You know how in history, occasionally the good old king would die and his crazy nephew would take over and burn all the peasants? This was possible because the king had absolute power.
Now, you might argue that this absolute power in this case is being used for good - but given the brush the US just had with accidental Nero, it’s worth being wary of how tools and powers might not only be used by current powers, but by future ones too.
Exactly. If you don't want weapons of mass destruction to exist, don't create them and definitely don't tell anyone (too late).
If you don't want tools of mass oppression to exist, don't create them. (We are here now.)
The fight against Japan in 1945 was important, as is the fight agains child abuse today.
But we will have to live with the choises we make, in the short run like I wrote about above and also in the long run when a crazy president is elected like you write.
I actually trust local police and courts. But I don't blindly trust future police, future courts and future politicians.
And when it comes to multi national companies I trust them to maximize shareholder value, even if that means doing what China or Saudi Arabia wishes.
As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.
> Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use.
You are forgiven if you have missed it but in the wake of Snowden Google and others have hardened their systems massively.
Signal, Matrix and others are actually making it hard to do dragnet surveillance.
> And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.
Because boundaries have been overstepped again. This is a constant battle that we software people have with authorities :-)
There has been an informal truce that they leave our devices alone and we accept that they scan the cloud.
Now things are about to change and we'll respond. We've won before and I think we can do it again.
PS: There are always good reasons.
PPS: We won the last big one: Cryptography software was "munitions" and couldn't be exported until someone took it on them to make a book out of it, ship it to Europe and let cryptography people here scan it.
So according to the argument up front terrorists won, and I guess we should have a lot of problems now, but we don't have.
If you've never seen a slippery slope in action, ask someone else if they have. It always starts with something everyone can agree on. It's the inevitable slippage over time as the population replaces itself with people who arrn't intrinsically cognizant of the "before" state and the implicit normalization of deviance that represents. We may only live for about 100 years, but I challenge you to look at the size of the United States Code and what has been specifically carved out as illegal or aberrancies normalized just in 200 years.
If you don't want the atmosphere full of toxic corrosive oxygen, don't breathe it out during photosynthesis. (we were here 2.5 billion years ago, worked great for methanogens)
If you don't want to live in oppressive stratified sedentary society don't invent agriculture. (we were here ~dozen millenia ago, worked great for hunter-gatherers)
Now, you might argue that this absolute power in this case is being used for good - but given the brush the US just had with accidental Nero, it’s worth being wary of how tools and powers might not only be used by current powers, but by future ones too.