Many years of reading on HN, I used to just accept that encryption is the best thing. And from a point of view of what will happen, that’s what will happen. But should we as a society want this?
I would argue these days that it is far better to be able to reconstruct a conversation and prove someone said something. In case things go wrong, we have to have a way to establish truth, and prove things, so we can have fairness in outcomes.
Now, if we have governments that punish people for being dissidents or engaging in victimless crimes, the answer is to fix the government and the laws, and not to sneak around. That’s like making slavery better for those few people who happened to have nice masters (or encryption).
So, what’s the upshot? We need more immutability and also work hard to make governments not punish people for victimless crimes.
PS: freedom of speech should refer to actual speech of humans, not the unregulated ability of organizations to provide megaphones (whether Twitter or network TV). I think these are harmful for society, and I would be happier if every statement in science, news, politics, history etc. would be peer reviewed and battle it out in some wiki site before the general public sees it. Unless they want to press the Talk page to see the battle going on behind the scenes, regular people should see the article AFTER multiple sides have battled it out. I see the current megaphones controlled by Sinclair or Twitter or Newspapers or Network TV a lot more harmful and dividing our society.
>the answer is to fix the government and the laws, and not to sneak around
It would be nice if someone “fixed” some governments (and some crimes as a side quest), but 1) condemning privacy only makes this harder than de-facto almost impossible. 2) “prove someone said something” is not how our earth-wide culture works. We are basically based on the fact that conversations are private to some extent.
Did you find yourself in a situation when your opponent knows your every step and thought and you don’t? Play any game that way and see where it goes.
>We need more immutability and also work hard to make governments not punish people for victimless crimes.
That’s cool, but something hints me you’re not living in one of these countries where hard work is required. Swap with one of its citizens, make a change, then we talk.
What if we apply the same radical transparency to government as well? No more secret courts or meetings, even black ops must be revealed after each limited operation is complete, everything must be out in the open. But leave democratic elections, for instance.
Would any government agree to unilaterally do this? I think the biggest danger will come not from the other governments but from losing the ability to be bribed and do unaccountable things.
> That’s cool, but something hints me you’re not living in one of these countries where hard work is required. Swap with one of its citizens, make a change, then we talk.
There are some points in the GP though. Ideally we should try to fix the government and the laws for who can't, but even people in countries blessed enough to be able to try don't try enough.
> I would argue these days that it is far better to be able to reconstruct a conversation and prove someone said something. In case things go wrong, we have to have a way to establish truth, and prove things, so we can have fairness in outcomes.
I'd love to have that capability. What matters is who controls it. If everything about me was constantly recorded but I was the person that decides if and when make some of this information available to other people (and initally to whom) then it would be great and I think that's our future that marries our progressing tech with our freedoms.
If I can be coerced to reveal information about myself or it can be revealed at the whim of government, judge or a corporation, then it's a dystopian nightmare which we see some people are trying to create for example by coercing people to reveal their passwords or unlock their devices.
There's of course some grey area like public places where privacy does not apply. Your thoughts there are private but the rest is not yours. We have pretty much worked out what's private and what's public in physical space. As for digital space I think things I do on my local machine or on another machine that I control then it's private. Once I do something on someone elses machine it stops being private.
I don’t think everything about you should be recorded without your consent. Privacy in your OWN person and documents is a major thing.
However, when you engage with another party and make promises, and then break them, the other party should have a way to prove what you said in a dispute. I think the default mode should not be “off the record”. Because most parties aren’t savvy enough to demand that you go “on the record” right before you talk. Instead, you can ask to go “off the record” so that will be the alert that none of your promises will matter during that period.
If being “on the record” is the default for all conversations, that’s what I’m talking about. The concept of “privacy” still applies to non-participants in the interaction.
The main question is, can we extend this expectation to other interactions not just conversations online? What if one of the participants had been carrying tiny body cameras and microphones, which has become more and more feasible to do?
You know how many rape crimes could be solved? Or police altercations? Imagine if everyone KNEW they were being recorded.
What if the cameras were not on the person’s body, but in the room? Surely we wouldn’t know, so the laws have to allow for it. But suppose we COULD legislate what these cameras did. One is to outlaw all cameras. The other is what if the video footage was always encrypted and it would require two keys:
1) M of N of the participants
2) a judge saying this is an active dispute / trial
It is in the interest of both parties to unlock the video once there is a court case, to help resolve what happened. Refusing to do so may be seen as an admission of guilt. The main reason for 1) is to allow people the option to be presumed guilty / held in contempt of court but not reveal the evidence against them. The problem is that they may be protecting some mob boss etc. so we may have to relax the condition 1) to just one of the parties. But recording entrapment still won’t be legal in two-party states.
Sure. I wouldn't mandate it. There would be no incentive to mandate it, when the owner remains in legal, practical control all the time, even in court.
I think most of us would still use it. To record our lives so you can review or share the good parts or prove something you said, heard or seen. It's already happening with phones (they just don't record all the time but that's mostly to technical limitations) and I think people today would love to be able to get easy, legal access to footage containing them from other sources.
> Now, if we have governments that punish people for being dissidents or engaging in victimless crimes, the answer is to fix the government and the laws, and not to sneak around.
You might as well be saying that instead of having democracy and elections, the answer is to fix the government and the laws.
You are putting the cart before the horse here: Sufficiently powerful individuals are the precondition for fixing the government and the laws. And that doesn't change once all the governments and laws are fixed: Criminals will continue to try and corrupt the government and the law. If you have too much power concentrated in one spot, be it a dictator or surveillance agencies, that is the spot that criminals will try to manipulate/use to their advantage, and only sufficient independent real power of individuals (that is: power that can not be made to disappear by a simple decision of someone trying to subvert the system) can possibly keep that in check.
The dream of the benevolent dictator, in some form or an other, seems to be irresistible--but if we want human rights to stay, we have to overcome that urge. Benevolent dictators are not a thing, and every attempt to build one so far has led to disaster.
How does that change anything? If you have a dictator control a thousand computers or a thousand humans, the result is that the dictator has the power.
The post office is obviously not a central component of the government, it simply was operated by the government in the past because it was useful to have as a basic service to serve the economy.
We may have misunderstood each other. I agree we should empower individuals in general, and try to defuse centralization of power. And I thought by powerful individuals you meant people in the government or some rival organizations.
I began talking about recording interactions, though, being potentially a very good thing.
I would argue these days that it is far better to be able to reconstruct a conversation and prove someone said something. In case things go wrong, we have to have a way to establish truth, and prove things, so we can have fairness in outcomes.
Now, if we have governments that punish people for being dissidents or engaging in victimless crimes, the answer is to fix the government and the laws, and not to sneak around. That’s like making slavery better for those few people who happened to have nice masters (or encryption).
So, what’s the upshot? We need more immutability and also work hard to make governments not punish people for victimless crimes.
PS: freedom of speech should refer to actual speech of humans, not the unregulated ability of organizations to provide megaphones (whether Twitter or network TV). I think these are harmful for society, and I would be happier if every statement in science, news, politics, history etc. would be peer reviewed and battle it out in some wiki site before the general public sees it. Unless they want to press the Talk page to see the battle going on behind the scenes, regular people should see the article AFTER multiple sides have battled it out. I see the current megaphones controlled by Sinclair or Twitter or Newspapers or Network TV a lot more harmful and dividing our society.