Europe has similar bills with chat control. There was no serious expert that did not warn about the severe negative repercussions. Representatives still didn't seem to be interested and the EU isn't particular democratic so anyone could be held to account.
I think technology must provide ways to ensure free and secure communication without a possibility of surveillance. The political class cannot be entrusted to shield essential freedoms, so technology has to provide it. Large tech companies are a single point of failure and we already have seen political influence there. While much of it is now challenged at least, I think we can all be glad the the internet provided some resilience against surveillance and propaganda attempts.
In that regard the panic about disinformation is also mostly manufactured in my opinion and the voice of experts will be disregarded anyway.
I agree generally, but we have to be realistic that decentralization/onion routing/public key encryption and all the other technical tricks at our disposal will only slow the corporations/the state down. Yes, it convenient for the FBI to have a web form to be able to get access to your gmail inbox or whatever, but they will happily just arrest you and beat you with a wrench until you give them your private keys.
The truth is that power (aka money) is heavily concentrated in global society. It's a worthwhile goal to break it up, and maybe there are some technical tricks to help people toward that end, but even if we woke up tomorrow with a perfectly decentralized and anonymous network culture, we would still be under the rule of oil interests/unelected bureaucrats/unaccountable intelligence agencies/the finance industry/your bogeyman of choice.
Yeah, i think we also have to be wary of defeatism when it comes to things like this as well. Of course they could just kidnap and torture you, they've always been able to do that. But this is about their ability to get information on millions of people simultaneously. It would be pretty unrealistic for the FBI to simultaneously kidnap and torture every member of an ethnic or political group. But if that data is all online then that information becomes easy and instant to get. So yeah, 1 person could be captured, that's not what this is about. This is about the simultaneous capture of _everyone_, which is wholly something outside the realm of possibility currently.
We shouldn't give up just because a bad thing already exists.
> Yes, it convenient for the FBI to have a web form to be able to get access to your gmail inbox or whatever, but they will happily just arrest you and beat you with a wrench until you give them your private keys.
Very unlikely on average, because they cannot (and are not interested) in arresting everyone. Internet surveillance, however, makes it easy to spy on everyone all the time.
This is also why it is vital to have approximately everyone using secure technologies.
> There was no serious expert that did not warn about the severe negative repercussions.
This is surprisingly often the case, not just for criminal law (or "security law") changes, but even in general lawmaking. And way more often than not those experts are spot on. Be it obvious loop holes in regulations, tax code issues, eroding civil rights, obvious unconstitionality of many surveillance (and many other) laws, obvious abuse potential and so on. It's a very long list.
I think technology must provide ways to ensure free and secure communication without a possibility of surveillance. The political class cannot be entrusted to shield essential freedoms, so technology has to provide it. Large tech companies are a single point of failure and we already have seen political influence there. While much of it is now challenged at least, I think we can all be glad the the internet provided some resilience against surveillance and propaganda attempts.
In that regard the panic about disinformation is also mostly manufactured in my opinion and the voice of experts will be disregarded anyway.