Signal president says company will not comply with U.K. ‘mass surveillance’ law

So I'm both? Who do I fight for?

People pay attention to their material interests. In most cases, you can get through to working class people despite ideology. Can’t win everyone over either and that’s ok too.

Ultimately, results matter. My country started semi feudal and it was under socialism that it industrialised, electrified, developed universal health care, built homes for every working family, etc. Sadly the coup in 89 ended that, but it doesn’t have to have been perfect to have been good.

The public is clearly not bound to even attempt to be consistent in its opinions from case to case, and if it's all over the place in its verdicts and might well be accepting or rejecting a verdicts for different reasons from the justices (maybe they think the legal arguments about privacy in the original Roe vs Wade were weak but also think women should have an inherent right to abortion that legislators haven't provided them with), it'ś difficult to see how lower courts can be bound by it.

There's also a big question of who gets to vote, particularly for the cases where a state law is argued to be in violation of the federal constitution, which tends to be the more controversial ones...

You're completely missing the point of the supreme court. It's explicitly not a democratic institution; it's purpose is to protect the constitutional rights of the minority from the tyranny of the majority. The other two branches are democratic; isn't that enough for you?

Surely you see the point of the US being a republic; rule by law, not by men. In your vision of the supreme court, if the majority decided they wanted to lock up some minorty and send them to gas chambers, the court couldn't do anything to stop them because the populace would vote for it in a referendum. That kind of thing has happened countless times in history in countries that didn't have a strong court system capable of protecting people's rights from the tyrrany of the majority.

Yes, you'll note that I said "the data will lead to a mandate for a constitutional amendment." My point is that the mechanisms that create and ratify constitutional amendments are broken for this purpose; not that we need a thing other than constitutional amendments.

Given the actual way bipartite or tripartite governments (at all levels — from municipal to federal) function in the real world, constitutional amendments only happen when there's a need to use an amendment to overridingly countermand law.

Constitutional amendments are almost never used for their original designed purpose — to pre-empt the ability to create law — because the legislative process is purely reactive, never proactive. Legislatures the world over only act when either corporate lobbying interests or outraged citizens demand they act.

The thing I'm saying doesn't exist, is a proactive branch of government that turns things that are currently "known to be desirable" but not yet "outraged about being taken away", into constitutional amendments protecting those things, before some law can be made somewhere that violates the implicit, intuitional, self-evident, but previously non-applicable right that the public believes it has. Like a right to anonymity in cash transactions.

Until a decade or two ago, nobody ever considered that "being able to transact anonymously via cash" needed to be thought of as a right. It was simply the only way things worked. There were no clear examples of it not working that way elsewhere in the world to serve as object lessons on why you'd need such a law.

Or, consider prohibition. Did the US really need to issue the 18th amendment, struggle for two decades, and then issue the 21st amendment to repeal it... when anyone who lived in America at any time during the two centuries before the rise of the temperance movement, could have seen that the public actually seems to consider itself to have a self-evident right to ingest mind-altering substances — and thereby, that there should be a constitutional limitation on laws which prohibit the production and sale of mind-altering substances? Yet America still doesn't have a constitutional amendment enshrining that self-evident right. Because there's no system for discovering "latent" public sentiment and enshrining it. If everybody thinks something, but nobody says that thing, then it never becomes law.

(If you think it's dumb to care about what "everyone thinks but nobody says" — why do you think democracy is built on secret voting? The public has a lot of things they want but aren't willing to say they want in front of others, for fear of reprisal in their local social-normative environment — including who they think would best represent them democratically!)

To your other points:

> The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures.

Legislatures at all levels are purely reactive; and therefore can't react to latent public sentiment, only to active demands.

> We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perceived problem with itself

What about every other democratic nation in the world that doesn't have this problem? (I'm Canadian, myself.) While America makes a good example for the failings of the reactive model for constitutional amendment, adding a proactive pipeline from latent public sentiment to constitutional amendment would be a change applicable to every country with a constitution. Not just democracies, actually; even constitutional monarchies.

That being said — everything I'm saying also applies, in the US, to state governments and their state charters/constitutions/other founding documents. State governments could have such a proactive body just like federal governments could. City governments could have such a proactive body. Heck, even corporations could have a proactive body to enshrine the interests of shareholders into the corporation's charter! (I bet there are corporations whose employees and shareholders would all prefer the corporation be transitioned to a B Corp with certain values held above profit — just not with enough outrage to consolidate a voice to make any coherent demands of the board of directors.)

And a system that requires a 3/4 supermajority of not even the population but the state legislatures (with the net effect that some states have a much greater say in pushing through or blocking amendments than others) is hardly a sane or sensible way to gauge public sentiment on such matters.

"Representative anarchy" was my shorthand for the concept of "whoever can stand up with a megaphone and get the largest mob behind them wins." To do this, the person with the megaphone needs to understand what hot-button issues will make the mob follow them in their coup or secession attempt. In that sense of understanding the public, they are acting as a kind of representative. Not a democratic representative — but the same kind of representative that you get when someone stands up and shouts something in a bar and everyone else shouts "yeah!"

Yes, the mob can be manipulated. But the nice thing about the breakdown of law and order, is that it stays broken until someone who's good at governing actively re-establishes it. If the mob that the new guy used to depose the old guy, doesn't appreciate the new guy's first few acts in power, then said mob will still usually be riled-up enough — and the new guy's hold on power will still usually be tenuous enough — that the mob will just turn around and depose the new guy, too. (Look at the War of the Roses for many small examples of this; or for a perfect example, at Burkina Faso's two coups in one year last year, where the second one was driven precisely by the public's lack of faith in the guy who did the first coup.)

> Afaik, journalists are there to tell the people what to think

Maybe I chose the wrong word? I suppose I meant intelligence operatives — but not the secret kind. Just, people who are paid to go and watch things and talk to people, and tell their government department what they found out. Census workers, for example! Or the people who go into retail stores to get the pricing data for the central banks to calculate the Consumer Price Index.

Only reading the federalist papers gives you a stilted opinion of what caused things to be the way they are

> There remains but one other view of this matter to conclude the point. The truth is, after all the declamations we have heard, that the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, A BILL OF RIGHTS. The several bills of rights in Great Britain form its Constitution, and conversely the constitution of each State is its bill of rights. And the proposed Constitution, if adopted, will be the bill of rights of the Union. Is it one object of a bill of rights to declare and specify the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government? This is done in the most ample and precise manner in the plan of the convention; comprehending various precautions for the public security, which are not to be found in any of the State constitutions. Is another object of a bill of rights to define certain immunities and modes of proceeding, which are relative to personal and private concerns? This we have seen has also been attended to, in a variety of cases, in the same plan. Adverting therefore to the substantial meaning of a bill of rights, it is absurd to allege that it is not to be found in the work of the convention. It may be said that it does not go far enough, though it will not be easy to make this appear; but it can with no propriety be contended that there is no such thing. It certainly must be immaterial what mode is observed as to the order of declaring the rights of the citizens, if they are to be found in any part of the instrument which establishes the government. And hence it must be apparent, that much of what has been said on this subject rests merely on verbal and nominal distinctions, entirely foreign from the substance of the thing. [1]

[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed84.asp

Don't get me wrong, the Federalist Papers are important historical documents and provide unique insight into the minds of the authors. But they're not laws, and treating them as if they have actual legal significance seems wrong.

Where "this way" includes all sorts of implementation details that may or may not be important.

Think of a baker in some kind of baker's guild, who was taught as an apprentice various techniques for how to get the best rise from their bread, before any scientific understanding of what those techniques are doing. The baker wants to keep following their various rules of thumb, because they know they'll produce the best bread. They don't know why the rules-of-thumb work; they just know that whenever they've accidentally diverged from them, they get less puffy bread.

Now, replace "baker's rules for baking bread" with e.g. "common-law rules around easements and rights-of-way in property disputes."

Er no. The law existed long before computers did.

> Laws are phrased vaguely on purpose because real life is far too complicated to write down every eventuality and also it's easier to build political consensus for vague laws.

This doesn't discount from the code comparison at all. Anyone who has worked on a codebase for a large company knows that the feature requests never stop piling in either because the computer program will never be able to handle all the complexity of what it is trying to model either. At the end of the day, you have a function myLaw which takes four arguments, plaintiff, defendant, judge and jury. The interactions between the four and the myLaw code decide what the return value is.

> A succinct way to see the difference: You want your computer to do exactly what you wrote in the code and nothing else. This is not true of legislation. You want people to do anything that's not explicitly forbidden and tolerate them doing things that are technically forbidden as a way to introduce slack into the system.

No, because you're assuming here that the law directly controls the people. I would argue that isn't the actual purpose of the law. If this were true then there would be no crime because once a law was written, everyone would abide by it as if it had telepathic mind control and there would be no crime. Instead, people are free to ignore or read the law and then to act in concordance or discordance of their own free will. The actual purpose of the law is for evaluating the actions of people after they have done something. People are run time variables that are inserted into the law function, they are not the code themselves.

Not saying they didn’t see anonymity as a desirable property of transactions, but I don’t take this as proof that they definitely did.

I was straining to think of a good example of the 'left-wing authoritarian' but I have definitely experienced it, and apart the location of birth they are the same exact people who are just as intolerant on right.

On aggregate all humans operate pretty much the same everywhere in the way they think and operate -- the only difference is experiences and culture. That was the the point I was making -- we are never going to be rid of the people responsible for throwing wrenches in the political works.

Tangent: I think the only way this gets fixed is by putting a benevolent AI in charge of everything.

What rights do these people not have that others do? Rights belong to all individuals.

> and inflation would be slightly lower as most capitalists aren't as brazen as Trump when he publicly threatened to fire the Fed chair if interest rates didn't come down. If Trump won in 2020 most of the bad political things happening in Florida would be happening to the whole country.

It's hard to say. Tump loved to sirens, and I am no fan of that, but inflation has been coming since Clinton left office. I find it unlikely that Hilary would have reduced the deficit, especially given the unconstitutional business closure orders that many states enacted, which PPP and enhanced unemployment sought to make condition via addressing 5A, but which utterly failed at doing so imo.

That’s scary. If 31 countries cant get their act together to manufacture basic weapons then we are in no better shape than russia. Should they win the war in ukraine and decide to attack other countries we’d be caught with our pants down.

To be fair it appears that Russia is using 10x more shells then they manufacture in a year so once they run out of their old soviet stock pile things will go south for them.

But why people think it's okay to hold the current generation responsible for things previous generations (in this case quite far back) did is just juvenile.

- Your father became rich as an inventor, creating wonderful gadgets which improved the world

- My father was a warlord

- My father murdered your father, and stole $1M from him;

- invested it; and as a result

- my family now has $1B

- your family is deeply in poverty

You're poor, uneducated, and hungry. I'm at Harvard, have a trust fund, and in connected political circles. I haven't done anything wrong myself, but I did inherit blood money.

What should happen?

It's not obvious.

Great-great-grandfather?

On the Scotland point, all I can say is that it's more complicated than you present. I did NOT present a narrative of either Scotland as subservient to England, and my exact phrasing was that it has a "mixed history with England." I stand by that. I don't think "equally complicit" is any more accurate than "subservient." The last Scottish independence vote was a 45/55 split.

As for "current citizens," you can look up more recent colonial issues, like the Mau Mau Rebellion.

Please follow your own advice.

> Alright, technical argument here. This is false and tech talking heads are spreading this lie for ideological reasons.

That is not true. The "lie" is that if you allow a back channel into secure communications then you cannot be sure who will use it. You have gone from trusting the other party (whom you probably know) to trusting them and a third party, who's identity is a bit of a mystery.

> You don't need to backdoor the protocol, just the specific targeted client.

Somebody else has pointed out this is nonsense. It makes no difference. Whilst it is a fact, it is also a lie. Well done.

> Signal can scan messages before encryption and report to the authorities just fine.

That too is a lie. Signal offers secure communications. If it scans messages and sends hem to third parties that is not "Signal", that is something else.

> Whatever the UK government desires, Signal should accept it as the will of the UK people

Extraordinarily naive about the habits, morals, and actions of the English state. That is so untrue it transcends "lie".

> I don't know UK law...

No shit!

> ...but dragnet surveillance is illegal in the US but targeted warrantful requests to backdoor apps is lawful.

Not under English law. There are no rights, as Americans know them, under English law. There are statutes, that can be changed at any time if the Lords agree, and over time if they do not

> Find a better way for govs to have an advantage against CSAM and other boogeymen

Constant surveillance of all people at all times. A camera in every bathroom, In general every bedroom. My point is a line must be drawn somewhere. The English, and Australian, states do not care at all for the personal liberty of the subjects of the English crown. Some very good people in England doing very good work, but the state there is very deep.

Why? The other side isn't playing fair by any metric.

> What kind of law do you get to follow, only when you agree with it?

I don't particularly care about "dura lex sed lex", so - all of them. Of course, if you get caught, that's unfortunate - but ethics and law are two different things, and in my book the former always wins when they are in conflict. I believe that it's always moral to break unjust laws, and it's always moral to help other people to do so.

> But if the people trust the government and think preventing CSAM is more important then it is their right to self-determine

"The people" are not a singular entity with rights. Even if there's a majority that wants this, it's not "their right" morally - not when it imposes surveillance on the rest of us. They will do it anyway, of course, because the most fundamental principle of any government is that might makes right. But I don't intend to make it any easier for them, majority or not. Let them work hard for every such law they pass, and then work even harder trying to deal with all the tech that makes those laws so difficult to enforce.

The people who want it need to prove that it will help.

I had started in to list paragraphs and paragraphs of failure modes, unintended consequences, and directly bad effects, but then I realized that that implicitly accepted an inappropriate burden of proof.

I am tired of hearing "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore this must be done".

Tell me, in detail, how any of these proposals will help. Include all of the steps from the initial scanning through the final removal of harm. Do not stop at "Authority(TM) will know about X, so they can fix it". Tell me how they will fix it, and how they will do that without doing harm. Not how they theoretically could. How they actually will. And make it plausible.

After you've given me that, I'll be happy to rip it to shreds for you.

Otherwise, if you can't figure out for yourself how it's harmful to give platforms massive incentives to shut down anybody who raises costs by triggering too many false positives, how it's equally harmful to give them massive incentives to broaden their definition of what's a "true" positive, how it's harmful to have thousands of random people viewing false "hits", how it's damaging to enable Authority(TM) to come down on kids for communicating among themselves, how it's dangerous to create a massive database of blackmail material on potentially vulnerable people, how it's trivial to repurpose a spying infrastructure for different targets, or how it's useless to give more reports to law enforcement that's overwhelmed with the reports it already has, then you'll have to content yourself with reading the vast volume of stuff other people have written up about the OSB and all the related proposals.

> you should convince lawmakers about this

Many of us have been trying. The OSB has not in fact passed yet. The EU and US proposals still less.

> instead of claiming the tech is impossible.

Nobody, not me, not Meredith Whittaker, not anybody, has claimed that client side scanning is impossible, or that you can't turn around and encrypt a copy of a message after you've spied on it. That is a straw man. It is entirely your fantasy.

What they've said is that it's stupid and contrary to the whole point of having the encryption in the first place. It leaks information that's supposed to be private, including false positives, and paints a target on the most sensitive stuff. It creates infrastructure for abuse. Those are the "security properties" being "communicated". And that is 100 percent true.

When she says "back doors", she's talking about system back doors, not necessarily protocol back doors. Although the protocol would have to have some way to report the data.

Anybody with a remotely clear-headed view of the situation understands that sending off plaintext copies of the stuff you then turn around and encrypt is in tension with the purpose of doing the encryption. They also understand that once you have either the scanning or the reporting system in place, there's nothing that controls how it can be used.

And they understand that the proponents of this stuff have no detailed story at all about how the leaked plaintext is supposed to be secured after the leaking is done... especially if it's actually going to be used for the stated purposes. That is a VAST technical and organizational problem that's constantly handwaved.

> What I would have a problem with is if Signal as a corporation chooses to remain in the UK market and refuse to comply with UK law.

That's another fantasy of yours. She's been very clear that if the UK does this, Signal will exit the UK market.

However, that's her and her corporation. It's not binding on the rest of us.

The fact is that "lawmakers" do not have infinite legitimate power. It is sometimes right and maybe even morally required to directly break the law.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the widespread use of P2P tools that will make Signal look like an open book... whether they're legal or not. At this point, laws even in the "free world" are descending into insanity.