some countries have a public policy of “don’t negotiate with terrorists”. it’s so tempting for me to adopt the same policy in my own life. if a burglar showed up at my door demanding entry, i wouldn’t debate them about why it’s morally preferable that they don’t enter against my will. but when it’s some politician demanding entry, suddenly everyone thinks i ought to engage in that debate.
no. better to dispel the myth: those who rule without consent are illegitimate rulers. the problem isn’t us failing to persuade such rulers. it’s us failing to reject such rulers.
The problem is that this line of thinking usually turns into just doing nothing and letting them roll over us anyway because they've taken our silence as consent.
generally speaking, rulers don't care about your consent. they might care about the second and third order effects of consent, but to say they'll interpret silence as consent is to suggest that their knowledge of your consent is a primary driver of their actions -- and that's just not the case.
but no, i'm not saying you should let yourself be steamrolled. anyone in this thread has the knowledge to work around this particular adversarial legislation; to build systems where bad actors have less power over you. spin up a Matrix server. bridge it to Signal or Telegram or wherever else you need to stay in contact with your less nerdy friends. then when bad people try to do bad things to the people around you, point them to that escape hatch you've already prepared.
I’m not familiar with Matrix. Does that include some mechanism which prevents “we know you’re running this server and politely ask you to stop”? I understand there are other tools for that but I wonder of the necessity with specific “stacks” as it were.
> Does that include some mechanism which prevents “we know you’re running this server and politely ask you to stop”?
to answer this literally: no. nothing out-of-the-box for that, at least.
but do sci-hub, zlib, and friends have such a mechanism? we've been here before with CFAA, then DMCA. ostensibly, we lost those legislative battles against DRM and copyright. and yet it's easier to access academic articles than ever before.
we have those things above because despite what legislators did, enough of the public is engaged with our goals, or views them as worthy, that it's political suicide to actually enforce on them.
so just do that again, but here: convince the public -- your peers -- that end-to-end encryption isn't for baddies; that privacy is a good thing. that your cause is morally just. build the tooling that makes privacy easy. then use it, share it, spread it. if we get that far, then congrats: whatever the legislators say can't actually hold water.
if you don't buy that, then do what worked for SOPA: voice your opinions publicly. keep the pressure on for months with website blackouts, banners and boycotts. make it a spectacle.
neither solution ends with "write your legislator". if you want to write them, i won't stop you: but that's not where the meat of any of this is actually determined.
- if handed a ballot with this issue on it, would mark the “no” column.
and if that were the case, i propose that you consider more seriously that second point. if voting is the path to better outcomes, you want always (1) more voter turnout AND (2) more precise translation of voter preference into policy.
i feel that what we’ve got today is something like a B, B- on voter turnout, but an unambiguous F on how votes drive policy. that if our democracy was somehow such that the conversation being had was “don’t forget to vote against EARN IT on your ballot” instead of “don’t forget to write your legislators about EARN IT”, we’d both find that a better system? ambiguities, caveats abound. i’m not literally saying that every policy issue ought be on the ballot, just that if the formal systems for fairly translating individual preference into policy were more capable, we wouldn’t feel any need to reach for informal methods like writing legislators or rejecting authority.
https://act.eff.org/action/the-earn-it-act-is-back-seeking-t...