It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…)
I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.
While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
I think highly-educated people have a tendency to overestimate their expertise outside of their field, and especially in different subfields of the field they're expert in. Many (though certainly not all) low-IQ people tend to delegate to experts; although they often don't know enough to choose the right ones.
Look at HN politics. It's still the same as other kinds of politics, just with the issues swapped. We exchange "they're trying to take away our guns" for "they're trying to take away our root access", with basically the same arguments.
>> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.
> then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I think the problem that Waterluvian's is getting at is precisely that WYSIWYG politics is taken as the preferred choice without understanding the implications that make it not actually work. For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
> If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
If the quality of those two goes up, hopefully people start employing second-order thinking and beyond and realize that WYSIWYG politics may not be what it seems to be at the surface level.
> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.
If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.
Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Be careful. Some actors are deliberately muddying the waters of good and bad. For example, vaccines are pretty good, but some groups want you to be unsure if they're good or bad.
Precisely. Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference. The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
“Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
> Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference.
This is an extremely dangerous idea without being counterbalanced by fact that reality is often complex and good actors want to be honest about it.
Bad actors desire confusion is closer to being accurate. But bad actors also often oversimplify to rouse people to some politically beneficial but ultimately harmful action.
It can go both ways. Bad actors can simplify because it leads to indifference, by way of generalizations. "black" = "bad", "illegal immigrant" = "gang member". It's how racism works.
> The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.
This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.
Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious.
Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views to mistreat and humiliate others without consequence, that doesn't seem right either.
It doesn't seem right for the men to have beat him up for defending himself. They thought they were being moral, but they weren't.
That is a good example actually. The reason women are typically not as harshly criticized for hitting men is that they are almost certainly physically weaker. It's also the reason why men typically feel safe with a woman walking behind them in a dark alley while the other way around it's terrifying. That's not to say we shouldn't criticize the woman for hitting the man, just that men have the onus to show more restraint in such a situation.
Now for all we know the woman was physically stronger than the man in the instance you're speaking of (doubtful) and hitting her back wasn't that big a deal or even deserved. But as a societal norm we should be dissuading men from hitting women even if they're hit first otherwise you might often get a major injury in exchange for a minor sting. And it's a FAFO situation when you break these norms.
But I find it hard to see the nuance in much of the political nonsense going on right now (which is what I thought you were speaking of). Mass surveillance that doesn't seem to offer any security in return? Obviously bad. Things like measles, the screwworm, and cyclospora coming back due to political posturing or just plain ignorance? Obviously bad. Again I don't see how you could possibly be on the fence about a lot of the politics going on right now unless it's benefiting you in some way.
Not all politics mind you, I'm sure you can find some nuggets of good in there somewhere too. But if you're having a tough time determining the bad things currently as prices for everything are rising and the world is in constant turmoil I want whatever drugs you're taking.
Speaking of perspective and nuance: violent self defense is justified to defend one's safety. But a slap by, let's be honest, a relatively physically weak person is not a credible threat to safety. It's just an insult.
On the other hand, physical abuse of women by men is much more common and dangerous, and there's a utilitarian argument that society should treat it more harshly. Not saying the guys beating up the other guy were moral, but it's easy to argue they were closer.
> Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
This continuously plays out in our political systems. Good actors cannot fight the deluge of evil of their opponents, who are free to lie cheat and steal.
Good binds its own hands. For good to win, it must act with even greater evil. At which point, it becomes the very thing that it tried to defeat.
> Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
The assumption here is that being Evil is advantageous. It's obviously advantageous to personal gain, but the relevant thing is whether it's advantageous to staying in power, and then the system you want to design is the one where it isn't.
Notice also that it isn't binary. You can make it harder to be Evil and then have less of it even if you never have none.
This is assuming a short game. Defection over cooperation dominates short games, but evil can't trust evil in longer play. And I would hope that the default desire is a long game..
Tangent: I think this illuminates why I enjoy the “evil” route in many RPGs. My evil party doesn’t have to be moustache twirling. They can pick and choose their evil moments. But a good party feels more constrained.
Rarely a great RPG forces my good party to make difficult decisions.
Funny enough Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I never finished for obvious reasons, actually had a few few moments with pretty thick gray areas where I had to really sit down and think about my decisions. It’s interesting looking back and recalling that mess as one of the only strong examples.
Ive noticed that when people say we need more education or we need to teach critical thinking or something like that often what they really mean is
"It is obvious my position is the intelligent one and those who have a different position are ignorant and foolish and if they just knew more, or were smarter they'd obviously really then superiority of what I advocate for over whatever they believe now."
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
I'm not gonna make any point about actual politics, but It's a fact that political beliefs heavily correlate with education so there's at least some truth in his point
But I have also observed educated people supporting some parties, ideas or policies rather mindlessly seemingly as a matter of differentiating themselves from the opinions and interests of uneducated.
It's correlation, it's not direct cause and effect. The average guess of a group of people is closer to the true value than most of the individual guesses.
What if the people who are part of the problem are people who point out the people who are part of the problem? What if there isn’t an actual problem beyond that? Like, things are, you know, just okay?
I think it’s more a consequence of the wealthy elites being one hundred percent comfortable with lying to get their way and not caring for the reaction from the rest of us. You know, sociopaths.
I could imagine true WYSIWYG politics, but it would need a very different temporal organizational structure than current politics.
Currwntly, politicians each have a series of meetings over time with different parties (constituents, lobbyists, domain experts, coalition members) and then at some point one of them drafts and tables a law (that's probably already been informally planned for ages among those in the know) and others vote for it (where many of those votes have probably also been informally pre-arranged for ages.)
To get WYSIWYG, every bit of all of those meetings would need to occur in the open. And likely the only way to practically accomplish that, in a “nothing up my sleeve” manner (i.e. to guarantee that there were no meetings outside of the official ones), would be to have all those meetings occur contiguously as part of one long recorded session in one place, with everyone who wants “a seat at the table” needing to operate on that session’s schedule; and where the politicians involved (i.e. those everyone else is there to influence) have a political career that starts and ends with that single session.
In other words, basically do the papal-election thing, or the sequestered-jury-trial thing: lock all the concerned parties (politicians + PAC leaders + lobbyists + etc) in a building together, and don’t let them out until they make a year’s worth of law. (But unlike either of those—record everything! Don’t allow any two people to be in the same room together without a camera.)
Only one of the things that makes what you're describing unworkable is that "concerned parties" include arbitrary members of the public. Anyone who can't afford to spend a year sequestered in a room can't so much as write a letter to their representative?
Another is that they would just agree on what to do before the official start of the process. Or learn to speak in code. Or pass notes to each other off camera etc.
The closest approximation that might actually do something would be to require the final version of any piece of legislation to be published a year before the final vote. Then the product of a backroom deal can't be enacted before anyone else has a chance to mount an opposition.
Another would be to make it easier to repeal things than to pass them. A lot of current corruption relies on the misfeature that we apply the same purposely-arduous process intended to inhibit bad things from passing as the requirement to un-pass existing bad things, so then if they can corrupt the entire process once they only have to maintain control of a single branch to prevent it from being rolled back.
You are quite right. Some laws have a pre-determined break-point; others are to introduce legislation that is not as severe initially, but will become more severe lateron. Age sniffing is one such case. A few EU countries rushed forward; then they are pulled back by the EU commission. The next step will be restrictive measures for all EU countries - I am certain about that part.
> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.
Well, it wouldn't work for politicians that pick decisions based on what end benfit they get. Would work fine for people. Would need actually honest media tho
Canada is so lucky to have someone like Michael Geist. He's been reporting on and doing in depth investigations on privacy invasions for about 2 decades now.
>As of May 2026, the following 76 participants have signed the treaty: Algeria, Angola, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Columbia, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Czechia, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, European Union, Fiji, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Ireland, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, Thailand, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
Some wonderful countries here: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China. Thankfully the US hasn't signed it and probably won't because it thinks itself too above international law.
>The State of Qatar does not consider itself bound by the provisions of Articles (16), (15), and (14) of the Convention, as they contradict the provisions of Islamic Sharia, national legislation, and the social and cultural values of the State of Qatar.
These provisions [being](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...) Article 14: Offences related to online child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material, Article 15: Solicitation or grooming for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child, Article 16: Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images.
I am trying to figure out what this means, as I am aware the Prophet married a 9 year old, but Google assures me the minimum age of marriage in Qatar is 16 with parental approval, and it's rare, and I thought Islam required no images of really anything at all, much less females of any age who are to be in burqas when in public.
True, but there is still a general expectation that if you sign you intend to make a good faith effort to ratify. There being plenty of exceptions (a country not engaging with int law in good faith! How shocking) doesnt change that i think most of the time signers do try to ratify.
About "cybercrime" in general my feeling is there is a status quo between the criminals and countries. Something like we do not take down your economy and you do not go after us.
I know for a fact that even the most powerful organizations are powerless to have some relatively unsophisticated group caught and put behind bar.
The idea we would need conventions to start acting is a joke.
Distantly related: similar to the local councils here in the UK that don't go after the obvious and prolific drug-front barbers and takeaways, because they pay business rates (local business tax) and probably employee taxes too for just enough staff for it to be believable.
When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them?
For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.
With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?
It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Perhaps something like a mandatory "Do not track" option for all data supported services, where you can "buyout" your data (at market rate) to prevent it from being sold.
I'm not pissed about having to pay for things. I'm pissed about having to pay, and then the thing being shit. Maybe if they have to earn their income they'll actually work hard.
>It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.
>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).
The same way we dont want smart people on juries, smart people in government is haram. especially people with technical educations who care about privacy. very haram!
Objectively, the left has this very strong ideology of “education will fix everything, and until then we know what’s best for the masses”
This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.
Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.
Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am
Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.
Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.
The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.
An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.
I think it's because there hasn't been a widespread reckoning moment for the privacy apathetic yet.
For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.
So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.
The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.
When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.
Some left libertarian positions support collective action to dismantle hierarchical power systems. It’s just difficult (impossible?) to maintain this sort of group orientation at scale; it inevitably devolves into factional power seeking/domination politics.
You're referring to various strains of anarcho-libertarianism, correct? I'm more familiar with geolibertarianism as a left-leaning libertarian faction, which doesn't have these stability problems, but does have a huge initial-conditions problem (it's nearly impossible to institute a land value tax in a society that doesn't already have one because of the effect it has on land prices, which are a primary storage form of wealth).
Yes, but those are the largest left-libertarian groups right now. I don’t think that Georgism would have these issues but you’re also correct about the difficulty of implementation. (It is garnering some interest in the UK, although I fear they will botch any implementation due to the immense power of the landowner class there.)
And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.
Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.
And then when a libertarian option finds itself getting mainstream, it quickly gets co-opted by authoritarian market forces, because they are so powerful. See how Git got coopted by GitHub, and half the stuff AWS does.
Frankly? Never. And the root cause is because majority of people have access to the internet now. The small voice of people who care about some stuff is completely overshadowed by billions of people scrolling through YT Shorts / Reels / TT.
As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.
Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.
What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?
One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed.
Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?)
I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible legislation?
It’s a multiparty system that was recently in a minority configuration but through a fairly interesting series of floor crossings and by elections to fill open seats the Liberal party under PM Mark Carney has obtained a majority which more or less allows them complete dominance over the legislative process.
An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.
As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will
Make them backtrack.
And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence
So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)
Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.
> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.
Our prime minister pretty much has full and complete control of the legislative and executive branches and even the appointment of judges. If you vote against your party then you can be kicked out. The whip is pretty absolute.
>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)
I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.
The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley
As a libertarian myself - these people are fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights wherein when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. The philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.
Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.
There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.
I dont call "just anyone" I disagree with that. I call it a specific libertarian millionaires and republican party as is now. Because they fit the definition. And have fascist goals.
I disagree with many other people who dont happen to be like that.
The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context.
And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.
In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.
And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.
Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.
Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.
I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.
Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.
One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.
I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.
And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.
While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.
I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.
I wish this was setup like a certificate authority so only the government is able to unmask an individual, but it's going to be pictures of government ID.
I don't think the government themselves are prepared for the amount of identity theft that is going to follow mass collection of government documents.
"We wish it could have a better solution, but you all just couldn't behave" is often the argument in these debates. You seem to be dissatisfied with it, but tacitly accept it as the only way. Let me put a finger on why I will never agree with it:
1. The current situation isn't that apocalyptic.
2. The alternative is so much more horrifying.
The first is a weaker argument because there is always a bottomless bag for the opponents to reach into and grab counterexamples. But none of these things are new. It's been 30 years since the average person could freely communicate with anyone in the world over the internet. 20 or so since the maturing of online scams. Probably at least 15 since nation-level actors started using the internet for propaganda purposes. The elephant in the room is AI, but I feel like AI use has diminishing returns, much like in any other fields. It offers a quick boost, but it's not infinitely scalable. The internet can't be completely taken over by scams and garbage in a way where everyone just keeps consuming it and goes crazy in their own ways. It's almost an ecosystem - pour too much garbage in, and you'll see people retreating into private communities and self-enforce trust, no universal carding necessary. Right now it's just tech people doing this on a large scale, but at a certain point of misinformation and incomprehensibility, treating the internet as untrustworthy by default would just become a mainstream view. It would likely fracture into massive social networks with strong identity verification and small communities that enforce trust in their own ways. As much as I don't like most private businesses, but your suggestion that they could take upon the role of the verifier is more palatable to me because that still leaves air in the room for small, private communities, and because businesses don't have perfect communication with each other or the government, preventing the universal tracking of everything.
The second argument is the real one. Technology would enable governments to track absolutely everything about everyone if we let them. Now this is a space where AI actually provides a novel use case - if before you had to have suspicion about a specific person and have someone look into them, AI will enable them to inspect everything and then form suspicion or document undesirable behaviors by default. It will be like having a personal private investigator that sees everything you do, being on the lookout for anything unusual 24/7. Online identity verification is nothing like having a SIN or a driver's license, because those two are used in specific contexts and don't enable tracking-by-default. The internet is used for ALL communications, so automated tracking of it is tracking of everything we do and say. Instead of showing your driver's license to the officer one time in a defined spot, the officer would come to you because your driver's license is etched into your skin for all to see at all times, and they're concerned about your recent movements that were automatically recorded and processed by a billion cameras. It would be a world without secrets, a world of perfect knowledge and ruthless enforcement. I don't want to live in it. I'm fine with the current world, thank you.
I agree with much of what you say, except the timing is a bit off. It's really only been 20 to 15 years since the "average person" even knew what that "Internet thing" was. It was the early 2000s, and later where it really took off for Average Joe.
The problem here though, isn't what you or I think. I expressed dislike, as you do. The problem is, what's the average person think? And more importantly, those being elected to legislative bodies? They see this recent change, this change that's really only been around for a few turns of the legislative cycle, as complete lawlessness. And they don't really see or understand issues with tracking.
And when I talk to the average mobile phone owner about tracking, their eyes glaze over. So there will be no help here, either.
So tracking will happen, at least that's the framework I'm talking about. If not, well then this discussion is meaningless. But I have seen courts push back over and over about governmental tracking, about police going too far in their tracking, yet I have seen very little, comparatively, push back about tracking on the corporate side. And we need to be honest here, in both cases private enterprise will manage the infrastructure which handles tracking, it's just who handles the "who is this person" portion. State or corporate.
I know you just want it to remain as it is, but I'm sorry that's over. It's not as if I'm advocating this change, I'm saying it's going to happen. There's a difference. I don't want a tornado to touch down near my house, but I'm not going to close my eyes if it's about to happen.
If you don't want this to happen, you're going to have to engage, or someone is, those two bodies of people I mentioned. Those elected to legislative bodies. And the Average Joe. From what I can see, the first wants this, the second doesn't even understand any part of the discussion.
this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.
> However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
The other side would make this exact same point about vaccine proponents. How can we differentiate one argument from the other?
Well, because the issue with vaccine doubt, is misinformation. It's disinformation, spread for either profit (followers on youtube), or foreign actors working to reduce the cohesion of the West's societies.
Russia? China? Iran? None of these countries, even together, stand a chance militarily against the West. But if you cannot beat them militarily, you must weaken them from within. So confusion. Distrust. Pour fuel on the fire of any differences between sectors of a society. If you can weaken your political enemy, they it ceases to become a threat. Even better if you can trick your enemy into fighting itself!
It's no secret that a lot of countries are engaged in disinformation campaigns against the West. If you can cause your competitor to have plagues, when they were preventable? Well, that ties up resources, reduces productivity, and so forth.
I honestly believe that much of ID verification on the Internet is about this. A healthy society can handle outliers, handle internally created disinformation. Not so, if 1 guy in a foreign country seems like 1000 youtube channels. And you can see this everywhere. A video with a TTS voice, which is now progressing to entirely crafted video from scratch. Now anyone from China can look like a US citizen, going on about the woes of vaccination.
But if you can identify every person, and they can be sued for slander, libel, or criminal acts? Then you're back to normal, internal, citizen protest. EG, your normal crazies. And it can't be stated enough, there are a lot of marginals. Those "on the fence". If they hear enough nutty stuff, they move into almond territory too.
In the end, China, Russia, Iran won't be truthful or play ball, or will undermine attempts with fake IDs willfully issued, so they'll just get cut of entirely. The West will likely sign treaties.
So. Identity verification, is actually an answer to the vaccine issue. After all, we didn't have this level of issue until crazy Internet posters caused it. Although, to be fair, Elvis Presley is who helped convince youth to get the original polio vaccinations.
One way to look at it, is like driver's licenses. Before them, there was no way to stop a person from legally driving on the road. Take it away, and now they could be fined, jailed, etc for driving "without a license". A few bad actors were just unrepentant, and suddenly everyone could be carded, ID required, just to get around. This is like that. A bad result, eg ID on the net, but the attempt is likely to solve 100 internet pains.
I think if we have any sense, we'll come up with a best-privacy-laden method to allow this to happen. Because I cannot see how it will go away. If we can steer it, make it palatable. make sure it cannot be used by industry to track us, etc., it would be at least a partial win.
It feels like there’s this weird layer to domestic and international politics where you do a lot of signalling to one audience while simultaneously winking at other audiences that you’re not actually serious. (I can never tell who is getting winked at…)
I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work. The Ned Stark character that is righteous and right and quickly meets the headman’s axe of the game theory and brinksmanship of everyone else.
While I agree this is the case, I think this is a consequence of low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse. If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
I'm not sure whether that's the case.
I think highly-educated people have a tendency to overestimate their expertise outside of their field, and especially in different subfields of the field they're expert in. Many (though certainly not all) low-IQ people tend to delegate to experts; although they often don't know enough to choose the right ones.
Look at HN politics. It's still the same as other kinds of politics, just with the issues swapped. We exchange "they're trying to take away our guns" for "they're trying to take away our root access", with basically the same arguments.
>> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.
> then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
I think the problem that Waterluvian's is getting at is precisely that WYSIWYG politics is taken as the preferred choice without understanding the implications that make it not actually work. For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
> If the quality of those two goes up, then WYSIWYG politics will emerge as a preferred choice.
If the quality of those two goes up, hopefully people start employing second-order thinking and beyond and realize that WYSIWYG politics may not be what it seems to be at the surface level.
I think you're talking past each other:
> For example, continuing to accept anything that remotely passes as protect-the-children politics without understanding that the consequences are worse than the benefits, even for the children themselves.
Passing a censorship/surveillance bill using the pretext of protecting children is the opposite of WYSIWYG. The true motive is building an apparatus to use to enforce other authoritarian policies and protecting children is the Trojan horse.
If people were better informed about second order effects then that wouldn't work because they would see through the consequences when a pretext is being presented for a bad idea, and then the politicians who attempt it would be more often punished than rewarded. The tactic of lying to people would happen less often because it would be selected against when the number of people who see through you is enough to boot you out of office.
Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
The more I learn, and the more versed I become with society, the harder and harder it becomes to see what is "good" and what is "bad".
The most confident I ever was that I was "obviously correct" was when I was 20.
Be careful. Some actors are deliberately muddying the waters of good and bad. For example, vaccines are pretty good, but some groups want you to be unsure if they're good or bad.
Precisely. Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference. The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
“Unions can be corrupt” or “You don’t need unions to get your voice heard” is the kind of rhetoric that leads to disinterest in unions over the years.
> Bad actors desire complexity because it leads to indifference.
This is an extremely dangerous idea without being counterbalanced by fact that reality is often complex and good actors want to be honest about it.
Bad actors desire confusion is closer to being accurate. But bad actors also often oversimplify to rouse people to some politically beneficial but ultimately harmful action.
It can go both ways. Bad actors can simplify because it leads to indifference, by way of generalizations. "black" = "bad", "illegal immigrant" = "gang member". It's how racism works.
> The “good” side therefore needs to fight that complexity with simplicity and empathy.
Empathy, yes. Simplicity doesn't normally lead to empathy; complexity does.
I read that left-wing people are consistently found to be much more able to process conflicting ideas than right-wing people are.
40 years of experience has taught me that absolutely no one is less able to process conflicting ideas than left wing people are, and it's not close.
Political extremes will be extreme. Centrists can hold both.
AFAIK this generally isn't true. About the centrists, I mean. Most self-identified centrists are just moderate right-wingers.
I think "unions are always good" is worse than "unions can be corrupt or good, here's how to push for good"
This reads somewhat like the older I get the less morals I have. If you have a hard time seeing the wild amount of bad in the world right now you're probably profiting from it in some way.
Or you lack perspective.
Also, it's not about not being able to see any bad, but some things that obviously seemed correct, stop seeming so obvious.
Reminds me of that clip where a man in some TV show gets slapped by the woman host and he slaps her back. Then a bunch of men from the audience come to beat him up. It's one thing to have the moral "never hit a woman" and "protect women", but if women abuse these views to mistreat and humiliate others without consequence, that doesn't seem right either.
It doesn't seem right for the men to have beat him up for defending himself. They thought they were being moral, but they weren't.
Sometimes moral views can require nuance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4akMaeZ0-k&t=58
That is a good example actually. The reason women are typically not as harshly criticized for hitting men is that they are almost certainly physically weaker. It's also the reason why men typically feel safe with a woman walking behind them in a dark alley while the other way around it's terrifying. That's not to say we shouldn't criticize the woman for hitting the man, just that men have the onus to show more restraint in such a situation.
Now for all we know the woman was physically stronger than the man in the instance you're speaking of (doubtful) and hitting her back wasn't that big a deal or even deserved. But as a societal norm we should be dissuading men from hitting women even if they're hit first otherwise you might often get a major injury in exchange for a minor sting. And it's a FAFO situation when you break these norms.
But I find it hard to see the nuance in much of the political nonsense going on right now (which is what I thought you were speaking of). Mass surveillance that doesn't seem to offer any security in return? Obviously bad. Things like measles, the screwworm, and cyclospora coming back due to political posturing or just plain ignorance? Obviously bad. Again I don't see how you could possibly be on the fence about a lot of the politics going on right now unless it's benefiting you in some way.
Not all politics mind you, I'm sure you can find some nuggets of good in there somewhere too. But if you're having a tough time determining the bad things currently as prices for everything are rising and the world is in constant turmoil I want whatever drugs you're taking.
Speaking of perspective and nuance: violent self defense is justified to defend one's safety. But a slap by, let's be honest, a relatively physically weak person is not a credible threat to safety. It's just an insult.
On the other hand, physical abuse of women by men is much more common and dangerous, and there's a utilitarian argument that society should treat it more harshly. Not saying the guys beating up the other guy were moral, but it's easy to argue they were closer.
> Unfortunately, both low education for the general public and low quality of the public discourse exist by design.
Absolutely. Bread and circuses isn't a new idea.
>The only possible way to remedy this is to maximize your own ability to exert power, possibly by becoming massively rich, and then hope it doesn't corrupt you enough along the way such that you can still enact good in the end.
Points for the doing good in the end. But it's a rule in hell/serve in heaven issue, if you first need to create hell with your quest for power you have failed the objective of doing good in the end.
If you have a binary view, Good will always lose.
Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
This continuously plays out in our political systems. Good actors cannot fight the deluge of evil of their opponents, who are free to lie cheat and steal.
Good binds its own hands. For good to win, it must act with even greater evil. At which point, it becomes the very thing that it tried to defeat.
> Evil can act Good, but Good cannot act Evil. Evil has that advantage over Good that cannot be matched.
The assumption here is that being Evil is advantageous. It's obviously advantageous to personal gain, but the relevant thing is whether it's advantageous to staying in power, and then the system you want to design is the one where it isn't.
Notice also that it isn't binary. You can make it harder to be Evil and then have less of it even if you never have none.
This is assuming a short game. Defection over cooperation dominates short games, but evil can't trust evil in longer play. And I would hope that the default desire is a long game..
Tangent: I think this illuminates why I enjoy the “evil” route in many RPGs. My evil party doesn’t have to be moustache twirling. They can pick and choose their evil moments. But a good party feels more constrained.
Rarely a great RPG forces my good party to make difficult decisions.
Funny enough Mass Effect: Andromeda, which I never finished for obvious reasons, actually had a few few moments with pretty thick gray areas where I had to really sit down and think about my decisions. It’s interesting looking back and recalling that mess as one of the only strong examples.
My favorite was one of the KOTOR games where helping an NPC got you dark side points for taking the opportunity for the NPC to help themselves.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain. But there's a third option, too: to die a nobody.
>I only wish I knew of possible ways for us to get there :(
Entropy. Things will dissolve enough that eventually someone will make changes. It takes a long time though, this is likely a feature.
Ive noticed that when people say we need more education or we need to teach critical thinking or something like that often what they really mean is "It is obvious my position is the intelligent one and those who have a different position are ignorant and foolish and if they just knew more, or were smarter they'd obviously really then superiority of what I advocate for over whatever they believe now."
Which is just the saying as "I'm right you're wrong" without adding any value. Most politically contentious issues have at their root a difference of value or tradeoffs, and it is only by understanding that we can really have civil discourse and reduce the polarization. And to be clear if you believe that the difference in value is simply between evil and good, e.g. everyone who belongs to Party A loves puppies and wants to bring happiness and love where anyone who votes for candidate B wants to revive Rasputin and unleash the legions of hell. You are part of the problem. (And if you're immediate response to this is to point out how Bernie/Trunp/Tredau/Harambee actually does want to feed puppies to Morgoth you're part of the problem)
I'm not gonna make any point about actual politics, but It's a fact that political beliefs heavily correlate with education so there's at least some truth in his point
But I have also observed educated people supporting some parties, ideas or policies rather mindlessly seemingly as a matter of differentiating themselves from the opinions and interests of uneducated.
It's correlation, it's not direct cause and effect. The average guess of a group of people is closer to the true value than most of the individual guesses.
This is definitely the position Morgoth wants you to take.
What if the people who are part of the problem are people who point out the people who are part of the problem? What if there isn’t an actual problem beyond that? Like, things are, you know, just okay?
I think it’s more a consequence of the wealthy elites being one hundred percent comfortable with lying to get their way and not caring for the reaction from the rest of us. You know, sociopaths.
I could imagine true WYSIWYG politics, but it would need a very different temporal organizational structure than current politics.
Currwntly, politicians each have a series of meetings over time with different parties (constituents, lobbyists, domain experts, coalition members) and then at some point one of them drafts and tables a law (that's probably already been informally planned for ages among those in the know) and others vote for it (where many of those votes have probably also been informally pre-arranged for ages.)
To get WYSIWYG, every bit of all of those meetings would need to occur in the open. And likely the only way to practically accomplish that, in a “nothing up my sleeve” manner (i.e. to guarantee that there were no meetings outside of the official ones), would be to have all those meetings occur contiguously as part of one long recorded session in one place, with everyone who wants “a seat at the table” needing to operate on that session’s schedule; and where the politicians involved (i.e. those everyone else is there to influence) have a political career that starts and ends with that single session.
In other words, basically do the papal-election thing, or the sequestered-jury-trial thing: lock all the concerned parties (politicians + PAC leaders + lobbyists + etc) in a building together, and don’t let them out until they make a year’s worth of law. (But unlike either of those—record everything! Don’t allow any two people to be in the same room together without a camera.)
Only one of the things that makes what you're describing unworkable is that "concerned parties" include arbitrary members of the public. Anyone who can't afford to spend a year sequestered in a room can't so much as write a letter to their representative?
Another is that they would just agree on what to do before the official start of the process. Or learn to speak in code. Or pass notes to each other off camera etc.
The closest approximation that might actually do something would be to require the final version of any piece of legislation to be published a year before the final vote. Then the product of a backroom deal can't be enacted before anyone else has a chance to mount an opposition.
Another would be to make it easier to repeal things than to pass them. A lot of current corruption relies on the misfeature that we apply the same purposely-arduous process intended to inhibit bad things from passing as the requirement to un-pass existing bad things, so then if they can corrupt the entire process once they only have to maintain control of a single branch to prevent it from being rolled back.
You are quite right. Some laws have a pre-determined break-point; others are to introduce legislation that is not as severe initially, but will become more severe lateron. Age sniffing is one such case. A few EU countries rushed forward; then they are pulled back by the EU commission. The next step will be restrictive measures for all EU countries - I am certain about that part.
> I feel like WYSIWYG politics is what most of us want, but probably doesn’t actually work.
Well, it wouldn't work for politicians that pick decisions based on what end benfit they get. Would work fine for people. Would need actually honest media tho
Isn’t it very ironic to post this under a pseudonym?
Which by definition contains some signalling that deviates from WYSIWYG.
Is GP running for political office here on HN or something?
Otherwise I can't really see your point.
Well, without a public identity we cannot know, they could be running for their local elections
Full disclosure: my name is Chip Dipson and I’m running for TV Remote Comptroller in the living room.
I’m running on a campaign of “PUT IT THE %#^* BACK IN THE SAME PLACE EVERY TIME WHEN YOU’RE DONE WITH IT.”
Canada is so lucky to have someone like Michael Geist. He's been reporting on and doing in depth investigations on privacy invasions for about 2 decades now.
Yes, and I'd include Cory Doctorow in the list of Canadians paying attention and writing about it.
Back to 2024: "Holy CRAP the UN Cybercrime Treaty is a nightmare"
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-07-23...
It would be luckier if the government actually listened to him.
>As of May 2026, the following 76 participants have signed the treaty: Algeria, Angola, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Columbia, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Czechia, North Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, European Union, Fiji, France, Ghana, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Ireland, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Laos, Libya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nauru, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Sweden, Thailand, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, Tanzania, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
Some wonderful countries here: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China. Thankfully the US hasn't signed it and probably won't because it thinks itself too above international law.
Interestingly, Qatar signed it with [the reservation](https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...) that
>The State of Qatar does not consider itself bound by the provisions of Articles (16), (15), and (14) of the Convention, as they contradict the provisions of Islamic Sharia, national legislation, and the social and cultural values of the State of Qatar.
These provisions [being](https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/cybercrime/convention/text/co...) Article 14: Offences related to online child sexual abuse or child sexual exploitation material, Article 15: Solicitation or grooming for the purpose of committing a sexual offence against a child, Article 16: Non-consensual dissemination of intimate images.
I am trying to figure out what this means, as I am aware the Prophet married a 9 year old, but Google assures me the minimum age of marriage in Qatar is 16 with parental approval, and it's rare, and I thought Islam required no images of really anything at all, much less females of any age who are to be in burqas when in public.
So has Australia, the EU, and the UK [0].
That said, being a signatory has limited impact as long as it isn't ratified.
[0] - https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mt...
Yeah, but normally when you sign something its because you intend to ratify it in short order.
Not true. Plenty of UN treaties have been signed but stalled on ratification.
True, but there is still a general expectation that if you sign you intend to make a good faith effort to ratify. There being plenty of exceptions (a country not engaging with int law in good faith! How shocking) doesnt change that i think most of the time signers do try to ratify.
> the EU, and the UK
The EU has their own cybercrime treaty: https://commission.europa.eu/law/cross-border-cases/judicial...
But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies based in the EU.
> But you'll never hear a peep from "no logs at all costs" VPN companies based in the EU
It’s actually a fairly common topic discussed by privacy advocates, including VPN companies
403 error.
Now that's concerning. Europe doesn't want me to know what the law is in the place where I am.
E-Evidence sharing is just a subset of the broader UN Cybercrime treaty which has been signed.
Canada signs most UN stuff
About "cybercrime" in general my feeling is there is a status quo between the criminals and countries. Something like we do not take down your economy and you do not go after us.
I know for a fact that even the most powerful organizations are powerless to have some relatively unsophisticated group caught and put behind bar.
The idea we would need conventions to start acting is a joke.
Distantly related: similar to the local councils here in the UK that don't go after the obvious and prolific drug-front barbers and takeaways, because they pay business rates (local business tax) and probably employee taxes too for just enough staff for it to be believable.
When are we going to see substantive legislation advancing digital rights instead of chipping away at them?
For the US, we need a new bill of rights, a bill of digital rights that constitutionally protects right of repair, right to root our own devices, right to be free from dragnet surveillance, right to general purpose computing, and the right to access speech without government-mandated age or identity checks.
With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Thomas Massie introduced the best privacy bill I have seen. I know nothing about political strategy but i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor. Will it even get voted on if the house speaker doesn't want it?
https://www.surveillanceaccountability.com/
>Warrant required Government must go before a judge to access your metadata, location, or financial records — just like searching your home.
>No Data Shopping Agencies can no longer simply purchase data from brokers to bypass the warrant process.
>Face recognition banned Warrantless facial recognition and AI biometric surveillance in public spaces is prohibited.
>You Can Sue Private right of action means if the government violates your rights, you have legal recourse.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8470...
It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Perhaps something like a mandatory "Do not track" option for all data supported services, where you can "buyout" your data (at market rate) to prevent it from being sold.
I'm not pissed about having to pay for things. I'm pissed about having to pay, and then the thing being shit. Maybe if they have to earn their income they'll actually work hard.
>It's dumb that private buyers can buy data profiles but the government can not. It leaves a million loop-holes for government to backdoor a suspects data.
Okay, but what's so bad about getting something positive done? It doesn't have to be comprehensive to apply to data brokers to be an improvement. That would bring in the data broker lobby and big tech. This bill would cement protections for Americans from their government.
>It's also going to piss off almost all of society if their data cannot be monetized, because pretty much all notable services will go from free to paid overnight.
Does it ban data brokers and selling data? From the website it seems to be focused on government privacy invasions. Its not a GDPR although we need that too (hopefully a better version).
>i would think a democrat would have been a better cosponsor
Why? Where is any equivalent measures coming from the US left?
It is because that’s how people identify as Democrats want them to behave? There seems to be a rift there.
Massie and Wyden are both anomalies in their respective parties. There’s not really any “privacy caucus” at a national level right now, to my dismay.
There were more people willing to stand up for privacy after 9/11 during the “with us or against us” GWOT, which really says something.
And Massie was kicked out after the most money was spent in any house primary and Trump heavily campaigned for the puppet candidate.
It's a super Trump-loving district with mostly elderly turnout, kind of crazy they had Massie for so long, him being a good guy and smart and all.
The same way we dont want smart people on juries, smart people in government is haram. especially people with technical educations who care about privacy. very haram!
You forgot the police with its explicit maximum IQ limits.
Because Congress doesn't work if an issue becomes partisan.
Objectively, the left has this very strong ideology of “education will fix everything, and until then we know what’s best for the masses”
This went too far with the whole woke thing, and resulted in 2 non-consecutive terms of trump, handing the right a litany of power they had no idea how to wield, and they hit every stupid branch falling down the failure tree.
Education isn’t the answer, dictating “I know what’s best” isn’t the answer, doge wasn’t the answer, starting random wars isn’t the answer.
Maybe by process of elimination we can find the answers. I am Hopeful that if the left gets a foothold again in the coming midterms they do not repeat their past mistakes.
Hopeful != optimistic. Lot of angry people out for blood.
Nah, gonna be populist idiots from the other side.
What is "the whole woke thing"?
Whatever the media turned it into to get trump elected.
I imagine you know what “the whole woke thing” is referencing and are instead looking to have an unproductive debate. I have no interest in that.
No, I really don't know what you mean by "the whole woke thing". Since it's load-bearing in your argument, could you explain it?
No. I already said I wasn’t interested in that debate.
It's load-bearing in your argument, so does that mean you withdraw your argument?
The effort to erode privacy is so much greater than the effort to preserve it. Governments around the world are like a dog with a bone when it comes to increasing surveillance.
An apathetic and ill informed public doesn’t help matters.
I think it's because there hasn't been a widespread reckoning moment for the privacy apathetic yet.
For the average person, 20 years of data profiles and tracking has given them tons of services that they have never paid a penny for. Something totally non-existent 30 years ago when you needed to pay money for everything.
So to them, they are getting free services, and the worst that has come of it is seeing the same Dawn ad four times a day.
The libertarian technologist space specifically prefers technological solutions because they don't depend upon fallible and corruptible humans implementing the laws. This is the ideological wing that gave us the PC, encryption, the Gnu project, free software, the Internet, P2P filesharing, Bittorrent, social media, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tor, Freenet, Mullvad and other VPNs, Monero, etc.
When it comes to laws, libertarianism faces an internal contradiction. A libertarian believes that they shouldn't be able to control other people; therefore, if a company wants to make an unrepairable unrootable surveillance device and the population consents to using it, the libertarian believes that it is not their right to interfere. The only thing they can do is create a better repairable rootable device, which is how we got GCC, Linux, Ubuntu, Firefox, Graphene, etc.
Some left libertarian positions support collective action to dismantle hierarchical power systems. It’s just difficult (impossible?) to maintain this sort of group orientation at scale; it inevitably devolves into factional power seeking/domination politics.
You're referring to various strains of anarcho-libertarianism, correct? I'm more familiar with geolibertarianism as a left-leaning libertarian faction, which doesn't have these stability problems, but does have a huge initial-conditions problem (it's nearly impossible to institute a land value tax in a society that doesn't already have one because of the effect it has on land prices, which are a primary storage form of wealth).
Yes, but those are the largest left-libertarian groups right now. I don’t think that Georgism would have these issues but you’re also correct about the difficulty of implementation. (It is garnering some interest in the UK, although I fear they will botch any implementation due to the immense power of the landowner class there.)
And yet the company can afford to spend an extra $0.10 per sale on marketing, which quickly drives the free option to the fringes because marketing drives almost all purchasing decisions.
Sad but true. Many libertarian options are comfortable being on the fringes, though, and just build for other libertarians. They lack economies of scale, but software's natural economies of scale (zero cost of reproduction, combined with diminishing returns to complexity) can often make this economical anyway as long as your audience doesn't mind not having the absolute highest level of UX polish possible.
And then when a libertarian option finds itself getting mainstream, it quickly gets co-opted by authoritarian market forces, because they are so powerful. See how Git got coopted by GitHub, and half the stuff AWS does.
Frankly? Never. And the root cause is because majority of people have access to the internet now. The small voice of people who care about some stuff is completely overshadowed by billions of people scrolling through YT Shorts / Reels / TT.
We don't need a "new" bill of rights. If they don't respect the first one why do you think they'll respect the next one?
There's a different remedy for the current situation.
As a Canadian user of HN it's really frustrating to see a rare post about a Canadian subject be immediately dominated by a thread about American politics.
Twenty words into your post and you've pivoted to the US.
What mechanism or discussion can we have to encourage the users to show some restraint on this?
Do you have any thoughts on the bill?
One thing we can do is try to upvote the citizens of the country being discussed.
Or calls to action -- who does someone who's Canadian call to complain about this? (Their MP I presume?)
I'd also be curious, given you have a multiparty system and not our peculiar two party one, why you struggle so hard to get candidates from NDP elected who would probably not push such terrible legislation?
>given you have a multiparty system [... why you struggle so hard to...
Multiparty yes, but also first-past-the-post, which favours 2 dominant parties.
Aha, thanks for this.
It’s a multiparty system that was recently in a minority configuration but through a fairly interesting series of floor crossings and by elections to fill open seats the Liberal party under PM Mark Carney has obtained a majority which more or less allows them complete dominance over the legislative process.
An explanation as to why the NDP fail to gain any substantial power could fill an entire book but imho the overarching reason comes down to the demographic distribution of Canada and dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence in such a densely populated part of the country.
As for the subject at hand, I wish it would be so easy as to just call an elected official, but as I said above, with the Liberal control of parliament for the remainder of their term and their high support in the polls there’s nothing that will Make them backtrack.
And this speaks to what Waterluvian mentioned in another thread. Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec preventing the establishment of any lasting NDP influence
So the social democrats won't play nice with the social democrats who want to secede, to grossly oversimplify? :-)
Here in the states (and sorry to do the thing parent was complaining about), I've seen the same people who used to vilify Ralph Nader for splitting the vote melt down they're getting primaried by "extremists" -- the generation that brought us South Park and the Iraq War has grown up to be fragile as fuck.
> Too often with these kinds of surveillance laws the drive for them doesn’t seem to be originating by from the electorate, and it feels like this kind of stuff has an exogenous source and is meant for a whole different audience or player in the game.
Too often we refuse to listen to victims and pretend there is a technical issue preventing the prosecution of serious violations of the non aggression principle.
For the Americans and others:
Our prime minister pretty much has full and complete control of the legislative and executive branches and even the appointment of judges. If you vote against your party then you can be kicked out. The whip is pretty absolute.
>dominance of the Bloq Quebecois has over Quebec
It's "Bloc". The NDP did well in Québec not long ago, when they had a candidate that the electorate liked.
> … why can't we make that happen?
Greed. More money to provide the tools of oppression via government contracts.
Because libertarians generally want fewer laws, not more.
And there are far too few of them elected to have any real impact.
that doesn't mean they don't want some of the 'right laws'. otherwise they would be anarchists and communists not libertarians.
When people working for corporate interest will stop being voted in. Good luck
>With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley and the venture capital space, why can't we make that happen?
Maybe because they're full of shit? (Sorry to swear, but I'm struggling for a better way to phrase this.)
I ran into a lot of open source projects that needed donations that would be considered tiny in any other nonprofit space, but despite all their talk about cipherpunk stuff, they don't seem to put their money where their mouth is.
The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data -- and if you get on their radar, they're just being neutral. (Forgive me if I roll my eyes so hard my retinas nearly detach.)
>The "lolbertarians", as I like to call them, seem to want a world where the state has a monopoly on violence and a monopoly on data
Sounds like you're describing authoritarians.
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley
As a libertarian myself - these people are fake libertarians, actually better described as crypto-authoritarians. So called "right" libertarianism is fertile ground for this, as it's based on an axiomatic/reductionist framing of rights wherein when someone violates a precondition, their rights then become irrelevant. The philosophy is supremely attractive to authoritarians who go down its rabbit hole - finding a whole bunch of reasons to reject appeals to other people's rights while convincing themselves they are advocating freedom.
Whereas in reality, the "freedom" they believe in is merely the freedom for themselves to oppress others - witness how these billionaires have chiefly made their money with centralized proprietary web apps/services based around removing choice away from users (at the edge) in favor of "take it or leave it" top-down monolithic offerings, slowly made worse over time (ie enshittification) to extract value after sticky network effects have been achieved.
There are of course exceptions - some use their wealth to attempt to pivot to making libre software. And I'm sure there are many more who become disillusioned with the "freedom" they thought they were making, and merely check out. But as the general rule this is why you don't see much actual support for freedom from the rich Surveillance Valley types.
> With all the libertarian millionaires and billionaires swirling around silicon valley
Those are pro-surveillance, pro-repair-prevention, pro-fascism.
Libertarianism is about your freedom to restrict others, if you are rich and powerful.
Whereas traditional Democrats and Republicans are all protecting privacy?
Thomas Massie is a wealthy libertarian and introduced a bill to protect privacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_network, he's part of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Massie, it's just protecting self interest by deregulation.
recommend reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book) there's a netflicks documentary by the same name that is NOT a substitute for the book.
The millionaires libertarians consistently support republican party. They are the ones ahifting it to the right and towards fascism.
Whoa whoa whoa whoa. You can't just call everyone you disagree with a fascist.
I dont call "just anyone" I disagree with that. I call it a specific libertarian millionaires and republican party as is now. Because they fit the definition. And have fascist goals.
I disagree with many other people who dont happen to be like that.
Freedom to put whatever you want in the EULA.
Because they're not libertarians. They're greedy narcissists who what to do whatever they want to anybody and just say that it's libertarian.
Wrong. The government cares.
The only way to have age verification on an international level, is to have treaties allowing for the sharing of information about citizens, digitally, in that context.
And this is that level of cooperation. And it has all the hallmarks of what comes next, identity verification. And this, is what this is for.
In order to prosecute anyone, you need to validate who did the crime. And that requires knowing who that person is. Not hearsay, not postulated, but validated "who this is". So you need to lock down anonymous access to the internet, in order to ensure you can easily and always prosecute such crimes.
And one of the issues right now, is that if someone in the UK does "bad thing" in Canada via the internet? It's doubly hard to track. So creating frameworks which will (on the backend) require some form of identity verification to work effectively, well... that tracks from where I sit and have seen in the last 2 years.
Frankly, from a government's perspective, this is no different than all the changes with KYC, for example 50 years ago the Government of Canada knew pretty much nothing about its citizenry. Certainly, it had no clue about bank account balances, transactions, investment holdings, a person's wealth and more. Now it knows enormous amounts of data, perhaps an arbitrary example is that your RRSP and TFSA(like American 501k) information, balances, and more are now yearly sent to the GoC. I believe also all information on trades made are, too, even in non-registered accounts. This absolutely wasn't the case, not to this degree, even a decade or two ago.
Some of these obligations are via ratified international treaties. The degree of surveillance, fiscally, is astonishing now. Americans know of this of course, after 9/11 they gave their government enormous data, and keep giving it, eg credit card transactions.
I remember when I was young, my parents arguing about having to get SIN cards (social insurance number). While it as introduced in the 60s, something happened which made it more of a requirement. Its only purpose at the time was for Revenue Canada to track info. Everyone argued about it, discussed it, was upset! It was the first time people needed "a number" to open certain bank accounts.
Yet we come from that, to this in really one generation's lifetime.
One of the problems is that, there is a massive, immense, enormous problem here right now, in terms of bots/foreign actors/asshats spreading immense disinformation for profit or state actor based goals. And with LLMs, it's going to get so much worse. People on HN at least are capable of some filtering, but the average Joe just sees video and 100% believes it is factual and true.
I wish I could see another path to locking out the asshattery, whilst keeping the internet anonymous. But I don't really. And unless a grass roots movement comes around, to ensure that every crime on the internet has a very high degree of success for prosecution? Then we'll be getting an identity managed internet.
I'm sure a lot of people will say "We can force companies to filter!", well, can you? For every forum out there? For torrents? For everything? And even if you think the "big boys" can be the main filter points, well, do you want a private company to decide what you post or not? And they'll need some way to ensure people don't just create a new account when banned! So they'll want ID too, if they're legislated to filter.
And if they're legislated to filter, can you fight decisions in court? Do you have the presumption on innocence? Do you have the right to face your accusers? A jury of your peers? With Google, Facebook, anyone these days, you get banned and it's nigh impossible to even find out why.
While there are exceptions, our governments are required to have criminal courts, and things prosecuted there.
I really don't want private, fiscally motivated companies to be the gatekeepers, if gatekeepers there must be.
Ah well. This is all a very unpleasant path.
I wish this was setup like a certificate authority so only the government is able to unmask an individual, but it's going to be pictures of government ID.
I don't think the government themselves are prepared for the amount of identity theft that is going to follow mass collection of government documents.
"We wish it could have a better solution, but you all just couldn't behave" is often the argument in these debates. You seem to be dissatisfied with it, but tacitly accept it as the only way. Let me put a finger on why I will never agree with it:
1. The current situation isn't that apocalyptic.
2. The alternative is so much more horrifying.
The first is a weaker argument because there is always a bottomless bag for the opponents to reach into and grab counterexamples. But none of these things are new. It's been 30 years since the average person could freely communicate with anyone in the world over the internet. 20 or so since the maturing of online scams. Probably at least 15 since nation-level actors started using the internet for propaganda purposes. The elephant in the room is AI, but I feel like AI use has diminishing returns, much like in any other fields. It offers a quick boost, but it's not infinitely scalable. The internet can't be completely taken over by scams and garbage in a way where everyone just keeps consuming it and goes crazy in their own ways. It's almost an ecosystem - pour too much garbage in, and you'll see people retreating into private communities and self-enforce trust, no universal carding necessary. Right now it's just tech people doing this on a large scale, but at a certain point of misinformation and incomprehensibility, treating the internet as untrustworthy by default would just become a mainstream view. It would likely fracture into massive social networks with strong identity verification and small communities that enforce trust in their own ways. As much as I don't like most private businesses, but your suggestion that they could take upon the role of the verifier is more palatable to me because that still leaves air in the room for small, private communities, and because businesses don't have perfect communication with each other or the government, preventing the universal tracking of everything.
The second argument is the real one. Technology would enable governments to track absolutely everything about everyone if we let them. Now this is a space where AI actually provides a novel use case - if before you had to have suspicion about a specific person and have someone look into them, AI will enable them to inspect everything and then form suspicion or document undesirable behaviors by default. It will be like having a personal private investigator that sees everything you do, being on the lookout for anything unusual 24/7. Online identity verification is nothing like having a SIN or a driver's license, because those two are used in specific contexts and don't enable tracking-by-default. The internet is used for ALL communications, so automated tracking of it is tracking of everything we do and say. Instead of showing your driver's license to the officer one time in a defined spot, the officer would come to you because your driver's license is etched into your skin for all to see at all times, and they're concerned about your recent movements that were automatically recorded and processed by a billion cameras. It would be a world without secrets, a world of perfect knowledge and ruthless enforcement. I don't want to live in it. I'm fine with the current world, thank you.
I agree with much of what you say, except the timing is a bit off. It's really only been 20 to 15 years since the "average person" even knew what that "Internet thing" was. It was the early 2000s, and later where it really took off for Average Joe.
The problem here though, isn't what you or I think. I expressed dislike, as you do. The problem is, what's the average person think? And more importantly, those being elected to legislative bodies? They see this recent change, this change that's really only been around for a few turns of the legislative cycle, as complete lawlessness. And they don't really see or understand issues with tracking.
And when I talk to the average mobile phone owner about tracking, their eyes glaze over. So there will be no help here, either.
So tracking will happen, at least that's the framework I'm talking about. If not, well then this discussion is meaningless. But I have seen courts push back over and over about governmental tracking, about police going too far in their tracking, yet I have seen very little, comparatively, push back about tracking on the corporate side. And we need to be honest here, in both cases private enterprise will manage the infrastructure which handles tracking, it's just who handles the "who is this person" portion. State or corporate.
I know you just want it to remain as it is, but I'm sorry that's over. It's not as if I'm advocating this change, I'm saying it's going to happen. There's a difference. I don't want a tornado to touch down near my house, but I'm not going to close my eyes if it's about to happen.
If you don't want this to happen, you're going to have to engage, or someone is, those two bodies of people I mentioned. Those elected to legislative bodies. And the Average Joe. From what I can see, the first wants this, the second doesn't even understand any part of the discussion.
this is insightful.. From a behavioral psychology point of view, there is an assumption among many law and order adherents that "we just need more control-info-courts-punishment" and we will have this done. However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
Does an entire society have to make the same choices of autonomy and record keeping that are common among members of the uniformed services? Mostly in the West, the answer was "No" but, here we go again.
> However, history has shown enormous missteps and in fact tragic actions of harm, from the very people that claim to be the ones that are Doing The Right Thing.
The other side would make this exact same point about vaccine proponents. How can we differentiate one argument from the other?
An interesting point to bring up. Why?
Well, because the issue with vaccine doubt, is misinformation. It's disinformation, spread for either profit (followers on youtube), or foreign actors working to reduce the cohesion of the West's societies.
Russia? China? Iran? None of these countries, even together, stand a chance militarily against the West. But if you cannot beat them militarily, you must weaken them from within. So confusion. Distrust. Pour fuel on the fire of any differences between sectors of a society. If you can weaken your political enemy, they it ceases to become a threat. Even better if you can trick your enemy into fighting itself!
It's no secret that a lot of countries are engaged in disinformation campaigns against the West. If you can cause your competitor to have plagues, when they were preventable? Well, that ties up resources, reduces productivity, and so forth.
I honestly believe that much of ID verification on the Internet is about this. A healthy society can handle outliers, handle internally created disinformation. Not so, if 1 guy in a foreign country seems like 1000 youtube channels. And you can see this everywhere. A video with a TTS voice, which is now progressing to entirely crafted video from scratch. Now anyone from China can look like a US citizen, going on about the woes of vaccination.
But if you can identify every person, and they can be sued for slander, libel, or criminal acts? Then you're back to normal, internal, citizen protest. EG, your normal crazies. And it can't be stated enough, there are a lot of marginals. Those "on the fence". If they hear enough nutty stuff, they move into almond territory too.
In the end, China, Russia, Iran won't be truthful or play ball, or will undermine attempts with fake IDs willfully issued, so they'll just get cut of entirely. The West will likely sign treaties.
So. Identity verification, is actually an answer to the vaccine issue. After all, we didn't have this level of issue until crazy Internet posters caused it. Although, to be fair, Elvis Presley is who helped convince youth to get the original polio vaccinations.
One way to look at it, is like driver's licenses. Before them, there was no way to stop a person from legally driving on the road. Take it away, and now they could be fined, jailed, etc for driving "without a license". A few bad actors were just unrepentant, and suddenly everyone could be carded, ID required, just to get around. This is like that. A bad result, eg ID on the net, but the attempt is likely to solve 100 internet pains.
I think if we have any sense, we'll come up with a best-privacy-laden method to allow this to happen. Because I cannot see how it will go away. If we can steer it, make it palatable. make sure it cannot be used by industry to track us, etc., it would be at least a partial win.
Democracies want data from their slaves, I mean, ... citizens.