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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   18416 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Ilhan Omar speaks to her own people, in her own language, and she is getting blasted for it.

The video itself, from what I think is the most original source I could find.

The headlines I've collected:

Ilhan Omar Deportation Calls Grow From Republicans

'Squad' member grilled for remarks about allegiance: 'Somalians first, Muslims second'

Rep. Ilhan Omar Faces Backlash on Social Media Following Viral Speech on Somalia

From her own, preferred, translation:

We Somalis are people who love each other. It is possible that some of us are rough with each other, but when the going gets tough, we are people who have each other’s backs. We are sisters and brothers, supporting each other, people who know they are Somalis and Muslims, coming to each other’s aid and aiding their brothers and sisters.

And the other day, when we heard that some Somalis, or those who say they are Somalis, entered an MoU with Ethiopia, many people called me and said, “Ilhan, you should talk to the US government; what is the US government going to do about this?”

My response was: the US government will do what we ask it to do. We should have this confidence in ourselves as Somalis. We live in this country. We are taxpayers in this country. This country is one where one of your daughters sits in Congress. While I am in Congress, no one will take Somalia’s sea. The United States will not back others to rob us. So, do not lose sleep over that, O Minnesotans. The lady you sent to Congress is on this, and she is as cognizant of this interest as you are.

I would like to tell President Hassan Sheikh that we are impressed with the great work you have done. You have made it known to those living in Somalia and other places that, in spite of the many challenges we face as Somalis, we are nonetheless competent people. People who believe in their country and will not allow it to be endangered.

Thus, I want to congratulate the Somalis in Minnesota and everywhere on how united you are. How you all stood by our president, because he needs our solidarity. Somalia belongs to all Somalis. Somalia is one. We are brothers and sisters, and our land will not be balkanized. Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them, but what we have now will not be balkanized.

I thank you all for how you always welcome me and honor me; may the Lord honor you. Peace and blessings of God be with you.

Nothing here is news to me. I also think Omar should be expelled from Congress and deported, but that's because she's committed immigration fraud to bring her brother into the US by posing as his wife. It's always been obvious to me that she's simply not American, will never be American, and can never be American. She's Somali, and here, in her native tongue, talking to her coethnics, she admits as much. Look at her preferred translation again, and consider who she lumps herself with.

We Somalis are people who love each other.

We are sisters and brothers, supporting each other, people who know they are Somalis and Muslims, coming to each other’s aid and aiding their brothers and sisters.

This is the part that has been translated into Somalis first, Muslims second, and Americans not at all (emphasis mine). She does, eventually, say Minnesotans:

So, do not lose sleep over that, O Minnesotans. The lady you sent to Congress is on this, and she is as cognizant of this interest as you are.

The video subtitles do not translate Minnesota, but it's clearly recognizable (sounds like "rare minnesoto" at ~1:38).

You have made it known to those living in Somalia and other places that, in spite of the many challenges we face as Somalis, we are nonetheless competent people.

Somalia belongs to all Somalis. Somalia is one. We are brothers and sisters, and our land will not be balkanized. Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them, but what we have now will not be balkanized.

The "brothers and sisters" refers to Somali muslims, not the Scandinavian or German ethnics who have been in Minnesota for generations, those who are being replaced by Omar and her ilk. Not the yankees who moved west from New York and Pennsylvania. Solidarity is for blacks and muslims, not whites, not Americans.

I'm not trying to hide my biases here. I've long thought it obvious that this woman was a foreign agent, representing foreigners in the US congress at the expense of Americans. That offends me deeply. I can't even call her disloyal, because she's very clearly loyal to who she considers her own. I'm glad more people are noticing, and I hope that she is punished for her misdeeds eventually. I simply wish I could say, America for the Americans, our lands will not be taken from us, but I unfortunately that sentiment is only available for foreigners.

Hopefully Tlaib is next.

If the US military stayed within its own borders except when genuinely attacked in an unprovoked way, I would be more willing to grant that US nativists have a worthy moral argument. But as long as the US constantly attempts to exert its will on the world using force, I see no moral argument for why people from the rest of the world should refrain from trying to influence US politics for the benefit of their own countries or ethnic groups or why they should refrain from moving to the US and enjoying the benefits of living there while having absolutely no loyalty to it and instead just exploiting it for their own purposes.

To be fair, many US nativists are actually in favor of a less interventionist US foreign policy.

Why does the fact that the US has troops in places like, say, Germany, give someone from Somalia carte blanche to "exploit" the US?

The U.S. has a (small, I think) naval base in neighboring Djibouti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Lemonnier.

The US has gone into Somalia before, maintains an active presence in the region, and periodically Carries out strikes in the country. It also doesn’t seem like the US compelling state interest in the region is anything beyond ‘more stable than it currently is and not ruled by pirates or terrorists’; to the U.S.A. it doesn’t matter which of several third world shitholes rules that particular patch of desert, as long as whoever does doesn’t allow Al-Qaeda or a pirate fleet to launch attacks from it. So it’s perfectly reasonable for Omar to think the US should back Somalia up and Somalis in America should get a say in the matter. Not that I think there should be Somalis in America, but you’ve got to deal the hand you’re dealt.

You never watched Black Hawk Down?

Also conducted strikes a little over a decade after that on Al-Shabaab, supported Ethiopia in the War in Somalia, and Kenya during Operation Linda Nchi. Trump pulled troops out of Somalia, though they continued airstrikes from Kenya and Djibouti. Biden has sent troops back in (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/biden-military-somalia.html) and that's just the military stuff and not the economic warfare.

...I see no moral argument for why people from the rest of the world should refrain from trying to influence US politics for the benefit of their own countries or ethnic groups or why they should refrain from moving to the US and enjoying the benefits of living there while having absolutely no loyalty to it and instead just exploiting it for their own purposes.

It's not a moral argument. I'm not arguing that they're evil for doing this, I'm arguing that the United States should tell them to fuck off because it's not in American interests.

I have no argument with that. My own take on the matter is selfish and, while I may be selfishly opposed to the selfishness of competing groups, at least the selfish argument is honest.

Wanting influence is one thing, living there is another. And even in that only some kind of influence. I am not an American for example and I don't see anything immoral in trying to influence American foreign poilicy against doing evil imperialist shit (and laudible for non Americans to prioritise opposing evil policy at their expense) but it destroys all boundaries and nuance to see all kinds of behavior as acceptable. I don't see why USA owes Somalians to let them go there and act as foreigners.

America owes itself to not let foreigners exploit its people. And it is immoral in general to support said exploitation, not a case of you having a point about nativists not having a sound moral reasoning.

Another thing to consider is the enormous amount of western help that goes to African countries.

And also that what you are doing here is being quite convenient for those who both like to invade the world and invite the world. Why not oppose both? I have noticed many of the liberals of this world and including in this forum have failed to be louder in opposing the neocons crowd. In a manner that is disappointing for someone who experienced them opposing the Iraq war as I also did at the time.

Anyway, it is interesting that you are an American who finds nothing immoral about non Americans exploiting Americans. Someone might even describe this attitude as a treasonous attitude and it won't be an uncharitable exaggeration. In actuality those who are uncharitable and booing as their outgroup, those who have standards and try to enforce them, would be incentivizing immorality in favor of exploitation.

Countries ideally should neither be invading the world, not letting themselves be exploited by the world. Something has gotten seriously wrong with the kind of people running things if you have reached that place. Combining pathological altruism with destructive imperialism is like having the worst of both worlds. Someone is winning in this process and it includes various lobbies, war manufacturers, the contractors, the state department.

I am not an American by birth, only by residence. I feel almost no loyalty whatsoever to America and am almost entirely happy to exploit it for my own benefit without feeling any sense of duty to it in return. I feel only slightly more loyalty to my ethnic group than I do to Americans (while recognizing that this is an irrational emotional urge), and none whatsoever to the government that currently rules my birth country. I do like Americans on average and feel a good bit of loyalty to certain specific ones who I am friends with but of course, I feel no loyalty whatsoever to the US government or to any abstract notions of "America".

I myself am not advocating for the moralistic argument and am quite content with leaving things at the selfish argument level, I'm just pointing out that US nativists could only be consistent by either grasping the selfish argument and abandoning moral ones or by advocating for non-interventionism.

In general, I simply do not respect borders, rules, or abstract notions of distinctions between nations or ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level. I am pragmatic - in practice, I respect the realities of such distinctions insofar as that is necessary to protect myself from violence, but I do not value borders, rules, or national distinctions in any ideological sense. When I cross a country's border, I have no sense at all that I am crossing some sort of line on a map that requires me to change anything about myself - I simply feel that I am moving from one place on the surface of this big rock, which is dominated by people who follow certain patterns of behavior, to another place, which is dominated by people who follow different patterns of behavior.

At the same time, I will of course not be so stupid as to not avail myself of other people's genuine ideological beliefs in things like borders and nations to benefit myself if it ever proves necessary. For example, I am perfectly happy to avail myself of the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law while at the same time feeling almost no obligation whatsoever to America as a geographical, ethnic, or legal entity.

And I do not consider myself immoral for this. I do care deeply about certain Americans - to be precise, my friends and those I view as allies. And in that, I am very much American. How much does the average Democrat care about Republicans? How much does the average Republican care about Democrats? Most Americans, it seems to me, at least the ones who care a lot about politics, which includes most people on this site, in reality operate just the same as I do. Any US-dwelling right-wing Motte poster who feels more affinity to some foreign writer who agrees politically with him than he does to some SJW leftist who was born and bred in the US is just the same as I am.

This is the most incredible thing I've ever read. I'm kind of amazed by it, honestly. Amazed and impressed.

I'm sorry because this really isn't the place to make assertions without evidence, but I don't believe you. I think you are a liar, and if people were this coldly utilitarian about their community, let alone their country, civilization might be at genuine risk of breaking down and the hardcore red-tribers who believe civilization is constantly inches from the precipice are not full of hyperbole and hot air.

To clarify, it's not the fact that you see the benefit in doing as you claim that impresses me so. It's the fact that you think not doing so is rational and pragmatic. The borders, rules, abstract nations of distinctions between nations and ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level that you claim to not respect are the very same rules that draw lines between you and others.

The house metaphor is overused, tired, but still apt. Do you respect fences, doors, barriers? Do you not understand, as a self-avowed rational actor, that if you show that living in this manner is possible for you, then others will realize the same thing and apply the same lack of respect to your fences, doors, and barriers?

And again, as a self-avowed rational actor, you are willing to say this out loud? Are you insane? In your own words, while you understand the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law, you feel no obligation whatsoever to America as a legal entity? You realize that what you are claiming is that that you like it when the laws govern others to your benefit but don't intend on following the same laws. Leaving all questions of morality aside, I struggle to believe you genuinely think this is a position with any pragmatic value at all.

So I don't believe you. I do not believe you are a pragmatic or rational actor, I believe you are reveling in taking advantage of a system designed to benefit you while caring nothing for its maintenance, under the belief that this is rational and logical behavior. Do so at your own peril, there's enough people who do the same already, but crowing about it makes other people who maintain the system you benefit from and contribute nothing to feel like maintaining the system less every day.

Again, I am making assertions without evidence, but I am willing to make a guess that you do not have offspring. If I am wrong and you are not a liar, and you genuinely hold this opinion, I wonder if you have any goodwill for those who carry your genes into the world and have to live in the countries - yes, countries! - of the future.

To wit - I never thought I'd see the day where ignoring the phrase "don't shit where you eat" is treated as a rational belief.

I am not an American by birth, only by residence. I feel almost no loyalty whatsoever to America and am almost entirely happy to exploit it for my own benefit without feeling any sense of duty to it in return.

Proving who you call nativists had a point when they have wanted to exclude people from coming there because they wouldn't have the same sense of loyalty as natives. Since the common good of a country requires people who act based on a sense of duty towards others.

And I do not consider myself immoral for this. I do care deeply about certain Americans - to be precise, my friends and those I view as allies. And in that, I am very much American.

A pro exploitation attitute that doesn't see one having a duty to his fellow people is inherently immoral. You don't have limitless duty or unconditional to how they treat you, to ones country, parents, children, but you do have duties.

You also have duties even to foreign people and countries. Saying that any exploitation is fine, does itself passes a blatantly immoral line.

You can be loyal to your country, even if you don't feel affinity for far leftists due to the fact they don't feel loyalty to their country.

Also, you can care about people in some ways for what you have in common, even if you disdain them in other ways.

It is easier for me to not really care about people I disagree with strongly here since you are anonymous foreigners, but I actually do value some people in my life that I have strong disagreements with on political issues.

It is still true though that there is an inherent issue with a certain type of ideologue whose ideology make them actively very hostile to their own nation by origin. But it is a case of themselves excluding themselves from their own ethnic community by their own hostility, rather than nativists in all contexts caring about abstract differences over ethnic affinity.

Ethnic bonds matter to many people in a way that they don't to you.

To be clear, I think the idea that people don't have a duty to their country is immoral also for "foreign" countries.

It is simply not true that everyone treats the way you do nations as irrelevant and illegitimate.

I do like Americans on average and feel a good bit of loyalty to certain specific ones who I am friends with but of course, I feel no loyalty whatsoever to the US government or to any abstract notions of "America".

The goverment is one thing, but the notion of X is its people. I would say that there is an inherent value to duty of doing things and also avoiding from doing (as in exploiting) people outside just one friends. And an individual who is part of an ethnic community benefits from this. It is friendship on a broader level.

A society made of people who feel a connection and a duty for each other is benefiting from them having said bonds and that is a good thing for them, no matter how irrational you find those feelings.

Now, I advocated that nationalism should respect other nations so we can have international peace so there are limits relating to ethnocentrism. Still ethnocentrism is a good thing, just one that shouldn't be limitless. The alternative to nations you represent is worse with the only thing to its supposed credit the idea that you find the ethnic bonds and the reciprocal duties as irrational.

Considering what is lost, it is a bad trade off.

I myself am not advocating for the moralistic argument and am quite content with leaving things at the selfish argument level, I'm just pointing out that US nativists could only be consistent by either grasping the selfish argument and abandoning moral ones or by advocating for non-interventionism.

Two wrongs don't make a right. So you should still have a problem with those supporting exploitation even if, which isn't the case, all the nativists supported immoral interventionism.

This is a false argument when not all groups have valid claims to being negatively affected by American interventionism.

Moreover, the enormous amount of western help towards African countries should matter.

I do think that someone who is an American nativist but does favor the USA screwing over non Americans abroad, is being selfish and morally hypocritcal. Although in a selfish manner their argument that nativism is in their own peoples interest has its validity.

It seems you have found this as an argument to use against nativists but aren't interested in the issue whether you are morally obligated to not just use it as a gotcha but ought to oppose the neocons and interventionists yourself.

You know, if I wanted to write an Ayn Rand-style novel about the evils of immigration, I could copy this and paste it almost verbatim into the mouth of one of the villains. I don’t say this out of any personal animus, but keeping out people with your selfish, exploitative, disloyal attitude is the single largest reason I want heavy restrictions on immigration. Whatever economic benefit you bring to the United States, I firmly believe the country would be better off forgoing it if it meant we would have fewer people like you. Call my attitude irrational, nativistic, whatever—when the chips are down, I and millions of Americans will make sacrifices for our communities and our country, while it’s pretty clear you’ll skip out to somewhere better the first chance you get.

How much does the average Democrat care about Republicans? How much does the average Republican care about Democrats?

I think this is one place where the Internet has severely soured the discourse. I strongly suspect that the median answer in both cases is that they care more than you expect, and that the loud cases you see online aren't truly representative (although I worry they are becoming moreso).

There exists genuine disagreement about how best to care about, say, single-parent families ("encourage marriage"/"throw money at them") with both sides accusing the other of being counterproductive, but as a fairly moderate voter, I don't generally doubt the intent on either side. There are some obvious cases of motivated reasoning -- although it's often hard to tell when one's reasoning is so-motivated. I have friends across the political spectrum, and while the level of empathy I see for others varies, none of them seem to operate purely selfishly (although such people probably exist outside of my set of friends).

And in that, I am very much American. How much does the average Democrat care about Republicans? How much does the average Republican care about Democrats?

Little, if asked in those specific terms. A lot, if not asked in those specific terms. If you ask Republican Richard what he thinks about Democrats, he might give you a pretty negative answer, but if you ask him whether he cares about his neighbor, Democrat Dave, he will frequently say that he cares a lot. Dave and Richard disagree about quite a few things, like gay marriage, and how much the rich should pay in taxes, and what the best way to handle medical funding is, but Dave and Richard both fly American flags, they both have pickups trucks, they cheer for the same football team, they've lived in the same community for decades, and they have a beer on the porch together on Friday nights.

Note that Richard and Dave above are two real people that I know, just renamed for alliteration. They're common and ordinary, particularly in rural areas. Adding Rhajiv and Juan that don't give a shit about the United States makes things worse for Rich and Dave in the long run, even if Rhajiv is a decent software developer and Juan will do construction cheaply.

Any US-dwelling right-wing Motte poster who feels more affinity to some foreign writer who agrees politically with him than he does to some SJW leftist who was born and bred in the US is just the same as I am.

Many of my neighbors are what I would call "shitlibs". They're also very nice people and fantastic neighbors. I feel much more affinity for them than some political fellow traveler thousands of leagues away.

We may be on the same page then, I think. As I pointed out, I also feel a great deal of affinity for my own American friends. More than I feel for some random political fellow traveler thousands of miles away. It's just that I don't feel any additional level of affinity for people just because they are American.

I love America. I love George Washington. I love Thomas Jefferson. I love Betsy Ross. I love our stupid national anthem with notes that most people can't reach. I love the Constitution, and the Liberty Bell, and our National Parks. I love the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers. I love our aircraft carriers and our war planes. I love the Grand Canyon and the Bald Eagle. I love supermarkets and farmer's markets. I love our long and fraught journey to secure each citizen the greatest freedoms enjoyed by man on Earth.

I love them in the same way I love my parents, who I didn't choose and aren't necessarily the best, but they raised me as best as they were able. To say that one country is the same as another to me would be to say that one random couple is the same as my parents to me.

Is this something only people raised in America feel, or does anyone else feel that way about their homeland?

I feel that way about Britain. I am... deeply annoyed by many of the things that large chunks of it have got up to lately, and the apparent suicidal instinct of its leaders, but it's my home. It has a great and noble history, rich traditions, beautiful landscapes, etc. etc. I just wish one of those traditions wasn't stamping on all the others.

I would assume both your parents and your country (in general) are too far above the minimum acceptable level of "good" for you to consider not loving them.

I value the cultural connection to my people, and begrudgingly grant that having our own state is better for our culture and our people than not having one, much like having abusive parents is still often better than an orphanage. That does not mean I feel obliged to grant any warm feelings to my country as a political entity. Lately especially, it is far too focused on supporting its expansion at the expense of its people.

Is this something only people raised in America feel, or does anyone else feel that way about their homeland?

Definitely not unique, I feel this way about Poland and there were are/many people who described their feelings this way (even if they targeted say willows rather than supermarkets and so on).

Many people in history also had opportunity to prove it be their deeds.

Similar applies elsewhere. I see nothing whatsoever to indicate that it applies uniquely to USA.

or does anyone else feel that way about their homeland?

I'd feel that way if my homeland was as free, and its society as well-regulated, as the US is.

It is not.

The majority outside the West surely do. 89% of Pakistanis are prepared to fight for their country, vs Italy and Germany at 22%.

https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/39dqfw/would_you_be_willing_to_fight_for_your_country/

Considering Pakistan's track record, they're likely to lose. Yet they're still ready to try!

I'd take those numbers with a grain of salt; in 2021 we saw that a stunning 0% of Afghanis were willing to fight for "their country", which is nowhere near the 76% the survey says.

Eh, quite a few Afghans were willing to fight for their country. Against the remains of the forces the former occupying Americans had propped up, that is.

If you're defining "their country" that way then yeah, I guess you could say the number was actually about 3%. Maybe they were under-counting the Taliban; I don't think they even get cell reception out there (that isn't via a drone pretending to be a tower to launch missiles at devices that try to connect to it).

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I imagine the confounder with Pakistan is that they're next door to people they really, really don't like. Italy and Germany, meanwhile, have never really had beef with each other since, what, the dawn of the 19th Century?

They, uh, were on opposite sides in WWI. And again towards the end of WWII. Germany didn’t exactly get a long leash during the Cold War, but I guess half of it was on Italy’s side.

I understand that Italy's motivation in WWI was more against the Austrians than the Prussians (irredentism over Trieste, IIRC?), though I did forget about the second war.

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I feel...differently about Germany.

I'd certainly describe myself as a patriot. A nationalist even. But it's the culture, the language, the actual physical country, the people and their ways, and the everyday architecture that I love. Not the institutions, the state, the monuments and symbols. But that may have an obvious historical explanations. For the Americans, those things were always theirs - a democracy from the get-go, by the people and for the people. Tacky as their symbols might be, they are theirs. But for us Germans, the state was never truly a democracy; the most we ever managed was to be handed whatever form of democracy our betters thought suitable for us, by the state and against the people. We accepted it, of course, having always been a people of loyal subjects. We are now loyal subjects of our democratic constitutional order, but it's by social convention and pragmatism, and not in our hearts. As a people, we remain subjects, and our relationship to the state is little different to that our ancestors had to the Reich, or to their local princes. Those on high decide, and we obey. So what does that make the monuments, the symbols and the institutions? Those are the emanations of the ruling class, or the ruling gestalt entity anyways. They aren't truly ours. The local church, alright, that at least is or was relevant to people's lives. The ruins of a castle, picturesque and one can picnic there. But the statue of some Prussian Junker or King? Some neoclassicist monument to the Kaiserreich? A memorial to holocaust victims? The halls of government? None of that is of us and for us, but is of the state and against us. We are to obey in actions, but our hearts are irrelevant. Our constitution, our institutions, our relationship to the military, all that are artificial post-war creations installed to dictate specific behaviors to us. It's not from us. It's not for us. It's to make us behave.

At the most one could say that our tricolor flag, the black-red-and-gold, is by and for us. But in truth it was by a small subset of the population, ideologically charged and by no means organic. It's still our flag, we rally around it for identification and for sports, so I suppose we have taken to it.

Still, it's my country and my people and my language and my culture and my land, and all those are the best in the world. Obviously.

The way I heard the story, a warlord in the somalian civil war attacked UN troops distributing aid – and so the US obligingly went in because they didn’t have anything else to do that day. But you reckon this was a machiavellian exploitation of the third world that now justifies a somalian revenge ?

To be fair, many US nativists are actually in favor of a less interventionist US foreign policy.

Yeah, and they say: 'I don't care if foreigners kill each other, even if we could prevent it easily'. Are you ready to stand by that statement and policy, or were you just using US interventionism as an excuse for foreigners to not be bound by any standard of decency?

But you reckon this was a machiavellian exploitation of the third world that now justifies a somalian revenge ?

No, not necessarily revenge. However, the US government clearly feels itself largely free to intervene wherever it pleases to in the world and can get away with, so from a moral perspective (not that I necessarily care about the moral perspective) I don't see why foreigners should not feel themselves largely free to at the least move to the US and advance their own ethnic interests.

I don't care if foreigners kill each other, even if we could prevent it easily

Can you? That was the Libyan operation in a nutshell. Qaddafi was this comic-book villain - Susan Rice announced that he was giving his troops viagra so they could rape more effectively: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/29/diplomat-gaddafi-troops-viagra-mass-rape

It would be so easy to topple him and save the civilians from being massacred and raped! We, the West, started an air campaign that monstered the Libyan Army. Qaddafi ended up with a bayonet in his ass. Then the country collapsed into a second civil war. Arms from now-unguarded Libyan army caches found their way to Syria. Russia and China were incensed that their acquiescence of UNSC 1973 developed a no-fly zone into a bombing campaign. Russia especially was very angry that the energy deal they'd negotiated with Qaddafi ended up going to French companies and decided they wouldn't accept the same thing happening in Syria. All this happened after Qaddafi denuclearized in 2003, sending a very clear signal to Iran and North Korea.

Seemingly simple actions have all kinds of complex, dangerous outcomes. We blew up Qaddafi, Libya is now split in two, Europe was destabilized by the refugee flow and international law took a major blow.

I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.

Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American. American's do this so much that there are thousands of memes making fun of us for it. So I see getting bent that a Somali-American calls herself Somali as just a thinly veiled boo outgroup.

Please find me an Irish congressman addressing Irish in America in Irish about how Ireland is "we" and not "they."

Better yet, find me a German congressman who calls himself German, speaks to Germans living in America in German, about the need to keep Germany for the Germans.

Or, even better, find me a Somali in Somalia who says makes fun of Omar for pretending to be Somali. Please, demonstrate this supposed equivalence. It's not the same, it's not close to same. It's offensive to even equate the two.

The Germans were rightly discouraged from doing this. They know better. The Somalis ought to know better, too, and if it takes their brightest star being cast out of my country in disgrace for them to learn, then so much the better.

These people are foreigners, regardless of laws or citizenship, and they have no desire to assimilate.

Pretty sure if you went back a hundred years ago when Irish immigrants were coming to the country through Ellis Island, there were probably numerous speeches given by congressmen and government officials at places like Tammany Hall that both were about how that particular Irish leader was looking out for the Irish constituents in America but also making sure that that the USA relationship with Ireland would only grow stronger and they promised that their home island would be subject to less bullying from England because of their American leverage.

I would put huge money on that any wasp republican from that time period would say the same exact thing as you regarding those Irish and Italians. That they are foreigners, have no respect for this nation and its culture and have no real desire to assimilate.

To a large extent you're true. I think first gen immigrants have a strong attachment to their country of origin and will always be like this. You can see it in other groups like how Indians Americans were in full force when Narendra Modi visited America, ect.

I think you're overestimating though how that makes any difference in the light of time. Children who grow up in America are mostly Americanized completely. Few younger Indian Americans care much about Indian politics, I know many Ethiopians who grew up here and though they are saddened by their recent civil war, they didn't shed tears like their parents did because their attachment to Ethiopia is more of a general vague identity and cultural traditions. Not the land or even its people. My Brazilian origin ex visits her grandparents and extended family in Brazil every couple of years and has somewhat strong ties to Brazil visiting it fairly often as a child, but she isn't Brazilian. She knows Portuguese, and loves the food of her country, follows some traditions and is culturally catholic, but she's American. She's not religious, dates people from every ethnic background, her favorite cuisine is Korean and lives to watch trashy american reality tv.

America is America and people are much too busy to care that much when its not a firsthand direct connection. Now, will my exes potential grandchild go to a liberal arts college one day and become a super woke identiterian using her latino and brazilian heritage as a crutch to not have or develop a real personality? Quite possibly, but that's also a uniquely American thing too.

I would put huge money on that any wasp republican from that time period would say the same exact thing as you regarding those Irish and Italians.

Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.). It's not a coincidence that Antonin Scalia and Ron DeSantis are big Republican names while the Democrats still boast politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Duggan. The GOP of that era thought that the Great Migration (Party of Lincoln!) was going to save them from the white ethnic hordes.

I believe the Germans were mostly Democrats during the peak periods of German immigration. The liberal, largely atheistic Forty-Eighters were almost all Republicans, but they were, despite their outsized cultural influence, a tiny minority of German immigrants. The majority were conservative Catholics and Lutherans who had little use for the Republican party. The midwestern German-Americans began to warm up to the Republicans before WWI, but they didn’t switch en mass until after.

My understanding is that Catholic and "traditional" Lutheran Germans were Democrats and the pietist Lutheran and Calvinist Germans were Republicans.

You are correct, and I shouldn’t have glossed over that distinction. The pietistic German Lutherans and Reformed tended to assimilate much more quickly than their Catholic and traditional Lutheran counterparts, with many joining Methodist or Baptist churches, supporting Prohibition, opposing parochial schools, and rather quickly dropping their “hyphenated” German-American identities, in many cases anglicizing their names in the process. These were much more likely to join the Republican party prior to WWI. The German freethinkers, with their singing and athletic clubs, were even more strongly Republican.

The Republicans actually had some decent success in courting traditional Lutherans and Catholics, but they had a habit of shooting themselves in the foot every couple of years and driving those groups back to the Democrats. Prohibition was the longest-lived issue, causing friction from the 1850s until the passage of the 18th Amendment, with the Republicans typically in favor and the Democrats typically opposed. Then in 1889, Illinois and Wisconsin passed laws requiring children to attend English-speaking schools, which led to a massive backlash from the traditional German communities and concomitant electoral victories for the Democrats. (There had already been quite a few skirmishes over Bible reading and prayer in the public schools before then, which an uneasy alliance of Catholics, traditional Lutherans, and German freethinkers opposed.)

Interestingly, the Scandinavians, being mostly Pietistic, were a pretty reliable Republican vote early on, though that naturally shifted over the years as the parties changed.

In Indiana, there was an additional wrinkle in the 1920s. The Ku Klux Klan popped up in the state during WWI, then flourished massively in the early 1920s, before dying off just as quickly as it had grown. Unlike in the south, the Indiana Klan was not primarily an anti-black organization, but was anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, and anti-Catholic, with animosity toward traditional Lutherans typically thrown in with those last two. The Klan was technically bipartisan but was more closely associated with the Republicans, which probably hampered the German vote’s transition to that party.

Very interesting post.

The Texas Germans voted Republican for a while IIRC, and they were conservative enough to schizophrenically larp about seceding to set up a Hapsburg monarchy.

That is interesting. Do you know what group that was? I know there were a few… attempts, if you can call it that; it would probably be more accurate to say idle day-dreams… to create a new Germany in the Midwest (every one of which fizzled out almost immediately as the immigrants realized that the USA was actually pretty great). I hadn’t heard of anything similar in Texas, but then I’m only really familiar with a couple of German communities down there.

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/adelsverein

They were successful enough that Texas had it's own dialect of German(which still has like a thousand native speakers in nursing homes in central Texas) and Fredericksburg is still a major town. Can't find a source on the monarchism RN but I swear they were planning it originally.

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Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.).

In the GSS, Italians lean more heavily Democrat than the Irish and both are significantly more Democrat than Republican. In this sample, the only white categories that don't lean Democrat overall are the British, the Scandinavians and the Germans & Dutch.

Put up, then. If they exist, you should be able to put them in front of me, not just speculate about their existence.

If you found such a speech, by the way, my response would be that the sentiment was rightly crushed by limited immigration and forced assimilation. Before that happened they were not American in any sense. And nobody would be defending it, or saying the Irish were just as American despite their need of a hyphen.

That they are foreigners, have no respect for this nation and have no real desire to assimilate.

As true then as it is today. The way to disprove such an accusation is, of course, to assimilate and interbreed, and that takes decades.

Relevantly, there were congressmen with ties to the IRA all through the troubles.

Please find me an Irish congressman addressing Irish in America in Irish

Well the main language in Ireland is English, and Irish is not even spoken by a majority of the population there, less than 40% have "some" ability to speak it. It's highly unlikely then anyone would be addressing a full speech in Irish, not because they assimilated to the US, but because even most Irish people would not understand it! I think your requirements for something that matches her speech are way too narrow but I will give you a brief set of examples below about how strong the Irish grip on America is. The Irish lobby in the US is arguably weakening but it is still huge. And I think it is hard to say her speech is worse than the actual actions taken across decades (from your point of view).

Having said that Peter King was a congressman until 2021 and he spoke repeatedly on the idea that the IRA was legitimately trying to create a free Ireland for his people.

"Speaking at a pro-IRA rally in 1982 in Nassau County, New York, King pledged support to "those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry."

"Shouts of "Long live the King" marked the annual St Patrick's Day parade here -- cheers for Peter King, a militant supporter of the Irish Republican Army who led 200,000 marchers up Fifth Avenue. King, the financial controller of suburban Nassau County, was named grand marshal of the parade after a bitter two-month campaign. "I was elected to send a clear message to England to get out of Ireland," he said. "The IRA's violence is only a reaction to violence started by the British Government.""

He spoke to try and stop the US government deporting Irish terrorists:

"Reps. Pete King (R-L.I.) and Tom Manton (D-Queens) will lead the speeches in support of Irish political figures such as Brian Pearson, whom the Immigration and Naturalization Service wants to deport as a terrorist.

"We want to focus attention on the terrible abuse of power by the Justice Department to deport these decent men," said King, Sinn Fein's biggest cheerleader in Congress."

And here we have another congressman saying support for meeting the queen is ok because "more Irish" (implying of course that he is himself at least somewhat Irish) people support it (this his position is not determined by what is good for the US)

"Democratic Congressman Richard Neal of Massachusetts, leader of the Friends of Ireland group in Congress and a vocal supporter of the peace process, told the Irish Voice he was surprised and pleased by the gesture. “None of us are more Irish than Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and John Hume,” he said. “If they say it’s okay, it’s okay for me."

We can also add Ronald Reagan saying Ireland was "home" and talking about how he had so many Irish-Americans in his cabinet that he had to fight them off Air Force One, and that he was an Irishman himself.

"Now, of course I didn't exactly expect a chilly reception. As I look around this chamber, I know I can't claim to be a better Irishman than anyone here, but I can perhaps claim to be an Irishman longer than most any of you here."

"I think you know, though, that Ireland has been much in our thoughts since the first days in office. I'm proud to say the first Embassy I visited as President was Ireland's, and I'm proud that our administration is blessed by so many Cabinet members of Irish extraction. Indeed I had to fight them off Air Force One or there wouldn't be anyone tending the store while we're gone. And that's not to mention the number of Irish Americans who hold extremely important leadership posts today in the United States Congress."

Or the so-called "four horsemen" of the Irish-American political grouping who used their influence to lobby the UK to treat their ancestral homeland differently? Sure they didn't say exactly what you asked.. but actions speak louder than words. They didn't just give speeches, they raised money and influenced government policy.

Whatever was said about Somalia and Somalians it probably also doesn't match up to Irish-Americans raising money for a violent group dedicated to unification of Ireland. Unless you think loyalty to Ireland had nothing to do with it of course.

Thank you.

Yes, the Irish have refused integration most assiduously, making all of the complaints about their initial migration justified in retrospect. I can only hope that we have since learned our lessons, and that we do not keep making the same mistake, over and over and over.

Well....except that nowadays that doesn't appear to be the case. Most of the things I quoted are from the 80s into the 90s.

Even the various Irish lobbies are of the opinion that time has passed.

https://reason.com/volokh/2023/03/17/the-declining-political-significance-of-irish-american-identity/

And if Reagan of all people would not be considered a true American, then I fear you may be a little miscalibrated.

Better yet, find me a German Bundestagsabgeordneten who calls himself German, speaks to Germans living in America in German, about the need to keep Germany for the Germans.

Entirely plausible, but would almost certainly be someone from the AfD, which means he'd be either conspicuously ignored or thoroughly discredited by the German press - and I guess would go unnoticed by the American press. Do you guys notice Germany at all?

Please find me an Irish congressman addressing Irish in America in Irish about how Ireland is "we" and not "they."

I'm not sure it's exactly what you're asking for, but the Irish community in America raised funds and trafficked arms for the IRA for decades, and I would not be surprised if Irish-American politicians participated at least somewhat in their actions. Financing and supplying a terror campaign against one of our core allies is, with some distance, a pretty significant action.

Indeed. The movie Blown Away with Jeff Bridges covers some of this territory actually (lol, I know)

You come into my house and recommend that movie in front of my face?

It was pretty ludicrous all round, but the one scene that made everyone in the cinema groan out loud when I saw it in my home town was Lloyd and Tommy having a drink together, and smiling with pure delight when some eejit produced a round of flat pints which they then proceeded to knock back.

High crimes and misdemeanours right there! Gaze with horrified disbelief on this offence against God and all human decency!

I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.

I can see how "our land will not be balkanized" might be considered a problem for Somaliland residents, or "Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them" for some Kenyans and Ethiopians. Irredentism is all fun and games until a Putin or a Hamas get serious about it.

That still wouldn't excuse the mistranslating (assuming it was a mistranslation) of other parts of the speech to make them sound much more inflammatory than they were.

Plenty of Americans describe themselves as "Irish" or "German" or whatever without trying to imply they are less American.

It should go without saying but: She didn't call herself Somali. She gave a speech advocating for Somali interests and called herself Somali.

Fair to say that's a different thing from half-Indian Jay highlighting his heritage at the icebreaker.

There are not actually very many German-Americans that would burn much mental energy on a maritime dispute between Germany and Sweden. Perhaps a century ago, but then ethnogenesis happened, and now German-Americans are simply Americans that enjoy Oktoberfest slightly more than the median. Omar is distinctly not-American in a way that is simply not true of Americans of old German stock.

now German-Americans are simply Americans that enjoy Oktoberfest slightly more than the median

Very true. German-Americans coming to Germany stick out as entirely American with nothing German about them.

So either their good German blood was diluted, or being German is a cultural categorization rather than a biological one.

From personal experience, I would say little of Column A, little of Column B. It's true that I'm not entirely German, depending on a few ancestry gaps that I'm not clear on, I'm in the ~70-75% range, with the rest being mostly old stock English. But really, I don't think it's that genetic distance that makes it visually obvious that I'm not a real German - you can tell from posture, from movement, from other subtle visual queues that I really can't even describe. The inverse of this is easy to see if you go to California - it's trivial to tell the difference between Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans before they ever say a word. I've always thought this was a pretty neat part of culture, that it's not just norms and preferences, but carries all the way down to unconscious movement patterns.

Also, Germans are just very... German. I'm distinctly a Midwestern Amerikaner, not a real German.

Oddly enough, some Midwestern women still seem very German to me, even the younger ones. Partly this is physical appearance, but also certain almost indescribable mannerisms, such as their quiet and careful speech. In contrast, I have never met an American man who seems German, even if he looks like something out of a "Visit Niederdorla!" catalogue.

Those Germans became full americans because of heavy assimilative pressure, not because of the action of time.

I know you don’t disagree with me. But on the eve of WWI support for Germany was a meaningful force in US politics and it took coercive assimilative pressure to stop. This will not happen for Somalis, and I feel like making that point, specifically. When will Minnesota make it illegal to speak Somali in schools?

I'm bordering on shitposting here, but it amuses me to think about Woodrow Wilson the son of Southern Confederates getting his revenge on stalwart Republican Germans.

The (arguable) long-term realignment of both sides of the Civil War into the Trump coalition is something to behold. I say this as an upper Southerner whose classmates frequently wore Confederate flag T-shirts while being blissfully unaware that their ancestors hailed from the most Unionist part of my state.

That image doesn’t quite work since the Germans were still a very heavily Democratic constituency on the eve of WWI. In fact, Wilson’s about-face (campaigning on “he kept us out of war” and then entering it against the Germans) was one factor that led the German-American vote to become much more Republican.

It needs to happen for the Mexicans before it needs to happen to the Somalis, but we simply don't have the will to do it anymore.

I have the will, but I don't have the allies.

Yes, we are on exactly the same page. When I say "ethnogenesis happened", what I really mean is that the door was slammed on immigration for decades, two World Wars applied aggressive coercion against sympathies for homelands, and multiple generations of time passed with ethnic intermixing and population migration.

I am of the stance that all government materials should be printed in English with no exceptions. People that cannot communicate in English are choosing to be not-American. Forcing them to adopt English (or at least for their children to) is for everyone's betterment in the long run.

(or at least for their children to)

I thought second-generation immigrants nearly universally spoke English natively, with the possible exception of some insular religious communities like the Amish. Are there notable exceptions that I'm missing?

The explosion of ESL classes in public schools suggests otherwise.

What explosion would this be?

Googling around, combining this piece and this piece, I get about about 8.1% of public school students were ELLs in 2000, 9.2% in 2010, 9.5% in 2015, and 10.3% in 2020. That seems like a quite slow and gradual increase over the last twenty years - hardly worth being called an 'explosion'.

There's more data here - the vast majority, over 75%, of ELLs are native speakers of Spanish, which suggests to me that we're mostly talking about migrants from South and Central America. I'd guess that the slow increase in English language education is probably just a result of the rate of immigration from Latin America increasing.

I see no evidence that the very modest increase is driven by second-generation immigrants living in ethnic enclaves and refusing to learn English. It seems entirely understandable if it's all first-generation.

EDIT: Wait, let me get this straight.

First person makes a huge and unsupported claim in one sentence.

Second person questions that claim, providing hard data that seems to contradict it.

The result is that the first person is upvoted, and the second person downvoted? What? What happened to rationalism? I don't think I was rude in any way - I was asking for evidence for a claim.

Maybe it's just a perception issue, since my state is top 10 in ELL. The two most populous states, California and Texas, are also the two with the highest proportion of ELL students.

By gross numbers you have a 35% increase over 19 years.

As for your edit, this isn't the rationalist thread, it's the culture war thread. We're at least three steps removed from rationalism by the time you've reached here.

I flat out don't believe that based on my experience with second generation Hispanic immigrants, who data suggests are one of the better assimilating groups.

ethnic intermixing

Was it eigen or one of the other little tpots who was postulating that that might be a non-trivial component of increased divorces in America? Interracialethnic marriages with very different cultural norms/lifestyle expectations being less stable than the intraethnic marriages that were the norm prior to the great wars.

Exactly.

Most people (probably even here) naively assume that the US is one uninterrupted string of mass immigration since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock.

But of course that isn't the case.

Most recently, immigration was at very low levels for 40 years from 1924–1965 with strict limits on the national origins of immigrants. It was during those crucial decades that most of the hyphenated Americans stopped being Italians, Irish, and Polish and started being just regular Americans.

There are far more Somalians in Somalia than there are in the US and almost all of them would rather be in the US. We need at least 40 years to assimilate the ones we already have before letting more in. There is unlimited demand for migration, but the the US has a very limited ability to assimilate newcomers.

Examples of heavy pressure:

  • 30 Germans were killed by vigilantes
  • Hundreds were beaten or tarred and feathered
  • Thousands of Germans were interned in both world wars.
  • German cultural expressions were actively repressed with things like a machine gun being taken to a Milwaukee theater to cancel performances of William Tell, states banning education in German, discrimination against people and places with Germanic names (which is why those surnames asound Jewish today they came after the Germans had changed their names to English sounding surnames).

I am not a fan of Ilhan Omar. I'd even go so far as to agree with you if you speculated that she probably feels more loyalty to Somalia than the US and does not, in her heart of hearts, really feel an allegiance to the Constitution. But that would be speculation; neither of us really knows.

That said, this is appears to be an attempt by her enemies to willfully read the worst possible interpretation/translation into her words. Even if "Somalian first, Muslim second" really is an accurate translation of her words, that isn't the "gotcha" admission that she doesn't consider herself American or loyal to America that it's being represented as. I am sure I've heard similar statements of ethnic solidarity from other politicians.

One would at least think this debunks the idea that she’s a radical Islamist; a radical Islamist would of course put nothing over Islam.

She’s married to the white guy she cheated on her husband with (and who, afaik, did not convert to Islam) and barely even covers her hair, the suggestion she was a radical Islamist is pretty ridiculous.

I always suspected she covers her hair mostly out if vanity (she suffers some form of alopecia based on old photos).

This just sounds like excuse making for a respectable 'grey' position. In any other case we'd be able to recognize that there are plenty of people with strong beliefs that fail in living up to their beliefs every single day of their lives. Be that not going to church, drinking alcohol or any other example you prefer. And we could all recognize that this failure does not need to, in any way, deter these people from pushing their beliefs on society. Be that legislatively or otherwise. But because the red tribe correctly sees the likes of Omar as obvious 'enemies', we, the respectables, have to distance ourselves from that in some way.

I only say this because the excuses in use here are so poor I can't see what else it could be. As an illustrative example, a nationalist in Poland could say 'I'm Polish first, Christian second' and we could all recognize that the ethnic and the religious, whilst often closely related, are not the same and no one would feel the need to question his anti-abortion pro-Christian social policies in Poland just because he said this. Yet somehow, in the case of Omar, we act not just as if her saying this is meaningful, we drag red tribe terminology like 'radical Islam' into our writing and purposefully distance ourselves from it.

If there is a reason for the ‘red tribe’ to dislike Omar’s politics it’s because she’s a progressive who proudly represents a largely unassimilated migrant community, not because she’s an Islamist. She’s not ‘worse’ than AOC because she’s Somali instead of Puerto Rican. It’s likely that as with Tlaib her communal origin affects eg her views on Israel, but there are plenty of white progressives with the same views on that subject too.

I am sure I've heard similar statements of ethnic solidarity from other politicians.

Examples?

I can only think of examples from overseas, and all of them have come to my attention because of Western (more progressive than not) backlash against the statements. One place I would've expected ethnic messaging is in Wab Kinew's victory speech (the first Native American Premier in Canada), but the closest he got was (paraphrasing from @2:53)"I want to speak to young [Native American children]. I want to speak to all youth, and people of all ages, but young [Native American children] in particular:..."

Remember Mike Pence's catch-phrase?

"I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican - in that order."

That sounded to me like a statement that his solidarity with Christians overrides his solidarity with conservatives, and that this overrides his solidarity with his party.

Or do 'Christians' not count as an ethnicity in this context?

But if you want national or ethnic identity specifically, as far as I can tell foreign-born congressmen do often play that card? For instance, Ted Lieu was born in Taiwan, and he advocates on Taiwan's behalf. Young Kim was born in Korea and she describes herself as a "bridge builder between our two countries", and appears to advocate for greater US-Korean cooperation, apparently "lobbying the Biden administration to ensure countries that have free-trade pacts with the U.S., such as South Korea, receive better treatment under laws that award special benefits to domestic companies". That sounds like some kind of solidarity with the nation of her birth? Raja Krishnamoorthi seems to recommend strengthening the US-India relationship, including bringing India into NATO PLUS.

It doesn't seem that rare for US politicians born in other countries to retain a level of interest in their home country, and to advocate for that country's interests in partnership with the United States.

Even if Christians were to count as a quasi ethnic group, they are one that is more integral to American-ness.

On the opposite side a Muslim is a more foreign identity.

This isn't to say that prioritizing Christianity too much can't be even be considred treasonous to a country. For example someone supporting open borders with Christian countries that would result in the replacement of the people with foreigners.

Isn't that just a rendition of "God, guns, and government" - a party slogan or credo, but with the blanks filled in?

Remember Mike Pence's catch-phrase?

The categories he highlighted (religion, political philosophy, party membership) are perfectly compatible with being American. I'd have some issues if he recognized the divine authority and infallibility of the Pope, but I don't think that has happened.

As for placing his party last? Meh. Politicians playing political games within the structure of a political event. I'd like my representatives to be loyal to the party I vote for, but that's merely a practical stance. It's not like I'd want Alain Rayes charged with pseudo-treason for leaving his party.

I don't have any problem with Americans pushing for better relations with Taiwan, South Korea, or any other country. It doesn't matter if their hobbyhorse happens to line up with the country of their birth, either. Neither of your links had any suggestion that they were anything but American.

Omar's speech sets herself up as a Somalian who happens to live in the US. She calls Somalia "our country", while she merely "live[s] in this country." when talking about the US. She frames President Hassan Sheikh as the leader of an ethnostate that she (and the audience) is a part of.

Which is an interesting way to frame it, actually, considering that Somalia is not an ethnostate. Only around 85% of Somalians are ethnic Somalis, and there are large populations of Somalis in neighbouring Ethiopia and Kenya; and, of course, Somaliland has been a persistent issue however much Somalia would like it not to be. The current constitution of Somalia (it is admittedly provisional; it's not the most stable part of the world) defines the country in terms of 'inclusive representation of the people' (Article 1), in Article 8 asserts that people of Somalia 'are one, indivisible, and comprise all the citizens', and in Article 11 outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, clan, tribe, ethnicity, and birth.

This may not be followed much in practice, but certainly de jure Somalia is not an ethnostate. It does not appear to present itself as the country of the Somalis, not does it seem to aspire to be that, at least officially.

It's possible that Omar is just choosing inapposite words, or appealing to national rather than ethnic identity in an awkward way. It is, at least, clear that Omar feels an identification with Somalia, and her statement that "Somalia belngs to all Somalis" suggests that she would like it to be an ethnostate, even if it currently isn't. Or maybe she's just equivocating between 'Somali' and 'Somalian' - imprecise language being the eternal curse of politics.

Really, I think we could all do with a bit more discussion of what she's specifically angry about - this seems like a reasonable intro. The short version today is that (formerly British) Somaliland is a large chunk of (former Italian Somaliland) Somalia, and it thinks it's independent and operates semi-autonomously. Somaliland recently made a deal to give Ethiopia a strip of land in exchange for progress in recognising its aspirations of independence; the Somalian position, naturally, is that this is illegal and Ethiopia trying to illegally acquire sovereign Somalian territory. Many Somalians outside of Somalia agree with the Somalian position here, and Omar is talking to them.

It's hard to think of a good analogous group in the US - the Somalian situation here is pretty unusual.

Man, I thought the immigration fraud argument was stupid when it came up years ago, and I think it’s stupid now. Are you the same guy who brought it up on Reddit? Because I’m pretty sure you’re citing the exact same tabloid. Do you have anything more credible?

  • -16

Why do you think it's stupid? Do you think it's simply not true? Or that it is true but doesn't matter? Or that she should have been able to bring her brother over at any time, so she was justified? What? Because I'm fairly certain it's true, and no, I don't have anything that could be cited on wikipedia to mollify you. Just local reporters that have dug around, which is where the story first got legs, and rumors in the Somalis in Minnesota.

I don't really believe you have any firsthand knowledge of Somali rumors.

Of course I don't. It's second and thirdhand.

I also don't have firsthand knowledge from the local reporters, because I'm not local.

That it’s not true. I spent some time trying to dig up my response from the last time it came up, but had no luck. Reddit’s search tools have only gotten worse.

I believe my argument boiled down to “why does this cigarette have so much credibility?”

Fill me in as a bystander, please. I am not adversarial to this point of view. In fact, I despise Ilhan Omar and would like the claim to be true because it's politically damaging to an adversary and hilarious. I just haven't actually seen any evidence that meets a remotely stringent standard of epistemology. Is there better evidence than it sounding plausible, being damaging to an adversary, and hilarious?

If you'll forgive links to PoliFact and the Daily Mail, I think these give a rough overview of the information involved.

https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/jul/18/did-ilhan-omar-marry-her-brother-her-hometown-news/

Basically she married Hirsi, divorced him, married Elmi but kept filing taxes with Hirsi, divorced Elmi and remarried Hirsi (she later divorced Hirsi and married a staffer of hers but I don't think it's relevant here, other than perhaps revealing she doesn't shy away from divorce).

I think the evidence does look like something shady went on with her marriage to Elmi, which may have been around getting him into the US so he could go to school. Though I note he was a British citizen and getting an F-1 visa is pretty straightforward as a British citizen in my direct experience. No evidence here that he is her brother however.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9891015/Claims-DNA-match-proves-Ilhan-Omar-married-brother.html

Here we have a claim that a Republican activist compared DNA from a cigarette claimed to have been smoked by Omar with DNA from a straw claimed to have been used by Elmi and that it showed a genetic match. However we have only their word that was the case, and they could have simply submitted DNA from any two siblings, as of course the lab wasn't present at the collection. Taking advantage of a pre-existing rumour to manufacture evidence? Or a true fact?

Apparently social media posts may lend credence to the idea Elmi is gay, which may speak to being part of an immigration scam marriage, but then again he is also apparently living back in the UK.

If I were pressed, given my knowledge of Islamic family practices, I might think Elmi was likely a cousin or close family friend. It's not unknown for marriages to cover for gay men in general, so I suspect their marriage wasn't "real". The DNA test is I think hopelessly tainted, so whether he is actually her brother is up in the air. Though it's possible someone with more knowledge of DNA tests might be able to see something those in the results that is dispositive.

I don’t have much problem with her speech. America has long had people with other loyalties. I myself would likely need to take directions from the Pope before the POTUS.

I do think the Nationalist and ethnonationalist have a legitimate beef with her.

According to her Somlia is for the Somalians and according the ADL Israel is for the Jews. But that doesn’t stop them from ripping on any domestic nationalist sympathies in the US. Concerns about limiting immigration etc should be valid arguments to these people. And voting her out of office and deporting her brother seem very valid.

I myself would likely need to take directions from the Pope before the POTUS.

Which has historically been an argument against Catholic immigration in many countries, including in the US. Then again, the Pope can't even get Ireland to do as he asks, so this is not a plausible problem today.

Do you have that same energy for the US congressman Brian Mast who wore his IDF uniform to Congress and said

“As the only member to serve with both the United States Army and the Israel Defense Forces, I will always stand with Israel,” Mast wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, alongside several photos of him wearing the uniform Friday.

and then:

“Tlaib’s got her flag. I got my uniform,” Mast wrote. “’Global Day of Rage’ my ass.”

Someone like this, along with the Israel lobby, is much more likely to hurt the US and get it into stupid foreign entanglements because of hi dual loyalty than anyone in the Squad.

While I consider all dual citizenship objectionable, and would lightly call for the deportation of all such peoples to their other place of citizenship (excepting those who's other countries would not allow them to renounce) Israel should be at the bottom of any such lists. They would, literally, be my last priority. Their concerns are legitimate. I think there is a major political party in America that is on track to seek their extinction as a race. So, yeah, when we have rid ourselves of the dual loyalty Mexican, Somali, Canadian, Chinese, and other X-Americans, we can deal with the Israeli problem. But I doubt we will have much such problems when all those others are sent away.

  • -12

Israel is the first priority. Israel spies on America and sells its secrets. It also lobbies the US to fight its wars and give it money. If Israel isn't the first priority then this whole thing is pointless. There's nobody from Taiwan or China in the US government doing this. I don't want to hear this argument until all Israeli first sympathizers are expelled from America and stripped of their citizenship. And that includes Americans like Sheldon Adelson.

It's 100% true that Israel spies on the United States, but this is very normal (for example, the US was caught spying on Germany, and France is apparently notorious for running SIGINT collections at international military exercises) in international relations. FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.

And it's 100% not true that China or Taiwan isn't lobbying (Taiwan definitely does) or spying on it (China definitely does).

(A historical aside, but I am not sure anything Israel has done has been as consequential as the coordinated British effort, which included espionage, to get us into the World Wars. The Zimmerman note would never have come to light if it was not for British espionage on US diplomatic traffic.)

I'm not talking about lobbying. I'm talking about Zionist Jews (sometimes with Israeli citizenship) serving in the US government at the highest levels. There is nobody like that for China yet there are who knows how many people like this for Israel. It's no shock that the largest recipient of foreign aid and the next biggest ones are the countries that recognize it. And we're not talking about just spying. What Israel does is leagues beyond that including selling secrets to its enemies. Israel and Jews are so far beyond what any other country does that it's not even comparable. So I don't even want to hear about The Squad until Israel is dealt with. Zionist Jews could start WW3, while Ilhan would just get the US in some entanglement in Africa that doesn't really matter. I think you could make a serious argument that Zionist Jews in the US government are literally the biggest threat to world peace.

When you make inflammatory claims, you need to bring evidence. “Could,” “would,” “who knows”—elaborate on these, and use them to make it clear why you stand by your claims.

FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.

I thought this was known to be false, as another layer of end-run around restrictions on SIGINT against citizens? If eg MI6 spies on an American citizen on American soil and relays it to NSA with the expectation of reciprocation, it's not NSA doing the spying, and therefore totally in the clear.

FVEYS might be the one group in the world that actually doesn't spy on each other.

I would bet against that, except there's no way to resolve the bet. I'm sure all countries involved attempt to get intelligence beyond the scope of the agreement, one way or another.

According to Wiki, he lost his legs while serving in the US military in Afghanistan in 2010, and then volunteered in Israel (presumably not in a combat capacity) several years later. It’s not a good look, but he at least has dual loyalty!

Some people don't even serve one country, and this guy serves two?

Everything I said about Omar could also be said about Mast, or Schumer. I think anyone who holds two passports should be ineligible to serve in any branch of any state or federal government, and I'm leaning towards county and municipal government, too. I have no patience for dual loyalties and no shame about it. What you linked was two foreigners arguing about their foreign lands, and I, an American, don't care about anything east of Greenland, west of Alaska, or South of Darien. Neither one of them should be in Congress.

Hell, I think you shouldn't be able to vote at all unless you've been in the country for 18 years, and the only reason I say 18 and not 21 is because the constitution is too difficult to amend. I think you shouldn't even be able to vote when you move states!

But I didn't want to start a thread about the perfidy of the Jews and the influence of AIPAC. I certainly could, but I didn't. I don't consider them American any more than I do anyone else who holds a hyphen.

I would just like to note for the record here that in Australia, it's unconstitutional for dual-citizens to serve in Federal Parliament (there's a minor exception in case of people who've attempted to formally renounce their foreign citizenship and failed; some countries don't allow renunciation of citizenship).

For the curious, there was a mild parliamentary crisis about that a few years back - hilariously, it turned out that a significant number of sitting MPs were dual citizens and had just forgotten about it, because no one remembers or checks that.

That said, I feel that it's worth clarifying that the Australian provision here is only for MPs and the radical isolationism that KMC seems to recommend is a fair distance away from that. If nothing else, not caring about anything outside of America's borders seems like a recipe for disaster for America itself.

I alluded to that same point regarding Israel vs. US interests/American people with a conservative on Twitter named Katya Sedgwick (who I interviewed a while back partially in the topic of the Ukraine proxy war, which we were both against, but October 7th has put us at odds).

The argument of cultural affinity and geopolitical good sense was the answer I got, to differentiate Israel/Jews vs. Somalia/Muslims. Highly questionable in my opinion, both as far as blowback and a Jewish ethnostate not particularly resonating with Americans on the ground nor their interests.

I think that, the US not being an ethnostate, given the levels of functionality being present, comparatively, in Somali and Jewish culture is a valid basis for comparison. Unassimilated Jews I have no more beef with than assimilated Jews(assuming the welfare queens are excluded from consideration); Somalis are a different story.

And an ethnostate America on a factual basis is not, and hasn't been since like 1830 at the latest. Poorly assimilated minorities are simply part of the American experience; it's fair to discriminate among those minorities, and for deleterious effects on American interests levy criticism, but on the whole having people that speak two languages at home and practice old country folkways is the rule in American history, not the exception.

Do you have that same energy for the US congressman Brian Mast who wore his IDF uniform to Congress and said

I'll say this: if you are a dual citizen, you should not be able to serve in congress, and probably shouldn't be able to serve in any role whatsoever in government including police. I'll even go so far as to say that only natural born US citizens should be able to serve in congress.

Re the first one, does this extend to cases where someone's a dual citizen due to essentially not being able to get rid of their second citizenship? Dual citizenships have been a bit of a topic in Finland in the recent years since the most common dual citizenship is Russian but, for instance, I have a friend who has such a dual citizenship and would like to get rid of it but essentially can't, since he'd have to physically go to Russia for that and there's a high chance he'd get punished for such an attempt, particularly since he's been a vocal opponent of Putin's policies and they might as well just go and forcibly draft him and throw him at the front.

Re the first one, does this extend to cases where someone's a dual citizen due to essentially not being able to get rid of their second citizenship?

Yes. There are many jobs that your friend would still be eligible for.

By that reasoning it's fine to bar him from taking part in any job whose name starts with the letters Q through Z. After all, even with that restriction there are many jobs he could take.

But it's totally arbitrary. Why do we have an interest in preventing someone from taking some jobs just because they refuse to put themselves in physical danger by going to Russia?

The government by its nature exerts power over me. It takes my money (by force), and implements behavioral prescriptions that it enforces with violence.

That's different than most jobs, and because of that different scrutiny should be applied to the people being entrusted with that power. I'm sorry your friend really wants to have that power but can't, but honestly in this scenario I am going to start wondering why they want the power that badly.

Would it be ok to ban say Christians from offices of state power? It's an easy claim that their loyalty is to God before country. And if they complain, well why do they want power so badly?

What a brilliant idea. Perhaps offices of state power should strive to resemble /r/antiwork's mod team.

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Nations are by default nationalistic and self interested. Your religion is orthogonal to your nationality.

Do I think a muslim should be allowed to be the Pope? Similarly no.

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but honestly in this scenario I am going to start wondering why they want the power that badly.

Probably for the same reason they'd want a job that starts with the letters Q through Z: because you need to have a job to live, and you're better off when a big chunk of the possible jobs aren't automatically barred from you in advance. Expecting someone to go to Russia to be jailed or drafted, before you'd hire them, is unreasonable.

What country are you in? Your friend has also chosen to eliminate themselves from all of the jobs in India by not moving to India and trying to get a job there, presumably. Why, if this is just a matter of increasing the possible number of jobs available, do they not do that?

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The bounds of this are interesting. Let's say I'm an absolute dictator in a brand new country in western asia (some breakaway province that it's convenient for the rest of the world to recognize), let's call it Trollistan. Can I keep people unfriendly to me out of your government by declaring them citizens and then not allowing them to revoke the citizenship?

If not, why? If it's because they didn't chose Trollistan, it doesn't seem that different than someone being born somewhere (which they don't chose), and then not being allowed to give the citizenship up later.

Do you really see no difference between:

  • Has never been to a place.

  • Was born in a place, was a citizen of a place, eventually left the place and went to another place and went through the process of becoming a citizen of that second, new place where they weren't born

?

I see a difference in that. But that's not what we're talking about here, considering natural born citizenship generally passes from parents to children, not only to people that are born in a place. Being born in a place automatically conferring citizenship is kind of a new world thing, most places in the old world don't do that (source)

In the current world, you can be a citizen of a place you've never been to already. And you can be incapable of giving up that citizenship. And that doesn't seem to be an exception for you, so I'm not sure why it's an important difference here.

The relevant difference is:

  • Place your family has history
  • Place your family doesn't have history

If that's not the relevant difference, I think you need to start carving out some exemptions to your policy.

The way Australia rules this is that if you've made a good-faith attempt to renounce foreign citizenship then you count as being only an Australian as far as Australia's concerned (and thus can be elected to Parliament). There are, after all, some countries that do not allow renunciation at all.


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