you for your own name.
I wouldn't hazard a statistic, because it'd be a guess, but I ...
This doesn't address my question though: is it true that a significant percentage of Google's Adsense revenue comes from such ads?
I'm not denying that Google profits from these, that would be silly. My point is that broadcast companies run morally questionable ads all the time, yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability.
Take for example drug commercials. If you are concerned about scams targeting seniors, then you must have reservations about these, since the way they portray drug positive effects, and downplay the adverse ones, is clearly misleading. Or, say, political ads. Facebook is taking a lot of flak because of these, but local TV stations have been running misleading and often borderline hateful commercials for ages, e.g.
I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe. I just can't tell you if it's 30%, 60%, or 90% of their revenue, the public doesn't have access to that information. I'm confident that how ever much you believe it is, it's higher.
> yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability
On the contrary, repealing Section 230 would place Google on the same level of accountability as broadcast companies. Section 230 carves out a special immunity to prosecution and lawsuit that only applies to online platforms. Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
> I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe.
Well, that's pretty much wishful thinking.
> Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
Are they now.
Let's put it this way: section 230 protects Facebook from being held accountable for the anachronistic opinion about Jewish people, and violent tendencies derived from it, of a random user. Such random user, as a TV show guest, could spout a call to arms to an audience of 2,5 million spectators, and the broadcaster would not suffer any legal consequences.
Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News.
> Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News.
Under what law? Section 230 is a special exemption for tech companies. Without it, Google is indeed subject to the same laws as Fox News. Now, it's possible those laws aren't strong enough... but they'd be equally not strong enough upon both Google and Fox News.
Currently, Fox News is held accountable poorly, and Google is not held accountable at all whatsoever.
Section 230 protects companies by not making them responsible for what third party actors publish in their platforms.
Name a single US based TV station prosecuted because some of their guests made false or hateful comments on air. Heck, it is in fact easier for the FCC to nail a broadcast company for "indecency", rather than hate speech.
I am going to stop here and not reply further, because I think we're going in circles. Again: Section 230 is an exception for tech companies. It allows them less accountability than other businesses. There is no law enforcing stricter responsibility for tech companies than broadcast companies.
Which means, if Fox News isn't held accountable enough, you shouldn't see any reason for Section 230 to exist: It's not protecting tech companies from any effective law as it is, so removing it won't harm anyone.
What is the problem here? Having federal interference in tech is a terrible idea as any laws are usually overbroad and stifle large amounts of innovation that we haven't imagined yet as an unintended consequence.
What multiuser system would survive a libel-law attack from a highly unfriendly jurisdiction? Email, forums, comments, and other forms of posting opinions would immediately cause any small operator to shutdown.
You just need a friend to make libelous comments on discus and then sue any site you want. 230 isn't a loophole, it's essential for speech on the Internet.
Then the platforms that host social media need to stop suppressing speech.
The President wants to kill 230 because Twitter is censoring his tweets. His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
It's politics; everything's always about politics. Whether this will be good for the industry and society is another question.
They have a right to suppress speech on their platform. If I show up at your house and demand to install campaign signs in your yard because of my first amendment rights what are you going to say?
I suspect “get off my property”.
Twitter and Facebook and everyone else have those same rights.
> Then the platforms that host social media need to stop suppressing speech.
They clearly state in their ToS that speech is limited on their platform.
> His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
Well, his response was to state he was "looking to see if he could suspend their protection". There is nothing to be worried here, because anyone can tell him that the answer is that he can't suspend their protection.
It was just infantile bluffing that in most other situations would cause the person bluffing to lose face, but not in the current political reality. In most situations, it's best to not state orders that you can't possible enforce and that reveal your weakness.
Repealing 230 would give them an even greater incentive to suppress conservative views as someone could argue they're looking the other at people being radicalised by hate speech. You could say 230 is what protects platforms like Gab who knowingly host conservative speech.
I can. Our representative government represent corporations and the deep state, in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term (as opposed to the more recent abuse of it), and not the people.
They have continually made moves like this, in a boiling frog fashion. Until we the people wake up from the two party divide and conquer system, very little will change, excepting very rare circumstances of pressure exerted en masse (SOPA/PIPA is a good example outlier).
I've thought about solutions to this problem for a long time, and my conclusion is the things needed are the following (in order to prevent a long term overton window shift as has been happening):
1. Renewed participation in local politics and elections, especially at the state level, but also county, city, etc.
2. Once that is achieved, voting in ranked choice voting initiatives. This will enable the next step.
3. Stop voting for anyone based on party, in particular the main power structure is based on the majority rule in the house and senate... the end goal would be to take away the majority from both parties. This is a huge undertaking, so I'm not saying it would be easy, or even possible, but I think it is what is required. I think those paying attention enough and not enured to the tribalism of the parties understands they cannot be reformed from the inside. They are simply too entrenched, and have too many mechanisms to get rid of those who seek to do so. The point is that we don't need to gain a majority with this new coalition party of independents and third parties, we simply need to take the majority away from the two main parties. To get this done though, [1] must be done, because many of the state laws have been manipulated by the duopoly to prevent third parties and independents.
3.1 To avoid fracturing of the coalition, there should be some very rudimentary and base document that all persons running can agree on. This is also difficult but, since all congresspeople swear an oath to the constitution (5 U.S. Code § 3331), something that reaffirms the principles of the constitution would be the best start. If they violate this, the coalition should work to remove them immediately. (something similar to Gingrich's "Contract with America")
4. Currently, and many don't know this, congresspeople have to sign an affidavit (5 U.S. Code § 3333) confirming their oath. I think we should then work towards enforcement of the laws against violation thereof, the primary one being perjury, or something similar (18 U.S. Code § 1918, 5 U.S. Code § 7311). For example, how many people have straight up lied to congress and had no action taken against them? (Clapper is one of the more egregious ones that comes to mind, but the point is congress is in dereliction of duty in enforcing perjury laws)
This would give the people a real opportunity to start passing laws that represent the people (such as term limits), but are still constitutionally sound.
The legislative is the branch closest to the people, and this is why it should be the focus. From a cleaned up legislative we can begin to resurrect the separation of power between the branches that has been egregiously eroded, primarily by the executive. The current checks and balances system is crumbling. A huge part of this erosion is the surveillance system, which enables compromise of congresspeople by the executive and the MICC. We must fight for privacy, both encryption and anonymity, as a fundamental part of protecting the checks and balances system.
Dear lord man. You've actually thought about this. I'm flabbergasted to see someone actually attempting to solve this problem. Out-grouping for the sake of sharing logic.
Oh geez, it's been at least a decade since I did a MBTI, but probably you are right on the money.
I've thought about it because I honestly considered running for POTUS, but even that is because I consider my oath the the constitution still valid even though I've been out of the military for a long time, though I'm still recovering my brain.
It is worse than just crazy. Government is made of people, and people are corruptible. If the encryption backdoor key leaks from the government to a bad actor, it will create a "national security" issue of magnitude never seen before. If this line of reasoning is correct, then proposing an encryption backdoor is akin to committing an act of treason in itself, because it is purposely weakening the technological infrastructure of the businesses and people in the country and thus the country itself. Attempts like these are either doomed to fail, or they will doom the country to fail.
They don't even have to be corruptible. People are fallible. Someone could just make a mistake. No bad actors needed. (Bad actors exist, and make the problem worse. But the problem exists even without bad actors.)
The TSA used essentially this system for luggage locks. You could have a lock on your luggage, but the TSA had a master key that could open any luggage lock.
This is an apt reminder that the question is not "how likely is it that backdoor keys will be leaked/stolen?", but rather "how soon until the first backdoor keys are leaked/stolen, and how frequently after that?"
And to make it much worse, we would now also have to ask "how soon until the required systemic weaknesses themselves are used an attack vector for a mass breach?".
Just for a moment, ignore all arguments about citizens' rights to privacy, potential for abuse by the organizations authorized to access the secrets (and their many fallible and corruptible employees), and so on. Of course all that _is_ important, but just for the sake of argument, ignore it. The problem remains that if anything resembling the "EARN IT" bill passes, then attacks against encryption will _scale too effectively_, and the USA will have exposed itself to having the secrets of thousands of politicians and civil servants leaked to an adversary at once. What do you think happens to democracy when that happens?
I get that many people are short-sighted, or even simply apathetic to the long-term consequences of a law that might make their job easier today. But it seems that whenever computers are involved, lawmakers become _so_ incredibly short-sighted that it verges on madness.
Consider this: a bill requiring a small GPS and remote-controlled bomb to be installed in the engine of every car would allow the police to entirely avoid dangerous high-speed pursuits. If it could be done cheaply enough, should it be done? It's pretty easy to understand the myriad ways this could be abused, so it would never happen. But add computers to the mix, and suddenly any kind of foresight goes out the window.
You're completely correct. I think the deeper issue is that the people responsible for directing US policy right now (and for the last few decades by varying amounts) generally do not care about the welfare of the country or the rights of an average person relative to how much they care about preserving and increasing their own power and advancing an ideological agenda to the same end.
The game is different than it once was; They aren't out murdering like Genghis Khan, but they are no less indifferent towards the people they harm in their conquest. The extent of their love for their country and it's people is the extent to which they can control it all. I've gotten to know this kind of sociopathic power-obsessed personality up close, and have no doubt certain mega-rich assholes out there influencing the political sphere have the same "defect".
I'm most curious on when they'll be knocking on the door of open source projects next. Notably, anyone who uses any crypto.
As much as I hate it, I can at least understand the back door argument from a [ignorant] lawmaker perspective. If I pretend and say their intentions are noble, I understand.
What concerns me though, beyond the obvious backdoor problems, is the who is next? Because I doubt big corporations will satisfy their greed for power and information. Especially since anyone who has anything to hide or cares about security will move into open source.
As a developer with a passion for developing distributed, encrypted software - when are they going to threaten me? Worse yet, the software I write I purposefully do not have control over. So am I going to be held liable for the fact that I literally cannot help them?
No matter what they threaten me with, the best I could do is break the application for future users. So what are they going to do to control these distributed systems? Especially ones who truly aim to be distributed, P2P & self hosted by every user?
As terrifying as the current anti-encryption behavior is, I'm oddly more concerned about the move after this.
>I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?
There's clearly a valid argument from the other side. For example:
>Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material, according to people familiar with the reports.
It's not clear how many of those lead to convictions but even a tiny fraction of a percent represents a significant number of children being rescued. Encrypting Messenger, as an example, will stop 3/4s of abuse reports and make it much safer and easier for paedophiles to exchange images. There's a pretty direct line from that decision to an increase in abuses like:
>“inserting an ice cube into the vagina” of a young girl, the documents said, before tying her ankles together, taping her mouth shut and suspending her upside down. As the video continued, the girl was beaten, slapped and burned with a match or candle.
>“The predominant sound is the child screaming and crying,” according to a federal agent quoted in the documents.
as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself? I'm actually convinced that all this does is reduce the sharing of such material, e.g. what people are outraged with is usually not only the act in itself but the fact that some sickos get off on this material. but I wouldn't think for a moment that because of some law less kids will be abused.
I'm actually fine with some kids biting the dust (yes literally being killed) to prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything (especially in poor volatile countries where cops are in fact part of the problem and happy to look away ...)
>as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself?
No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse.
>prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives.
Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
>I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything
Facebook helped develop a zero day exploit that the FBI used to catch a predator that abused dozens of girls. In this one specific case clearly more power to the cops solved something.
I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones, computers, or from sites like Facebook. It stands to reason that if we saw default E2E encryption across the board it would be a lot harder for the police to get evidence and would lead to a lot fewer convictions.
> It stands to reason that if we saw default E2E encryption across the board it would be a lot harder for the police to get evidence and would lead to a lot fewer convictions.
I am firmly-albeit-reluctantly OK with this, if the alternative is widespread surveillance of what should logically be private correspondence/communication among private citizens.
I value the privacy of the hundreds of millions of the citizen population over a slight increase in the conviction rate of the tens to hundreds of thousands predators.
Agreed.
Making encryption the boogeyman is the wrong way, too broad. Ensuring the easily accessible comm channels are accessible to law enforcement, seems like an OK compromise. What those channels are should be the focus of the discussion imo.
This is my issue with the act, it doesnt spell out who would be subject to this rather leaves it up to the DOJ to spell out the rules later.
I am probably in the minority here on HN but I think bundling together encryption with platforms like Facebook/IG is a bad idea given how easy those platforms make it for bad actors to meet/identify potential victims. Signal/whatsapp etc I am ok with since they dont provide that same ability.
> No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse.
call me old fashioned but every time I look at porn (which is very rare these days) I am disgusted by the meta-data that is added to these videos. It shows that people love to click on videos that read "stepdad and stepdaughter ..." and similar taglines. America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho and it's the main reason why I hate porn. It looks like it's hard to find videos where some form of domination (rough sex) isn't part of it. the way women are treated is IMO the gateway which normalizes violence first against women (even pretend rape is a genre here pushed by pornhub & co). why do people get off on this and why do porn companies get away with it ?? <- my opinion is to start the crackdown on this type of messaging here and before even cracking down have a discussion about wtf is wrong with people? why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
> Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
the problem with FB is mostly that it many countries FB _is_ the Internet. Myanmar (the Rohinga's) would be a fitting example. Also the Philipines where the Duarte government is currently using it on their brutal war on drugs. If there would be justice Zuck and anyone working at FB would be rotting in jail even before we discuss pedophelia. thousands in the Philipines have been killed thanks to Duarte's messaging. FB literally kills and gets away with it.
FB agreeing to develop 0days to crack down on a few cases doesn't make them the good guys. I believe the world would be better off if FB wouldn't exist at all.
Vice is also known to push a pro-cop pro-LE agenda. I stopped watching their videos and reading their content when they showed how cannabis production in Albania hurts Europe (wtf) ... they are a pro-cop & ultra-conservative outlet. Screw vice and screw cops.
> I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones,
I know security companies love to cite their work with law-enforcement and how they help fight crime. when I had an interview with the biggest Swiss security company few years ago they bragged about their work with Interpol and how they help fight the bad guys. But nobody ever mentions that the software companies like NSO, Gamma, HackingTeam makes doesn't just allow LS to compromise phones (people assume it's read-only) when reality is the features are always read-write. Putting things on these devices is possible because from an engineering pov why would you limit a feature and not allow write access ... I know enough cops who brag about how they abuse their power . So why would I trust them not to plant shit on these phones (especially when they're convinced that they're dealing with a bad guy).
> America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho
It is impossible to have a discussion on this topic when some people use the word Pedophilia to cover "babies and small children" and others are using it to cover zero to eighteen year olds. While it might be immoral or illegal if a 55 year old is having sex with a 16 year old it isn't pedophilia. A Daddy kink is incest, again not pedophilia. Please use the correct terms. Otherwise it muddies the discussion until no one can discuss it at all.
>why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
Okay, now it smells like SJW and white-knighting. Many women fantasize about being raped, dominated and strangled. There's nothing bad or wrong in living out those fantasies. It doesn't normalize violence or cause rape.
> America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho
I would challenge that. I would argue that it is a that there are a lot of people (regardless of country) that get a rise out of things that are taboo. One of those things is the step-parent/child thing (because parent/child is too far for many people).
To my knowledge, a vast majority of crimes are committed in the home and without uploading evidence of it online. It would never be dealt with by outlawing any sort of encryption.
Would it not be better to figure out ways we could tackle that? Counsellors taking a close look at children? Teachers trained to identify abused children? CPS making a closer examination of suspicious households?
I know you're coming from but online crime really is a tip of an iceberg. An iceberg that is easy to spot but one which masks the true scope of the insidiousness going on below and makes it all too easy to say mission accomplished.
For people like Hernandez, and I don't know how many there are, as it is never mentioned anywhere. You could think of restricting Tor anonymity with children you have no shared contacts with. I would be very, very wary of going a step further than that as it's very easy to justify "just another step.
To prevent someone from growing dependent on or vulnerable to an external abuser, we could invest in mental healthcare and counselling for conditions like depression which is all too common in teenagers nowadays.
Facebook should not be in the business of writing malware. Malware which could well be used against activists.
How many of these images are re-circulations? How many of them are new images? How much abuse is actually facilitated on the platform? Does directing more resources towards this take away resources and mind share which could be used to tackle more serious crime than someone posting images over and over?
Fear-mongering is strong. Look at all the freedoms we lost after 9/11. Pedophiles and terrorists and porn are always the scapegoats.
It is also a very electable sound bite. Everyone is against the "bad people". Re-election at any cost is the goal. We have government of the people and by the people but we stopped being for the people long long ago.
But pedophiles and terrorists are 'bad people' and 'the people' are overwhelmingly in favor of stopping them.
It's only in libertarian/ancap bubbles of places like HN where pedos and terrorists are treated like noble antiheroes in the eternal war against fascism and political correctness. If you're going to talk about government "for the people" you need to remember who "the people" actually are and what the majority of them want.
Of course everyone wants those bad people stopped. But every law that claims to be "to stop the bad people and save the children" end up not actually getting used to that end, but instead to further harm the people. They all have far more collateral damage.
I used to investigate computer crime. You know what would have made my job really easy? Unlimited access to all computers worldwide.
Luckily I had to learn alternative investigative methods because we value privacy more than we value catching criminals, which is a good thing. I'd rather a criminal go free once in a while than a complete loss of privacy.
Isn't that more-or-less what the NSA have already?
What I mean is, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA already have most criminals' dirty laundry. The only thing keeping the law from rolling 'em up wholesale is the Overton window around parallel construction.
The fearmongering list has also been expanded to Russia and the far-right. As the list of perceived threats grows more varied, so does bipartisan support for undermining encryption.
With communists, especially in the 50s you would have been arguably justified in being extremely sceptical of them in power. Not to the extents of McCarthy but keep in mind that around that time the KGB were really flexing their muscles.
In the UK, the soviets were almost totally successful largely because the British establishment could not believe that someone who came from the right place and went to the right place could really be a communist spy. Even after, with or without hindsight, it was obvious Kim Philby was almost exonerated and re-entered MI6 to an extent purely because the people above him decided it was simultaneously too damaging and unlikely for a Cambridge man to be a communist.
Do you remember the bipartisan consensus on SOPA/PIPA?
"This bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20, 2010, a Monday. And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it said it was scheduled for a vote on September 23 — just three days later.
And while of course there had to be a vote — you can't pass a bill without a vote — the results of that vote were a foregone conclusion. Because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn't just introduced by one, rogue, eccentric member of Congress. It was introduced by the chair of the committee — and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members — Republicans and Democrats. So there would be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill — before it was even introduced.
I can't stress enough how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean the way it really works. I think we all know that Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics.
There is always bipartisan consensus in whatever gives more actual power to powerful people. It's just that some would rather the power be for billionaires and others for the government.
It’s one of those things that people think is a grand idea, right up until it’s been in force for a few weeks and it turns out that China is reading all the internal US message traffic.
Then everyone will be like “Whoa?! Who would have thought something like this could happen!”. I feel like this is a tale as old as time.
> I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption.
Most differences between republicans and democrats are superficial. Republicans don't really believe in small government no more than Democrats really believe in social justice.
Doesn't surprise me at all and it was painted on the wall pretty clearly in my opinion. It is of course a sad state of affairs. I think it shouldn't need to be mentioned but apparently it does.
Where are my elected representatives that represent my privacy rights on bills like this? Maybe I need to run for office since I care about end2end encryption, free software, and the rights of free people and information to freely travel around the world...
In Europe quite a few "pirate parties" popped up about a decade ago. None of them were too successful as far as I know, at least in The Netherlands they didn't mention to gain a single seat (out of 150).
You can run, and with that platform your opponent will conveniently turn it around into "my opponent supports child molestors and terrorists". Because if you think you'll simply walk up to the podium talking about something most folks could not give a working definition for, boy, are you going to be in for a shock when your opponent "dumbs it down" for the audience.
Which is how we end up with stuff like the EARN IT Act that one would reasonably think would be shot down immediately, but isn't.
"My opponent supports the attorney general having access to your porn habits. I support your privacy" is a pretty straightforward simplified riposte to your above oversimplification.
Lesser of two evils is a common tactic to push authoritarian bills in some countries. They don't expect LAED to pass and it has practically no supporters.
In that case we need to provide working definitions advocating for privacy and information freedom that the average consumer can appreciate and support. I'm open to ideas. One approach is to explain that without private encrypted communications your information cannot be free: instead it will be monitored and censored by the many parties that believe we should not see or say one thing or another. Privacy enables freedom.
The ruling elite have a monopoly on this. They publicly opposite it via bills like this and use media giants to crush 'conspiracy theories' involving people like Epstein and all the people he was closely associated with in Washington and Hollywood.
I think if we actually got evidence and leaks on how bad child abuse within politicians are, Americans would be absolutely horrified by the straight up hypocrisy.
Indeed, but think about who is running those blackmail ops... the three letters, well, how is it that Schumer put it, "you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from sunday at getting back at you..."
Bill Maher may be right -- you have to fight fire with fire. Once mud has been thrown your only option is to throw more mud back. Point out the Cosbys, Epsteins, Trumps, warmongers, etc. "The untouchable elite are the terrorists and molestors"
My reply: "Government is trying to spy on every aspect of your life. There are more government employees that can spy on your children than there are child molestors in the country."
Do you want creepy gov't contractors spying on your kids?
You should call their offices. Give your qualifications and make their staff listen to you explain all the reasons why its a terrible idea. It can move the needle if enough people do it. If you have the energy to run for office then you should start by lobbying for these issues, it's good practice
Awkwardly enough the only Senator I have even the smallest amount of respect for these days did add a bunch of amendments to try and fix parts of it....but I think its a shit bill from top to bottom and I expect him to vote against it anyway.
Perhaps instead of supporting politicians who "say" they're going to do X, Y, and Z we should support politicians who have a track record of doing exactly X, Y and Z regardless of how politically convenient it is to do something else.
More laws will not fix the problem of having too many bad laws, in my opinion.
I reached out to my representatives on this when the Act was first proposed. I'm confused about the changes that have happened since that time and the post does not say anything about what has changed. What does "Advancing" mean in this case? If I have already contacted all of my legislators about strong encryption and opposition to this bill, what is the latest change that requires re-engaging?
I haven't followed the specifics, either, but it looks like it was introduced back in March. When I reached out to my Senators and Reps back then I got a reply from my House Rep (who I believe was supportive of the bill). The bill is currently in the Senate and only this week is getting "marked up" in the Judiciary Committee--I imagine if your Senator is on that committee it's more important to reach out.
Sadly, I think issues need constant re-engaging since they pop up under different names and in different forms.
Thankful for Mozilla and EFF, but have any tech elites spoken out against this or put money into defeating it? Thiel, Musk, Altman, Graham... hello? Should we assume SV is complicit?
Not even touching on those individuals, it's been bothering me that it feels like mostly silence from Google, Apple, Facebook (who this would presumably really hit at), etc.
I'd really love to be missing something. It feels like this is just fading into the background... and while I can acknowledge the idea that you might just try to fight this as unconstitutional after it passes, that feels inherently risky given this administration (if not downright stupid).
because apple, google, facebook already comply with this. they have built ways for the government to access their data. any company with an important enough set of information is going to get this request and you can’t say no
I know what you're saying, but where do you think you are? Please have enough common sense to assume I asked the question knowing how that works.
The primary thing with this bill that the companies seem explicitly quiet on is the fact that the use case it opens up for the government (sidestepping user privacy/encryption) coupled with the level of power it more or less places in the Attorney General's hands.
I can't in good faith assume that these companies are comfortable with this, and I'd like to know why they're not speaking up.
At least for Apple, they claim the iPhone (at least devices post-checkm8) has not been compromised. iCloud is required to comply with records requests, but the data isn’t in iCloud the feds can’t get it. Even with checkm8, the Secure Enclave still has not been compromised.
If they were in bed with the feds, the FBI/NYPD wouldn’t keep asking them for keys that Apple doesn’t have.
These bad bills keep coming up in an effort to address serious real problems, like child porn. People are going to keep proposing bills to address these problems until something passes.
By just concentrating on shooting down bad bill after bad bill without devoting any effort to getting good bills proposed the next bill after each defeated bad bill will be another bill from the same general set of people. Maybe the new one will address some of the issues in the prior ones but the chances are good that it won't address all of them.
Just telling everyone else what is wrong with their approach to solving a problem instead of also offering up your own better solutions tends to not work well in the long run.
> to address serious real problems, like child porn
Can you quantify the size of this problem? It sounds like military defense spending during the cold war. "You just have to take our word for it that child porn is a massive problem affecting 1 out of 4 children, so we need to crush the tech industry."
> Just telling everyone else what is wrong with their approach to solving a problem instead of also offering up your own better solutions tends to not work well in the long run.
How would you think the introduction of a competing bill would fare, if it still needs the support of the first bill proponents? Wouldn't they believe that anything short than the original bill is not worth supporting?
I don't think the issue is that there are no better ways to deal with, say, child porn. I do believe that many politicians, if not most, refuse to acknowledge that there are better solutions out there, and for that there are several factors.
Child porn is a serious problem in that it is abhorrent.
I have not seen any evidence that it is a serious problem in that it has significant impact at a societal level.
These bills are not being introduced to significantly reduce child porn. They're meant to further enhance surveillance powers or earn easy political points. Any actual effect on crime is a side benefit.
Let's not forget that the same people that propose these bills are the ones hanging out at Epstein's private island.
Your comment seemed to imply that a network of pedophiles in Congress was tailoring these laws specifically to weaken law enforcement's ability to prosecute people like them. That would certainly lead to a societal impact, as it would by design empower and entrench child pornographers and pedophiles across the board.
Ah I see. What I meant to express was that based on the fact that there appears to be a higher preponderance of child abusers among the rich and powerful, it's unlikely that actions they take are actually "to protect the children"
- Undercover police work and informants, which is how most large busts already happen now. The worst offenders are not swapping child porn on Facebook or Dropbox
- Encourage marriage and remove benefits penalties for two-parent households, as children are substantially more likely to be abused when their biological father is not in the household
- Institute the death penalty for child sexual abuse and make sure it is performed swiftly and publicly
Before you think that's too harsh, consider that the other options are to ban encryption or to not try to stop it at all (quasi-decriminalization).
I don't think anyone would oppose a bill to make CP carry the death penalty. The problem is they won't ever make this law because then they won't be able to milk the cow anymore.
I don't think it is the real problem. It is a problem in the sense that it is disgusting but it isn't worth destroying a free society over and I don't think it is possible to stop.
What you can crackdown on are the producers.
You can infiltrate the places where it is originally disseminated.
You can run face and voice recognition on the content.
You can flip lower level mass distributors into informants to gather evidence on the producers.
For rapists.
You can train teachers and counsellors to identify children who have been abused and to handle other psychological problems like depression which are endemic in our society.
You can train police officers to better spot criminals on a basis other than race or status.
You can better fund the CPS.
You can conduct assessments on parents who appear to be mentally unstable.
I took the opportunity to donate to Mozilla as well. I'd encourage you to do the same! They are one of the "good guys" on the internet and they need our support to stay alive.
The primary impediment to combating child sexual abuse material is the scarcity of law enforcement agents relative to the scale of offenders.[0] Law enforcement agencies are already at the limit of how many offenders they can prosecute because offenders are primarily detected by agents who are posing as offenders or by agents who are posing as victims.
The solution proposed by the researchers in the referenced documentary is to create AI agents that can automate the work of posing as offenders or posing as victims. This solves the scaling problem of the law enforcement agencies.
So, create some dog-and-ponies AI start-up for this in the districts of the most influential lawmakers, with stated job counts (for AI-mechanical turk work that hires lots of people).
Tie the "correct" solution to their real political motivations and it will get done in a heartbeat. It has to be something they can sell to their base though.
Well, it's being realistic. The politicians aren't choosing the best choice for us, they are choosing the choice that looks like the best choice for the hordes weighed against the interests of their powerful lobbyists.
If privacy (as partially defined as crypto) looked important to the hordes of people and/or the lobbyists, we wouldn't have anything to worry about. Think about the children is a much easier platform to get elected for though.
That scares me. If that entrapment-at-scale is legal, it could be deployed to throw huge numbers of people in jail for buying drugs or supporting terrorism.
If I hit reply to tell you to go to hell, did I just participate in the exchange of pictures of minors? (since your pictures will be quoted in my email)
Note that the AI is used to automate the work of the law enforcement agents, not the work of the judges and juries. The AI collects evidence that prosecutors use to build cases against defendants. The defendants still have the right to public trial in a court of law in front of a human judge and human jury.
edit: It seems there is a misunderstanding of what the AI does. It simulates human traffickers in text or video chat in order to find people who try to exchange money with them, and it simulates children in text and video chat in order to find people who try to groom them. It does not simulate child sexual abuse material or proliferate child sexual abuse material.
To Californians, Dianne Feinstein is one of the cosponsors of the bill in the Senate. It really grinds my gears seeing our senior leadership from California take actions that directly harm our interests, both towards our peoples' freedom and our businesses.
I feel vindicated for voting against her in 2018, because I thought she'd be out of touch with our interests as a state.
She’ll send a smarmy response about how you’re clearly an idiot for thinking it has anything to do with encryption, and how she’s proud to be a co-sponsor.
She’s been completely ignoring voter complaints for decades. Before open primaries, it was essentially impossible for her to lose an election, and she knew it.
I’m extremely liberal, but if the “recall governor Newsom” crowd went after Feinstein instead, I’d sign on in a heartbeat.
Feinstein is easily the worst Democratic Senator. It's absolutely bonkers to me that a state where tech is as important as it is keeps re-electing her. Surely there's someone out there who wants to primary her?
CA has a blanket primary, which means that all candidates from all parties take part in the primary and then the top 2 compete in the general election, regardless of party affiliation.
Feinstein wiped the floor with everyone in the primary in 2018. She took 44% of the vote, and the next leading candidate (Kevin de Leon) took 12%. When they ran against each other, de Leon lost by a fairly large margin but turnout kind of sucked.
de Leon wasn't a good candidate by any means, and I voted for the guy. He always struck me as a bit of a smarmy huckster who didn't stand for anything but reelection. But I knew that Feinstein was probably running for her last term and only cared about serving the national party's interests, and not our state. I'll take the guy that wants my next vote over someone that probably won't live long enough to get it.
Getting to the point you were responding to: in fact Feinstein won on the back of a bunch of "republican" votes, cast strategically in a "blue" state where a traditional candidate wasn't likely to win. Which is to say: nonpartisan voting did exactly what it was advertised to do and resulted in the election of a centrist candidate.
Obviously there are other externalities to consider (Feinstein is very senior), etc... But I don't know why anyone is so upset that she's the "worst democrat". She'd be the "worst republican" too.
You want consensus-building nonpartisan elections, you get candidates that reflect social consensus and not your particular party's priorities.
> fact Feinstein won on the back of a bunch of "republican" votes, cast strategically in a "blue" state where a traditional candidate wasn't likely to win
Except de Leon carried the red districts. Not Feinstein.
I didn't say she carried all the republicans, just that she carried enough of them to put her above any of the more "typical" democratic candidates you'd expect to see from a state with the demographics of California. You can't feasibly elect a progressive with a non-partisan election, even in California.
Calling a democrat that won't even pretend to support blue team freedoms the "worst democrat" makes a lot of sense.
What is called "centrist" is nowhere near the center, but is actually straight up authoritarianism. If you look at both the blue team's and red team's grassroots messages, individuals are not happy with how much control the government exerts over us. Each political team markets a half-libertarian message and lures individual voters in by focusing on those gripes. They then channel their supporters' energy into going after the "other team", and "compromise" by enacting the fully authoritarian policies their sponsors paid for.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. In general, a "centrist", in common usage, is a person who broadly supports existing social structures. So yes, they're going to support law enforcement over privacy, the media industry over public access concerns, etc... So to anyone who cares deeply about some issue of social change, a centrist is going to look "just as bad as" the "other side".
But calling them (sigh) "authoritarian" isn't helping your case when they come back at you to persecute a (sigh) "revolutionary" or "extremist". Work with people. Centrists aren't idiots. Their constituency is real, and has concerns too.
> a person who broadly supports existing social structures. So yes, they're going to support law enforcement over privacy, the media industry over public access concerns
We already have a word for this - conservative. And I do agree that conservatives have consistent and valid points, even if I do not agree.
I don't know what other word to use besides "authoritarian" as in the two-dimensional political space with red-blue on one axis, and authoritarian-libertarian on the other.
To me "centrist" implies some middle of the road. I do not agree that someone who supports (this bill, the patriot act, elective wars, drone strikes, etc) deserves the label centrist, as they're nowhere near the entire libertarian half of the political spectrum. Allowing this to be called centrism is privileging and cloaking authoritarianism.
Again, you're playing semantic games. That's not what "conservative" means in modern political discourse, at all. And I'm sure you know this. In fact when journalists want to use the sense you cited they generally have to call it out explicitly (c.f. "small-c conservative", by reference to the Conservative parties in commonwealth nations).
> I don't know what other word to use besides "authoritarian"
And for the same reasons, it doesn't help your case to invent new jargon here either. The word you're looking for, describing people generally predisposed to agreement with existing social and government structures, is "centrist". It's what I use, it's what everyone in journalism uses. It's probabaly what you use too when you're talking to people in the real world and not trying to score points with hyperbole on HN by likening centrists to Nazis and Communists.
Misusing terms like that makes it harder to have a meaningful conversation about political beliefs. Someone might say "I'm not conservative, I'm liberal". But that is nonsensical. Liberal and conservative are on different spectrums. It would be like saying "I don't like white things, I like sweet things". The color/light spectrum is different from the taste spectrum, and vanilla ice cream is both white and sweet. Someone can be liberal and conservative.
The three political spectrums are:
- Progressive <-> Conservative
- Liberal <-> Fascist (Authoritarian)
- Left-wing <-> Right-wing
Progressive is someone who pushes are for change, major change, and rapid change. Conservative is someone who likes things how they are, wants to make changes slowly and carefully. People can be progressive on some topics (like pushing for civil rights), and conservative on others (like being careful about changing fiscal policy). But lots of people will default to one or the other.
Liberal is to allow, a true liberal would allow things they disagree with. A fascist (authoritarian) forces everyone to be like them, and passes laws to force everyone to do as they believe.
Left-wing and right-wing is less a spectrum and more clustering of ideologies.
Left-wing ideologies generally favor the community as a whole over the individual, and support those with less power or who are less well off. That results in things like pro environment, minority rights, and social welfare. Internationally left-wing could include going to war overseas to protect people from oppression and powerful aggressors.
Right-wing ideologies tend to favor the individual and those in power, more everyone for themselves. This could mean freedom to make individual choices that hurt the environment, pro big business, lack of social services. In the extreme it can be racism against minorities. Internationally it could result in isolationist policies.
I think if people actually understand the terms, and they are well defined, people can thinks about how they as an individual feel. And maybe that can help us break away from the two-party fighting we have now.
I think if people actually analyze there beliefs, they may come to better understand themselves, and people can better understand each other. For example I think some people that call themselves "Progressive Liberals" will find out they they are "Progressive Left-wing Fascist", and some people who call themselves "Conservative" will find that they are "Conservative Left-wing Liberals".
First, I'm not "trying to score points with hyperbole on HN by likening centrists to Nazis and Communists", nor "playing semantic games". The meanings of terms we use are important, as they carry latent bias.
> That's not what "conservative" means in modern political discourse, at all. And I'm sure you know this
I honestly don't know what "conservative" is supposed to mean in the modern political discourse, besides simply referring to people who support the red team. Therefore, I think it's instructive to fall back to its general abstract meaning. For example, current Trump supporters are in no way actually conservative. Hence seeing ideological conservatives distancing themselves from that populist-reactionary ship of destruction.
> ["centrist" is] probably what you use too when you're talking to people in the real world
I've never heard the word "centrist" in the real world. As I said, it seems like a mainstream media term shifting the Overton window towards authoritarianism (away from libertarianism), following the idea that increased centralized control can be used to solve societal problems. I apologize for using this word that you are reacting strongly to, but I've yet to hear a different straightforward technical term that refers to ever-growing government involvement.
She will be 91 the next time she is up for re-election. Hopefully she’ll finally retire instead. I’ve been hoping for that for over a decade.
Feinstein could not have been re-elected if it weren’t for overwhelmingly strong support for her in Silicon Valley.
If she is up for re-election again, please vote for the other candidate (who will probably also be a Democrat!). Also, tell your friends.
She wants to ban encryption. Her voting record is further to the right than many republicans. She votes according to Trump’s wishes more than any other Democrat in the senate.
I think you’re misreading it. It’s sorted by Trump affinity, and there is only one Democrat higher than her (she used to be at the top, but has been dethroned by a large margin by one Democrat).
No, the default sort is "Trump plus-minus" which takes into account what percentage of the state voted for Trump. The idea is that if 50% of the state voted for Trump, a senator from that state should vote along with Trump 50% of the time, giving a zero plus-minus.
Such a low percentage of people in CA voted for Trump (2nd lowest after Hawaii) that a middle of the pack Democrat will be high in the default sort. The same for senators from Hawaii, who are 4th and 5th with the default sort.
Has anyone considered that maybe there are actually people in this world that want to be able to catch criminals and terrorists? Even if the bill does result in adding backdoors (which is all based on speculation anyway), you don't think people and technology would recalibrate itself to overcome issues caused by backdoors? I find it insane that people think technology is so much more important than the potential for saving human lives.
Alternately, we could recalibrate the methods used to catch criminals and terrorists so that we did _not_ have to yield up all of our information to the gov, as well as every script kiddie with an internet connection.
Because what you're describing is a method for violating the rights of one person, and they know it's happening. What's described in the article is a method for violating the rights of anyone, and they won't even know.
There's another good reason for term limits, how many of these VERY OLD people don't even understand what encryption is and couldn't possibly understand the concept that this is like passing a law demanding that you leave your house key at the local police station, unless you let them search your house every second Tuesday.
Analogies to physical security are not helpful, because they're easily countered with "but you support someone getting into a house with a warrant, right?". Encryption is nothing like physical security. There is no analogue to busting down a door. Correctly built encryption has no way to get in without the key; anything else has fundamental, unfixable security flaws.
Many years ago, I read an article about some proposal to creating and using alternative dns root zones. Organizations certainly do this but how feasible would it be to maintain a 'separate' internet?
1. It puts our national security at risk. It opens up American cyber-security at large to nation states like China, Russia, and Iran, as well as more sophisticated terrorist groups.
2. It hampers innovation and competition in the tech industry. Compliance will increase costs, especially for startups, especially in a Covid19 environment, and the global market will not be able trust the cyber-security of American networks.
I trust the Mozilla foundation has good reason to oppose this, as likely do I, but I'm sad to not see a "learn more" button on this page to add your name to some opposition list. I'd certainly like to learn more about what I'm signing up against, and I can do that myself, but I feel as if they would also have a responsibility to further educate if they're asking for my support.
> There was once a far away land called Ruritania, and in Ruritania there was a strange phenonmenon -- all the trees that grew in Ruritainia were transparent. Now, in the days when people had lived in mud huts, this had not been a problem, but now high-tech wood technology had been developed, and in the new age of wood, everyone in Ruritania found that their homes were all 100% see through...
> One day, a smart man invented paint -- and if you painted your house, suddenly the police couldn't watch all your actions at will...
> Indignant, the state decided to try to require that all homes have video cameras installed in every nook and cranny. "After all", they said, "with this new development crime could run rampant. Installing video cameras doesn't mean that the police get any new capability -- they are just keeping the old one." [...]
> Some agencies of the United States Government (notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)), want to prevent the deployment of encryption technology. They want either encryption so weak that just about anyone can break it, or they want a copy of every key used with strong encryption.
The people who want a skeleton key to open all electronic doors are the same people who compiled a blackmail database on their own high-clearance employees and failed to keep it safe (the OPM data breach).
> This would be equivalent to a town with no locks on the front doors, or where the sheriff has a copy of every door key (just in case he has to search the house).
To be accurate though that's not exactly true. The sheriff doesn't even need a key to enter your house, he can get a warrant and bust your door down.
This is a town where your house is indestructible and un-enterable without a key.
I included the clock.org homepage because I found it surprising how closely it describes the EARN IT act, despite being published before 1998. It’s a warning from over 20 years ago.
I agree that their analogy isn’t particularly strong, so I removed that part from my comment.
The problem with the doors and locks analogies is that it's not really what this is about.
This isn't about their ability to seize things you have after they get a warrant. It's that they want the ability to seize things you have before they get a warrant, just in case they get one later.
It's like requiring everyone to have video cameras in their house with recordings sent to law enforcement no matter whether they're under suspicion or not, and then claiming that it's fine because they pinky swear not to look at them without a warrant. (Never mind that then you can't prove that they're not cheating, and that it would be the world's largest target for organized crime and foreign powers.)
> The sheriff doesn't even need a key to enter your house, he can get a warrant and bust your door down.
That requires following due process, the presumption of innocence, and observing the right to privacy. You have to convince a judge, in the context of the existing laws, that a certain individual or group are suspicious enough to call for (specific) further investigation.
Mass surveillance and forcing weak encryption bypass or overturn all that. It's a radically different view when you assume everybody is guilty of something by default and that they have no right to privacy.
> Mujahedeen Secrets (first release: 2007), Al-Queda’s own encrypted messaging software. Those developers aren’t going to respond to a US court order.
Even with that, you are now forcing the terrorists to roll their own encryption. The likelihood of finding an exploit in Mujahadeen Secrets is likely much higher than finding an exploit in Apple Messenger or WhatsApp or something by djb or Moxie, etc. In addition, Mujahadeen is likely having to be side loaded - you won't find it in the App Store. This gives a chance to try to hack a single storage location to have a trojan horse version spread through their network. Finally, it affects recruiting. Basically only someone already comitted will go to the trouble of having Mujahadeen Secrets on their device, whereas a lot more people could be expected to have a common end-to-end messenger on their device. So overall, thinking from a purely law enforcement, anti-terrorist perspective, it would still be better for them to not have e2e in widely used apps, even if the terrorists tried to develop their own app.
The point is that the EARN IT act primarily affects the general population. Al-Queda hasn’t used American-made encryption software for the past 13 years.
One of the groups that signed on for updates on such laws sent me a link over SMS. It automated calling 22 senators to ask them to reject Earn IT. I spoke to staff or left messages with 20. Two had full voicemail. One of this was my local rep, Feinstein. Figures.
Earn It act is adorable little attempt at institutional police state policy.
One would argue that terrorists will simply use other inventive ways to get around lack of main stream encrypted tech (and they will). Or that a back door for the govt is a back door for anyone (which is true). Both are logical points.
I posit that this is known among backers of Earn It - they're not that dumb. Therefore, this isn't about child porn or terrorists, its about dissenters of established institutions (government, corporations, media, etc). That's the move - the "party of Davos" sees the populist wave from both left and right (AOC, Bernie, BLM, Trump, Bannon, etc) and this how they think they will stop it.
The next AOC, BLM, or any populist movement will be labeled as threats to the established order, maybe as domestic terrorists. With Earn It, you can see who they organize with, when they meet, how they strategize, etc. This is COINTELPRO with smart phones [1]. Very slick, very effective. It's what I would do in their shoes.
The only flaw is that it is poorly marketed. It's so transparent, it's cute.
J Edgar Hoover is smiling somewhere in the after life.
Do yourself a favor, treat your phone and email like CIA recording device. We'll be fine.
Warrant-proof encryption is not compatible with a society that accepts the principle that we are accountable to the law. There is nothing sacred about your cell phone.
That's a very bold claim. We already have warrant-proof toilets for flushing drugs down. Why do you think crypto should be illegal because old-technology warrants don't work very easily with it?
We've had warrant-proof encryption for a long time now in our society (at least 20 years?).
569 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] threadRichard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) - term ends in 2022*
Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) - 2024
Dianne Feinstein (D-California) - 2024 as well... good luck with this one
I mean, yes. Feinstein is better than the alternative in the General. The Primaries are the way to get rid of her, I can't believe no one has booted her out yet.
In her 2018 race, Feinstein faced another Democrat, who lost by 10 points in the general with Feinstein winning the vast majority of the vote in densely populated areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elec...
Newsom was a reaction to Trump, but sort of an aberration. More than half of our governors have been Republicans, including Regan, who went on be President and a paragon of the GOP.
Since the 80s 14 out of 30 years has been Republicans, and Jerry Brown was 10 of the remaining 16 years, and he's pretty moderate as far as Democrats go.
Politics keeps moving on. I'm still on the Iraq war. I'm not interested on any other issue until we solve that one.
Edit: s/bailouts of/bailouts and/
Everyone vowed to vote out the representatives that bailed out Wall Street and left home owners holding the bag. Then whatever came along and poof, that didn't matter.
Same (and more importantly) with the Iraq war. IMO, you voted for it, you're out. Doesn't matter why, doesn't matter what you believed at the time, you're out.
There's been zero accountability on death and destruction on the grandest scale this century, so I don't expect anyone to remotely lift a finger about some IT bill.
[0]: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/video/does-voting-make-a-...
Also, I'd bet there are a lot of folks that read HN that are already in the top 10% of income earners. So maybe I'm speaking directly to some of the 10% now.
I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?
In fact, the patriot act has been prolongued 5 times, no matter the administration, and is still in effect.
As a european, I don't see any party that actually have american people's interest in mind.
Fighting for either seems so futile from here.
Of course, we have similar problems as well so I'm not going to pretend I have a solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_summary_of_the_Patriot...
Lindsey Graham(R) tried to extend this- but Trump has been somewhat vocally against this extension due to his own allegations that the FISA courts were misused to spy on him.
To be fair, us Europeans have the same issues with our politicians, with the exception of socialists, communists and Greens. Just look for the article13 fiasco.
We're all being fucked.
So, not really.
It's a mathematical model and accompanying explanation that shows that simple plurality (first past the post) voting produces bi-polarization, while other voting methods like approval voting do not. It also shows that the instant-runoff voting method that people are trying to replace FPTP with is non-monotonic, meaning that gaining a few points of support can actually hurt a candidate.
As a european, I don't see any party that actually have european people's interest in mind.
As a human, I don't see any party that actually have regular people's interest in mind.
Really? What country are you in, if you don't mind me asking?
Also, we don't vote EU wide so it is apples to oranges.
As an American, I don't see any party that has my interests in mind. Elections always seem to be having to choose the lesser of two evils.
https://www.fairvote.org/rcv
https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives
Maine has converted to RCV already and it's stood up in court; 49 to go.
https://www.cgpgrey.com/politics-in-the-animal-kingdom
Cognitive dissonance around the idea that there is room for improvement is inevitable.
And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it still surprises me.
I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
No Treason should be required reading
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is because IRV doesn't effectively change things. The realist in me thinks it is just trendy.
For others: See me other comment (it is large, you can't miss it) explaining these topics in more detail (with links!)
1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods.
2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effects, IRV has a weak resistance. CGP actually hints to this when he talks about that IRV doesn't prevent a trend towards two party systems.
"Ranked voting" is the more general term.
> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]
> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting
I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.
There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).
For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.
This manifests in their comparison chart:
https://www.fairvote.org/alternatives
They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)
For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.
The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.
> RV vs RCV
These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people.
> STAR
Anyone who is advocating for STAR has my approval. It is the preferred system in my mind. I want to plug my longer post that has a lot of links and expands on all the topics you described
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705413
> Fair Vote frustration
I think this is a style of argument that is increasingly becoming more common and is destructive. Pushing the your argument past the point of validity in an effort to make it stronger. Their use of broad classes is a gross mischaracterization. When they discuss Condorcet methods they discuss several types, lumping together the worst features from different ones. But they ignore the good methods like RP and Schulze. The comparisons are unfair. But then again, they aren't trying to appeal to people that are informed on the subject, they are trying to appeal to the masses which are completely unfamiliar with the subjects. But I do not think this justifies the outright lying and mischaracterizations.
> Spoilers and Strategy
In my other post I actually link an example of where IRV fails, and it is the specific type of spoiling that we are about: when similar candidates spoil (e.g. Bernie and Biden, not Stein and Biden). IRV doesn't solve this (but FV claims otherwise).
For strategy, this is the argument that I get into with the Condorcet camp (though we're clearly on the same side and these are nuanced friendly arguments not hostile). To me STAR is good because its range of VSE is more compact (i.e. resistant to strategies). The Condorcet camp claims that there is enough dis-incentivization to not vote strategically therefore just maximize VSE (VSE is only slightly different between STAR05 and RP). So for anyone listening on the sidelines, this is really what we're arguing, minutia. I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
> Center For Election Science
I'd also like to mention Equal Vote, which advocates for STAR. https://www.equal.vote/starvoting
Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.
It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
This is fair and I won't really push back against it. This is the reason I push so hard against IRV. Because once IRV is the status quo it will be hard to continue moving forward. After all, we already have the capabilities. If you have to chose to eat acid, plain oatmeal, or chocolate pudding you don't eat the oatmeal then the pudding, you just jump straight to the pudding.
> It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
While I'm in this camp I do think it is unfair to completely rule out Condorcet methods. The interview I linked to with Dr. Arrow I think expands on this well. If asked to advocate for a system, advocate for score (STAR). But that isn't to recognize that there's so much uncertainty in Social Choice Theory that we can trust theory alone. There's smaller experiments that have been done, but nothing on the scale we are advocating for. Of course we expect the theory and experiments to be relatively accurate, but we must acknowledge the lack of empirical large scale data. Frankly, you can only get that by doing it.
> Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
;) For me
STAR 5, Score: 4 (4.5), Approval: 4, RP: 3 (3.8), Schulze: 3, IRV: 1 Plurality: 0
I'm pretty similar. I like STAR and score about the same because I like simplicity, and don't see STAR as that huge an improvement over score. So maybe:
STAR: 5, score: 5, approval: 4, *Condorcet: 3, IRV: 2, plurality: 0
Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my preferred candidate to win more than I want any of the "fine I guess" candidates. And if I have to pick between "bad" and "horrible" I still want to vote for "bad".
With approval voting, I am forced to vote strategically, considering what point in my preference order to draw the line at in order to maximize my chance of causing the highest possible position in my preference order to win.
I realise that IRV isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than any non-ranked choice voting method as far as I can see, and honestly I think the risk of the situations where honest voting results in a sub-optimal outcome is massively overblown, though I don't have data to back that up.
I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine), and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV), so you can have systems like Australia where IRV is used in single-winner races and STV in multi-winner ones without the voting public needing to learn two systems.
I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).
If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).
But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).
I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.
But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!
You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"
Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :) https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496
Utila? I think I ran into you on Reddit yesterday. Good to see you're also on HN. Small world (if not, then from your tweet I met Mark).
This is exactly why it makes no sense to waste our limited activist energy and resources on IRV.
https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/momentum-e5fd12ffce2a
> and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV)
Score voting (and by extension STAR voting and approval voting) have a proportional multi-winner analog that's much simpler than STV and arguably better.
scorevoting.net/RRV
https://www.electionscience.org/library/tactical-voting-basi...
Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.
Other countries with other systems don't really do much better.
The fundamental problem is that the people who want this sort of power are the last ones who should ever be allowed to wield it. When people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get a job that pays $500K a year, you have to wonder what's really going on.
(I'm partial to approval voting (vote "yes" or "no" for each cantidate separately and if the winner doesn't have at least 50% "yes", the office is vacant until the next election), but I suspect the party line would immediately become "you're a traitor if you approve anyone but the Party's candidate".)
Not voting, but it is a real election system, known as Sortition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition). It was used in ancient Athens.
Also, yes, approval voting is a great approach and we should absolutely use it. We'd still get people who vote party-line, and it'd take a while for people to truly internalize that they can safely vote for other candidates they like, but it'd be a massive improvement.
I vaguely remembered that, but not the name, thanks.
It's made much worse by the bad voting system, but it's perfectly possible that I simply disagree with enough of my fellow citizens that any compromise we can reach will be some "lesser evil".
I think there's a strong argument that RCV/Approval would shift the incentives and game-theoretic landscape away from polarization and turnout, and towards big-tent coalition building, to appeal to the greatest quantity of left, right, center, and independent. That does mean compromise, and likely policy concessions; but i think that would be a huge improvement over (a) taking turns at obstructionism, and (b) a de-facto one-party system regarding corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, etc.
The problem is that IRV/RCV doesn't capture your preferences, because it ignores all your preferences except your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated. IRV is reasonably good at making sure that third-parties can't prevent first-parties from being elected, but very bad at actually allowing third parties to actually be elected even if they have widespread approval.
Approval is a good compromise, and fully ranked systems (e.g. Condorcet) would be even better but much harder to enact. I would happily support universal adoption of Approval.
That all said, full ranking systems are definitely the superior option, and I’d certainly take approval over our current state.
No. Approval voting has been extensively studied by game theory experts like NYU political science professor Steven Brams, and found to be one of the most resistant to tactical voting. Computer simulations show it performing exceptionally well even with highly strategic voters.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig.html
https://rpubs.com/Jameson-Quinn/vse7
There's even a mathematical theorem (proof) that, given plausible strategic behavior by voters, approval voting always elects a beats-all "Condorcet winner" when one exists. This is mild (some would say GOOD) reaction to strategy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW
> Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins.
Yes, this is beneficial not harmful. The alternative is that the voting method must ignore all preference data about the relative support of X vs. Y as long as the voter prefers X to Y. That causes big problems.
https://medium.com/@ClayShentrup/later-no-harm-72c44e145510
It is precisely why ranked voting methods like Instant Runoff Voting are so vulnerable to tactics. If I prefer the Green, my general best strategy is to tactically rank the Democrat in 1st place, thus "burying" the Green and making the mere appearance of un-electability a self-fulfilling prophecy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtKAScORevQ
https://www.rangevoting.org/NESD
The major moral of voting theory is to AVOID RANKED VOTING METHODS, favoring RATED voting methods like score voting, STAR voting, and approval voting. Here's a presentation I gave in 2015 to the Colorado League of Women Voters explaining more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyBm_Hcu4DI&t=488
I would also recommend the 2008 book "Gaming the Vote". Full disclosure: I'm in it.
scorevoting.net/IrvIgnoreExample.html
I would disagree about Condorcet. Score voting and variants, such as STAR voting and approval voting, are vastly simpler than any ranked method, and perform better in voter satisfaction efficiency calculations, and plausibly make better Condorcet methods than real Condorcet methods.
https://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW
The biggest moral of social choice theory is: avoid ranked voting methods.
I think most people wildly overestimate the popular appeal for compromise. Only about 20% of the population would support an opposite-side moderate over a near-side extremist. A true centrist party is doomed to lose in any system that knocks out unviable candidates, since it's the first choice of almost nobody.
I think there's a LOT more room for nuance than "this" or "that" even among the ignorant and/or unengaged. Just look at sports-team divides in the US for evidence.
> to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
- What they are referring to as RCV is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). IRV is a RCV, but RCV isn't IRV. Think "Rock and Roll is The Beatles" vs "The Beatles are a Rock and Roll group."
- IRV isn't that great when it comes to Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE)[0]. There's even other RCV methods like Ranked Pair[1] that are exactly the same for the voter. Essentially IRV is a 6% improvement upon plurality (what we currently use) but RP is a 15% increase from plurality. So I ask, why go to IRV when we can do twice as good? (or better! Keep reading)
- Fair Vote claims that IRV has a high resistance to spoiler candidates (a candidate that takes away votes from another similar candidate). This is actually why the distinction from RCV and IRV is important and why Fair Vote is misleading. While RCV is better than plurality in this respect, some RCVs are better than others. IRV doesn't adequately solve this issue (but there are other RCVs that do!). IRV fails when two candidates are similar in positions and similar in popularity. [2] This is specifically the kind of spoiling that we are trying to prevent. We're trying to prevent a candidate like Sanders from spoiling Biden (or vise versa) not Jill Stein spoiling Biden. IRV prevents the latter, but not the former. I am specifically upset with Fair Vote because they are misleading in this context. Because they claim IRV := RCV, they take all the things different RCV methods solve and claim IRV solves them. This is simply not true (and why I make the first bullet).
- There are just better methods besides ranking (also called "ordinal" methods). There's a class called Cardinal[3], that is actually simpler. The simplest is called approval. An example of approval is Netflix's rating system (binary). It does pretty well. Better yet is range/score voting. This would be the old Netflix system where you rated out of 5 stars. The difference in ranked vs cardinal is that you rate each candidate or policy independent of the others. This allows you to be more precise/honest (you may actually like two candidates equally!). It also reduces complexity because a common accident in ranking is rating two candidates the same. In ordinal systems this is a bug, in cardinal this is a feature.
- I want to specifically mention STAR voting[4]. While STAR isn't perfect, it much better handles various types of spoiler candidates, has a high VSE (similar to that of RP), and handles strategic voting well. The last is the major reason you should choose STAR over RP (and there's no reason you should choose IRV over RP, because RP is strictly better). While all three systems encourage honest voting (in a single agent scenario) strategic voting is always an issue. Under no circumstance is STAR worse than IRV because STAR handles strategic voting. Specifically the most important kind is the "1-sided strategy"[5] which is arguably very common.
- Lastly, I want to appeal to authority. Kennith Arrow (who you may be familiar with from Arrow's Impossibility theorem and Gibbard's extension) is a Nobel Laureate and said cardinal systems are "probably right."[6] And I think many of us know science speak into the confidence that conveys. That link is a full interview with him from Election Science. It is a good read/listen.
TLDR: We want a good voting system, use STAR, not IRV.
[0] https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_pairs
[2] https://www.electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/
[3]
There are conditions which resolve this (e.g., when ballot markings in a method like score voting represent the amount of some valuable resource the voter commits to paying if the given choice is elected, or where markings in approval represent a binding commitment to not participate if an non-approved option is chosen and/or to participate if an approved options is chosen.) But these resolutions are typically not available or desirable in most public elections.
> that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask
I don't see this as an issue. I also don't see it as a problem to specifically non-ordinal, but to every system. I like to try to explain a STAR05 ballot simply to people with a forum they are very familiar with. A ballot might look like below
How do you feel about ___x___ candidate?
Very Unfavorably, unfavorably, neutral, favorably, very favorably
Those are your 5 options. Yes, this isn't exact, but we can't have an infinite score. But as we understand distributions, we know that the fluctuations won't matter much. If a group of people have an "honest" opinion that a candidate is rated "favorably" (or a 4) we'll see a distribution around this (a fairly tight distribution). So you'll get some 3's and 5's, but most people will give 4's and the average will be 4. So it isn't an issue. Similarly, if you are ranking people and view two candidates equally 50% of people will put candidate A in front of B and vise versa (well real world there'd be a bias for things like: who is listed first, "nicer" sounding name, familiarity, etc. But still, that's not too big of an issue because at the end we get pretty close to the optimal efficiency that the system can provide). You have to remember that there is no perfect system, Arrow and Gibbard showed that. But the question is if we statistically come close to the optimal (that the system can provide).
I want to point out that simple approval voting is VERY effective, even though it is low precision. You're literally choosing "like" and "dislike." Analysts aren't that concerned with the lack of objectivity in the difference between a 4 and 5 or a 3 and 4 because it is much more refined. If this is a major concern, then extend the expressiveness by increasing the range, e.g. 0-10.
I would also encourage you to listen to that interview that I linked. Arrow briefly discusses this topic. He makes some criticisms of score voting but also says it is the option he would push (question is which he'd advocate for). Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. There's always a trade-off. We're just trying to minimize the trade-offs.
And personally, if someone made RP popular I would gladly advocate for it. But because we're trying to trade one shitty system (plurality) for something only slightly less shitty (IRV) I am going to be vocal about the issues and lying that is happening. I don't really have an issue with RCVs, but specifically IRV. This is why I wanted to make a clear distinction between the two. Because when the discussions come up we end up using different languages, using the same words to describe different things. This may have been a smart move by Fair Vote, but we're on Hacker News and there's an expectation of more nuance than we'd have in other places like Reddit or in person.
So I am happy to try my best to answer questions and provide more resources. If you like game theory, this is a great subject to learn and has clear and immediate applications (even outside of elections).
Two counterpoints:
- I'm aware of Arrow, but I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good". :) Whatever the flaws of IRV, it still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences. (We suffer so much status quo bias, it takes a lot of activation energy just to communicate to the average voter that better options exist at all!) But I happily cede the point: IRV is not the best choice of all the available options.
- My favorite is actually Approval, and I don't always bring it up because it has lower mindshare and is less self-descriptive / "sticky-branding" compared to Ranked Choice. My reasons for the preference:
(a) There's no nitpicking over counting methods: whoever gets the most votes wins.
(b) Easy to explain to voters (including the counting system), and degrades gracefully for those who still want to vote for only one candidate. (I've heard objections that some voters hit a cheater-detection trigger, that "some people get more votes than others"; this can be solved by reframing as "Y/N" per candidate, so X candidates = X Y/N votes per voter).
(c) I believe it largely sidesteps Arrow by redefining the success condition: rather than attempt to perfectly measure ideal preferences, it definitionally represents "Consent of the Governed": not who's your favorite, but who are you willing to live with? This would make it more difficult for bolder and more unconventional candidates, but at the benefit of rewarding coalitions and consensus-building. Polarization and sowing distrust would cease to be a viable strategy.
(As an aside, in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held.)
This is 100% how you should think about it. But what I'm trying to say is that we already have substantially better methods, so why not use them? Perfect is the enemy of good, but if I have the choice of eating acid, a bowl of oatmeal, and chocolate pudding, I'm going with the pudding. Perfect is the enemy of good when we don't already have the choices sitting right in front of us.
> [IRV] still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences
And here's where I'm disagreeing, but only slightly. It is definitely better, but not an order of magnitude.
> Approval voting
I love approval voting. It is great because of its simplicity. That's why they use it in systems like Netflix. Easy to collect and gather results from. Honestly I use it all the time. It is how I solve the "where do you want to eat" problem with friends. You just list things until you get a unanimous vote or if you exhaust your list you just take the most approvals. Simple and easy.
The reason I don't like it for elections is that it makes tying easy and I do not believe it has enough precision. The interview I linked Arrow talks about this so I'll deffer to him (he's clearly smarter than me). In elections you need a clear winner.
Why I like score voting (and Condorcet methods, like RP, which is again RCV) is because I actually hate party systems, but I recognize that they can't be destroyed. But these methods drastically reduce their power (I don't think IRV does).
And I highly encourage you to dig more into the subject and am happy to provide links. I also highly suggest looking deep into everything that the Fair Vote chart discusses, mainly because I believe you will be as frustrated as me (and others, like Condorcet proponents) when you learn what each of those topics are. Everyone I know that is well read in the subject is frustrated by Fair Vote's mischaracterizations.
I think this, all by itself, would be a great thing to have in elections. If this had existed in every election in which I have voted, I think I would have used it at least half the time, quite possibly more.
At any rate, I'm very much in agreement, I think it's a sound policy across the board, even in the context of FPTP. One thing our election system fails to do is disambiguate between voter apathy, and the implicit protest vote of staying home (Australia's mandatory voting being another solution, albeit lacking the teeth of a "None of the Above" reboot).
An alternative for many posts would be to have no one in the office once the incumbent's term expires. For example, suppose no one wins a race for a seat in the House of Representatives: when the incumbent's term expires, that seat could simply be vacant, and could be deemed to have voted "abstain" for all votes during the term in which it is empty (or until a new special election is held to hopefully fill the seat).
(For an office like the President, there might have to be some other provision made.)
This would also handle the other case you mention:
> For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%?
I would say yes: that counts as no one winning the election, so the seat remains vacant until a new special election is held (assuming someone does win that).
> What if literally no one else wants the job?
Then I would say the will of the people is that they prefer to have no one doing it, if they do not approve of anyone who wants it.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Gavin-Newsom-ve...
If you're wondering why it was vetoed, maybe look at the history of CVRA lawsuits and how having districts has helped communities more than RCV. RCV is an apportioning method, which doesn't necessarily make it a good voting method.
The two parties do not significantly differ on indefinite detention of American citizens on US soil.
The two parties do not significantly differ on domestic spying, dragnet-style data collection and warrantless wiretapping.
The two parties do not differ on their support for backdoors in encryption.
The two parties do not significantly differ on allowing extra-judicial targeted killings.
The two parties do not significantly differ on the use of unmanned drones, either for combat or domestic surveillance.
The two parties both support pre-emptive "cyber" war and non-defensive hacking.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for continuing the War On Terror and War On Drugs.
The two parties both support maintaining US military bases around the world.
The two parties do not significantly differ on favoring Keynesian economics.
The two parties support delegating monetary policy decisions to the Federal Reserve, including support for quantitative easing.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of earmarks and pork barrel spending.
Neither of the two parties have (recently) proposed plans for balancing the budget.
Neither of the two parties plans to significantly cut defense spending.
The two parties both favor taxpayer-funded foreign aid.
The two parties are largely backed by the same corporate sponsors and special interest groups, with a few key differences.
The two parties both backed TARP and in general favor bailing out companies too big to fail.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their general support of "economic stimulus" as a tool to prop up the economy.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for and allegiance to Israel.
The two parties both favor and continue sanctions on Iran.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited spending from corporations and special interest groups.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of gerrymandering to gain political advantage.
The two parties oppose any measures that would strengthen the viability of a third party.
The EU has been considering similar anti-encryption legislation for years. Primarily supported by France, UK and Germany. The main opponents to it in the EU have been NGOs, which mirrors the American experience on this issue.
The cynic in me speculates the reason the EU parliament hasn’t pushed the issue further is simply because it’s waiting for it’s influential members states (or the US) to pass the legislation required to gut these services, so that they won’t have the potentially unpopular task of doing so themselves.
Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
It most certainly does. Security and Justice are very clearly established as areas of “shared responsibilities” in the EU, granting the EU parliament has full authority legislate.
> Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
Sorry to disappoint, but...
https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/15/germany_joins_antienc...
The EU has also explored a number of backdoor-by-another-name options, including a very concerning Function Encryption initiative [0], and forcing E2EE service providers to refresh secrets to insert government actors into conversations.
[0]: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/780108
My primary motivation for posting the parent comment was that any EU resident who thinks their governments are above this sort of thing is absolutely wrong, and if you’re complacent and fail to hold your governments to account, this is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to happen. You can’t just read the feel-good press releases and hope for the best. European politicians are politicians too, and if there’s anything politicians of all stripes have always been good at, it’s accumulating power and lying.
[1]Kind of, Democrats think tech companies got Trump elected, Republicans think tech companies are suppressing conservative viewpoints, but either way, they agree on the problem.
Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. The tech platforms have been shielded from lawsuits by 230. Once 230 is suspended or repealed, they will no longer be shielded from lawsuits.
As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob.
Section 230 just makes the courts more efficient. There is no loophole.
Sorry to keep posting this link but the Section 230 misconception is very dangerous.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
https://www.popehat.com/2019/08/29/make-no-law-deplatformed/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4XJHX_pNOc
I doubt it (though feel free to link to a statement), because they aren't "allowed" to put labels on tweets because of Section 230, they're allowed to do so by the first amendment.
Speech is supposed to have consequences. How else could it be?
> Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists.
I guess nazis can be seen as conservative voices by definition. But isn't that the same thing as Fox in the other direction? Corporations suppress viewpoints they don't like. Have you read the ToS?
> As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob
So newspapers will be unable to report the news because people might lose their jobs? People lose their job all of the time when newspapers report on their crimes/actions.
Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.
I started writing a reply to parent before I saw yours but I stopped when I saw this sentence because there's no way I could put it better.
That said if this does pass, we can only hope that the attractive nuisances of webapps will fall out of fashion. User-advocating client software is the real anti-censorship future. Of course what will likely happen is the frog will slowly continue to boil, and the censorship regime will be extended to p2p communications as well.
I myself believe that companies should be doing a better job at moderating the contents they host in their websites, but also that by repealing such provision, smaller ventures with not enough money to enforce the rules, would either go bankrupt or simply suppress any third party content to avoid issues with the law enforcement.
A huge portion of Google Ad income is malicious content, and as long as they can't be sued or indited for it, they're going to continue to automatically approve and profit off criminal activity.
The problem with Section 230 isn't about one guy who posts something bad, the problem is with systemic abuse on platforms which are financially motivated to allow the abuse to continue.
Citation needed.
Also, wouldn't this also apply to broadcasting companies? Say, potentially harmful commercials airing on prime time.
And importantly, broadcast television doesn't get Section 230 protections, and does just fine. A great example of why tech companies don't need immunity. Broadcast TV ads are sold on a smaller scale, such that humans are involved in the process and bad actors are caught early.
> Citation needed.
The general problem here is that Google is the only one with meaningful data, and obviously they're very motivated not to reveal how big a market illegal activity is on their platform. Note that even in legitimate verticals, scams push the bidding higher for advertising on their platforms. So not only does Google make money directly off scammers, they also make more money off legitimate advertisers because the bidding was higher. Google both claims that there's no data proving their business is illegitimate, while keeping all the data secret. So we have to rely on the evidence we can see.
A great example is what The Verge uncovered in 2017 with rehab scams: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... where they found some insane CPCs: "If you’re in Arizona, and you click on the top ad, you’ll cost that advertiser around $221", and Google was actively soliciting business in this extremely valuable market: "The search giant actively courts treatment centers, both online and off. In May, a Google “digital ambassador” was a featured speaker at the Treatment Center Executive & Marketing Retreat". They had multiple people directly focused on cultivating business in this particular market. Scammers were both harming consumers directly, and also pushing the CPCs up to insane levels for real drug rehab centers, hurting consumers indirectly as well.
You can also see an interesting way Google helps bad actors stay hidden here: "The 800 number was ephemeral. ...Google offers advertisers unique “tracking” phone numbers that forward to a company’s phones, so they can understand which ads are bringing in the most clients. The phone numbers only stay up as long as the ad does." So you can't even meaningfully trace out a phone number on a scam ad back to the company that pays for it. Everything is laundered through Google accounts.
After this piece, of course, Google finally acted and more or less shut down their entire drug rehab vertical for a while, and retooled it. I'm sure it's drastically less profitable now. But the problem is, they got to keep the millions and millions of dollars profit they got from engaging in a business practice that was directly harmful to people.
My long time example, which Google still refuses to address, is searches for "mapquest". MapQuest is a top search term for seniors, who don't realize that other directions sites exist. To it's credit, MapQuest is still pretty decent. Problem is, Google sells ads for "Maps Quest" that look like the real site, but redirect you to sites that require you install browser-hijacking add-ons in order to proceed (add-ons hosted in the Chrome Web Store, I might add). No matter how many times I've attempted to report them, these sites are allowed to continue doing this. A Googler actually had them removed once, and Google re-enabled the same sites' ads within a couple of hours.
Another fun part of this, is that if MapQuest wants to be presented above those malicious ads, MapQuest has to outbid them... for it's own trademarked brand name! Ad squatting is another way Google rakes in massive revenues via essentially blackmail: Pay us or we'll let scammers place higher than you for your own name.
I wouldn't hazard a statistic, because it'd be a guess, but I ...
I'm not denying that Google profits from these, that would be silly. My point is that broadcast companies run morally questionable ads all the time, yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability.
Take for example drug commercials. If you are concerned about scams targeting seniors, then you must have reservations about these, since the way they portray drug positive effects, and downplay the adverse ones, is clearly misleading. Or, say, political ads. Facebook is taking a lot of flak because of these, but local TV stations have been running misleading and often borderline hateful commercials for ages, e.g.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/ct-met-jeanne-ives-b...
https://www.kcur.org/show/up-to-date/2016-07-25/asian-americ...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/10577284453865390...
None of the broadcasters involved in playing these commercials faced any sort of legal consequences. Shouldn't that change, too?
I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe. I just can't tell you if it's 30%, 60%, or 90% of their revenue, the public doesn't have access to that information. I'm confident that how ever much you believe it is, it's higher.
> yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability
On the contrary, repealing Section 230 would place Google on the same level of accountability as broadcast companies. Section 230 carves out a special immunity to prosecution and lawsuit that only applies to online platforms. Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
Well, that's pretty much wishful thinking.
> Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
Are they now.
Let's put it this way: section 230 protects Facebook from being held accountable for the anachronistic opinion about Jewish people, and violent tendencies derived from it, of a random user. Such random user, as a TV show guest, could spout a call to arms to an audience of 2,5 million spectators, and the broadcaster would not suffer any legal consequences.
Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News.
Under what law? Section 230 is a special exemption for tech companies. Without it, Google is indeed subject to the same laws as Fox News. Now, it's possible those laws aren't strong enough... but they'd be equally not strong enough upon both Google and Fox News.
Currently, Fox News is held accountable poorly, and Google is not held accountable at all whatsoever.
Name a single US based TV station prosecuted because some of their guests made false or hateful comments on air. Heck, it is in fact easier for the FCC to nail a broadcast company for "indecency", rather than hate speech.
Which means, if Fox News isn't held accountable enough, you shouldn't see any reason for Section 230 to exist: It's not protecting tech companies from any effective law as it is, so removing it won't harm anyone.
What multiuser system would survive a libel-law attack from a highly unfriendly jurisdiction? Email, forums, comments, and other forms of posting opinions would immediately cause any small operator to shutdown.
You just need a friend to make libelous comments on discus and then sue any site you want. 230 isn't a loophole, it's essential for speech on the Internet.
The President wants to kill 230 because Twitter is censoring his tweets. His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
It's politics; everything's always about politics. Whether this will be good for the industry and society is another question.
I suspect “get off my property”.
Twitter and Facebook and everyone else have those same rights.
They clearly state in their ToS that speech is limited on their platform.
> His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
Well, his response was to state he was "looking to see if he could suspend their protection". There is nothing to be worried here, because anyone can tell him that the answer is that he can't suspend their protection.
It was just infantile bluffing that in most other situations would cause the person bluffing to lose face, but not in the current political reality. In most situations, it's best to not state orders that you can't possible enforce and that reveal your weakness.
Summary: there is no loophole.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
They have continually made moves like this, in a boiling frog fashion. Until we the people wake up from the two party divide and conquer system, very little will change, excepting very rare circumstances of pressure exerted en masse (SOPA/PIPA is a good example outlier).
I've thought about solutions to this problem for a long time, and my conclusion is the things needed are the following (in order to prevent a long term overton window shift as has been happening):
1. Renewed participation in local politics and elections, especially at the state level, but also county, city, etc.
2. Once that is achieved, voting in ranked choice voting initiatives. This will enable the next step.
3. Stop voting for anyone based on party, in particular the main power structure is based on the majority rule in the house and senate... the end goal would be to take away the majority from both parties. This is a huge undertaking, so I'm not saying it would be easy, or even possible, but I think it is what is required. I think those paying attention enough and not enured to the tribalism of the parties understands they cannot be reformed from the inside. They are simply too entrenched, and have too many mechanisms to get rid of those who seek to do so. The point is that we don't need to gain a majority with this new coalition party of independents and third parties, we simply need to take the majority away from the two main parties. To get this done though, [1] must be done, because many of the state laws have been manipulated by the duopoly to prevent third parties and independents.
3.1 To avoid fracturing of the coalition, there should be some very rudimentary and base document that all persons running can agree on. This is also difficult but, since all congresspeople swear an oath to the constitution (5 U.S. Code § 3331), something that reaffirms the principles of the constitution would be the best start. If they violate this, the coalition should work to remove them immediately. (something similar to Gingrich's "Contract with America")
4. Currently, and many don't know this, congresspeople have to sign an affidavit (5 U.S. Code § 3333) confirming their oath. I think we should then work towards enforcement of the laws against violation thereof, the primary one being perjury, or something similar (18 U.S. Code § 1918, 5 U.S. Code § 7311). For example, how many people have straight up lied to congress and had no action taken against them? (Clapper is one of the more egregious ones that comes to mind, but the point is congress is in dereliction of duty in enforcing perjury laws)
This would give the people a real opportunity to start passing laws that represent the people (such as term limits), but are still constitutionally sound.
The legislative is the branch closest to the people, and this is why it should be the focus. From a cleaned up legislative we can begin to resurrect the separation of power between the branches that has been egregiously eroded, primarily by the executive. The current checks and balances system is crumbling. A huge part of this erosion is the surveillance system, which enables compromise of congresspeople by the executive and the MICC. We must fight for privacy, both encryption and anonymity, as a fundamental part of protecting the checks and balances system.
INTJ?
I've thought about it because I honestly considered running for POTUS, but even that is because I consider my oath the the constitution still valid even though I've been out of the military for a long time, though I'm still recovering my brain.
The master keys became available on 3D printing sites after the TSA allowed a photo of them to be published in a news article: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/lockpickers-3-d-print-tsa-lugg...
And to make it much worse, we would now also have to ask "how soon until the required systemic weaknesses themselves are used an attack vector for a mass breach?".
Just for a moment, ignore all arguments about citizens' rights to privacy, potential for abuse by the organizations authorized to access the secrets (and their many fallible and corruptible employees), and so on. Of course all that _is_ important, but just for the sake of argument, ignore it. The problem remains that if anything resembling the "EARN IT" bill passes, then attacks against encryption will _scale too effectively_, and the USA will have exposed itself to having the secrets of thousands of politicians and civil servants leaked to an adversary at once. What do you think happens to democracy when that happens?
I get that many people are short-sighted, or even simply apathetic to the long-term consequences of a law that might make their job easier today. But it seems that whenever computers are involved, lawmakers become _so_ incredibly short-sighted that it verges on madness.
Consider this: a bill requiring a small GPS and remote-controlled bomb to be installed in the engine of every car would allow the police to entirely avoid dangerous high-speed pursuits. If it could be done cheaply enough, should it be done? It's pretty easy to understand the myriad ways this could be abused, so it would never happen. But add computers to the mix, and suddenly any kind of foresight goes out the window.
The game is different than it once was; They aren't out murdering like Genghis Khan, but they are no less indifferent towards the people they harm in their conquest. The extent of their love for their country and it's people is the extent to which they can control it all. I've gotten to know this kind of sociopathic power-obsessed personality up close, and have no doubt certain mega-rich assholes out there influencing the political sphere have the same "defect".
As much as I hate it, I can at least understand the back door argument from a [ignorant] lawmaker perspective. If I pretend and say their intentions are noble, I understand.
What concerns me though, beyond the obvious backdoor problems, is the who is next? Because I doubt big corporations will satisfy their greed for power and information. Especially since anyone who has anything to hide or cares about security will move into open source.
As a developer with a passion for developing distributed, encrypted software - when are they going to threaten me? Worse yet, the software I write I purposefully do not have control over. So am I going to be held liable for the fact that I literally cannot help them?
No matter what they threaten me with, the best I could do is break the application for future users. So what are they going to do to control these distributed systems? Especially ones who truly aim to be distributed, P2P & self hosted by every user?
As terrifying as the current anti-encryption behavior is, I'm oddly more concerned about the move after this.
There's clearly a valid argument from the other side. For example:
>Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material, according to people familiar with the reports.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
It's not clear how many of those lead to convictions but even a tiny fraction of a percent represents a significant number of children being rescued. Encrypting Messenger, as an example, will stop 3/4s of abuse reports and make it much safer and easier for paedophiles to exchange images. There's a pretty direct line from that decision to an increase in abuses like:
>“inserting an ice cube into the vagina” of a young girl, the documents said, before tying her ankles together, taping her mouth shut and suspending her upside down. As the video continued, the girl was beaten, slapped and burned with a match or candle.
>“The predominant sound is the child screaming and crying,” according to a federal agent quoted in the documents.
I'm actually fine with some kids biting the dust (yes literally being killed) to prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything (especially in poor volatile countries where cops are in fact part of the problem and happy to look away ...)
No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse.
>prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives.
Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
>I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything
Here's one that comes to mind:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gd9b/facebook-helped-fb...
Facebook helped develop a zero day exploit that the FBI used to catch a predator that abused dozens of girls. In this one specific case clearly more power to the cops solved something.
I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones, computers, or from sites like Facebook. It stands to reason that if we saw default E2E encryption across the board it would be a lot harder for the police to get evidence and would lead to a lot fewer convictions.
I am firmly-albeit-reluctantly OK with this, if the alternative is widespread surveillance of what should logically be private correspondence/communication among private citizens.
I value the privacy of the hundreds of millions of the citizen population over a slight increase in the conviction rate of the tens to hundreds of thousands predators.
I am probably in the minority here on HN but I think bundling together encryption with platforms like Facebook/IG is a bad idea given how easy those platforms make it for bad actors to meet/identify potential victims. Signal/whatsapp etc I am ok with since they dont provide that same ability.
call me old fashioned but every time I look at porn (which is very rare these days) I am disgusted by the meta-data that is added to these videos. It shows that people love to click on videos that read "stepdad and stepdaughter ..." and similar taglines. America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho and it's the main reason why I hate porn. It looks like it's hard to find videos where some form of domination (rough sex) isn't part of it. the way women are treated is IMO the gateway which normalizes violence first against women (even pretend rape is a genre here pushed by pornhub & co). why do people get off on this and why do porn companies get away with it ?? <- my opinion is to start the crackdown on this type of messaging here and before even cracking down have a discussion about wtf is wrong with people? why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
> Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
the problem with FB is mostly that it many countries FB _is_ the Internet. Myanmar (the Rohinga's) would be a fitting example. Also the Philipines where the Duarte government is currently using it on their brutal war on drugs. If there would be justice Zuck and anyone working at FB would be rotting in jail even before we discuss pedophelia. thousands in the Philipines have been killed thanks to Duarte's messaging. FB literally kills and gets away with it.
FB agreeing to develop 0days to crack down on a few cases doesn't make them the good guys. I believe the world would be better off if FB wouldn't exist at all.
Vice is also known to push a pro-cop pro-LE agenda. I stopped watching their videos and reading their content when they showed how cannabis production in Albania hurts Europe (wtf) ... they are a pro-cop & ultra-conservative outlet. Screw vice and screw cops.
> I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones,
I know security companies love to cite their work with law-enforcement and how they help fight crime. when I had an interview with the biggest Swiss security company few years ago they bragged about their work with Interpol and how they help fight the bad guys. But nobody ever mentions that the software companies like NSO, Gamma, HackingTeam makes doesn't just allow LS to compromise phones (people assume it's read-only) when reality is the features are always read-write. Putting things on these devices is possible because from an engineering pov why would you limit a feature and not allow write access ... I know enough cops who brag about how they abuse their power . So why would I trust them not to plant shit on these phones (especially when they're convinced that they're dealing with a bad guy).
It is impossible to have a discussion on this topic when some people use the word Pedophilia to cover "babies and small children" and others are using it to cover zero to eighteen year olds. While it might be immoral or illegal if a 55 year old is having sex with a 16 year old it isn't pedophilia. A Daddy kink is incest, again not pedophilia. Please use the correct terms. Otherwise it muddies the discussion until no one can discuss it at all.
>why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
Okay, now it smells like SJW and white-knighting. Many women fantasize about being raped, dominated and strangled. There's nothing bad or wrong in living out those fantasies. It doesn't normalize violence or cause rape.
I would challenge that. I would argue that it is a that there are a lot of people (regardless of country) that get a rise out of things that are taboo. One of those things is the step-parent/child thing (because parent/child is too far for many people).
Would it not be better to figure out ways we could tackle that? Counsellors taking a close look at children? Teachers trained to identify abused children? CPS making a closer examination of suspicious households?
I know you're coming from but online crime really is a tip of an iceberg. An iceberg that is easy to spot but one which masks the true scope of the insidiousness going on below and makes it all too easy to say mission accomplished.
To prevent someone from growing dependent on or vulnerable to an external abuser, we could invest in mental healthcare and counselling for conditions like depression which is all too common in teenagers nowadays.
Facebook should not be in the business of writing malware. Malware which could well be used against activists.
FB Messager report function sends a decrypted copy to Facebook AFAIK.
It is also a very electable sound bite. Everyone is against the "bad people". Re-election at any cost is the goal. We have government of the people and by the people but we stopped being for the people long long ago.
It's only in libertarian/ancap bubbles of places like HN where pedos and terrorists are treated like noble antiheroes in the eternal war against fascism and political correctness. If you're going to talk about government "for the people" you need to remember who "the people" actually are and what the majority of them want.
I used to investigate computer crime. You know what would have made my job really easy? Unlimited access to all computers worldwide.
Luckily I had to learn alternative investigative methods because we value privacy more than we value catching criminals, which is a good thing. I'd rather a criminal go free once in a while than a complete loss of privacy.
Isn't that more-or-less what the NSA have already?
What I mean is, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA already have most criminals' dirty laundry. The only thing keeping the law from rolling 'em up wholesale is the Overton window around parallel construction.
In the UK, the soviets were almost totally successful largely because the British establishment could not believe that someone who came from the right place and went to the right place could really be a communist spy. Even after, with or without hindsight, it was obvious Kim Philby was almost exonerated and re-entered MI6 to an extent purely because the people above him decided it was simultaneously too damaging and unlikely for a Cambridge man to be a communist.
Hawkish foreign policy would be another one.
Not sure what is the solution here, the popular people's choice couldn't even get elected.
> we
"It's a big club and you ain't in it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0
"This bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20, 2010, a Monday. And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it said it was scheduled for a vote on September 23 — just three days later.
And while of course there had to be a vote — you can't pass a bill without a vote — the results of that vote were a foregone conclusion. Because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn't just introduced by one, rogue, eccentric member of Congress. It was introduced by the chair of the committee — and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members — Republicans and Democrats. So there would be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill — before it was even introduced.
I can't stress enough how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean the way it really works. I think we all know that Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics.
...
Whoever was behind this was good."
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/how-aaron-swa... (excerpt from talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqriFtr2k-k -- FWIW the lobbyist behind sopa/pipa was Chris Dodd, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd#Motion_Picture_Asso...)
Have you noticed routine protest and informed debate occurring throughout the US for oh say 30 years to be generous?
Political reality isn’t logical, it’s on the nose. There’s no engagement to prevent this, and decades of flag waving as enforcement funding is cut.
That has an impact.
The generation that still holds the most seats in government has no idea how any of this works.
Giving them the benefit of the doubt it’s ignorance not informed malice their intuition is nevertheless “expand police state.”
I’m sure we’ll all take a break from HN and debating flat or skeuomorphic to tell them piss off
Then everyone will be like “Whoa?! Who would have thought something like this could happen!”. I feel like this is a tale as old as time.
Most differences between republicans and democrats are superficial. Republicans don't really believe in small government no more than Democrats really believe in social justice.
Which is how we end up with stuff like the EARN IT Act that one would reasonably think would be shot down immediately, but isn't.
"My opponent supports giving all law enforcement officers unrestricted access to your children's chats, photos and calls."
EARN IT looks like a compromise compared to this: https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/06/there%E2%80%99s-n... which is I assume why it was pushed only a few days ago.
You're talking about an electorate that has been shown the abuses of its data by Google, Facebook, and others time and again and couldn't care less.
The ruling elite have a monopoly on this. They publicly opposite it via bills like this and use media giants to crush 'conspiracy theories' involving people like Epstein and all the people he was closely associated with in Washington and Hollywood.
I think if we actually got evidence and leaks on how bad child abuse within politicians are, Americans would be absolutely horrified by the straight up hypocrisy.
[1] https://youtu.be/6OYyXv2l4-I?t=52
We need a new Church committee.
Do you want creepy gov't contractors spying on your kids?
Perhaps instead of supporting politicians who "say" they're going to do X, Y, and Z we should support politicians who have a track record of doing exactly X, Y and Z regardless of how politically convenient it is to do something else.
More laws will not fix the problem of having too many bad laws, in my opinion.
Sadly, I think issues need constant re-engaging since they pop up under different names and in different forms.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/new-earn-it-bill-still...
I'd really love to be missing something. It feels like this is just fading into the background... and while I can acknowledge the idea that you might just try to fight this as unconstitutional after it passes, that feels inherently risky given this administration (if not downright stupid).
The primary thing with this bill that the companies seem explicitly quiet on is the fact that the use case it opens up for the government (sidestepping user privacy/encryption) coupled with the level of power it more or less places in the Attorney General's hands.
I can't in good faith assume that these companies are comfortable with this, and I'd like to know why they're not speaking up.
If they were in bed with the feds, the FBI/NYPD wouldn’t keep asking them for keys that Apple doesn’t have.
These bad bills keep coming up in an effort to address serious real problems, like child porn. People are going to keep proposing bills to address these problems until something passes.
By just concentrating on shooting down bad bill after bad bill without devoting any effort to getting good bills proposed the next bill after each defeated bad bill will be another bill from the same general set of people. Maybe the new one will address some of the issues in the prior ones but the chances are good that it won't address all of them.
Just telling everyone else what is wrong with their approach to solving a problem instead of also offering up your own better solutions tends to not work well in the long run.
Can you quantify the size of this problem? It sounds like military defense spending during the cold war. "You just have to take our word for it that child porn is a massive problem affecting 1 out of 4 children, so we need to crush the tech industry."
How would you think the introduction of a competing bill would fare, if it still needs the support of the first bill proponents? Wouldn't they believe that anything short than the original bill is not worth supporting?
I don't think the issue is that there are no better ways to deal with, say, child porn. I do believe that many politicians, if not most, refuse to acknowledge that there are better solutions out there, and for that there are several factors.
I have not seen any evidence that it is a serious problem in that it has significant impact at a societal level.
These bills are not being introduced to significantly reduce child porn. They're meant to further enhance surveillance powers or earn easy political points. Any actual effect on crime is a side benefit.
Let's not forget that the same people that propose these bills are the ones hanging out at Epstein's private island.
>Let's not forget that the same people that propose these bills are the ones hanging out at Epstein's private island.
The implication in the last sentence of your comment would seem to contradict your initial premise.
This is an obvious short-term mitigation tactic until they develop brain implants that can pre-emptively moderate harmful thoughts.
Or finally dispense with the desire to police the residents of other countries, and contact the local authorities.
- Undercover police work and informants, which is how most large busts already happen now. The worst offenders are not swapping child porn on Facebook or Dropbox
- Encourage marriage and remove benefits penalties for two-parent households, as children are substantially more likely to be abused when their biological father is not in the household
- Institute the death penalty for child sexual abuse and make sure it is performed swiftly and publicly
Before you think that's too harsh, consider that the other options are to ban encryption or to not try to stop it at all (quasi-decriminalization).
I don't think anyone would oppose a bill to make CP carry the death penalty. The problem is they won't ever make this law because then they won't be able to milk the cow anymore.
What you can crackdown on are the producers.
You can infiltrate the places where it is originally disseminated.
You can run face and voice recognition on the content.
You can flip lower level mass distributors into informants to gather evidence on the producers.
For rapists.
You can train teachers and counsellors to identify children who have been abused and to handle other psychological problems like depression which are endemic in our society.
You can train police officers to better spot criminals on a basis other than race or status.
You can better fund the CPS.
You can conduct assessments on parents who appear to be mentally unstable.
The solution proposed by the researchers in the referenced documentary is to create AI agents that can automate the work of posing as offenders or posing as victims. This solves the scaling problem of the law enforcement agencies.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcCj1zNpKoM
Tie the "correct" solution to their real political motivations and it will get done in a heartbeat. It has to be something they can sell to their base though.
If privacy (as partially defined as crypto) looked important to the hordes of people and/or the lobbyists, we wouldn't have anything to worry about. Think about the children is a much easier platform to get elected for though.
If I texted you and told you I'm 13 years old, would you start hitting on me?
edit: It seems there is a misunderstanding of what the AI does. It simulates human traffickers in text or video chat in order to find people who try to exchange money with them, and it simulates children in text and video chat in order to find people who try to groom them. It does not simulate child sexual abuse material or proliferate child sexual abuse material.
High schooler sold drugs to undercover cop who pretended to be his girlfriend: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/457/what-i-did-for-love/act...
Legal study on failures of the entrapment defense in post-9/11 terrorism cases: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-social-inqui...
Most people will make a plea deal when faced with prosecution, so there’s never an adversarial process in front of a judge and jury.
I feel vindicated for voting against her in 2018, because I thought she'd be out of touch with our interests as a state.
She’ll send a smarmy response about how you’re clearly an idiot for thinking it has anything to do with encryption, and how she’s proud to be a co-sponsor.
She’s been completely ignoring voter complaints for decades. Before open primaries, it was essentially impossible for her to lose an election, and she knew it.
I’m extremely liberal, but if the “recall governor Newsom” crowd went after Feinstein instead, I’d sign on in a heartbeat.
Feinstein wiped the floor with everyone in the primary in 2018. She took 44% of the vote, and the next leading candidate (Kevin de Leon) took 12%. When they ran against each other, de Leon lost by a fairly large margin but turnout kind of sucked.
de Leon wasn't a good candidate by any means, and I voted for the guy. He always struck me as a bit of a smarmy huckster who didn't stand for anything but reelection. But I knew that Feinstein was probably running for her last term and only cared about serving the national party's interests, and not our state. I'll take the guy that wants my next vote over someone that probably won't live long enough to get it.
Obviously there are other externalities to consider (Feinstein is very senior), etc... But I don't know why anyone is so upset that she's the "worst democrat". She'd be the "worst republican" too.
You want consensus-building nonpartisan elections, you get candidates that reflect social consensus and not your particular party's priorities.
Except de Leon carried the red districts. Not Feinstein.
What is called "centrist" is nowhere near the center, but is actually straight up authoritarianism. If you look at both the blue team's and red team's grassroots messages, individuals are not happy with how much control the government exerts over us. Each political team markets a half-libertarian message and lures individual voters in by focusing on those gripes. They then channel their supporters' energy into going after the "other team", and "compromise" by enacting the fully authoritarian policies their sponsors paid for.
But calling them (sigh) "authoritarian" isn't helping your case when they come back at you to persecute a (sigh) "revolutionary" or "extremist". Work with people. Centrists aren't idiots. Their constituency is real, and has concerns too.
We already have a word for this - conservative. And I do agree that conservatives have consistent and valid points, even if I do not agree.
I don't know what other word to use besides "authoritarian" as in the two-dimensional political space with red-blue on one axis, and authoritarian-libertarian on the other.
To me "centrist" implies some middle of the road. I do not agree that someone who supports (this bill, the patriot act, elective wars, drone strikes, etc) deserves the label centrist, as they're nowhere near the entire libertarian half of the political spectrum. Allowing this to be called centrism is privileging and cloaking authoritarianism.
> I don't know what other word to use besides "authoritarian"
And for the same reasons, it doesn't help your case to invent new jargon here either. The word you're looking for, describing people generally predisposed to agreement with existing social and government structures, is "centrist". It's what I use, it's what everyone in journalism uses. It's probabaly what you use too when you're talking to people in the real world and not trying to score points with hyperbole on HN by likening centrists to Nazis and Communists.
Basically: you know what I meant.
The three political spectrums are:
- Progressive <-> Conservative
- Liberal <-> Fascist (Authoritarian)
- Left-wing <-> Right-wing
Progressive is someone who pushes are for change, major change, and rapid change. Conservative is someone who likes things how they are, wants to make changes slowly and carefully. People can be progressive on some topics (like pushing for civil rights), and conservative on others (like being careful about changing fiscal policy). But lots of people will default to one or the other.
Liberal is to allow, a true liberal would allow things they disagree with. A fascist (authoritarian) forces everyone to be like them, and passes laws to force everyone to do as they believe.
Left-wing and right-wing is less a spectrum and more clustering of ideologies.
Left-wing ideologies generally favor the community as a whole over the individual, and support those with less power or who are less well off. That results in things like pro environment, minority rights, and social welfare. Internationally left-wing could include going to war overseas to protect people from oppression and powerful aggressors.
Right-wing ideologies tend to favor the individual and those in power, more everyone for themselves. This could mean freedom to make individual choices that hurt the environment, pro big business, lack of social services. In the extreme it can be racism against minorities. Internationally it could result in isolationist policies.
I think if people actually understand the terms, and they are well defined, people can thinks about how they as an individual feel. And maybe that can help us break away from the two-party fighting we have now.
I think if people actually analyze there beliefs, they may come to better understand themselves, and people can better understand each other. For example I think some people that call themselves "Progressive Liberals" will find out they they are "Progressive Left-wing Fascist", and some people who call themselves "Conservative" will find that they are "Conservative Left-wing Liberals".
> That's not what "conservative" means in modern political discourse, at all. And I'm sure you know this
I honestly don't know what "conservative" is supposed to mean in the modern political discourse, besides simply referring to people who support the red team. Therefore, I think it's instructive to fall back to its general abstract meaning. For example, current Trump supporters are in no way actually conservative. Hence seeing ideological conservatives distancing themselves from that populist-reactionary ship of destruction.
> ["centrist" is] probably what you use too when you're talking to people in the real world
I've never heard the word "centrist" in the real world. As I said, it seems like a mainstream media term shifting the Overton window towards authoritarianism (away from libertarianism), following the idea that increased centralized control can be used to solve societal problems. I apologize for using this word that you are reacting strongly to, but I've yet to hear a different straightforward technical term that refers to ever-growing government involvement.
Feinstein could not have been re-elected if it weren’t for overwhelmingly strong support for her in Silicon Valley.
If she is up for re-election again, please vote for the other candidate (who will probably also be a Democrat!). Also, tell your friends.
She wants to ban encryption. Her voting record is further to the right than many republicans. She votes according to Trump’s wishes more than any other Democrat in the senate.
> Her voting record is further to the right than many republicans. She votes according to Trump’s wishes more than any other Democrat in the senate.
This seems to imply she's in the middle of the pack for her democratic peers as it relates to Trump's wishes: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/
Such a low percentage of people in CA voted for Trump (2nd lowest after Hawaii) that a middle of the pack Democrat will be high in the default sort. The same for senators from Hawaii, who are 4th and 5th with the default sort.
Problems start to arise when the government pretends they _are_ the former and pretends they _are_not_ the latter.
In the span of many decades, perhaps centuries, all manner of governments evolve into their final form: tyranny.
Needs elaboration, but I see two major points:
1. It puts our national security at risk. It opens up American cyber-security at large to nation states like China, Russia, and Iran, as well as more sophisticated terrorist groups.
2. It hampers innovation and competition in the tech industry. Compliance will increase costs, especially for startups, especially in a Covid19 environment, and the global market will not be able trust the cyber-security of American networks.
> There was once a far away land called Ruritania, and in Ruritania there was a strange phenonmenon -- all the trees that grew in Ruritainia were transparent. Now, in the days when people had lived in mud huts, this had not been a problem, but now high-tech wood technology had been developed, and in the new age of wood, everyone in Ruritania found that their homes were all 100% see through...
> One day, a smart man invented paint -- and if you painted your house, suddenly the police couldn't watch all your actions at will...
> Indignant, the state decided to try to require that all homes have video cameras installed in every nook and cranny. "After all", they said, "with this new development crime could run rampant. Installing video cameras doesn't mean that the police get any new capability -- they are just keeping the old one." [...]
https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/04/msg00559.html
(I recommend reading the full parable.)
—————
clock.org homepage (c. 1998)
> Some agencies of the United States Government (notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)), want to prevent the deployment of encryption technology. They want either encryption so weak that just about anyone can break it, or they want a copy of every key used with strong encryption.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980113124617/http://www.clock....
Sound familiar?
—————
Mujahedeen Secrets (first release: 2007), Al-Queda’s own encrypted messaging software. Those developers aren’t going to respond to a US court order.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mujahedeen_Secrets
It's like shooting oneself in the foot before hiking.
To be accurate though that's not exactly true. The sheriff doesn't even need a key to enter your house, he can get a warrant and bust your door down.
This is a town where your house is indestructible and un-enterable without a key.
I agree that their analogy isn’t particularly strong, so I removed that part from my comment.
This isn't about their ability to seize things you have after they get a warrant. It's that they want the ability to seize things you have before they get a warrant, just in case they get one later.
It's like requiring everyone to have video cameras in their house with recordings sent to law enforcement no matter whether they're under suspicion or not, and then claiming that it's fine because they pinky swear not to look at them without a warrant. (Never mind that then you can't prove that they're not cheating, and that it would be the world's largest target for organized crime and foreign powers.)
That requires following due process, the presumption of innocence, and observing the right to privacy. You have to convince a judge, in the context of the existing laws, that a certain individual or group are suspicious enough to call for (specific) further investigation.
Mass surveillance and forcing weak encryption bypass or overturn all that. It's a radically different view when you assume everybody is guilty of something by default and that they have no right to privacy.
Even with that, you are now forcing the terrorists to roll their own encryption. The likelihood of finding an exploit in Mujahadeen Secrets is likely much higher than finding an exploit in Apple Messenger or WhatsApp or something by djb or Moxie, etc. In addition, Mujahadeen is likely having to be side loaded - you won't find it in the App Store. This gives a chance to try to hack a single storage location to have a trojan horse version spread through their network. Finally, it affects recruiting. Basically only someone already comitted will go to the trouble of having Mujahadeen Secrets on their device, whereas a lot more people could be expected to have a common end-to-end messenger on their device. So overall, thinking from a purely law enforcement, anti-terrorist perspective, it would still be better for them to not have e2e in widely used apps, even if the terrorists tried to develop their own app.
Rianna Pfefferkorn wrote a in-depth analysis about EARN IT which is really good to read:
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-b...
I also wrote a smaller high level article about it if you're interested in a briefer read:
https://medium.com/@console.blog/action-tell-your-representa...
http://noearnitact.org/call
One would argue that terrorists will simply use other inventive ways to get around lack of main stream encrypted tech (and they will). Or that a back door for the govt is a back door for anyone (which is true). Both are logical points.
I posit that this is known among backers of Earn It - they're not that dumb. Therefore, this isn't about child porn or terrorists, its about dissenters of established institutions (government, corporations, media, etc). That's the move - the "party of Davos" sees the populist wave from both left and right (AOC, Bernie, BLM, Trump, Bannon, etc) and this how they think they will stop it.
The next AOC, BLM, or any populist movement will be labeled as threats to the established order, maybe as domestic terrorists. With Earn It, you can see who they organize with, when they meet, how they strategize, etc. This is COINTELPRO with smart phones [1]. Very slick, very effective. It's what I would do in their shoes.
The only flaw is that it is poorly marketed. It's so transparent, it's cute.
J Edgar Hoover is smiling somewhere in the after life.
Do yourself a favor, treat your phone and email like CIA recording device. We'll be fine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#:~:text=COINTELPRO%....
'JoshTriplett explained it better than I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23704928
We've had warrant-proof encryption for a long time now in our society (at least 20 years?).