In many cases, (In my country for sure, and I bet this is common elsewhere) members of the legislative branch are approached by people from the intelligence community, who hand them the drafts for stuff they 'need'.
And you can bet those people do understand encryption.
Disagree on hypocrisy. US still affords significant freedoms and largely respects human rights. Whether your communications can be decrypted or intercepted on networks that are government regulated anyway is not hypocritical.
Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally if not mistaken. Strong encryption is open source as you've pointed out. There's no law against using those open source libraries, nor any discussion to try to censor/outlaw them, AFAIK.
Policing the airwaves and internet pipes hardly qualifies as some major abuse of human rights, particularly when the best that the Intercept/Snowden crowd can come up with regarding things like "Parallel Reconstruction" is "abuse" of "surveillance power" to catch, e.g., methamphetamine traffickers [1].
> Policing the airwaves and internet pipes hardly qualifies as some major abuse of human rights
The leaders of today are not the same as those of tomorrow - sweeping powers to invade anyone's privacy and communications could easily be used for nefarious purposes. I don't trust our current leaders with such powers, much less potentially worse ones.
> Residents of the US are still free to use whatever mathematical algorithm they want to encrypt their comms. Transporting OTP's across physical borders is trivial, and not technically illegally if not mistaken. Strong encryption is open source as you've pointed out. There's no law against using those open source libraries, nor any discussion to try to censor/outlaw them, AFAIK.
Do you really think things will stay this way?
It seems to me that TFA is just the next step on a slow, but steady, march towards an authoritarian nightmare - once they've worn us down some more, there will be serious moves against encryption (it's happened before, and politicians have been bringing it up a lot in the past 10 years or so).
While I don't agree that your argument was high-quality:
Paul Graham:
I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that.
Thanks for clarifying and stating your opinion about the quality of my comment. However, seems a bit too broad-stroke to use downvoting for both the (lack of) quality of the comment and to express disagreement.
I do not personally have downmod capabilities, but I don't think it is necessarily too broad: If you interpret it as "People shouldn't read this", it seems reasonable.
HN doesn't want to encourage discourse, it wants to encourage worthwhile discourse, and the distinction is significant. Consider "people shouldn't read this" as short for "Having made the mistake of wasting my time reading this, I will flag it to help others to not make the same mistake."
Revise that slightly to 'it is a waste if time to read this' maybe.
I downvote quite rarely in HN over disagreeing with someone. Usually it is when I don't feel the reply adds any value, and is actually negative for the discourse.
That is, e.g doesn't reach me anything about the opposing position, or is argumentative without any substance, but distracting from comments that are more constructive.
Of course other people use different judgement. At the same time, HN doesn't hide comments to a great extent. Even 'dead' comments are optionally visible (with the 'showdead' setting) and quite a few of us read HN with that on. It's very rare for downvotes to silence people here who aren't actively disruptive.
Couple that with first enabling downvotes when people hit a certain karma threshold, and various other limitations, and HN is free of a lot of the downvote problems of other places.
That to me makes it less of an issue if people downvote to signal disapproval here.
Often initial downvotes will be countered when people feel a comment has been downvotes too much as well.
Assuming that US citizens are safe, that doesn't apply to citizens of other countries. So even it the US and the UK respect their own citizens' rights (Snowden showed they don't) they won't respect other people's rights. And then surveillance becomes a tool against a countries and policies the US and UK don't agree with regardless if these are a genuine threat or not. So yeah, it is kind of a big problem.
> Disagree on hypocrisy. US still affords significant freedoms and largely respects human rights.
If you are US citizen maybe, for the rest of the world. Definitively not.
Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilians in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is not an example of "respect of humans rights".
> Without being a lawyer, I'm pretty sure random drone strike on civilian in Pakistan, torture in Guantanamo or intercepting entire world communication is an example of "respect of humans rights"
This is a good point, I think. The US has an appalling record on human rights (aside from your examples, arming terrorists and overthrowing democratically elected governments spring to mind) - as long as we're talking about the rights of non-Americans.
Some of those individuals were guilty of little more than political activism but experienced real harm (e.g. deportation) thanks to surveillance overreach.
Disagree. The end goal has always been to make civilian use of encryption in a such a way as to prevent government from being able to intercept communication illegal. That’s where we will end up.
The US, by their own admission, is "killing people based on metadata" [0].
Which in practice is done by using machine learning [1] on huge data sets gathered with that global surveillance enabled trough Five Eyes.
Because the army of humans that could manually sort trough those zettabytes of data has yet to be cloned. All that ends up in the fancy-sounding "disposition matrix" [2] aka the USGs kill-list. It's just systems upon systems doing their thing and nobody is directly responsible or accountable for anything that ends up happening, like when yet another 30 Afghani farmers get "splatted" by accident [3].
Considering how this has been going on for close to two decades, and the US has a very convenient way going about the casualty statistics [4], I guess these Afghani farmers are just another rounding error in the "war on terror". Figures, because before that they were mostly considered biometric cattle [5] and lab-rats for fantasies about "full-spectrum surveillance" [6].
Note: Under Trump, the USG now even stopped releasing their shined up drone statistics. So it's pretty much impossible to know the full scale about what's still going on to this day.
Or they want political cover to avoid revealing their capabilities, or to enable that data to be used more easily in court or for a wider range of offences.
This is the second time that this article (from May 2019) has been on the front page of HN in the past 24 hours.
Presumably this is due to the news about the Army being on alert for Involuntary Celibates planning a mass shooting in US theaters for the screening of Joker. [1]
As a former service member I can tell you the US Military is pretty much defined by involuntary celibacy. This is especially true in the lower ranks. If you know of an incel, please encourage them to sign up for the military. The structure, discipline, and sense of purpose the military gives you is the greatest inoculation of the anger that comes from involuntary celibacy in young men.
What?! That's the opposite. Not to be crass, but people in uniform are the least likely to go periods without reciprocation from advances. Both being in uniform plus the fitness aspects of being in the military make officers and enlisted personal incredibly attractive. It may be anecdotal, but people I know in the military talk about how they often clean up any time they're in a bar.
There are definitely guys that clean up when they're in a bar. After all, most soldiers are young, fit, and horny. They are, however, likely describing experiences when they aren't near the base, such as being home on leave, or on vacation. I'm sure you're aware of the propensity for some guys to exaggerate stories of conquest.
When you're on base, or deployed, it's another story. There is a severe dearth of satisfactory partners. Bases grow small, civilians tell their daughters to avoid soldiers, available females line up for the top 10% of males and completely ignore the remaining 90%. The reality is most male soldiers are not having much sex. Now think of a deployment, sailors on a boat (where consensual sex with another service member can get you in trouble), or some mountain top in the middle of nowhere (the goats start to look cute). Those periods last a year or more, and can be very tough.
Why do you think prostitution and strip clubs are so rampant around military bases? It's not because the guys are "cleaning up at the bar" I can tell you that.
If you want to experience the tension created by a room full of drunk undersexed young incels in peak fitness take a trip to any bar outside a remote military base. It's frightening. Good thing they only take that aggression out on each other in a ritual of tribal fist fights and reconciliation by the base MP (military police). Better that than at home polishing their AR-15 while they watch Hentai. On base we keep the guns under lock and key.
Right, so that would be a good thing if you're "involuntarily" celibate and that is causing you severe emotional distress. Just have to be careful not to marry the first girl you meet in a bar the first time you're on leave.
> The structure, discipline, and sense of purpose the military gives you is the greatest inoculation of the anger that comes from involuntary celibacy in young men.
Incels typically feel inadequate. Structure, discipline, and sense of purpose can counter that.
Taking care of the celibacy might be a quicker solution, and a longer lasting one too. The military is not an institution put together for social work.
Snowden is a top scumbag. Bring him to justice. He could have just disclosed domestic spying operations. Instead, he lit a match and torched the NSA to the ground, while kicking off a global subversion movement directed primarily at the USIC. That he fled to adversaries while, for instance, disclosing USIC hacking efforts against them indicates his motives. He's anything but a patriot. He's a traitor against the United States, against the oath he took. His profits from the book should be seized.
Why does Snowden's twitter only follow @NSAGov? Are they his sole "target" forever? His entire social presence is centered around this idea of the NSA being his sole "adversary"? He torched the NSA to the ground.
Why did someone who is so calculating execute an ostensibly haphazard plan to end up overseas? Intentional or not, Snowden went to HK then Russia. He stays in Russia to avoid facing justice.
How much time did Snowden have to plan for his escape? At least since December 2012. It was enough time for him to think through and coordinate the biggest part of such a plan: the diversion. It would not be surprising to discover that he had help domestically during this process.
The forthcoming book does allow Snowden to write his own history.
Writing your own story is what every human does. Then we mediate our perceptions with others. It does get amusing that we apparently live in times where there is already an established hivemind perception people are expected to adhere to. I could have understood it in former USSR. I do not understand or accept it for US. I moved here by choice and I am stupid and naive enough to believe founding fathers dreams.
Snowden is still a hero to me. At least he shone light on it. Before that, Wyden tried to do it through official channels, but Clapper outright lied in public.
So what do you do? Collect paycheck, keep your head down, not make waves and listen to elected critters make statements you know to run counter to reality.
Alternatively, you can tell the truth and risk government wrath for telling how things really work.
Most of what Snowden said was the nonsensical ravings of a conspiracy theorist. You would think he would have documents to prove his conspiracies, but the only illegal program he revealed was phone metadata collection, which was borderline enough that the second court to look at it ruled that it was legal.
