The most effective argument never used during the Snowden debate

Ryan Carboni ryacko at gmail.com
Mon Jan 22 08:35:43 PST 2018


How much should it cost to hack a $100 computer?

No really, poll it. Make opinion polls, get people to print them out and
mail their congressmen. Have the statistical distribution per decile listed.

Fortunately, we had the NSA make the hard decision on how secure computers
should be. The average person is not capable of making a tradeoff between
freedom and security. This is an unfortunate limit to democracy, people
will only demand what is in their own interests, not preventing the
creation of victims.

Perhaps terrorism could be limited in impact by limiting coverage of it
altogether, but journalists can't help themselves or listen to anyone. If
there was proof otherwise, it'd make people question everything.

The cost of securing a computer is only available to the biggest companies
with economies of scale, small businesses are out of luck. An estimate of
losses to economic espionage is $100 billion a year. Thus the value of
American economic insecurity must be greater than that of secure computing
for everyone.
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