We’re the good guys so it would be a good thing. Not a bad thing.

The problem is, they’re almost always the absolute worst to deal with, as almost any evil is excusable when done ‘for the right reasons’ or when ‘we’re the good guys’, where selfish evil at least sometimes takes a break or feels bad. And selfish evil is usually more predictable.

It’s a constant struggle. The underlying need for some to control others, to know what others are doing at all times (and the corresponding elements of control and manipulation) has always lived in every group.

How a group does is more about what it does with it, and how it directs it/reins it in (and acknowledges it), rather than its lack of existence.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

It seems to me that most of the Eastern European states would be against this law but as it stands, they most certainly welcome it.

> How a group does is more about what it does with it, and how it directs it/reins it in (and acknowledges it), rather than its lack of existence

I am not sure I understand what you mean

And denying that we could be bad (or have bad tendencies) that need to be resisted makes it more likely that we would, ultimately, be really bad.

But acknowledging we can be bad ‘hurts’. People want to feel good, and right, and justified. The more pain they are in, the more true it is. People don’t like pain. When it gets really bad, they look for scapegoats and seek comfort in delusion, anger, etc.

There is a balancing act in here somewhere. Frankly though, looking at history as best as I can - the wheel exists, and the analogy of the wheel is so apt because it does keep going in cycles. Pretending that knowing history will somehow insulate us from repeating it is a delusion.

It will all happen again.

The best we can hope for, is that we can make it less painful or evil when it does.

But still, I can't help feeling like we are regressing.

Notably, the Stasi was never very effective at many tasks. It definitely turned a blind eye to organized crime, among many other things.

Great at destroying a people though so they can’t be a threat against you though. Apparently.

The Germans I know have noted that it’s still quite clear who grew up in East Germany. And the economy itself is no comparison either.

Through failure of instinct. Seeing government agents open your letters, copy their contents, then re-seal them to send them on their way, or tap your phone and listen attentively with headphones, provokes an immediate, instinctive, visceral reaction. There's no need to construct elaborate scenarios how an ordinary law-abiding citizen could fall afoul of his government to make them see the threat.

But change those human spies into innocuous databases and convenient phones, and you lose the benefit of instinct.

Not to mention that they would use all this data to train the next generation of algorithms.

Also, assuming high levels of privacy in the days of old might be in error, depending on what you were doing.

That’s exactly what they want to avoid.

Problem/reaction/solution or manufactured consent is much easier.

Take this to NSA levels of privacy invasion and things are about to get _really_ interesting. Nixing candidates is only the beginning, you can sell them protection, or force them to pass/don't pass laws or foreign policy. To me, that's the _real_ benefit of all this. they probably couldn't care less about dissidents.

> How come we end up here again? Why can't the powers that be just leave the people to live their lives in peace without being snooped on by the surveillance apparatus?

You need to read more anarchist/communist literature that explains the situation as it has always been: the presence of a State, as an entity, implies that the population has never been in control. The State has always been. Yes, sure, sometimes the State gives a facade of openness, but it's always been a facade.

Whatever the "free" era we think happened, that era was still definitely not free for a part of the population: marginalized people, non-obedient people, people with an identity considered deviant, .... It wasn't "free", it was just "free for me"

I am not deluded to the point that I think everyone had a great time in the last 30 years or so but since the fall of the USSR and some of it's satellites states , it seemed like we were on an upward trajectory in terms of human rights, democracy and civil liberties.

If the last 30 years have only been a blip in terms of freedom acquired by some parts of the global population, does this mean that we are just returning to the mean value of freedom and that we are by definition always meant to be under some kind of semi-authoritarian regime?

The fall of the USSR is the victory of capitalism and most above all the spread of neoliberalism, definitely not an upward trajectory for human rights, democracy or civil liberties. If you think it's been going up, it's because you were not in the group that has been crushed by it, which means you were in the group that, on the global stage, was crushing the other. Our collective well-being always depends on exploiting someone else, unless you're one of those who is simply exploited

> we are by definition always meant to be under some kind of semi-authoritarian regime?

No, we are not doomed to live under a semi-authoritarian regime because we are not doomed to live under a "regime", or more precisely, a State. Alternatives have existed and have all been crushed by conservative, usually capitalist movements but also Stalinism. They failed not because of their inner issues but because they didn't have enough power in the balance to survive against antagonist movements. Which is enough for me to believe there is some good in it, and it's worth fighting for it

Which is the group being crushed by capitalism? The major complaint against it is inequality, which in practice has meant that it has benefited some people a lot and some people only a little. There are very few people worse off under it than what came before.

Its biggest failings are government failures to appropriately price externalities and the enactment of rules that constrain competition when a government is captured by industry.

But how do you want to fix that? Government-operated commerce certainly doesn't, the environmental record of state-operated industries is catastrophic -- you're essentially asking the industry to regulate itself. Anarchy can't price externalities, how does it propose to prevent anyone from dumping in the river?

So what do you want to do instead?

The workers who are barely paid a living wage, the workers who are currently in a row with Meta because it used their work for mediation but exploited them, the workers who are currently doing all the not-artificial job of teaching AI. Capitalism works by exploiting people, globalization has just made it less visible

> So what do you want to do instead?

I want people, those who wield tools, those who build tools, those who use resources, to be the ones to decide what we build, how we build it, how much we build it. I don't want industry to regulate itself, I want the users to be their own industry, or if they don't want to/can't, to control the industry.

> Anarchy can't price externalities, how does it propose to prevent anyone from dumping in the river?

Contrary to popular belief, anarchism doesn't mean the absence of rules. How does capitalism proposes to prevent anyone from dumping in the river ? It doesn't, there are rules outside of capitalism that block it from dumping. The trick is to work out who decides the rules.

Anarchism is about taking control of our lives, of our futures. It's about doing for ourselves rather than complaining and hoping someone else does it better for us.

That's overcooked. We've only had strong end-user crypto(graphy) for about 20 years; you can still have private conversations, whether in a field or in a private space that you are sure isn't bugged. This is no worse than it was 20 years ago. "Democracy [...] is dead" is a counsel of despair.

I believe it never went away and technology simply kept making it more pervasive, more efficient. It didn't suddenly happen in the last ten years or so, it was a continuous progression over decades.

Hopefully technology can also help us defeat it.

It's little bit what we have now with respect to nuclear weapons, where we have used them twice and decided to not do it again (so far).

I just cannot fathom that someone is genuinely ok with having their worst secrets and their deepest fear out there in the open being sorted and analyzed by some black box algorithm who may or may not start an investigation against them because they said the wrong thing or shared the wrong image.

etc. etc.

The very microsecond that some tragedy befalls the populace, the very first thing people start screaming about is how pathetic the government is for not knowing about the tragedy in advance and preventing it.

We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.

If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.

Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.

So you... put some secret agents on Telegram to infiltrate the terrorists. In the same way as you got into the room with them before people had portable phones. You bug their phones in the same way as you used to bug their rooms -- through physical access. Which is effective but expensive, and so it works against terrorists and serious criminals but not for mass surveillance.

> When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it.

If we actually had sufficiently secure communications to ward off our own intelligence agencies, why would some other country's have any more luck? Preventing theirs from working against us is good.

Technically shouldn't be happening? Also, probably shouldn't be happening period. Every time it does, Stuff Goes Wrong (tm).

I think the relevant Franklin quote was: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

> When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it.

I don't quite understand your logic. My naive intuition says that applying the strongest possible security posture in all aspects of society will lead to the society being at its most secure.

I'm aware that sometimes seemingly counter-intuitive things hold. If you state that weakening civilian security might somehow strengthen overall security, you may somehow be correct. But you're not quite connecting the dots for me here yet?

I agree with you that is true but is there any proof that even if all telecommunications were open completely to the governments, it would be possible to stop every incoming attacks/tragedies?

Because that is the current justification that is being used now. Oh if only we could see your Whats-app messages, then we'll be able to stop these horrors. I am not inclined to agree that this would solve anything at all.

Notwithstanding the umber of false positives that this system would generate, there is no risk zero.

> We don't live in 1923. We live in 2023. You can't put a secret agent in a room with a bunch of nefarious terrorists anymore, because those terrorists don't sit in a room with each other. They talk on Telegram. We, the tech nerds and libertarians obsessed with privacy and the freedom to do whatever we want, have been fermenting a technological arms race for decades. The more bullet-proof encryption we create, the more the government has to encroach on our privacy to do the thing we require them to do: keep us safe from the real threats that do actually exist in the world, and hide among us.

This argument does not make sense.

We accept a certain level of risk that is inherent to living in a modern civilization.

We don't ban cars even though the damage they do to people each year is infinitely greater than terrorist attacks. How many people have died of terrorist activities in the last year vs the number of people who have been killed/maimed by reckless/ drunk drivers?

So on this basis alone, if we aim at reducing the global number of preventable deaths, then banning cars would be the best thing to do.

> If you want more privacy, paradoxically, the best thing would be to actually give up some privacy. Telephones and letter mail have been automatically scanned for like 50 years, and this doesn't seem to concern us, and was good enough for intelligence services that they didn't need to collect anything more. So we could stop sending all our communications with bulletproof encryption. We could give the federal government a bypass. Allow the security services to peek under the covers. If we give them some leeway, they won't feel the need to compromise all privacy and security. But if you give them nothing, they literally have no other recourse but to compromise everything, because they don't know where to look and they have no leads.

This solution only works if the government that is doing the monitoring decides to keep it's pinky promise that it won't use this info to get rid of political dissidents or groups of people that are not acceptable/needed anymore.

Is there any reason to believe that a government that gets all this data would use it only for the good of its citizen and not to target certain populations?

Is there any reason to believe that this data would be kept from being shared without consent?

If we look at the last century of history, any time a government has been granted such access, it used it to the detriment of it's citizen and kept themselves in power trough coercion and threats targeting any one who dared resist them.

So forgive me for not wanting to share even more of my private life with someone would may use it later against me.

Finally, we both know that there is no such thing as backdoor for the good guys only, if it exist it will be exploited by foreign actors as soon as possible.

> Nobody wants the government snooping on them. But if you really can't handle any level of surveillance at all, tell your elected officials you no longer want any federal or state intelligence services, and deal with the consequences. When the nation falls to all the other nations' intelligence apparatuses and covert operations, you will decry it and ask why the government did nothing to stop it. You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.

This is straw-man argument. Just like the argument about saving the children now. So you don't want to have the government read all your messages, and watch your private conversations, surely you must be a child abuser or a friend of the terrorists. Give me break.

More to the point of your comment, how would opening my private life to the government protect my country from being targeted by a foreign government?

> You simply can not have your cake and eat it too.

And that was exactly my point about the coming out with it already. It seems that the governments in the Western world are hellbent on making sure that they are perceived as freedom loving, democracy loving states. This stance comes with all the posturing regarding China and Russia when in fact they dream to have the same access.

So why the charade? Let's call a spade a spade.

If you want access to every thing I read, every single thing I type, every image I share, then this is not freedom. This is a digital prison and I would very much appreciate it if they could stop lying to our faces and be honest about it.