Concerns About Using Private and Secure Software for Bad Things

100% agree, it unfortunately isn’t representative of our current reality.

It’s worth considering APTs aren’t even considered “criminal” in their own country/allies as they’re often doing the bidding of the state.

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There is no game, you’re just touching on morality and asserting it’s objective when the evidence (so far) points to it being a bit more complicated than that.

Let’s go even further with violence then. If it’s something “everyone” can agree on, that violence is bad, why are there people who support the death penalty for some crimes? What about people who think some wars are justified? and so on.

yeah, there’s that fine line between APTs who are state actors, and APTs who are technically organised crime but tolerated by their state

War is never justified. The death penalty can be and has been argued to be immoral. So again, I still stand by my statement all violence is bad. And watching violence and committing violence, just propagates an endless cycle of violence. So in order for violence to be stopped it needs to be eradicated irrespective of its context.

As for criminals, statistically and from experience we can all agree that the majority of humans can not develop sophisticated software, this includes criminals, even for those who are proficient this is more than a minor inconvenience, in addition, in the ideal world this software would be targeted for removal, which sorts that out. Again in reality, this is way harder almost impossible, but with innovation anything is possible.

I think this argument can all be summarised as: call me a dreamer.

Whether it is for better of for worse, is for you to decide.

From a moral perspective maybe, things should be talked about.

Ultimately though when talking fails, that is where things end up. At the same time defense is considered a response to war and that will always be necessary.

Without defense a state would encourage more war as they would be considered “weak” by states with more aggressive policy. One of the things that prevents war is the calculation of cost to the aggressor state.

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You raise a good point, on your last point, no because often times these states become engulfed and apart of the aggressor state.

Ideally, there would be no divisions and states or war or violence, I guess I can refine my initial statement, the person or people initiating the violence is/are bad. And I think with that, we can all agree on.

The problem is, that those people don’t consider what they are doing to be bad, especially if they’re not particularly mentally well or have a realistic view of reality.

This is why functional democracies are important, so that individuals at the top making bad decisions can be removed. Simply put, humans aren’t infallible regardless of color, nationality or geographical region.

It’s also why it’s important for there to be separation of the executive and judicial branches of government.

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Yes, there are certainly many real life constraints, and I honestly suspect we will never achieve the ideals that the majority of humans irrespective of their background luckily agree on.

At the least we can certainly work towards them, but there will unfortunately always be some * head to manipulate technological advances to do the opposite of their intended purpose, and we have seen this with like everything. But by removing things that are historically used for more bad than good, cough* guns, we can certainly achieve some largely uni-directional improvements.

Had a good discussion with y’all, my bad if I came off as mean spirited.

I don’t think anyone took it that way, we allow for open discussion here.

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Haha yeah, maybe just @pinkandwhite my bad for saying you were playing games I didn’t mean to imply that you were doing it maliciously. :+1:

Anyway, keep on trucking you all are certainly doing more good than harm, I definitely did not to intend to suggest otherwise, but I did want to highlight the double edged source that is complete anonymity, and that I think I did. Love this community so much!

(quick sidenote: moved to Off Topic since this isn’t a question that has a definitive answer, which is what Questions is for)

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How would you proceed forward without turning society into a dystopia?

Lets say this universe has given you divine right to rule and govern your country right now (without anything else changing, including what you know right now). How would you proceed forward?

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The topic is very interesting to me, and although I will have a bias being a privacy advocate myself, I am also interested in the social and philosophical side of this question.

However, I am currently going to an event soon. I will read the replies and respond to them and your post when I am free. I will do so by editing this post below the line.


I see the right to privacy, and support for privacy-preserving and privacy-enhancing tools much the same way I see any other fundamental right.

An order of magnitude more harm and danger comes from the elimination of the right, than comes from bad actors abusing the right.

I personally feel it is somewhat naive unrealistic to assume that empowering an entity to regulate speech, or monitor all of our communications and determine what is or isn’t acceptable, would be the most effective way to stop bad things from happening, I think it is even more naive unrealistic to think that whatever entity or person is empowered to make these determinations would always do so objectively and without ulterior motives or bias, and would not be corruptible or exploitable.

Part of living in a modern, democratic, pluralistic society is understanding that there is no one morality we can all agree on, or that is objectively inarguably the only right way to see things. Freedom of expression is an acknowledgement of two things, its natural and inevitable (and healthy) in a pluralistic society to hear opinions and statements you disagree with, sometimes even things you find morally objectionable, and more importantly that even if you want there to be some arbiter of what is or isn’t acceptable to say, empowering anyone to dictate that is a bigger danger in and of itself (and doesn’t solve the problem–people being told they can’t say or think something doesn’t actually change opinions). Most of the ideas that are considered mainstream and progressive today would’ve been considered wrong, dangerous, or even heretical in the past, and are still considered wrong in many societies today. I think of the right to privacy in much the same way as I see freedom of expression. Undermining that right would create more danger than it eliminates.

I find it scary when people (seemingly) advocate the monitoring and regulation of all private communications, with the intent of prohibiting things like “endorsing a specific religion”. That scares me, and I am not even slightly religious.

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Well spoken, but such is the nature of your claim that it can not be substantiated.

I don’t think I was implying this in my original context, I simply mentioned a bunch of things that have been historically associated as “bad”. Perhaps rather than using the word endorsing, I should have said imposing, brain-washing or aggressively imposing, especially at a young age, to get my point across. Nevertheless, with informing discussion, perhaps only universally agreed on “bad things” like violence could be banned, grey areas could be left alone as you have pointed out they are subject to bias.

Again, all the things you have said are the hurdles that must be overcome, taking my ideal at face value, it would certainly be better than the current situation, the question of achieving this ideal is an entirely different question altogether.

I think fundamentally the issue with this is:

  • Who decides what is good or bad or fundamentally wrong and for what reason
  • Why would anyone care what they think if they’re not an authority where the developer lives
  • Why would the user care if they can just use software that doesn’t have those limitations

It can only really ever happen in situations where large companies can be threatened by government and don’t employ any kind of zero knowledge technology.

If government rules zero knowledge technology is illegal then there are two outcomes:

  • Users just use something in a juristiction that does provide this functionality
  • Companies wind up operations in hostile countries (thus depriving government of taxation)

Therefore there just isn’t a workable solution. Essenially you’d have to have all governments of the world agree on things which simply doesn’t happen in practice/reality.

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