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Comment by throwawaygh | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism.

Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.

It's a special sort of odd neoliberal fantasy where capitalists or technologists can route around an authoritarian social movement that seizes the power of the state.

Do you want to know what happens to people who think they can route around an authoritarian regime with clever computer code? There's a relevant XKCD about a $5 wrench [1], except instead of a $5 wrnech it's the entire apparatus of a developed nation-state.

If you really think authoritarianism is coming to your country, stop fucking around with prime numbers and get serious about the work of political persuasion.

[1] https://xkcd.com/538/

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Technology people make this mistake a lot. They see a problem like "the government might track all of our payments in the future" and create bitcoin. Or "the government might rootkit our phones" and creates an open source hardware phone. Or "the government might want to see who you are communicating with" and create an E2E encrypted chat application.

None of these solutions do anything to solve the original problem, it just allows a portion of the population to ignore them.

I am the author of the original tweet, so allow me to push back on this point of view.

Technology people are not the solution to this problem, we are the problem. And we really need to stop being the problem. There have been authoritarian governments before, and still are all over the world: but they've never had access to technology anywhere near as powerful as what we have today, e.g., ubiquitous user location or unencrypted smartphone backup or vast unprotected email databases. These technologies themselves are brand new: smartphone cloud backup is only 10 years old, and ubiquitous GPS-enabled smartphones are younger than my middle-school aged child.

But thanks to aggressive deployment by Silicon Valley we went ahead and created a surveillance utopia on a timescale so short that most citizens don't even realize what we've done. Future governments now have capabilities we could never have imagined a decade ago: centralized data repositories and collection systems that would make the Stasi blush. These systems now exist because people like us built them and decided to leave the problem of securing those repositories to the future. But we're running out of future.

Is more privacy the solution? I don't know. It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused, and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale. I suspect this could happen but would be slow and inefficient and full of friction. None of that has to happen now -- there is no friction -- because Silicon Valley has already done the architecture work and deployed the technology at scale. They did it recklessly and with no thought to how it might be abused, and now they're finding it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. It will not get easier.

TL;DR: The data repositories already exist and all that's protecting them is a fig-leaf of legislation and honest government behavior that could disappear at any moment. Removing those repositories might not save us, but we need to try. We sure need to stop creating more of them.

Okay, so we delete existing repositories and stop collecting that data for now. I'm in full agreement.

I just don't see how developing new systems is any sort of solution.

> It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused

The genie is out of the bottle. Issuing an edict to "do things like you did them in 2022" doesn't exactly require genius-level administrative talent...

It's also a bit presumptuous to assume that a future authoritarian regime wouldn't have expert technologists at their disposal... why do you make this assumption? Technologists are just people; a few will be partisans and many more will go along to get along. (To wit: how many of your colleagues at Johns Hopkins who have personal issues with the defense industry don't take boatloads of $$$ from DoD? Or at very least submit to NSF CFPs that are transparently adjacent to concurrently running DARPA programs? Ditto for colleagues who have beef with the tech industry?)

> and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale.

No forcing of consumers required. Just point a gun at whoever has market power and tell them to do things like they were done in 2022. After all, we are talking about an authoritarian regime.

You make a reasonable case for deleting existing troves of data, and a good counter-factual case for never developing smartphones in the first place. But, again, the genie is out of the bottle.

> It's also a bit presumptuous to assume that a future authoritarian regime wouldn't have expert technologists at their disposal...

I think your thinking here is too binary. Clearly there exist possible futures where authoritarian governments are hyper-efficient and have brilliant technologists advising them. In those futures we're clearly doomed and thus we might as well give up now. The thing is, those futures are not inevitable. There are also many (IMHO more realistic) futures where governments are messy and inefficient (like they are today), where their authority is blunted by organizational and jurisdictional issues (as it is today), where their technologists are not hyper-competent (believe me, as they are today.)

In those worlds there is a huge difference between a scenario where the full weight of FAANGM's resources is pushing to build massive data repositories, and one where they've taken firm technological steps to limit it. We are in the first world and we should be in the second one.

> Issuing an edict to "do things like you did them in 2022" doesn't exactly require genius-level administrative talent...

I think that this will actually be more difficult than you think: this is why governments are spending ~millions right now to slow down the deployment of new encryption technology [1]. But stop worrying about 2022: what you should be worried about is 2036. Look at what we've done to privacy since 2007 -- the year the first iPhone launched. Now imagine someone from ~14 years in the future coming back to to explain what Silicon Valley has done with even better technology like wearables and powerful ML tooling. When you're in a hole, the most important step is to stop digging.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/01/uk-paid-724000-creepy-...

I think you massively under-estimate the banality of authoritarianism.

If an authoritarian movement takes over the US government, at least a majority of the Johns Hopkins CS faculty will continue taking grants from the NSF/DoD. Many of those grants will be more-or-less aligned with the objectives of that authoritarian movement. Non-authoritarian students will grind away on those projects.

Something similar would happen at FAANGM. No iCloud backups? NBD; lean on those companies to collect whatever data the state wants. You don't need super competent loyal technologists, because FAANGM and their employees will most of the time just do what you tell them. You don't need existing troves of data, because you can start collecting at any point and still get a huge amount of utility.

Could the authoritarian world be marginally better if big tech makes an about-face and stops collecting data? Sure. Is that difference enough to make any sort of significant difference in the lived experience of people or the trajectory of the authoritarian regime? Probably not.

I don't think you're wrong, per se, about the risks. But I don't think you have a compelling solution. And, anyways, there are much stronger arguments for reigning in data collection at big tech than the risk of impending authoritarianism.

> Something similar would happen at FAANGM. ... lean on those companies to collect whatever data the state wants.

Well, that has already happened. The NSA went to Google and other companies and asked them to implement PRISM, and they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

Right? This comment thread reads like this sort of thing hasn’t already happened here. But it has. The US may not be the most authoritarian regime, but I think that its recent actions scream authoritarianism louder than any words claiming that it’s not.

>Is more privacy the solution?

It is the only solution to prevent massive widespread reduction of freedom.

Partially correct. But we only have an ounce of privacy because states are not able to intrude all systems that we have. If it would be possible, surveillance would be even more extensive.

Sure, if there is enough incentive they might compromise your communication. At that point the wrench argument becomes very true.

So yes, technology did prevent the worst. It is true that it doesn't solve the problem of politcal ambitions of course, that was never the intend.

> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism.

> Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.

That seems to me like false dilemma of ideal freedom vs authoritarian regimes. Full-scale authoritarian regimes are scary but unlikely risk for western democracies. The real risk is small-scale creeping authoritarian policies accepted democratically with popular support.

We have to consider that liberty is not without real trade-offs between it and other values. It is fantasy to offer political persuasion as a solution. Different people have different preferences for political values and if there is a policy that is unacceptable for liberty-loving minority but satisfies preferences of majority by offering better support for other values, then it is unlikely than just political work can stop it (that would mean to convince others to accept a position detrimental to their own values). And there is enough people who in good faith would like to repress terrorist, CSAM, corruption, tax evasion, public health risks for a 'small' liberty restriction.

While this is 100% correct that Surveillance-resistant systems or other technical means are not he answer to authoritarianism, this statement has at least two problems.

1. A technical solution may not in itself be the way to counter authoritarianism, but may assist in either resisting it or prevent it from gaining enough power. Since democracy is a state of permanent fight against the iron law of oligarchy (which ultimately leads to authoritarianism), any thing that reduces the power of the govt to a certain extent is good. In other words, we don't want the govt to be 100% efficient in whatever it does. Arguably modern tech in current state gives the govt near 100% efficiency in surveillance, so this has to be countered with any means, most of which are of course political and legislative, but surveillance-resistant technology can also play its part.

2. Authoritarianism is not the only threat. It's entirely possible to have a democracy in place and yet have a miserable existence under it. For example, if every perfectly democratic law we have now is enforced with 100% efficiency it will feel very close to a dystopia. Technology can help alleviate this to a certain extent.

> Surveillance-resistant systems are not an answer to authoritarianism. > > Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.

Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them.

The only surveillance resistant (not surveillance-proof obviously) technologies are distributed, decentralized ones implemented in open source.

You're right that political activism is ultimately the only good answer. But it's not either/or, it is still quite useful in parallel to also develop, maintain and popularize decentralized systems as much as possible.

> Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them.

There’s a range on this - ask Apple about the FBI – and there are still several levels of usefulness: designing systems which don’t store data unnecessarily, forcing things to follow the legal process rather than quietly turning data over, and notifying the user when this happens. Obviously not all of this is possible to varying degrees but not all authoritarian states are the same, either.

> get serious about the work of political persuasion

The Conversations with Tyler Cowen podcast episode "Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy (Ep. 106)" has some interesting content in this regard. Tang works on the government side but the same principles are involved regardless of direction.

https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/audrey-tang-tyle...

When authoritarianism comes around, it wont just be surveiling. An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because the goal is to turn the state into an all-encompasing master of peoples lives, and work is a large part of peoples lives (especially in an a11n regime!)

Whether or not the state can surveil is a moot point if the owners of the tech are in on the game.

> a11n

I'm not sure what this means, assuming weird auto-correct from authoritarian?

> An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because...

Only if that leadership is necessary to seize or hold power.

An authoritarian regime in the US would not need buy-in from major tech companies.

They don't want to type the letters in the middle, so they dropped them and put a count of how many letters were dropped. I'm mostly familiar with a11y meaning accessibility.

I believe this pattern was originally popularized by "i18n" for "internationalization", partly for convenience and partly to have an identifier that would fit in legacy systems.

Numeronym:

According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym

Agree that i18n cemented it in the letter count form (homonym form is older, like K9 for canine).

('K9' is homophone for 'canine'. To be homonyms, two terms should have different meaning - if two terms share the same name and meaning, they are the same...)

> a11n

Perhaps it's like i18n, except it's the will of the dictator that which gets translated for the masses.

> get serious about the work of political persuasion

The thing about populist authoritarian movements is that they're popular. They're supported by a large segment of the population, and that segment is full of passionate intensity while the rest of us lack all conviction [0].

I can't think of a large populist authoritarian movement in the last hundred years that was defeated by mere "political persuasion".

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...

> There's a relevant XKCD

So... what? Don't try? Don't bother? That's like saying don't bother cooking your food because even cooked food can get you sick some of the time. Or do you believe that a hypothetical future authoritarian government can hire an army of thugs to kneecap everybody who they believe shared an anti-regime meme? Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Laying the framework for anonymous communication today while it's easier just to be on the safe side is worthwhile.

> Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong.

Right, so my whole point here is...

...and how's that going?

Better than if they had nothing.

Interesting thought, another reason to get to space.

With the internet and modern IT tools, authoritarian control over the populace is approaching turnkey. Well, it is, we just haven't had a strongman yet in the US (that wasn't an idiot).

The only defense is the speed of light. A question: at what amount of transit time from "the authority" to "the colony" does total information control fall apart? 1 light-minute? 1 light-hour? 1 light-day?

Nevertheless, space will be a whole new set of rules. The "authority" will be on Earth, and won't be able to think in terms of "space".

I strongly agree with you, but at the same time think giving more control to individuals in terms of communication, expression, and infrastructure is probably helpful?

Non-technological and technological solutions aren't mutually exclusive.

I guess I always think of the the quasiomnipotent totalitarian state as a kind of theoretical [anti?]ideal state, sort of like "what's the worst possible case scenario and how does this do in that scenario?"

The goalposts are always being moved but that doesn't mean you shouldn't adjust accordingly.

To be fair, those primes are an exceptionally useful tool if you want to get serious about the work of political persuasion.

They are not what will change things, but they are a tool you can use to disperse ideas and make change happen.

Thank you for your comment.

This is much needed on this website of cypherpunk idealism.

Tor seems to do okay in Russia. Maybe not stellar, but in practice, it seems to work fine. Same for Signal and all this other stuff.

Just because a system(tor) exists doesn't means its existence has any real effect.

The existence of Tor in the state of Russia and Russia being the Authoritarian state that it is supports the case.

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