[agwp]

The absurd thing is that the amendment only covers smartphones and tablets - which means those who the bill aims to target can easily break the law by using a laptop, desktop, camera, smart TV etc.

In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open.

[matheusmoreira]

Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to.

Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.

Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.

They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.

It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.

[bamboozled]

The other side of this coin is that, disgusting horrific pedophiles, terrorists and drug smugglers also have access to this stuff too.

I'm not in support of this bill, I'm just saying whenever I read these arguments, it's almost like you're entirely discounting the challenge the very tech your praising incurs for law enforcement and society.

For me the paradox is simple, one the one hand people want everything to be "open and transparent" including their computers, but those same people often want the ability to completely hide everything in cryptography. Which one is it? If you were for openness and transparency in it's entirety, why wouldn't you by default be against cryptography ? This paradox is where the rubber hits the road on legislation like this and likely why the average Joe Smith doesn't really care about the cause. Because realistically, it all sounds suspicious. To a law abiding citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.

[Duwensatzaj]

You already gave up your arms. Why are you surprised they’re coming for anything else they want?

[orangecat]

Give it time. The natural end state is that all computing devices available to the general public are dumb framebuffers that are only capable of displaying a UI running in the cloud. No more privacy for anything; even if the cloud OS lets you run Linux in a VM, everything you do will be visible and constantly monitored for suspicious activity.