[vbo]

I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim. And perhaps that's true to some extent. But since most people believe the battle is lost, moreso that this has always been the status quo, then any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin. We have capitulated on privacy, because it's a vague concept and we don't equate it with freedom, or perhaps our sense of being free is so ingrained in modern societies that we see no risk to it being lost lest something drastic and immediate takes it away, when in fact the very system designed to protect our freedoms (led by people that look like us, think like us and enjoy these freedoms as much as we do) is malfunctioning and slowly erodes rights that previous generations enjoyed. We're not collectively trying to harm our freedoms and yet here we are.

And shortsightedness on the side of lawmakers is baffling. Nobody takes responsibility for vision, we just go along with implementing solutions without considering broader impact or history. If the government has all your correspondence and the government falls into the wrong hands, you're toast, assuming you do not align with the leadership. We're writing that possibility off, but someone gets to brag that they've written legislation to stop the bad guys -- and maybe they did, but the cost was our collective freedom.

[hiatus]

It's crazy that we allow this at all. The government can't observe clandestine conversations that occur in person, does that mean they can mandate us to carry a government recording device? That people don't equally balk at requests to encumber encryption is baffling.

[ashton314]

I like this vein of argument: assume that it is good that the government be able to snoop on your text messages. Why not in-person conversations as well? OK, let's make it so everything you say gets recorded. Eesh.

[madaxe_again]

They feel they have nothing to hide. I find the “nothing to hide” argument baffling, as when they say this, I immediately ask them to tell me about their last sexual encounter, in graphic detail. After all, they’ve nothing to hide.

For some reason, they never do, and they usually get rather upset with me.

[mensetmanusman]

Should it be legal to have a private conversation along a windy beach?

Government: “Allowing it might be as dangerous as a gun!”

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> a government recording device

Many people believe this is happening with your phone. It's a recording device after all, and usually carried by most people. If not you then someone nearby likely has one. All these conversations can be transcripted automatically and the vast amounts of text can be analyzed by AI for whatever purpose they want. The infrastructure is already available.

[raxxorraxor]

It was predicted that encryption would be attacked with a veneer of being against child pornography or terrorism.

Problem is most people aren't politically involved and just don't think about any implications of a state being able to fish your messages. And for tech affine users this will likely not be true, but certainly for the masses.

[pms]

I don't think it's that crazy if you trust the government to use these capabilities in the intended ways, that is to catch serious crimes. The US is a very specific country, because here people have very low trust in government and public institutions, which is why public good endeavors are less developed here, while corporations do whatever they want, as long as it seems legal. Many people would argue that's a bad thing for public good...

[dralley]

>I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.

A big part of the issue is that the nature of the conversations has changed. Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private. The idea of having complete privacy in such conversations is actually rather new.

The difference is that those communication mediums now represent nearly all communication, rather than a small fraction of it, and that the effort to meaningfully break that privacy has dropped significantly over what it would have required to surveil millions of people in the 1950s. It doesn't require an East-German-esque security state anymore.

[jonhohle]

Great! Long distance communication has finally caught up with fundamental rights!

Had those rights been respected all along instead of exploited by perverted, power-obsessed authorities because of how easy it was, it wouldn’t be such a shock to lose the ability again. At least in the US where a right to privacy is a constitutional guarantee, I would hope that Apple and others would defiantly continue to offer encrypted services despite government threats. It would seem like the Human Rights Act guarantees the same right, though I don’t know if it has any higher precedence than any other act parliament.

[kwhitefoot]

> Mail and Telephones were never at any point perfectly private

In principle they were not private but in practice they were because in most places the police had to realize that there was a conversation of interest, get a warrant, and use scarce resources.

Now the authorities are able to use machines to monitor traffic patterns for almost all communication the cost of interception is much lower.

[lost_tourist]

That's not true, people have stepped aside for 10s of thousands of years to have private conversations they didn't want other people to hear. why does the medium matter, whether is pressure waves from mouth to ears or electron/light communications. Why does anyone have a right to listen in?

[lynx23]

To me, there is one big argument for privacy: You never know what your govewrnment will change into in the next few years. This basic argument for encryption is often raised in combination with countries which we already consider non-free. But, frankly, I have finally learned the true meaning of this message during COVID times. I would never have expected society deteriorating into this fear/hate driven, media induced witchhunt. Since that experience, I basically expect anything frm the government, which makes the argument for being able to encrypt communication even stronger for me.

[sbarre]

Yes, this is something a lot of people don't think about:

What is acceptable (even legal) today may not be tomorrow, or in X years (10, 15, or more)..

If we allow all our private conversations and messages to be permanently archived (and you know they will be, disk space is effectively infinite), who is to say that wouldn't be used against us in the future when laws, or even social standards, have drastically changed?

[lost_tourist]

Yep, this just gives them the tools when they go full fascist. For example the USA had a recent coup attempt, and that same person attempting the coup will be running again for president and there is a non-zero chance that he will win. He has openly stated that he wanted to "reform" the government and install only loyalists, that is the type of regime you don't want to have instant access to all communications.

[raxxorraxor]

You assume your current government to be benevolent. We see a lot of political prosecution from these benevolent governments even today.

[tick_tock_tick]

> I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.

The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy but don't believe that privacy from the government should exist.

[adra]

This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful surveillance design)?

I guess my question boils down to what specifically does the US do right that the UK and Europe does worse?

[jen20]

The fact that almost every US telecoms provider is selling your location - and there is no restriction on law enforcement buying it - means that things are not exactly rosy in the US either.

[lozenge]

Has Snowden been forgotten so quickly?

[cmiles74]

An insidious part of this discussion is this idea that these laws do not interfere with encryption. IMHO, it's a dishonest stance to take but when debated, the first thing defenders of this legislation say is that this "does nothing to break encryption" or "Privacy and security are not mutually exclusive — we need both, and we can have both and that is what this amendment delivers."

In this plan messages are sent to a third party for analysis. Sure the messages sent to the third party are encrypted but your privacy is entirely violated.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/uk-osb-csam-scanning/

[JohnFen]

> [...] any battle on the subject is lost before it has a chance to begin

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim

Traditionally, couldn't they with texts? And with all the major social media players?

Isn't stuff like Signal they can't track relatively new and getting outlawed in many places?

[Loquebantur]

It's not just about encryption and privacy. That's missing the forest for the trees.

For a democracy to function, people need to be able to have free and candid discussions about any topic without the fear of being ostracised, persecuted or whatever. Only that way can ideas be exchanged and people get a hunch of what others think about stuff of relevance. Only that way can people partake in sensible democratic decision-making. Framed opinions pushed onto you by one-way media are no substitute. That's dictatorship in disguise.

"Classic" ways of public communication, like town halls, pubs, marketplaces or whatnot, cannot fill that role any longer. But online, places like Twitter, Reddit and some chat services that closed the gap now get killed off, too. This dystopia cannot be let come to pass.

[vbo]

They could and they did, the problem is they’re now attempting to get the same access to encrypted communications by outlawing privacy, essentially saying they need to get rid of your freedom to speak privately for our greater good.

[lanstin]

I used PGP Phone with my dad, which means it was pre-Dec 1999. The crypto battle is kind of orthogonal to general privacy concerns. Stuff like being allowed to sell location data from your phone is not related to building back-doors into encryption. The argument against crypto backdoors is pretty simple: bad guys can get good crypto, and backdoors invariably end up providing access to bad actors, via hacking or secret leaking or corruption.

[jonhohle]

In terms of human history, easily eavesdroppable communication is relatively new, mass eavesdroppable communication even more. I’d like to believe we’re reverting back to the mean - similar privacy to in person conversation but now over long distant.

[inhumantsar]

BlackBerry's BBM was E2E encrypted with no backdoors much like Signal is today.

Tho as I understand it, Signal's security is more robust.

[eli]

Cmon who is saying that?

Plenty of people believe in limits to free speech but very very few would draw the line there.

[nonethewiser]

If the definition of free speech doesnt feel over inclusive then its not free speech.

[wilg]

Wait, do you think there are people who think “Let’s Go Brandon” is anything but a hilarious conservative self-own?

[xenospn]

Can you point to a comment that said that, or are you simply projecting?

[badrabbit]

> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority

I'd like you to back up that claim because from what I had seen about surveillance and terrorism most people supported it(even the patriot act had popular support in the polls). Only people smart enough to know about encryption oppose this. Most people who don't understand tech pretty much assume the government is already looking at messages. Long before snowden, illegal phone tapping was a public secret people were fine with so long as the government doesn't abuse that access. Even before computers, they had secret rooms where they opened to read people's letters without a warrant. Not one major political candidate that I can recall since 9/11 has mentioned expiring the patriot act or investingating the NSA and recommending criminal charges in their campaign, nor does it get brought up in their town halls.

[schoen]

I think you parsed the comment you're replying to backwards. Like you, the previous commenter suggested that opposition to surveillance is uncommon.

[nonethewiser]

Anti encryption? Not sure most people support that specifically.

But generally speaking, I dont think you’ve emphasized it strongly enough. People arent just supportive of trading privacy and freedom for the promise of safety. They are literally begging for it.