= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
OrphanWilde comments on Open Thread, May 4 - May 10, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (215)
True.
But if they truly shut the anarchy down - prevented VPN and proxy connections to external anarchy - would that still hold?
No, not really, because you can't "truly shut the anarchy down".
Consider, say, the night streets of New York City. Is there anarchy there? Certainly not. And yet there is some level of crime, you can buy drugs, you can get mugged, etc. If you get shot in the Bronx, it doesn't mean that a government agent shot you (though sometimes that is so).
"Shutting down the anarchy" means getting it down to meatspace level.
Meatspace analogies don't apply to bitspace. Autonomous government agents are expensive in meatspace, but have only a marginal cost in bitspace if you prohibit secure-against-government-search communications, which is easy to do once you've committed to creating said autonomous agents to identify anybody attempting to engage in them.
That's a very big IF and I'm fairly optimistic that the cryptography genie will be hard to stuff back into his bottle.
Even if you try to enforce plaintext-only communications (which by itself leads to a host of issues), I can stuff a wide communication channel into the lower bits of cat videos (and such) after which we are off to the arms races and your "marginal cost of governement agents" becomes not so marginal after all.
In any case, if we get to THAT totalitarian society, we'll have bigger things to worry about than the freedoms of the internet.
You don't need to catch every secure communication. Even a 1% identification rate is enough; less if you're willing to toss in some traffic analysis into the mix. Your goal, after all, isn't to prevent secure communication, or even to identify what's inside it, it's to identify the people doing it, because the secure communication itself, rather than the contents of the communication, are what you've banned.
But I don't think anybody -wants- this level of control. The Internet is too powerful a weapon.