This is a short follow up to my Friday post which argued for protest over more crypto and received a lot of critical comments. Based on these here are my replies to the key questions / objections:
1. The most common comment was – why not do both? Why not more crypto and protest? In fact won’t we need to crypto to protest? Doing both suggests that doubling down on crypto is a viable strategy. It is not – the more we invest in this now the more we expend resources on an unwinnable arms race (if anyone wants to disagree here I would like to see both a comprehensive technological argument including hardware and a historic precedent). In order to be effective we have to pursue a strategy of protest that is completely out in the open. We would better be spending those resources on getting the message out to citizens and voters. I will have a separate post just on this question alone based on the following principle: don’t compete, change the game.
2. What good is it to protest in the US when this is an international issue? Well, for starters it does seem that the NSA has been the global ring leader so it does make a lot of sense to start here. Furthermore, there is a lot of Internet traffic that’s strictly within the US. And finally, there is no way we can ask others to put their house in order until we have done that at home – the US has been a beacon for democracy in the past and it can be that again if we fight for it.
3. Government isn’t good for anything and/or can never be trusted or controlled, so why bother? The level of anti government cynicism in the comments was quite extraordinary and probably the most troubling. It is at a minimum a misunderstanding of the past and at the worst a betrayal. Democratic government with a constitution and a bill of rights is very clearly an improvement over anything we have had before. The people who fought the British monarchy and helped establish our current system would be sorely disappointed to see us simply shrug our shoulders and say “nah, can’t be fixed, let’s build some tech instead of trying.”
More on this to come for sure. The proper use and limitations of technology seems like the central issue for the future of democracy and surveillance is the sharp edge.
