National security can largely kiss my ass.
For the most part, “national security” is the security of the State, and is largely unrelated to the security of the people who live in that State. Since we’re all speaking English here, it’s safe to assume that the States we’re talking about are capitalist ones, so “national security” is for the most part the security of the oligarchs of the State in question.
A closely related term is “national interest,” which for the most part is a euphemism for the interests of the country’s billionaires.
For my fellow Americans, here are two concrete examples of what I mean:
Those two holes in the middle of New York City are blowback from our national interests in West Asia in the later half of the last century. National interests and national security are not our interests or our security.
It’s the same thing as when people reference “the economy”, when what they are really taking about is the stock market
🛎️🛎️🛎️ Citations Needed podcast: Ep 191: How Media’s Use of ‘The Economy’ Flattens Class Conflict
My digital information should have the same privacy my home does.
Authorities need probable cause to obtain a warrant to search my home, photo album, notes, or anything else.
Tech companies are not allowed to come into my private home, look through everything, cataloge all of it, then turn around and sell it.
My electronic devices should also have these same priviledges.
National security is just the thing people in government say when they’re doing something they know they shouldn’t be doing.
National security is never a justification for anything.
Get a real fucking search warrant. No blanket warrants, no rubber stamps.
It should be like in The Wire. Every communications tap requires its own warrant from a judge. And if there are challenges decoding those communications, it is the law enforcement officers’ job to make sense of the data.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that national security and privacy are mutually exclusive. I think its a load of horseshit used to get people to give up their privacy willingly.
Law enforcement and governments have more then enough weapons and tech to do their job without trampling on privacy.
How are they opposed?
Depending on how you define national security they aren’t.
You can default to privacy while allowing court ordered exceptions. That seems reasonable and effective, and seemingly has worked fine for along time.
Individual privacy and security is national security.
The “nation” in anything resembling a democracy is made up of individual private people with their own motivations, and their own sometimes considerable power, whose security is protected even when it doesn’t line up with the interests of whoever happens to be in charge of the government. Those nations can become extremely powerful, much more so than “secure” states, because they have within them powerful people who give good faith to the systems of government that can organize and wield state power. It has to be that way. Any government that betrays that relationship will collapse into something akin to modern-day Russia. Certain policies might be bad for “individual privacy” in the short run, and good for “national security” in the short run, but there’s a reason why the nations of Nazi Germany or the USSR who prioritized state security so high above that of individuals, weren’t at all secure in practice. On an individual or a national level.
In the absolute middle of World War 2, when Britain was fighting literally for its life against the literal Nazis, and losing, the government had to deal with paying rent to the sometimes disagreeable landlords for their military intelligence offices, and they had to face angry questions from civilians in government about firebombing in German cities and how it was inhumane. They weren’t allowed to just get on with whatever they decided they wanted to do. There was no question about “well this is a government matter so I don’t care what you think, as a private person, and I don’t have to.” That’s not how a democracy works. Some people might disagree, but in my opinion that’s why the side that Britain was part of ultimately won the war: Because the British people knew their rights as individuals would be respected, and so they in turn felt comfortable giving wholehearted support back to the government when the government needed it.
Anyone who describes “national security” as a thing that has to be balanced against the rights of the people who in actual reality make up the nation, is probably talking about something more akin to “state security” in the USSR or Nazi sense. Not the security of the actual nation, but the safety and convenience of policymakers and their friends, sometimes specifically their safety from the nation (i.e. the people).
Backdoors are never a good idea because social engineering is a thing and the backdoors can be reverse engineered. A good enough looking phishing website sent to enough government email addresses gets you the backdoor login
So Israel was monitoring everything happening in Gaza in the name of national security. There was no privacy there. How did it work out for them?
I think that the right to private digital communication is more essential to the security of a free state than gun ownership.
The gvmt in my country (UK) have stoked fears about security to pass, and begin the process of passing, various bits of legislation to curtail both activity and privacy - laws to make strike action nearly impossible, laws to class any demonstration or protest as contravening public order, the online safety bill to break encryption, laws to criminalise dissent and perceived ‘anti britishness’ and are introducing plans to roll out more and more facial recognition systems everywhere.
Of course there is online crime, including CSAM and terrorists organising shit, but the legislation they’ve both passed and are planning to pass does nothing to stop these things e.g. making Signal break users encrypted messages won’t prevent CSAM as the abuse has already happened to the victim, it’s also trivial for anyone with a basic knowledge to set up their own encrypted service so that’s where they’ll go. Lastly the people it will affect is the faith of those using Signal et al quite legitimately.
What the gvmt are doing is assuming we’re all criminals and that it’s therefore totally legitimate to pry into every corner of our lives. What they should be doing is enacting legislation that will work to prevent things like CSAM from happening in the first place.
Individual privacy, always. If they can’t get in, that ain’t my problem. Idgaf WHAT it is, my rights don’t disappear because other people are assholes
privacy comes first, what happens on my device stays on my device. and if i send a funny cat picture to my mom, you bet your ass i’m gonna use a VPN and the most private messenger i know of.
if someone does a crime, they will have enough evidence without being able to look at chatlogs.
I draw the line at narrowly tailored search warrants.
I have been pondering this as of late and as i am new to the privacy space I only have recently learnt of my countries ant-encryptions laws (Australia). See i like the idea of national security and sure i have nothing to hide but it is a matter of principle why is MY data not mine? And if my governments is allowed to see all of my files and internet history that scares me sure they are not to tyrannical now but what happens if that changes this is the first step to then begin to be way more intrusive and it gets all 1984 up in here with thought police.
