Currently replying on my newly deGoogled Android phone (/e/OS). It's a bit awkward in a few ways but it definitely feels like I'm not handing over all my data to Google.
The most annoying part is the hybris if they would really care they would go for the real alternatives like a pine or phones with plasma or sailfish. Nope most of these articles take the comfort option over what they preach.
A degoogled pixel phone with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS is a good alternative. You can choose not to use cloud services and better control what runs on your phone.
There actually ARE other choices - like Librem, PinePhone, etc.
These other choices definitely are better when it comes to privacy. But probably worse in every other regard.
I personally am not quite willing to make that tradeoff (yet). But I sure am highly grateful to everyone who does, and helps make those alternatives better, and helps them gain momentum.
I agree, given how much I rely on my phone/computer to just work, I'd not personally be willing to make the usability and reliability tradeoffs with switching to something like a PinePhone. Plus there are some other steps you can take to reduce the privacy/security risks of relying on Google/Apple/etc., for example I use PiHole/Tailscale for DNS and Cryptomator for files stored in the cloud
> There actually ARE other choices - like Librem, PinePhone, etc.
The trade offs pretty much rules out the alternatives for most people. I need just a few apps, but they are for payment and government stuff, so they are only ever going to be available in the official app stores. For others it's going to be messaging apps, social media or something local, like an app for the supermarket. If those apps are not available, then the point of a smartphone goes away. At least of me.
Not just you. Loads of countries are pushing further digitalization and pseudo-require a smartphone to not make things a complete hassle. If you're lucky, their APKs are distributed outside the playstore and you get to manually update everything once a month.
The whole thing is making people dependent on the common app stores. Not actually dependent, but practically.
Android is just worse from a security perspective, and I'm not an Apple fan.
If you're going to use Android, use an open source AOSP fork. Lineage, Graphene, Calyx... how can you be sure that you're actually secure and private if you can't even be sure exactly what firmware your phone is running? You can't.
It does, either via AuroraStore (complete Google Play Store replacement without google account) or Sandboxed Google Play [1]. My banking apps works, and everything else I can think of.
Hard to say what a "normal" level of tinkering is with Android, as I have switched directly from iOS to Graphene and have never used Stock Android. I am sure some things are a little bit more cumbersome, but for me the tradeoff is worth it.
Also the stock g-cam (with internet access disabled) and g-photos (with internet access disabled) make a pretty amazing photo and photo editing experience.
They lost me with their article "Why I’m Ditching Android" which is a switch from Google to Apple. Just like switching from Coke to Pepsi is not going to help you lose weight. You have to make a real change to be private.
You may have nothing to hide in the current political climate or under the current political leaders, but what is allowed now might become anathema later, and those records can be searched and retroactively prosecuted.
We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
True but your arguments here largely regard deliberate speech, whereas the post is more about personal data. What OS is running on your phone doesn't really make a difference in whether you get cancelled over something your posted on social media 10 years ago.
But were you in a certain building at the time the opposition party was having a meeting? Did you have dinner with this certain person who was part of an underground resistance (of which you had no idea at the time)? Your phone was turned off for 10 hours, during which this murder happened and someone saw you in the area.
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
This is actually my argument for the 2nd amendment too.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
>I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
2A as written doesn't just cover firearms. It covers 'arms.' Like nukes and cruise missiles. The fact that one may need these to overthrow tyranny is also a strong argument to the literal interpretation.
>When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
There is more wealth in private hands in the US than government hands.
> 2A as written doesn't just cover firearms. It covers 'arms.' Like nukes and cruise missiles.
That's a matter of interpretation, especially since weapons like those didn't exist when the 2A was written.
What really matters isn't what rights people who lived 200+ years ago thought that we should have today; it's what rights we, who are alive now, think we should have. We shouldn't accept the meaning, or even the existence, of the 2nd amendment simply because it's there. We should continually be scrutinizing and improving the entire document.
I agree 100%, which is if we now don't want 'arms' to be protected generally, the constitution should be amended to exclude nukes or whatever. Not just make shit up on the fly and say 'well it says arms but nah, we'll just ignore that because if it sounds absurd I can just re-interpret it at will'
FWIW, while I'm not aware of any court decision that would specifically claim 2A protection, things like grenade launchers, mortars, artillery, and even tanks with active main gun is all legal in US. It's just more paperwork than your usual stuff, and it has to go through the feds - but they can't just say "no".
I hate to say it but all these examples seem to be implying is that the ordinary people should be able to purchase artillery, RPGs and tanks under the 2nd amendment. Indeed, the second amendment's language regarding well regulated militias would seem to suggest the formulation of civic organizations outside of the direct control of the state and federal government with such weapons. The evidence cited here would strengthen this notion that armed civic organizations that can go toe to toe with an army corps and are not under the command of the state or federal government are one the best ways to prevent the state from abusing the monopoly on violence that has somehow been normalized in western political thought.
"Listen, you fantastically retarded motherfucker. I’m going to try to explain this so that you can understand it.
You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones or any of these things that you so stupidly believe trumps citizen ownership of firearms.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce “no assembly” edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington D.C. into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why in a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while the people have nothing but their limp dicks.
BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out the fucking window because now the police are out numbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency that the U.S. military has tried to destroy. They’re all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
Dumb. Fuck"
>They’re all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
This is incorrect.
The United States military became very skilled at dealing with them to the point that Taliban activity was near-zero.
Analyzing the causes of death of US servicemembers during the conflict, a surprisingly low number was due to firearms. All of the AKs in the world were useless against the US military and the Taliban knew it so they decided to wait the US out instead.
The moment the US left? That’s a different story.
The moral of this should be that patience is more empowering than firearms.
Patient use of firearms and other guerrilla tactics, I would say. If they weren't armed, it wouldn't have mattered how long they just sat there and waited for American troops to leave.
>The moment the US left? That’s a different story.
So in what scenario can the US military "leave" the US? You are pretty much proving the guy's point, no?
Yes, the US military could scorch earth its backyard. Nobody really denies that. What would be impossible is maintaining that control for any meaningful amount of time. This is also assuming somehow that 100% of the military and 100% of its assets are on board with whatever "regime" comes to be, which I just don't see happening.
Guns don't cause that many deaths in military conflicts in general, not even in a fair fight. The kill count is dominated by artillery, air strikes, and other such things that cover a lot of ground at once and can get thru cover much better than those tiny bullets.
But your example of Taliban is a curious one, because, for all their expensive toys, US forces in Afghanistan never really controlled much ground outside of their bases. That's why the Taliban could wait them out - because most of the country out there was already theirs to wait in. To control all that territory would have required a lot more US troops, precisely because of all those lurking Taliban fighters with their measly AKs.
The regulations surrounding private ownership of explosives require they be stored properly and be subjected to random audits. No law abiding citizen owning explosives would have them in their home.
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
> Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong
Well, this is a very extraordinary claim… also, one that makes me feel like any potential example will be dismissed by you, as you seem to have essentially considered every single instance of armed conflict involving firearms.
The rest of your comment goes over several examples but I think the foundation is flawed. There is no scenario where there would be 10 million AR-15s vs 10k “mechanized infantrymen.” It’s also akin to saying matches are useless in a competition to see who can detonate the biggest sick of dynamite.
Just touching on your first example. Of course to win an international war against the largest empire on earth, you will need more than just firearms. However, the mere existence of an access to firearms is an undeniable factor in the way things turned out.
Do you really believe independence would have been gained through “strong civic organization and rule of law” - as you claim? You then follow that by saying if that doesn’t work, whoever has more cash and weapons usually wins… certainly not what happened in the revolutionary war… nor the next big conflict (war of 1812).
The thing about privacy is you never know when future politics is going to come into play.
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
We're not, never were. We're seeing the slow decline in the hard fought rights gained over decades because we were never ever a live and let live country.
The UK is one of the most "live and let live" countries in the world.
However I think there is a marked difference between 2010 and 2022, especially in Scotland, who I used to think of as usually the sensible ones; the land of David Hume.
Free speech is being curtailed by legislation that is auspiciously about preventing "hate crime", but in actuality is being used as a tool to shut down dissenting opinions, such as the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill.
It's difficult for me to grasp why you suggest that the UK is "is one of the most 'live and let live' countries in the world." You realise that it wasn't that long ago that Alan Turing, a war hero to say the least, was chemically castrated, which lead to his death, for being gay. The Age of Consent wasn't equalised to 16 UK wide until 2008. Section 28 (and its legacies) were not outlawed until 2010. Homosexual acts stopped being grounds for dishonourable discharge from the armed forces in 2016. Same sex marriage wasn't permitted UK wide until 2020. The blanket ban against sexually active gay men from donating blood wasn't relaxed until 2020. Etc. People forget how extremely recent these things are. So it's hard for me to understand why you think the UK was and continues to be "one of the most 'live and let live' countries in the world"... is it just because our punishments were less severe? That Alan Turing was chemically castrated instead of thrown off a building? That constitutes us being a 'live and let live' society?
And this is just the history I'm personally connected with. There's plenty of other examples of how the UK has treated other minorities poorly, notably the Windrush Generation. Being a 'live and let live' society isn't, and shouldn't, just mean being the least worst country, if we can even claim that title... it's about being a permissive society, of letting people get on with their own lives unmolested and in return you can expect the same. But as I've already shown, that was in no way the case for us... if you ever wonder why there's so few gay men around the age of 60+, it's because so so many of them were left to die of the gay disease.
I don't see how "there are monarchists in Parliament" is a refutation of "this treatment of people protesting the monarchy is a strong argument in favor of abolishing the monarchy"...?
Those Monarchists were elected. I'm sorry that sometimes people you disagree with get elected. Regardless, it's the police who are enforcing this law passed by Parliament... I don't believe the law even mentions republican protests. You are blaming the Monarchy for the acts of the Government and Parliament.
Were they arrested for "protesting the monarchy" or breaching the peace? Context is important. Silently holding up a banner: fine. Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO. A bit like yelling at women entering an abortion clinic, or yelling loyalist slogans at an IRA funeral. There's a time & place.
Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".
And this is something you want enforced by the state? What other unenumerated rights should be enforced by security forces? In North Korea, security forces have the responsibility of making sure that people express the appropriate amount of worry and fear when a Kim might be ill, and the appropriate amount of rage when a Kim has been insulted by a foreign leader.
One person, probably not invited, makes a scene, shouts a bunch of stuff. Perhaps they have a mental illness, perhaps they had a grudge against your mom - she might have been a judge or a teacher.
Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some security to remove that person so that you and others can have a peaceful funeral?
The risk is that if the state have no power to forcibly remove someone causing such a disturbance then those present may lose faith in institutions such as the police who they may not unreasonably see as being responsible for "keeping the peace" and worse, take matters into their own hands (in fact it very much looked like this was likely in one such case in Edinburgh).
As long it's not considered criminal and the only "punishment" is being physically denied access to the scene in question I wouldn't be overly concerned about it being an overreach of the government.
None of which is to say I accept the police did everything right in this particular occasion.
> But it's far more offensive and far more vile to suggest that the State has any right to regulate public speech based on its content.
Why? Offensive to whom? There seems to be general agreement that some speech crosses lines that are not okay and should be regulated. This is why all countries that have freedom of speech protections also have a list of exceptions. In the US, certain things like ads, pornography, slander, sedition, and lies are generally not considered protected speech. It depends on the specifics in any given case, but I’m not offended at all by the suggestion that the State should be allowed to regulate these kinds of speech when they cause harm.
She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
I could go on.
Public figures in general, and heads of state in particular, lose the right to be treated as "just somebody's mom". They get treated by the public based, at least in part, on their treatment of the public.
And even apart from all that, this funeral, at a time when many, many UK residents are facing skyrocketing costs for everything from food to electricity to heat—as in, increases of 5-10x, not just a few percent—is projected to cost upwards of half a billion pounds, from what I've heard.
> She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
Then it is pretty damning that not almost everyone is shouting! I'll go even further, then it is outrageous that people around the world mostly, including in the US, are saying what a great person she was.
So I wonder why is that?
Also, my understanding is that the person who got arrested for heckling was doing so because Andrew had sex with a 17 year old. So he was more upset about that than the queen overseeing genocides.
And if people really think she was evil, why wait until death? Why not speak up very loudly while the person is alive in order to affect change.
> the people being arrested were in public places.
Funerals are reasonably often held at public cemeteries.
FWIW I disagree the arrests were justifiable unless the protestors refused to be non-violently lead away from the scene, assuming they presented a genuine risk of provoking a violent response from the mourners etc.
In this case no, but the question remains to the GP as to whether having the police remove the man from the crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery.
(To be clear, I don't especially have a problem with the police taking Prince Andrew's heckler away, if nothing else for his own safety given members of the public were also manhandling him. I do have an issue with him being arrested and expected to face court.)
> as to whether having the police remove the man from the crowd would have been justifiable if it were a cemetery.
Of course it would be wrong for the police to arrest people for being disrespectful in a cemetery. What would be alright is if the owners of that cemetery wanted them to leave the property, they refused, and the police were called. That's why all of the photos of Westboro protesting at funerals were them on the sidewalk facing a cemetery.
So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body and our gathering is interrupted by an unruly mob of hooligans determined to disrupt proceedings as much as possible barring physical violence, you're saying I should have no right to request that the police escort them from the scene?
(We have "public nuisance" common law in Australia exactly to deal with that sort of scenario, which allows that "The action endangered the life, health, property, morale or comfort of the public". Surprisingly it can be treated as a criminal offense, though I'm not sure how often it really is).
> So if I choose to hold my mother's funeral at a public cemetery owned and administered by a governmental body
Just because City Hall is public doesn't mean that there aren't rules that you have to follow when you're there, or that you can't be kicked out when you break those rules. What it means is that you can't make up rules, because those are just the whims of the ruler.
If there are no rules at a publicly-owned cemetery against verbally abusing your recently dead mother in front of her grandchildren, you have to face that the abuser, as part of the public, has as much a right to be there as you do. But in real life there will be posted rules, just like there are rules at the public pool.
If Britain wants to pass a blanket law criminalizing all criticism of the royal family, they should. Plenty of dictatorships and monarchies already have lèse majesté laws, they can just copy them. They won't have to make up rules or improvise.
The abuser has as much a right to be there as I do, but I disagree they have a right to act in a clearly harassing/heckling manner. If they have something important to say that's worth protecting with free speech laws, that's not the way to say it.
If that's the sort of behaviour that's protected by the 1st amendment in the US, you're welcome to it.
On the other hand, nor do I ever wish to live in a country that criminalises criticism of anyone, esp. those in positions of power.
Someone’s mothers funeral is a private event. Is this not a public event? Does it seem fair to compare the funeral of an individual citizen to that of a “royal”?
"God save the queen, the fascist regime, make you a moron, potential H-bomb, ..."
Unlike in the 80-es, singing that today would make you arrested. Maybe the song is now more true than then, maybe the regime really became more fascist?
> The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.
Of course they can - for example, remembering those who died in a terrorist attack, victims of genocide, victims of the diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, etc. Lots of groups can declare solemn events for a lot of different reasons, and they shouldn't have to deal with obnoxious and thoughtless individuals purposely trying to disrupt those events.
Holding "not my king" poster has nothing to do with "deep solemnity" and does not prevent anyone from grieving. Yet they still got arrested or questioned.
Perhaps, but we not unreasonably see it as behaviour where a man was clearly taking advantage of his position of wealth and power over someone of an impressionable age who's unlikely to be in a position to give meaningfully informed consent. At any rate the "sick old man" accusation made by heckler was pretty well justified on its own terms, even if choosing that exact moment to make it did little to help the cause.
I know nothing of the particular case, but this argument isn't very convincing to me; the existence of a disparity does no work to show that disparity was actually part of the decision making process for the 17 year old in the way you're insinuating. The more we start removing the agency of late adolescents by calling them 'impressionable', the less sensible this conversation becomes, as though nobody can remember when they themselves were once 17, I know I can.
The argument is flawed because we generally tolerate power differences in relationships: men and women (institutional power), certain cases of coworkers of different ranks, an able-bodied person with a disabled person, a depressed person with a mentally healthy person, a suicidal person with a happy person, etc.
There are also a lot of adults who vary, due to personal characteristics or experiences with relationships (or lack thereof) who are far more easily snared into a relationship; the average 17 year old has had many more relationships than I have as a 25 year old, and sexual ones too, usually with peers. If anything, I'm the naive one who would fall into a very convincing snare with an older man.
I'm not attempting to make any sort of legal argument, just positing why it's widely seen as being an especially egregious act of sexual predation (and I'll admit that's how it appears on the surface to me, but ultimately it's up to the criminal justice system to decide).
I simply struggle to see it as an 'especially egregious' act of sexual predation when the facts are on the ground, or rather, obscured and unknown. I'm saying that the assumption that a difference in power is enough to turn a relationship from 'weird but OK' to 'egregious sexual predation' does not always hold, and it's hard to see where it does hold without removing all agency from the 'victim'.
Um, the facts aren't really that obscure or unknown - the evidence Ms Giuffre was a pawn in Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, one that Prince Andrew was happy to take advantage of, is pretty compelling, even if not proven beyond reasonable doubt. Yes, she admitted to being involved in recruiting for it (while under 18), which was almost certainly a decision made out of immaturity, given her role now running Speak Out/Act/Reclaim.
17 is not a child, but a teenager. Yeah, still creepy as hell, still wrong, but let's not mix the two things as it only serves to dilute the meaning and severity of actual child abuse.
It's so hard to keep straight, dead children, dead pigs, live children, other politicians... the upper wrung of British society seems to be two thirds disturbing fringe sex stuff and one third terrible decision making.
Different occasion. The guy holding the poster definitely shouldn't have been arrested. The guy shouting at Prince Andrew during the procession was breaching the peace. Different context, which was my point.
> Yelling at passing royals at a moment of deep solemnity: not fine, and stretching the free speech defence IMO
lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's nobility things they don't want to hear.
Any time and place other than a funeral or memorial service would be a good start. I can't believe there are adults here arguing that it's somehow ok to crash someone's funeral or memorial service to hurl insults at their relatives.
>"A protest that is not irritating is not a protest.... finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest. "
Which school of thought is this from? Protesting can take many forms and they need not be offensive and/or irritating to be effective. I personally respect calm, dignified, and persistent protestors far more than the loud, disruptive, and in-your-face ones.
If your calm and dignified protest achieves a meaningful result, it's because you were a better option compared to someone else who was not calm and dignified. There's some value in that, but not without that other guy to unlock it.
You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and surrounded by mourners.
Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.
It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.
> You left out the context, not only was Andrew walking right behind the coffin, the man was yards away and surrounded by mourners.
>Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.
>It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.
Clearly that guy was being an asshole, but being a loud jerk shouldn't be a crime, IMHO.
If that's the prevailing attitude there, I'm glad I don't live in the UK.
Not because I think it's right to intrude on the mourning/grief/funerary rights of others (cf., Westboro Baptist Church[0]), much to the contrary, but because it shouldn't be illegal (as much as I despise such folks) to be an asshole.
It's not just the protestors that have rights, the mourners do too.
Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.
You're the one being incredibly unreasonable here.
Also, you can't freely protest a soldier's funerals in America, so you're also ridiculously hypocritical, sort your own country out first if you feel so strongly about this!
If you're not actively protesti g The Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act then you need to get off your high horse.
>Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.
Right. Because words that are unpleasant are exactly the same as violence, right?
Shall we jail anyone who says something that annoys, disturbs or is unpleasant to anyone else? Based on the unpleasantness in your comment, let's start with you.
Yes, it's rude and obnoxious to intrude on others, especially at gatherings like funerals. And most of us (myself included) try not to do so.
However, some folks are jerks, and will do so anyway. But making such a thing a crime rather than just removing the disruptive individual from the area is a recipe for abuse.
Who decides what's a crime or not in a given circumstance? You?
I'd note that I'm neither angry nor insulted by you. Rather, I'm trying (I hope successfully this time) to get you to see that making someone a criminal for being a jerk is a really bad idea.
Remove such a person from your sight. Shun them. Verbally abuse them right back. But the idea that someone should be criminalised for being insensitive and/or obnoxious is risible at best.
I expect you will continue to disagree with me and think I'm being nasty, disruptive and a jerk. Shall we arrest me too? How long should I spend in prison for pissing you off?
To arrest someone, the behaviour they're engaging in has to be criminal (i.e. chargeable).
Then the police can ask the prosecution service to charge them (the US equivalent of the DA I guess), which is the discretionary bit. This seems to be the thing you're taking issue with.
So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.
>So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.
Nope. Not intentionally or otherwise. Police have always had the "move along citizen" (with no arrest/detention at all) power. In fact, I'd say they use it far too often, at least in the US.
I'm not in the UK, and when I've visited I haven't interacted with the police, so that may not be true there. Is it?
What's more, being asked/encouraged to leave if someone is being disruptive is pretty normal and certainly doesn't require detention and/or arrest. Or even police for that matter.
Even more, (again, I'm not in the UK so not sure if this applies there) arrest records are public records and can negatively affect one's ability to get a job or housing due to the stigma around "criminals" even if they aren't actually charged/convicted in relation to such an arrest.
So no. I'm not advocating (wittingly or otherwise) for any new powers for the police. Rather, I'm agreeing with your premise that folks shouldn't disrupt solemn occasions like funerals, but I'm disagreeing with your premise[0] that such activity should be criminalised.
And I also take issue with your assertion (perhaps I misunderstood, but that's the impression I got. Please enlighten me if I've misunderstood) that the only options for police are either arrest or do nothing at all. That's absurd on its face.
The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others. They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because they are decidedly anti-free-speech. They are now reaping what they have sowed.
The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.
> They got very little sympathy from the pro-free-speech crowd because
Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly things come out, none of which are consistent with the image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves as.
In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.
I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who market themselves free speech advocates, please.
> In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.
This is a fairly easily to verify claim. Now of course it's not going to be all of them, but a large chunk from what I've seen.
It's certainly more concrete than OP saying:
> The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others.
I think the reason most people are wary of sharing banking information is that they are worried you would exploit it or because of social norms not to talk about money, not that they have something to hide.
What better reason to hide something than because you think people will exploit that knowledge to harm you? You don't even need to think the party you're giving the information to will abuse it. Can you trust them to not pass it on or have it stolen from them? We have many many examples of why you should not.
>"I will be expecting your credit card and bank information on my table in the morning"
I've shared this (or similar info) with landlords and realtors and platforms that I don't trust. That's life.
The point is that just because you have something to hide doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. You might end up sharing that information in certain situations, but carefully. The framing those who promulgate that phrasing want to push is that not wanting to share information with the government makes you suspicious, because your only possible reason could be wrongdoing. This notion is hostile to liberty and security.
I completely agree with you about "identity theft" but I also keep the keys to my house private, although anybody who would burglarize me if I didn't would clearly be in the wrong and legally liable for my things.
Notwithstanding any legal or ethical judgement, being burglarized would cause me significant inconvenience and at the very least some sentimental losses, even if I were ultimately compensated years later with interest. Therefore, I keep my keys private to protect myself.
What people mean is that they've done nothing wrong, not that there's nothing they'd rather keep secret. "Not like that!" means they're annoyed you're focused on their words instead of their meaning. They're about to write you off and walk away with their beliefs even stronger.
There are also a ton of bewildered Boomers out there who believe they have done nothing wrong and are completely bewildered their children have gone no contact. I’d say if your kids won’t talk to you’ve seriously fucked up, and at least for some of them it’s over conversations they could have taken to their grave but instead their “truth” was more important than meeting their grandkids.
I told my father something about myself years ago and he tried to make the case that I hadn’t brought it up because I was ashamed.
I wasn’t ashamed. But if you share certain things about yourself, being gay being one of the most obvious examples, some people want to define you by it, or talk about it to the exclusion of all other things. I’d much rather talk about trees, for that matter tax law.
One of my mentees had a bit of a persecution complex about several things, orientation one of them. When late in our relationship I finally mentioned that my kid had come out, she was shocked I hadn’t brought it up before (which in retrospect I think she may have been recalculating her opinions of me on the fly, like the Key & Peele skit, “Oh I see, I’m just an asshole.”)
Without a pause I answered that it’s because it’s not the most interesting thing about them, which just made the eyebrows go up even higher. But I think it finally sunk in.
> you're focused on their words instead of their meaning.
If I were focused on that meaning, I'd call talking about whether they're doing right or wrong things completely unresponsive. We're talking about privacy and protection, not their personal assessments of the merit of their private lives.
Instead, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and remind them that the people who are dangerous to them may not share their standards or ethics.
‘Something to hide’ in English often has a negative connotation meaning deliberately trying to deceive or something bad they did and don’t want you to know about.
Better would be to not use that phrase as most people have something they wish to remain private or secret, without it being anything sinister. Like their password for example !
Canonical example here are the records (that included religion) kept by the Dutch that enabled the nazis to easily round up all the jews in The Netherlands during WWII
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.
Came here to point IBM out which is a sign of how it was: Many Americans supported Nazi.
There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American software and hardware.
What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest first and foremost, even if it means doing business with authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane? are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it impacts their bottom line.
Most people were unaware/indifferent, and a nonnegligible number thought it was cool/alright, and tens of thousands openly showed up for it, untold numbers directly/indirectly supported it- undoubtedly some never stopped.
There's an interesting discussion in the book The Sum of the People which argues that the disorganized recordkeeping in France was a ruse and a deliberate attempt by Rene Carmille to embrace the concept of population registry but to undermine the Nazi policy (Chapter 4, "Paper People"). In particular, Carmille apparently didn't enter the religion data from the census on the punchcards and never delivered lists. Carmille was arrested by the SS in 1944. It's not an entirely happy story though because there were absolutely others in France who collaborated to produce as many lists as they could, especially of Jewish immigrants who were easier to find in the records.
IBM's Holocaust collaboration became all the more significant when I ran across this justification / defence of pervasive data surveillance by Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate in economics and one of the fathers of AI. This is in his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society". In it, he addresses concerns:
The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM.
McCarthyism was how this played out in the states. Not as brutal and bloody, but lives were still ruined.
In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
Right. The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either. Their ethnicity was outed by things like census data that people divulged and the state collected. Nothing to hide after all. It's not a crime to be Jewish.
Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.
> The Jewish before the Holocaust had nothing to hide either.
Actually it started much earlier than that.
Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
Eh, you may not “know” something like this, but considering it’s never happened in my country in my lifetime at any appreciable scale, it’s probably not very likely, and doesn’t realistically factor into my threat model.
If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.
A guy who cares about evaluating the likelihood and significance of an event taking place.
I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall as a threat, not worth considering within my personal attack surface.
You're right, they didn't have an example of their exact situation, so they should have felt perfectly safe. They could see that pogroms happened in other places, to other people, a long time ago, obviously not even relevant in hypermodern civilized 1930s Germany.
I'm glad you recognize how fundamentally different the world is today than how it was in the 1930s, because not realizing that would probably confuse the hell out of you a lot of the time.
To me, privacy is first and foremost protection. That's from my upbringing, I guess. It's hard to argue with anything other to people who don't seem like they care about their privacy at all - and I get it, some people just don't care and trust their government etc. What else would you bring up to these people other than the bad things that have already happened due to less privacy than possible?
You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale, rather than irrelevant-but-also-terrible things that weren't directly caused by a lack of privacy.
You mean like when the KGB murdered my grandparent based on class origin and corporation ownership? Or the time when the Gestapo did the same to my great-grandparent, also based on ownership of the same corporation?
To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.
Again, I get that bad things happen, but none of what you've brought up would have been prevented with better privacy in practice. It's well beyond "privacy" to believe that ownership of a corporation should be hidden information, that'd be exceedingly easy to abuse.
I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.
It's nowhere beyond, it's exactly privacy. My country still (since the 90s) has numbered shares - meaning not tied to a person. The fight is not over yet, even though the EU is really trying hard to destroy all privacy here. And it's not really that simple to abuse - someone has to show up with the shares in hand to do that.
You're doing business with a corporation - it's a legal person after all. There are reporting requirements etc so you can check all you need about that corporation very precisely. You don't need to know the owners at all. It's not like you can know with US/EU corps - go check and see how many paper trails end in Virgin Islands numbered corporations ;-)
That's your opinion, and fortunately not one that nearly anyone shares.
You're doing a common Internet Thing by twisting a conversation into the topic you actually want to talk about, even though it's wholly unrelated.
Just because something bad happened to your family doesn't mean the entire planet should adjust fundamental aspects of how humans interact. That's just your trauma speaking, and not a rational thought.
Regardless of opinions, you can't know the owners of many corporations today. Are you sure you're not doing business with businesses that have owners hidden behind Virgin Islands numbered shares? I wouldn't be, it's actually very common. And if you're actually doing business with them - where's the problem?
> You could try bringing up relevant situations where a breach of privacy was the proximate cause of a systemic negative consequence on a large scale
The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.
Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.
So your most recent widespread example is 80+ years ago, and then a very tiny hypothetical set of lawsuits that have not been filed (zero prosecutions are "under way")?
My most recent widespread example was so recently that there are people still alive who were subjected to it, yes. Regarding the other point: this is not a hypothetical set of lawsuits. People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.
> People are getting prosecuted, criminally, right now.
Name one person who is being prosecuted for obtaining an abortion, and that prosecution is moving forward due to evidence collected from any kind of extrajudicial breach of privacy.
Woah, what's this about the breach of privacy needing to be extrajudicial? There was nothing about that originally. These are goalposts being moved. I refuse to continue this line of discussion if the discussion is happening in bad faith with moving goalposts.
The fact that you equate "privacy" with "warrants as a concept" is kind of sad, but I doubt you're capable of learning better, given your pretty terrible attitude thusfar.
On the other hand, people from every country which has had dictatorships (like many if not most in Latin America) should be wary of this kind of scenarios.
It just happened in the US. A lady and her daughter were arrested for taking a federally approved abortion pill based on information found when they subpoenaed their Facebook messenger chat.
I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.
So far, the only jurisdictions in the developed world who seem to be on a trajectory towards increased or at least not decreased privacy of any type are in Europe.
My government evaluates police work by number of cases. What does the police do if there is not enough crime? For example they look at energy usage of people and try to spot patterns that might indicate something like a weed farm. If the pattern match your home will be searched. This is a supposedly civilized western country that managed to start two dictatorships in just one century and had massive problems with surveillance. You can guess the country now...
Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...
I'm not sure why it's especially governments. I find this propensity for privacy focused people to overlap with more conservative thinking individuals very perplexing. Especially since typically the more prominent feature of conservatism is support towards large corporations - which are the largest entities removing our privacy.
It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.
A steelman of that perspective (full disclosure: I'm leaning more libertarian, but my stance is complicated, and nuanced), is that you can just not use facebook, but government's laws are full liability -they enforce (rather than describe) norms, and stances which can suffocate non-represented minorities, and you can not opt out in ways other than moving.
People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other than privacy.
In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a potential vulnerability, we take into account both the probability, and the impact of exploiting such vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general, ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote for candidates of their choice: probability of being successful is medium, but impact for the individual is relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you: probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant for gov interventions, especially where freedom, and liberties are concerned.
The future politic of other country to. I love to travel, so I try not critic other country online just because I scared that can be use against me when visiting a country with a authoritarian regime.
I work with prosecutors, and some of them will straight up misrepresent innocent facts to paint them as evidence of malicious intent and pressure parties to plead guilty.
I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.
It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.
When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.
Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir.
And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.
In highschool I was sent to detention and almost suspended because a study hall teacher overheard me talking about the "black market" feature of an roleplaying game I was writing on my graphing calculator. It took an hour of trying to explain TI-BASIC to my principle (and I think some angry phonecalls from my mother, a teacher in that district) before they relented with the insane mafioso accusations.
> Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.
Bigtech will happily store data on their users indefinitely so they can mine it in the future, should they think of new profit-generating ideas. But they will absolutely delete their employee's emails after N months unless they are on litigation hold (i.e. legally required not to do so). Complete double standard.
A plausible justification was given. It makes sense. It also has nothing to do with Hillary's decision-making. You can call all the people involved liars, or just deny the facts that have been presented to you - but the facts, as presented, do portray innocent behavior.
> In July, FBI Director James B. Comey said while the investigation revealed potential violations, “our judgement is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
In other words, crimes were probably committed but the FBI dropped the investigation because they figured that no prosecutor would file charges in the case.
>Was it really routine maintenance to BleachBit an entire server after you receive a subpoena from the FBI?
I would hope so, since presumably the storage devices on that server would either be resold or sent to a dump.
The info on those storage devices (assuming backups/existence of that data elsewhere for government data retention purposes) should not be let out into the wild.
In fact, I (and I don't work/exist in areas with confidential data) have a dozen or so hard drives that sit in a closet as I don't have the interface cards (any more) to hook them up and securely delete the data.
Eventually I'll probably purchase a bulk eraser[0], but until then, those disks will sit in my closet as my business is my business and no one else's.
I understand why people want to erase hard drives permanently and totally. My point was more about, isn't it a little weird to do so after the FBI says they want to look into the status of said devices.
lol, dude, just take out the screws and toss the platters in the oven. you need software to retrieve data, but not necessarily to destroy it.
I made a cool spiral chandelier out of fishing wire and hard drive parts. The platters don't chime as harmoniously as I had hoped, but it still worked out great - and I have enough super fridge magnets to last the rest of my life.
> I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court.
Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.
> ... prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong
I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be investigated: "Those were her weights. I never touched those weights!"
Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the weights and that statement is untrue...
I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in water, otherwise the prints will wash off.
For anyone that isn't convinced, here is a talk by a lawyer and a police officer discussing the idea of never talking to the police [0]. It's interesting that they largely agree that talking to the police is not a good idea.
> having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court
And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?
I think you can even attack this position immediately. When a person (or politician) say they have nothing to hide, ask them to hand you their unlocked phone. You will promise to not tell anyone about anything that you learn or see. I've found that this triggers people desire for privacy even if they haven't committed any "crimes" or what not.
Yeah. Medical procedures, like abortions in the states, are a very real example of how things can dramatically change on a whim to an unbelievable level. Or syncing your cycle data to a smart device and later having a retro-scan to detect cycle anomalies to charge women with probable crimes.
We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
What I find most ironic is that those people who are now realizing the same privacy platforms they used to defend with "I have nothing to hide" are the ones complying against their interests.
It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.
It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".
Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.
It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.
Was there a Pope of Abortion Rights that pronounced such an edict? As a man, I haven't encountered this in an abortion discussion, but it sounds like something an asshole would say and I try not to hang out with assholes.
I've heard variations on it many times, usually by the people who frame it entirely as "right to choose" (-> "if you're not capable of getting pregnant you have no right to input on this"). I get what they're going for, conceptually, but wow that is not how you get allies.
> ... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't concern them.
that never stopped women from doing what they want. you are completely brushing past the main issue which is apathy towards privacy which is not remotely related to women's rights portrayed by mainstream media and your language generalizes 100+ years of women, who regardless societal expectations, went on their own because they believed they had same rights as any other human. It's sad that the same spirit is now being used as shields to derail completely unrelated issues that by mere association of gender, calls for a complete review of a certain political lens that we are all familiar with. Save us the grace here honey.
This assumes the rule of law holds. America has a pretty good track record in this regard, better than most countries I think, but there can be no guarantees for the future.
You don’t get in trouble just for turning around, I think its that turning around gets you pulled over and breathalyzed and you get in trouble for DUI. I realize this is kind of a classic “why worry if you have nothing to hide” argument, but everything is a balance and I’m ok with this intrusion to reduce DUI deaths. It is not equivalent to other privacy invasions.
There is a risk to using "not private" services. And like all risks, it has to be measured and balanced against what you gain from taking that risk.
For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.
Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.
There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.
If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.
> If my government wants to know something about me, they will be able to find out and that's whether I use DuckDuckGo or Google, Chrome or Firefox, Facebook or no Facebook, Gmail or my own private server, and whether or not I use a VPN service.
In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.
But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
> But I'm more interested in convenience.
This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.
Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.
I don't consider myself a paranoid person, but I realized 20 years ago that we were all losing our privacy to online entities. When I first read about "the cloud", I knew that what I put on it was no longer mine. Government regulators don't care at all about our privacy, so what makes anyone really think they have nothing to hide? Honestly though, I can't imagine my life without these entities stealing my data, that's how bad it has become!
I always try to break privacy concerns down because when everything is lumped together I think people that aren't into privacy get confused.
There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.
My take on this is, even if you trust [insert data holding brand name], do you:
- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?
- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?
- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?
Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.
You also don't know what future you will be doing. Lots of activists where people with pretty boring lives until someone happened with them that triggered their indignation and revolt. Or maybe some relative of yours, or a friend. It doesn't matter, you don't know future you.
If people say they have nothing to hide, ask them if they close/lock the door when they use the bathroom. It's not like their doing anything secret in the bathroom, I mean there's only a few number of things people realistically do in there and we all know what they are.
This is the best way I've been able to illustrate the difference between privacy and secrecy. Some things I do are just private, doesn't mean that they are secret.
Is there really anything you can do or say that will change peoples mind? If people don't see the problem, then explaining it is one thing, and I think the bathroom thing works okay. It won't cause them to change their mind, but you can convince them of the problem. Even if their privacy is blatantly misused a large number of people wouldn't change their mind.
This is actually an interesting question. If I lived alone, I would rather unlock my door on purpose when taking a shower, so that in case I fell and knocked myself out, my neighbors and the ambulance personnel had an easier time getting in.
I don't think anybody who lives alone locks the door to the shower (or toilet), because what's the point?
People who live with roommates or family do, sometimes. I considered this. In the end, I decided if I faint while taking a shower and hit my head, I want someone to be able to rescue me, so: door unlocked.
I'd say the security concerns are more pressing than the privacy concerns in that case. Though of course the two are related because the person who robs you also learns quite a lot about you.
What do I have to hide? Legally, nothing. In my day-to-day life, I don't do anything that is a crime. I'm not using lots of drugs, I'm not into illegal porn, I'm not committing fraud, robbing banks, or planning anything illegal. But I still don't want everyone to know what porn I view, what I did as a child, what I plan on doing next year, or when I am or I am not at home.
While I may having nothing I need to hide, I have lots of things I want to hide. It's just happens that all the stuff I don't care about hiding are all the things these privacy consuming companies want. For others, they want to hide more and that's ok too.
You don't have anything you need to hide now, but as seen with Republicans in the US, there are major political parties that will happily criminalize and prosecute basic aspects of bodily function if they get the chance.
I think you miss the point, I said I have nothing to hide yet still want to hide things.
Also, there is only one time I can think of where someone has been convicted of a crime while it was legal when they did it and it was The Pirate Bay conviction. Everything else, it's always been if it's legal while you do it, it's legal. That holds true for abortion.
You have no idea whether you are currently committing any crimes. The US code is something like 80,000 pages and includes several felonies like carrying a sharpie or a screwdriver around in public or using a fake name on the internet. In the EU, the situation is similar. Nobody has any idea what they have to hide legally.
No, I'm really certain I'm not committing crimes. Living a rather boring life, where I work almost non-stop and use the internet. Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
Have you ever deposited a large sum of cash less than $10,000 in a bank account? Whether or not that's a crime depends on the state of your mind when you did it, which can be hard for you to produce to defend yourself.
You mean the prosecution, and in theory you're right. Yet in practice many jury members believe their job is to find their best guess of the truth, not hold the state to their burden. So if you can't present evidence in your own defense you can still loose. Plus, the process is sufficient punishment. Before you're acquitted you may lose your job and have to spend large amounts of money.
> Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
That is really immaterial to the discussion, as charges being brought alone can royally fuck up a life, whether or not a conviction is made in the end.
The title of the book has been repeatedly debunked, applies mainly to professionals who are far from the average American, conflates federal crimes with felonies, and is off by one to two orders of magnitude for the cases that are likely to adhere to the average professional.
I'm still a fan of reducing the complexity of the legal code and enormously circumscribing plea bargaining false-confession-ammunition, so it's not like I'm not aligned with the overall libertarian impulse here, but I disagree that this is a good book.
In most countries when a law is basically dead it means they won't even file charges. Prosecutors are overloaded and they don't have all the bag of tricks US prosecutors have for reducing the number of trials so charging an ancient law is one way of increasing your trial count.
However, it seems rather odd that I say I have nothing I need to hide I just have things I want to hide. People are insisting I must have somethign I need to hide. This is where I think many activists screw up. They're too busy trying to push their framing of the issue on to people. Instead of getting behind the idea that people have stuff they don't want others to know, which we all do, it seems everyone here is busy talking about the need to hide illegal stuff because what they currently do might become illegal. That isn't going to wash with most people. Most people are going to be againist it because now you're keeping privacy in the mindset of committing crimes and all these privacy tools aren't for keeping your personal secrets but for committing crimes. Who wants to support these crimes? Especially when instantly the other side talks about child porn.
It's like how when the protests in the US kicked off in 2020. They framed it as black lives matter which instantly allowed detractors to point out that white people are killed by police more often and silence them. If it wasn't just framed as a racial thing and instead of a police brutality problem against all people, it could have gone further.
I believe a hacker, or bad actor in general, will gain access to my data if they really really wanted it. I believe stealing data is just a function of time and resources (money). Based on this premise, I don't keep anything truly valuable available digitally. Sure, I have my bank accounts secured, but nothing past start practices.
I do not believe my feelings on this mean I do not care about free speech, nor do I not care about privacy. I believe our reality is that no one should be surprised if their data is stolen. People should plan on this happening and be prepared. Just as corporations have Incident Response and Business Continuity plans.
Yup. For serious people like military, etc they do keep important info in NON-digital form. When Snowden revelations came out, Russians switched to type writer for their internal memos.
For personal use, just have to say offline USB drive is a good investment if you can make the physical switch.
Until we can have something like the quantum entanglement communication.
Im not a conspiracy theorist or eternal cynic, but yes to the above stuff. I simply dont trust anyone. In the software world its the same concept as never trusting anything client side.
I don't think it has anything to to conspiracy theory or anything like that, it just a matter of fact, that nation state actors just simply DO NOT trust anything digital for important stuff ATM.
I guess the biggest thing is passwords. I use passphrases, but yea - I don't use any single point of failure with respect to access.
As far as physical, while a lot of your footprint exists on line, still having the physical matters. A property deed is a good example of this. Another example is my will. I might be aging myself out of this conversation, but it's a point of view for consideration. And yes, these are in a fireproof safe along with birth certificates, passports, etc. So yes, if someone steals my identity, I still have physical proof. Standard MFA stuff (from wikipedia) "knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user has), and inherence (something only the user is)"
I'll end with another opinion ... digital wallets which are not backed by the FDIC are super scary. Im sure this is another conversation, but just because I choose not to have a digital wallet doesn't mean I don't care about free speech :)
Hacker will not gain access to your data if there is no data, that's what article is really advocating.
With regards to not caring about free speech, I am trying to picture myself being in this hypothetical situation: lets imagine I was ran by a car and was denied the right to do or say anything about it because the driver was some prominent person, I'm picturing myself in such situation and I'm glad we still have free speech...
The same argument could be made about your home. A dedicated burglar will get your possessions (including data drives) given time and resources so you should not be surprised to have everything you own taken and your identity stolen.
Again, the same argument could be used about your physical person. Given time and resources someone could kidnap and torture you so you shouldn't be surprised if that happens.
When we talk about privacy, we are not only talking about what you can control. Your bank info is secure until it's not, meaning that without privacy regulations the bank sells your info and habits to anyone who's willing to pay, the same thing goes for your phone company and many other essential services.
Whether we accept it or not, the cloud is our "home" now. We have little to no control on who keeps our information on their servers. (i.e. employer, government, school, bank, phone company...)
And I'll use the home as an analogy here. A bad actor can access your house anyway, why have a door? Why have laws that criminalize burglary? Using your example, you could say not to keep anything valuable at home.
I agree with your point that we shouldn't be surprised if our information is hacked, but the point about privacy isn't to necessarily protect you against hackers, but to regulate those that keep your information. Prohibit them from selling your info, store it when not needed and as an extra benefit make it more difficult for hackers to access your info.
Good response. I believe the right counter is "diminishing returns".
Yes, the bad actor can break in my door, but they actually have to do it. Walking through without a door is sooooo much easier.
But then when they get inside, what will they find? Will I have silver and gold bars? Or will it be random HN posts?
My advice is to take reasonable precautions. However, if you have your entire life savings in an offshore back account with Venmo access which doesn't require 2FA ... then yea, I would worry.
I believe things that are valuable, like truly valuable, should be hard to change. Like liquidating a 401k life savings shouldn't be a couple mouse clicks. It should be a long and hard process because you are prolly only going to once or twice in your life. There is nothing wrong IMO with requiring being present at a bank to perform significant value transfers. Sure, wouldn't it be nice to only have to click a button? Sure ... but requiring physical (think MFA) slows the process down for the sake of security.
I agree, and I think your examples of Venmo, and liquidating your 401k are examples of where regulation is needed. Same goes for storing data, while many people hate the GDPR, I think forcing companies to delete personal data is an important piece of legislation. The same thing goes for the right to be forgotten even if it's by manual request.
The only time I've ever gotten someone "with nothing to hide" interested in data privacy was when I made an idle comment about ads I saw after sharing their IP address that were clearly targeted at them. That idle comment was accidentally 10x more convincing than any amount of rigorous argument.
IME people who have "nothing to hide" get suddenly more interested in data privacy if it stops being an abstract threat. They see Google knowing their intimate secrets in much the same way they would their hairdryer. Until they dont.
Unfortunately, that will probably happen for most people about two weeks before a stasi-like secret police takes full control over the country and by that point it'll have been about 10 years too late to start taking data privacy seriously.
There's the recent story about a man texting pictures of his son's infected <groin area> to his wife and doctor, then Google deletes his account and won't give it back. Oh, and the local law enforcement had a case on him about it. Tell me what evil this man did to deserve what happened.
Privacy would help here but more importantly these big companies need to provide a way to fix errors. Seems once you get caught by one of the filters you get suspended and are offered no path to clarify the situation.
Not really. You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to the cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point. This man could have been suspended by the government, and he would have had to clarify the situation to a judge. Granted, the judge would be infinitely more receptive to arguments than Google, but it shouldn't have to come to that.
" You can't 'fix' an error that you've reported to the cops. That's kind of on a criminal record at that point. "
If the legal system works you can "fix" an error with the cops. It's not like Google reporting something will automatically go on your criminal record. Once the legal system also starts using AI and automated systems to convict people without further explanation then we are in serious trouble.
How would you resolve the issues with the police? The police are not and should not be judges. The man had “child pornography” on his phone, it was reported and the police did their job given the evidence they had.
Watch the TV show COPS to see how many times criminals lie to police officers during an arrest.
It’s unfortunate this man got caught up in this but the police did exactly their job. Commit a crime, have evidence, press charges. Arrest if is procedure.
These companies should not police pictures in the first place. The user should have privacy from these corporations as well. This is not a vehicle to fight crime. If it becomes that criminals will quickly find out and switch channels and you are left with false allegations.
Catching child predators is always the tip of the sword in the advancing frontier of surveillance.
It just so happens that it's a cover for outsourcing and scaling up the intelligence apparatus's ability to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. Just in case they do something really bad like steal state secrets or try to blow the whistle on a crime committed by a powerful person. It's always about cover stories for the state's unrelenting paranoia.
The thing which always irks me about the "I have nothing to hide" comment is would you behave the same if you were being observed. The conversations we all have in the pub, in the car and even in the privacy of our home - would they be the same knowing there is a camera or audio device listening.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
My standard response to "I have nothing to hide" is "then why are you wearing clothes?". It seems to work relatively well to put things into the exact perspective you describe.
Social taboo is a reason we hide things. We know there are social taboos against many things that are harmless, like nudity, so we conceal them. I feel it's a pretty good analogy.
I disagree. A lot of what people would "hide" are in fact equivalent to "clothes" worn because of social norms or taboos.
A comment I make to a friend sitting next to me would be inappropriate to make to the policeman in the corner, or to my boss. Inappropriate to the point of there being consequences.
100%. I have group chats with friends where we express views that would be viewed askance, to put it lightly, by those that don't share the same opinions. Something to hide? Not particularly, but its private discussion so fuck off thank you kindly.
> but for the negative social consequences of the alternative
You mean like hiding your bank balance because the social consequences of people seeing it? Or hiding your medical records because of the social consequences of people seeing it?
My response is to "I have nothing to hide", is that isn't what you're giving up when you give away your privacy. You should be comfortable with "never needing to hide anything in your past, present, or future". The future is impossible to predict and actions that could be innocuous today may cause a great deal of trouble for you in the future. You give up that right forever when you lose privacy.
I believe there is a much more powerful control mechanism than recording devices. It's in your own brain created by years of socialization and there is no way to hide form it, no thought without it. Some may call it conscience but I think may of its parts are simply surveillance software. It's why most people unconsciously signal it to others when they lie or have done some socially unacceptable things. It can even lower your own self-esteem. That is to say that it has real power.
Sadly in the US there is not really a privacy debate. Essentially the “I have nothing to hide” line of reasoning has been pressed ahead and the nation continues in the direction of China.
We have a bit of a pretend debate from now and then … and a few technical elite are able to protect their own privacy to some degree… but for the masses privacy debate was over before it began. If anything it is just a marketing campaign by a few companies like Apple.
(Side Note: Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all icloud data and hands it over)
> Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all icloud data and hands it over
You say this like it's some kind of gotcha, rather than Apple, a major corporation, refusing to actively break the law of the country where they're headquartered.
Sloppy excuse. Breaking the law seems to be no problem for any form of security service. The case of privacy has long been an issue outside of the law.
Of course I don't expect companies to break the law, it is to no benefit to them, but we should not pretend that the rule of law has much value when it comes to government surveillance. And I would argue that to protect your privacy the legality of the means are secondary.
Because there's a world of difference between responding to a lawful warrant to produce data you have stored on your servers, and agreeing to create a special version of your software specifically to give the FBI carte blanche to unlock any phones they want (at least within that particular model).
Apple doesn’t and can’t “decrypt” data that it says it doesn’t have the encryption keys for like your health information. Apple lists the data that isn’t encrypted and the data that is
There is a view of "rights and freedoms" that is related to privacy, where rights are positively defined, and freedom is a limit on the scope and ability or powers of the state or other party to encroach on it, a kind of "shall make no law" clause. It makes more sense in the context of a freedom, where a platform provider would simply not be entitled to collect, use, disclose, or retain information without the express consent of the data subject. This is how health information privacy works, and privacy legislation around some governments and agencies using PII. Freedom is something for people, not the transnational conspiracies we call "platforms" these days. As arms of policy, the FAANGs are in effect, modern Hudsons Bay and the British and Dutch East India Companies.
Somehow we've made corporations sovereign on the internet, and the only mitigations we have on it are from free software and encryption tech - which they routinely evade and sabotage on behalf of their advertisers, but also for government agencies whose activities are otherwise regulated by constitutional and other guaranteed freedoms. This axis of state and industry colluding against citizen "users," has a bunch of ugly precedents.
Imo, addressing the "I have nothing to hide," argument at all is a tarpit. These are neutralized and disengaged people who are content to bargain and live as liquid subjects, and expecting anything more than repeating official talking points and bromides from them misunderstands their survival strategy. I don't think you change anyones mind, you can only activate or neutralize them based on their existing beliefs. I'd recommend letting the "I have nothing to hide" people alone, and instead, encourage active minds to develop the skills to build technology and products that shape the future.
Even PHI is monetized, btw. You know those HIPAA forms you sign? They tend to authorize sharing of your info with insurers and their partners, and often the sponsors of the plan if it is through an employer indirectly through metrics and reporting. If enough attention is paid, and data correlated carefully enough, one can deanonymize on that alone if one cared to.
Indeed, recording consent in healthcare has become a joke and the incentives for regulators to enforce it aren't there either. I worked on a platform for consent directives management, and the problem wasn't technical, it was "deprioritized" by the agency responsible for it because it put limits on their discretion.
I'd even say health information is worse than monetized now, it's actively politicized. I know that C19 vaccination records (names/addr/date/dosenumber) were shared with PR/oppo-research firms working for politicans involved in the rollout, and there was no consent for collection or use of that data either. We live in interesting times.:)
I don't think privacy, in the sense of a right not to be observed, is a right at all. its like saying you have the right for people not to look at you or remember you, it may sound like a great idea but its fundamentally unworkable.
I think what people mean by privacy is what might be considered private within reasonable expectations. Not being seen in public like you have Potter's cloak is not realistic. But there's no clear reason why an American tech company should have so much access to everything you do.
Even for those with "Nothing to hide (tm)", the only rational approach is privacy maximization.
Suppose your future circumstances change and you find yourself in a situation where you do have something to hide. The mere fact that you have "gone dark" can be observed and used as evidence that you are now engaging in activities you believe need to be hidden.
Anyone with kids will recognise this - you're not worried when they're yelling and screaming. You're worried when they stop yelling and screaming and suddenly become too quiet.
Sometimes having a strong competitor has an advantage. It becomes a team game on who is worse and the question if both are terrible doesn't get the focus it might need.
Worse than Android for privacy? A simple GDPR data request shows Android is FAR worse. If you disable tracking on Google, the user experience is severely limited, while it's not on iOS, as the services is build around less data collection.
Besides that, iOS E2E encrypt a lot more like health data, browsing history, maps data, HomeKit data etc.
Privacy is all about having agency over information about one's life.
Unless there is some clear and genuine overriding interest, I should be the one to decide whether or not, to whom, when, and how that information is disclosed.
That doesn't mean I am necessarily opposed to any piece of information being disclosed (i.e. I have nothing to hide), but these decisions shouldn't be made for me.
482 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadI wish there was a better choice; but I think I would still pick Android for now...
These other choices definitely are better when it comes to privacy. But probably worse in every other regard.
I personally am not quite willing to make that tradeoff (yet). But I sure am highly grateful to everyone who does, and helps make those alternatives better, and helps them gain momentum.
The trade offs pretty much rules out the alternatives for most people. I need just a few apps, but they are for payment and government stuff, so they are only ever going to be available in the official app stores. For others it's going to be messaging apps, social media or something local, like an app for the supermarket. If those apps are not available, then the point of a smartphone goes away. At least of me.
The whole thing is making people dependent on the common app stores. Not actually dependent, but practically.
If you're going to use Android, use an open source AOSP fork. Lineage, Graphene, Calyx... how can you be sure that you're actually secure and private if you can't even be sure exactly what firmware your phone is running? You can't.
Hard to say what a "normal" level of tinkering is with Android, as I have switched directly from iOS to Graphene and have never used Stock Android. I am sure some things are a little bit more cumbersome, but for me the tradeoff is worth it.
Also the stock g-cam (with internet access disabled) and g-photos (with internet access disabled) make a pretty amazing photo and photo editing experience.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play
https://kevquirk.com/why-im-ditching-android
We already see hints of this when someone gets canceled for something they tweeted 10 years ago. Imagine that, but on a broader scale with more violent consequences. That's why privacy is important for everyone.
I could go on like this. I think you underestimate the story someone can build from your data (even if the story they invent is completely untrue) and I think you underestimate the frenzied desperation that can overtake people in power who are desperate to stay in power. Reading historic accounts of life in totalitarian regimes is worth the effort.
Hope you can prove your innocence!
The point to be made is that you don't know because you can't predict.
I don’t believe we need guns atm… but we are unsure of what the future holds and surrendering such a monumental right would be next to impossible to “undo” if the time ever comes.
No freedom has ever been won or guarded with the types of firearms legal under the 2nd amendment.
Ever. Anywhere.
Literally every single example you're going to reply with is wrong.
Not even the American Revolution was "won" using personally-owned weapons. It was won using artillery, naval vessels, mercenaries from overseas, and the first thing that happened when a patriot showed up for his patriotic duty with his pappy's musket was throw it in the trash and issue a soldier a Brown Bess or Committee of Safety musket so that the caliber, rate of fire, effective range, and operating procedures were the same amongst all soldiers.
Not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not anywhere at any time has a conflict against a government either foreign or domestic been defeated using personally-owned weapons.
The few times in America where it was tried, post Revolutionary War, the tax/whiskey/voting rights rebellioneers were crushed under the might of a pathetically small standing army that used cavalry and artillery to intimidate them.
The various slave rebellions and civil rights conflicts changed nothing. Lawyers, peaceful protest, not-so-peaceful-protest, and public opinion changed things.
In terms of ethnic violence, everywhere, every time, in each and every case where a smaller population has armed itself to protect itself the only result has been the employment of mechanized terror against them with horrific results.
"Oh but the Warsaw Ghetto.." nope. The germans went in, received fire from personal weapons, left and leveled the ghetto with tanks and mortars.
"Oh but if the Tutsis had had rif.." nope. Both sides had rifles. When the Tutsis started scrouging AKs, the Hutus responded with grenades, automatic weapons, and bulldozers. The government didn't even do most of the killing, instead ordering the Hutu majority population to do it for them, at the point of a belt-fed machine gun. During the Kibeho massacre guns were too slow so they just mortared the sea of refugees with 60mm mortars. If every single Tutsi had possessed an automatic rifle with infinite ammunition, they would have all still been murdered. A rifle is useless against 60mm mortars and air-mobile military forces.
The only protection against tyranny is strong civic organizations and the rule of law. When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
The only thing the wide availability of weapons has done in areas WITHOUT strong civic organizations and the rule of law has been to turn vast swathes of Pakistan and Afghanistan into lawless zones of chaos and misery, ruled by whichever warlord can get the most RPGs or convince their followers to become suicide bombers.
Ten million personal AR-15s are useless against ten thousand mechanized infantrymen.
Firearms protecting rights is a myth.
>When those break down whoever has the most cash to buy the most heavy weapons, usually the government, wins.
There is more wealth in private hands in the US than government hands.
That's a matter of interpretation, especially since weapons like those didn't exist when the 2A was written.
What really matters isn't what rights people who lived 200+ years ago thought that we should have today; it's what rights we, who are alive now, think we should have. We shouldn't accept the meaning, or even the existence, of the 2nd amendment simply because it's there. We should continually be scrutinizing and improving the entire document.
--------------
This is incorrect.
The United States military became very skilled at dealing with them to the point that Taliban activity was near-zero.
Analyzing the causes of death of US servicemembers during the conflict, a surprisingly low number was due to firearms. All of the AKs in the world were useless against the US military and the Taliban knew it so they decided to wait the US out instead.
The moment the US left? That’s a different story.
The moral of this should be that patience is more empowering than firearms.
So in what scenario can the US military "leave" the US? You are pretty much proving the guy's point, no?
Yes, the US military could scorch earth its backyard. Nobody really denies that. What would be impossible is maintaining that control for any meaningful amount of time. This is also assuming somehow that 100% of the military and 100% of its assets are on board with whatever "regime" comes to be, which I just don't see happening.
But your example of Taliban is a curious one, because, for all their expensive toys, US forces in Afghanistan never really controlled much ground outside of their bases. That's why the Taliban could wait them out - because most of the country out there was already theirs to wait in. To control all that territory would have required a lot more US troops, precisely because of all those lurking Taliban fighters with their measly AKs.
https://www.atf.gov/explosives/explosives-storage-requiremen...
“No indoor magazine may be located in residence or dwelling.”
As for valid uses of private ownership of explosives, they are used heavily to clear land and rocks / boulders.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
Well, this is a very extraordinary claim… also, one that makes me feel like any potential example will be dismissed by you, as you seem to have essentially considered every single instance of armed conflict involving firearms.
The rest of your comment goes over several examples but I think the foundation is flawed. There is no scenario where there would be 10 million AR-15s vs 10k “mechanized infantrymen.” It’s also akin to saying matches are useless in a competition to see who can detonate the biggest sick of dynamite.
Just touching on your first example. Of course to win an international war against the largest empire on earth, you will need more than just firearms. However, the mere existence of an access to firearms is an undeniable factor in the way things turned out.
Do you really believe independence would have been gained through “strong civic organization and rule of law” - as you claim? You then follow that by saying if that doesn’t work, whoever has more cash and weapons usually wins… certainly not what happened in the revolutionary war… nor the next big conflict (war of 1812).
Maybe a medical procedure will suddenly become illegal, such that your location history is now subject to warranted search.
Maybe your country will take a sharp turn towards authoritarianism, electing politicians who are ready and willing to use law enforcement to "punish" their enemies.
Maybe your monarch will die, and a recently passed bill will be used to arrest people who protest the existence of the monarchy.
Having "nothing to hide" isn't necessarily a fixed state.
Seeing the arrests in Edinburgh this past week has been heart wrenching. It's just... I thought we were better than that?
The UK is one of the most "live and let live" countries in the world.
However I think there is a marked difference between 2010 and 2022, especially in Scotland, who I used to think of as usually the sensible ones; the land of David Hume.
Free speech is being curtailed by legislation that is auspiciously about preventing "hate crime", but in actuality is being used as a tool to shut down dissenting opinions, such as the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Bill.
And this is just the history I'm personally connected with. There's plenty of other examples of how the UK has treated other minorities poorly, notably the Windrush Generation. Being a 'live and let live' society isn't, and shouldn't, just mean being the least worst country, if we can even claim that title... it's about being a permissive society, of letting people get on with their own lives unmolested and in return you can expect the same. But as I've already shown, that was in no way the case for us... if you ever wonder why there's so few gay men around the age of 60+, it's because so so many of them were left to die of the gay disease.
We were never ever a live and let live country.
Edit: Also, this is OT anyway from the matter of privacy and "nothing to hide".
But I do agree somewhat, if what you’re saying is true. People should be able to hold a funeral in peace.
One person, probably not invited, makes a scene, shouts a bunch of stuff. Perhaps they have a mental illness, perhaps they had a grudge against your mom - she might have been a judge or a teacher.
Are you just going to ignore it? Would you expect some security to remove that person so that you and others can have a peaceful funeral?
But it's far more offensive and far more vile to suggest that the State has any right to regulate public speech based on its content.
If you want to control what is said at the funeral, don't have the funeral in public. End of.
Why? Offensive to whom? There seems to be general agreement that some speech crosses lines that are not okay and should be regulated. This is why all countries that have freedom of speech protections also have a list of exceptions. In the US, certain things like ads, pornography, slander, sedition, and lies are generally not considered protected speech. It depends on the specifics in any given case, but I’m not offended at all by the suggestion that the State should be allowed to regulate these kinds of speech when they cause harm.
She was the head of state who presided over genocides, resisted the independence many dozens of British colonies, got carveouts in laws to shield her personal possessions from scrutiny for stolen antiquities...
I could go on.
Public figures in general, and heads of state in particular, lose the right to be treated as "just somebody's mom". They get treated by the public based, at least in part, on their treatment of the public.
And even apart from all that, this funeral, at a time when many, many UK residents are facing skyrocketing costs for everything from food to electricity to heat—as in, increases of 5-10x, not just a few percent—is projected to cost upwards of half a billion pounds, from what I've heard.
So no, let's not "say it is your mom's funeral".
Then it is pretty damning that not almost everyone is shouting! I'll go even further, then it is outrageous that people around the world mostly, including in the US, are saying what a great person she was.
So I wonder why is that?
Also, my understanding is that the person who got arrested for heckling was doing so because Andrew had sex with a 17 year old. So he was more upset about that than the queen overseeing genocides.
And if people really think she was evil, why wait until death? Why not speak up very loudly while the person is alive in order to affect change.
Weird priorities, or misdirection.
False equivalence.
This is the accession to the throne of a monarch wrapped around a funeral.
That doesn't happen when anyone else's mom dies.
And the people being arrested were in public places.
Funerals are reasonably often held at public cemeteries. FWIW I disagree the arrests were justifiable unless the protestors refused to be non-violently lead away from the scene, assuming they presented a genuine risk of provoking a violent response from the mourners etc.
Of course it would be wrong for the police to arrest people for being disrespectful in a cemetery. What would be alright is if the owners of that cemetery wanted them to leave the property, they refused, and the police were called. That's why all of the photos of Westboro protesting at funerals were them on the sidewalk facing a cemetery.
Just because City Hall is public doesn't mean that there aren't rules that you have to follow when you're there, or that you can't be kicked out when you break those rules. What it means is that you can't make up rules, because those are just the whims of the ruler.
If there are no rules at a publicly-owned cemetery against verbally abusing your recently dead mother in front of her grandchildren, you have to face that the abuser, as part of the public, has as much a right to be there as you do. But in real life there will be posted rules, just like there are rules at the public pool.
If Britain wants to pass a blanket law criminalizing all criticism of the royal family, they should. Plenty of dictatorships and monarchies already have lèse majesté laws, they can just copy them. They won't have to make up rules or improvise.
This is extremely compatible with Juche thought. Let's say that the Kim family is the mother of North Korea.
Having someone removed for being loud and obnoxious is a much different thing than being arrested and potentially incarcerated for same.
I would say this for _anyone_, today it just happens to be a famous person.
If the family wanted to control the show, they should organize a private event with only invited guests who signed a code of conduct.
This very obviously isn't "just a funeral".
Anyone else dies and they don't cancel the EPL for the weekend.
I assumed based on what OP said, it was akin to a funeral being disrupted. That’s a big “if” though.
Unlike in the 80-es, singing that today would make you arrested. Maybe the song is now more true than then, maybe the regime really became more fascist?
The state shouldn't get to declare mandatory solemnity.
Of course they can - for example, remembering those who died in a terrorist attack, victims of genocide, victims of the diseases such as the AIDS epidemic, etc. Lots of groups can declare solemn events for a lot of different reasons, and they shouldn't have to deal with obnoxious and thoughtless individuals purposely trying to disrupt those events.
And to put a fine point on it, the age of consent in New York is 17 and is 16 in New Jersey.
So I think the focus on "child" is not only misplaced, but untrue. Rape is the real issue, so that's the real thing to focus on.
The argument is flawed because we generally tolerate power differences in relationships: men and women (institutional power), certain cases of coworkers of different ranks, an able-bodied person with a disabled person, a depressed person with a mentally healthy person, a suicidal person with a happy person, etc.
There are also a lot of adults who vary, due to personal characteristics or experiences with relationships (or lack thereof) who are far more easily snared into a relationship; the average 17 year old has had many more relationships than I have as a 25 year old, and sexual ones too, usually with peers. If anything, I'm the naive one who would fall into a very convincing snare with an older man.
lol, my country's concept of free speech is in part based on the idea everyone should be able to tell your country's nobility things they don't want to hear.
And as for time & place, finding the right moment and location to be maximally irritating is part of the art of protest.
Which school of thought is this from? Protesting can take many forms and they need not be offensive and/or irritating to be effective. I personally respect calm, dignified, and persistent protestors far more than the loud, disruptive, and in-your-face ones.
Maybe the common British people should take notes from their French neighbors and teach these royal shits what true persecution feels like.
Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.
It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.
>Their moment for grief was severely impacted by the protestor.
>It's nowhere near as simple as you or other people in this thread are pretending it is. Even though I think Andrew should be stripped of his titles, it's right that guy was arrested.
Clearly that guy was being an asshole, but being a loud jerk shouldn't be a crime, IMHO.
If that's the prevailing attitude there, I'm glad I don't live in the UK.
Not because I think it's right to intrude on the mourning/grief/funerary rights of others (cf., Westboro Baptist Church[0]), much to the contrary, but because it shouldn't be illegal (as much as I despise such folks) to be an asshole.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church
It's not just the protestors that have rights, the mourners do too.
Just like you've got no human right to stab people as much as you like, you can't cause other people distress at a funeral.
You're the one being incredibly unreasonable here.
Also, you can't freely protest a soldier's funerals in America, so you're also ridiculously hypocritical, sort your own country out first if you feel so strongly about this!
If you're not actively protesti g The Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act then you need to get off your high horse.
Possibly me, too. Maybe we could be cell mates. What do you say, handsome?
Right. Because words that are unpleasant are exactly the same as violence, right?
Shall we jail anyone who says something that annoys, disturbs or is unpleasant to anyone else? Based on the unpleasantness in your comment, let's start with you.
Yes, it's rude and obnoxious to intrude on others, especially at gatherings like funerals. And most of us (myself included) try not to do so.
However, some folks are jerks, and will do so anyway. But making such a thing a crime rather than just removing the disruptive individual from the area is a recipe for abuse.
Who decides what's a crime or not in a given circumstance? You?
I'd note that I'm neither angry nor insulted by you. Rather, I'm trying (I hope successfully this time) to get you to see that making someone a criminal for being a jerk is a really bad idea.
Remove such a person from your sight. Shun them. Verbally abuse them right back. But the idea that someone should be criminalised for being insensitive and/or obnoxious is risible at best.
I expect you will continue to disagree with me and think I'm being nasty, disruptive and a jerk. Shall we arrest me too? How long should I spend in prison for pissing you off?
Edit: Fixed typo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest
To arrest someone, the behaviour they're engaging in has to be criminal (i.e. chargeable).
Then the police can ask the prosecution service to charge them (the US equivalent of the DA I guess), which is the discretionary bit. This seems to be the thing you're taking issue with.
So although you don't realize it, you're basically saying you want to give the police brand new powers to grab anyone they want. That's an incredibly dangerous and seriously poorly thought out suggestion.
Nope. Not intentionally or otherwise. Police have always had the "move along citizen" (with no arrest/detention at all) power. In fact, I'd say they use it far too often, at least in the US.
I'm not in the UK, and when I've visited I haven't interacted with the police, so that may not be true there. Is it?
What's more, being asked/encouraged to leave if someone is being disruptive is pretty normal and certainly doesn't require detention and/or arrest. Or even police for that matter.
Even more, (again, I'm not in the UK so not sure if this applies there) arrest records are public records and can negatively affect one's ability to get a job or housing due to the stigma around "criminals" even if they aren't actually charged/convicted in relation to such an arrest.
So no. I'm not advocating (wittingly or otherwise) for any new powers for the police. Rather, I'm agreeing with your premise that folks shouldn't disrupt solemn occasions like funerals, but I'm disagreeing with your premise[0] that such activity should be criminalised.
And I also take issue with your assertion (perhaps I misunderstood, but that's the impression I got. Please enlighten me if I've misunderstood) that the only options for police are either arrest or do nothing at all. That's absurd on its face.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32848029
The sad part is that they, and all of their supporters, will probably go back to agitating against free speech after this whole thing blows over.
Every officially designated 'pro free speech warrior' I've seen in recent times has been strongly for authoritarianism if it suits their agenda. Just ask many of them for their opinion on say Palestine or Yemen and you'll lots of ugly things come out, none of which are consistent with the image of 'freedom' these types like to portray themselves as.
In fact, many of them seem to support anti-BDS laws and such.
I do not endorse censorship attempts, but also let's not kid ourselves about the nature of many of the people who market themselves free speech advocates, please.
Huge sweeping claim, with exactly nothing to back it up.
This is a fairly easily to verify claim. Now of course it's not going to be all of them, but a large chunk from what I've seen.
It's certainly more concrete than OP saying:
> The people getting arrested in the streets of Edinburgh were the same people who have been arguing to take away free speech and privacy rights from others.
Then providing nothing to back up the claim.
A: "I have nothing to hide."
B: "Give me your bank details."
A: "Not like that! That's not something to hide because I'm hiding them to protect my savings."
B: "The reason other people hide things is also to protect themselves, their property, and their loved ones."
As Mitchell and Webb pointed out, "identity theft" is actually bank theft that's blamed on the account holder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
Notwithstanding any legal or ethical judgement, being burglarized would cause me significant inconvenience and at the very least some sentimental losses, even if I were ultimately compensated years later with interest. Therefore, I keep my keys private to protect myself.
I told my father something about myself years ago and he tried to make the case that I hadn’t brought it up because I was ashamed.
I wasn’t ashamed. But if you share certain things about yourself, being gay being one of the most obvious examples, some people want to define you by it, or talk about it to the exclusion of all other things. I’d much rather talk about trees, for that matter tax law.
One of my mentees had a bit of a persecution complex about several things, orientation one of them. When late in our relationship I finally mentioned that my kid had come out, she was shocked I hadn’t brought it up before (which in retrospect I think she may have been recalculating her opinions of me on the fly, like the Key & Peele skit, “Oh I see, I’m just an asshole.”)
Without a pause I answered that it’s because it’s not the most interesting thing about them, which just made the eyebrows go up even higher. But I think it finally sunk in.
If I were focused on that meaning, I'd call talking about whether they're doing right or wrong things completely unresponsive. We're talking about privacy and protection, not their personal assessments of the merit of their private lives.
Instead, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and remind them that the people who are dangerous to them may not share their standards or ethics.
Better would be to not use that phrase as most people have something they wish to remain private or secret, without it being anything sinister. Like their password for example !
By implication, what your provider knows, governments also know - they have a direct line.
Sell your soul.
And French Jewry was spared to a large extent not because of the compassion of Vichy administration, who even sent French children to the death camps over German objections, but due to a complicated bureaucracy and disorganized recordkeeping that made it a real challenge for French collaborators to round Jewish people up. They'd have no such roadblock these days.
There is this rose tinted glass view that Americans rose up to defeat Nazism taught in textbooks and mainstream media but was far from the truth. Not only did Nazism was cool then, American corporations like IBM directly aided Nazi party with surveillance efforts, very much like they have funded the persecution of uyghurs by purchasing American software and hardware.
What is constant is that the US looks out for its interest first and foremost, even if it means doing business with authoritarian or tyrannical regimes. Is it moral from a humane perspective? No. But is the state subject to humane? are corporations? The accepted view is that they have no consciousness and is not bound by the same moral/ethical afflictions unless they are shamed out of it that it impacts their bottom line.
https://anightatthegarden.com/
The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly valuable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
<https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...> (PDF)
There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by an American company, IBM.
Another Edwin Black IBM and the Holocaust link:
<https://ibmandtheholocaust.com>
In theory it’s unconstitutional here to prosecute someone for an act they committed before there was a law against it. But there are other ways to convict someone, for better or worse.
Corporations leverage this all the time, so they go unpunished unless it’s in the court of public opinion. The toolset is necessary but the power dynamics are important.
Today is the 59th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four girls aged 11--14 were killed, and another 14--22 injured.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16th_Street_Baptist_Church_bom...>
thank you
PS I'm sorry for digressing; there was no reply button on that post.
See: <https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Using_marks> <https://www.marksanborn.net/software/using-markers-in-vim/>
(Six year old comment comes back to haunt me ... Could've been worse ;-)
Mountains of personal data is too juicy and is inevitably misused.
Actually it started much earlier than that.
Christian started going after Jews since at least the fourth century, inspired by the hatred written in the Gospel of John. In particular, it was a Christian ritual to physically attack Jews around Easter in the Middle Ages.
More detail: https://theconversation.com/why-good-friday-was-dangerous-fo...
If you want to “worst case” scenario something, that’s your choice, but it’s not very predictive.
I'm not value judging this, I'm just trying to determine if it's worth reacting to, and based on the number of folks effected, the severity of the impact, and the frequency, privacy violations seem pretty minor overall as a threat, not worth considering within my personal attack surface.
Sorry... but some nice contradiction you have there. I think your "algorithm" might be a bit off ;)
Anyways, something like 40% of the EU citizens lived through communism, so it's not exactly unusual.
Kind of makes it seem like privacy itself can't stand on its own as meritous, and needs to be propped up by overgeneralizations and FUD.
To me, it seems like there are much longer periods of problems than periods of peaceful life. Only 30 years out of the last 100 were in lived in relative freedom here, and still excesses are happening today. Protect yourselves people. Nobody will return your health and life back once an excess happens to you.
I'm sorry those things happened to your family, but they're not relevant to a modern privacy conversation.
You're doing a common Internet Thing by twisting a conversation into the topic you actually want to talk about, even though it's wholly unrelated.
Just because something bad happened to your family doesn't mean the entire planet should adjust fundamental aspects of how humans interact. That's just your trauma speaking, and not a rational thought.
But, again, completely irrelevant to the broader topic of conversation, privacy.
[0] https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fact-sheet-benefic...
The US Government directly used census data to target families and neighborhoods to send to internment camps within living memory.
Something ongoing: prosecutions are currently underway to parties who have abortions or assist in abortions based off of private correspondences such as texting, calling, or facebook messages.
Name one person who is being prosecuted for obtaining an abortion, and that prosecution is moving forward due to evidence collected from any kind of extrajudicial breach of privacy.
I refuse to continue a discussion with someone who doesn't believe in the concept of a warrant.
I'm looking at the European Union and at Apple and Google. Good intentions? That doesn't mean that you're the good guys! History has shown that the bad guys always believe strongly that they were the good guys. Privacy and security is not only about protection from criminals and companies but especially about protection from our governments. It doesn't matter wether you voted for your government or not or you like them or not or they like you or not.
Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...
It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.
People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other than privacy.
In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a potential vulnerability, we take into account both the probability, and the impact of exploiting such vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general, ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote for candidates of their choice: probability of being successful is medium, but impact for the individual is relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you: probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant for gov interventions, especially where freedom, and liberties are concerned.
Good luck on getting Facebook to stop using you though [1].
In a similar vain, how does Equifax fit into this mythical world where government is the problem but corporations are not?
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile
But, yes, corporations will quite readily sell all that information to the government, anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end.
I have seen stuff like "defendant had TOR installed - a popular program for criminals" in court filings. ...and judges and juries accept that as fact because they just don't understand the technology. For example, having a bookmark for "Hacker News" would absolutely show up in court. Crazy stuff meant to bias judges and juries that don't know tech.
The point is that the situation is 100x worse in tech where prosecutors, judges, and juries simply do not understand the evidence. ANYTHING can be painted as incriminating evidence.
I have seen saved credentials on automation jobs being used to incorrectly establish people's network activity. I have seen routine maintenance being used to establish obstruction charges just to intimidate possible witnesses... Like stuff you would not believe happens, happens.
It's even worse in civil suits, where opposing counsel will subpoena as much as possible (mountains of data) just to give you more work and fish for trade secrets or anything they can twist in court.
When I was junior, I proudly told my legal team "good news, I added space to keep our transaction records for 20 years!" and was aghast when they said they wanted files deleted THE DAY the legal requirement to hold it expired because it increased legal liability.
Now I totally get it. Today we only store the bare minimum - everything else is deleted immediately. ... and I have to re-explain this to junior employees each year to their disgust.
I was punished in school for having NetHack source code in my home dir. And it was not because it was a game but because it allegedly was a hacking tool.
https://web.archive.org/web/20031114161830/http://www.adequa...
Same in software-land. Nobody wants to have years of who-knows-what subpoenaed.
You're talking about Hillary Clinton, right? That's literally one of the arguments they used against her.
https://www.denverpost.com/2016/09/03/fbi-report-platte-rive...
In other words, crimes were probably committed but the FBI dropped the investigation because they figured that no prosecutor would file charges in the case.
I would hope so, since presumably the storage devices on that server would either be resold or sent to a dump.
The info on those storage devices (assuming backups/existence of that data elsewhere for government data retention purposes) should not be let out into the wild.
In fact, I (and I don't work/exist in areas with confidential data) have a dozen or so hard drives that sit in a closet as I don't have the interface cards (any more) to hook them up and securely delete the data.
Eventually I'll probably purchase a bulk eraser[0], but until then, those disks will sit in my closet as my business is my business and no one else's.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Degausser-Electricity-Required-Mainte...
On sale, now only $3,990.00 (previously $6,999.99).
An interesting idea and one I hadn't considered. Thanks!
I made a cool spiral chandelier out of fishing wire and hard drive parts. The platters don't chime as harmoniously as I had hoped, but it still worked out great - and I have enough super fridge magnets to last the rest of my life.
Both of those are really good examples of how a statement of fact that is literally true can still be a lie. Politicians do this kind of stuff all the time especially in their attack ads that make TV unwatchable around this time of year in every even numbered year. Amazingly what gets a politician called out by the other party's press as a "liar" is the opposite of this kind of statement: something that is fundamentally true but where the politician got one minor irrelevant detail wrong. That's also a major reason why it isn't a good idea to represent yourself in court or to explain yourself to the police when you get arrested because people are prone to accidentally getting minor details wrong or misspeaking even when they're telling the truth to the best of their ability.
I know a prosecutor who had to investigate the statements made by the husband of a person who (presumably) had drowned themself in their pool (she used workout weights to keep herself at the bottom). The statement to be investigated: "Those were her weights. I never touched those weights!"
Now all of a sudden maybe his fingerprints are on the weights and that statement is untrue...
I also got to learn that they scoop the weights into a bucket because I guess they need to keep them submerged in water, otherwise the prints will wash off.
Cannot emphasise this enough.
Unless you live a criminal lifestyle (if so, you can learn nothing from me) you may encounter cops once. They do it every day.
Often police job advancement is helped by making your life hell. Say nothing you are not legally obliged to.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
"Don't Talk to the Police Part 2" - https://youtu.be/tIt-l2YmH8M
And would the defense be allowed to show the legal and harmless conversations we have here? Or ask the prosecutors which HN posts they believe influenced the accused to commit a crime?
You have nothing to hide... yet.
We do that with speed cameras, why not just automate health data mining too? Why did you stop updating your cycle data, is it because you knew you were pregnant and wanted an abortion? Sounds like suspicious activity to me, exactly identical to turning around at a DUI checkpoint.
It's a poignant example of what others have pointed out. "I have nothing to hide" until political landscape changes to make it something to hide.
It's like people pushing for liberal drug laws and legalizing homeless tents and then one day its in their backyard.
While I feel for women part of groups that are impacted by Roe vs Wade being overturned, their apathy against privacy concerns have boomeranged, the same of which proportion of men who aren't having to deal with abortion are looking at this issue as "I don't need an abortion so it doesn't concern me".
Those women caught up in this struggle also looked on, along with men and everybody else as Uyghur women were sterilized and forced to abort using the very surveillance mechanism that were developed and custom tailored to fit the needs of the abusers.
It's almost like the land of CCP is a testing ground for what's in store for Western civilization. Remember what caused Latin America's shift towards tyranny and dictatorship, it was inflation. Nothing about our land that makes it any less susceptible or resilient. Inflation has deep remifications to privacy and this Roe vs Wade situation is only the beginning.
... maybe we shouldn't have spent years telling them they weren't allowed to have an opinion because it didn't concern them.
It turns out assholes come in all genders.
that never stopped women from doing what they want. you are completely brushing past the main issue which is apathy towards privacy which is not remotely related to women's rights portrayed by mainstream media and your language generalizes 100+ years of women, who regardless societal expectations, went on their own because they believed they had same rights as any other human. It's sad that the same spirit is now being used as shields to derail completely unrelated issues that by mere association of gender, calls for a complete review of a certain political lens that we are all familiar with. Save us the grace here honey.
Change, but not retroactively.
Has anyone actually got in trouble for that? I turned around those checkpoints all the time because it's just faster to go around.
For instance, if you go hiking, you my get attacked by a bear, is it a risk worth taking? Usually yes, bear attacks are rare, unless you do stupid things like going where you know there is a bear. Same thing for privacy, you can take some risks, for example by letting Facebook follow you doing mundane things for targeted advertising, but not be so stupid as to post picture of yourself doing stupid things for everyone to see. The concrete example in the article is in the second category: some guy gets fired because he posts a picture of doing stupid things at his job.
Personally, I consider the political risks you cited low for the US or EU. Not zero, it is never zero, but low enough to be negligible compared to what Google, Amazon or Facebook offer me. Maybe it is not your case.
There are some privacy high risks, and that's, I think, mostly about things you publish online. Police doesn't need a warrant to look at your public profile, neither does your boss or the spouse you are cheating. Others include doing stupid things on your employer's corporate network, or doing things that are seriously illegal right now in your country without necessary precautions.
Some people (especially here on HN) are so into privacy for the sake of privacy, more like a hobby than a practical exercise in improving their quality of life. And that's completely fine. But I'm more interested in convenience. I'm at the point where I would legitimately prefer my Social Security Number to be leaked on the dark web than have to deal with the proposed three-factor authentication for my banking and brokerage accounts.
In the case of a targeted investigation, yeah, you're probably right. Thing is, that's not the only (or even most likely) threat unless you're some kind of wannabe DPR. Dragnet/geofence-style investigations are getting more common and while not using Google likely won't save you from the CIA, it may very well avoid your technically-incompetent local LEOs accidentally framing you for a bank robbery or something when you win the location-data lottery.
But that's an individual-level argument, which imo isn't the main point - privacy is a societal-level good.
> But I'm more interested in convenience.
This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere. The effectiveness of privacy methods scale both technically and socially: an example on the technical front is how tor is more useful the more "normal" traffic ends up on it, and an example on the social front is how encrypted messaging capabilities aren't suspicious if they're integrated by default into widely used apps. So, I see privacy as less about me and more about participating in creating an environment where those who truly require it can have it, and that's something that's way harder if privacy is only conceived as being "for" dissidents or fetishists or whatever.
Is it inconvenient sometimes? Sure, but it's also a civic duty. I'd honestly call it analogous to jury selection: quite possibly nothing but a burden to you personally, but an important part of maintaining a healthy society.
> This is basically the "I have nothing to say, so I have no need for freedom of expression" argument transplanted into the privacy sphere.
Not at all. It's "I do not have infinite time and energy to spend in trying to protect myself against every remote possible negative outcome."
There's concerns about: hackers, surveillance capitalism, foreign state actors, and domestic state actors. People that say they have nothing to hide are usually unconcerned about one or two of these (surveillance capitalism and domestic state actors) but often are actually concerned with at least one.
The truth of the matter is, though, that if you're concerned about one, you need to be concerned about all of them. There is no door that only good guys can use and bad guys can't. Breaking it down has often led to more successful conversations for me. Even in a group of highly tech literate people (CS graduate students) I often see the "I don't care" or "what can I do" sentiments. So I suggest when talking about all this, break it down into these categories. Maybe if more of us did this then we'd have more success as a community.
- (access) trust every individual employee who has immediate access. Forever? And every individual employee of the government agencies that could compel access? Forever?
- (policy from above) trust every executive who could change policy on where your data goes and how it is held. Forever? Trust the relevant national government regarding laws about your data. Forever?
- (security) trust the Security set up is at least great. Forever?
Forever, because data can last that long. And auditing data handling is hard.
Edit: tried to make it clearer.
This is the best way I've been able to illustrate the difference between privacy and secrecy. Some things I do are just private, doesn't mean that they are secret.
People who live with roommates or family do, sometimes. I considered this. In the end, I decided if I faint while taking a shower and hit my head, I want someone to be able to rescue me, so: door unlocked.
While I may having nothing I need to hide, I have lots of things I want to hide. It's just happens that all the stuff I don't care about hiding are all the things these privacy consuming companies want. For others, they want to hide more and that's ok too.
You may be doing something right now that may be viewed as a crime in the future. Abortion comes to mind but I am sure there are more.
Also, there is only one time I can think of where someone has been convicted of a crime while it was legal when they did it and it was The Pirate Bay conviction. Everything else, it's always been if it's legal while you do it, it's legal. That holds true for abortion.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-audiobook/dp/B07J4...
> Many of the laws you are referring to are basically dead laws. You couldn't convict someone if you tried.
That is really immaterial to the discussion, as charges being brought alone can royally fuck up a life, whether or not a conviction is made in the end.
I'm still a fan of reducing the complexity of the legal code and enormously circumscribing plea bargaining false-confession-ammunition, so it's not like I'm not aligned with the overall libertarian impulse here, but I disagree that this is a good book.
However, it seems rather odd that I say I have nothing I need to hide I just have things I want to hide. People are insisting I must have somethign I need to hide. This is where I think many activists screw up. They're too busy trying to push their framing of the issue on to people. Instead of getting behind the idea that people have stuff they don't want others to know, which we all do, it seems everyone here is busy talking about the need to hide illegal stuff because what they currently do might become illegal. That isn't going to wash with most people. Most people are going to be againist it because now you're keeping privacy in the mindset of committing crimes and all these privacy tools aren't for keeping your personal secrets but for committing crimes. Who wants to support these crimes? Especially when instantly the other side talks about child porn.
It's like how when the protests in the US kicked off in 2020. They framed it as black lives matter which instantly allowed detractors to point out that white people are killed by police more often and silence them. If it wasn't just framed as a racial thing and instead of a police brutality problem against all people, it could have gone further.
- Sold something in person for cash
- Gifts over a certain amount depending on the country
- Bartered items and services
- Gambling winnings
- Forgiven debt
I believe a hacker, or bad actor in general, will gain access to my data if they really really wanted it. I believe stealing data is just a function of time and resources (money). Based on this premise, I don't keep anything truly valuable available digitally. Sure, I have my bank accounts secured, but nothing past start practices.
I do not believe my feelings on this mean I do not care about free speech, nor do I not care about privacy. I believe our reality is that no one should be surprised if their data is stolen. People should plan on this happening and be prepared. Just as corporations have Incident Response and Business Continuity plans.
Do you have physical notebooks full of information that you don't like to keep in digital format?
For personal use, just have to say offline USB drive is a good investment if you can make the physical switch.
Until we can have something like the quantum entanglement communication.
As far as physical, while a lot of your footprint exists on line, still having the physical matters. A property deed is a good example of this. Another example is my will. I might be aging myself out of this conversation, but it's a point of view for consideration. And yes, these are in a fireproof safe along with birth certificates, passports, etc. So yes, if someone steals my identity, I still have physical proof. Standard MFA stuff (from wikipedia) "knowledge (something only the user knows), possession (something only the user has), and inherence (something only the user is)"
I'll end with another opinion ... digital wallets which are not backed by the FDIC are super scary. Im sure this is another conversation, but just because I choose not to have a digital wallet doesn't mean I don't care about free speech :)
With regards to not caring about free speech, I am trying to picture myself being in this hypothetical situation: lets imagine I was ran by a car and was denied the right to do or say anything about it because the driver was some prominent person, I'm picturing myself in such situation and I'm glad we still have free speech...
Again, the same argument could be used about your physical person. Given time and resources someone could kidnap and torture you so you shouldn't be surprised if that happens.
Whether we accept it or not, the cloud is our "home" now. We have little to no control on who keeps our information on their servers. (i.e. employer, government, school, bank, phone company...)
And I'll use the home as an analogy here. A bad actor can access your house anyway, why have a door? Why have laws that criminalize burglary? Using your example, you could say not to keep anything valuable at home.
I agree with your point that we shouldn't be surprised if our information is hacked, but the point about privacy isn't to necessarily protect you against hackers, but to regulate those that keep your information. Prohibit them from selling your info, store it when not needed and as an extra benefit make it more difficult for hackers to access your info.
Yes, the bad actor can break in my door, but they actually have to do it. Walking through without a door is sooooo much easier.
But then when they get inside, what will they find? Will I have silver and gold bars? Or will it be random HN posts?
My advice is to take reasonable precautions. However, if you have your entire life savings in an offshore back account with Venmo access which doesn't require 2FA ... then yea, I would worry.
I believe things that are valuable, like truly valuable, should be hard to change. Like liquidating a 401k life savings shouldn't be a couple mouse clicks. It should be a long and hard process because you are prolly only going to once or twice in your life. There is nothing wrong IMO with requiring being present at a bank to perform significant value transfers. Sure, wouldn't it be nice to only have to click a button? Sure ... but requiring physical (think MFA) slows the process down for the sake of security.
IME people who have "nothing to hide" get suddenly more interested in data privacy if it stops being an abstract threat. They see Google knowing their intimate secrets in much the same way they would their hairdryer. Until they dont.
Unfortunately, that will probably happen for most people about two weeks before a stasi-like secret police takes full control over the country and by that point it'll have been about 10 years too late to start taking data privacy seriously.
That's true for almost everything, unfortunately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...
He had nothing illegal to hide, but got screwed anyway. Privacy would have been useful in this situation, wouldn't it?
If the legal system works you can "fix" an error with the cops. It's not like Google reporting something will automatically go on your criminal record. Once the legal system also starts using AI and automated systems to convict people without further explanation then we are in serious trouble.
Watch the TV show COPS to see how many times criminals lie to police officers during an arrest.
It’s unfortunate this man got caught up in this but the police did exactly their job. Commit a crime, have evidence, press charges. Arrest if is procedure.
>The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.
>Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.
>“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”
>Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail.
It just so happens that it's a cover for outsourcing and scaling up the intelligence apparatus's ability to track everyone, everywhere, all the time. Just in case they do something really bad like steal state secrets or try to blow the whistle on a crime committed by a powerful person. It's always about cover stories for the state's unrelenting paranoia.
May just be my tin foil hat speaking, but I believe a lot of things would change knowing you're always being listened to even when you think it's just two people in the room
Ignoring the role social taboo plays in that interaction isn’t intellectually honest.
A comment I make to a friend sitting next to me would be inappropriate to make to the policeman in the corner, or to my boss. Inappropriate to the point of there being consequences.
I feel like the whole clothes thing was a horrible example.
If we only wore clothes for "warmth and protection" then why do we wear them indoors? The point is still valid.
You mean like hiding your bank balance because the social consequences of people seeing it? Or hiding your medical records because of the social consequences of people seeing it?
We have a bit of a pretend debate from now and then … and a few technical elite are able to protect their own privacy to some degree… but for the masses privacy debate was over before it began. If anything it is just a marketing campaign by a few companies like Apple.
(Side Note: Apple fully complies with all warrants and decrypts all icloud data and hands it over)
nooo, the same Apple that had "never heard of the NSA". it can't be...
You say this like it's some kind of gotcha, rather than Apple, a major corporation, refusing to actively break the law of the country where they're headquartered.
At the very least, it's obviously passively breaking the law, unless you consider refusing to obey an activity.
Of course I don't expect companies to break the law, it is to no benefit to them, but we should not pretend that the rule of law has much value when it comes to government surveillance. And I would argue that to protect your privacy the legality of the means are secondary.
it is not illegal to allow users to hold their own keys such that Apple would have nothing to hand over to the government
Apple chooses to run icloud in such a way that they can provide data on request.
Expecting them to operate a service like iCloud like a tech-expert-focused privacy-first-even-before-usability service is just utterly unrealistic.
Because there's a world of difference between responding to a lawful warrant to produce data you have stored on your servers, and agreeing to create a special version of your software specifically to give the FBI carte blanche to unlock any phones they want (at least within that particular model).
By contesting it they were going against a court order, not just refusing an informal request by the FBI.
Somehow we've made corporations sovereign on the internet, and the only mitigations we have on it are from free software and encryption tech - which they routinely evade and sabotage on behalf of their advertisers, but also for government agencies whose activities are otherwise regulated by constitutional and other guaranteed freedoms. This axis of state and industry colluding against citizen "users," has a bunch of ugly precedents.
Imo, addressing the "I have nothing to hide," argument at all is a tarpit. These are neutralized and disengaged people who are content to bargain and live as liquid subjects, and expecting anything more than repeating official talking points and bromides from them misunderstands their survival strategy. I don't think you change anyones mind, you can only activate or neutralize them based on their existing beliefs. I'd recommend letting the "I have nothing to hide" people alone, and instead, encourage active minds to develop the skills to build technology and products that shape the future.
I'd even say health information is worse than monetized now, it's actively politicized. I know that C19 vaccination records (names/addr/date/dosenumber) were shared with PR/oppo-research firms working for politicans involved in the rollout, and there was no consent for collection or use of that data either. We live in interesting times.:)
Suppose your future circumstances change and you find yourself in a situation where you do have something to hide. The mere fact that you have "gone dark" can be observed and used as evidence that you are now engaging in activities you believe need to be hidden.
Anyone with kids will recognise this - you're not worried when they're yelling and screaming. You're worried when they stop yelling and screaming and suddenly become too quiet.
They fight for your data like a lion fights for a deer.
Anyone thinking apple has no advertising prospects is deluding themselves.
Advertising is a curse on humanity.
Besides that, iOS E2E encrypt a lot more like health data, browsing history, maps data, HomeKit data etc.
I want to hide what sandwich I had for lunch. I want to hide what book I'm reading at the moment. I want to hide what my favourite mug is.
I want to hide lots of things about my life that are legal and socially completely acceptable.
Why do I want to hide these legal and socially acceptable activities? That's also something I choose not to divulge.
Should I be allowed to hide these things?
Unless there is some clear and genuine overriding interest, I should be the one to decide whether or not, to whom, when, and how that information is disclosed.
That doesn't mean I am necessarily opposed to any piece of information being disclosed (i.e. I have nothing to hide), but these decisions shouldn't be made for me.