Been working on that last one for years.  At least I&#x27;m likely to out live her.

Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) - vote for Jamie Harrison on Nov 3 in SCRichard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) - term ends in 2022*Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) - 2024Dianne Feinstein (D-California) - 2024 as well... good luck with this one

What are &quot;bailouts of the Iraq war&quot; ?

If you give up, then the powers that be win by default.

Just like we needed to vote out the people that voted for the bailouts and the Iraq war.Politics keeps moving on. I&#x27;m still on the Iraq war. I&#x27;m not interested on any other issue until we solve that one.Edit: s&#x2F;bailouts of&#x2F;bailouts and&#x2F;

The video there talks about a study about how people feel about a policy and whether the policy gets passed or not. Then it goes on to extrapolate that to electing humans. The video is right that we have less influence over policy, policy that citizens do not vote on directly. We do directly vote for humans and those votes do count - electoral college is a special case.Also, I&#x27;d bet there are a lot of folks that read HN that are already in the top 10% of income earners. So maybe I&#x27;m speaking directly to some of the 10% now.

In American politics, voting really doesn&#x27;t make a difference as much as just having opinions alighted with those of the top 10% of income earners[0]. Making noise and protests are more effective in some ways, but the sad reality is that most of senate&#x2F;congress is not beholden to the selectorate of all voters, but rather the smaller selectorate of influences that control the advertising and narrative that allows them to continue to be re-elected.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;battlepenguin.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;video&#x2F;does-voting-make-a-difference&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;battlepenguin.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;video&#x2F;does-voting-make-a-...</a>

We need to vote out the people pushing for backdoors.  They seem to want backdoors at any cost, without any technical understanding of why its a terrible idea.  Vote them out!

Some of the programs originally from the USA PATRIOT Act expired in March 2020.

Trump threatened to veto the Patriot renewal bill, which includes the FISA court, despite bipartisan support. The bill is now withdrawn pending rewrite.

&gt; As a european, I don&#x27;t see any party that actually have american people&#x27;s interest in mind.To be fair, us Europeans have the same issues with our politicians, with the exception of socialists, communists and Greens. Just look for the article13 fiasco.We&#x27;re all being fucked.

Exactly, we need way more political parties with direct representation. However, power seems to do a great job of consolidating itself so that won&#x27;t be an easy task.

&gt; As a european, I don&#x27;t see any party that actually have american people&#x27;s interest in mind.As a european, I don&#x27;t see any party that actually have european people&#x27;s interest in mind.

&gt; As a european, I don&#x27;t see any party that actually have american people&#x27;s interest in mind.As an American, I don&#x27;t see any party that has my interests in mind. Elections always seem to be having to choose the lesser of two evils.

As an American, I don’t see any country in the world that doesn’t have exactly the same problems.The EU has been considering similar anti-encryption legislation for years. Primarily supported by France, UK and Germany. The main opponents to it in the EU have been NGOs, which mirrors the American experience on this issue.The cynic in me speculates the reason the EU parliament hasn’t pushed the issue further is simply because it’s waiting for it’s influential members states (or the US) to pass the legislation required to gut these services, so that they won’t have the potentially unpopular task of doing so themselves.

Torture was heavily repelled by Democrats, and was only &quot;legalized&quot; in that John McCain intentionally put in loop holes into his own bill that allowed the CIA to continue it because Bush threatened to veto the bill otherwise. Those loop holes were later closed under Obama both by legislation and an executive order. This was very much a partisan issue.

Well, nsa mass surveillance and legalized torture were never repelled by any side.In fact, the patriot act has been prolongued 5 times, no matter the administration, and is still in effect.As a european, I don&#x27;t see any party that actually have american people&#x27;s interest in mind.Fighting for either seems so futile from here.Of course, we have similar problems as well so I&#x27;m not going to pretend I have a solution.

Can you clarify what you mean by the &quot;230 Loophole&quot;? Many believe that tech companies should be fully responsible for anything said on their platforms. If this were the case, I believe this would have an extraordinary chilling effect on speech.

Honest question, why do you think that Section 230 should be repealed?I myself believe that companies should be doing a better job at moderating the contents they host in their websites, but also that by repealing such provision, smaller ventures with not enough money to enforce the rules, would either go bankrupt or simply suppress any third party content to avoid issues with the law enforcement.

What is the problem here? Having federal interference in tech is a terrible idea as any laws are usually overbroad and stifle large amounts of innovation that we haven&#x27;t imagined yet as an unintended consequence.What multiuser system would survive a libel-law attack from a highly unfriendly jurisdiction? Email, forums, comments, and other forms of posting opinions would immediately cause any small operator to shutdown.You just need a friend to make libelous comments on discus and then sue any site you want. 230 isn&#x27;t a loophole, it&#x27;s essential for speech on the Internet.

You seem to be misinformed about Section 230. This link provides a better description than I can.Summary: there is no loophole.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20200531&#x2F;23325444617&#x2F;hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20200531&#x2F;23325444617&#x2F;hello...</a>

Repealing 230 would give them an even greater incentive to suppress conservative views as someone could argue they&#x27;re looking the other at people being radicalised by hate speech. You could say 230 is what protects platforms like Gab who knowingly host conservative speech.

We have bipartisan consensus[1] that tech companies have acted badly and that Section 230 should be repealed or significantly amended. I think EARN IT will probably kill Section 230, not strong encryption, so I think EARN IT is pretty great. Tech companies probably should be coming to the realization by now that it&#x27;s only a matter of time (probably 4-8 years) before we close the 230 loophole: So if they&#x27;re given a choice, they should choose to protect strong encryption, and forego Section 230 protection, since it&#x27;s going away anyhow.[1]Kind of, Democrats think tech companies got Trump elected, Republicans think tech companies are suppressing conservative viewpoints, but either way, they agree on the problem.

Dear lord man. You&#x27;ve actually thought about this. I&#x27;m flabbergasted to see someone actually attempting to solve this problem. Out-grouping for the sake of sharing logic.INTJ?

I can. Our representative government represent corporations and the deep state, in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term (as opposed to the more recent abuse of it), and not the people.They have continually made moves like this, in a boiling frog fashion. Until we the people wake up from the two party divide and conquer system, very little will change, excepting very rare circumstances of pressure exerted en masse (SOPA&#x2F;PIPA is a good example outlier).I&#x27;ve thought about solutions to this problem for a long time, and my conclusion is the things needed are the following (in order to prevent a long term overton window shift as has been happening):1. Renewed participation in local politics and elections, especially at the state level, but also county, city, etc.2. Once that is achieved, voting in ranked choice voting initiatives. This will enable the next step.3. Stop voting for anyone based on party, in particular the main power structure is based on the majority rule in the house and senate... the end goal would be to take away the majority from both parties. This is a huge undertaking, so I&#x27;m not saying it would be easy, or even possible, but I think it is what is required. I think those paying attention enough and not enured to the tribalism of the parties understands they cannot be reformed from the inside. They are simply too entrenched, and have too many mechanisms to get rid of those who seek to do so. The point is that we don&#x27;t need to gain a majority with this new coalition party of independents and third parties, we simply need to take the majority away from the two main parties. To get this done though, [1] must be done, because many of the state laws have been manipulated by the duopoly to prevent third parties and independents.3.1 To avoid fracturing of the coalition, there should be some very rudimentary and base document that all persons running can agree on. This is also difficult but, since all congresspeople swear an oath to the constitution (5 U.S. Code § 3331), something that reaffirms the principles of the constitution would be the best start. If they violate this, the coalition should work to remove them immediately. (something similar to Gingrich&#x27;s &quot;Contract with America&quot;)4. Currently, and many don&#x27;t know this, congresspeople have to sign an affidavit (5 U.S. Code § 3333) confirming their oath. I think we should then work towards enforcement of the laws against violation thereof, the primary one being perjury, or something similar (18 U.S. Code § 1918, 5 U.S. Code § 7311). For example, how many people have straight up lied to congress and had no action taken against them? (Clapper is one of the more egregious ones that comes to mind, but the point is congress is in dereliction of duty in enforcing perjury laws)This would give the people a real opportunity to start passing laws that represent the people (such as term limits), but are still constitutionally sound.The legislative is the branch closest to the people, and this is why it should be the focus. From a cleaned up legislative we can begin to resurrect the separation of power between the branches that has been egregiously eroded, primarily by the executive. The current checks and balances system is crumbling. A huge part of this erosion is the surveillance system, which enables compromise of congresspeople by the executive and the MICC. We must fight for privacy, both encryption and anonymity, as a fundamental part of protecting the checks and balances system.

They don&#x27;t even have to be corruptible. People are fallible. Someone could just make a mistake. No bad actors needed. (Bad actors exist, and make the problem worse. But the problem exists even without bad actors.)

Also, they have no fucking idea what we&#x27;re talking about, and &quot;can&#x27;t read their messages&quot; just flat sounds like a bad idea to them.

It&#x27;s not if it leaks, but when. And despite what you think about who&#x27;s in charge now (whether it&#x27;s your &quot;team&quot; or not) it won&#x27;t always be that way.

It is worse than just crazy. Government is made of people, and people are corruptible. If the encryption backdoor key leaks from the government to a bad actor, it will create a &quot;national security&quot; issue of magnitude never seen before. If this line of reasoning is correct, then proposing an encryption backdoor is akin to committing an act of treason in itself, because it is purposely weakening the technological infrastructure of the businesses and people in the country and thus the country itself. Attempts like these are either doomed to fail, or they will doom the country to fail.

There was a huge push for backdoors and weakened crypto during the Clinton years.  It&#x27;s not a right&#x2F;left thing, it&#x27;s  government control thing.

I&#x27;m most curious on when they&#x27;ll be knocking on the door of open source projects next. Notably, anyone who uses any crypto.As much as I hate it, I can at least understand the back door argument from a [ignorant] lawmaker perspective. If I pretend and say their intentions are noble, I understand.What concerns me though, beyond the obvious backdoor problems, is the who is next? Because I doubt big corporations will satisfy their greed for power and information. Especially since anyone who has anything to hide or cares about security will move into open source.As a developer with a passion for developing distributed, encrypted software - when are they going to threaten me? Worse yet, the software I write I purposefully do not have control over. So am I going to be held liable for the fact that I literally cannot help them?No matter what they threaten me with, the best I could do is break the application for future users. So what are they going to do to control these distributed systems? Especially ones who truly aim to be distributed, P2P &amp; self hosted by every user?As terrifying as the current anti-encryption behavior is, I&#x27;m oddly more concerned about the move after this.

as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself? I&#x27;m actually convinced that all this does is reduce the sharing of such material, e.g. what people are outraged with is usually not only the act in itself but the fact that some sickos get off on this material. but I wouldn&#x27;t think for a moment that because of some law less kids will be abused.I&#x27;m actually fine with some kids biting the dust (yes literally being killed) to prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. I&#x27;m not saying these kids don&#x27;t deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything (especially in poor volatile countries where cops are in fact part of the problem and happy to look away ...)

Why would it stop abuse reports?FB Messager report function sends a decrypted copy to Facebook AFAIK.

How many of these images are re-circulations? How many of them are new images? How much abuse is actually facilitated on the platform? Does directing more resources towards this take away resources and mind share which could be used to tackle more serious crime than someone posting images over and over?

&gt;I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?There&#x27;s clearly a valid argument from the other side. For example:&gt;Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material, according to people familiar with the reports.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;28&#x2F;us&#x2F;child-sex-abuse.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;28&#x2F;us&#x2F;child-sex-...</a>It&#x27;s not clear how many of those lead to convictions but even a tiny fraction of a percent represents a significant number of children being rescued. Encrypting Messenger, as an example, will stop 3&#x2F;4s of abuse reports and make it much safer and easier for paedophiles to exchange images. There&#x27;s a pretty direct line from that decision to an increase in abuses like:&gt;“inserting an ice cube into the vagina” of a young girl, the documents said, before tying her ankles together, taping her mouth shut and suspending her upside down. As the video continued, the girl was beaten, slapped and burned with a match or candle.&gt;“The predominant sound is the child screaming and crying,” according to a federal agent quoted in the documents.

Don&#x27;t forget the communists, the OG once-and-future scapegoats.

Fear-mongering is strong. Look at all the freedoms we lost after 9&#x2F;11. Pedophiles and terrorists and porn are always the scapegoats.It is also a very electable sound bite. Everyone is against the &quot;bad people&quot;. Re-election at any cost is the goal. We have government of the people and by the people but we stopped being for the people long long ago.

&gt; I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensusHawkish foreign policy would be another one.

It&#x27;s not crazy. The class war between the super rich and everybody else has been happening forever. It just becomes more blatant now.Not sure what is the solution here, the popular people&#x27;s choice couldn&#x27;t even get elected.

&gt; we have bipartisan consensus&gt; we&quot;It&#x27;s a big club and you ain&#x27;t in it&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=i5dBZDSSky0</a>

I can. I have one administration in particular that I think can be blamed for this massive expansion of the surveillance state in the past 10 years.

Your government is an Advanced Persistent Threat.

Do you remember the bipartisan consensus on SOPA&#x2F;PIPA?&quot;This bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20, 2010, a Monday. And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it said it was scheduled for a vote on September 23 — just three days later.And while of course there had to be a vote — you can&#x27;t pass a bill without a vote — the results of that vote were a foregone conclusion. Because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn&#x27;t just introduced by one, rogue, eccentric member of Congress. It was introduced by the chair of the committee — and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members — Republicans and Democrats. So there would be a vote, but it wouldn&#x27;t be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill — before it was even introduced.I can&#x27;t stress enough how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I&#x27;m not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean the way it really works. I think we all know that Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics....Whoever was behind this was good.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeednews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;jwherrman&#x2F;how-aaron-swartz-joined-the-fight-against-sopa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.buzzfeednews.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;jwherrman&#x2F;how-aaron-swa...</a> (excerpt from talk at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OqriFtr2k-k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OqriFtr2k-k</a> -- FWIW the lobbyist behind sopa&#x2F;pipa was Chris Dodd, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chris_Dodd#Motion_Picture_Association_of_America" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chris_Dodd#Motion_Picture_Asso...</a>)

Its being framed as a way to prevent terrorism and child sex abuse, it&#x27;s really hard for a politician to come out in against preventing those things.

I can’t really believe the shock.Have you noticed routine protest and informed debate occurring throughout the US for oh say 30 years to be generous?Political reality isn’t logical, it’s on the nose. There’s no engagement to prevent this, and decades of flag waving as enforcement funding is cut.That has an impact.The generation that still holds the most seats in government has no idea how any of this works.Giving them the benefit of the doubt it’s ignorance not informed malice their intuition is nevertheless “expand police state.”I’m sure we’ll all take a break from HN and debating flat or skeuomorphic to tell them piss off

There is always bipartisan consensus in whatever gives more actual power to powerful people. It&#x27;s just that some would rather the power be for billionaires and others for the government.

It’s one of those things that people think is a grand idea, right up until it’s been in force for a few weeks and it turns out that China is reading all the internal US message traffic.Then everyone will be like “Whoa?! Who would have thought something like this could happen!”. I feel like this is a tale as old as time.

&gt; I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption.Most differences between republicans and democrats are superficial. Republicans don&#x27;t really believe in small government no more than Democrats really believe in social justice.

Doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all and it was painted on the wall pretty clearly in my opinion. It is of course a sad state of affairs. I think it shouldn&#x27;t need to be mentioned but apparently it does.

I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption.I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?

In Europe quite a few &quot;pirate parties&quot; popped up about a decade ago. None of them were too successful as far as I know, at least in The Netherlands they didn&#x27;t mention to gain a single seat (out of 150).

&quot;My opponent supports the attorney general having access to your porn habits. I support your privacy&quot; is a pretty straightforward simplified riposte to your above oversimplification.

&gt; that one would reasonably think would be shot down immediately, but isn&#x27;t.EARN IT looks like a compromise compared to this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyberlaw.stanford.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;there%E2%80%99s-now-even-worse-anti-encryption-bill-earn-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-make-earn-it-bill-ok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyberlaw.stanford.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;there%E2%80%99s-n...</a> which is I assume why it was pushed only a few days ago.

In that case we need to provide working definitions advocating for privacy and information freedom that the average consumer can appreciate and support. I&#x27;m open to ideas. One approach is to explain that without private encrypted communications your information cannot be free: instead it will be monitored and censored by the many parties that believe we should not see or say one thing or another. Privacy enables freedom.

&gt; my opponent supports child molestorsThe ruling elite have a monopoly on this. They publicly opposite it via bills like this and use media giants to crush &#x27;conspiracy theories&#x27; involving people like Epstein and all the people he was closely associated with in Washington and Hollywood.I think if we actually got evidence and leaks on how bad child abuse within politicians are, Americans would be absolutely horrified by the straight up hypocrisy.

Bill Maher may be right -- you have to fight fire with fire.  Once mud has been thrown your only option is to throw more mud back.  Point out the Cosbys, Epsteins, Trumps, warmongers, etc.  &quot;The untouchable elite are the terrorists and molestors&quot;

My reply: &quot;Government is trying to spy on every aspect of your life. There are more government employees that can spy on your children than there are child molestors in the country.&quot;Do you want creepy gov&#x27;t contractors spying on your kids?

You can run, and with that platform your opponent will conveniently turn it around into &quot;my opponent supports child molestors and terrorists&quot;. Because if you think you&#x27;ll simply walk up to the podium talking about something most folks could not give a working definition for, boy, are you going to be in for a shock when your opponent &quot;dumbs it down&quot; for the audience.Which is how we end up with stuff like the EARN IT Act that one would reasonably think would be shot down immediately, but isn&#x27;t.

You should call their offices. Give your qualifications and make their staff listen to you explain all the reasons why its a terrible idea. It can move the needle if enough people do it. If you have the energy to run for office then you should start by lobbying for these issues, it&#x27;s good practice

Awkwardly enough the only Senator I have even the smallest amount of respect for these days did add a bunch of amendments to try and fix parts of it....but I think its a shit bill from top to bottom and I expect him to vote against it anyway.Perhaps instead of supporting politicians who &quot;say&quot; they&#x27;re going to do X, Y, and Z we should support politicians who have a track record of doing exactly X, Y and Z regardless of how politically convenient it is to do something else.More laws will not fix the problem of having too many bad laws, in my opinion.

Where are my elected representatives that represent my privacy rights on bills like this? Maybe I need to run for office since I care about end2end encryption, free software, and the rights of free people and information to freely travel around the world...

I haven&#x27;t followed the specifics, either, but it looks like it was introduced back in March. When I reached out to my Senators and Reps back then I got a reply from my House Rep (who I believe was supportive of the bill). The bill is currently in the Senate and only this week is getting &quot;marked up&quot; in the Judiciary Committee--I imagine if your Senator is on that committee it&#x27;s more important to reach out.Sadly, I think issues need constant re-engaging since they pop up under different names and in different forms.

The latest version now involves State law so if one State out of 50 decides encryption is bad for children they can go after any company in the U.S.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;new-earn-it-bill-still-threatens-encryption-and-free-speech" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;new-earn-it-bill-still...</a>

I reached out to my representatives on this when the Act was first proposed. I&#x27;m confused about the changes that have happened since that time and the post does not say anything about what has changed. What does &quot;Advancing&quot; mean in this case? If I have already contacted all of my legislators about strong encryption and opposition to this bill, what is the latest change that requires re-engaging?

because apple, google, facebook already comply with this. they have built ways for the government to access their data. any company with an important enough set of information is going to get this request and you can’t say no

Their lobby group has shared their concerns over the bill but they haven&#x27;t done much beyond that.

Not even touching on those individuals, it&#x27;s been bothering me that it feels like mostly silence from Google, Apple, Facebook (who this would presumably really hit at), etc.I&#x27;d really love to be missing something. It feels like this is just fading into the background... and while I can acknowledge the idea that you might just try to fight this as unconstitutional after it passes, that feels inherently risky given this administration (if not downright stupid).

Thankful for Mozilla and EFF, but have any tech elites spoken out against this or put money into defeating it? Thiel, Musk, Altman, Graham... hello? Should we assume SV is complicit?

Not necessarily.These bad bills keep coming up in an effort to address serious real problems, like child porn. People are going to keep proposing bills to address these problems until something passes.By just concentrating on shooting down bad bill after bad bill without devoting any effort to getting good bills proposed the next bill after each defeated bad bill will be another bill from the same general set of people. Maybe the new one will address some of the issues in the prior ones but the chances are good that it won&#x27;t address all of them.Just telling everyone else what is wrong with their approach to solving a problem instead of also offering up your own better solutions tends to not work well in the long run.

This sounds like the start of a false dichotomy.

Have a mandatory bodycam implanted in everyone&#x27;s right eyesocket, that livestreams to government servers 24&#x2F;7.This is an obvious short-term mitigation tactic until they develop brain implants that can pre-emptively moderate harmful thoughts.

A modest proposal would suggest killing all of the children.   What did you have in mind?

Just a thought, but maybe we should arrest people who make child porn.

I don&#x27;t know. But I do know that it&#x27;s not a technology problem.

Serious answer:- Undercover police work and informants, which is how most large busts already happen now. The worst offenders are not swapping child porn on Facebook or Dropbox- Encourage marriage and remove benefits penalties for two-parent households, as children are substantially more likely to be abused when their biological father is not in the household- Institute the death penalty for child sexual abuse and make sure it is performed swiftly and publicly

Make possession carry the death penalty.Before you think that&#x27;s too harsh, consider that the other options are to ban encryption or to not try to stop it at all (quasi-decriminalization).I don&#x27;t think anyone would oppose a bill to make CP carry the death penalty. The problem is they won&#x27;t ever make this law because then they won&#x27;t be able to milk the cow anymore.

I don&#x27;t think it is the real problem. It is a problem in the sense that it is disgusting but it isn&#x27;t worth destroying a free society over and I don&#x27;t think it is possible to stop.What you can crackdown on are the producers.You can infiltrate the places where it is originally disseminated.You can run face and voice recognition on the content.You can flip lower level mass distributors into informants to gather evidence on the producers.For rapists.You can train teachers and counsellors to identify children who have been abused and to handle other psychological problems like depression which are endemic in our society.You can train police officers to better spot criminals on a basis other than race or status.You can better fund the CPS.You can conduct assessments on parents who appear to be mentally unstable.

Obviously this sucks as a proposal but... how do we stop the child porn?

I took the opportunity to donate to Mozilla as well. I&#x27;d encourage you to do the same! They are one of the &quot;good guys&quot; on the internet and they need our support to stay alive.

We don&#x27;t need to be cynical. We can demand that our government guarantees our rights to safety and privacy because they are not mutually exclusive.

So, create some dog-and-ponies AI start-up for this in the districts of the most influential lawmakers, with stated job counts (for AI-mechanical turk work that hires lots of people).Tie the &quot;correct&quot; solution to their real political motivations and it will get done in a heartbeat. It has to be something they can sell to their base though.

If I emailed you and offered you to share pictures of naked 13 year olds, would you accept?If I texted you and told you I&#x27;m 13 years old, would you start hitting on me?

Note that the AI is used to automate the work of the law enforcement agents, not the work of the judges and juries. The AI collects evidence that prosecutors use to build cases against defendants. The defendants still have the right to public trial in a court of law in front of a human judge and human jury.edit: It seems there is a misunderstanding of what the AI does. It simulates human traffickers in text or video chat in order to find people who try to exchange money with them, and it simulates children in text and video chat in order to find people who try to groom them. It does not simulate child sexual abuse material or proliferate child sexual abuse material.

That scares me. If that entrapment-at-scale is legal, it could be deployed to throw huge numbers of people in jail for buying drugs or supporting terrorism.

The primary impediment to combating child sexual abuse material is the scarcity of law enforcement agents relative to the scale of offenders.[0] Law enforcement agencies are already at the limit of how many offenders they can prosecute because offenders are primarily detected by agents who are posing as offenders or by agents who are posing as victims.The solution proposed by the researchers in the referenced documentary is to create AI agents that can automate the work of posing as offenders or posing as victims. This solves the scaling problem of the law enforcement agencies.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xcCj1zNpKoM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=xcCj1zNpKoM</a>

I&#x27;ve done that many times over the years - she stopped responding and refuses to consider the opinion of encryption experts.

Been there, done that.  Her office sends back a letter that boils down to, &quot;We know better than you, please be quiet&quot;.

Writing Feinstein is a total waste of time.She’ll send a smarmy response about how you’re clearly an idiot for thinking it has anything to do with encryption, and how she’s proud to be a co-sponsor.She’s been completely ignoring voter complaints for decades. Before open primaries, it was essentially impossible for her to lose an election, and she knew it.I’m extremely liberal, but if the “recall governor Newsom” crowd went after Feinstein instead, I’d sign on in a heartbeat.

Send her an e-mail in 2 minutes telling her to stop supporting EARN-IT <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feinstein.senate.gov&#x2F;public&#x2F;index.cfm&#x2F;e-mail-me" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.feinstein.senate.gov&#x2F;public&#x2F;index.cfm&#x2F;e-mail-me</a>

CA has a blanket primary, which means that all candidates from all parties take part in the primary and then the top 2 compete in the general election, regardless of party affiliation.Feinstein wiped the floor with everyone in the primary in 2018. She took 44% of the vote, and the next leading candidate (Kevin de Leon) took 12%. When they ran against each other, de Leon lost by a fairly large margin but turnout kind of sucked.de Leon wasn&#x27;t a good candidate by any means, and I voted for the guy. He always struck me as a bit of a smarmy huckster who didn&#x27;t stand for anything but reelection. But I knew that Feinstein was probably running for her last term and only cared about serving the national party&#x27;s interests, and not our state. I&#x27;ll take the guy that wants my next vote over someone that probably won&#x27;t live long enough to get it.

Feinstein is easily the worst Democratic Senator. It&#x27;s absolutely bonkers to me that a state where tech is as important as it is keeps re-electing her. Surely there&#x27;s someone out there who wants to primary her?

I agree with you about Feinstein, but:&gt; Her voting record is further to the right than many republicans. She votes according to Trump’s wishes more than any other Democrat in the senate.This seems to imply she&#x27;s in the middle of the pack for her democratic peers as it relates to Trump&#x27;s wishes: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;congress-trump-score&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.fivethirtyeight.com&#x2F;congress-trump-score&#x2F;</a>

She will be 91 the next time she is up for re-election. Hopefully she’ll finally retire instead. I’ve been hoping for that for over a decade.Feinstein could not have been re-elected if it weren’t for overwhelmingly strong support for her in Silicon Valley.If she is up for re-election again, please vote for the other candidate (who will probably also be a Democrat!). Also, tell your friends.She wants to ban encryption. Her voting record is further to the right than many republicans. She votes according to Trump’s wishes more than any other Democrat in the senate.

Why would you be surprised? California has a long history of stepping on people&#x27;s freedoms and rights

To Californians, Dianne Feinstein is one of the cosponsors of the bill in the Senate. It really grinds my gears seeing our senior leadership from California take actions that directly harm our interests, both towards our peoples&#x27; freedom and our businesses.I feel vindicated for voting against her in 2018, because I thought she&#x27;d be out of touch with our interests as a state.

Alternately, we could recalibrate the methods used to catch criminals and terrorists so that we did _not_ have to yield up all of our information to the gov, as well as every script kiddie with an internet connection.

I&#x27;m all for _benevolent_ authoritarian governance.Problems start to arise when the government pretends they _are_ the former and pretends they _are_not_ the latter.

Has anyone considered that maybe there are actually people in this world that want to be able to catch criminals and terrorists? Even if the bill does result in adding backdoors (which is all based on speculation anyway), you don&#x27;t think people and technology would recalibrate itself to overcome issues caused by backdoors? I find it insane that people think technology is so much more important than the potential for saving human lives.

Yes, but at least when they do that they don&#x27;t have to fundamentally break crypto. Not that it&#x27;s OK. I&#x27;m just saying.

Because what you&#x27;re describing is a method for violating the rights of one person, and they know it&#x27;s happening.   What&#x27;s described in the article is a method for violating the rights of anyone, and they won&#x27;t even know.

Why does this matter?
The US government can force you to give them your keys, and gag you so you can&#x27;t say anything...

Doesn&#x27;t this weaken security for everyone and not just consumers?

Analogies to physical security are not helpful, because they&#x27;re easily countered with &quot;but you support someone getting into a house with a warrant, right?&quot;. Encryption is nothing like physical security. There is no analogue to busting down a door. Correctly built encryption has no way to get in without the key; anything else has fundamental, unfixable security flaws.

There&#x27;s another good reason for term limits, how many of these VERY OLD people don&#x27;t even understand what encryption is and couldn&#x27;t possibly understand the concept that this is like passing a law demanding that you leave your house key at the local police station, unless you let them search your house every second Tuesday.

Many years ago, I read an article about some proposal  to creating and using alternative dns root zones. Organizations certainly do this but how feasible would it be to maintain a &#x27;separate&#x27; internet?

The only true government is newly-formed.In the span of many decades, perhaps centuries, all manner of governments evolve into their final form: tyranny.

Anyone have a template for opposing this bill?Needs elaboration, but I see two major points:1. It puts our national security at risk. It opens up American cyber-security at large to nation states like China, Russia, and Iran, as well as more sophisticated terrorist groups.2. It hampers innovation and competition in the tech industry. Compliance will increase costs, especially for startups, especially in a Covid19 environment, and the global market will not be able trust the cyber-security of American networks.

I trust the Mozilla foundation has good reason to oppose this, as likely do I, but I&#x27;m sad to not see a &quot;learn more&quot; button on this page to add your name to some opposition list.  I&#x27;d certainly like to learn more about what I&#x27;m signing up against, and I can do that myself, but I feel as if they would also have a responsibility to further educate if they&#x27;re asking for my support.

If this is passed, I&#x27;m waiting for the inevitable data breach of US elected officials&#x27; personal&#x2F;private data.

My only question to this proposed act is how they&#x27;re going to keep online banking and e-commerce working..It&#x27;s like shooting oneself in the foot before hiking.

The people who want a skeleton key to open all electronic doors are the same people who compiled a blackmail database on their own high-clearance employees and failed to keep it safe (the OPM data breach).

I included the clock.org homepage because I found it surprising how closely it describes the EARN IT act, despite being published before 1998. It’s a warning from over 20 years ago.I agree that their analogy isn’t particularly strong, so I removed that part from my comment.

Where the &quot;bad guys&quot; can build their own indestructible and un-enterable house themselves, without having to give the sheriff a key.

The problem with the doors and locks analogies is that it&#x27;s not really what this is about.This isn&#x27;t about their ability to seize things you have after they get a warrant. It&#x27;s that they want the ability to seize things you have before they get a warrant, just in case they get one later.It&#x27;s like requiring everyone to have video cameras in their house with recordings sent to law enforcement no matter whether they&#x27;re under suspicion or not, and then claiming that it&#x27;s fine because they pinky swear not to look at them without a warrant. (Never mind that then you can&#x27;t prove that they&#x27;re not cheating, and that it would be the world&#x27;s largest target for organized crime and foreign powers.)

&gt; The sheriff doesn&#x27;t even need a key to enter your house, he can get a warrant and bust your door down.That requires following due process, the presumption of innocence, and observing the right to privacy. You have to convince a judge, in the context of the existing laws, that a certain individual or group are suspicious enough to call for (specific) further investigation.Mass surveillance and forcing weak encryption bypass or overturn all that. It&#x27;s a radically different view when you assume everybody is guilty of something by default and that they have no right to privacy.

&gt; This would be equivalent to a town with no locks on the front doors, or where the sheriff has a copy of every door key (just in case he has to search the house).To be accurate though that&#x27;s not exactly true. The sheriff doesn&#x27;t even need a key to enter your house, he can get a warrant and bust your door down.This is a town where your house is indestructible and un-enterable without a key.

The point is that the EARN IT act primarily affects the general population. Al-Queda hasn’t used American-made encryption software for the past 13 years.

&gt; Mujahedeen Secrets (first release: 2007), Al-Queda’s own encrypted messaging software. Those developers aren’t going to respond to a US court order.Even with that, you are now forcing the terrorists to roll their own encryption. The likelihood of finding an exploit in Mujahadeen Secrets is likely much higher than finding an exploit in Apple Messenger or WhatsApp or something by djb or Moxie, etc. In addition, Mujahadeen is likely having to be side loaded - you won&#x27;t find it in the App Store. This gives a chance to try to hack a single storage location to have a trojan horse version spread through their network. Finally, it affects recruiting. Basically only someone already comitted will go to the trouble of having Mujahadeen Secrets on their device, whereas a lot more people could be expected to have a common end-to-end messenger on their device. So overall, thinking from a purely law enforcement, anti-terrorist perspective, it would still be better for them to not have e2e in widely used apps, even if the terrorists tried to develop their own app.

“A Parable” by Perry E. Metzger (1993)&gt; There was once a far away land called Ruritania, and in Ruritania there was a strange phenonmenon -- all the trees that grew in Ruritainia were transparent. Now, in the days when people had lived in mud huts, this had not been a problem, but now high-tech wood technology had been developed, and in the new age of wood, everyone in Ruritania found that their homes were all 100% see through...&gt; One day, a smart man invented paint -- and if you painted your house, suddenly the police couldn&#x27;t watch all your actions at will...&gt; Indignant, the state decided to try to require that all homes have video cameras installed in every nook and cranny. &quot;After all&quot;, they said, &quot;with this new development crime could run rampant. Installing video cameras doesn&#x27;t mean that the police get any new capability -- they are just keeping the old one.&quot; [...]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cypherpunks.venona.com&#x2F;date&#x2F;1993&#x2F;04&#x2F;msg00559.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cypherpunks.venona.com&#x2F;date&#x2F;1993&#x2F;04&#x2F;msg00559.html</a>(I recommend reading the full parable.)—————clock.org homepage (c. 1998)&gt; Some agencies of the United States Government (notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)), want to prevent the deployment of encryption technology. They want either encryption so weak that just about anyone can break it, or they want a copy of every key used with strong encryption.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19980113124617&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clock.org:80&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19980113124617&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clock....</a>Sound familiar?—————Mujahedeen Secrets (first release: 2007), Al-Queda’s own encrypted messaging software. Those developers aren’t going to respond to a US court order.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mujahedeen_Secrets" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Mujahedeen_Secrets</a>

It&#x27;s just bad, real bad, only made worse by the LAED bill they&#x27;ve recently introduced.Rianna Pfefferkorn wrote a in-depth analysis about EARN IT which is really good to read:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyberlaw.stanford.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;earn-it-act-how-ban-end-end-encryption-without-actually-banning-it" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cyberlaw.stanford.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;01&#x2F;earn-it-act-how-b...</a>I also wrote a smaller high level article about it if you&#x27;re interested in a briefer read:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@console.blog&#x2F;action-tell-your-representative-to-oppose-earn-it-bbd4ea5ef267" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@console.blog&#x2F;action-tell-your-representa...</a>

One of the groups that signed on for updates on such laws sent me a link over SMS. It automated calling 22 senators to ask them to reject Earn IT. I spoke to staff or left messages with 20. Two had full voicemail. One of this was my local rep, Feinstein. Figures.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;noearnitact.org&#x2F;call" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;noearnitact.org&#x2F;call</a>

Earn It act is adorable little attempt at institutional police state policy.One would argue that terrorists will simply use other inventive ways to get around lack of main stream encrypted tech (and they will). Or that a back door for the govt is a back door for anyone (which is true). Both are logical points.I posit that this is known among backers of Earn It - they&#x27;re not that dumb. Therefore, this isn&#x27;t about child porn or terrorists, its about dissenters of established institutions (government, corporations, media, etc). That&#x27;s the move - the &quot;party of Davos&quot; sees the populist wave from both left and right (AOC, Bernie, BLM, Trump, Bannon, etc) and this how they think they will stop it.The next AOC, BLM, or any populist movement will be labeled as threats to the established order, maybe as domestic terrorists. With Earn It, you can see who they organize with, when they meet, how they strategize, etc. This is COINTELPRO with smart phones [1]. Very slick, very effective. It&#x27;s what I would do in their shoes.The only flaw is that it is poorly marketed. It&#x27;s so transparent, it&#x27;s cute.J Edgar Hoover is smiling somewhere in the after life.Do yourself a favor, treat your phone and email like CIA recording device. We&#x27;ll be fine.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;COINTELPRO#:~:text=COINTELPRO%20(syllabic%20abbreviation%20derived%20from,and%20disrupting%20American%20political%20organizations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;COINTELPRO#:~:text=COINTELPRO%...</a>.

Wish we could see how many people signed maybe paired with a goal for the number of signatures

Encryption that can only be unlocked by the &quot;good guys&quot; is fundamentally not how encryption works.&#x27;JoshTriplett explained it better than I did: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23704928" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23704928</a>

That&#x27;s a very bold claim. We already have warrant-proof toilets for flushing drugs down. Why do you think crypto should be illegal because old-technology warrants don&#x27;t work very easily with it?We&#x27;ve had warrant-proof encryption for a long time now in our society (at least 20 years?).

Warrant-proof encryption is not compatible with a society that accepts the principle that we are accountable to the law. There is nothing sacred about your cell phone.

Does anyone where know where this bill is at in the legislative process?  Should we be leaning on senators or congresscritters or both?

Or worse, the one&#x27;s who smugly say you have no expectation of privacy while in public anyway.

That’s the best part. Remind them that it’s not about you. It’s about whistleblowers and journalists who need to protect their sources, and lawyers who need to communicate with their clients. That tends to bring the ego down a peg ;)But honestly, it’s best not to be aggressive. Some people don’t care much, and you won’t convince them.FWIW, all my non-technical friends use Signal with me, and they know about verifying safety numbers! It can be done.

May be it&#x27;s not about &#x27;nothing to hide&#x27; vs &#x27;something to hide&#x27;. May be it&#x27;s about inadequate responsibility level for a bar conversation.When people make public speeches they tend to choose words more carefully because they aware about possible dramatic consequences.The same level of awareness for each private conversation in the bar can lead to a lot of efforts. It&#x27;s another level of efforts to formulate things correctly. Sometimes people just need a safe place to formulate and try ideas without worrying about being punished for consequences.If everything is livestreaming it&#x27;s hard to achieve certain level of relaxation.Because it becomes a hard work to avoid saying something they didn&#x27;t mean.This kind of hard extra work would result in overloads and intentional faking to be on the safe side.And &#x27;that&#x27; is the core damage effect of any mass surveillance: Inability to have a free and open private discussions.So even when there is &#x27;nothing to hide&#x27;, there is a lot of work just to &#x27;avoid to show&#x27; something you didn&#x27;t mean.

Ask them if they&#x27;ll turn it off in the bathroom or when having sex.

I&#x27;m stealing your analogy but I&#x27;m also ready for people to smugly proclaim that they would have no issue with livestreaming their entire life since they have nothing to hide.

People tend to feel attacked when you argue that they do, in fact, have something to hide. Even when you come from the perspective that everyone has something to hide, mostly small things.I&#x27;ve had the best success with the argument I posted. It helps people understand that privacy isn&#x27;t &quot;hiding&quot;, it&#x27;s normal. What&#x27;s not normal is guaranteeing your government can see everything you do all the time, and we should think about whether that&#x27;s what we want.

I&#x27;m not really sure this is a good argument at all. In your scenario, if the two people have nothing to hide why would they care?You&#x27;re better of appealing to things that they normally might want to hide, like an embarrassing act or things that are said that are questionable out of context, etc.A person who truly has nothing to hide, by definition, would not care about privacy. The entire point of privacy is that there are things that we do not want to share, for whatever reason.

&gt;Personally I like to just remind people if we had nothing to hide, nobody would wear clothing,you must live in a nice climate.

&gt;here&#x27;s how I like to get past the &quot;nothing to hide&quot; argument.Personally I like to just remind people if we had nothing to hide, nobody would wear clothing, own curtains, or care about peeping toms.

Sadly I&#x27;ve come to the conclusion that people don&#x27;t really actually care about the stability of democracy so long as they have food on the table and a warm bed at night. No matter the fact that a stable democracy free from the tyrannical rule of a monarch is what gave rise to their entire lifestyle as they know it. But people forget so quickly what we sacrifice for democracy. It&#x27;s almost irrelevant, though. Our once pristine western democracy has been slowly eroded by the forces free markets. So I don&#x27;t know who&#x27;s crazier, the people who seem to care less about the values required to maintain a democracy, or the people who still think we participate in one...

I mentioned something about this yesterday in another thread: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23693298" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23693298</a>Basically it isn&#x27;t about having anything to hide but the instability of democracy and what power bad actors have.Do I have anything to hide from Google? Not really. But do I want that same data that Google has to be in the hands of someone like Putin? No. I don&#x27;t even want it in the hands of the NSA. The issue is that if we say that ads can manipulate people to buy things, why can&#x27;t they manipulate people to do things like vote or divide. Russia&#x27;s strategy since the Cold War has been to divide and prod The West, to sow disruption. That disruption has caused consolidation of power but also makes it difficult for coalitions to get things done.It is clear that anger generates more clicks, so why is it unrealistic to think bad actors can use that data to better divide us and sow discontent?The next factor is that democracy relies on a distribution of power. Data collection is a means to consolidate power. There&#x27;s the term &quot;turnkey tyranny&quot; that&#x27;s thrown around. The reason isn&#x27;t because we think a tyrant is going to come to power and destroy our way of life, but rather that we recognize that such a thing is possible and want to ensure that such actions would be infeasible if a malicious actor gained power. In democracy power is distributed. This has pros and cons. But the point of distribution is so that consolidation is difficult and we can never have a monarch or tyrant.So it has never been about having something to hide (which btw, do people know they are referencing Goebbels?), but about stability in democracy. Distribution of power that was inherent to the system in the past is no longer built in. Technology has changed and enabled things we never previously imagined.

&gt; In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson&#x27;s or MS very early through voice&#x2F;video&#x2F;typing characteristics.We probably won&#x27;t.

Oddly specific, but this is such a great plausible example that I&#x27;m going to use from now on.

Banks can’t base mortgage on possibility of dying: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.55places.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;60-year-old-can-get-30-year-mortgage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.55places.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;60-year-old-can-get-30-year-mo...</a>Even barring the legal requirement, banks already prices mortgages such that they can handle being stuck holding the title with no payment. Down payments or government guarantees prevent them from holding the bag unless the housing market takes a big downturn.

I think the key here isn&#x27;t broadcasting, it&#x27;s storage. In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson&#x27;s or MS very early through voice&#x2F;video&#x2F;typing characteristics.Your conversations were recorded, the data leaked to or purchased by a fly by night company hired by your bank, and now suddenly despite your excellent credit history you can&#x27;t get a 30 year mortgage, you try to find a new job but companies are only offering 6 month contracts, etc.It&#x27;s hard to prove a database doesn&#x27;t exist, better to encrypt the content beforehand and make it harder to create.

I don&#x27;t know, tracking everyone&#x27;s speed to issue tickets doesn&#x27;t sound nearly as bad as having a recording of 100% of all remote conversations.

I say, no need to look at hypotheticals. Just sit back and watch what the Chinese government likely has done with the social media posts from people in Hong Kong, who are now in a desperate rush to obliterate them. Tough look, those have already been crawled and indexed. It&#x27;s not quite the same, because these social media posts weren&#x27;t meant to be private at the time, but it illustrates the point what can happen when &#x27;data is out there&#x27;.

This is not a good analogy because if you speed on the highway you are putting other peoples lives at risk, and doing it in public. I think we probably should have a satellite tracking every car and issuing a ticket as soon as a car speeds.

I like the speeding analogy.&quot;I have nothing to hide&quot;&quot;Have you ever sped on the highway?&quot;&quot;Well, yes&quot;&quot;Imagine if the government reveals it&#x27;s been tracking everyone&#x27;s speed, and has decided to write everyone tickets for speeding.&quot;&quot;That&#x27;s insane, the government can&#x27;t do that!&quot;&quot;Exactly&quot;

I like to tell people about programs like &quot;LOVEINT&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LOVEINT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;LOVEINT</a>). Where there is personal information available to others, it can and will be abused in ways you won&#x27;t approve of. Privacy might seem like an abstract concern until you or someone you know is being stalked, etc.

12 minutes ago, why do you ask? :PBut income is definitely something that people love to hide. There&#x27;s a lot of things that all people would love to keep quiet, mostly because their friends or loved ones would find out and may disown them

If someone says they have nothing to hide, just say “cool, how much do you earn?”Or if you can do it with a straight face “when was the last time you masturbated?” :)

not sure who to attribute but I like the &quot;privacy is not secrecy. You close the door to the toilet even though we all know what you&#x27;re doing in there&quot;

I like this argument.My normal response to &quot;I have nothing to hide&quot; is: &quot;Cool, can I take a look at your browser search&#x2F;reddit history?&quot;.

Wouldn&#x27;t the counterargument be &quot;but only the government would have access, and we can trust the government&quot;?

The best response is simpler than that, that even encryption laymen can understand:&quot;If I have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to look.&quot;

I like this. I&#x27;ll offer a third approach, but yours might be better: remind the person that there are plenty of moments in normal life in which no-one is doing anything wrong, but for which privacy remains paramount. This doesn&#x27;t take much imagination.It doesn&#x27;t speak to Internet surveillance directly, but it&#x27;s enough to show that there&#x27;s more to privacy than the desire to conceal wrongdoing.Edit Also, there&#x27;s a great 2007 paper on this kind of thing, &#x27;I&#x27;ve Got Nothing to Hide&#x27; and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565</a>Mirror: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholarship.law.gwu.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article=1159&amp;context=faculty_publications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholarship.law.gwu.edu&#x2F;cgi&#x2F;viewcontent.cgi?article=...</a>

No offense to apeace but this is the far better argument. A conversation in a bar is public already; you have no idea if the person sitting across the room might have a microphone trained on you and recording the conversation, because you are speaking in a group within a larger group with no protections. There is no expectation of privacy so there is no argument for privacy in that analogy.It&#x27;s far better to ask why we should have encryption (for our safety, our security, and yes, our personal privacy) rather than whether we should have it. The government, with this bill, is debating whether we should have it, when it&#x27;s obvious to the people that we definitely should. Turn that around on the senators proposing it; ask them if they want to build in back doors into our digital lives, can we as their employers and electors do the same thing to them?

We all know what happens in the bathroom, yet we still close the door.  Privacy is a choice that belongs to me.

My nothing to hide argument is a little different;Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don&#x27;t you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems..we don&#x27;t know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.

If I&#x27;m not mistaken, it was Edward Snowden who said this.

I like that.It raises the important point: of course you don&#x27;t care about privacy now while you have nothing to hide. You should care about it because one day you might.It might be a stalker, a corrupt government official or policeman, someone at work who is competitive with you, you might be a whistleblower or learn a family secret that would damage your reputation (lets say, your father is a pedophile) .... all these things happen to completely &quot;regular&quot; people who until that point had &quot;nothing to hide&quot; and they end up needing or wishing to hide them in at least some circumstances.

While I fully support strong privacy &amp; encryption, there is absolutely no logic in this argument because it tries to build upon an unrelated hypothetical.A stronger argument should have tried to explain how this violates the constitution:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;earn-it-act-violates-constitution" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;earn-it-act-violates-c...</a>

Though plenty of people don&#x27;t believe in the right to free speech

Instead of &quot;nothing to hide&quot;, we should frame it as do you have &quot;nothing to protect&quot;?Without privacy, you, your family, or anyone you are in contact with becomes an easier target.

The best argument I ever heard was:&quot;Would you give up your right to free speech just because you have nothing important to say? No? Then why would you give up your right to privacy just because you have nothing to hide?&quot;

Another argument is that a conversation we are having today (nothing to hide and between friends) may be used against us in the future. It could also be used against your children.

&gt; why should you close your shower curtain?Because otherwise you get water all over your bathroom floor?

There&#x27;s other ways. Ask them for their passwords, ask them to hand their phone and riffle through their conversations and photos. If I know they won&#x27;t be offended them I&#x27;ll ask them to send me nudes or if they would let me put a camera in their shower.After all, if you&#x27;re have nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, so why should you close your shower curtain?

&gt;Yes there are people who should be under surveillance.When I read this as you put it . It comes to me something we tend to forget that surveillance is a form of attack on a person&#x27;s freedom obviously. The fact of it presence is already an insult actually.

While this is on the right track, one would point out that these conversations wouldn&#x27;t be public they would only be visible to government authorities.I think the due process argument is more compelling. Part of preventing abuses and corruption by law enforcement is ensuring they can only surveil people with reasonable suspicion. Yes there are people who should be under surveillance. But it&#x27;s crucial that this gets approval from the courts to prevent agencies from snooping on people not for law enforcement but to gain leverage and power. Your privacy helps us prevent the next J Edgar Hoover even if you have nothing to hide.

For those who aren&#x27;t convinced by this argument, you can take it a little further by introducing a hypothetical situation in which their political opponents obtain power and criminalise criticism of government or other powerful &quot;common-good&quot; entities. Now your recorded conversations could become evidence of sedition, and even if it wasn&#x27;t criminal at the time it could certainly be used to show evidence of previous behaviour.

&gt; When people say &quot;nothing to hide&quot; they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_.I don&#x27;t think so. I think people simply mean they have a reasonable expectation of privacy in all of their personal activities. There are lots of things I say and do that law enforcement would not be interested in at all, but that I still want to keep private, simply because I want to. I shouldn&#x27;t have to give a reason; privacy should be the default. People who genuinely want to share every little detail of their personal lives already have Facebook.

&gt; I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships.What bizarro alternate reality do you live in where this is the case?

The funny thing is, the reason I support surveillance and legislation against encrypted messaging (or at least a backdoor for law enforcement) is extremist groups like ANTIFA

I think this misses the point. When people say &quot;nothing to hide&quot; they mean nothing to hide _from Law Enforcement_.I think the only counter argument is to demonstrate how close many of our western democracies are to becoming fascist dictatorships.We need privacy because if ever laws are passed that we don&#x27;t agree with, we need to be able to break them until we can have the law changed.For example, if it was against the law to be a pro-democracy protestor.

What if the government decides protesting is unlawful?

Most people implicitly mean, &quot;nothing unlawful to hide&quot; when they say that, I think.

The police should wear body cams all the time, and we can end qualified immunityGot nothing to hide and there will be no problem, right?

I saved a link to this post a few years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;changemyview&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1fv4r6&#x2F;i_believe_the_government_should_be_allowed_to&#x2F;cd89cqr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;changemyview&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1fv4r6&#x2F;i_beli...</a>I won&#x27;t try and summarise it because I think I&#x27;d do a disservice to it, but it&#x27;s another really good argument, ostensibly from experience, re corrupt countries and surveillance.

The IRS already knows that information...The question is not whether you have anything to hide, it’s about whether you have anything to hide from law enforcement.HUGE diffeeence.

In the US, this argument is even easier to debunk, especially when it comes from middle-class adults who&#x27;ve been working for a while.&quot;I have nothing to hide&quot;&quot;What&#x27;s your salary and your spouse&#x27;s salary?&quot;The huge amount of secrecy around salaries in the US is proof that a lot of people have perfectly innocuous secrets that they very much like to hide.

&gt; &quot;We have made it technically impossible to see your messages.&quot;That one&#x27;s not actually a &quot;promise&quot;; it&#x27;s either true and sufficient (although it&#x27;s hard to imagine how if the software supports automatic updates), or a direct lie because they have not in fact made it impossible.

Unless this bill&#x27;s critics are mistaken, if your friends are using &quot;file encryption&quot;, i.e, encrypting the contents of the communications themselves before sending, then this bill has no effect on that.IMO, your friends, unless they are nerds, are never going to place much value on encryption when they never actually use it themselves. When some third party tech company is doing the &quot;end-to-end encryption&quot; for them then your friends are really not in control of the situation, let alone having any reason to understand it. It could be a sham and they might not know it.This bill stands to hurt tech companies but according to its critics (surprise: it&#x27;s the tech companies) it does not interfere with any individual&#x27;s use of encryption for communications.No one wants third parties to have potential access their communications. However there is no law preventing a tech company that provides &quot;encrypted messaging&quot; from decrypting people&#x27;s communications. There is not even a contract with users. If they do this, their liability is zero. There are only &quot;promises&quot;, something like, &quot;We promise we won&#x27;t do it, unless we receive a valid subpoena&quot; or &quot;We have made it technically impossible to see your messages.&quot; (Nevermind metadata.)Well, what if some other third party, like the people pushing this bill, made the same promises? Would that be &quot;good enough&quot;?Of course not.For the record, I am not taking a for&#x2F;against position here. I am not a tech company nor someone trying to get access to encrypted messaging services provided by tech companies. However if something came along -- not suggesting this is it -- that created the necessary evolutionary pressure to make every person, not just &quot;bad guys&quot;, have a basic understanding of how to encrypt a file and send it over an insecure network, without relying on a third party for the encryption, then I would think that would be a good thing.

&gt;easily debunk-able, I don&#x27;t take seriously anyone who offers it up at this point.I also do not take such person seriously but if I wish to convince such person I need a good argument that works.If it&#x27;s easy debunk-able for you I would be interested to see a few from you.

The &quot;nothing to hide&quot; argument is so old and easily debunk-able, I don&#x27;t take seriously anyone who offers it up at this point.

This is a terrible analogy.What&#x27;s actually happening is that Facebook, Google, et.al. can read your messages and the Government can do so with a warrant. Nobody is planning on broadcasting everything to everyone. We don&#x27;t have to ask people if they would do that or not. The vast majority of them do that today.

&gt; To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity.
&gt;there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled.I would agree. Those are very important points. 
When people being watched they are not as free as they could be in their actions and exploration of ideas, because they measure what to say and what is forbidden to say. 
This can have a huge damaging effect in creativity domain.

&gt;I&#x27;m able to see the insanity of my own age. And I will guard privacy with my life on the street, if I have to.I think what we may not realise yet is that we are possibly under new attack of &#x27;modern communism&#x27;. They changed clothes and they do not call themselves communists, but their actions and principles they protect are revealing who they are and we know how many people died in 20 century because of this ideology.&gt;It is an insult to anyone who is different from the normAnd now they attack the basic principles of a free society.&gt;Privacy is a core freedom to protect human diversity. It must not be shamed. It must be loved. Cherished. Treasured.I would also add it&#x27;s a core freedom to protect a free society respecting human rights.

Humans need privacy because of the selfishness of our survival biology. There simply are bad people in the world, and I wish it were different, but it&#x27;s not. &#x27;Just trust us&#x27; are words often told to us by people who only want power - at our expense.The best sentiment I&#x27;ve ever heard about privacy is from Shoshana Zuboff, and it&#x27;s now influenced my thoughts. It&#x27;s at the end of her amazing 2018 book &#x27;Surveillance Capitalism&#x27;, the best book on tech I have ever read. She shares a conclusion along this line: To be private and free from surveillance is to be human. If we have no privacy, we lose our humanity.She explains that there is a direct connection between being watched, and being controlled. We need freedom of diversity - to will - to decide for ourselves. Otherwise, and now I conclude, bad actors with power lust will only bend the world to their vision.The guilt-tripping words of &quot;nothing to hide&quot; come from a place of privilege - or worse, hypocrisy. It is an insult to anyone who is different from the norm, and who wants to be themselves. What you have every right to hide does not even have to be illegal, but often it is, like LGBTQ people last century. Illegal ≠ immoral.Privacy is a core freedom to protect human diversity. It must not be shamed. It must be loved. Cherished. Treasured.Privacy begets diversity. Surveillance begets conformity. Which one is more important for the development of life in the universe?As a child, I instinctively knew that privacy was something natural and important in life. Now as an adult, with education and intellect I can articulate why - and resist psychological manipulation and intellectual dishonesty from others trying to tell us that privacy should die.I&#x27;m able to see the insanity of my own age. And I will guard privacy with my life on the street, if I have to.

Having a conversation in a bar thinking it&#x27;s private..Anyway, it might at well be Pleasantville 1950s for a lot of people. They are both hiding everything and being suspicious AF of anybody with something to hide.

May be a good argument would be that it&#x27;s not about &#x27;nothing to hide&#x27; it&#x27;s about your authority to decide wether you wish something to hide or not.

So now, the terrorists and child molesters still use the bar, but they always go into the bathroom to talk. The owner suspects that they are talking about bad things in there, and installs surveillance cameras so that if the police ever need to know what&#x27;s happening in there, they have access. Would you want a real life bar owner to record you on the toilet just so that one day the police can track some bad guys easily? Probably not. Do you think it&#x27;s reasonable to expect privacy on the toilet even when you&#x27;re in a bar owned by someone else? Yes, even if it might one day make law enforcement a little harder. And just like we think that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using places intended for that in the real world, we think they should also have it online.

&gt; just like the police can get a search warrant for a bad person&#x27;s home or a bar where a lot of bad people are congregating and planning and doing bad things, we think they should also be allowed to do that in the online world.Bad analogy, because a search warrant for one bad person&#x27;s home or bar does not require the government to have keys to everyone&#x27;s home and bar, just in case they need to search it.In other words, the problem is not the &quot;get a search warrant&quot; part. It&#x27;s the &quot;break strong encryption so no one&#x27;s data is secure, just in case we need to search anyone&#x27;s data&quot; part.

Filling someone&#x27;s head with hateful, racist lies is 100% legal so it would not be applicable to the proponents of the bill. Terrorism is another beast.You will find a lot more people than you would like in a lot of communities are racist. I do not approve of it but preventing it would enter the realm of thought policing and would require a totalitarian police state.

&gt; Imagine we&#x27;re sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming.If we are doing imaginary situations, the proponents of this bill can also do something like this:Imagine there is a bar, where the police are unable to go inside. Every day, people go into the bar to plan terror attacks or to spread hate and racism. They can have whoever from across the world join them in the private bar without the police being able to find out. Sometimes they also bring young children into the bar to sexually exploit them. Other times, they bring vulnerable young men and indoctrinate them with their racist hate. The owner of the bar knows that those kinds of things are happening, but they say, a lot of people just come into the bar to talk with friends, so we never allow the police to come. In addition, before serving drinks, the owner puts on a blindfold and stuffs their ears with cotton so they won&#x27;t be able to see or hear what is going on. They live by the principle: See no evil, hear no evil. The owner of the bar is making a lot of money from the people using the bar.Don&#x27;t you think we should keep the terrorists, and neo-Nazis, and child molesters from having a bar that they can go to to do and plan their evil stuff that police cannot get to? Don&#x27;t you think that the bar owners, instead of stuffing their ears and covering their eyes so they are unable to see the bad stuff, should make sure that bad people aren&#x27;t using their bar for evil stuff. Sure, just like in the real world, you will have your privacy just like you have in your home or at the local bar. But, you would want a real life bar owner to not close their eyes to people using their bar as a planning ground for terrorism, or who are bringing young kids with fake id&#x27;s to the bar to exploit them, or who are filling young men&#x27;s minds with hateful, racist lies? Also, just like the police can get a search warrant for a bad person&#x27;s home or a bar where a lot of bad people are congregating and planning and doing bad things, we think they should also be allowed to do that in the online world.Now tell me, to the average non-tech voter, which will pull the most emotional strings?

You could move that a notch up and say that only the owner of the bar and their friends get to watch all these conversations and they keep copies. That should really freak out some people.

No, because when police have a search warrant and storm your home, they can&#x27;t seize the private conversation you had in bed with your partner a year earlier. They can&#x27;t suck the memories out of your head. Technology like mobile phones and messaging have become an extension of us, they are used for private conversations and personal memories. Breaking encryption on these is not like search warrants of yesteryear, and not like wire taps. In traditional search warrant they would not be seizing communications. And in wire taps they would only get conversations going forward, not years in the past that they can search through, and even with conversations going forward they sometimes wouldn&#x27;t be allowed to listen to personal conversations.The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the constitution) is all about protecting us against abuses of government officials. It presumes people in government could be bad, and we need protecting from them. By allowing a government official to seize all our private conversations it could allow a bad government official to go fishing and find things things that they can use against their enemies. There are many, many laws. Many of them aren&#x27;t enforced, but could be.For example in some states adultery is illegal, even a felony in some states. Not just in small states, but in New York, Massachusetts, and Michigan. In Massachusetts there hasn&#x27;t been an adultery conviction since 1983. But if law enforcement was allowed to decrypt an iPhone, and find private bedroom things, it could be used as an attack on a political enemy.It isn&#x27;t only &quot;bad people&quot; that should be worried about the government. I think pretty much everyone agrees Martin Luther King Jr. was a good person. But the government at the time didn&#x27;t think so. When he was killed the first people on the scene were the police officers who were doing surveillance of him from across the street. That is the kind of government we need to be protected from.

But YouTube Live is publicly accessible, it&#x27;s not the same as a law enforcement warrant. I think a better analogy is whether it should be okay for a judge to allow police officers to storm into your private residence with only a few seconds warning, and then proceed to examine and even take away anything in your room.

Moxie Marlinspike made a great point in one of his essays on his website about this.There&#x27;s 10 to a hundred thousand laws on the books already.How do you know you don&#x27;t have something to hide?

My take: 
The “nothing to hide” argument is a fallacy for two reasons: 
(1) The connotation that things discussed in private are bad. True, criminals may discuss illegal activity in private, but that does not mean everyone’s private conversations are illegal. 
(2) The notion of what needs “hiding” is subject to opinion, and changes over time. You may not be breaking any laws today, but if the law changes and governments have access to your past data, you are now vulnerable and have nowhere to hide.From my post about privacy not too long ago, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.davidexmachina.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;privacy-matters.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.davidexmachina.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;privacy-matters.html</a>

I&#x27;ve used most of the arguments against &#x27;nothing to hide&#x27; mentality mentioned in this thread, and guess what: most of the people still don&#x27;t care enough to change a single one of their bad privacy habits. Their eyes glaze over, or they think you are just overly dramatic or a conspiracy thinker, or &quot;I&#x27;m not that important&quot; or &quot;Small chance it happens to me&quot;, &quot;I trust the government&quot; (when it comes to encryption), etc. Some friends and family I educated in length, and still they are not even willing to e.g. switch their Samsung browser to FF, or install an ad-blocker.The concept of privacy and the consequences of not having it are too abstract for them. It is like saying that climate change will lead to disaster unless we all act now. They will only act after something bad happens to them personally.

I find it much easier to argue from the moral perspective.It&#x27;s my right to hide whatever I want, regardless of whether somebody else considers it &quot;something to hide&quot; or not; just as it&#x27;s your right to buy a 3m tall chocolate statue of yourself, regardless of whether I think it&#x27;s something you need.The question is not &quot;is it really necessary?&quot; but &quot;who the #£$! gave you the right to decide whether I consider it to be necessary for myself?&quot;Then again, here in (east) Germany, somebody argues &quot;I have nothnig to hide&quot;, you just tell them &quot;Neither did people 40 years ago&quot; and the conversation is pretty much over.

That argument is good, and is an example of the type which Bruce Schneier makes in The Eternal Value of Privacy:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-eternal-value-of-privacy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;2006&#x2F;05&#x2F;the-eternal-value-of-privacy&#x2F;</a>

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here&#x27;s how I like to get past the &quot;nothing to hide&quot; argument.Imagine we&#x27;re sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming.We still don&#x27;t &quot;have anything to hide&quot;. We&#x27;re just having a conversation. But the conversation used to be private--that&#x27;s normal. Now it&#x27;s not private, which is not normal.Whether or not you feel like you have to &quot;hide&quot; anything during a bar conversation is not the point. It&#x27;s whether you think we should make changes to our society where having a private conversation is never allowed.This kind of analogy, in my experience, helps people understand that the &quot;nothing to hide&quot; argument assumes that privacy is only for evil people, when in reality it&#x27;s the very normal default of daily life. The parable posted in another top-level comment is also great.

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