The basic problem is an impedance mismatch. Some people see the internet as this noble grand thing (like you, comparing it to the church). The government, like most voters, sees it as just a place to look at cat pictures and buy crap on zappos. The government treats the internet like it treats meat space things. Nobody complains that they can Public Storage to open storage units with a warrant, so why should the internet be treated any differently?
That impedance mismatch will take a long time to reconcile. If the Facebook generation is any indication, it will probably never be reconciled to your taste.
What I'm trying to say is: get used to being an intellectual minority. You're joining the company of lots of people, from those who think the government has no business forcing you to save for retirement to those who think the government has no business forcing you to serve or hire certain people in your private establishment. You probably agree with some of those people and disagree vehemently with others.
> Nobody complains that they can [force?] Public Storage to open storage units with a warrant
If they can get a warrant from a court under fair laws, personally I don't mind the government having equivalent powers in the online world. There are people doing bad things online, and I want there to be mechanisms to minimise that.
I don't know the specifics of the Lavabit case, but from the NSA revelations, it seems like the controls and oversight are much weaker in the online world than in the physical one.
How do you defend yourself against a rogue government? Furthermore, who gets to define when a government becomes rogue? All definitions aside, how do you defend yourself from a large, well-funded organization that's determined to do what ever it wants to you? Fair laws? The fact that someone else decides what's right and wrong means we've already lost.
All of these questions are at least as pressing in the physical world as they are in the online one. So you're asking philosophical questions about the nature of government and the rule of law that I'm not properly qualified to answer.
I think there has to be a socially defined code of what behaviour is allowed and what is not - even without written laws, lynch mobs would enforce some kind of rules. Since people don't all agree on such things, many people will inevitably disagree with parts of that code. The question of how we decide on the code - both the written laws and the social conventions of overlooking some violations of those laws - is difficult. But we can't put society on hold and wait for the philosophers come up with a perfect system.
To take an example which almost everyone here will see from the same perspective: the UK government recently pushed for a form of opt-out web filtering. To HN readers, it was a clear sign of out-of-control government censorship, championed by politicians too out of touch to understand the internet. But plenty of other people were quite happy with the idea of web filtering. You may deride them as 'think of the children' types and media industry lobbyists, but that's how democracy works. You don't get your way just because you say your opponents are stupid. You have to persuade and educate people to get support for your position.
To be clear, I agree that the web filtering plan was a bad idea.
As long as the engineers who design and build the internet care, we can do ok.
If the protocols that run the web are so easily compromised, it raises all kinds of problems with the underlying, somewhat invisible, functions to how the world works. That manifests itself as a liability to for-profit corporations. It also is something that the cat pictures people care about -- how many of them want their webcams capturing video of them walking around their rooms naked or wake up one morning and notice their brokerage account is empty? Very few.
It is quite an irony that governments demand one set of standards for privacy and security while attempting to compromise them for their own benefit (European countries carry just as much blame here.)
> As long as the engineers who design and build the internet care, we can do ok.
If the engineers who designed and built the internet cared about privacy, internet protocols wouldn't completely ignore privacy. They designed a massive routed network that involves packet forwarding between random untrusted nodes and then built a bunch of plain-text protocols on top (SMTP, HTTP, etc).
> how many of them want their webcams capturing video of them walking around their rooms naked or wake up one morning and notice their brokerage account is empty?
Probably none, but the government wouldn't do that. That's not how abuse of power works in liberal democracies. Targeting the majority is a voter-loser. You have to target minorities: hacktivists, terrorists, etc.
> It is quite an irony that governments demand one set of standards for privacy and security while attempting to compromise them for their own benefit
Nothing ironic about it. The whole premise of liberal democracy is that government needs to exist as an entity with powers superior to those of individuals, but as a check on that power must be subject to majoritarian control. You don't have to agree with that premise, but it's consistent with different standards of privacy for individuals and the government.
I often agree with you, but the statement that the Internet founders didn't care about privacy is factually incorrect: Vint Cerf (as mentioned by the sibling comment) is on record as not only being in favor of privacy but wishing the technology had existed for practical cryptographically secure authentication at the protocol level at the time the Internet was designed.
Had the original TCP/IP protocols as they were designed included cryptographic security, the designers of those protocols would themselves have had to be be pioneers of cryptography. This is a little like asking why Henry Ford didn't just start with the electric car. I mean, sure, there was electricity when he started...
> If the engineers who designed and built the internet cared about privacy
I believe Vint Cerf cares an awful lot about privacy. But, as he has stated countless times, this internetwork was supposed to be an experiment. Who would ever design a real network with only billions of addresses?
The reason you are wrong is that you ignore the dragnet aspect. In meat space people would not accept their snail mail being read without probable cause. Recent polls show that people are more concerned about the spying than terrorism.
Getting a warrant to search one person's inbox seems pretty reasonable to me. (Seems pretty analogous to searching one person's rented storage space.)
Forcing Lavabit to hand over everything seems like searching all storage lockers, even for people who are suspected of nothing. That's way over the line for me.
That impedance mismatch will take a long time to reconcile. If the Facebook generation is any indication, it will probably never be reconciled to your taste.
What I'm trying to say is: get used to being an intellectual minority. You're joining the company of lots of people, from those who think the government has no business forcing you to save for retirement to those who think the government has no business forcing you to serve or hire certain people in your private establishment. You probably agree with some of those people and disagree vehemently with others.