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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   18417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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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.

  1. I'm aware this argument is cited derisively by other security professionals, but that doesn't make them correct. Ticking time bomb plots are a real thing.

Ironically, if you are paranoid about privacy you are better off using a big tech platform, not a smaller site, forum, or service. Big tech platforms tend to be harder to hack and less inclined to cough up info unless pressed, which small services are happy to comply with minimal prodding (look how hard it is for the FBI to get Apple to unlock its phones). I have lost track of the number of time small web-hosters and forums have been hacked and data leaked.

Yes, this completely. Smaller platforms, including things you'd use for self-hosting, are very easy to fool with (e.g.) completely forged subpoenas.

I think you are taking a bit different take here, but I haven't seen my argument considered by you or anyone else here. Why do people encrypt their personal notes, self-host their e-mail servers and use VPN with Tor? Because their can. Similarly, why people climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. Himalayan mountaineering is one of the deadliest activity one can think of and yet, there is no shortage of people who want to give it a try.

As far as I observed, many people concerned with privacy, usually do so on a superficial level, while their deeper motivation resolves around the temptation to do something single-handedly. Many programmers possess only a limited understanding of unix systems, operating systems architecture in general, cryptographic algorithms and other more obscure topics. They are usually happy using Windows with VS code. Do they miss something in their day-to-day life, do their actions lack utility? Not at all.

But I'm talking here about a different type of people: hackers, tweakers, geeks who just build complicated projects for their own joy, because it's in their nature to take the road less traveled. You are right that it takes a certain kind of person to take pleasure in tens of hours of setting and adjusting systems that have a high chance of being abandoned after a couple of uses, but isn't that what FOSS is all about? The famous: "Linux is free if your time is worth nothing" points to the fact, that exploring software consumes tons of hours. Is it useful? I don't know man, this is exploratory behavior, some people think that there is some utility in exploring and learning new things. Of course one should be able to find a difference between a hobby and mental issues.

I don't buy into falling prey to conspiracy theories. Maybe you know people, who are so involved into distrustful political stances or are stuck in the views of the society taken out of the '80s and 90's movies like 12 Monkeys or Fight Club, but usually it's just an excuse for DIY. Here you have a link to a blog of a person, who self-hosted her blog server as a unikernel. A cumbersome way of doing it to say the least! And she in fact mentions hacker attacks as a reason in her blog post, but it may as well have something to do with the fact that she has worked on MirrageOS, a framework for creating unikernels. This is the pattern I find among the bloggers I follow: not the distrustful schizos, but rather hackers constantly experimenting with new tooling.

I don't mean to condemn people who are doing it for fun. Or securitymaxxing as art. As a cybersec person I 100% appreciate the beauty of a blog tech stack that's pure OCaml all of the way down to the (virtual) metal and have fantasies that one day we will go further and synthesize bespoke hardware from the type graphs and there's nothing black-box between your code and the net. Holy shit, so good.

I'm specifically trying to grab and shake the person who, when setting up their new phone, sees the [x] use cloud backups/sharing for safety and convenience? option and unchecks it because they believe they're so subversive or outrageous that the state (or big corporations) are looking for them and they can't afford the risk of centralizing their photos and documents. And then they go further and get to work on their GrapheneOS game and turn off push notifications because of side channel attacks and really want to live in a world where they don't get your message until they take their phone out of a faraday sleeve, get on WiFi, open Signal and have it pull messages.

This is a type of person and they're afflicted with something and I'm surrounded by them and I don't fully understand what's going on. I understand liberals and conservatives and libertarians. I can change the sliders on my values and see how my thinking can have me end up in one tribe or another. But the amount of paranoia that I'd have to add to end up in privacymaxx zone seems untenable. Surely something else is going on.

Now I see your point better! I would suspect that many people nurture the grandiose thoughts of self-importance and would even dream of the government taking interest in their usual life. Though sometimes cloud services can suck and while iCloud is smooth, my institution uses Outlook and I'm struck with OneDrive, which is sometimes so slow, that I usually carry around external HD to not get frustrated every couple hours or so.

Though I must admit, that I don't know many people of the type you're writing about, since in general I don't know that many people.

I don't use cloud saves for photos not because of privacy, but because I'm afraid that inevitably due to an error on either side an empty folder is going to get synced the wrong way and I'll lose five years' worth of photos. As for music, movies, and ebooks: lol lmao, as if I'm going to vendor-lock myself to a single storefront.

A few notes, but mostly marking to think and read more and maybe write more about later:

I have a feeling that like 70% of the privacy ultra-activist stuff is counter-productive in that it mostly serves to draw more attention onto you than would be paid if you acted more like a "perfectly ordinary sheep" type. Like the guy trying to be covert with the obvious trench coat just making sure everyone in the diner is staring at him versus nobody giving him a second glance if he was wearing business casual.

Google gets beat up a lot for non-responsiveness to user inquiries and supposed privacy violations. I actually agree with your point in that I continue to use Google for most things because I trust their security better than just about anyone else. Their Advanced Protection stuff is probably best of breed, and at least I can be sure that no hacker or activist will ever be able to socially engineer their way into my accounts. I accept that they might delete it someday because some wrongthink I posted somewhere gets caught in the wrong filter. And they might give everything they have to the Government some day, but meh, I doubt it's much safer anywhere else.

I do still use Google's location tracking, partly because it is sometimes convenient. I also have a feeling, or at least would not be surprised if it is some day revealed, that the phone UI checkboxes to turn it off actually only turn off the visibility to you, not the collection and storage. If they're gonna collect and store it either way, I might as well get some use from it too. If I ever need to really be covert, I guess I'll have to leave it at home. Though even that might not help much, since it's such an unusual and rare thing to do, if anybody was actually watching that closely, they'd probably have reason to think that, whatever I was actually doing then, I was up to no good.

And yeah, running your own servers and storage has its own risks as well. I doubt I'm a particularly great sysadmin, but as far as I know, I haven't lost any servers yet, so maybe it's not quite that hard, or maybe nobody cares that much about my stuff.

Are you aware of the third party doctrine?

Not specifically. I was aware of it on a "how to deal with the police" tactics based level: law enforcers looking at emails requires a warrant but documents you have sitting in Drive may not.

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.

One alternative suggestion that I haven't seen explored (but I'm sure isn't original) is that privacy concerns are often the result of human intuition about our evolved environment rather than about our modern one. Thinking of data collectors as just algorithmic and disinterested in you personally doesn't come intuitively to most people. If they're collecting your information and using your information for something that they profit from, surely they must have some specific interest in you, they must be taking something from you that is yours, and you don't want them to get that which belongs to you. When it comes to physical goods, proprietary knowledge, or genuinely clandestine information in a Dunbar-limited world, these concerns basically make sense. If you had information that you could sell to some other guy to make money, you'd be pretty pissed off that someone was ripping it off! Likewise, if someone collected something you thought was private, it would be quite reasonable to be concerned that they're trying to hurt you, or at least want leverage over you in the future.

Oh, actually, people also seem to drastically overvalue what their private data is worth.

Anecdotally: So, I don't have health insurance (I have wealth insurance instead, for catastrophes and it can't call itself insurance). So, I pay the retail rate for drugs. But it turns out there's a whole bizarro world economy where you can go to goodrx.com and get insane discounts off of the list price, like 90% or more and the drug ends up costing less than it would with an insurance copay.

Anyway, I have no idea how this works. I asked the pharmacist once why this free coupon knocked $10 off of this totally mundane drug that millions of people take. Her knee-jerk reaction was "because they sell your data". She really thought the fact that I take this med + my email address is worth $10 to someone. Not just that one time, but every time I refill it.

So, extrapolating "taking something that's yours" and "$10+ per take", I could see a recipe for widespread driving people crazy about privacy.

…what would feel like a good price?

I agree that $10 is way too high for any real value of that data. I could also believe that it’s where companies end up after factoring in all that bizarro-world. Maybe they sell the data for $1, but are also saving for bureaucratic reasons. Maybe it’s one of those loss-leader things where the cheap Xanax keeps people (or insurers?) in the program when they have to buy the long tail of exotic drugs. My personal guess would be that it has something to due with Medicaid pricing, because that derails literally everything.

I think it's probably worth a penny, at most?

Anyway, my research suggests these goodrx.com coupons are actually drug manufacturer rebates to the pharmacy off of their wholesale purchase. The manufacturer is effectively using this channel to quote much lower prices to uninsured poor people who would otherwise be forced to go without.

privacy concerns are often the result of human intuition about our evolved environment rather than about our modern one. Thinking of data collectors as just algorithmic and disinterested in you personally doesn't come intuitively to most people.

We're looking at more of an intuitive statistical gap in understanding small percentage chances. There is clearly a greater chance that if my private information is stored at police headquarters that some sequence of events will lead to someone at police headquarters using that information against me in some way, than if that information is not stored at police headquarters. Most people aren't capable of actually calculating the expected value of that probability, so they either round it up too high or too low.

Most people don't have the information to even estimate. If your GPS location pattern marks you as being high risk for being a drug courier and you keep getting pulled over for minor and imagined traffic violations as a result, how would you even know that's what's resulting in the harassment?

It's worse. I have to estimate it long before anything goes wrong.

And my modal case is something like coming into contact with a person of interest. Or it's personal, your former coworker with an axe to grind or your ex boyfriend or your new girlfriend's ex boyfriend with a grudge, happens to have access to that kind of thing in some way or another.

That probability is impossible to estimate in advance. When I went skeet shooting in 2017, I could not have known that multiple people I shot with would be indicted in federal court on "insurrection" charges. I've seen friends stalk romantic partners, perspective and current and former, all across the internet including misusing work tools to do so. I have no method of assessing the people I interact with for whether they materially increase that risk.

and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.

Calling it, this dude is an alien or something. No human being would communicate this to another as if it were something anyone would ever give one iota of a shit about.

This comment was an antagonistic and low effort reply. Warning you not to do this.

I was not holding it up as a loss in particular, just pointing out it's the only visible scar from all of that self-flagellation.

As a former Facebooker I share this sentiment. Personalized ads are better than non-personalized. Sometimes I actually find something nice through personalized ads.

They don't butter my bread anymore and I still believe this.

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.

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.

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"

We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.

this digital cache of self-produced child pornography is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice.

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 level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.

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.

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.

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.

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"

We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.

Sure fine whatever. But even these are not absolute, and can be pierced if justified.

this digital cache of self-produced child pornography is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice.

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).

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.

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.

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.

  • -12

authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.

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?

authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.

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?

  1. Torture warrants
  2. Require device and crypto backdoors

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.

I'm aware 95% of security researchers think #2 is a nightmare and makes security worse

They're both nightmares, only #1 is more honest about it.

It is absurd to claim a system where law enforcers have a backdoor is not a solvable problem.

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.

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.

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.

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?

To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.

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.

This stuff did not at all alter life in the US except for giving the government slightly more power to investigate crime.

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?

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?

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?

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.

Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?

Again, how do you think anyone ends up in a gas chamber?

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.

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.

This is indeed the main anxiety of those who confound you, I suspect, and moreover, the main driver of our modern discourse.

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.

Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?

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.

Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to?

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.

Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -

(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.

(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.

Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -

Wow, okay, good timing. I was just about reserved to believe I was debating with 100 swords pointed at me until this falls below the fold (thanks everyone for engaging!)

What's the line of your academic work?

(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.

Well, right from a healthy living perspective, ads that are very targeted and appealing might be a problem. But isn't it said (advocated) that "good ads" are in fact, "content"? If that premise holds, don't we already widely suffer from this problem?

(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.

I agree it makes more natural sense that women have higher privacy concerns because there's a lot pervs trying to get inside of their digital devices to exfiltrate nudes (and be otherwise generally creepy). But the level of inconvenience and fringe-ness men take on in pursuit of privacy is more extreme than what women do, in my read.

I think part of the issue, for me anyway, is just how much of my data is out there and how useful it is. And it turns out to be not only nearly impossible to protect your data from leaking with or without a warrant, but absolutely impossible to remove information once it’s in the wild.

If I go into your house, warrent or not, I’m bound to only the things in that location to get Information on your life. I might rifle through the papers on your desk, and maybe find out some things. But it’s limited in scope and it’s not going farther than those bits of data that are available in that house. Give me access to your data and I can know pretty much literally everything about you. I have your location, the websites you visit, the apps you use, your contact list — and that’s just from your internet service provider. Get your credit card information, and I know every purchase you’ve made. The scope is worlds apart.

The other thing is the permanent nature of the databases that the governments can build off the data. Once they have it, storage capacity is the only limit to the size and detail of the profile built. And this presents a problem that really needs addressing— if the cops get a warrent on me today, how far back can they dig and how far forward? How long can they keep this data? What can they do with these dossiers once they have them?

For most people, I think the danger is probably overblown. Most of us aren’t that interesting. But there are people who would absolutely be harmed by public databases being available. Back doors for cops can easily be weaponized by bad actors to track down escaping domestic abuse victims, for example. Governments can use these databases to track dissenters or in extreme cases to enable genocide. If the government decided in 2357 that it wanted to kill Hispanics, your phone and the data it collected and continues to collect would turn you in rather quickly. You had your phone in your pocket when you went to the Hispanic church up the road. You have a Spanish keyboard on your phone. You follow Hispanic topics on social media. It doesn’t take a lot of work to query a database with markers for membership in the wrong demographic group.

These databases already exist and have more than enough information to carry out any kind of genocide you'd like. Society couldn't possibly work without them. This was true 100 years ago and it's true today.

If the government wants to find and kill a group (or even an individual), it's not lack of information that's going to stop them, it hasn't been for a very long time.

I feel like much of the pracrical issues is with how these databases are accessed. People shouldn't have as wide access as the do and analysis should be done more by machines whose algorithms are centrally controlled (rather than having potentially millions of bad actors accessing the information and being security risks), that can then hand risks related to specific individuals to human analysist/administrators who only get access to that relevant information.

There were limits. Real time tracking wouldn’t have been possible in 1924. And given that most of the data available at the time we’re on paper that had to be physically stored, copied and sent to various places, it would have been much harder to pull off a targeted mass killing without missing people who wanted to hide. In fact there was at least one country (I believe it was Holland) that managed to save a substantial number of Jews from the Nazis by burning the census records. In that era, burning the single copy of the records in question makes them no longer exist. In the era of cloud computing, nothing short of destroying all the internet connected computers on earth would guarantee the data being gone.

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.

There is a very thin line between "enemies" and "neutrals" when it comes to protecting your digital privacy, its one irreversible data exchange away from belonging to both of them.

I generally don't take too many steps to protect my own privacy, because I consider it a lost cause. If some enemy wants to go after me I'm pretty sure I'm fucked. Because enough "neutral" parties have collected enough data on me that is only loosely protected. There is a certain point where tech savvy adults have this realization about their online activities. "Oh shit, all of this stuff in aggregate could totally be used against me and fuck me over." Plenty of them react by trying to lock down the data about them. I don't think I blame them for that reaction, even if I kind of agree with you that this is a pointless endeavor. Its a bit of a horror show to realize how quickly an unscrupulous asshole could fuck over your life.

I work in web-development and GDPR has been a huge annoyance. I think its brought us closer to a Balkanization of the internet. Many large companies in the US were able to comply with the regulations, many small companies weren't. The obvious choice for the small companies was just to stop offering services to Europe. At some point the inter region disparities in law could force even the big companies to pull out. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. Let each country or region have the internet it deserves based on the laws they impose on it. The sophisticated users will resort to using VPNs (at least until those get fully banned).

The sophisticated users will resort to using VPNs (at least until those get fully banned).

Perhaps by the services themselves, rather than any government. Once I turned my VPN on, Google blocked me from search even after I solved a few captchas.

go figure. shitty pooled IPs. same experience here with VPNs.

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.

This isn't some hypothetical threat. Given you work in the industry I'm sure you're well aware of the number of times that employees at these companies have been caught spying on individual user's data or listening to them fuck via voice assistant recordings.

From the original Vice article:

The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties. Ten percent of all allegations in 2020 concerned misuse of systems, which can include accessing user or employee data in violation of Google's own policies, helping others to access that data, or modifying or deleting user or employee data, according to the document.

So, it's a bit hard to parse without the actual numbers, but it appears that of 36 security incidents, 31 (86%) were Google employees leaking confidential corporate information (ironically, including the document leaked to the Vice reporter). 4 of them were misuse of systems (which includes but is not limited to accessing user or employee data). This is actually pretty amazing, considering how many Google employees there are and the scale of data that Google collects. You might say "well, that's how many were caught," but it's very likely the majority of cases are caught (all major systems at Google have every user data access logged and audited, though I suppose some minor systems that no one uses might not have that set up).

If anything, working at Google actually made me a lot more confident about their PII protections. They take it extremely seriously and I'm actually surprised so many people were able to abuse it, though it's to be expected at their scale: Google has 175,000 employees and maintains billions of accounts.

To me, this is the exception that proves the rule: you're safer with Google.

Gin, mdb, rpcsp... Security there is taken very seriously. There're always potential holes in the system, but I trust Google much more to keep my data safe against realistic adversaries than anyone's homelab duct taped together with VLANs and reverse proxies. (And at least 90% of alternative non-Google third party hosts are honeypots, either out of incompetence or malice.)

The danger with Google is that Google co-operates with the authorities, either voluntarily, "voluntarily", or because they've been literally infiltrated.

It's absolutely fair to say that, if you're doing something the government places a high priority on detecting and punishing, Google is not the place to put digital evidence of that something. And that's a certainty.

The issue comes in when someone believes that there exist digital safes that no one but they can open. You're not going to build one in your spare time, and you're certainly not going to find one in other well-known third-party services (which are equally compromised by the government and less secure than Google) or in unknown fly-by-night services (half of which are government honeypots, and the other half are people waiting to do a rug pull to steal all your bitcoin and which are probably breached by the government anyway).

I agree, when I worked at Google I remember their security measures being extremely well-thought-out - so much better than the lax approach most tech companies take. However, I DON'T trust their ideological capture. They won't abuse people's information by accident, but I will not be surprised if they start doing it on purpose to their outgroup. And they have the tools to do it en masse.

Either for ideology or just to squeeze out a few more dollars. If Google's moats start falling, and their profits start falling with them, the first sign will just be that products start being less good. This is understandable and fine; they won't have as much funny money to blow on non-profit-centers that only add marginally, but that customers like. But if it gets really bad, well, there's always Baker's Law: "You never know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who created it fear for their jobs."

I've never heard of that (and DDG brings up nothing except stuff that looks more relevant to biology), what are some examples of tech-gone-bad like that?

The extremely low-level version of this is the classic example of a free, simple app. I heard the story of one recently that was just an app that let you change the brightness of the flashlight on some phones that didn't have that functionality built in. It started off just having basic ads. But as it became less and less profitable, crowded out by things like more phones having it just built-in, they saw the writing on the wall. Presumably, they just sold it to someone else, but I don't know in this particular case. In any event, either the original owner or someone who bought it added really obtrusive video ads... and then snuck in a $15/month subscription charge. Basically just banking on it already being installed in some number of phones, and some number of them not really noticing or accidentally clicking the wrong thing and not noticing and such. This is the really simple version.

I'd have to try to go back and see if I can find any real examples, but you can imagine that an app that collects a bunch of data on you, maybe biometric data and such, could end up on a downward spiral, profitwise. Who freaking knows how they'll sell it in order to make that last buck? Who knows what form of shady scaremongering they could do, "We see that you have this gene, and you're really in danger of [medical problem] (that is barely supportable by the scientific evidence), so you really ought to consult with [our shady partner who sells you some worthless shit and kicks us back money]."

Actually, just as I finished writing that, I thought of the example of virus protection software. That shit was constantly burying itself deeper and deeper into your system, until it had basically unfettered access to everything. Lots of people kept using it, mostly out of inertia. As it started getting squeezed out of the market, they started squeezing customers harder and causing all sorts of problems, not least of which is the tension between, "If our software has a vulnerability, attackers can use that to get deep access to your system, but you're probably oblivious to the details of how that works, so we're actually kind of okay with it, so long as it scares enough people to keep paying the subscription."

Jeez, never thought about it like that.

Will skip most of the points here since we already have great comments and I don't have a lot more to add, but I feel a very important a very important aspect of it is often brushed off without much thought.

makes the ads being served to you dumber.

I don't know about you, but to me that alone sounds like an end in itself. I am not aware of any comprehensive study that dissects the impact of targeted ads on - at individual level - opinions, behavior, finances and mental health; and, by extention, at a societal level - social development, culture, economy and public health.

This ought to be better understood (recommendations for reading are welcome!), but given gargantuan size of targeted publicity businesses (including Big Tech names) it seems like the impact of targeted advertisement can hardly be overstated. And I do not - and neither should you - trust that private corporations should hold that power.

Of course, privacy hacks can only do so much in terms of protecting you from big baddie tech, whatever that means, and people who do that are already very likely savvy enough to block ads anyway. But as a policy, I think GDPR and other initiatives are a great step forward, although not so effective yet.

A warrant lets specific authorities in to a specific place for a specific period of time. Unencrypted data doesn't know or care about the who or the when - it can be copied infinitely, in perpetuity. The risk profile is not the same. One single unscrupulous copy operation, or even a short residence on a machine that has a security hole and a curious onlooker, is all it takes for the genie to get out of the bottle.

I am probably less technical than you at this point but: Broadly, I agree that trying to roll your own security is less secure than trusting a convenient megacorp who employs professionals. For 99.5% of people, this is the case.

I also agree that the probability of being targeted because of your data is lower than many privacy-obsessed people mention.

I also am glad you're bringing arguably a fresh PoV to the discussion!

However, I think other folks have swung back on a number of items very well that I'm not even going to try to double up on. Random thoughts:

Not all privacy desires have their foundations in criminality and kiddy porn. Villainizing E2E encryption and truly private spaces as exclusively the domains of ne'er do wells is the exact same tactic people use against guns to win the culture war. Carrying a pistol doesn't make you a paranoid asshole; it means you're vastly more prepared for a rare occurrence than someone who doesn't. You can't even make the same off-color jokes in Discord that you could have made in a Facebook message 5 years ago without auto-bans, so the probability of unsecured communication having consequences isn't super low.

I want to be able to talk about the government without them listening. I want to be able to talk about psychotic leftists without them getting me fired, and I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired. I don't trust any convenient megacorp to safeguard me from any of these actors or themselves.

Not all privacy desires have their foundations in criminality and kiddy porn. Villainizing E2E encryption and truly private spaces as exclusively the domains of ne'er do wells is the exact same tactic people use against guns to win the culture war. Carrying a pistol doesn't make you a paranoid asshole; it means you're vastly more prepared for a rare occurrence than someone who doesn't.

Just to be clear, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not villainizing people for using E2E encryption. Just pointing out that E2E encryption is an absolute gift to villains while everyone else using it LARPs as an enemy of the state.

As someone who has guns himself, my view is

  1. it would be best if society had no guns in it
  2. but our society has guns
  3. criminals exist and are incentivized to crime
  4. police cannot stop them from doing crime fast enough
  5. therefore, I should have guns myself

Perhaps if police response time in my town was 90 seconds and not 20 minutes the economics of crime would change, but it's not so I need a gun.

Anyway, I agree given the circumstances handgun ownership makes sense. Is the claim for E2E messaging even this solid?

I want to be able to talk about the government without them listening. I want to be able to talk about psychotic leftists without them getting me fired, and I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired. I don't trust any convenient megacorp to safeguard me from any of these actors or themselves.

I don't quite follow. You want to be able to do this stuff under your real name without every adversary finding you? Or... you want to be able to do this via an anon handle without being easy to doxx?

I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired

As a psychotic rightist, I can't say I'm thrilled about anyone watching exotic porn, but I don't want to know you watch it and whatever you do in the privacy of your own goon cave is your business, not mine.

The freakin' ads and marketing and metrics and data scraping and the rest of it make it my business. Just shut up and let me browse in peace! The irony, of course, is that none of this stops the pornbots spamming me on social media sites, even when it's "we're a big professional company, trust us" (the Tumblr Female-Presenting Nipples Purge did nothing to stop the 'hi [username], I really like you and want to get to know your bank account' crap, and ironically Tumblr Live is now being mercy-killed since nobody used it except as an OnlyFans knockoff, and even that couldn't make money).

In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?

As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.

In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?

In the olden days we used to argue that mass surveillance was actually useless because it generated far too much data and even detection systems with very low false positive rates still created an unworkably huge number of events that had to be manually reviewed.

I haven't seen anything that has changed the story on this, except in CSAM which is so radioactive that law enforcers have successfully pushed the burden onto companies to surveil and report them. There's been some criticism of the false positives here https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html but so far this doesn't seem like a huge problem. And again only something like CSAM appears to rise to this standard, for now.

To be clear, I still think police should have warrants to do stuff.

As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.

I thought the Snowden leaks, specifically the revelation that the NSA was able to re-construct GMail inboxes without a warrant because they had tapped replication events on private lines between Google's datacenters, compelled an industry-wide effort to take security a lot more seriously, including TLS everywhere by default. Also it timed well with the fact that CPUs were now fast enough that encrypting by default didn't add an unacceptable burden. I'd be curious to see how the GDPR specifically made a difference here since it coincided with these two other events.

In the olden days we used to argue that mass surveillance was actually useless because it generated far too much data and even detection systems with very low false positive rates still created an unworkably huge number of events that had to be manually reviewed.

An issue that I think will no longer be a concern to the Big Other once AI gets good enough. Sure, ten humans today might not be able to find a dissident in the sea of data with four weeks of searching, but an AI drinking from the gigahertz of an RTX card might with only ten seconds.

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.

If by "privacy advocates" you mean Ursula von der Leyen and all the other assorted EU / WEF / World Bank goons who want to have all the aggregated data for themselves, in order to turn society into a panopticon while pretending they care about "privacy", then yes.

"I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".

It's incoherent to scoff at privacy advocates because actually all the data is aggregated, and at the same time laugh at their efforts to not be a part of the aggregated dataset. There are valid criticism, like you can say it doesn't add up to a spit in the bucket, or that the only people using these alternatives are privacy freaks, so using one automatically marks you as the odd one out, but "it's still better than laying down and dying letting Big Tech have an absolute monopoly without a single alternative" seems like a valid counter-argument.

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.

Based. Bad faith actors are an absolute minority in society, and as you pointed out yourself most of the cyber-surveillance is aggregate level. If the cost of blinding the elites to society-wide trends is letting a few pedos get away with it, it seems worth it. Sure, you could posit some theoretically-existing good-guy elites, who only bypass encryption to catch the bad guys, and would never use Big Data to manipulate society, but that's not the elites we have, and not ones we are about to get any time soon.

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.

Your photo-album could perish in a fire if you house burns down, that's not an argument for leaving it in some centralized repository where every bureaucrat working there can skim through it, access to it can be denied at their whim, etc.

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?

Mostly no. GDPR has some good provisions, like giving you the option to force companies to delete all your personal data, or to send to you everything that they collected on you, but for the most part it's not even a joke. It's a measure to centralize data in the hands of a few big companies that are easier to pressure politically. I agree the solution is not regulatory but technological (like the aforementioned E2E encryption that nobody gets to bypass, or in the case of GDPR more trivial measures like blocking third party cookies).

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.

If by "privacy advocates" you mean Ursula von der Leyen and all the other assorted EU / WEF / World Bank goons who want to have all the aggregated data for themselves, in order to turn society into a panopticon while pretending they care about "privacy", then yes.

Don't we live in the world where the maximum amount of information about you is widely available? Haven't we for 10+ years or so? The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone. In terms of my personal life, it's telling that the only person I know who has suffered a catastrophic privacy breach is someone that was hell-bent on never trusting Google or Facebook and self-hosted the whole way.

This is a type of person.

It's incoherent to scoff at privacy advocates because actually all the data is aggregated, and at the same time laugh at their efforts to not be a part of the aggregated dataset.

I do scoff at them, independent of the avoiding aggregation claim, because in their efforts to protect their privacy because they're so paranoid about the ThE bIG tEcH ComPaniEs they leave themselves far more vulnerable. And effectively island themselves from social activities like, oh, sharing photos with friends.

Your photo-album could perish in a fire if you house burns down, that's not an argument for leaving it in some centralized repository where every bureaucrat working there can skim through it, access to it can be denied at their whim, etc.

I'm just here to say when someone tries to share a photo with me from their home nextcloud server and I wait 5 minutes for the account confirmation email to show up, and it never arrives, and I have to help them diagnose whether or not they fucked up their self-hosted mail configuration, it's hard not to judge them as being so conceited that they think a state bureaucrat gives a shit about their private life.

I suppose they could print their photos out and mail them to me. That would be a nice change of pace even. But could I convince them to put a printer inside of their home nowadays? Think of how much closed source firmware those things have which could be reporting every single thing you print to The Powers that Be.

The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone.

Are you familiar with the existence of the nation of China? The actual "absolute worst" that has happened from a complete lack of digital privacy is government dissidents and people who report the official who sexually harassed them getting disappeared and their organs harvested. You're talking about how all these silly paranoid privacy people have concerns that could never be realistic, and all the while we can just go look at one of the largest nations on Earth and see what happens when you get your way.

You're talking about how all these silly paranoid privacy people have concerns that could never be realistic, and all the while we can just go look at one of the largest nations on Earth and see what happens when you get your way.

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.

See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time.

This is makes about as much sense as "come on, baby, just the tip", for all the derision you lob at privacy advocates this is insanely naive given what has already happened in the west, let alone their open drooling at China's social credit system.

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time.

Do you think authoritarian dictatorships announce themselves as authoritarian dictatorships and democratically ask the people to vote on their takeover? The privacy warriors in the US are looking over at places like China, Russia and the UK and seeing almost exactly the things they were warning about being implemented, and you're calling them paranoid when they take umbrage at US politicians talking about how great those things are and wanting to bring them here! One of the major arguments made by the privacy warriors is that even if you give the government this power now because you trust it not to become an authoritarian dictatorship, it is impossible to tell when one of those is coming down the pipe. Yes, it sucks that the one pedophile who was capable of using encryption perfectly to hide his crimes got away, but that's utterly insignificant when compared to the danger posed by our current panopticon if it were to fall into the wrong hands, and there is no way of making sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Both sides of politics believe that their opposition will use this power corruptly, and I'm honestly not sure either of them are wrong.

Your argument is essentially saying that it is fine to not have seatbelts because you personally haven't crashed your car and don't think you're going to crash it in the near future (yeah sure other people get into car crashes but you're built different), and the people saying "hey you should wear a seatbelt" are just paranoid, low-status losers who shouldn't be listened to.

Don't we live in the world where the maximum amount of information about you is widely available? Haven't we for 10+ years or so?

Maximum? Last I checked we still have not reached the elite's wet dream of all our activities being done through a uniquely identifying digital identity.

The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone.

This is again incoherent in the light of your "it's all aggregated" criticism. These will never be things that happen to everybody, because manipulating society by manipulating each individual is the most inefficient way to go about it that I can think of. That doesn't change the fact that the measures they already took to monitor and control the flow of information already justify burning everything down and salting the earth.

independent of the avoiding aggregation claim

You don't get to do that. People avoiding Big Tech aren't doing so for fear of being super-haxxored, they do so to avoid centralizing power. You especially don't get to do that after claiming they ignore the aggregated nature of surveillance.

it's hard not to judge them as being so conceited that they think a state bureaucrat gives a shit about their private life.

We already had Google removing documents with wrongthink that got too popular. That I am personally not important to them is not relevant to my argument.

I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end 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.

This is implicitly misrepresenting the actual situation. Searching your home dungeon takes a warrant; searching your digital asserts (held by third parties) for self-produced child-pornography or other state-disapproved things requires a subpoena at best and may simply be blanket done on everything by some sort of automated system.

This is implicitly misrepresenting the actual situation. Searching your home dungeon takes a warrant; searching your digital asserts (held by third parties) for self-produced child-pornography or other state-disapproved things requires a subpoena at best and may simply be blanket done on everything by some sort of automated system.

Oh, sorry, I meant to say end-to-end encrypted messaging up there. Fixed. That's private to only the sender and recipient and even a warrant can't compel discovery if both sides destroy their copies .

This is it, yes.

If there was a widespread invasion of privacy by our governments in the physical realm, as in once every year when you're out of the home a team of detectives (or to make the analogy more 1:1, a sophisticated automated drone) breaks in and inspect your home for evidence of crimes without warrants, we would very likely have at least some evidence that they did. If they did it in the digital realm, we would have... Exactly the evidence we have right now: no clear admission that it is so but also courts allowing "de-anonymising" of people of interest, implying they actually do intercept data without any kind of warrants, whistleblowers like Snowden, etc...

OP can dismiss it as "QAnon" stuff if he wants, but there's a hightened general distrust of our governments nowadays from both the left and the right. The red tribe today has reason to believe that the legal system, including police and the judiciary are weaponized against them, there's a discussion about such here today. You can disagree, but even if you do I think it's unfair to call it unreasonable to believe. And the blue tribe loudly frets about scenarios where if the red tribe gains power again they will weaponize government against them. So concerns about surveillance being in the interest of legitimate police interventions are convincing no one.

I'll reply to what I think is your central claim which is that "my private sex dungeon isn't off limits to cops so why should my hard drive be off limits".

The difference is scale.

For example, my house is not very secure. I lock my doors, but anyone with a crowbar could pretty easily break in and steal my stuff when I'm gone. I live in Seattle, so there's also zero chance they would caught or go to jail. Why am I okay with this state of affairs? Why haven't I put iron bars on all the windows? The answer: there simply aren't enough people willing to commit a home invasion to worry about it.

On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.

The number of people that local cops can harass is limited by the resources of the local police department. Salaries aren't cheap.

The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.

Scale matters.

I brought up the wholesale surveillance concern here https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

It's not a complete response to your comment though.

The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.

Scalable harassment is worrying, though I don't see how this is a function of privacy really? Like how would you solve the de-banking problem? Is the problem that it was too easy for the government to figure out who all of the protestors were and then work backwards to find their financial accounts and lock them down?

On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.

Irony of ironies, the extremely technically competent anarchist friend who had his self-hosted personal email hacked was because the attacker was an organized criminal who knew he had millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. The level of sophistication deployed by the attacker was astounding, which included producing faked search warrants. The attacker also already somehow had copies of his driver's license and we have no idea how he got it. They were not successful in stealing his Bitcoin but they came very close and this criminal continues to pop up in his life from time to time using information he gathered.

See also that a Bitcoin core developer was hacked recently https://www.theblock.co/post/198688/bitcoin-developer-pgp-exploit

I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

I am not saying this. I think the grand majority of people who use (e.g.) Signal are unremarkable and having completely mundane conversations. The reason more people aren't burned by Signal is that it's not too inconvenient. If your phone dies you lose all of your chat history with everyone (since no cloud backups). People survive that okay, it turns out. But the flip-side of the normalization of Signal is that there also bad people using it for crime and law enforcement is 100% powerless to do anything about it.

The Qanon-adjacent part is believing your mundane unremarkable life is so important that you must use Signal and that this meaningfully protects you from The Powers Whom are Unspecified, which is Important.

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

What additional argument is needed here? The no privacy status quo has existed for decades for billions of people and the only people that are for the worse for it are stupid criminals who send CSAM over Facebook in the clear and have been busted for it, and also a few freak headlines where normies are also swept up in abuses?

I'm a Signal user, and definitely one of those people who are too mundane to be noticed most of the time. While I do use regular SMS for most convos, there are particularly spicy chats with trusted friends and family that I use Signal for because I don't trust the alternatives. Perhaps this is paranoid of me, but a few things triggered its adoption:

  1. A blast from my edgy teenage past (about 15 years old at the time of the incident) popped up out of the blue with potential professional consequences for not only me, but an old friend as well. I was shocked that a JPG uploaded to the middle of nowhere on a webzone stuck in early 00s design and infrastructure managed to turn up in a company's background check for him. I was lucky to get a response and takedown from the current owner after spamming his email for a week.

  2. There's this phenomenon where people caught in freak, chaotic situations who make a bad move have their text histories pored over. This is to be expected, I imagine. But... Did you express violent displeasure at the 2019 protestors to a confidant? Maybe use some colorful language? Were you so bold and colorful to suggest that maybe a certain kind of protestor should have the ambulances they're obstructing drive right through them? Hope you didn't write that down. If you end up in a situation where somebody gets hurt or killed, you're a premeditated murderer! Let's say that I would be fucked beyond measure if one of MY antisocial morning-before-coffee shitposts got dug up after a protestor died after attacking my dad, for instance.

And during these moments, I'm noticing that the open, mind-your-own-business, permissive tech culture of old has been largely inverted by men and women who sound like you. I don't trust that change, and I don't trust you or your fellow travelers to never take it too far. Sure, I'm too boring today - unless an aggrieved party forces my publicity. But I can certainly imagine an evolved, V2 future wokescold developing the interest once they've exhausted every other one of Al Capone's vaults in their quest to find racism and intolerance as an explanation for why the world sucks. When you can no longer find any mechanism for systemic racism in the processes or the data, but you don't yet have mindeaders, why not go for the next best thing like their lifelong chat history? And who wouldn't be tempted to ctrl-f the word 'nigger' to see what comes up in a paper trail of that size?

Part of the concern is that today's mundane can quickly become tomorrow's problematic. That transgressing popular orthodoxies is not as ruinous or catastrophic as it could be by historical standards doesn't assuage my fears, because I honestly don't know if and when such curiosity regarding wrongthink and badspeak will be sated. I think I need to cement here that I did not have 'privacy concerns' as a foremost thing in my mind until I felt like the culture and people I'm surrounded by got bizarrely tilted and bloodthirsty.

I recognize that my small, amateurish attempts to guard against this are probably futile and incomplete, and possibly laughable by your vantage. But the impulse to escape your sight lines will continue to be very real. Dangling a hypothetical pedo bunker over the scale doesn't move me. A world without privacy and encryption looks more like the Trump investigations stretching into infinite than a parade of young girls rescued from Joseph Fritzl. Even the latter would require real work and resources, so I expect more resume-padding and activity among DEI hires in the Department of Bad Texts than anything else.

If I have to submit to your preferred apparatus, it would only be in the 'nice until meanness is coordinated' sense. Secretly I'll keep hoping it's destroyed by implosion or external force.

Let me present you an alternate vision of dystopia.

https://www.themotte.org/post/479/calling-all-lurkers-share-your-dreams/94878?context=8#context

We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built darknet markets (DNMs) so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.

The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.

Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cypherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.

Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.

Perhaps my view on this is informed by being very close to the production of the tools that could create this dystopia, but the creation of a completely lawless criminal state that law enforcement is permanently locked out of meeting technocapitalist incentives is a possibility that is too casually dismissed.

There's still a lot of room for an underworld Jeff Bezos to pick up a trillion dollars.

We have only to look at the Chinese surveillance system, especially as implemented in Xinjiang to track Uyghurs, to see that it is entirely feasible to have technology tracking every individual citizen all the time: where they go, who they are in contact with, and what they say.

We can also see from the COVID lockdowns how quickly “of course we could do that, but we never would” turns into “we will use every tool at our disposal to keep you safe” when a real or perceived crisis arises.

I am enough of a heretic to know that I will be discriminated against if the UK ever implements Chinese-style social credit. I was already subject to a considerable amount of abuse for voicing moderate right-wing opinions at the university I was in. I therefore want to maximise the number of controversial steps that have to be made, and red lines that have to be publicly overrun, before such a social credit system becomes popular.

It is vital that using e2e, local storage, blockers and privacy settings is done by ordinary citizens as well as witches. Otherwise it is very easy to make attempting to avoid surveillance effective proof of wrongthink.

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.

See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context

You will not agree, I think, but from where I’m standing both America and the UK became authoritarian dictatorships in 2019 2020 when they locked the entire population in involuntary house arrest. I get why, but I was raised to believe that there were certain things we would never do, and seeing how quickly we stomped all over them has soured me on “let’s go 50% of the way there but obviously not 100%, who would do that?”. The fact that we managed to pull most of the way back again doesn’t really reassure me.

The privacy weirdos provide an immense service to society by keeping privacy somewhat non-partisan and acting as meat shields for witches.

Can discuss more later but got to go.

It's not substantive and I agree with your point but it is really astonishing to me that anyone could get the year in which the world reacted to COVID wrong. I feel like "2020" will never look the same as any other number to me again.

Ha. I think it’s because they first discovered it in 2019, so I got used to thinking of it as Covid 2019-2022. Thanks for the correction.

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.

Halle-freakin'-lujah!

I don't want smart ads. I don't want tailored ads. I don't want "we've been snooping on what sites you browse for the past six months so we think we can sell you this particular crap".

If I want a good or service, I'll look it up. I don't buy unsolicited rubbish, and I haven't the money for the stuff they want me to buy, anyway, so I'm bad fit for their "if this bozo spends thousands, we'll get a cut" commission.

You tell me that kicking up about this shit means it will be hobbled? Sign me up to put the hobnails on and start the kicking!

There are a lot of half arguments here.

Like, you scoff at impenetrable end to end encryption. But the realities of the internet are that any back-door or security flaw that allows end to end encryption to be penetrated exposes literally everything to literally everyone. There is no limiting principle as is the case of say, a door to a kiddy porn dungeon. Presumably there would be a warrant. Or maybe in the case of your valuables being in the sort of safe The Lockpicking Lawyer could open in under 1 second with a toothpick, some hopefully limited number of criminals will ever actually get a crack at it. Not so with anything on the internet. Either it's impenetrable, even to legitimate law enforcement (but especially illegitimate law enforcement), or virtually every criminal on Earth already has access to it. There is very little in between.

Then you decide to stan for cloud computers. Because a friend of yours is an idiot and didn't fix his NAS when it had a problem. But the fact of the matter is, the cloud is still only someone else's computer. And they can revoke access to your data just as capriciously as a RAID array might fail.

And then to smear everyone concerned as QAnon, as though fears of data collection and spying haven't been validated time and time and time again. Did Snowden happen before you were born? Has it been that long?

And then to smear everyone concerned as QAnon, as though fears of data collection and spying haven't been validated time and time and time again. Did Snowden happen before you were born? Has it been that long?

The vein here is that the most unremarkable people seem to believe that far-away powers that be care about looking at their private data because they're such a threat to the state because they're so edgy and subversive when the truth is the powers that be just don't care about them. Probably not even in the aggregate.

  • -10

The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.

These are average people in extremely man-bites-dog circumstances though. Contra-evidence: ~2 billion lifelong users of Google and Apple have uneventful things to report.

True, but more than ever we're at an inflection point nowadays where the ability to process this information and abuse it meets a distrust of its handlers. It's barely been one year where the public has seen the ability for computers to read and seemingly really "understand" human speech and its intents. All that collected data that we thought was too much to be processed, it could now be fed to NLP algos and to LLMs to read through and flag, on all sorts of criteria. Take a small fast LLM like Phi-2, tell it to read all personal conversations on Facebook Messenger or whatnot, flag all those that seem to indicate political extremism (as defined by politicians the public distrusts), forward them to a smarter LLM (GPT-4) to review, if it agrees, forward to a human for further review.

We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6).

It was very predictable that the governments involved would be highly interested in going after the people involved in these two things, though.

Maybe after the fact. But prior, I'm sure a lot of people still clung to the belief that we lived in a free country.

Yes, nobody thought that the trucking protest was going to work, but anyone who expected that a ‘stop the steal’ rally busting into Capitol Hill during the electoral count would be treated proportionately had not been paying attention.

Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.

And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants.

If anything, a number of privacy advocates are attacking the problem from an abortion rights angle, from what I've seen, so there's already a good amount of left-coded concern.

Like, you scoff at impenetrable end to end encryption. But the realities of the internet are that any back-door or security flaw that allows end to end encryption to be penetrated exposes literally everything to literally everyone.

[...]

Not so with anything on the internet. Either it's impenetrable, even to legitimate law enforcement (but especially illegitimate law enforcement), or virtually every criminal on Earth already has access to it. There is very little in between.

This is grandiose. On Facebook without E2E encryption (but with TLS), your messages are only exposed to Facebook and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility. Adding E2E encrypted messaging with a law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case, even if that key is ultimately compromised.

Then you decide to stan for cloud computers. Because a friend of yours is an idiot and didn't fix his NAS when it had a problem. But the fact of the matter is, the cloud is still only someone else's computer. And they can revoke access to your data just as capriciously as a RAID array might fail.

Somehow it never occurs to people making this argument that it's trivial to make off-site backups from cloud providers, if you're that worried about them revoking access.

Adding E2E encrypted messaging with a law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case, even if that key is ultimately compromised.

...

law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant

How exactly are you enforcing this? Magic? This is, technologically, an explicitly unsolvable problem. You may as well propose a defence system that relies on a diviner performing tarot readings to determine when missiles are incoming.

This is a common talking point, but it's never really made sense. People go down the route of saying, "Well, you can't have a mathematically provable way of verifying the validity of warrants," but that's not really relevant to the typical digital threat vectors that are normally relevant (I.e., a 400lb guy in a bed in Russia attacking your device over the internet thousands of times in the middle of the night). You can pretty easily have FB keep a private key in an HSM locked in a vault somewhere, not connected to the internet, and after their legal department has fully vetted the warrant request, they could take the encrypted blob of messages into the vault and use the purpose-built hardware to decrypt it. Sure, add some qualifier about, "..can only be used with a warrant, up to the accuracy with which FB's legal team can determine the validity of said warrant," but then your only objection fades away.

Of course, this method would also be subject to the possibility of abuse by the small number of FB insiders who are tasked with this warrant service, but that, by the terms of the argument made above, "does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case," because in the non-E2E case, FB can also trivially abuse their access to your messages. The question here is to what extent you think FB is, itself, a threat actor, but I think the terms of the argument above stipulated that they weren't. The appropriate criticism (seen elsewhere here) is that they are.

I will actually grant that I'm not sure making an actual secret backdoor key in those lines is technologically impossible - I thought it was, but I'll freely grant that I may have been wrong there.

You can pretty easily have FB keep a private key in an HSM locked in a vault somewhere, not connected to the internet, and after their legal department has fully vetted the warrant request, they could take the encrypted blob of messages into the vault and use the purpose-built hardware to decrypt it. Sure, add some qualifier about, "..can only be used with a warrant, up to the accuracy with which FB's legal team can determine the validity of said warrant," but then your only objection fades away.

But you depart from reality here.

Think about how many law enforcement requests for this kind of data are made all over the world, every single day. Every single time a person in the UK makes a problematic tweet, that vault is getting opened. Every single minor crime or drug dealer that the police go after? That vault is getting opened. This kind of law enforcement key/bypass would have to be so easily accessible that the idea it wouldn't be leaked is just not viable.

How would it be leaked? It's buried in an HSM that is not connected to the internet and housed in an access-controlled vault. Just assuming a breakage of the first of those conditions (extracting a key from an HSM) utterly breaks all device security guarantees you have for all the devices you own. If step one of your plan to "leak" this key is to be able to break all device security guarantees for all devices everywhere, then we can probably conclude that this thing doesn't constitute a meaningful additional risk over the status quo. Like, mayyyyybe an epsilon increase, maybe. But that epsilon is sooooo small that it would be dwarfed by a literal billion other security improvements we could make in every other aspect of our digital computing.

How would it be leaked? It's buried in an HSM that is not connected to the internet and housed in an access-controlled vault. Just assuming a breakage of the first of those conditions (extracting a key from an HSM) utterly breaks all device security guarantees you have for all the devices you own.

This just isn't true. Microsoft can keep the signing keys for some important elements of the OS private, and those keys are only accessed extremely rarely and in specific circumstances. But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This super skeleton key that unlocks all encryption and allows you to bypass all security on financial transactions, privacy, government documents, military assets... not only is this going to be the most valuable key in the world with thousands of motivated parties trying to get access to it, there are going to be law enforcement and government requests for it on a constant basis. Think about how many warrants are served in the USA and then remember that every single one of them is going to involve someone getting access to this key. Then remember that this key is also in use everywhere else in the world - it has to be the same otherwise you've completely broken the internet and global economy by making encrypted communication between different nations impossible (it'd be illegal to have communications that don't allow access via this master key after all). So that means that every single time a Chinese, Russian, Brazilian or South African cop wants access to some communications, that vault is getting opened right back up again.

THAT is what makes it so likely to leak - this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials every single day, and it is the most valuable key in the world given that it can defeat all encryption used in financial transactions and would make fraud and financial crime as easy as pie, let alone privacy invasion and surveillance. If you think that the Chinese (or American for that matter) government is going to use this access responsibly (or just not keep their word when they say they're not making copies of the key), lmao.

This conversation is about E2EE of Facebook messages, not bank transactions. Law enforcement/government can just subpoena your bank to get your bank transactions.

this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials

Also BZZZZT. As I said, the only people that ever access this key are a small number of approved Facebook insiders. Law enforcement/government make requests (with warrants) to Facebook, but they never even touch the handle to the door of the vault that contains the computer with the HSM with the key.

But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This is why I had said:

Of course, this method would also be subject to the possibility of abuse by the small number of FB insiders who are tasked with this warrant service, but that, by the terms of the argument made above, "does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case," because in the non-E2E case, FB can also trivially abuse their access to your messages. The question here is to what extent you think FB is, itself, a threat actor, but I think the terms of the argument above stipulated that they weren't. The appropriate criticism (seen elsewhere here) is that they are.

More comments

On Facebook without E2E encryption (but with TLS), your messages are only exposed to Facebook and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility.

You obviously haven't heard of the third party doctrine.

If Facebook has your messages, and you haven't encrypted them E2E, the government can look at them any time they want without a warrant. Your statement that they can only be seen by Facebook and by hackers is false; the current legal environment makes them open to the government, no warrant needed.

You're also ignoring that for the government to look in your basement takes some effort. Looking at millions of people's data is trivial.

I responded to this third party doctrine concern you raised on a different comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183485?context=8#context

But to recap

If Facebook has your messages, and you haven't encrypted them E2E, the government can look at them any time they want without a warrant.

This isn't exactly true. Things that neatly fall into the category of "communication" are protected, like 1:1 messages. Metadata and other content (like documents) are not.

You're also ignoring that for the government to look in your basement takes some effort. Looking at millions of people's data is trivial.

A different commenter also raised this. Addressed here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

Wholesale surveillance has been criticized as fairly useless to law enforcement by security experts for a long time.

Wholesale surveillance has been criticized as fairly useless to law enforcement by security experts for a long time.

  1. It might be useless for legitimate law enforcement purposes but fine and dandy for not-so-legitimate ones.

  2. I would argue that machine learning classifiers have made wholesale surveillance quite a bit more useful, by making it a lot easier. You want to find crimetalk, train a classifier with crimetalk and run everything through it; no need for humans to do all that work.

Fair enough. Eliot Spitzer got brought down because his bank transfers to a brothel were red flagged, they investigated, and they just happened to nail the governor of NY. Obviously what really happened is they brought up all of Eliot Spitzer's records, went over it with a magnifying glass, pieced together the brothel thing, and also noticed it had been red flagged (like a billion other transactions that are never looked at), and worked backwards from there to construct a story where they had cause.

So that's an extreme case. How often does this happen in practice though? Also, even in my extreme case, it doesn't seem actually wrong for this information to have come out about Eliot Spitzer?

So that's an extreme case. How often does this happen in practice though?

The magic of parallel construction -- where law enforcement obtains information from an illegitimate source, fabricates a chain of evidence back to a legitimate source, and then presents the fabricated chain to the court -- says we'll never know.

A different commenter also raised this. Addressed here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

Wholesale surveillance has been criticized as fairly useless to law enforcement by security experts for a long time.

Useless at preventing crime. Fantastic as "Show me the person, and I'll show you the crime." I routinely see the government producing private non-serious conversations they've harvested through whatever means to defame the character of people they are politically persecuting.

and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility

Would you consider Microsoft making a configuration mistake giving read access to every Office 365 account to a test account that was then trivially hacked more or less likely than Facebook making a similar mistake? I work in IT too, and I would have considered Microsoft more serious than Facebook regarding security. Maybe I'm wrong and Microsoft is just unserious about security while Facebook is serious. Maybe. But personally I still adjusted my estimation of the likelihood of this kind of serious breach from all of FAANG(O)/big tech upwards.

My bias is Microsoft is a lot more incompetent at security than Facebook and they regularly prove it. They're getting better, but still have a long way to go. https://srslyriskybiz.substack.com/p/microsofts-security-culture-just

Fani Willis is the Fulton County District Attorney. Her office, led by Nathan Wade, is prosecuting Trump and many others under Georgia RICO for election interference. Normally we would expect Trump to claim someone in the court had an improper relationship, but this time it was his co-defendant Michael Roman who claimed that Willis appointed Wade because of their romantic relationship and profited from it.

There had been calls for her to step aside to avoid the possibility of being disqualified, which would greatly delay the trial. She had already been disqualified for her handling of Burt Jones, where she fund-raised for his opponent.

Willis is not stepping aside, but she has now admitted to a personal relationship with Wade. About the facts in the case, Willis has at least two defenses. First, Wade may have paid for some of their vacations, but Willis paid for at least one $700 plane ticket for Wade. Second, Wade claims the personal relationship did not start until 2022.

The press, while stressing that these problems don't invalidate the facts of the case against Trump, has not been kind to Willis. This case has already been going for a long time, and seems unlikely to even start before the election:

  • In October 2021: Wade agrees to be special prosecutor.
  • November 1st, 2021: Wade is sworn in.
  • November 2nd, 2021: Wade files for divorce.
  • November 3rd, 2021: Wade begins work, charging 8 hours.
  • November 5th, 2021: Wade continues, charging 24 hours.
  • August 14th, 2023: Trump and 18 others are indicted.
  • January 8th, 2024: Roman files motion to dismiss.
  • January 30th, 2024: Wade reaches agreement in divorce to avoid testifying about Willis.
  • February 2nd, 2024: Willis and Wade publicly admit to their relationship.

I don't think I understand the central claim here.

So potentially Wade maybe got their job by sleeping with someone. Ok.

Does that make them unfairly biased against Trump and unable to try the case fairly, for some reason? Am I missing something tying these facts to the Trump case specifically?

Or is this just a purely ad hominem, this person is bad on an unrelated topic so ignore their judgement here' thing?

So potentially Wade maybe got their job by sleeping with someone. Ok.

Does that make them unfairly biased against Trump and unable to try the case fairly, for some reason?

Is there a reason why you're referring to Wade with "they" pronouns? We're talking about a specific man.

Anyways. The claim is that in the course of the investigation into Trump, Fani Willis misused the powers of her office for personal gain. I don't know how Georgia law treats this scenario, but this kind of thing can get a person sent to prison in many jurisdictions if true. At the minimum, I'll be surprised if the case doesn't get taken off her, and whoever ends up with it may decide to take a very different approach (e.g. going for a more simple and limited case over false court statements rather than a big RICO case with over a dozen defendants).

The below may be dated (my understand of this doesn’t really include the latest week)

  1. Wade isn’t a criminal law expert nor is he a staff attorney. The city is paying him as an “expert” to help with this case.

  2. Fani therefore is using the Trump case to funnel a lot of state money to her new boyfriend who in turn has taken Fani on lavish vacations. Fani has claimed without evidence she reimbursed Wade for these expenses.

Putting those together Fani is arguably using the Trump case to funnel state money to her new beau and herself.

If the DA is using public funds to pay an inflated salary to her boyfriend who is prosecuting a defendant, and the boyfriend is spending that money on gifts and vacations with the DA, then the DA has a pecuniary interest in the prosecution and directly profits from it. That's essentially the conflict claim here.

Ok, makes sense, ty.

It's a soap opera, best way to approach it is like that. That the guy was dumb enough to (1) file for divorce literally the day after he got appointed to the Big Job as Trump prosecutor by his sugar momma and (2) tried to hide his assets from his missus, who not unnaturally was mad as hell and ripped open the laundry bag full of dirty linen in public is surprising (for a lawyer) but not astounding.

What's that about glasshouses and throwing stones, Ms. DA?

How to buy/sell access to true information when adversaries and third parties benefit from your deprivation thereof?

Imagine a hypothetical future where the contextualized value of every entity, as determined by a benign and almighty super intelligence, is incorruptibly beamed right above it as you look at it. Say you're at a major life juncture and need advice; you can trust that 9.9/10 godly friend with your life. If he tells you to jump off a bridge, he must know something you don't about the afterlife, or something grand is waiting for you in the river below. Or you stand at a literal fork in the road, and you see to your left a 1.3/10 who looks nasty and is shouting insults at passersby, and to your right a 1.2/10 who is beautiful and sending you coquettish smiles--well, better endure the olfactory and verbal abuse lest you get shanked in the back.

If resources remain scarce relative to wants in this future, the good news is we can eliminate much waste. No longer do businesses need to throw away 25% of margins on sales and marketing; consumers just pull up a list of products on sale and pick the one with the highest contextualized number for themselves. Applying to a company or joining a gym? Sure, narrow down the field given your personal preferences, but no need to worry that you'll join a sinking ship or get ripped off. Everything is perfectly priced--that 9.5 dentist charges a premium to patients who can trust the root canal isn't superfluous, while the 3.0 pays 5x in malpractice insurance and treats clients who can't or don't care to pay for more. The 1.7s lose their licenses and maybe get sent to jail. When it comes to dating or finding friends, if you happen to be a 7, no need to waste time on 9s or 5s; the market is perfectly efficient because the information is perfect, so walk up to other 7s and assess compatibility while knowing you are certainly worthy of each other--if there is a spark.

If you think this life is too boring, the benign almighty gives you the temporary or permanent option to disable the floating numbers, and you go back to a life of adventure. Maybe there is a community somewhere that only allows in those who opt out of this feature.

I'm sure a good writer can make the above into a horrible dystopia. Until then, I'd pay big bucks to subscribe to download this killer app on the Neuralink or Apple Vision Pro app store.

…because it seems to me that true information is more expensive to acquire than ever.

This isn't about waging the culture war, but I'm afraid I'm stuck in it even if I just want to escape it. At the risk of preaching to the choir, on matters of "the truth," I trust ChatGPT a little less with every update; Google has been largely useless for years; Amazon reviews are shockingly useless; Youtube shows no dislikes, Reddit still helps for many niche questions but is working overtime to enshittify itself ahead of the IPO and beyond. I'm sure everyone here has consciously or unconsciously picked up "tricks" to make sense past the deafening noise; a few of mine are:

  • When ordering food delivery, ignore the stellar reviews on Grubhub/Doordash/Ubereats and instead check the more critical Yelp reviews; oh, and be on the watch out for all the ghost kitchens brands that aren't adequately disclosed by the platforms
  • When reading news and opinion pieces, depending on the publication, check the reader comments for a possible counterbalance (to the extent that hasn't been censored)
  • When a major event happens and experts start opining, look up stock prices and prediction/superforecasting markets to see just how big of a deal it actually is

The narrative is pervasive, and maybe universal. Pictures and videos everywhere, from brochures and web landing pages to movies and TV commercials, all give me a very different impression of the demographic composition of western society and economy. Of course I know that, and can try to mentally reverse the skewed weights behind the scenes. But this adjustment is imperfect: every now and then I'm shocked to realize just how many incredibly attractive people there are in real life--you wouldn't know from all the clothing and makeup ads that once showed the world beauty standards that roughly aligned with your lying eyes.

The problem worsens greatly when you deal in unintuitive or complex information. Scott's recent post on whether schizophrenia should be described as genetic is one example. Excerpt:

Still, if you look at the resources on how to avoid schizophrenia, the ones doctors are supposed to give people from high-risk families when they’re considering having kids, they never mention polygenic screening. It’s all just “don’t do drugs” and “avoid getting socially defeated”.

It’s even worse than that, because people keep trying to sabotage polygenic screening! The psychiatric genetics teams are trying to prevent screening companies from using their data! Sometimes it’s because this completely voluntary process vaguely reminds of them of eugenics. Other times it’s because they somehow try to pretend the amount of variance involved doesn’t matter or isn’t worth it, even though it’s a million times more than the drug abuse and social defeat issues people constantly obsess over. But other times it’s even weirder - a bioethicist in this article and a geneticist in this one both say variants of “health care should be about treating schizophrenia, not preventing it”.

And so all of us--well, maybe except for a minority of brilliant minds active here and in other rationalist spaces--are fooled into confusion, frustration, and a learned helplessness. Do you know of a young woman who insists she would never cross the street any differently if the person coming to you in the distance were of a particular sex, race, or age? Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love? What do you do if you happen to be parent of a young child who learns from her teachers, doctor, and the APA that her feelings of wanting to be a boy must be affirmed or she'd probably kill herself?

I don't see any of this changing because structurally, special interest groups benefit from your broad ignorance. Information is power, right? So I'm more powerful if I can keep it from you.

I'm too weak to dwell much on the mass suffering attendant to systemic bad information, and frankly, I think most people are doomed because they lack some combination of ability, time, and interest to try to make better sense of a too complex world.

What I want to know is, how do you stay cleareyed when the entire system seeks to turn off the lights at every step?

I can see three paths forward:

  1. Pray for the advent of an open-source equivalent to GPT-7 or a jailbroken AGI personal assistant with no censorship, RLHF, or other biased training background.
  2. Pray to reincarnate to be born into a large and prosperous family, or make a great many high quality friends so they can privately teach you all the unspoken secret truths of how the world works.
  3. Expend an enormous amount of time researching individual issues as they come up. Try to get slightly more proficient over time with process, and gain leverage through trusted sources and tools (until they can no longer be trusted).

Before #1 is possible, for those unlucky to go with #2 and are unwilling or unable to indulge #3, what else is there?

Facilely, some kind of near-anonymous and semi-private digital community/wiki might do the trick. But you'll need safeguards and complex features, like reputation scores, membership vetting, dispute resolution, witch-culling, and maybe even a judiciary to handle defectors and saboteurs. I don't see this taking off commercially.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love?

I mean, that's true. I've known pit bulls with good owners who were as gentle a dog as you could ever ask for. I've also known pit bulls with shitty owners who turned out to be a menace. But that's on the owners, not the breed. It just happens that shitty owners gravitate towards pit bulls.

  • -10

No its not true. The big strong jaw is what makes them dangerous. No amount of love will change this. Sometimes dogs that got nothing but love will snap.

It just happens that shitty owners gravitate towards pit bulls.

No the shitty owners do not just happen to gravitate towards dogs that were bred to fight other dogs.

The selective breeding was originally not for dog fighting, but for dogs that want to bite bull faces and never let go.

I certainly wouldn't turn down the advice of a benevolent weakly-godlike ASI, but I would much prefer to become one myself.

I wish to not need GPT-Ω at all, but to be able to understand the world better myself.

Now, I don't think reliance on such an entity would be anywhere near as bad as Scott's story about The Whispering Earrings, especially since I would expect that if it truly meets my criteria for benevolence wouldn't let me become little more than a puppet following strictly optimal decisions. I wish to make those myself.

Do you see what the common thread is, in all the problems you've mentioned?

It's a lack of intelligence. While not a panacea, it is as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. Someone with an IQ >120 will do a much better job trying to parse the world on their own terms than a true midwit who is probably better served by accepting the wisdom of authority figures diffused through noisy channels. Thinking for yourself is powerful. It is also dangerous.

There is no human alive, nor did one ever exist, who possessed the level of intelligence needed to grokk the entire world from first principles. Even geniuses need tutors, but their genius lets them learn the lessons well, and more importantly, know how trustworthy the tutor is.

And so all of us--well, maybe except for a minority of brilliant minds active here and in other rationalist spaces--are fooled into confusion, frustration, and a learned helplessness. Do you know of a young woman who insists she would never cross the street any differently if the person coming to you in the distance were of a particular sex, race, or age? Have you ever met someone who genuinely believes pit bulls are no more dangerous than any other breeds if given their love? What do you do if you happen to be parent of a young child who learns from her teachers, doctor, and the APA that her feelings of wanting to be a boy must be affirmed or she'd probably kill herself?

An underappreciated, if distasteful to my libertarian sensibilities, is how well the modern world has built guard-rails around people managing to do grievous harm to themselves from their stupidity. For most of history, you could make the best decisions you could, strive earnestly and intelligently, and yet starve to death during a famine, or have a barbarian deprive you of your head.

In contrast, the stupid/luxurg beliefs here are, in absolute magnitude, practically harmless to those who hold them:

The /r/aww Redditor gushing over velvet hippos will almost never have a nanny-dog maul them and theirs. Even the levels of criminality and destruction of the commons that bleeding heart tolerance for a criminal underclass stewing the commons with needles only reduces QOL to a degree far above what most of the 97 or so billion anatomically modern humans have tolerated. Vegans may suffer nutritional deficiencies, they are not likely to starve because the shaman demanded they ritually sacrifice their last goat to call back the rain.

People are insulated from the worst consequences of their stupidity. This is both a triumph and a tragedy of modernity, but the former outweighs the latter by orders of magnitudes. The strong, intelligent and self-sufficient are more enabled by the stability of modern society to make the most of their gifts than we lose from the average person being deeply stupid.

Expend an enormous amount of time researching individual issues as they come up. Try to get slightly more proficient over time with process, and gain leverage through trusted sources and tools (until they can no longer be trusted).

Most things don't matter. Your opinion on land value taxes or your choice of candidate in the next election have minimal effect on your well-being. This is why explicit Rationality is more of a hobby than a guaranteed means of success, Yudkowsky framed it as the systematized art of winning, and you don't need a system to win. Of course, if their efforts to cry wolf when the great of AI was a mere pup pay off now that it possesses teeth, it will all be worth it nonetheless.

Accept that your agency is limited. That most of your opinions will not change the world. That is okay. That is true. Do not let it dissuade you from trying to be better.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

The market can remain stupid longer than you can remain solvent, but it approximates efficiency nonetheless, given enough time. We can give it a helping hand, as I endorse @faceh in thinking Prediction Markets are some of the best social technology we could ever build, if only people would get the fuck out of the way when they're being implemented.

Surprisingly, Manifold outperforms real-money prediction markets, which I wager is a combination of the Crowd being larger and thus more Wise, and because Fake Internet Points and reputation on leaderboards have enough intrinsic value to users that they can substitute cold hard cash.

Rootclaim has a few analyses that diverge from what the official narrative. The Syria chemical attack, for one.

https://www.rootclaim.com/

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

Yes, if the Government would allow the proliferation of reliable prediction markets. Kalshi is making headway, but it turns out that the government doesn't like people betting on election outcomes so they're still feeling out the boundaries for what is and is not permissible to make contracts on.

One of my slightly tin-foil-hat theories is that the government does not WANT prediction markets to proliferate because that allows people to bypass the state in some subtle ways, and making information about, e.g. legislative policy outcomes and national elections legible; thereby making it harder to influence those outcomes in desired ways. There's really no other way for me to square the fact that they're allowing the proliferation of sports betting across the country but are squeamish about allowing people to bet on national election outcomes.

Me, I would pay a decent sum for a killer app that was basically an (AI-assisted?) prediction market aggregator where I could have consistent feed of the market predictions for various events that might influence my life, then I could enter queries about stuff that I need to make decisions on and get an immediate estimate on the odds of [X] occurring and recommendations for how I can hedge the risks based on my desired outcome. Bonus points if I can set alerts based on a particularly complex set of contracts that signal, e.g., that a war is breaking out or a major disaster is occurring.

Simple example: "My birthday party is scheduled for this weekend, what are the chances that it will rain or otherwise have uncomfortable weather" and then it provides an estimate and provides me with the option to buy shares that will pay out if it rains out my party.

Now, if I were building a business that was trying to make the information environment better, I would try starting up a journalism/news company whose source of revenue was based on accurately reporting on stories before anyone else. That is, the journalists should actually be good at their jobs and confirm breaking stories before the general public hears about them, then when we buy a position in a prediction market that corresponds to our story being true, and when we publish the story, we include a link to that prediction market in the broadcast so the audience can bet against us if they don't believe it.

The main effect here is that our company only profits if we are better at detecting true events before they become common knowledge, and anyone who has better information can try to beat us at our own game. And we don't have to rely on advertisers and thus we're less susceptible to being bent towards an ideological agenda.

I think it would make people more interested in watching 'the news' if they could 'play along' and bet against us if they think we screwed up a story or that they can profit by buying in early because they trust our accuracy.

This does all tend to fall victim to the Oracle problem. That is, who do you trust to be the final arbiter of truth when there's a dispute over an outcome. And THAT is where this benevolent superintelligence of yours might need to come in. I know of no way to truly eliminate counterparty risk, although Augur came close.

Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?

For one of your problems, namely:

Google has been largely useless for years

Then I think the answer is yes. Check out Kagi. It's not perfect, but it is an improvement on Google in my opinion

There is definitely the problem (not intractable, but hard) where Google is so dominant that their name is synonymous with search and so they are everybody's default first choice, and getting everyone to switch en masse is practically impossible without some LARGE screwup by Goog itself.

Here's a fourth path. Money. If you want information better than the available sources you mention, you need either a quant or a consultant. Both of these are very expensive for a reason.

As for review systems specifically, these get gamed both by people seeking to damage a business for malicious reasons, and by the review system wanting to punish customers who dislike certain business practices. In the long run review systems seem to inevitably devolve into politics.

Be careful about using bad Yelp reviews.

Google up "yelp review blackmail". (Unfortunately the first link I get looks barely above ChatGPT.

@Gillitrut was asking about entryism and underhanded tactics downthread, and I thought I’d give an account of what I’d seen and maybe try to gather people’s experiences to make a compendium of recognisable tactics.

In my case, I sat on a committee that was taken over by entryists using the following process:

  1. Have a sympathetic head, and vaguely sympathetic or apolitical committee members. It’s hard to do entryism in an org that’s strongly opposed to you.
  2. Demand special representatives be added to the committee for minority groups. Specifically: female, gay, ethnic minority, disabled. The original committee was only about five people, so this gave them almost a majority by themselves and allowed them to reach quorum for minor decisions with just the representatives. Any suggestion that perhaps one representative might be enough was met with tears and fury.
  3. Manipulate procedure. Turns out that there was no actual definition of ‘minor decision’. It had originally been meant so that you didn’t need to convene the whole committee to buy more coffee, but it now meant making political statements on behalf of the organisation, renting busses for protests, and organising mandatory consent workshops.
  4. Bully and outlast the opposition. There’s a classic trick which is that you come up with a few really boring items and get them put on the agenda before the spicy stuff. Then you make sure to keep the discussions going until the meeting overruns. Sooner or later normie members, even if they don’t like your proposal much, give up and go home. This gives you the majority you need, but importantly it also lets you unload both barrels into the remaining opposition, who is now significantly outnumbered. The goal is to make the experience as unpleasant as possible for them so that they dread coming to meetings and start leaving with the normies.
  5. Consolidate. By now the entryists basically have the committee to themselves, and can start using it in earnest. Things like giving the minority representatives the right to review and veto future events in the organisation, or funnelling money to pet projects owned and run by committee members. By this point quite a lot of people are feeling uneasy but learned helplessness is fully in play - it’s very difficult to convince people to join you in fights that they don’t believe you can win, and by now everyone is used to shrugging their shoulders and trying to get on with things. They also don’t apply for committee openings when they join up. The committee has become permanently hard-left.

What tactics have people seen used, and what counter-tactics?

Fresh Moms For Liberty Scandal Just Dropped

Clarice Schillinger, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, is facing charges of assault, harassment and furnishing minors with alcohol, including vodka and rum, in connection to a September party she hosted in her Bucks County home, according to a police complaint obtained by Newsweek.

From what I can gather from reading the newspaper on the topic, she appeared to be running the local Party House. Police reports state that they had been called to her house for underage drinking multiple times in prior weeks. She threw a birthday party for her daughter, perhaps larger than usual?, and things got a little out of hand. Schillinger and her boyfriend provided both liquor and beer. Schillinger drank with the teens, including playing beer pong and pouring shots. Schillinger and her boyfriend, separately, punched different teens while trying to restrain them from leaving the party. Schillinger supposedly yelled "THE ONLY THING I ASK IS THAT YOU DON'T LEAVE."

While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States, Schillinger appears to have been attempting to do so responsibly. She wanted her kids to drink at her house, under supervision, and to keep them there until the morning when they had sobered up to avoid drunk driving. Kids drinking under parental supervision are obviously safer than kids drinking in the woods or in an empty house. Kids who drink and don't drive home are safer than kids who drive. The altercations alleged seem more like (politically motivated?) throw ins than serious assaults, no allegations of serious injuries, more like horseplay than violence.

This comes after an earlier scandal involving an OG founder of the group and her husband, the president of the Florida GOP:

...it was reported that an unnamed woman claiming to be a friend of the Zieglers filed a report with the Sarasota Police in early October claiming that Christian Ziegler had come to her apartment and raped her, after a planned threesome between the victim and the couple fell through after Bridget Ziegler became busy at the last minute.

The Ziegler's confirmed in interviews that the pair had a prior history of group sex with the woman involved, but Mr. Ziegler (obviously) denied any wrongdoing. Ziegler was, however, at the woman's apartment at the time alleged. The prior history reduces, though obviously does not eliminate, the odds that this is a politically motivated hit-job. More likely to be a case of sex being a full contact sport, with some degree of hazy consent violation in there. The bigger story than the alleged sexual assault in the papers has been the confirmed threesomes.

Thoughts? Some of mine, disorganized:

-- Everyone, regardless of their politics and their opinions of alcohol or group sex, needs to recognize that this is why laws and social customs that pry into people's personal lives are bad. If Ziegler committed assault, prosecute him, but various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best. When we pass laws that allow people to be prosecuted for actions in their personal lives, we open political dissidents (of all stripes) to these kinds of criminal prosecution attacks. I don't really know any details of this particular case, but rape laws that make proving innocence essentially impossible open political avenues of criminal attack that are indefensibly broad. We've already seen this happen to Assange, where it is physically impossible for him to prove that he used a condom and it remained on throughout the sexual act, and that was leveraged to force him into hiding. Irrational underage drinking laws make criminals of normal, normatively moral American teenagers, and criminalizing "furnishing minors" makes felons out of parents who are trying to engage in harm reduction. Ordinary Americans should not have an adversarial relationship with the cops, where we find that ordinary Americans have an adversarial relationship with the cops it is the law that is wrong.

-- This does bring to mind my general joke about the Moms For Liberty and adjacent content police in public schools: if anybody wants to remove or ban a piece of media from the public school library, their own child first needs to come in for an interview. If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?

-- On the other hand, it strikes me that both women were engaging in libertine behavior in what is "generally" a responsible and rational way. Schillinger tried to protect the teens, who were probably going to drink anyway, by supervising them and making sure they didn't drive. Ziegler was engaging in non-monogamy, but in the context of a committed marriage. Maybe the MFL types really do believe that these things are a-ok for consenting adults, but not for minors. Maybe they really do want to teach kids about fraught topics in their own way, rather than by rote in school? Just this possibilty makes me infinitely more sympathetic and amenable to MFL.

-- Does the median Moms For Liberty donor care about this? Is this behavior seen as hypocritical by the people who support MFL, or merely by liberals who are confused about their actual values? Is MFL low-key a Vulgar Wave organization, advocating for tits-and-beer 90s liberalism once kids are of age? Or is this a hypocritical look behind the curtain? Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?

-- The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.

-- On an apolitical note, prominence in literally any field is once again proven to get you fresh trim. Someone commented to me after seeing the movie that it was weird to them that Oppenheimer, a probably-autistic physics professor, was able to have a wife and a mistress. I replied that he was brilliant and recognized as brilliant and prominent by those around him. That made him sexy. We see that over and over with people like Kissinger, Oppy, Falwell Jr. Even being prominent for advocating a return to moral conservatism will get women to engage in wild sex with you, despite the obvious factors.

various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best

The headlines are fine unless you believe in extreme UK-style libel laws (and even there tabloids report on these things), it’s any actual legal action that is presumably debatable.

In any case, social conservatism doesn’t really exist in America anymore. Of course Republicans are swingers and sexual degenerates; their king is, but even Ronald and Nancy had their pasts, come on.

The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.

This misunderstands the objection to sexual libertinism. It’s not ‘hard’ to have this kind of fun. Sex is easy, it’s just a question of correctly evaluating one’s own attractiveness and finding partners on that basis. Provided they have sufficient humility, even ugly people can get laid all the time, or they can pay for it.

In this case, the Republican in question, while schlubby, has a pretty wife, which I’m given to understand is the most important thing in swinging circles (especially for ‘unicorns’ who could, after all, find a more attractive single man if they wanted that).

The headlines are fine unless you believe in extreme UK-style libel laws

"Gauche" doesn't mean "illegal" from what I understand.

In any case, social conservatism doesn’t really exist in America anymore.

...on the elite level (although if you're watching from so high above, it might be all the same, I suppose). Just from following zoomer detransitioners I heard more than enough stories of conservative communities that are a bit too much for me, even after I made my turn toward being a trad.

Physician, heal thyself!

Sadly the GMC frowns on self-prescription, or you bet I would.

I agree that this all appears to be a motivated hit job, I don't know why Americans are still so anal about underage drinking under adult supervision, but god knows that trying to stop drunk teens from leaving your house till they sober up shouldn't be a criminal offense.

And I find it dubious that a man (and wife) who had a regular tryst with another woman is likely to have committed rape, but since said woman is the one filing the report, I remain in a state of withholding judgement.

I don't know why Americans are still so anal about underage drinking under adult supervision

I think HBD is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this: the people who left Europe had a genetic predilection to have problems with vices (you only get a stick up your ass about alcohol in 2 circumstances- either your God tells you it's bad, or you can't handle it yourself and have the opportunity to leave for a land where there isn't any), and the natives never evolved the genes that down-regulate alcohol addiction. Mix them together and you get a temperance movement strong enough to enshrine itself into the toughest law in the nation to change.

Americans also have a general hatred of the underaged for some reason and I haven't fully managed to figure out why that is yet- maybe a combination of parents being worried about the above effects in their children, a genetic predilection to overreact to anything risky/fun (Puritanism), and being fans of Old Testament-style property rights over children due to the dominant religion espousing them for most of the country's history?

“Predilection to have problems with vices” isn’t the most complex idea that I’ve seen attributed to genes, but it’s got to be close.

What advantage does this explanation have over boring old culture?

Eh, susceptibility to addiction was something I heard was partially genetic, which seems not crazy—any genes affecting the neurological reward system would presumably matter? It would of course have substantial behavioral effects, and so could easily be selected for or against.

That said, I see no reason to believe this hypothesis.

The puritans weren't "I hate the risky/fun", they were more, "your life should be ordered, in its entirety, towards God's will." Of course, in practice, that still meant they were opposed to an extreme number of things. In general, uprooting one's life is a high-risk endeavor, so any selection would be the opposite way.

I'm led to understand opposition to alcohol was a 19th-20th century thing, due to a relatively serious problem with drunkenness. Note that anti-alcohol stances are usually associated with Baptists, who became popular later, rather than the earlier puritans, presbyterians, episcopalians, etc.

“Predilection to have problems with vices” isn’t the most complex idea that I’ve seen attributed to genes, but it’s got to be close.

Even if so, it's no point against it.

What advantage does this explanation have over boring old culture?

It holds between families within the same culture.

It’d be more compelling if it held between families without the same culture, no?

And I’d say complexity is a point against it. East Asian diets don’t contain much dairy, but I wouldn’t say this reflects a predilection against raising cattle. There’s an easier explanation.

Edit: I’m realizing that the OP might be arguing for a white European predilection towards alcoholism, rather than against vice. I think that would be a more credible mechanism. But I also don’t see that it’s supported by the historical record, in which European settlers are not the ones collapsing into alcoholism.

"Vices" is maybe too vague to be productive but physiological addiction is something we have to some extent genetically tracked. Here's a government link suggesting that half of alcoholism is genetic (https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-use-disorder/genetics-alcohol-use-disorder). Some estimates suggest higher numbers.

Unlike "I like math" or "I'm a nervous person" which both may be genetic but are much more complicated, addiction tends to be associated with clearer markers for things like genes that increase or decrease metabolism for something, or established enhanced response from such and such neurotransmitter.

Addiction is (slowly) starting to move into the realm of personalized medicine where we give people recommendations like "you need more vitamin B6" or "this chemotherapy drug/psychotropic/blood pressure medication is going to work worse for you."

That's not to say I agree with OP however, I figure cultural tendencies (see: Irish drinking stereotypes) are doing just as much or more of the work.

I find bias towards alcoholism (or addiction, or whatever) plausible. I don’t think there’s such good evidence that it applies to Puritans, let alone caused the teetotaler movement. There are several obvious candidates for a cultural mechanism, but the OP just kind of skims over them in favor of an HBD explanation.

Yeah again saying I don't really agree with OP, but I do find it very plausible that American culture is significantly informed by immigrant communities that had a problematic relationship with addiction (ex: Irish, Borderers, Puritans (in the sense they hated that shit, would need evidence that such things were for cause)) and that generated and informed our toxic attitudes.

As an example, American pain and discomfort tolerance is overall pretty low with respect to seeking pharmacological intervention (notoriously noted in the opioid crisis but you can also see it with our OTC pain killer usage).

Perpetual youthfulness is highly valued in the US. Actual youth are a reminder of how us olds fall short. Envy is therefore a simple answer.

I don't think HBD is a good explanation here. A hangover from Puritan culture seems far more likely, what with the countries that White settlers came from being far more more liberal with their dispensation of alcohol today.

In fact, the US seems more anal about it than it has ever been since the Prohibition days, I doubt anyone would have gotten into trouble for serving drinks to teens in a private domicile more than a decade or two back. I'm under the impression that if teenage drinking was curtailed, it was mostly in the context of them throwing their own parties or trying to order drinks outside while underage.

You'd also expect HBD, if appropriate, to cause a general aversion to drinking for adults too, and the average American is no stranger to drink.

In fact, it's postulated that the Asian Flush is attributable to evolutionary pressures to reduce alcohol consumption, with how easy and abundant rice wine was. Yet they still make drinking a primary form of recreation in China, Korea and Japan, for all that they find it hard to handle their liquor.

And the Natives are an utterly minuscule sliver of the population, and I doubt they have been a primary concern of general temperance movements since the 1800s. I attribute it more to the general erosion of freedoms for American teens in the past few decades, as is true for younger children who were once expected to roam the neighborhood freely even when absolute crime rates were much higher.

I attribute it more to the general erosion of freedoms for American teens in the past few decades, as is true for younger children who were once expected to roam the neighborhood freely even when absolute crime rates were much higher.

I’ll go further; the electronic leash specifically makes underaged drinking harder the same way it does every other form of ‘bad’ behavior. If I cared about underaged drinking I would think this a good thing(I don’t).

Seems unlikely. People drank a lot in colonial America, something like three times as much as moderns. My understanding is that the Puritanesque turn against alcohol was a reaction against that, and was carried along by one of America's regular religious revivals.

Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?

Huh? And why do you think the kid didn't learn it from the other kids at school?

Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?

Yeah, that's a tough one. I'd say it matters, but it's not absolute, and has to be decided case by case.

Huh? And why do you think the kid didn't learn it from the other kids at school?

I'm not understanding your point. If X wants to remove some book from the curriculum for sexual explicitness, but their kid has already been exposed to similar content outside the classroom, I don't know why learning it from their peers would make it logical to remove the book from the curriculum.

If you are more exposed to something you are more likely to develop those thoughts, behaviors, vices etc.

If I went to Ibiza and people were doing heroin that doesn’t mean I need to approve of Heroin being sold at 7-eleven. Let alone I want Heroin sold at the Lunch counter in elementary school.

I'm mostly saying it makes no sense to say that the parents failed to apply their own standard, if the kids are in the school's custody for better part of the day where they are surrounded by other kids who might not share their parent's values. I don't see how "physician heal thyself" applies here.

But I think I can even defend the version of the argument you presented. There's a difference between learning something on your own or from your peers, and learning it from an official institution. If my kid starts talking about 72 genders because they learned about it on tumblr, it's a lot easier to deal with then if they learned about it from every single adult in a position of power.

What's the purpose of the classroom? Why does something being taught to kids outside school justify teaching it inside school?

Everyone please stop spending my tax dollars on gay cartoon porn in public schools. As an entirely separate matter we can consider the crassness or explicitness of the rest of the curriculum.

And to go further: I do not consider "but some suburban moms are kind of bi" as a justification for spending my tax dollars on porn for kids.

While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States,

There are some subtleties to this (which aren't terribly relevant to the described incident): my jurisdiction allows parents (or guardians) to provide alcohol to their supervised minor dependents, as well as spouses. Obviously not to whole parties, though.

It's highly unlikely that any jurisdiction would excuse parents providing their children with alcohol if those children then became intoxicated enough to result in the police being called.

I don't think so. It's explicitly legal in Wisconsin for parents to serve their children alcohol. The situation you describe would probably result in trouble for the disturbance, but not serving alcohol to minors. How could it, when it is legal for that to happen?

My goodness, adult men plying their underage wives with booze. I bet they even get up to certain activities afterwards! I wonder if there's any discourse around on this topic that's as ridiculous as I would think it to be.

The law expects it to be 21 yo’s married to 20 yo’s. I mean technically speaking I could marry a 16 year old and get her drunk, but it’s not the median case(and IIRC married 16 year olds have smaller average age gaps in their relationships than married 20 year olds).

Oh, I meant "underage" in the drinking sense. I still think the idea that people can consent to marry, have kids, or kill for armed forces but are pretty questionable when it comes to beer is absolutely bizarre, which I guess that plays into how I find the spousal drinking laws amusing.

It seems like most people don’t expect serious enforcement of the drinking age, anyways. Honestly that’s kind of dumb; as Europe shows teenagers drinking isn’t that bad, but the American habit of ‘just not enforcing anything unless you’re annoying’ is probably a bad habit to get into.

The American reality is different than the European reality in that many places in the US you are easily mixing drinking with driving. Places like NYC are more relaxed since a 20 year old isn’t driving anywhere.

Drunk driving is about as dangerous whether the person behind the wheel is 16 or 21 or 30 or whatever.

Of course. I think the idea is a 30 year old would be less likely to drink and drive (who knows if true)

The US does expect serious enforcement of the drinking age, but a lot of people still haven't adjusted to that now-decades-old reality. You can get an adult criminal record for underaged drinking, and "party moms" can be and are jailed on felonies for providing the booze.

Another little line buried in the Ziegler case:

Police said Ziegler was cooperative throughout the investigation and provided them a copy of the sexual encounter, which he recorded on his cell phone. In a statement released January 19, police said "the video showed the encounter was likely consensual."

NPR of course framing it to prove that recording sexual encounters without consent is a 'lil rapey!

In a Nov. 2 interview with detectives with his attorney present, Ziegler said the sex was consensual and that he had recorded it. He said he then deleted the video, but after the accusation he recovered it and uploaded it to Google.

This is all very much like the hockey players with video of consent from last week.

I don't understand why Apple's Vision Pro is generating any buzz. It's pretty clear we need wearable & discrete recording devices for whenever someone whips out their cock, way before we need to watch 5 basketball games at a time.

This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice. A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present. These parties will probably include drugs and sexual harassment by strangers.

The “don’t leave” was made to sound like they were trapping the kids but it was certainly more about preventing them from driving drunk. Which, again, some percentage of teen drinkers will do after attending a party without adult supervision.

Eh, depends. The endorsement of parents could definitely make a difference.

And, of course, hosting a party with drinking doesn't mean they won't also go to the other hypothetical party, unless you're deliberately scheduling parties to conflict or something.

This is a situation where it’s illustrative to look at the alternative behavioral choice.

That's what I find so interesting about the situation: that argument of "harm reduction" is exactly the argument that Moms for Liberty's opponents are typically making. MFL (and its allies) largely argue against early/LGBT/overly-explicit sex-ed on the basis that kids shouldn't do that so they shouldn't know about it. Liberal arguments are that kids will do it anyway so they should be educated about it so they do it safely. We've precisely flipped our valences.

On parental control: did each child (30-40 by police report) show up with a signed permission slip? Was each parent aware of where their child was going and what they were doing? Or were the teens mostly there without their parents' permission?

You see where this all gets slippery, I hope. I see the harm reduction argument she would make, but teen drinking is also not an inevitability for all kids, and making it less convenient makes it less common. Marginal kids are drinking/not-drinking based on how easy it is to get alcohol and get a place to drink it, even if some kids are going to find a way regardless. Much like it's obvious to me that doing too much PRIDE bullshit in the classroom will probably increase the amount of homosexuals coming out of that school marginally, even if there will still be gay kids if you don't do any PRIDE education; holding regular ragers at your house probably causes some marginal kids to drink who would not have otherwise been drinking, because now they're invited to a party where otherwise they might not have been or because they feel comfortable going there or because their parents are ok with them going to a party with Mrs. Schillinger, even if it is true that some kids would still drink regardless. I was drunk less than five times in high school, based on my later behavior in college I've not doubt I would have been more likely to drink had there been a convenient Party House in our school system.

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not. Likewise, introducing kindergarteners to the gender/sexuality spectrum is way off the fucking mark of when that lesson would be age appropriate, if you agreed it was appropriate at all for compulsory K-12 education. Having teenagers drink at roughly the same age teenagers have always drank as long as humans had alcohol gets a big fat meh from me.

Source for the above claim about gender spectrum bullshit in kindergarten

In his kindergarten classroom, one teacher in western Massachusetts using “Rights, Respect, Responsibility” introduces the idea of gender as part of an exploration of identity. He explains that people use all sorts of pronouns: he, she, they, ze. He introduces the terms transgender and gender queer but doesn’t fully define them because that is too much for kindergartners, said the teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his district did not authorize him to speak publicly.

He talks to students about anatomy but declines to classify various body parts as male or female. “We don’t say a penis belongs to a man,” he said. It belongs to a human, he explains.

And he makes clear that even if a doctor proclaims at birth, “It’s a boy!” that baby may not be a boy. “Someone who was born a boy may not feel they are a boy.”

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory.

No, it isn't. If you don't want your kids going to public school, you don't have to send them.

You are required to do something that you call education, and public schools are the lowest friction way to do that. But the unschoolers get away with it, you can too.

Not only that, but you can opt out of certain curricula. There was always some religious kid who had to leave the room when we talked about sex in health class, presumably to pray for our souls.

I was unaware I could opt out of English class.

You are required to do X. X costs a lot of money. The government will provide free X and will generally make it the easy default.

What percentage of people choose not government X?

I think this analysis completely skips over the fact that public K-12 education is compulsory. Attending some wine mom's parties are not.

I'm not sure I did. The question here isn't whether attending those parties is compulsory, it is whether I as the hypothetical parent of teenagers in her neighborhood in suburban PA, have control over my kid. If parents don't let kids drink at their house, then as long as I ensure that my kids are overnighting at someone's house with parental supervision, I can be confident they won't be drinking. If other parents are allowing kids to drink at their house, I now need to investigate every time my kid overnights somewhere else. My freedom is restricted by that.

((My, largely unrelated, view on compulsory LGBT education is that it's a complete waste of fucking time and money, but also likely to be highly ineffective at inculcating values in kids. My advocacy for local schools has been to implement elective courses in bible study, I'd LOVE to see an AP Theology course.))

I'm not sure I did. The question here isn't whether attending those parties is compulsory, it is whether I as the hypothetical parent of teenagers in her neighborhood in suburban PA, have control over my kid. If parents don't let kids drink at their house, then as long as I ensure that my kids are overnighting at someone's house with parental supervision, I can be confident they won't be drinking. If other parents are allowing kids to drink at their house, I now need to investigate every time my kid overnights somewhere else. My freedom is restricted by that.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you. To me, I see a clear and bright line between wanting to free from compulsory exposure to something odious, and wanting to be free from incidental or hypothetical exposure.

I don't have a teenager... yet. But vetting the households of her friends is already a key part of our lives. Maybe we're being controlling. Maybe we have an unhealthy fear of how bifurcated America has become. Maybe it's a perfectly healthy fear. Only time will tell.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world.

Not really, isn't this the core debate over anarchotyrrany? It's fairly uncontroversial that enforced law and order increases freedom for law abiding citizens, the question is where we set the laws and how intense the enforcement should be, what acceptable levels of law-breaking and over-enforcement are. I, and certainly my wife, have more freedom in NYC in a world where the NYPD enforces the laws than I have in a world where they don't.

You might disagree that underage drinking is bad, I might disagree with it. But there is no indication whatsoever that a democratic majority of voting Americans disagree with it. The most recent polling I could find indicated that just 10% of Americans favor a drinking age of 18, let alone lower than 18. Back in 2014, 77% of Americans opposed lowering the drinking age to 18 while 60% favored more strict penalties for underage drinking.

Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible. It narrows the universe of places that parents can be confident their kids will be safe from something that the vast majority of parents think is dangerous.

I've heard enough from libertarians about "positive freedoms" to refuse that. They have the freedom to choose from the options they're given with regards to how much they let their kid be unsupervised. What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".

What others are allowed to do is not within the realm of "freedom".

I would assume that @FiveHourMarathon would think that they have more viable options than they did before, if suldenly everyone decided to prevent underage drinking. That proliferation of choice seems like freedom.

And, of course, the subjective experience would feel freeing.

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Allowing parents to serve alcohol to minors, to other parents' children, restricts the freedom of other parents to allow their teenagers to move about the world as freely as possible and with as little supervision as possible.

That's like saying that allowing people to publish blasphemy restricts the freedom of everyone else to be in a world free of blasphemy.

You have a funny definition of freedom. You seem to be defining it as freedom from something existing anywhere in the world. Or perhaps just an hours drive from you.

Or freedom as the tendency for things to go to their proper place and stay there. Look, I don't actually care if teenagers drink. I think potential co-ed sleeping arrangements at that party are a bigger concern and drinking brings a profound meh. But you have to have a default about it, and taking for granted that they shouldn't, then hosting teen drinking parties should be fraught. Why? Because society has to have defaults about all sorts of behavior, and opting out of defaults carries friction. "He is sovereign who sets the null hypothesis" and all that. You can move to a nudist colony to opt out of the societal default of pants(or a sarong, whatever). I will not stop you. But it is quite a bit of friction towards living a pantsfree life. And there's thousands of defaults on issues more controversial among non-weirdos. Like drug use, which is what we're talking about.

I happen to think that defaults should be virtuous and prosocial. I don't particularly view teen drinking as bad, but imposing friction on doing bad things is, to me, definitionally freer than imposing friction on doing good things, because you can't do neither. We live in a society and societies have norms.

Now it looks like moms for liberty's sworn enemy is doing its damnedest to establish a societal norm of "everyone is a gay gendergoblin", and it is in no way hypocritical to oppose that societal norm(which is in fact highly stupid and probably destructive), while also undermining the social norm of "teenagers don't get to use alcohol". I agree with that set of values. But it is also in no way contrary to freedom to punish defectors.

A 17 year old whose parents do not allow her to host a party with drinking will instead attend parties where no responsible adults are present.

This is the sort of argument a judge will quote sneeringly at the parent's sentencing.

I never understand the hypocrisy angle, and it always seems to me to be used 100% in bad faith.

I'm a parent and have several vices that I'm not proud of. I don't want my children to have the same vices, so I teach them that those vices are wrong. No parent wants their kids to grow up hooked on anger, alcohol, drugs, or porn. For each of my vices, if I could go back in time and prevent myself from ever getting hooked in the first place, I would do it, even for the vices I "enjoy." It would have been better to never have known those corrupting pleasures. But I can't. Sometimes it feels like having a chronic disease. So I scratch the itch every so often and do my best to endure the temptation otherwise.

Even if the Zieglers don't feel guilty about having threesomes and don't intend to stop, I don't see how it undermines their organization. Perfect morality and zero hypocrisy is an intentionally impossible demand. I don't think the Zieglers believe that having threesomes is morally preferable to not having them. It's possible to realize that you have a broken moral compass and at the same time to work hard to ensure that the people you love most in the world, your children, don't end up like you. So this pearl clutching seems ridiculous to me. Let he who is with sin cast the first stone.

To more fairly apportion the blame though -- the reason these hit pieces are published is because there's an unfortunate section of the red tribe who "thank God that they were not made like other men" and will drop support for this group over this. Luckily I think this group is shrinking, but it must still be effective -- they're certainly not publishing these to convince blue tribers.

I am Catholic from a Catholic culture. Damn, I would be very surprised if the conservatives did not engaged in drinking games and threesomes!

I always found hilarious how, in Protestants and Anglo-saxon countries, you are expected to behave in private as you behave with your public persona. I understand that the accusation of hypocrisy are easy to do in these cases and are a fruit too sweet to not pick it, but still it does not registers in my brain.

Does the Catholic culture not teach that God sees all, even your private life, and that it is God's judgment that matters, not the public's?

Yes, but it also about one of the main differences between Protestants and Catholics, the division and opposition between Faith and Works.

In Catholic teachings, salvation come both by faith and work. It implies also that, if you are not a good Catholic (as everyone else, because we are all sinners) at least you can find salvation by work (helping your communities, joining the public rites etc).

That is why you encounter two peculiar phenomena here that I do not see in protestant countries;

  • Atheist youngsters, often females and feminists, helping with public rites (celebration of the Saints, community and city-based religious and folk festivals etc), mantaining churches and other location of cult, or simply art-posting on Instagram how amazing all of this is.
  • Absolutely debauched public figures, often divorcees, people with illegitimate sons or multiple partners, cheaters and partygoers, all of them publicy sustaining the Church and the rites that I said before, and nobody batting an eye.

That is why it is absolutely hilarious when someone try to import protestant behavior here, like intersectional feminists trying to persuade ours that we need to burn churches, or local politicians (often left-wing) yelling at the population that drinking or partying or whoring is immoral, and being systematically ignored.

...

You've still gotta go to confession and genuinely repent man, and that comes with making genuine attempts at not fornicating.

It implies also that, if you are not a good Catholic (as everyone else, because we are all sinners) at least you can find salvation by work (helping your communities, joining the public rites etc).

I think there has been a misunderstanding of Catholic doctrine somewhere.

I know that both faith and works are necessary. But the facto... That is why I used "implies"

I'd go further and say it isn't even necessarily hypocrisy to simultaneously be opposed to taxpayer funded gay cartoon porn in public schools and also enjoy gay sex acts.

I don't know the group involved and I'm not interested in the political fighting, but I have to keep reminding myself that "minor" in this context means "under 21". Whereas the legal drinking age here in Ireland is 18*, so if there were a bunch of 18 year olds at the party, it would be "so what?" over here.

I don't think the description of the party sounds great, I think the job of parents is to be "not while you're under my roof" but yeah, it can be explained as trying to control it with "if we don't supervise or permit it, they'll just go elsewhere and get drunk anyway and get into trouble".

As for the non-monogamy, not going to touch that with a ten-foot bargepole.

*Legal age; actual age of having your first drink seems to be around 15-16, which seems about right for the stories of drunken teens the morning after celebrating the results of their Junior Cert.

I still laugh thinking about a college trip I took to Bilbao in Spain, our professor took us to meet a high school teacher friend of hers, and we talked to the class of high schoolers. It was funny realizing that the high schoolers could drink legally and I couldn't in my home country.

I have seen responsible adults who set up safe and sane parties for the younger people in their lives that include some alcohol and looking the other way on pot to dissuade them from going to more dangerous parties elsewhere. This is generally good and fine.

I have also seen adults who set up ragers with so much alcohol and drugs and party equipment that the young people in their orbit are inevitably drawn in, at times and frequencies where no other alternate 'dangerous' party would have otherwise existed, with the intent to party with the young people to relive their youths and feel still young and active and desirable, often involving some level of sexual predation or at least inappropriateness.

And then there's a spectrum between those ends, of course. And the central question seems to be where Schillinger and her boyfriend fall on that spectrum, with all the colorful details added onto the basic fact of the party existing being evidence towards the bad end of the scale.

Of course enemies will preferentially leak and frame details to make it look as bad as possible, but if true, the 'police being called multiple times in a few weeks' thing seems objectively verifiable and pretty decisive here. Parents who are just trying to keep their kids away from other dangerous parties by hosting parties themself don't need boozed-up-minors call-the-police-for-niose-complaints parties every week, kids should not normally have other opportunities to attend parties of that magnitude every week regardless.

But, you know, we don't actually know all the real details, just 2 competing motivated narratives, so who knows.

Looks like a generic hit piece. Moms for Liberty has become a new bogeyman of late, so that I am constantly hearing about scandals and hypocrisies. But why should I care?

I don't generally have a problem with adults introducing children to drink. Maybe the parents of some teens involved would disagree. It's a nuanced social complication. A few key details could make me go one way or other. But why should I care? Even if MOM is recklessly teaching kids to drink, I don't see why this rises to the level of story I have to have an opinion about.

I think by this point, nobody cares because to me, these are isolated demands for rigor chastity that are only being brought up because of the conservative nature of the group. These kinds of events happen all the time around me. Parents would rather the drinking that will happen occur with responsible adults around rather than turning into a drunken drug fueled orgy without adults present. It’s definitely something that happens on all sides. And because of this and similar stories, I’m pretty immune to the pearl clutching articles about “did you see what [outgroup member] did? Don’t you want to distance yourself from people on your side who are doing [thing that most people do]?” Like if she’d hired prostitutes for a bachelor party, okay that’s at least out of the ordinary and something that most people wouldn’t be okay with.

Yeah, I don't support the people. I support the policies. And if they are advocating and scoring victories for keeping Gender Queer out of middle schools, and not letting schools secretly socially transition children without their parents knowledge or consent, they have my support. They can live whatever debauched lives they choose. Their policy preferences aren't that nobody should ever read Gender Queer, transition, drink underage or have orgies. They are that these things have no place in a public, compulsory institution like K-12 schools.

It's same muddling of what "hypocrisy" is when leftist accuse Republicans of "banning books". Gender Queer is not banned, unlike Dr Seuss books which got unpublished and pulled from secondary markets. It was deemed inappropriate for school libraries. It still exists. It's "banned" in the same sense that vintage Playboy's aren't in school libraries.

My first thought is that there is absolute no tension or conflict between the Moms for Liberty position that parents should substantially control what schools teach and having leadership that is permissive with underage drinking and group sex. Contra the position that MfL is a group of lunatic right-wingers, I think they are actually sincere in their position that parents should be determining values rather than schools. Despite the snarky "family views indeed" from columnist Scott Maxwell, it is actually entirely possible to promote family values while having a personally kinky sex life or thinking it's fine for teens to play beer pong. If we weren't so deep into red-blue bullshit, pretty much everyone I know on the Blue Tribe side of things would think this is fine.

On your last point, I looked up the people involved, and... wow. Christian Ziegler is a rather dumpy fellow. Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up. But now you tell me that not only does the portly fellow have a stunning wife, he was apparently regularly finding threesomes with her? I swear, if this whole thing was flipped around, the Blue Tribe would just be making fun of the Red Tribe for being jealous of Christian's life.

This feels like such a stretch.

The central innovation of the Florida school curriculum lockdown controversy was the right starting to call anyone on the left who tried to help trans teens or teach anyone that gay people are a thing that exists 'groomers'.

Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.

Which, I'm not saying that full sequence of events necessarily happened here, but come on. If your side is going to make the entire argument center on who is or isn't a groomer, 'my boyfriend and I throw drunken parties every week for local minors where we get wasted with them and get in psychical scuffles with them' cannot possibly be spun as a good look.

Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.

Well at least we all agree on what groomers are now. Although personally I think that's a mistake on your part.

It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin -- I do think that the confusion is related to a misapplication of the (artificial) Red/Blue team dichotomy. If it were "Moms for Jesus" or something I could buy some hypocrisy-based attack, but she seems to be living well within her moral framework here?

It says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin

And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula discussing LGBT, trans and civil rights issues:

Accompanying that letter is an 11-page spreadsheet with complaints about books on the district’s curriculum, ranging from popular books on civil rights heroes to books about poisonous animals (“text speaks of horned lizard squirting blood out of its eyes”), Johnny Appleseed (“story is sad and dark”), and Greek and Roman mythology (“illustration of the goddess Venus naked coming out of the ocean...story of Tantalus and how he cooks up, serves, and eats his son.”) A book about hurricanes is no good (“1st grade is too young to hear about possible devastating effects of hurricanes”) and a book about owls is designated as a downer. (“It’s a sad book, but turns out ok. Not a book I would want to read for fun,” an adult wrote of the owl book in the spreadsheet.)

...

At one juncture, the group implores the school district to include more charitable descriptions of the Catholic Church when teaching a book about astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was persecuted by said church for suggesting that Earth revolves around the sun. “Where is the HERO of the church?” the group’s spreadsheet asks, “to contrast with their mistakes? There are so many opportunities to teach children the truth of our history as a nation. The Church has a huge and lasting influence on American culture. Both good and bad should be represented. The Christian church is responsible for the genesis of Hospitals, Orphanages, Social Work, Charity, to name a few.” MFL’s Williamson County chapter also takes issue with a picture book about seahorses, in part because it depicted “mating seahorses with pictures of postions [sic] and discussion of the male carrying the eggs.”

So painting them as being about Liberty in any meaningful sense of the word, other than Liberty being a red-tribe codeword, seems patently dishonest. Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe. Some of the shit that was banned in Florida schools a few years ago was hilariously inoffensive.

As for the OP, whatever. I don't really care. But if people bothered to look at the context, I'd expect most to at least get a chuckle out of the fact that people clutching their pearls at the idea of their child being exposed to the idea that gay people exist then get schwasted with them on the weekend in between threesomes.

And yet, most of their advocacy revolves around banning books and curricula

I agree that it's a bit ironic, but I wouldn't go so far as to say dishonest. In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' -- school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all. I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum -- although they seem a bit nutty and I'm sure that I wouldn't want to defend their specific choices of books that should not be taught in school. (much less whatever straw version of them that the D.B. has cooked up)

In context I'd defend it as 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion'

Indeed; mask mandates are also pro-liberty as they give people the freedom to not worry about getting COVID in the train. Censorship gives LGBT and minorities freedom from hate speech. Jailing Donald Trump will give us freedom from fascism and neo-nazism.

Censorship is inherently illiberal however you try and dress it up. That doesn't make it bad. There's such an aversion to censorship that when we actually decide we want to engage in it we have to lie to ourselves and dress it up as some freedom or another.

school is mandatory and funded by all sides of the political spectrum after all.

Better argument for the curriculum. Bad argument for book bans. Nobody is forcing your child to look at those books any more than anyone was forcing the other high school kids to go to that party.

I don't think it's unreasonable to demand a neutral curriculum

Whew. Good luck with that one, man.

I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.

The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?

You don't seem to be engaging with Chrispratt's initial point about the dishonesty of the org name. If the 'freedom not to have one's children indoctrinated into the state religion' is liberty, then anything can be liberty. Can you name an example of a political issue that cannot be framed as liberty in this way? I agree with you that determining curriculum is not anti-liberty. I disagree that it is honest to call it pro-liberty.

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This in a way reminds me of Bastiat’s claim against statists. He said something to the effect if we object to the public funding of education the statist believes we object to education.

Hell, the books aren't even censored. If somebody wants to go buy their drawn child porn at Borders for their kid, they'll get the full experience.

Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe.

But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. Being pro-liberty does not require them to support the woke reading list over the maga reading list.

I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .

But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .

I wouldn't claim it as apolitical, and I wish you wouldn't call it my side.

In some cases I'd agree with you, in others I would disagree. In still others we would get bogged down by semantics about 'making things political.' I could argue that children sitting at desks is a weapon of the white supremacist state to keep down PoC and that they need to go, and MFL would fervently oppose that. In this example I'd argue that the MFL position isn't political at all, it's just...keeping desks in school. The same way that for some of these books, I don't think it should be controversial at all that they're available in the library.

But all of that is somewhat beside the point. The comment I replied to was describing MFL as if they're some objective and principled group that supports liberty and freedom of choice. The reality is that they're anything but.

Jkf wasn't calling mfl objective and principled - hell like he said it says "Moms for Liberty" right on the tin.

Moms for Liberty, not principled autists for liberty. The idea they are principled and objective is an expectation only blue tribers hold, red tribers don't have to lie to themselves about women to that extent. I mean, it's pretty bad for red tribe too don't get me wrong, but not at the level of expecting a group of Floridian moms to be principled and objective.

Chris has me blocked so this is me mostly yelling at clouds, but:

  • Removing books from a school curriculum cannot in any reasonable way be considered "banning"

  • The linked article does not link to primary sources, where I can confirm MFL is portrayed accurately. The link to Galileo, MLK, and sea horses do not lead to where the claim was made, but to years old articles from the Daily Beast itself, about Galileo, MLK, and sea horses.

Removing books from a school curriculum cannot in any reasonable way be considered "banning"

'Deplatforming is not censorship' is a stance I held and defended vociferously during the Cancel Culture debates, but I think the tide has sailed on that one, as they say.

  • -10

For clarity, am I supposed to pretend you aren't who people say you are or not?

You do you fam.

It seems to me there is a very big difference between a public institution endorsing controversial things for kids and calls to deplatform (eg remove from Twitter or prevent someone from speaking at a university).

I can be for the freedom to engage in consensual sex for money. I can at the same time believe that institutions can try to discourage prostitution. Similarly I can be against kids having sex and making that illegal without there being a contradiction.

Sure, there are principled reasons to treat the situations differently, of course.

I was just responding to a very specific form of semantic argument about how to define words like 'censorship' and 'banning' and so forth. Arguments that don't rely on those semantic distinctions and the emotional associations we have to them are not affected.

Yeah, it was a wild ride to see the same people argue for cutting off access of willing adults to messages they want to hear, suddenly turn around to declare it's beyond the pale for parents to curate what their children get to see.

Sorry, which platforms that have zero children on them were people being deplatformed from?

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In addition, given how gay people (who I have effectively zero problems with) have been perpetually used as a wedge to justify the normalization and protection of the trans phenomenon, I would be terribly close-minded to not consider expelling them from course books if I thought it ultimately wasn't worth the tradeoff, at least under these conditions.

If Dems keep up the taunts of "So now what, you're gonna deny that gay people exist?", they may end up having a real Fucked-Around-Found-Out moment. There's a lot of things I might be tempted to sacrifice if they're going to be cynically propped up as shields against me.

Well, what's true is, 'arguments as soldiers' is partially an inevitable result of our two-party system, and in some cases is actually a sadly effective and pragmatic tactic that you're sort of forced to play into if you don't want the other side to beat you with it.

To whit: You can say that the Red/Blue team dichotomy is artificial, but the Democrats/Republicans dichotomy is not. People trying to have political stances and agendas that don't fall along that dichotomy may be perfectly valid and reasonable and good, but they're also in a very real way irrelevant to teh exercise of power. The person appointing the next Supreme Court Justice is going to have either a (D) or an (R) next to his name, and that's what will determine how the game of politics cashes out in actually affecting people's lives for the next 50 years.

So: Sure, Moms for Liberty and the Ron Desantis (or whoever else you want to use as a stand-in for the 'teachers are groomers' movement) are different people with different personal politics, so to an extent it's not surprising or scandalous at all if their rhetoric disagrees with each other in fundamentally contradictory ways.

ON THE OTHER HAND: They are both republican-aligned movements that are trying to promote Republican policies and put more (R)s next to more names in government.

If the broader republican movement is trying to convince us they're right using two different arguments, and those two arguments directly contradict each other, doesn't that mean that there must be some flaw in their platform, the the broader ideology overall is inconsistent and misleading in some way, that something is rotten in Denmark, and anyone who is on the R side should be noticing that some of their soldiers are pointing their guns the wrong way and get confused and self-reflective about it?

Even if the two arguments are reasonable on their own and are aligned with the ideology of the individual person making them, the fact that both are then being taken up and spun into the larger Republican narrative alongside each other, indicates a flaw in that platform.

(and, I shouldn't even have to say this, but obviously this all applies ceteris parabis to Democrats and the left, this is a general problems with politics)

To whit: You can say that the Red/Blue team dichotomy is artificial, but the Democrats/Republicans dichotomy is not.

You misunderstand -- I'm saying that this is not an issue that cuts cleanly across party lines. There are many left-ish people who are not comfortable with the orthodoxy vis a vis trans issues, and there are Republicans (I'm thinking fiscally conservative urban types) who are probably fine with it.

For most of these people it is not important enough to impact their vote, so long as it stays off their lawn -- but putting it into schools plants it squarely on the lawn of every parent. So we shouldn't be at all surprised if the opposition does not fulfill the classic grumpy church-mom stereotype that is typically in the drivers' seat at socially conservative organizations. (say, anti abortion ones)

So we shouldn't be at all surprised if the opposition does not fulfill the classic grumpy church-mom stereotype that is typically in the drivers' seat at socially conservative organizations.

Well yeah, because these are liberal organizations in opposition, not traditionalist ones (who look like that) or progressive ones (who also look like that, except with an unnatural hair color).

In this case, the liberals have finally started to notice just how rotten the skin suit of sex-positivity progressives are currently wearing is. (30 years too late, but better late than never.) And while they're still kind of stupid- the ultimate way to defend their "we're banning these books from the library" is to argue from slave morality and insist that they actually be good enough to justify their content (1984 wouldn't be the same commentary it is without the depictions of sex therein; if you think they're either gratuitous or disrespectful to women, then you are part of the problem don't understand Orwell)- I'm not surprised that a faction that's been taking its victory a little too much for granted hasn't put on its best face yet (not that it can; liberals don't believe in best faces).

I will stand on parents supervising teens drinking isn't bad, but teachers telling pre-teens that they might be trans is. I have zero trouble holding those thoughts in my head. I don't generally like the term "groomer" and don't even think it's politically useful, but I do think "helping trans teens" is almost uniformly a Bad Thing for teachers to do.

Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up.

Holy shit you're right.

If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself!

I have a counter-proposal: If it is found that the students at a school are not testing at grade level for math, reading and science then the school is not allowed to spend any time or money on LGBT or DEI subjects.

I like that one too.


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