I wonder if there are technological shields that can be developed—using intelligence—to protect / shield privacy. Similar to VPNs. Like suggest parts of my face I could cover to hide my heart rate or insert noise into my call or browsing history.
There are, but none will be allowed to exist. All tools which help privacy also makes it easier to get away with breaking the law or engaging in immoral behaviour. Online anonymity is under attack through ID verification, and they’re trying to ban encryption. VPNs are also increasingly illegal.
The system is trying to make the world more legible so that it can automate its judgement of you, the processing of your information, and the collection of your private information (since it’s valuable to companies and attractive to governments). They will claim that you must be doing something illegal if you want privacy, and since most people don’t want to look bad, few will come to your defense.
Those bans are a work-in-progress. I expect it to take a few more years personally.
Senate Bill 73 was signed on March 19, making websites accountable for users use of VPNs in the state of Utah. Denmark tried to ban VPNs recently (perhaps not a full ban, just a move to “combat piracy”), but due to pushback it was dropped. Officials in France have talked about VPN bans in connection to a planned social media ban for teens under 15, and there’s a proposed EU regulation called “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (it’s also known as Chat Control”) and VPNs seem like a likely way to get past it, so I figure VPNs will be targeted next. VPNs also have legitimate uses which are hard to ban, so they might simply restrict their use.
When laws like this don’t go through at first, they simply try again and again until they manage, so it’s just a question of time. The slippery slope fallacy is rarely much of a fallacy when it comes to things like this
My impression was that the FBI and CIA etc has always been trying to ban encryption an similar, but has so far mostly failed. Strong encryption was illegal (from the Wikipedia page on PGP):
”in February 1993 Zimmermann [inventor of PGP encryption] became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for “munitions export without a license”. At the time, cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time.”
But this was later changed to allow strong encryption for the public. So while I share your worry, I take hope that the slippery slope is not inevitable.
Either the restrictive law itself, or a close equivalent, yes. But the reason is that tyranny is an attractor state in many systems.
Revolutions, civil wars and other strong disruption such can reset a tyrannical state into a more free state, but that seems to happen less recently due to globalism, and there’s a sort of meta-progress of away from freedom which is not reset, so the baseline of privacy and freedom is approximately the inverse of technological achievement.
Now, you might want proof of this, or stronger arguments than what I have. In the hard sciences, which society regards as the most difficult intellectual work, proofs are possible. But every day life is actually much more complicated than the hard sciences are, and too many things depend on eachother for us to be able to isolate anything as a cause. Some people, myself included, are good with more complex systems, and we’re no worse predictors than those who specialize in just one thing and get renown for that. Academia is rather hostile to those who don’t commit the McNamara fallacy, as them commiting the fallacy makes them unsympathetic towards people who make claims which are difficult to verify. Nassim Taleb has pretty good takes on complex systems which I recommend
I think if you actually dig into the facts here you’ll see that while there may be a gradual increase in restrictive laws over long periods of time the majority of restrictive measures introduced—just like the majority of nearly all measures introduced—fail. This is particularly true at the Federal level, while at the state and local level there’s a lot of variation from place to place.
Deflecting demands for proof, particularly as that term is understood in the “hard” sciences, is not unreasonable. Deflecting demands for stronger arguments is just intellectual laziness.
The period is not so long. It’s enough that if you were to implement 10 years of change in a single day, you’d have mass protests or a civil war on your hand. Culturally, the world is currently changing very fast, since we can only compare to the past, which changed much more slowly.
A gradual decrease in freedom over time is a really bad sign, for the same reason that a gradual increase in temperature, and a gradual decrease in birth rates are really bad signs. The media attacks the social status of those who don’t panic enough about global warming, and it attacks the social status of those who panic too much about privacy, and then people compete in showing how good and proper they are (by signaling that they do not belong to the group which is being criticized). It’s a waste of time to argue against common opinion, even when one is correct and in possession of good arguments. Disagreements about facts play out as if they’re power and value conflicts
I wonder if there are technological shields that can be developed—using intelligence—to protect / shield privacy. Similar to VPNs. Like suggest parts of my face I could cover to hide my heart rate or insert noise into my call or browsing history.
There are, but none will be allowed to exist. All tools which help privacy also makes it easier to get away with breaking the law or engaging in immoral behaviour. Online anonymity is under attack through ID verification, and they’re trying to ban encryption. VPNs are also increasingly illegal.
The system is trying to make the world more legible so that it can automate its judgement of you, the processing of your information, and the collection of your private information (since it’s valuable to companies and attractive to governments). They will claim that you must be doing something illegal if you want privacy, and since most people don’t want to look bad, few will come to your defense.
Where (outside of widely-recognized-as-totalitarian societies) are VPNs illegal?
Those bans are a work-in-progress. I expect it to take a few more years personally.
Senate Bill 73 was signed on March 19, making websites accountable for users use of VPNs in the state of Utah. Denmark tried to ban VPNs recently (perhaps not a full ban, just a move to “combat piracy”), but due to pushback it was dropped. Officials in France have talked about VPN bans in connection to a planned social media ban for teens under 15, and there’s a proposed EU regulation called “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (it’s also known as Chat Control”) and VPNs seem like a likely way to get past it, so I figure VPNs will be targeted next. VPNs also have legitimate uses which are hard to ban, so they might simply restrict their use.
When laws like this don’t go through at first, they simply try again and again until they manage, so it’s just a question of time. The slippery slope fallacy is rarely much of a fallacy when it comes to things like this
My impression was that the FBI and CIA etc has always been trying to ban encryption an similar, but has so far mostly failed. Strong encryption was illegal (from the Wikipedia page on PGP):
”in February 1993 Zimmermann [inventor of PGP encryption] became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for “munitions export without a license”. At the time, cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time.”
But this was later changed to allow strong encryption for the public. So while I share your worry, I take hope that the slippery slope is not inevitable.
I’m reminded of https://xkcd.com/504/ (which was written before “crypto” meant “cryptocurrency”).
It sounds like you’re arguing that every restrictive law that’s ever attempted is eventually enacted. Is that really your claim?
Either the restrictive law itself, or a close equivalent, yes. But the reason is that tyranny is an attractor state in many systems.
Revolutions, civil wars and other strong disruption such can reset a tyrannical state into a more free state, but that seems to happen less recently due to globalism, and there’s a sort of meta-progress of away from freedom which is not reset, so the baseline of privacy and freedom is approximately the inverse of technological achievement.
Now, you might want proof of this, or stronger arguments than what I have. In the hard sciences, which society regards as the most difficult intellectual work, proofs are possible. But every day life is actually much more complicated than the hard sciences are, and too many things depend on eachother for us to be able to isolate anything as a cause. Some people, myself included, are good with more complex systems, and we’re no worse predictors than those who specialize in just one thing and get renown for that. Academia is rather hostile to those who don’t commit the McNamara fallacy, as them commiting the fallacy makes them unsympathetic towards people who make claims which are difficult to verify. Nassim Taleb has pretty good takes on complex systems which I recommend
I think if you actually dig into the facts here you’ll see that while there may be a gradual increase in restrictive laws over long periods of time the majority of restrictive measures introduced—just like the majority of nearly all measures introduced—fail. This is particularly true at the Federal level, while at the state and local level there’s a lot of variation from place to place.
Deflecting demands for proof, particularly as that term is understood in the “hard” sciences, is not unreasonable. Deflecting demands for stronger arguments is just intellectual laziness.
The period is not so long. It’s enough that if you were to implement 10 years of change in a single day, you’d have mass protests or a civil war on your hand. Culturally, the world is currently changing very fast, since we can only compare to the past, which changed much more slowly.
A gradual decrease in freedom over time is a really bad sign, for the same reason that a gradual increase in temperature, and a gradual decrease in birth rates are really bad signs. The media attacks the social status of those who don’t panic enough about global warming, and it attacks the social status of those who panic too much about privacy, and then people compete in showing how good and proper they are (by signaling that they do not belong to the group which is being criticized). It’s a waste of time to argue against common opinion, even when one is correct and in possession of good arguments. Disagreements about facts play out as if they’re power and value conflicts