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Comment by giaour | Hacker News Reader

> It’s the dilemma of cryptography, in that you cannot have a secure system that doesn’t also allow bad guys to use it too.

I hear similar things from the NRA about how we'd all be safer if everyone carried a concealed firearm. I just don't want the world to be a place where we all have to be armed and launder our money after every transaction.

There is always a balance that needs to be struck between privacy and accountability. Bob Woodward violated the privacy of the Nixon white house, but we generally believe the public interest there outweighs the privacy concerns at stake. I am always particularly skeptical of financial privacy maneuvers, since they are of considerably greater interest to the already rich and powerful.

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I am not super pro guns, but I am super pro encryption. There are parallels. We are all safer if we encrypt our traffic and data at rest. Safer when we use end-to-end messaging schemes.

I don’t know if I agree about accountability balance — accountable to whom?? It is better if everyone is equally blind. Technology that takes power from the powerful is our weapon. You don’t need accountability if there is nobody to be accountable to.

"Accountability" here is the public's right to know some facts, like if corporation X dumped toxic waste on public land or if individual Y funded a spoiler candidate in a major political race.

Creating a new form of privacy means creating a new arena in which to conceal malfeasance, and some will inevitably take advantage of that. Privacy can become a means of entrenching power as easily as it can become a means of distributing power. Wealthy people and organizations in the US sue journalists for invasion of privacy to prevent embarrassing information from being published. In the US, some parties have been lobbying and suing for decades to be able to spend unlimited sums with no public disclosure on political and influence campaigns.

> I just don't want the world to be a place where we all have to be armed and launder our money after every transaction.

Interesting to consider that many gun owners likely don't want the world to be a place in which they feel the need to carry a firearm.

Sounds like a variant of the prisoner's dilemma: the best outcome is if no civilians are carrying guns, but needing and gun and not having one is a worse outcome than needing and having one?

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