UK Effort to Keep Apple Encryption Fight Secret Is Blocked

Unfortunately, I don't see there is any healthy middle ground with even existing tech, let alone future tech.

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From the perspective of tech, secrets are mandatory and impossible:

Mandatory for the functioning of identification, of logging in with a secure password that remains secure. The modern world would just stop functioning if passwords were not secure, if online orders or banking could be intercepted by criminals, and there's no way to limit encryption to "just the people who need it", because that's approximately everyone on approximately all economically relevant websites.

Impossible, because surveillance tech is already powerful, and also improving so fast. Drones with telephoto lenses to watch you type your password, or duplicate every key on your physical keyring. WIFI used as wall-penetrating radar. Laser microphones to hear your conversation. Side-channel attacks from Van Eck phreaking onwards. The attacks are increasingly affordable, I have to assume at this point that organised crime uses them.

(For future tech, I think we're only a few years from "smart dust" that's actually dust-sized).

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From politics, it's no better:

We all know about our own secrets, the importance of keeping them. Many of us are familiar with the lessons of history, where governments use secret police to engage in covert ops against a political, ideological, or social opponents and dissidents — even the term "secret police" is a shorthand for authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. And the CIA and FBI (and some US state entities like the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission[0]).

But.

Internationally, between governments, these forces battle each other. The CIA needed to be secretive and have the power to snoop, to be able to intercept the KGB agents trying to influence things.

As the MSSC (which I only learned about while writing this comment) shows, one polity's idea of unwanted political interference is another polity's idea of natural justice. (Indeed, the whole cold war has been described as a "friendly debate over which economic system is good and which one is an evil virus of Satan"[1]).

To a government, there's no important difference between outsiders who want change because they themselves are the barbarians at the gate and those who want change because they're a fifth column. States group together everything that might be a threat from unarmed students fatally shot by an Ohio National Guardsman for daring to protest against the draft, to whoever it was that shot up some power transformers a few years back[3], to MS-13, in the same way your immune system goes against all things that might cause illness regardless of if that's a common cold, COVID, or an infection that tries to pretend to be pancreatic cells and thereby triggers type-1 diabetes.

You, personally you, (and me) need some kind of intelligence agency that goes around and infiltrates all the groups that think we shouldn't be able to do ${insert liberty here}. For me, that includes freedom to be bi, freedom to not be a Christian, and freedom to not be a Muslim — there's people in this world today who want to end each of these things, and in the past also people who wanted to ban left-handed writing (another freedom relevant to me).

"Freedom to swing your fist ends at someone else's nose" and all that. But paradox of tolerance, how do you stop someone else who wants everyone to be free to swing a fist into ${outgroup}'s noses, how do you stop them rising to power? Who watches the watchers?

There's more freedoms that I'd like to have and don't, freedoms that other people would be horrified by. People in power in many places would not want me to be able to organise to become free in those ways, they would see it as a threat. One of the freedoms that I want and which powerful people see as a threat was my preference for the EU over the UK, especially with regard to the Human Rights Act and associated courts (but also, I'm not a royalist), where some commentators during the Brexit wanted to leave the human rights courts as part of Brexit, and the only thing I could do to remain confident about it in light of the uncertainty was to leave the UK myself — many in positions of power in the UK, were talking about people like me who like the EU in such terms, calling us "Quislings" and similar.

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I think this is a U-shaped problem: the only two stable conditions are (1) a horrifyingly omnipresent surveillance state that enforces whatever social norms it happened to coalesce out of, or (2) a nearly anarchic system, in an economy that's either post-money or hard-cash-only (no digital), where nobody even has the capability to organise groups because everyone can see the attempt immediately.

[0] TIL, and WTF, "a permanent authority for maintenance of racial segregation with a full staff and funds for its operations to come out of tax money": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_State_Sovereignty_...

[1] 18 minutes into "history of the entire world, i guess": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuCn8ux2gbs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack

There are other stable conditions: law is not the only possible system of justice. Is it in the best interests for everyone if the law steps in every time one person punches another? Law is helpful when things can't be resolved at an interpersonal level: there are situations where a single punch should be prosecuted, so we can't just make punching legal; but equally, if too many things are illegal, selective policing becomes possible, and that's an abuse we really don't want.

Institutions like the criminal justice system are tools. Some can wield the institutions skilfully (e.g. https://www.loweringthebar.net/2006/07/judge_tells_con.html, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-38021839/speeding-drivers-q...), but often, it's a blunt instrument.

I think "justice" is one of those words where people all think they're in agreement about it being good, but when you ask them what it means then suddenly they're all wildly divergent.

And that's the problem.

"Swinging one's fist" is more of a quote than an example here; for an example, consider that everyone agrees "murder is wrong", but we don't agree about abortion, euthanasia, deaths by police action, the death penalty, accidental civilian casualties during war, war crimes, or population liabilities if a large number of each people produce a small quantity of toxin that causes a statistically significant change in the life expectancy of the area. People protest these things, and some attempt crimes to force change on these topics.

Some say it's acceptable to use lethal force to prevent a homicide. Is it acceptable for anti-pollution protestors to vandalise gasoline supplies to reduce NOx emissions? Was it acceptable 20 years ago when we didn't have any obvious rapid path to electrification of road traffic, given that our economies are dependent on road transport?

A while before the 9/11 attacks, I saw a chain-email demanding action against the Taliban for their mis-treatment of women. When Afghanistan was invaded, I saw people upset about that, too (though in different ways, e.g. because the invading forces accidentally killed people by dropping food on their heads or bombing weddings because of the celebratory machine gun fire). Nobody was a fan of Saddam Hussein, but the second Iraq war was even more heavily criticised, despite UK/US leadership insisting Iraq had WMDs.

The boundaries here seem clean, crime vs. justice, peace vs. war, protest vs. terrorism, self defence vs. attack, but the closer I look the more I see these things as continuums.

The world is deep and hard to categorise, people disagree on the nature of justice, and many (all?) people mistake their moral heuristics for moral truth. But there's one thing that everybody agrees on: "justice is obeying the law" is wrong. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/196 (Or https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-obligation/, if you're one of those boring types who wants factual understanding.)