Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do
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maybe I'm just being naive?
In this case, the comment does strike me as naive.
Back in the 1990s the tech community convinced itself (myself included) that Napster had zero ethical responsibility for the mass piracy it enabled. In reality, law in a society is supposed to serve that society. The tech community talked itself into believing that the only valid arguments were for Napster. In hindsight, it's less cut-and-dry.
I have never believed E2EE to be viable, in the real world, without a back-door. It makes several horrendous kinds of crime too difficult to combat. It also has some upsides, but including a back-door, in practice, won't erase the upsides for most users.
It is naive to think people (and government) will ignore E2EE; a feature that facilitates child porn, human trafficking, organized crime, murder-for-hire, foreign spying, etc etc. The decision about whether the good attributes justify the bad ones is too impactful on society to defer to chat app CEOs.
This should be obvious to everyone here, but it's pretty much inevitable that if a backdoor exists, criminals will eventually find their way through it. Not to mention the "legitimate" access by corrupt and oppressive governments that can put people in mortal danger for daring to disagree.
No doubt that is true, and presumably Cory Doctorow has written some article making that seem like the only concern. The alternative makes it difficult to enforce all kinds of laws, though.
You can go ahead and encrypt messages yourself, without explicit E2E support on the platform. In fact, choosing your own secure channel for communicating the key would probably be more secure than anything in-band.
I doubt that will upset the public the way Signal and Telegram eventually will. Most people, including criminals, struggle with tech. If they want E2EE badly enough, and use one of the big messaging GUI apps they can succeed. If they can only do it via less user-friendly software, they'll need help or to do research, and likely will leave a trail behind them. That is more useful to law enforcement than if they simply had downloaded one of the most popular App Store apps. It's hard for a news story about a CLI utility to gain traction.
Historically speaking, a great deal more crime was impossible to combat in practice simply because no state could afford a police apparatus extensive enough to monitor everything. Coincidentally, this also extended to things like political dissent.
Now that automated mass surveillance actually makes it possible for the states to keep tabs on just about everything, E2EE, if anything, merely rebalances the scales (although even that is overselling it - in practice, with modern surveillance tools, the scales are still much more heavily tilted in favor of those surveilling).
To what extent people really want to embrace the panopticon is not so clear-cut. It is certainly something heavily pushed from above, and in many societies that does seem to be reflected in public opinion (e.g. UK) - but not in all, so I do not think it can be reasonably assumed to be the default.
That's how most law works. I have to give up my right to murder someone in order to enjoy a society where it's illegal for everyone.
If you believe privacy not inspectable by law enforcement is wrong the prerequisite is saying that you're willing to have the the law apply to you as well.
I believe that privacy not inspectable by law enforcement is a fundamental right. I'm willing to accept that aids some crimes but also willing to change my mind if the latter becomes too much of a problem. It doesn't seem to be the case at all ATM.
Yes, that is my position. E2EE back-doors might not affect my communications or yours, but have serious and undesirable repercussions for some journalists and whistleblowers. The thing is, regular people aren't going to tolerate a sustained parade of news stories in which E2EE helps the world's worst people to evade justice.
This comment can itself be said to take for granted the naive view of what law it exposes.
Law is a way to enforce a policy on massive scale, sure. But there is no guarantee that it enforces things that are aiming the best equilibrium of everyone flourishing in society. And even when it does, laws are done by humans, so unless they results from a highly dynamic process that gather feedback from those on which it applies and strive to improve over time, there is almost no chance laws can meet such an ambitious goal.
What if Napster was a symptom, but not of ill behavior? Supposing that unconditional sharing cultural heritage is basically the sane way to go can be backed on solid anthropological evidences, over several hundred millennia.
What if information monopolies is the massive ethical atrocity, enforced by corrupted governments which were hijacked by various sociopaths whose chief goal is to parasite as much as possible resources from societies?
Horrendous crimes, yes there are many out there, often commissioned by governments who will shamelessly throw outrageous lies at there citizens to transform them into cannon fodders and other atrocities.
Regarding fair retribution of most artists out there, we would certainly be better served with universal unconditional net revenue for everyone. The current fame lottery is just as fair as a national bingo as a way to make a decent career.
You know, I agree with nearly all of these points. I even think there is something to your point about Napster 'being a symptom' but (as people love to say around here) it's 'orthogonal' to the original point I wanted to make.
Few things would please me more than to live under a system where arts and culture were freely available to all, and artists didn't have to starve in the process. It doesn't strike me as far-fetched either; it wouldn't take much to improve on the system we currently have.
But my original point was that, given the society we actually had when Napster came along, it was unreasonable for Napster unilaterally to decide for everyone else that existing laws and expectations no longer mattered.
> Horrendous crimes, yes there are
many out there, often commissioned by governments who will shamelessly throw outrageous lies at there citizens to transform them into cannon fodders and other atrocities.
Yes, this happened, is happening and will happen.
I wonder however if the word "often" may perhaps be misleading or even completely wrong.
If you pick one random victim of a horrendous crime today in a western society. Feel free to pick the minority most hated by that society. What is the likelihood that that crime was commissioned by the government? It's more likely domestic violence, trafficking etc done by fellow community members.
Sure there are examples of governments shooting civilian planes in the sky or ferries in the and covering up. And it's perfectly sensible to be outraged when that happens. But jumping to the conclusion that "the government" just does those things as a matter of routine doesn't sound right to me. I don't buy it. It smells conspiratorial thinking and requires extraordinary proof.
Back in the 1990s the tech community convinced itself (myself included) that Napster had zero ethical responsibility for the mass piracy it enabled. In reality, law in a society is supposed to serve that society. The tech community talked itself into believing that the only valid arguments were for Napster. In hindsight, it's less cut-and-dry.
I have never believed E2EE to be viable, in the real world, without a back-door. It makes several horrendous kinds of crime too difficult to combat. It also has some upsides, but including a back-door, in practice, won't erase the upsides for most users.
It is naive to think people (and government) will ignore E2EE; a feature that facilitates child porn, human trafficking, organized crime, murder-for-hire, foreign spying, etc etc. The decision about whether the good attributes justify the bad ones is too impactful on society to defer to chat app CEOs.