It's true that these back doors are very dangerous from a technical security point of view. But they are also bad ideas when they're working as intended.
If these companies give that kind of access to "the authorities" in the US, they have no leverage to not give it to "the authorities" in $insert_hellhole_dictatorship_here. And even in places like the US, "the authorities" routinely break the rules, overstep their bounds, and create giant unjustifiable oppressive programs. It's stupidly dangerous, to children and everybody else, to concentrate that kind of power.
They shouldn't have that power, period, even if it could be secured, which of course it can't.
It's the court saying that Google is required to make sure that top search results "reflects the current legal position." In other words, if someone was exonerated after being accused of a crime, that must now be the top link.
Or, y'know, it could be the court not being absolutely perfect in drafting its decision.
What you quoted could easily be interpreted to mean that if, say, somebody had been exonerated in a criminal case, that link would have to appear first among links mentioning the case. If the criminal case were minor 20-year-old bullshit, all of the links about it might still be on the tenth page, below more relevant material. Or nonexistant, for that matter.
And even if you don't accept that interpretation, I bet they will correct it quickly if it ever becomes a problem.
Now, whether it's possible for a computer to meet even that standard is another question. I sure don't know how I'd write code to figure out the current legal interpretation of anything. Maybe they'll accept "best efforts and quick correction". Which is still a can of worms. But why not stick to that real can of worms rather than jumping on things that are almost certainly unintentional and won't stick anyway?
If you really try to set up and follow a system of rules that divides all rights, or really all of anything else, into exactly two possible categories of "fundamental" and "not fundamental", with everything solidly on its own side of the line and nothing "not fundamental" allowed to infringe in any way on anything "fundamental", with absolutely no balancing allowed between the categories (and no real guidance on how to do balancing within either category), then you will come up with stupid nonsensical outcomes that cause massive misery.
Especially if you try to do it in any document worded vaguely enough to survive a political process. The US Constitution, for example, is horribly vague in most places, and most of the places where it doesn't leave wiggle room are poorly thought out.
It's attractive to try to make absolute distinctions, because you feel like maybe you can make a hard law to prevent some obnoxious abuse of power, but if you really try to do it, with no wiggle room at all, it won't work. Especially not if you try to have a lot of absolutes, or if you're arbitrary about which things you make absolute.
Assholes will still find a way to be assholes, and sometimes they will be able to recruit your rules to their side.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't have clear rules. It means that you have to understand that the approach has limits.
I say this, by the way, as a person who doesn't think the US is absolute enough about a lot of kinds of free speech, and who would be very unlikely to support any RTBF rule anywhere in the world.
I don't know if it matters to you, but you've abandoned any claims to textualism and are now down in the "I know a fundamental right when I see it" swamp. The US Constitution contains no general right at all to be secure in your person. The phrase appears in the Fourth Amendment, but the scope there is limited to search and seizure, which is not at issue.
So apparently you're saying there are other sources of fundamental rights, outside of the text of the document itself, that should have weight in US constitutional law. OK, cool. What are those sources, and how do I know whether I've found such a fundamental right? Maybe the right to be free from the dissemination of irrelevant negative information is one of them. If it's not, why isn't it?
You're not allowed to do any balancing in your answer. Bright lines and black-and-white categories only.
Also, the child porn restrictions do in fact apply to mere possession, as well as applying to distribution that doesn't involve producing it to begin with. In fact, the main point of adopting the laws was really to get at distribution, and indeed also at possession. Creation involves child molestation anyway, and that was already illegal, therefore less pressing.
In the US, the right to possession of protected media is treated as part of the right of free speech. Maybe that's odd, but that really is universal in US law; having and reading it is considered part of the same right as writing or saying it. And, possession aside, distribution sure as hell qualifies as part of the expressive side.
So we have a content-based restriction on expression that has nothing to do with the act production (or of how the production is done, for that matter).
And any part of the harm that's unique to the porn part, as opposed to the molestation part, is clearly a harm arising solely from that expressive act. That continuing harm does not involve security of the person. It may indeed be emotionally damaging to know that pictures of your past molestation are being distributed, but the damage does not arise from any current, ongoing violation of your actual person.
Which, if we don't allow ourselves to look at matters of degree and do "balancing", is really very much like the RTBF case, with the ongoing distribution of irrelevant, damaging information being treated as harmful to the subject.
You are going to have a HELL of a time finding a hard-edged, balancing-free distinction between those.
It's not any less bullshit when Ken White says it than it is when you say it.
And he is purely flat out full of shit when he says the US Supreme Court has never approved a content-based restriction. The child porn restriction, for example, is 100 percent content-based. It is officially justified by negative impact on those depicted... even though, ya know, by your own criteria isn't any "fundamental right" not to be traumatized that way.
It's very much like the RTBF, actually, in kind if not in degree. The US Supremen Court justifies the restriction on child porn, at the root, in terms a right to have the depicted abuse forgotten.
Once again, the very creation of those exceptional categories represents a weighing, dare I even say a balancing, of the FA and its guarantees against other concerns.
It doesn't matter if a court doesn't use the word "balance". It doesn't matter if the outcome of the balancing test is a bright line test for lower courts to use. In the end you're still balancing, and trying to deny it is sophistry.
... and those excluded categories are total asspulls, based on the feeling that SOME things are just too far beyond the pale... that those things are so bad that they, um, outbalance the fundamental right.
The First Amendment does not say "except for libel", "except for child porn", or "except for all the other stuff that's magically not protected". Those exceptions are created by balancing the "fundamental" FA right against other rights which may or may not be equally "fundamental".
There's no reason you couldn't use the same logic you use to get a libel exception to get an "irrelevant negative information" exception along the lines of the RTBF. There's simply no principled distinction being made.
things that are not fundamental rights, like "protection of personal data."
While I tend to be sympathetic, who exactly appointed you to decide which rights were fundamental?
In the US, for the most part, we've decided that the 1st Amendment doesn't have a "balancing" test.
Oh, really? What happens to me if I "express" some corporation's trade secrets? What happens to some corporation if it "expresses" something misleading in commercial advertising, using the same sort of innuendo that's allowed in political speech? Where's the government's fundamental right to have classified information.
US FA law is full of balancing tests, just like all US constitutional law. The balance may be more strongly tilted than in other places, but it's still there.
Silly me. I would have thought that when a record was ordered "expunged", that meant "completely destroy each and every copy that any government agency or anybody else under the court's jurisdiction can get their hands on".
Only lawyers would set up a system where there was any question of anybody using an "expunged" record.
Oh, yeah? Who opts into the part where EVERY PHOTO THE CAMP CAN GET ITS HANDS ON is uploaded to the cloud so that this thing can look for pictures of the "opted-in" kids? These idiots have to handle photos of everybody, opted-in or not.
Here's an idea: the staff takes no photos, period. Tthe kids share the photos they want to share among themselves by whatever means they see fit. If you see a photo you think your parents might want, and if you want them to have it, you ask for it.
... and if you do NOT want your parents to see a photo, then you don't show it to them. So that you, as a child, can begin to develop a sense of yourself as an independent human with some fucking agency and some fucking entitlement to exist without being watched all the fucking time.
So, yes, Medtronic's response here is lame and they should feel bad.
BUT it's also true that pretty much anybody is in a position to kill pretty much anybody pretty much any time. I don't have to hack your insulin pump. I can ambush you with a baseball bat. Or I can poison your insulin. Or any number of other things.
So it gets kind of old to see this stuff hyped all the time.
> "But there are no public platforms"
There aren't?
Well, no, not according to what you say in the next paragraph. They're all private property.
No, you don't get to co-opt someone's private property because it's a popular place for people to go. That doesn't work in the physical world and doesn't work here.
First, you're shifting the frame. The grandparent just means that the "large private spaces" are assuming all the functions of the old public spaces. There's nothing in that post about what to do about it.
But I am prepared to go there.
Why shouldn't we co-opt it? Private property is just a social convention. If it ceases to be of value, it can be limited or modified as necessary. In fact, it always has been limited.
In the "physical world", you have never, ever been allowed to do just anything you wanted with or on your property. Never. Not in any human society since villages popped up, and probably not before that.
There have always been taxes, land use restrictions, zoning, obligations to provide specific facilities if you provided other facilities, adverse easements, nuisance rules, etc, etc, etc. The denser the population has been, the more such restrictions there have been.
Do not pretend that private property is or should be absolute in the "physical world".
As for when you might want to limit virtual private property, one example might be when a space in which we'd previously recognized a very broad right of private control began to assume the functions of a public space...
If you actually want bureaucrats (or anybody else) to comply with a law, you build in personal consequences for failure to do so. A criminal penalty can work if it's actually enforced. In this particular case, a criminal penalty probably would not be enforced. It might actually be more effective to make anybody who willfully obstructs compliance or fails to comply permanently ineligible to work for the government... and then allow any member of the public to sue to have that applied.
I know that tech inside and out from about 30(!) years' experience (OK, only 25 for HTTP). And I have to say that the difference between a caching proxy and a host is pretty tenuous... and probably completely irrelevant from an ethical point of view.
If you're deliberately participating in delivering specific content, having chosen that particular content at least to the level that you know this or that site is controversial for this or that reason, then what difference does it make?
I could equally apply your argument to paid hosting. If a better host won't carry some content, then it'll still find hosting on a worse one. And , "btw", for controversial content, Cloudflare isn't about "a bit less reliable". It can be the difference between "reasonably available" and "essentially unavailable".
The difference between me and the grandparent is that I believe Cloudflare, and paid hosts, and whoever else, probably including large social media platforms, should NOT discriminate on content at all.
I'm having trouble seeing how economic interests are in any way better justifications for copyright than moral ones are.
In fact, I think I'll make the stronger statement that that's bullshit. Either you should have X form of control over my works, or you should not. Your motivations for exercising control shouldn't come into it.
Even most of the things you honestly think are "problems" don't seem to be real problems. It's not that we should accept them to get the good parts, it's that they are good parts. And that ignores the other stuff you tried to sneak in.
Good outcome. Papparazzi add no value and knowing where Prince Whatzisname lives or vacations is of no public interest. Guy has ZERO power over the UK government.
Good outcome. Trash should've been being shredded all along.
OK, not actually a good outcome. The "right to be forgotten" actually predates the GDPR, but the GDPR does codify it. The GDPR should probably be fixed to stay out of the public sphere more.
How is that not an INCREDIBLY GOOD outcome? You claim the GDPR is bad because it conflicts with a TOTALLY INSANE copyright rule? Obviously you didn't think anybody'd bother to check your links, and thought you could get away with using this to pad the list.
Does not appear to be related to the GDPR at all. More weaksauce list inflation.
Getting parental consent = good outcome. Returns issue = obvious misapplication of the regulations. In fact almost certainly an intentional and self-interested misapplication on the part of the retailers.
Amazon shouldn't have 1700 audio recordings of anybody to begin with, and that goes double if Amazon is so fucked up it can't tell whose data are which. I don't know why anybody'd care about Spotify history, but if anybody does care, then Spotify shouldn't have the data either.
The obvious solution here is not to collect the data to begin with. Which is what the GDPR is supposed to incent. OK, yes, the "platforms" are trying to evade the whole point of the rule, and that results in paradoxical outcomes. Looks like the GDPR should be tightened to prevent them from possessing the information at all.
And if that means Amazon can't train Alexa, then tough... Alexa is not important.
On the post: Deputy Attorney General Rosen: Companies Like Facebook Are Making Everyone Less Safe By Offering Encryption
Let's not forget...
It's true that these back doors are very dangerous from a technical security point of view. But they are also bad ideas when they're working as intended.
If these companies give that kind of access to "the authorities" in the US, they have no leverage to not give it to "the authorities" in $insert_hellhole_dictatorship_here. And even in places like the US, "the authorities" routinely break the rules, overstep their bounds, and create giant unjustifiable oppressive programs. It's stupidly dangerous, to children and everybody else, to concentrate that kind of power.
They shouldn't have that power, period, even if it could be secured, which of course it can't.
On the post: DOJ Using The FOSTA Playbook To Attack Encryption
Wow, I wish Barr would lend his enormous prestige and sterling personal reputation to MY issues...
On the post: Other Big CJEU Case Says Google Must Put Certain Links At The Top Of Search Results
Or, y'know, it could be the court not being absolutely perfect in drafting its decision.
What you quoted could easily be interpreted to mean that if, say, somebody had been exonerated in a criminal case, that link would have to appear first among links mentioning the case. If the criminal case were minor 20-year-old bullshit, all of the links about it might still be on the tenth page, below more relevant material. Or nonexistant, for that matter.
And even if you don't accept that interpretation, I bet they will correct it quickly if it ever becomes a problem.
Now, whether it's possible for a computer to meet even that standard is another question. I sure don't know how I'd write code to figure out the current legal interpretation of anything. Maybe they'll accept "best efforts and quick correction". Which is still a can of worms. But why not stick to that real can of worms rather than jumping on things that are almost certainly unintentional and won't stick anyway?
On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)
Re: Re:
It' a stupid question.
If you really try to set up and follow a system of rules that divides all rights, or really all of anything else, into exactly two possible categories of "fundamental" and "not fundamental", with everything solidly on its own side of the line and nothing "not fundamental" allowed to infringe in any way on anything "fundamental", with absolutely no balancing allowed between the categories (and no real guidance on how to do balancing within either category), then you will come up with stupid nonsensical outcomes that cause massive misery.
Especially if you try to do it in any document worded vaguely enough to survive a political process. The US Constitution, for example, is horribly vague in most places, and most of the places where it doesn't leave wiggle room are poorly thought out.
It's attractive to try to make absolute distinctions, because you feel like maybe you can make a hard law to prevent some obnoxious abuse of power, but if you really try to do it, with no wiggle room at all, it won't work. Especially not if you try to have a lot of absolutes, or if you're arbitrary about which things you make absolute.
Assholes will still find a way to be assholes, and sometimes they will be able to recruit your rules to their side.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't have clear rules. It means that you have to understand that the approach has limits.
I say this, by the way, as a person who doesn't think the US is absolute enough about a lot of kinds of free speech, and who would be very unlikely to support any RTBF rule anywhere in the world.
On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I don't know if it matters to you, but you've abandoned any claims to textualism and are now down in the "I know a fundamental right when I see it" swamp. The US Constitution contains no general right at all to be secure in your person. The phrase appears in the Fourth Amendment, but the scope there is limited to search and seizure, which is not at issue.
So apparently you're saying there are other sources of fundamental rights, outside of the text of the document itself, that should have weight in US constitutional law. OK, cool. What are those sources, and how do I know whether I've found such a fundamental right? Maybe the right to be free from the dissemination of irrelevant negative information is one of them. If it's not, why isn't it?
You're not allowed to do any balancing in your answer. Bright lines and black-and-white categories only.
Also, the child porn restrictions do in fact apply to mere possession, as well as applying to distribution that doesn't involve producing it to begin with. In fact, the main point of adopting the laws was really to get at distribution, and indeed also at possession. Creation involves child molestation anyway, and that was already illegal, therefore less pressing.
In the US, the right to possession of protected media is treated as part of the right of free speech. Maybe that's odd, but that really is universal in US law; having and reading it is considered part of the same right as writing or saying it. And, possession aside, distribution sure as hell qualifies as part of the expressive side.
So we have a content-based restriction on expression that has nothing to do with the act production (or of how the production is done, for that matter).
And any part of the harm that's unique to the porn part, as opposed to the molestation part, is clearly a harm arising solely from that expressive act. That continuing harm does not involve security of the person. It may indeed be emotionally damaging to know that pictures of your past molestation are being distributed, but the damage does not arise from any current, ongoing violation of your actual person.
Which, if we don't allow ourselves to look at matters of degree and do "balancing", is really very much like the RTBF case, with the ongoing distribution of irrelevant, damaging information being treated as harmful to the subject.
You are going to have a HELL of a time finding a hard-edged, balancing-free distinction between those.
On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)
Re: Re: 1st Amendment and Balancing
It's not any less bullshit when Ken White says it than it is when you say it.
And he is purely flat out full of shit when he says the US Supreme Court has never approved a content-based restriction. The child porn restriction, for example, is 100 percent content-based. It is officially justified by negative impact on those depicted... even though, ya know, by your own criteria isn't any "fundamental right" not to be traumatized that way.
It's very much like the RTBF, actually, in kind if not in degree. The US Supremen Court justifies the restriction on child porn, at the root, in terms a right to have the depicted abuse forgotten.
On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)
Re: Re:
Once again, the very creation of those exceptional categories represents a weighing, dare I even say a balancing, of the FA and its guarantees against other concerns.
It doesn't matter if a court doesn't use the word "balance". It doesn't matter if the outcome of the balancing test is a bright line test for lower courts to use. In the end you're still balancing, and trying to deny it is sophistry.
On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)
Re: Re: 1st Amendment and Balancing
... and those excluded categories are total asspulls, based on the feeling that SOME things are just too far beyond the pale... that those things are so bad that they, um, outbalance the fundamental right.
The First Amendment does not say "except for libel", "except for child porn", or "except for all the other stuff that's magically not protected". Those exceptions are created by balancing the "fundamental" FA right against other rights which may or may not be equally "fundamental".
There's no reason you couldn't use the same logic you use to get a libel exception to get an "irrelevant negative information" exception along the lines of the RTBF. There's simply no principled distinction being made.
On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)
While I tend to be sympathetic, who exactly appointed you to decide which rights were fundamental?
Oh, really? What happens to me if I "express" some corporation's trade secrets? What happens to some corporation if it "expresses" something misleading in commercial advertising, using the same sort of innuendo that's allowed in political speech? Where's the government's fundamental right to have classified information.
US FA law is full of balancing tests, just like all US constitutional law. The balance may be more strongly tilted than in other places, but it's still there.
On the post: NYPD, Prosecutors Illegally Using Expunged Criminal Records To Perform Investigations, Ask For Longer Sentences
Silly me. I would have thought that when a record was ordered "expunged", that meant "completely destroy each and every copy that any government agency or anybody else under the court's jurisdiction can get their hands on".
Only lawyers would set up a system where there was any question of anybody using an "expunged" record.
On the post: They Grow Up So Fast These Days: Facial Recognition Tech Edition
Oh, yeah? Who opts into the part where EVERY PHOTO THE CAMP CAN GET ITS HANDS ON is uploaded to the cloud so that this thing can look for pictures of the "opted-in" kids? These idiots have to handle photos of everybody, opted-in or not.
Here's an idea: the staff takes no photos, period. Tthe kids share the photos they want to share among themselves by whatever means they see fit. If you see a photo you think your parents might want, and if you want them to have it, you ask for it.
... and if you do NOT want your parents to see a photo, then you don't show it to them. So that you, as a child, can begin to develop a sense of yourself as an independent human with some fucking agency and some fucking entitlement to exist without being watched all the fucking time.
On the post: Researchers Build App That Kills To Highlight Insulin Pump Exploit
So, yes, Medtronic's response here is lame and they should feel bad.
BUT it's also true that pretty much anybody is in a position to kill pretty much anybody pretty much any time. I don't have to hack your insulin pump. I can ambush you with a baseball bat. Or I can poison your insulin. Or any number of other things.
So it gets kind of old to see this stuff hyped all the time.
On the post: The End Of The Open Internet: Cory Doctorow's Op-Ed From The Future
Re: Re: Re:
Well, no, not according to what you say in the next paragraph. They're all private property.
First, you're shifting the frame. The grandparent just means that the "large private spaces" are assuming all the functions of the old public spaces. There's nothing in that post about what to do about it.
But I am prepared to go there.
Why shouldn't we co-opt it? Private property is just a social convention. If it ceases to be of value, it can be limited or modified as necessary. In fact, it always has been limited.
In the "physical world", you have never, ever been allowed to do just anything you wanted with or on your property. Never. Not in any human society since villages popped up, and probably not before that.
There have always been taxes, land use restrictions, zoning, obligations to provide specific facilities if you provided other facilities, adverse easements, nuisance rules, etc, etc, etc. The denser the population has been, the more such restrictions there have been.
Do not pretend that private property is or should be absolute in the "physical world".
As for when you might want to limit virtual private property, one example might be when a space in which we'd previously recognized a very broad right of private control began to assume the functions of a public space...
On the post: Interior Department Putting Even More Effort Into Dodging FOIA Request
This stuff is totally predictable
If you actually want bureaucrats (or anybody else) to comply with a law, you build in personal consequences for failure to do so. A criminal penalty can work if it's actually enforced. In this particular case, a criminal penalty probably would not be enforced. It might actually be more effective to make anybody who willfully obstructs compliance or fails to comply permanently ineligible to work for the government... and then allow any member of the public to sue to have that applied.
On the post: The Flipside To Figuring Out What Content Do You Block: Cloudflare's Project Galileo Focuses On Who It Should Protect
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I know that tech inside and out from about 30(!) years' experience (OK, only 25 for HTTP). And I have to say that the difference between a caching proxy and a host is pretty tenuous... and probably completely irrelevant from an ethical point of view.
If you're deliberately participating in delivering specific content, having chosen that particular content at least to the level that you know this or that site is controversial for this or that reason, then what difference does it make?
I could equally apply your argument to paid hosting. If a better host won't carry some content, then it'll still find hosting on a worse one. And , "btw", for controversial content, Cloudflare isn't about "a bit less reliable". It can be the difference between "reasonably available" and "essentially unavailable".
The difference between me and the grandparent is that I believe Cloudflare, and paid hosts, and whoever else, probably including large social media platforms, should NOT discriminate on content at all.
On the post: Pepe The Frog Creator, Infowars Both Claim Victory After $15k Copyright Settlement
Issue closed: not a bug
I'm having trouble seeing how economic interests are in any way better justifications for copyright than moral ones are.
In fact, I think I'll make the stronger statement that that's bullshit. Either you should have X form of control over my works, or you should not. Your motivations for exercising control shouldn't come into it.
On the post: Oversight Says FBI's Facial Recognition System Has Gotten Bigger, But Not Better
Seems like there's a bit too much concern about accuracy...
... and a bit too little concern about whether they should be doing this to begin with...
On the post: Amazon, Law Enforcement Joining Forces To Turn Your Front Door Into An Integral Part Of The Surveillance State
What about the people across the street?
Do I have any recourse if my neighbor installs a device that spies on MY house 24/7?
On the post: One Year Into The GDPR: Can We Declare It A Total Failure Yet?
"Numerous articles", my ass
Even most of the things you honestly think are "problems" don't seem to be real problems. It's not that we should accept them to get the good parts, it's that they are good parts. And that ignores the other stuff you tried to sneak in.
The obvious solution here is not to collect the data to begin with. Which is what the GDPR is supposed to incent. OK, yes, the "platforms" are trying to evade the whole point of the rule, and that results in paradoxical outcomes. Looks like the GDPR should be tightened to prevent them from possessing the information at all.
And if that means Amazon can't train Alexa, then tough... Alexa is not important.
On the post: FBI And Half The World Bust Operators Of A Site That Made The Dark Web Searchable
If Deep Dot Web is the one I remember, it's misleading to call it a search engine. It was more like a news site with advertising.
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