Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel

[Tyler Durden]

"It's mildly amusing to watch your months-long transition from newcomer to believer that crypto provides the tools for sabotaging the State and protecting real liberty."

Well, this is for me not an easy issue. Amerika has always had a hard-on for fascism (as long as it was in the service of "freedom"), and as a result the pendulum seems to swing pretty wildly at times.

Crypto is for me primarily a way to send information to somebody else without worrying if a third party hears it. This may be financial data, it may be personal information.

In a state where Crypto is not resisted (OK, there probably aren't a lot of these...perhaps in Europe or Canada?), Crypto "defaults" to the above.

In a state where crypto (and hence my right to communicate discretely) is resisted, it then transforms into a means of resistance and possible preservation of residual freedoms. (And I would argue that Crypto is transformed precisely BY the resisting powers, contrary to their belief.)

And let's say, for 5 minutes, that I might be willing to sacrifice some of my freedom for more "security". Even if I actually believed this would work, the fact is that the state that "protects us" now from the scary Terrorists out there can (and likely will) transmute into a corrupt shell for the rich and powerful (if it isn't that already).

I am actually anti-violence (insofar as violence is defined as harm by humans towards other humans). I am not a passifist, however, which for me means that if actual violence is ever to be used, it should be used only as an absolute last resort, after all other possibilities have been exhausted, and only for reasons that have undeniable need (WW2 is an example, as was the Chinese Communist reaction to the Nationalist's non-response to Japanese Genocide in China).

In this sense, then, strong Crypto, Ubiquitous WiFi/Broadband, P2P, Blacknet and so on are for me tools with which to head off scenarios where violence might otherwise be the only reasonable recourse. Are we nearing such a scenario? I really don't know. I haven't yet been in a situation where I felt it was the only reasonable response, and I hope I never am. (I've been close, though.) What I DO hope is that via the proliferation of such (and other) technologies, the very notions of "limiting speech" (whether by "good guys" or "bad guys"), surveillance of on-line activites, and so on, become anachronistic, perhaps even non-concepts. This won't solve all thr problems, of course, but at least it will be difficult (if not impossible) for Governments to operate without their being widespread knowledge of its activities, and I believe this can only be a good thing (like, imagine if their had been video regularly uploaded out of Treblinka).

Is this view necessarily anti-State? It depends on the state.

This is essentially the view I had coming in, and its basically the view I have now, except I am thinking I should start finding the time to write some code!





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