Although they can work to coopt and compromise in various ways, there are legal limits to control of crypto and security in the US. That's what all the fights in the 90's were about. We've seen that ATT and Microsoft seem to easily turn over, or enable to be turned over, access to everyone's data. And now there are some avenues to combat this in court and public opinion. Others aren't so cooperative. Individuals and new companies can only be convinced on a case by case basis. The Internet is democratic in the sense that new attempts at perfect security and independence can always be synthesized and tried. Not perfect, but close enough. We did not go with the needs-approval-first paradigm which is the diametric opposite of freedom and democracy.

Various levels of illegal activity would seem to act as canaries on communications systems: If they continue unmolested, then the venue may be secure. On the other hand, allowing illegal but uninteresting dealings, occasionally spinning up parallel construction when someone just can't wait, would provide cover for plausible security. That then acts as a honeypot of sorts for target traffic.

There are some obvious ways to combat this. I wonder if they will be outlawed successfully. I was somewhat surprised to learn of the widespread illegality of wearing masks in public, notwithstanding cold weather and Halloween apparently. The legal grounding there seems an overreach; lucky it wasn't successfully applied to online personas.

Governments are, variously imperfectly, proxies for their citizens. What communications system would be secure, reliable, and free, while enabling the right portion of the population to break security when appropriate? If there are terrorists, especially after the fact but ideally before, how could their activity be exposed reliably while also reliably preventing any other traffic from being exposed?

One answer is to make exposure the equivalent of a noop. In the past 10 years, we've caused this to be true in many ways. Oversharing on Facebook is no big deal. Being silly or stupid is not rare or fatal to your long-term persona because we know that many people do those things.

At a more serious level, we want commercial or government agents to be like doctors and priests, holding and generally forgetting our almost completely mundane secrets when the have to run across them. That requires both strict training and ethics, but also management, oversight, and some outlets to sense and respond to overstep. Failure of the government to police itself well enough or in murky ways tends to lead to leaks eventually.

Elements of governments have previously had some terrible ideas that they pursued using both public and invasion of privacy level of information. Some of this still happens, although the gap between reasonable ideals and actual persecutions is continually getting smaller, at least in the US. There is a long way to go in certain areas on drugs, sex, violence, fraud, etc., but we've come a long long way. In some ways, I suspect that the need to focus on anti-terrorism has caused relaxation and some abandonment of pursuing some gray areas.

Some people really don't trust that government will consistently converge to a reasonable ideal in these areas, although it seems to be steadily going that way in the US. Other countries seem generally behind on that path, or for various reasons off on some other random and less effective path.

What do you propose as an alternative that meets many of modern societies important goals? Anti-terrorism is a good example problem. Fair and lucid election campaigns are another. Open commerce that has modern controls on the market that we know are needed for a healthy system is another.

Another thing to consider is whether some crowd-controlled but somehow tyranny of the masses avoiding system might also be an avenue for possibly dynamic jury nullification-like judgment.

sdw

On 9/14/16 12:46 PM, Sean Lynch wrote: