Always keep in mind that such oppressive legislation backed by silly arguments is possible because the people at large are essentially OK with this, and many of them even support it outright if it means getting "tougher on crime" or whatever.
The true enemies of freedom aren't shadowy cabals scheming in back rooms – they are your neighbors, your coworkers, some of your friends, and possibly even some of your family members.
One of my problems with representative democracy is that there is never a candidate that ticks all my boxes. I.e. an actual representative. If I vote for someone to keep my digital liberties, they want to ban nuclear power instead, or whatever. It's all a tradeoff, and I don't think it's good that the tradeoff needs to happen so early in the process of representating me.
I like Switzerland (where I currently live,) because they have direct voting on topics, mixed with electing representatives. There's a filter so the people don't have to vote on everything, but for the big questions, there's already a system in place to ask the people. That must have sucked 100 years ago, when communication was more limited, but today, I think every nation should move to it. It also keeps the people engaged (voting on 3-4 topics every quarter,) and not just something that happens every four years.
Maybe that would have saved Sweden from the extreme sides of (nationalist) politics, and from banning investments into nuclear for 40 years before ripping that up. Mind you the nuclear disinvestment was based on a (non-binding) ballot vote, but my problem is no one dared challenge it, or have a process to re-ballot the question, in 40 years. Even in light of new climate information.
> because the people at large are essentially OK with this,
Only because they are not informed about what this is actually about. It's all about framing.
* Do you want the police to have better tools to fight child abuse? -> Of course!
* Do you want the police to see what private messages you are sending to your loved ones so that they can ensure that you are not a pedophile? -> Hell no!
> Do you want the police to see what private messages you are sending to your loved ones so that they can ensure that you are not a pedophile?
Most people doesn't even care anymore, they know they're always spied on when they use messenger or instagram (covering the whole age spectrum here), they'll always hit you with the "I don't have anything to hide"
Anecdotal example - I was talking with a (usually very reasonable) friend, and she was convinced Google (via Android) listens to her all the time (with a microphone) and suggests products based on her real life conversations with her friends[1]. What creeped me out was that it was not presented as a conspiracy theory but something completely mundane, almost a remark ("you know how they spy on everyone - like yesterday I was talking about Greece with some friends and today I get plane ticket ads - you know, the usual"). Not even a bit outraged. Crazy for me, but clearly people don't feel about this issue as strongly as we do.
Later her friends agreed that it happens for them too and didn't believe me when I suggested other possibilities.
[1] In reality, most likely ad targeting based on her online habits works as intended.
Test it. Pick a medical condition, randomly. From the musty pages of an old-fashioned book, so there's no digital connection.
Then mention that disease a few times in the presence of your Alexa, Siri, or Google whatever. Talk about the disease to your wife on a phone call once or twice (make sure she's in on it, so she knows never to type the disease into a search engine).
See if you start getting ads for treatment for that disease.
It's a little crazy, but I'm not convinced it's impossible. I've something similar to me happen a couple times, but not under rigorously controlled circumstances, so maybe it was google searches by a relative or friend who overheard me, and I was marketed to by association? Maybe somebody with that disease visited my house and their location was broadcast and linked to my wifi?
I've had many conversations exactly like yours, literally. To reasonable people being convinced that's normal, and me trying to explain how it's probably a coincidence or ad targeting.
These two questions are at the root of this conundrum, but you're not being completely accurate.
What exactly is your justification for regarding your right to privacy in your communication with your loved ones is more important than the right of the police to fight child abuse?
I believe most people would not agree with this exact proposition, but with a different one: that once the police is given the power to fight child abuse, which can only be given by allowing them to access private communications of anyone suspect of being involved in such crime, then there will be abuse of power and they will use that access to also fight other crimes or even for political gain, as tends to happen in authoritarian states.
I would absolutely be willing to forego my right to privacy under certain circumstances given that there were strong enough guardrails in place to prevent abuse in the future if that would allow child abuse and other hideous crimes to be prevented - it would be immoral to not do so. However, as most other people in tech, I have enough knowledge to understand that it would not be possible at all to prevent abuse with current technology - once the power exists at all to break into communications, anyone with enough motivation and resources available will be able to do it, not just the intended receipients of such power, unfortunately.
If you really want people on the other side of the debate to understand you, you need to stop being so simplistic - there are very good justifications for their positions if you remove the practical limitations of being able to stop abuse - which they do not understand, and I suspect a lot of people in tech even also fail to comprehend.
I would even go as far as to say that future technology may change this: it may be possible to have completely abuse-proof technologies in the future which, if it existed, would make me change my position on this matter.
For example, something that uses blockchain technology to make it cryptographically impossible for the police to access someone's communications without having a warrant?? And making that warrant only usable by the police if it was also approved by a number of different, independent groups, including groups advocating for privacy (something like a "smart contract" could do this?)??
You can say these are stupid ideas, and I would probably agree... but my point is that this may not be impossible, and perhaps people who are really concerned about privacy while also having an understanding of why the police may need this sort of power should be actually trying to find ways to do this properly instea d of just keeping repeating the mantra that no, this is impossible and we'll have to live with child abuse , terrorism etc. forever?!
> What exactly is your justification for regarding your right to privacy in your communication with your loved ones is more important than the right of the police to fight child abuse?
Violation of privacy is harmful. The police is not supposed to cause unnecessary harm. Given that the vast majority of people are not child abusers, there will be a great amount of harm for no gain. And most child abusers will find ways to evade the surveillance. This is not even remotely close to a reasonable bargain.
> If you really want people on the other side of the debate to understand you, you need to stop being so simplistic
We were talking about the general population and how they perceive the same topic given different framings. Most people think in simplistic terms when it comes to topics that they don't actively engage with.
> there are very good justifications for their positions if you remove the practical limitations of being able to stop abuse - which they do not understand, and I suspect a lot of people in tech even also fail to comprehend.
Are there very good reasons to fight child abuse? Of course. But if non-technical people believe that there is a magical technology that can deliver what politicians claim then you have to challenge them to explain where their beliefs come from. And precisely because they actually don't understand the technology they have to admit that they actually can't form a well-founded opinion on it. You might not be able to make them understand why the practical limitations make this a bad idea, but you can make them understand that there is an important gap in their knowledge on the topic. And something that everyone can understand is: Not every solution is actually a good or even effective solution.
The "true enemies" are the folk scheming in backrooms who hope to succeed by the ignorance of the rest of the folk you listed. Are my neighbors, coworkers, etc. a problem in this battle? Yes, absolutely, but they're not the ones acting with malicious intent.
It's not ignorance, it's malice. "The people" are much smarter, but much more evil, than commonly assumed.
And ironically, the false idea that the population is ignorant of every important issue is yet another argument for invasive, controlling regulation of everything...
The majority of the population does not have the background to consider the implications of say, banning E2EE, they do have the background to understand that CSAM is bad. Thus, when told that banning E2EE might make CSAM harder to distribute, of course they're going to prefer it. That doesn't make them malicious or evil.
The entire point of representative democracy is that the elected representatives are the ones who work with subject matter experts to reach solutions that work best for the people. Thus, it is the representatives who are, at worst, malicious/evil for not listening to subject matter experts in favor of their political games.
Yes, that is, in fact, how the banality of evil works. Everyone is capable of doing evil, without "feeling" evil, if they can self justify its perfectly fine.
> The majority of the population does not have the background to consider the implications of say, banning E2EE, they do have the background to understand that CSAM is bad.
This is all still just framing and you're only falling into the trap.
One of the many strong arguments against this kind of government surveillance is it's the sort of thing authoritarian governments use to commit atrocities. People can certainly understand that Nazis are bad and technologies that protect people from Nazis are good. Now all you need is to point to the proponents of the scanning and ask why they want to help Nazis.
It's the same tactic they're using. And then they use counter-tactics, like weaponizing Godwin's Law even in cases when you actually are discussing authoritarian government policy.
It has nothing to do with the nature of the issue and everything to do with the fact that the proponents of these measures are professionally trained propagandists who know exactly what they're doing.
Maybe we need a corollary to Godwin's Law. Let's call it Lovejoy's Law:
As the length of a policy debate increases, the probability that someone implores you to Think Of The Children approaches 1, and the person to do this loses the argument.
This is exactly what I mean about framing. The Nazis used infamously broken encryption. We have to make sure our codes can't be broken, unlike the foolish evildoers. The Germans were never able to defeat the Navajo code talkers, and then we won the war.
It's ignorance. I can't expect Grandma to fully understand the importance of E2EE, but I can absolutely expect her to vehemently oppose CSAM. Same goes for the Joe and Jane Blows that have no technical background.
No. People are driven by fear, real or unfounded. Only a very small part of the population could be labeled as inherently evil and that part is usually psychologically impaired.
You are quite possibly correct. Late-modern monarchies, absolutist on paper, were certainly granting more freedoms to their people than those people themselves would have likely voted for, had they been given the power to do so. I can only imagine what an "Enlightened Absolutist" European monarchy would look like in the 21st century. Pity that proto-fascist faux-democracies are all that is left.
The true enemies of freedom aren't shadowy cabals scheming in back rooms – they are your neighbors, your coworkers, some of your friends, and possibly even some of your family members.