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I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
The steelman for this being "if technology is basically just telepathy, why should "because it's technically possible" ever be a valid argument for society to have any right to monitor the contents of the communication"? The strongest right is one you can guarantee personally, after all.
We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.
We throw, and threaten to throw, teenagers in jail all the time over this. It is probably good that they take steps to defend themselves if they're going to engage in this activity to avoid the current environment of societal overreaction; the entire point of "rights" is to limit the damage society can do when (not if) it overreacts (the flip side of the coin being "ticking time bomb plots", but I'm willing to trade the lives lost in those for the ones saved due to them not committing suicide any more over this).
The overwhelming majority of murders worldwide in the 20th century were perpetrated in an organized fashion by governments targeting their own citizens (organized mobs using simple demographic criteria make up most of the rest); the impulse to make one a harder target against those is only natural. Proponents of this approach can point to things like census records being burned to stop an angry invading force from determining which people were going to the concentration camps and which were not. The Germans are well-acquainted with this; being that they have committed the overwhelming majority of murder on the European continent in the last 100 years probably has something to do with that.
While there are a variety of reasons why this is true, men are murdered more often than women; I don't think it's more complex than that.
Sure fine whatever. But even these are not absolute, and can be pierced if justified.
By "self-produced child pornography" I did not mean teenagers recording themselves over Snapshot. I meant something more like an adult recording a child that they have prisoner in their closet that they raped periodically before murdering and disappearing them. The child is now gone without a trace but authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.
These atrocities were committed by dictatorships, yes?
When I say people with these worries are Qanon-adjacent. this is what I mean. Invocation of living in fascist Germany or the Khmer Rouge to describe the need to rigorously defend your privacy living in the United States in 2024. Yes, if you live in a totalitarian dictatorship, or one that's rapidly becoming one, sure fine privacy seems pretty important! To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late. IMO this is a persecution fear very distantly tethered to Earth.
I submit that privacy warriors are just another shade of culture warrior, and it's a kind of warfare with bipartisan appeal.
What do you think preparing looks like, if not fighting for civil liberties and maintaining our ability to coordinate politically without being targeted? To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.
Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?
This very much depends on context, but in the case of murder by one's own government, usually yes.
German Jews had "time to prepare" in that it was obvious that a murderously anti-semitic political force was in the ascendant since 1930, and most of them did - the core fact about the Holocaust they don't teach you is that it was mostly a genocide of defeated enemy Jews because only 180,000 or so Jews were left in Germany proper to Holocaust.
The various groups that would be predictably disfavoured by the Soviets also had fair warning (the Soviet Union didn't actually enforce emigration restrictions until 1928, a decade after the revolution) and those who had the resources to get out, did so (more than 1% of the pre-revolution population emigrated). If you were a Ukrainian kulak, you had "time to prepare" but probably not the resources to do anything about it - with 21st century transport tech and refugee law, I think most would have got out. The people who got gulagged in the 1930's included actual political opponents of the regime, but also a significant number of people who were effectively swept up at random - that isn't something people manage to plan around.
I am less sure about precisely what happened in China, but the Great Leap Forward looks like a combination of "insane regime kills at random" and genuine incompetence in a country poor enough to have no margin for error, and the Cultural Revolution is the Trope Codifier for "insane regime kills at random". In any case, Communist rule in China follows a period of 30 years of pervasive political violence (warlordism, murderous military government under Chiang Kai-Shek, Japanese invasion, civil war)
The much more common case is "Lose war, get occupied, get genocided". Contrary to the usual spin, this covers the vast majority of Nazi victims. It also covers most of the post-1945 communist victims - if you became an ethnic minority in the USSR as a result of the Soviets conquering your country in WW2, things were unlikely to end well for you. (And, of course, all the colonial genocides). I
So in summary, "Emigrate if you find yourself ruled by people who hate you" seems to be a heuristic that people tend to put into practice if they have the resources, with the result that "Government genocides a disfavoured minority group in its own core territory" is a much less common threat model than people think it is. "Emigrate if you think your country might lose a war in the near future" and "Emigrate if your country might fall under communist rule in the near future." are similarly good heuristics, but ones which people seem to struggle with acting on.
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So, what's the ground truth here? When you unbox a smartphone do you decline to log into a Google/Apple account so you can sync because you're worried that if you say yes there's a 1% chance that's how you end up in a gas chamber some day? If this isn't you, are you saying you sympathize with that view?
What do you mean by "ground truth"? I personally don't make many sacrifices for privacy or civil liberty's sake, but I'm grateful when others do.
Where I live I already don't have freedom of speech or association, and the government recently froze the bank accounts of protesters whom the state-run news agency had already demonized.
Again, how do you think anyone ends up in a gas chamber?
Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?
I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.
Yes, that's it. Sadly, places that have gone insane don't make it necessarily obvious that they have gone insane, because they attempt to gaslight the sane. And being nice prosocial apes those sane ones waste a lot of time they could be using to get away from insane place wondering if everyone around them seeming insane is not what insane people observe about the world.
I wouldn't say quite that, but canadian culture in particular is uniquely vulnerable to mass insanity and mass manipulation, being obsessed with getting along over anything else. So while it's not on the slope right now, you can be sure the canadian slope is gonna be steep and well lubrified when we get on it.
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This is indeed the main anxiety of those who confound you, I suspect, and moreover, the main driver of our modern discourse.
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From my view everyone who raged teary-eyed against government "overreach" like the PATRIOT act or FISA has been proven wrong to date. This stuff did not at all alter life in the US except for giving the government slightly more power to investigate crime.
I'll be really embarrassed if this all paved the way for a USA Patriot Points social credit system but I just don't see that taking off in the US. The notion sounds really far-fetched.
I agree that some people were overly certain about the consequences of the PATRIOT act. But I would still rage teary-eyed against government overreach even if I were merely worried it would lead to tyranny, because once the government is totalitarian it's very hard to come back from that.
Also, in that time there have been various counter-movements, such as Snowden's, that pushed back against mass surveillance. But that could have easily not happened, and plus the state has presumably hardened itself against the next Snowden since then.
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How are you going to know if the government investigated you secretly and then made some excuse about it? Look up parallel construction.
Touched on here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183560?context=8#context
I'm not denying it doesn't happen, it obviously does sometimes. So, that said, what's the argument in response? Because parallel construction could happen (and sometimes does), that means the government therefore should not have access to these tools without a court order ahead of time and if it wrecks their ability to counter terrorist plots or organized crime or handle fast-moving cases, so be it?
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And how do you propose authorities do that if the device is turned off and the data has been securely encrypted at rest? Put back doors into every computing device to prevent this scenario from arising?
I'm aware 95% of security researchers think #2 is a nightmare and makes security worse, but I believe they are simply revealing their libertarian-anarchist ideology. We just got through a period where enormous sums were invested in web 3.0 crypto-systems with outlandish ultra complicated architectures for everything from micropayments to whole network states (etc) and it was all pursued with doe eyed zeal. It is absurd to claim a system where law enforcers have a backdoor is not a solvable problem.
They're both nightmares, only #1 is more honest about it.
Of course that's a solvable problem. But such a back door is destruction of security. And being universal, it's a rather less-than-controlled destruction of security.
The problem to be solved with law enforcement backdoors is not destruction of security by itself, it's law enforcement abusing the backdoor and not telling us. And you're not solving that problem.
I don't think @dr_analog thinks that's a problem.
To be clear, I think police abuses are bad. I consider that a problem. I don't think it's unsolvable or that it is destruction of security. At least not moreso than any other rights. I don't think someone would say the security around your property rights don't exist or are destructed because a police officer can theoretically steal your property and tell you to suck it.
By "We just got through a period where enormous sums were invested in web 3.0 crypto-systems with outlandish ultra complicated architectures for everything from micropayments to whole network states (etc) and it was all pursued with doe eyed zeal" I mean that it's absolutely possible to construct a system where law enforcement has keys to unlock crypto with some semblance of due process. The problem previously is that it's been done so secretively (since the community response is so outraged) that nothing with a sound design has been produced.
I cant stress this enough; the cypherpunk community warned us at length of how impossible it would be to prevent abuses if you give law enforcement a backdoor and then during web 3.0 cheerfully advanced pitch decks for protocol research labs for moving all social media to blockchain, tracking and enforcing all property rights either through blockchain or DAOs, doing anonymous voting, insurance, exchanges and a hundred other libertarian fantasy replacements for the state that balajis could generate.
Take their hysteria about police backdoors with a grain of salt.
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