I think that that needs to be what I call “the dog shall not bark up the wrong tree” laws where an organization cannot spend its resources on influencing the laws that manage its conduct. You can argue that it makes sense that these people understand the problem best so they should have some input into the decision-making process. However, I think that the most they should do is present the raw data of their operations sanitized of only the sensitive information that they are required to sanitize by law and no more. Otherwise, they are just government lobbyists lobbying for their advantage.
Everything went wrong when lawmakers criminalized possession of drugs. All of this nonsense follows from a system where ordinary people are treated with suspicion and criminals are given exclusive access to a highly profitable market.
Al Capone and his ilk taught us the disastrous consequences of prohibition a century. Yet we continue making the same mistake with different substances.
They've also been good with the messaging on drugs. Colombian Drug Cartels right? If only we can go to war in South America we can fix it.
But the majority of drug use are home-grown. [1]. Take marijuana out the picture (home grown) and Oxy, Prescriptions and other (home grown) drugs prevail.
Criminalising weed is a failed policy, which thankfully is being slowly dropped.
Less impressive is that the drug machine that created the oxy crisis is more or less ignored.
The issue is we have a bunch of puritan teetotalers who think the best way to "fix" society is to criminalize the parts of society they find morally objectionable.
It doesn't matter that the social sciences have found that rehab works WAY better than prison [1]. It doesn't matter that incarceration is WAY more detrimental both to the individual and society [2]. Nope, sinners need to be punished.
If we want a better society, make drugs legal and send public funds to public rehab rather than private prisons.
Let's leave prison as a last resort for people that are actually dangerous to society; Not your uncle who grew weed in his backyard.
Who said the solution was easy? Do you think dismantling and rebuilding a huge portion of the penal code would somehow be easy? Do you think revitalizing and rebuilding our public mental health services is a cake walk?
Just because the solution can be expressed simply doesn't mean it's "easy".
I'm neither and addict or ex-addict. But I am an ex puritan/teetotaler. I'm well aware of how they think, preach, and talk about this stuff. I'm living proof that it's not beyond them, but the fact is you have to abandon your puritan/teetotaling beliefs to actually understand the problem.
You sure? This comment looks like a misunderstanding at best and an indictment of your own character at worst. Automatically assuming people who use substances are addicts is extreme and wildly judgmental.
Have you actually been to downtown Seattle/Portland? I have fairly recently. It's really not that bad.
But to that, I'd also point out that "refusing help" is hardly the reason seattle/portland have so many homeless people. A lot of these people have been priced out of apartments. Some have suffered from mental health issues (or have developed mental health issues after becoming homeless).
My son's teacher's aid was temporarily homeless while being fully employed. She was simply priced out of living anywhere. Do you think that was a result of substance abuse?
The attitude of your post is actually part of the reason homelessness is so bad. It's the view that people are homeless because they did something wrong to deserve it. Addressing homelessness requires compassion and funds. You can never make it go away all together, but you can relieve it simply by giving people a place to exist.
> Addressing homelessness requires compassion and funds.
If you're talking about working people being priced out of homes in stupidly low-density cities (which places like Seattle and Portland are), the greater part of the solution is just building more so that supply rises to match demand.
Artificially suppressing the supply of homes via government action (restrictive zoning) then helping the people who lost homes as a result via government action (social services funded by redistributive taxation) is just so wasteful that I don't even know where to begin.
Expanding roadways are an example of induced demand, which means that for some class of things, as it gets cheaper (or qualitatively better/less costly, as in the example of traffic), more people consume it by shifting preferences from alternatives, and in the end it's just as pricey (or qualitatively poor) as before. Is your point that as housing gets cheaper in a place, more people will be housed and eventually the equilibrium goes back higher?
If so, isn't that the goal? More people are still housed than before.
I think thread poster is only commenting on the smaller, yet much more visible mental ill homelessness.
While housing is the solution to true majority of homelessness (like your individual income experience with the teacher), people like the individual above above make valid observations. They’re pointing out problems that, at the very least, get intermingled with consequences of homes being unaffordable for all. This need not be a value judgement on their character. It is a value judgement on actions, which is something that not only is fair (all are in control of what they choose to do), but necessary for a functioning society (how else do you morally compel folks to follow laws and determine responsibility if not by one’s actions?).
The solution is to both make housing affordable to every person *and* ensure everyone who needs it takes it.
> Have you actually been to downtown Seattle/Portland? I have fairly recently. It's really not that bad.
I was actually in downtown Seattle last night (not seeing Taylor Swift though). These people who line the streets are not in shelters because the shelters do not let them use drugs. They are in tent cities overdosing off fentanyl whilst virtue signalers like you scream that there isn't enough housing.
Across Lake Washington in Bellevue, where the median rent price is 50% higher, there are none of these drugs addicts, so if it is a housing problem, why are they all centered in Seattle? Because Seattle City Council, King County all allow it to happen.
Solution is mandatory treatment when someone demonstrates they can’t take care of themselves AND as a result their behavior is causing problems for others.
Not the folks struggling to get housing (just build more and give it away for operating/maintenance cost, don’t recoup capital investment ). Just the few 10-20% of the highly visible ones with mental health problems (and the like 3% that are just asses- every large enough group of people has got ‘em!).
The evidence indicates that primary cause of homelessness is housing affordability. Shelters are over-subscribed and programs have so many strings attached that it is nearly impossible to remain on them. The trope of drug addicts who are homeless by choice is a talking point to distract from the real issue of housing shortages and gutless assistance programs. In addition, homeless people are often the target of crime.
Between 60-75% of homeless people are not on any drugs or alcohol. They are just homeless. In addition, Housing First initiatives have seen sharp drops in addiction.
The thing is, there are three categories of illicit drugs:
- relatively harmless / have established use: a lot of the "home grown" drugs fall under this category, they are usually low-price as they are mass products. Marijuana and diverted pharma pills, mostly.
- stuff that is extremely fucking dangerous, like fentanyl, its even more strong cousin carfentanyl, meth or self-made stuff like krokodil (gained from boiling codein cough medicine). Extremely simple to make in general, extremely potent, extremely hard to wean off.
- stuff that fuels organized crime, aka cocaine (almost exclusively grown/refined in Southern America) and heroin (which comes to an overwhelming degree from Afghanistan's poppy farms).
The large cartels almost exclusively focus on the latter, as there's a ton of money to be made smuggling that, which is a very real problem as the cartels can offer sums to corrupt officials even in Western countries that pay good money to border control staff. A boat full of cocaine can make hundreds of millions of dollars, while no one cares about a boat full of weed - not worth the effort.
It's easy to grow compared with cocaine. You can grow the plant in a tent or if need be just on your windowsill, pluck and trim it, dry it, then smoke it or bake it in an edible. And even a single plant is good for quite a number of joints. Hash oil extraction is more difficult but most stoners prefer to smoke pure or tobacco mix weed anyway.
Cocaine in contrast, you need 300-ish grams of leaves to make 1 gram of cocaine, and a ton of chemistry afterwards to extract and purify it.
For the level of processing involved, marijuana isn't that cheep when compared to any other bulk farming product. Hemp fiber for example is around $150 per ton. The markup is still very high comparatively for the drug product.
When you look at the production line of something like high fructose corn syurp, you could industrialize the process in to the range of $10000 per ton pretty easily.
Again, it's the black market that turns it into the million dollar range because of the risks involved.
The DEA is the same social problem as the cold war agencies. The US can't actually get rid of jobs of the correct prestige for these people and as long as they are kept they will continue to commit the US to a criminal path.
This is difficult for people to stomach because so much of post-FDR, post- Wickard v Filburn U.S. law has no validity under the Constitution, even though the idea of breaking the last 80 years of jurisprudence is unpalatable...
The constitution doesn't allow the feds to ban substances. That's why we needed a constitutional amendment for the failed experiment to ban alcohol in the first place.
(And, arguably, through the 14th amendment, the States, although that's not a strong case because it's not an enumerated right, but there are 1A issues with religions including Christianity using various drugs, and 4A issues with enforcement... same as most "let's ban X" ideas have.)
> The constitution doesn't allow the feds to ban substances.
Article 1 section 8 gives congress the power to regulate interstate goods.
The reason we got a constitutional amendment was because the teetotalers of the time (rightly) saw that removing a constitutional amendment would be MUCH harder than undoing a law.
Employment Division v. Smith, written by Scalia the original originalist justice, makes the argument that religion doesn't shield you from regulations regarding substances.
Hence the SC should throw-out constitutional interpretation which places unenumerated rights above enumerated ones --- that would be a genuinely libertarian act. Of course, the SC is only libertarian when it wishes.
It's rather mad that the SC seems to have collective attentional blindness to the 9th Amd.
It's probably the most important amendement for interpreting, at least, the bill of rights -- since it says the duty of the SC is to do moral philosophy not to be lawyers, or historians, or politicians, or legislators.
Their job is to actually outline a (denotological) moral philosophy for the US which is sufficiently minimal that it precludes few laws, but sufficiently maximal that it prevents tyranny. That's the entire point of the 9th Am., and it completely demolishes most of the legal philosophies of the current SC.
In this light, it becomes obvious why originalism is self-contradictory: the framers did not want an originalist interpretation, since it confines the future to be against only the forms of tyranny of that day.
Abortion was not illegal in the US when the constitution was written... not even until the AMA formed in 1847 and shortly thereafter started pushing for criminalization. The process was slow at first.
After the civil war many people became concerned that white women would get abortions and be outbred by the blacks. By 1910 it was illegal in every state.
I think it's interesting that this history has been forgotten.
My point is that it wouldn't even matter. The historical conditions no longer hold, ie., Would "illegal abortion" be a tyranny for women in 1800? Well, it's going to be very poorly enforced; you may die anyway; etc. It's a fairly marginal infringement of rights.
You're really not much more oppressed if you do/do-not have a right to abortion in 1800. You'll get one anyway, with just the same concequences.
But in today's world with basically risk-free abortions and massive systematic enforcement of the laws, etc., its easy to see that making abortion illegal creates an actual tyranny for women.
It is this which makes the originalist reading of the constitution absurd, immoral, and profoundly anti-originalist.
The issue with originalism is that it outright rejects the plain meaning of the constitution: it is a document which explicitly requires ignoring "what would the government of 1800 have done", indeed, ignoring what any government in history would have done
I'm not sure I fully understand or agree with your take on the 9th amendment as it relates to originalism. Many of the problems I see and both issues presented by the go present due to a moving target interpretation of the Constitution (Filburn and section 1 drugs).
Regarding abortion, the Commerce Clause should already protect the people from federal prohibition of abortion, as well as explicit federal prohibition on states prohibiting abortion. The transaction happens wholly with a state. 10A should apply here, imo. I don't see how 9A presents in such a way that it grants a right to abortion, but I do have trouble with the blanket extension of innumerated rights and their interaction with 10A.
It isnt just the 9th. It's throughout the constitution, and indeed why it's a philosophical document, not a legal one.
The people who wrote the constitution were not trying to enumerate a finite number of laws which were contemporary to their society such that the SC prevented that society from changing these laws. That's a radical misunderstanding, and the heart of "originalism" which explicitly misunderstands the original.
It's a little like "biblical literalists" misreading biblical stories and thinking that's their original interpretation -- when even, eg., Paul reads OT stories allegorically. In this sense the bible prescribes allegorical interpretation; in the similar way the constitution prescribes philosophical elaboration.
The purpose was to enumerate a series of principles to prevent tyranny, and have these require interpretation for any given society. Insofar as the SC asks, "what would the authors think about issue X", they're doing the opposite of what those authors wanted from the constitution.
They wrote a document which was at the time routinely violated by the laws and practices of their own society. The principles are supposed to drag the executive away from tyranny.
In this sense the police arresting a woman for having an abortion in contemporary society is precisely what those principles were designed to prevent -- and even if the people who wrote them would have not recognised it.
Their (historical) recognition of tyranny isnt the basis on which the constitution precludes tyranny -- that's the whole point of giving principles, not laws. If they thought they could always say what tryanny was, they'd list all the laws to prvent it.
This is an interesting challenge. I guess the best way I can put it would be:
"That no law shall be made preventing an informed and consenting adult from consuming whatever substance they so please."
As a side tangent: Tennessee prevents the sale of raw milk. I can not go to a dairy farmer in TN, watch him produce a pail of milk, and pay him for the pleasure of considering that pail of milk to be mine. Why? This is probably the stupidest prohibition I have yet to see. If you want to prevent the general public from unwittingly consuming raw dairy, that makes sense. But why can I not purchase raw dairy that I know to be raw and produced in good condition? There is a work-around to this, where you are legally entitled to consume the dairy of any cow you own... and so some dairy farmers sell "shares" of their cow, which entitles you to its milk. I'm not wholly against such an arrangement but it does seem rather farcical in its mandatory character.
It is pretty silly. They could solve the problem by imposing strict liability on dairy sales. If the farmer sells you a pail of raw milk and you get sick from drinking it, that farmer is liable for it, no waivers.
This is often how other dangerous products such as fireworks are regulated. The liability is a cost of doing business.
Strict liability would always apply in that case, if you sell product X for the intent of purpose Y and doing Y with X causes injury then the seller of X is strictly liable.
Strangely enough since raw milk is sold for "dog/animal use" that limits any liability for human consumption since it's explicitly sold for not human consumption.
> no law shall be made preventing an informed and consenting adult from consuming whatever substance they so please
Which is as stupid as it can get, unless you add the prescription that said adult must be the only one to bear the consequences of its consumption.
You want to binge-drink every night? Sure, why not? Just make sure in advance that you won't come in contact with civilised people while intoxicated, and sign a statement releasing the society from any duty to assist you when your liver shuts down. Similar for lighter or heavier drugs.
You want to smoke as a chimney? Damn, I'll fight with you to protect your right to fill your lungs with tar! Just don't go to the E.R. every time a small cold turns into a serious respiratory issue, and especially make sure you collect all the ashes and all the smoke, before they poison unwilling people.
> Which is as stupid as it can get, unless you add the prescription that said adult must be the only one to bear the consequences of its consumption.
By and large that is already the law. It is already illegal to harm someone else.
This is a significant and annoying factor of many knee-jerk reactions that harshly criminalise already illegal things. That was how the rollback of basic liberties went after 9/11 for example - there was a pretence that somehow terrorism wasn't already illegal and effectively policed. And we ended up with mass spying and about as much terrorism as there ever was. Similar to this, really. I doubt the amount of drugs taken will change, they are just looking for excuses to spy more.
Which means that nobody should be surprised of measures meant to prevent people from getting harmed.
Following your reasoning, as it is already illegal to harm someone else, then there is no point in banning weapons from aeroplanes; or in forbidding drunk people from operating a vehicle...
I'd like to point out that I'm not a priori against drugs; but whoever proposes that anybody can do what he wants within a society, he does not know what society means.
But in the US, which does not have public healthcare, the burden "to bear the consequences of consumption" does already fall on the individual in those cases.
This pro-prohibition argument is more impressive when made in countries that do have public healthcare, although it still falls short when trying to explain why doctors should mend bones that people break while engaging in some high-risk activities (like skiing or mountainbiking), but should not heal ailments that people incur while engaging in other high-risk activities (such as smoking).
Banning drug consumption in public spaces, where they might harm others, is a different issue, and the drug that is most problematic here - tobacco - is in any case one of the least restricted ones.
This is not true, in a number of ways. The most obvious example: A person overdoses on something and is taken to the emergency department, treated, and then asked to pay. If they don't have the money, well, tough -- that cost simply ends up borne by the hospital. They also take up scarce resources (a bed, and the corresponding attention of medical professionals) thus delaying the treatment of other patients.
It's not only a matter of medical insurance: it's also, and most important, a matter of driving while intoxicated, or putting yourself into such miserable conditions that you will forget any human decency and commit petty and/or dangerous crimes to get your next dose.
Generally if you’re sick enough to need the ER you’re too sick to drive. Further, did you know that there is such a thing as legally impaired driving?
> Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.
Notice how that doesn’t say “only if they do what I say”?
What about putting yourself in such miserable conditions that you will forget human decency and commit the non-petty crime of violating everyone's constitutional rights?
Your entire argument rests on the unfounded and frankly disgusting notion that addiction is a choice and not a disease.
Should people be held responsible for crimes committed under the influence? Absolutely, to a significant extent, though there are some gradations there. Should people be denied medical treatment for their ailments because some people believe they're a moral failing, when all the evidence proves they are in fact medical ailments? Absolutely not.
It's worth pointing out the medical industries complicity with stigmatizing drugs. The idea that anyone who ever touched a drug should die in the street without medical care is extremely popular to the medical community.
You'll see lip service about being compassionate towards drug addicts, then send them to around the least compassionate people on earth towards drug addicts, except maybe cops.
Here in Norway there's a huge push towards medicalisation of drug users after the Portuguese model. While I think it's maybe a mild improvement over prison, fines and a criminal record, having experienced both first and second hand how addicts are treated in the medical and psychiatric systems, I'm struggling to be too thrilled about it.
We need a fundamentally new cultural paradigm in how we see drug use. Medicine will obviously play a part for those who truly need help, but not everyone does, and forcing help on those can actually turn them into addicts or otherwise hurt them.
> medical industries complicity with stigmatizing drugs
I know nothing on this subject, but I trust you checked your sources.
Anyway, concerning public health, or any other public policy, would you rather listen to people who devoted several years to the study oh the human body and psyche, and whose profession consists in helping others, or to people who pour money into heinous criminal organizations without a second thought just to spice up a party?
Honestly, I don't think this is captured in "the sources". Keep in mind you're dealing with a culture here, much like with policing issues.
Doctors don't hold each other accountable, and assume that if there's an issue with a patient, it's the patient's fault; they're being unreasonable, and some poor doctor must be putting up with their bullshit.
Then you have the very real truth that addicts don't always make the best patients. Further they tie up an inordinate amount of medical resources. It doesn't just stop and end there. Medical abuse is rampant, in any case, and with several other conditions, why would they leave drug addicts out? There's an environment of hostility from both sides - addicts who are fed up with treatment from doctors, and doctors angry with addicts; the fighting can cause a feedback loop.
Doctors are some of the most anti-addict people on the face of the earth. If you took a blind poll of doctors and got their true thoughts, I think a shocking number would be in favor of euthanasia via medical inaction. They are not trustworthy on these issues. Believe it or not experiencing the worst of society, often through bigoted and stereotypical lens, does not make someone a rational decision maker. You're more likely to find bitter, angry hotheads that just want to punish the bad people they've come to hate.
Getting back to "the sources" here, there really aren't great sources, because no one reporting has a motive to talk about this. You will see some quiet conversations, but they don't go far. Doctors are respected and addicts aren't. Medical policy is written by medical workers (the ones I'm criticizing). IMO the media isn't great at holding doctors accountable. They're getting better with police, but they used to be horrible there too.
Media, government, doctors, and insurance companies are way more of one team than people realize. With police we only heard stories for the longest time. Some of them seemed like conspiracy theories, but the number and magnitude of these interactions mount. This is true here, too. People are getting abused by their doctors. If you ask around you'll hear stories.
If you talk to drug addicts, who've had experience with doctors, and shockingly, even people with very moderate use (even one time!), you'll hear the truth: You are dealing with a temperamental, sketchy piece of work that's also a powerful bureaucrat that will take your different lifestyle as carte blanche to refuse to treat you and ignore your medical issues... and it doesn't even matter if you quit!
Just talk to someone that's gone through the system. You will hear conflicting reports, just like a huge percentage of people never have bad interaction with police, but there's a lot of people out there that know exactly what I'm talking about. There's sides of society not everyone sees.
Think about how bad you sound speaking up and there's massive chance you sound even worse in the story.
I'm not sure we are talking about the same subject!
I was responding to someone proposing to let everybody consume what he wants, and I replied that freedom to choose must imply obligation of bearing the consequences.
Concerning the addiction, while freeing any addicted person from his shackles would be of great value for everybody (both the addicted person and the society at large), we must also insist on prevention as much as possible. And considering addiction only a disease, while forgetting that it usually stems from an initial deliberate choice, is a very dangerous stance.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot ever become dependent on a drug if you never consumed it. Which means that, short of being forcefully injected, every dependency on an illegal drug has roots in the initial choice.
I feel the pain for the people already in it, but treating anything less than extremely serious has being, and is still, wreaking havoc on several generations.
Just stop pushing the idea that there is anything cool or romantic in illegal drugs.
> I fail to see how legality is relevant to the question of whether choosing to take a drug is choosing to become addicted.
A substance being illegal basically everywhere should be a strong hint that it may be dangerous. Most of the people on Earth not using a substance is a strong hint that it may not be necessary.
Illegal, dangerous and not necessary: several good reasons not to use it, and no good reason to use it.
Concerning cigarettes, look at how much money has been spent on dissuading people from smoking. With dangerous substances, not using them is the only sure way not to lose.
In conclusion, while I reiterate my support towards helping people already addicted, it is important to pass the right message to those who are hesitating.
Dependency is not an illness that comes on its own: it cannot come without prior usage, thus stay safe and don't use.
I'm sorry but your idea of why drugs are illegal is completely devoid of historical context and medical fact. Two of the most harmful psychoactive drugs we know of are the legal ones: alcohol and tobacco. Some of the least harmful psychoactive drugs we know of are illegal(psychedelics).
Drugs being banned had nothing to do with supposed harmfulness. It had everything to do with suppressing counterculture, racism, and doubling down on failed policy decisions.
And to say there are no good reasons to use drugs is again hopelessly misguided. It's exactly the kind of simplistic, moralistic bullshit that is so obviously false it drives teenagers to ignore any public advice outright. It's just not as black and white as that. Hell, most recreational drugs happen to have legitimate medical uses: opioids, benzodiazepines, cannabis, psychedelics, amphetamine, even meth!
To help guide people away from addiction and into reasonable use we need to acknowledge the good and the bad, not pretend there's only bad. We've been doing that for decades and the jury's in. It doesn't work.
> Dependency is not an illness that comes on its own: it cannot come without prior usage, thus stay safe and don't use.
What are your credentials? MD? at least some sort of medical / physiological phd? have you at least experienced it at all in the past? where are you drawing your knowledge from?
> Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but you cannot ever become dependent on a drug if you never consumed it.
I mean super easy one there is crack addicted newborns. Clearly they’ve used right?
Are you aware that when someone abuses substances they usually have some underlying issue? Things like PTSD, bi-polar, etc. These people start using because their conditions are untreated, and they just want to feel normal. This of course escalates when they need to use more and more of the substance until before long they’re dependent.
What does the initial choice have to do with anything? As long as humans have existed, so has addiction. In all these centuries, prohibition has never helped. People use the fact that addiction starts with a choice - by the way, it doesn’t always - as an excuse to double down on failed policies that cost the public trillions of dollars, destroys families, and leads to massive amounts of death and human suffering.
Does this refusal of medicine extend to those who are incompetent? For example, if someone staples their finger to the wall should they be allowed to seek medical help? What about a car accident due to texting while driving? What about someone carrying a lot of boxes downstairs then trips and falls?
Why when people do something you don’t like do you want to control them by removing access to medicine?
Pasteurization switched from the old to new method [0]; the health issue with milk is not just the condition when it was produced, but the growth of pathogens afterwards, during the supply-chain:
* From c. 1910-end 1960’s, milk was treated by batch pasteurization at 63°C/145°F for 30 mins (pathogenic bacteria killed off as measured by 1960s technology, but flavor barely affected)
* Since then industry switched to HTST pasteurization at 72°C/162°F for 15 seconds (kills more pathogens; 120 times faster but affects flavor)
* Even higher-temperature methods are HHST and UHT [1]
US milk producers also refused to pasteurize for decades after some European countries started, only because it would slightly decrease their profits. So they put formaldehyde and other stuff in it instead.
Then you just inact harsh punishments for farmers that do so, like every other criminal law ever made? Why would you ban restaurants entirely because people might get sick eating from one every so often.
If you'll sell $2000 more raw milk when you lie about its safety and the potential fine is $200k that will ruin your life if you're caught doing so, the trade off is not worth it. This is also the problem with corporate America in general, the fines are too damn small and are just taken as operating costs instead of nuclear deterrent.
So is cooking or curing meat before eating it, but sushi restaurants haven't been blanket banned. There's a difference between driving one farmer that poisons people out of business and prohibiting it entirely.
Even stuff like fugu which can genuinely kill you remains legal. The difference is being told the caveats upfront loud and clear, instead of trying to hide it and lying to people. That's the crux of the issue isn't it, after all? Being informed enough to be able to make your own decisions, and making those disclaimers required by law. That's what needs addressing, not banning shit because it's easy.
> So is cooking or curing meat before eating it, but sushi restaurants haven't been blanket banned. There's a difference between driving one farmer that poisons people out of business and prohibiting it entirely.
I'm not sure why people always bring up sushi restaurants so incorrectly when discussing this topic.
Much like the requirement to pasteurise milk, when fish are caught we require they are processed to destroy bacteria and parasites via freezing.
> Even stuff like fugu which can genuinely kill you remains legal.
I had trouble establishing how widespread the legality of Fugu is. Some articles claim it's widely banned, whereas others that it must be imported from Japan, which requires the individual to be licensed.
The other difference is that fugu is entirely safe when prepared with care. Applying safety measures to the production of unpasteurised milk can reduce the risk of introducing new/more bacteria but it cannot remove any already present.
People being defrauded, injured, poisoned, and dying must be much more efficient. That's the reality that drove the formation of these agencies.
I'm sure an inability to trust the safety, quality, and accuracy of the things one buys wouldn't have any negative effect at all on a market.
The illustrious and unbesmirched track record of the worlds major auditing, accountancy, and credit firms has demonstrated beyond doubt that private enterprise can truly be trusted to handle these matters in a manner that puts society's needs at the forefront.
Since we're already laughing, I propose we go further! Privatising the military would unleash the inherent good and efficiency only found within corporations. A free market of privately held armies, competing against one another for the benefit of society. Federal taxes would drop drastically, what could go wrong?
The argument is that they're more efficient than the alternatives:
> People being defrauded, injured, poisoned, and dying must be much more efficient
> I'm sure an inability to trust the safety, quality, and accuracy of the things one buys wouldn't have any negative effect at all on a market.
And that private business is not an alternative, having given rise to the need for such an agency in the first place and a demonstrated inability to oversee, audit, or classify honestly:
> The illustrious and unbesmirched track record of the worlds major auditing, accountancy, and credit firms has demonstrated beyond doubt that private enterprise can truly be trusted to handle these matters in a manner that puts society's needs at the forefront.
That's not to say that the public agencies responsible couldn't be improved but the idea that privatisation of these matters leads to increased efficiency is farcical.
What makes you think consumers have the bandwidth to do that for every single product they consume? What makes you think that requiring every single person does this contributes to a healthy economy? As a simple counterargument, how many children are you willing to let die due to contaminated raw milk in order for this absolute "freedom" to be honored, and what makes you think those values make sense at societal scales?
1) Government bans nothing, citizens are expected to do their own research for their protection
2) Business models are developed to communicate reliable, trustworthy products.
3) Unscrupulous businesses lie about the benifits of their products, and sue the other businesses doing (2) for libel. The courts, already overwhelmed, back up, and these bad businesses can take their money, disolve, and vanish before their cases finish, leaving consumers harmed and misled with no recourse.
There are companies that are rather efficent at coming into existance to bring a few products, and then vanishing, for whatever reasons.
Have you seen the thread yesterday where someone was complaining that they are dying and the government is preventing them from trying an experimental treatment? You guys should talk :)
And there were so many comments lamenting the total lack of sense of forbidding certain treatments....
As in many situations, there is a balance to be struck. It's just so sad seeing so many people, presumably smart people, complaining about how an opinion opposed to theirs can't possibly make any sense whatsoever. This is why we can't have nice things.
We can't have nice things because people ignore nuance in order to make bad faith arguments :)
There is a difference between "we don't know the effects of this treatment, there is reason to believe it could work but we have no statistics, so the risk is on you" and "we know the negative effects of this product, we have plenty of statistics on the empirical risk, so we made a decision to limit the behaviors of those providing the product".
> Could those consumers just go for pasteurized milk and let others have the choice they want?
People can have the choice they want. It requires that you shoulder the risk yourself, rather than having it pushed on you by someone who is financially benefitting from it.
No, through painful experience we have arrived at a system where people can go to a store and purchase food without needing to develop the expertise and expend enough time to be reasonably confident that it won't kill them.
For the same reasons we also restrict the sale of expired meat or adulterated baby formula.
> Raw milk products are routinely consumed in France, I've never heard of someone getting sick from it.
Raw milk itself is not routinely consumed though. Apparently, 95% of the milk used by consumers is UHT[0]. People do get sick from unpasteurised end-products as well:
> In France over the last decade, 34%, 37% and 60% of outbreaks of salmonellosis, listeriosis and enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) infections respectively have been linked to the consumption of raw-milk cheeses.[1]
April this year[2]:
> Five people are sick in France, two seriously, and one in Belgium after drinking a brand of raw fermented milk.
In 2019[3]:
> The Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) O26 outbreak was from March to mid-May. In total, 19 cases were identified, with 18 confirmed, of which 17 had HUS and were hospitalized. One child and an adult only had diarrhea. Of HUS cases, eight had neurological complications.
Sounds more like inadequate testing than any deficiency in raw milk. It’s still absurd to deny people who want raw milk from obtaining it. Gatekeeping of the worst kind.
People are prohibited from selling it. You may obtain all you'd like, no one's stopping you shooting it straight from the teat.
An ice cream maker and husband of a dairy farmer puts it better than I could[0].
> My wife is 53 and has drunk raw milk pretty much daily all her life. However, we know the hygiene of our cows and of our milking process, and we know our herd is free of TB and MAP.
> I am NOT a raw milk advocate for the simple reason that these health and safety issues are tough, and serious. So I would not drink the raw milk from another farmer’s cows. There’s simply too much risk.
> "That no law shall be made preventing an informed and consenting adult from consuming whatever substance they so please."
That seems reckless, it includes medicines and pharmaceuticals, creatine, steroids, HGH, lip-fillers, stimulants... So either you effectively abolish the FDA and pharmacies, or downgrade them to mere advisories which people can ignore.
Cigarettes are killing more people than all the substances you mentioned.
Also the fact that you include "creatine" among those substances is extremely ridiculous, creatine is available OTC and present in many foods, it's obvious that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
Lip-fillers are not substances that you ingest or inject in your bloodstream, they're part of surgeries.
The FDA should be here to say this is recommended for this and that purpose. Here are the recommended dosages.
Not to forbid you from using something.
Every dangerous substances should have warnings on them like "this could kill you/give you cancer/mental illnesses" or even "not meant for human consumption".
Your ad-hominem is unacceptable behavior; I clearly listed a fairly obvious mix of things (some OTC, some prescription, some FDA regulated) which are sometimes misused or excessively used. I didn't even bother mentioning opioids or benzodiazepine because presumably we would think of those first.
Lip-fillers are not "part of surgeries", they're non-surgical procedures; their use is regulated by the FDA [in the US]. Noone claimed you "put them in your bloodstream". Just stop misrepresenting in bad-faith.
> Cigarettes are killing more people than all the substances you mentioned.
We know that. Red herring: so is bad nutrition (sugar, HFCS, salt, for example).
You're sidestepping grandparent's point about abolishing any legal limits on pharmaceuticals. How would such a world work? Prescriptions would be pointless since consenting adults could just sell/trade them.
The tone of your comment seems to indicate you think this is obviously a bad thing?
Prescriptions would just be doctors recommendations in this case. There could still be mechanisms to softly encourage only this usage, like insurance only covering doctor prescribed drugs.
Is your concern about painkiller addiction and abuse or about people hurting themselves by taking drugs without good understanding of them or something else?
>Prescriptions would be pointless since consenting adults could just sell/trade them.
A good chunk of the population operates this way right now. Also why pay a $150 kickback to doctors just to write something on a pad that probably shouldn't require a prescription in the first place?
That's an American complaint about an American problem. Basic healthcare in the rest of the developed world functions ok, unlike the US.
And why the US created that setup (between the 1960s-80s) is a political discussion.
We're straying from the general premise here about about abolishing any legal limits on pharmaceuticals. Or else, we're changing the topic to an argument-from-consequences based on the idiosyncrasies of US healthcare and its costs.
What’s wrong with this? A prescription would just be a doctors recommended amount of a substance and not a license to have an otherwise illegal substance as it now
The raw milk debate is odd to me because we have factory food recalled all the time due to deaths. The factory food outbreaks cover a wider area than a raw milk dairy farm.
Wish granted, but I just discovered a substance people can drink that sends them into a blind rage where they shoot everyone they can see for the next five hours, because it feels very good to them. People are getting addicted to the good feeling of shooting people while on stuff. Don't you think we should ban it?
You could also easily just slap liability to the seller of known harmful substances (see the sibling to your comment) or enforce warning labels as on tobacco products (eg "this product makes you shoot people and shooting people will get your thrown in jail").
But this thread is about how the cure is often worse than the disease with prohibition. See: 18th Amendment, War on Drugs. Concocting a hypothetical scenario where the drug is Disney-villian evil and enforcement is not an unmitigated disaster is hardly a decisive rhetorical victory, wouldn't you say?
1) The scenario proposed seems...outlandish. I could argue for a host of provisions in law or the Constitution based on the possibility of widespread development of bulletproof skin, but I fail to see the utility of doing so.
2) Even within the hypothetical, it is possible (I would argue probable) that banning the evil rage drug would simply make the situation worse than alternative solutions, in which case the proposed amendment would be a positive.
Edit: You could argue that the above amendment is also ridiculously unlikely to pass and isn't worth debating either. You'd probably be right.
1) I hope you aren't basing your policy positions on situations that involve completely hypothetical substances.
2) No I don't think we would need to ban it. Allow people who want to use it to lock themselves in a cell for 12 hours and rage against some padded walls. There probably would be a thriving market for that sort of thing [0]. We let people drink and if you drink and drive someone will probably die - the solution is not to let people drive after drinking. You're basically describing a strong form of alcohol. We already tolerate this sort of risk.
If you want to argue that a substance exists that is so terrible that people who consume it need to be locked up, you should name the substance and provide some argument for why it is so bad. The present state is locking people up for no obvious reason.
Treating raw milk like a drug was the basis of a Portlandia sketch that was pretty amusing, but unfortunately I'm having trouble finding the entirety of it on youtube at the moment to link
We already have the 9th and 10th amendments. The Federal government is acting outside Constitutional limits with these laws. Add more amendments won't make them follow the Constitution, we need courts more willing to strike down this kind of overreach.
Problem is, both sides of the ideological spectrum have spent 100+ years studiously ignoring the actual basis for rights in the US--- Natural Rights theory--- in favor of more "malleable" approaches that can be twisted to their desired ends. Both the crazy strict textualists, who think that the constitution as-written is the end-all be-all of human rights, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the crazy extreme "living document" theorists with their "anything goes" approach; neither of them want to acknowledge that there's an underlying philosophical framework that potentially flips the table on their shenanigans.
yes, crime was definitely invented because of 1920’s Prohibition. But for that dark episode of history, there would be no one trying to hide illicit doings behind the curtain of encryption, and the NSA/FBI/DEA/ATF/etc would definitely not be interested in reading encrypted traffic. Because, no crime, you see, so those agencies probably wouldn’t exist.
So it's about the cartels now, huh? And you're really concerned by wellbeing and "life satisfaction" that you want to put people in jail because they consume a substance you don't. Prohibition style thinking.
Arguably, The most dangerous criminal organizations in the world are probably the security agencies and forces which cause untold damage around the world and, incidentally, have ties with druglords like in Afghanistan.
But I'm sure you'd support those over the individual's choice of what to do with their body regardless of what your Religious like belief that's you should get to decide what fulfills someone's life. Maybe reading certain books is something we don't need, right?
The insult at the end just exposes you further. Drug cartels exist due to those things being illegal, not the other way around, but stay classy.
> you want to put people in jail because they consume a substance you don't.
No, I'm not a priori against illegal substances, and I'm open to discuss legalizing them.
But if the only people asking for their legalization are idiots who keep considering their consumption innocent, while funding the author of heinous crimes, then I don't expect a very interesting discussion.
On the other side, when a doctor proposes marijuana to help their patients, well, that may be worth changing our laws to accommodate.
> But if the only people asking for their legalization are idiots who keep considering their consumption innocent, while funding the author of heinous crimes, then I don't expect a very interesting discussion.
They are only incidentally supporting organized crime because the market has been pushed underground by draconian legislation. The current legal status of various substances is an extremely recent invention, it might as well been yesterday in terms of human history of drug use.
Users of these substances are temporarily routing around a roadblock during a brief period of human history where the nanny state is interfering with these personal choices. Claiming that they're willfully funding organized crime is disingenuous at best.
How about you stop insulting? You're making it very tempting to just call you whateve you call others. You're not about an interesting discussion but a disingenuous strawman.
And your strawman is absolutely annoying, seeking some sort of ridiculous purity. I don't consume any drugs (but I'm not saying I won't ever, just that I'm not interested at this point) but I'm still for this so there you go. You even got your pure example.
Google Glenn greenwald debates bush drug Czar on war on drugs. It addresses your strawmen.
In any case, you've shown to not have arguments but strawmen and ad Homs and the only thing you consider is what is already legal.
Worst of all is your righteousness. You don't care about cartels or people or you wouldn't focus on "idiots who take drugs".
In any case. GG covers it all pretty nicely.
Quick Edit: let's not even talk about the way politicians and powerful people can use drugs without the same consequences as normal or poorer people.
I'd like to point out a very important detail: I'm not insulting people for wanting to enjoy themselves. No, not at all!
But people are idiots when they don't see the connection between the dollars they pay for their fix and the monstrosities that are committed with those same dollars.
And, if they do see the connection and do not care, that they are criminals.
I do understand and justify, though, those people who use marijuana for medical conditions (physical and/or mental pain) and cannot find it legally.
Because you force their hand to not have another choice.
You removed the choice.
I love how authortiarians think that they'll get exactly their way. Suddenly laws of supply and demand disappear and they can shape the world at their pleasure.
>Where most people want marijuana, it gets legal. Where it doesn't, it's because people at large don't want it. That's it!
Or in a free society, people that want it, get it. People that don't, choose not to get it. Authoritarian is saying "I don't like it, so I will force you not to have it". The right to control one's body is a pretty fundamental freedom. You aren't supposed to be able to vote to take away the freedom of others. In an extreme example, you can't vote to make slavery legal. Laws can be immoral and unethical, and breaking those laws does not automatically make the law breaker unjustified.
> Where it doesn't, it's because people at large don't want it. That's it!
"People at large don't want", after the government spent decades brainwashing the population about the supposed dangers of drugs with sustained propaganda? By that standard North Korea and Russia are fully democratic countries, too, the population just happens to support things that their governments are doing!
I suggest you actually read it with extreme scrutiny: whose opinions exactly are being reported. Look at their exact quotes. A politically-independent mayor? Someone in law enforcement mad they don’t have more laws to enforce?
Portugal is great. Don’t let someone who works for Bezos tell you otherwise.
The prevailing sentiment when this was brought up on HN a couple weeks ago was that the failure in Portugal is heavily impacted by severe budget cuts with respect to treatment. I would not say that proves, in and of itself, that this approach does not work very well.
Cuts in absolute terms, or failure to keep up with a surge in demand? (genuinely asking as I don't know, the latter situation is the case with the UK's NHS)
The problem with Portugal is that successive governments defunded the support programs for drug addiction. It's a real Republican move: first, defund the programs that were successful, then claim that they don't work, so you can abolish them. The practice "not working well" any more is a deliberate choice.
It’s a complicated problem that requires many things to address. There are numerous studies on it. But criminalization is one of the least helpful things you can do. At every stage, criminalization makes it worse. It adds violence to the drug trade. It leads to an unsafe supply. It prevents people from seeking help in an emergency. Drug busts lead to more overdoses in the surrounding areas. It gives people a criminal history which prevents them from gaining employment, which massively reduces their chances of successful recovery. It creates a stigma, which prevents addicts from receiving the support they need to recover. Now this isn’t to say, you shouldn’t prosecute other crimes - robbery, etc., but you have to do more than just decriminalization.
That’s what SF struggles with. You need to provide addicts with a free, safe supply to stabilize the situation and prevent addicts from committing crimes to pay for their habit. Most illicit drugs are dirt cheap to produce. This would cost us a pittance. Then you need to provide support. Detox and maintenance drugs like suboxone. You need mental and physical healthcare. You need environments recovering addicts can live in, and then need to have a future. This means they need to be able to work. This is a big part. When felons can’t find work, things seem hopeless and they are very likely to relapse. We do everything we can in this country to set addicts up for failure. I honestly believe policy makers and law enforcement officials think the only good addict is a dead one. And we need a lot more research. I believe eventually, we can medically solve compulsive behaviors, but the incentives aren’t there right now.
And yes, all this would cost a lot of money. But we already pay and insane amount of money to not solve this problem. Law Enforcement consumes billions and billions. Billions of not trillions of dollars are funneled into the pockets of drug dealers. All the money lost due to adjacent criminal activity. And all the medical costs because we don’t help these people until it so bad that they are in crisis. Not to mention, you shouldn’t just ignore an epidemic because it is hard or expensive.
The problem in America is that we don’t want to address it. We don’t like to help people with “ugly” medical problems. We only like the good patients. Anyone with a disease that causes adverse social behaviors need to “help themselves”. Or at least they shouldn’t be allowed to be visible, even if it means they have to die.
> You need to provide addicts with a free, safe supply to stabilize the situation and prevent addicts from committing crimes to pay for their habit.
This is the missing step in the Portugal model.
Want free drugs? The government will provide that if you demonstrate addiction with a drug test, and be willing to tell the police where you got the drugs. For plausible deniability, perhaps only 10% of addicts are actually asked.
Drug dealers can't compete with free. Drug addicts will eventually cave and get the supply. Vigorously prosecute the property crimes addicts use to get high.
Once the drug dealers are out of a job, you can start tagging the drugs so they appear as government-issued on the drug test, and start tapering the supply for everyone.
You will probably never get to zero that way, but you can eradicate most of the crime at a fraction of the cost of the current policing and healthcare support methods.
The Netherlands is not going back on this. 20-30 years ago we had a really progressive soft drug policy (tolerance policy / gedoogbeleid). We still have that same policy. Only now it seems regressive because many other countries have legalized soft drugs in the past decades and we just kept our old policies.
What?!?! Netherlands illegalizes something every week. I guess your talking about the tolerant policies where even selling drugs rarely results in prison? No more shrooms and nitrous; I think the shroom thing is just for tourists and they're just expecting you to grow yourself and keep to yourself.
I know you can get quite a serious charge (in other countries) and make out okay in NL. You could kill someone and be working a good job on the outside in 2-10 years.
The main reason the Netherlands is going "back on this" is that due to cuts in law enforcement over the past decade the gangs running the trade and manufacture have had free reign. This is mostly meant for foreign markets and less of a drugs-at-home issue. The Netherlands is mostly a throughout country with respect to trade, and drugs are no exception (with mdma production being the exception, but this is also mostly meant for export).
The Netherlands arent changing their drug policy. We just have the problem of being an import/export country for not just goods but also drugs for the entirety of europe. Drug consumption by citizens is not changing.
That would be ideal. Citizens should be deciding what they view as anti-comptetitive, or reasonable defensive actions, and the FTC and the DOD should act based on those decisions. In an ideal world.
Personally, I like the work that the FTC does but even in this situation, I would like to have them be split up into an enforcement part, and a sort of think tank / brainstorming / general investigation of trends part. You can argue that I have sort of moved the problem instead of eliminating it, but I would argue that it’s both a good start and a good on-ramp for winning the game of lobbyist influence whack-a-mole.
It bars experts from deliberation. It would require debating space policy while keeping anyone from NASA. For a good amount of policy space, that limits debate and discussion to the uninformed. While an oil lobbyist would love NOAA kept out of Congress during climate debates, I’m not sure who that helps apart from the blowhards.
As someone who worked for NASA, I can tell you that sounds like a great idea. NASA is stuck where it is exactly because of the vested interests from within the agency itself with undue influence. People that are too close to the problem can’t see the surrounding context and are blind to tradeoffs. The best space policy comes from independent space advocacy groups.
Edit: if you want a more authoritative version of the same take, read Escaping Gravity. I was at NASA at the same time she was deputy administrator, and I cannot emphasize enough how vilified she was. The epitome of the know-nothing outsider coming in the screw up the space program. There was a united front against her and her crazy ideas about commercial crew… and of course she’s been proven right on every point.
Reminds me of the internet outrage surrounding the "know-nothing" Bridenstine being appointed NASA Administrator, which ended up not only unfounded but aged incredibly poorly in retrospect.
We're in a situation where agencies are advocating for the elimination of rights of the populace. How is that in their purview? Given the current law, an executive agency should be defending the rights of the people, not advocating to make more of them criminals where they aren't.
> It bars experts from deliberation.
They can vote and speak like any other person. This would also allow multiple views to come from an agency, not just from the political climbers at the top.
Hmm, there should probably be some sort of guardrails in place: like these agencies can comment on the bill, but not actually influence it. Or, maybe this only applies to enforcement agencies, versus regulatory ones like the FTC.
Unless we pass an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing the right for private individuals communicate over encrypted channels, which won’t happen.
And we have to win every single time one of these bills come up. They only have to win once.
Indeed. It's astonishing how many people seem to believe that passing law X would accomplish X.
We have no shortage of laws already. Including many laws that (on paper) protect individual rights. All of those laws are routinely being ignored. They don't mean anything.
The constitution is meaningless. The bill of rights is meaningless. International human rights treaties are meaningless. All that matters is what happens in practice.
If individual rights exist in a country, it's because of how society and the government operate – not because somewhere, there's a piece of paper that says so. A democracy can turn into a dictatorship without a single law having to change.
The judiciary is supposed to have enough power to ensure that laws are actually followed by the executive. Of course, if judges are in bed with the executive this assumption is violated. A strong separation of power is the best insurance against such things.
If we're really at a point where all rights must be constitutional protected the game is already lost. Rights and freedoms are meant to default to the citizen, meaning anything is legal unless it specifically violates a law on the books.
I.e. Laws and rights are meant to be subtractive rather than addative. You can remove my rights by law, short of that I can do whatever I want.
I don't think this is the right way to look at it. Without the 1st Amendment, where would be today? Many people on this site are not fans of the 2nd Amendment, but I think they would have to acknowledge that, without it, the situation of the armed citizenry today, while not really comparable to that of colonial times, would be much shabbier than it is -- we would have lost as much of the right to bear arms as the British have, or the Canadians.
One important function of laws is to delimit and codify the exercise of rights and freedoms. Another is to explicitly limit the government. We should probably be amending the Constitution to accomplish this more often, actually.
I don't have any problem with having amendments protecting our rights, though I my opinion they are meant to be moral declarations rather than defining the limit of our rights.
It's similar for limiting government. Our original designin the US was that the government only has the powers expli itly given to it by the people. We can have laws limiting the government, but again those are really just moral stances because the government should default to having no power.
We lost this somewhere along the way, slipping to a point where it's commonplace for the government to claim to have authority we never gave it while we look for laws that grant us our freedoms rather than fight against laws that limit them.
Amending hasn’t really cut it though, has it? I’m convinced we need a page 1 rewrite.
Assumptions don’t age well (earth is flat and the center of the universe, diseases are caused by the humors, a weapon only marginally increases the harm a human can do, etc etc). All laws (the constitution included) are created upon assumptions and they should go through a controlled burn once in a while or else we get end-of-empire wildfires.
I’m also wondering what good to see in an armed citizenry being “not shabby” - and before you say something to the effect that it “keeps our government in line” try to remember they have stratospheric death robots that think your ar-15 is just adorable.
Which assumptions from the constitution do you think need to be rewritten? They seem to have aged astonishingly well to me, although I think they should be extended in many cases, eg. limiting government ability to mess with encrypted communications. Rewritting them in this day and age would surely limit our rights further.
Article 1 Section 1 is a good place to start. The system of checks and balances and the concept for the structure and format of representative government has proven itself incapable of being effective in the modern era.
We get nothing done, and what we do get done is exclusively to the benefit of those that can afford to finance campaigns. Our legislative branch is an absolute joke (life terms, like, really?) and the whole idea behind the senate is meaningless in a world where we can fly from one end of the country to the other in a day, and have instantaneous communication.
Our systems of voting are similarly backwards, designed in a time when you had to send a dude on a horse to communicate.
What would you like to see added or removed from the constitution?
Personally I'd love an amendment declaring our right to privacy, though we really just need to better enforce illegal search and seizure.
> I’m also wondering what good to see in an armed citizenry being “not shabby” - and before you say something to the effect that it “keeps our government in line” try to remember they have stratospheric death robots that think your ar-15 is just adorable.
So are you saying we shouldn't have the right to arm ourselves because we're already so outmatched by our own government?
And to clarify here, the goal of an armed citizenry and armed militias was extremely important when we didn't have a standing military. The original goal was much less about actually making sure citizens come uld overthrow their own government, that's a modern view usually held by those who don't realize how terrible a civil war would actually be.
I'm of the opinion that we should get rid of this farce that we must have a permanent, massive standing army rather than attempting to disarm all our citizens. Our military needs something to do as long as it's there, we're always going to be looking for a fight to prove why they exist.
> ...the goal of an armed citizenry and armed militias was extremely important when we didn't have a standing military. The original goal was much less about actually making sure citizens come uld overthrow their own government, that's a modern view usually held by those who don't realize how terrible a civil war would actually be.
Yes, this is something more 2nd Amendment advocates should learn about. The militia was instituted for the common defence and was characteristic of the "...organic union of society and government..." that Huntington attributes to many of the late medieval institutions which contributed to the decentralised, self-balancing system of public policy which the founders inherited from the English.
In very layman's terms, I've long viewed the original design as the wanting a educated, trained, and armed citizenry that could actually be trusted to act like adults. If needed they could form militias or even organized armies, but the default state is a nation of adults largely just living out their lives with as few government interventions as possible.
We've since destroyed that goal. Our education system is trash, we don't train our citizens how to take care of or defend themselves, and the gun debate has largely devolved into "no one should have guns because we have cops and armies for that" versus "I have a right to bear arms so I can keep this oppressive government in check"
See, I'm a little on the other side of this. I believe in compulsory service. It's not that I think the military is all that (it isn't, source: did it myself), it's just that if we're gonna let people have weapons, it is a Good Idea to train them on how to respect them properly.
It's hard to take these gun nut militias seriously when all their videos have them doing dumbass shit like barrel flagging and handling them loaded when they're just showing them off. Never mind that mass shootings have become like, the new normal. If we are showing we can't be trusted, then we can't be trusted. It's pretty cut and dry.
> Without the 1st Amendment, where would be today?
Lots of countries don't have a constitutionally guaranteed right to say harmful things or carry a sidearm, so I'm going to say, just based on other cultural-similarities, it'd probably be a lot like the UK or Canada...
> Many people on this site are not fans of the 2nd Amendment, but I think they would have to acknowledge that, without it, the situation of the armed citizenry today, while not really comparable to that of colonial times, would be much shabbier than it is
erm, no, I don't think I do. It sounds a lot like you're saying you think things are "much shabbier" in the UK or Canada than in the USA, but friend this just isn't true.
Having grown up in the US and recently spent a couple years living in a country where free speech isn't guaranteed, I feel even more strongly about the importance of the 1st amendment.
The idea that one could be convicted and jailed for saying something deemed offensive in public is completely insane. If I think the PM is being an asshat I would like to be able to say that openly without fear of jail time.
I don't have as much experience with the UK, but with regards to Canada I would indeed consider things there to be shabby. A peaceful protest should never be justification for the government to shut down bank accounts of private citizens. Hell even a violent protest shouldn't lead to that kind of intervention, we were shutting down bank accounts during BLM protests which were sometimes anything but peaceful.
The armed citizenry is certainly shabbier in the UK or Canada. Americans retain much more ready access to basic small arms -- in particular, semi-automatic rifles, banned in the UK in the 1980s -- and with some trouble can get machine guns, grenade launchers, rockets, mortars and many other squad and platoon level level weapons. There are at least 600000 machine guns in private hands in the USA today, registered under the terms of the NFA; and there are probably quite a few more, since many people become Class III dealers more or less just to have them.
Now, none of this is half as good as colonial times. In the United States, we didn't see much restriction of the arms market until the 1930s. Americans freely traded all classes and varieties of weaponry -- small arms, cannons, swords, &c -- during the colonial era and for more than a century after. Americans today have much less of the freedom promised by the 2nd Amendment than we used to; but we have retained much more of this particular right of the English than any other English speaking country.
Sure, they're trying to. We're supposed to have a say in laws that get passed and who is passing them though. I was only pushing back on the idea that we need new amendments to carve out our rights when we shiuld be able to simply block laws we disagree with and replace the people trying to trample on our rights.
With regards to privacy specifically, we could go a long way with the existing rights protecting us from illegal search and seizure. That should really cover any overstepping by the government and police, leaving only the need to limit what private companies can and can't do (though this should be done with laws and not amendments).
> Unless we pass an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing the right for private individuals communicate over encrypted channels, which won’t happen.
I’m not an American, and I’m definitely not an American constitutional law scholar, but from having a read of the text of the amendment it does appear to primarily be referring to public speech? I’m likely misinterpreting this, but nothing about the First Amendment appears to me about communicating in private and ensuring the privacy of that communication.
Speech has been broadly interpreted to include many "outputs" from human action/work/communication. It extends beyond literal speech/talking. For example, decorating a cake is considered speech, and a baker can refuse to decorate a cake for customers they don't like, because the government cannot compel speech.
I've seen arguments that the encryption algorithm itself is speech and should be protected, similar to the cake decoration.
In addition to protections on speech, the Constitution also has protections on privacy (albeit not literal - that protection has been interpreted by courts over the years - the Griswold case being the most recent/important interpretation of that right [google: "Griswold penumbra"], and now Dobbs could see some of that protection walked back).
> I've seen arguments that the encryption algorithm itself is speech and should be protected
Yeah, that's an interesting distinction for sure. I mean, this has gone back to PGP and the encryption wars in the 90s where it was illegal to export an electronic version of PGP from the US under... ITAR, I believe (secure encryption was considered a munition and thus export-restricted?). And it was worked around by publishing the source code in a book, which could be exported just fine. Where it gets a bit more complicated is publication-restriction vs. use-restriction though; I'm sure I could readily find bomb plans on and possess the plans freely, but the moment I follow the directions in those plans I am committing a criminal act (in Canada at least it'd be "possession of a prohibited device").
The Griswold and Dobbs thing is a really unfortunate situation :(.
Up here in Canada, we've got a kind of interesting situation that really favours E2E and I wish I had a citation handy... basically, law enforcement cannot search your cellphone for evidence without a warrant, as expected, and also can't get a wiretap without a warrant. The situation that arose, though, was that one of the major telecommunication companies was keeping short-term SMS logs for ostensibly system debugging and law enforcement realized they could request those logs warrant-free. Because it was voluntary third-party disclosure, no one was "compelled" to disclose these logs and there was no protection in place for either party of the communication.
Yeah, Clinton-era restrictions classified certain encryption products as munitions.
That restriction lost in early appeals, but IIRC, it never made it to SCOTUS, as the tides changes and industry forced the government to relax the restriction somewhat (IIRC, some restrictions still apply, but not to what we'd consider "normal" encryption products).
Edit/Addition - also worth noting the target/subject of speech matters. Political speech is the most protected, with almost absolute protection.
And often missed by the general public - speech is protected only in the senes the government can't restrict it (without a very good reason), but that doesn't mean speech is free of consequences from the public.
> That restriction lost in early appeals, but IIRC, it never made it to SCOTUS, as the tides changes and industry forced the government to relax the restriction somewhat
The government was forced to relax the regulations when the Ninth Circuit found they were an unconstitutional restraint on speech.
All software has had first amendment protections since that ruling, and the only reason it never made it to the Supreme Court is because that ruling has never been appealed by the government.
Congress can make any laws it likes, and there’s existing unconstitutional restraints on software in the law today (like the DMCA anti-circumvention restrictions), but it has subsequently never attempted to enforce any restraints of writing or distributing software, and couldn’t without the permission of the Supreme Court.
I’m not trying to be rude, but I don’t understand how so many people on HN seem to be unfamiliar with this case. It’s arguably the most important legal decision in the history of writing software.
> an amendment to the constitution guaranteeing the right for private individuals communicate over encrypted channels
I understand here on HN it looks so obvious, but if you stop and think for a moment it is no natural at all.
The only natural way of having a private conversation is directly from mouth to ear. Private remote communication never existed until recent technology made it possible during the last decades.
We are in the same situation as cars, where people have been walking for millions of years but little more than a century ago we got the ability to move freely along longer distances at previously unimaginable speeds.
I'm not against private communication, as I'm not against cars, but it's just normal that new things get regulated in a society. All countries are OK with driving being regulated (get a licence, always show a readable registration plate...), so why are we shocked every time someone proposes to regulate remote conversations?
I also understand the point that encryption is either breakable by nobody or by everyone (thus the thing about only authorities being able to eavesdrop is moot), but please stop assigning to a pinnacle of modern technology the same status as a natural human right.
> until recent technology made it possible during the last decades.
Julius Ceasar used encryption (poor, but effective at the time). The enigma machine was developed at the end of World War 1. Unless you have a very charitable interpretation of “last decades”, the premise of your argument does not stand up to basic scrutiny.
"normal" changes over time: a hundred years ago it wasn't normal to talk with literally all of your friends and family remotely all the time, nowadays it is.
Countries signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should respect Article 12:
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his ... correspondence
Still, nobody was ever shocked that a judge could order letters to be open or telephones to be tapped. And yet, as soon as someone asks whether we should consider something similar for electronic encryption, HN reacts as if this was something never heard of, nor imaginable.
Whether for one person or for everybody, eavesdropping requires encryption to be breakable. We must accept that serious discussion on this issue is not yet closed, and we must accept that one possible outcome is that encryption be banned.
Treating a recent advancement in computing technology as the most natural of the things is not good advocacy of an issue.
I'm not sure you read any of my comments, apart the one you replied to.
My only point is that discussions concerning the use of encryption must be accepted, because there is nothing inherently evil or unnatural in them. Don't let's get shocked any time someone proposes something that goes against some folks' credo, and let's debate the proposal in a constructive manner.
I don't get how the political system can work like this, we keep denying laws that are absolute dogshit. The politicians give them a makeover and try again. They only need a yes once and we need a no every time.
Makes me question democracy really, it seems fundamentally broken when the peoples voice is supressed over and over. Same stuff happens in Sweden, but with other kinds of laws.
I've always felt like laws should be reviewed every so often, maybe even re-passed, to be sure they are still relevant, make sense, and to see if they worked as intended.
There are at least some laws that don't make sense anymore or just flat out failed, but have big implications. Like blue laws, adultery laws, inheritance/intestacy laws, mandatory minimum sentences, sodomy laws, drug laws, etc..
But I do see problems in revisiting laws, it's expensive and time consuming. It would be a never ending battle for both sides, and we would get even less done.
In the current political climate in the US, I'd also be concerned that laws that we obviously need and agree on would be held hostage for negotiation purposes just like the budget. I also wonder if laws would just get bundled together for a single vote and then bullshit/pork gets attached.
> It would be a never ending battle for both sides, and we would get even less done.
Heh, are you a Congressperson? Who is this "we"? The whole thread is people pointing out that "we" and the people doing the things are different. Congress has been on a quiet crusade against encryption since before Pretty Good Privacy in the 90s.
I remain confused about what people fundamentally see when they look at Congress. It would be a huge win for them to get nothing done and have nearly no laws, most of what they've passed for the last 30 years has been disastrous and encouraged the US in steadily unwinding financially and as a united political body. If the power isn't in Congress it'll get picked up by state and local governments where much more ordinary people will get a say on how they are governed. And do much less damage when they screw up.
Democracy makes a lot more sense if you see it as an emergency escape valve to prevent violent revolution (because you assume anyone willing to violently revolt would be willing to vote).
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others."
A monarchy of genuinely good rulers is a better government than a democracy, but it's hard to ensure a good ruler because whoever gets chosen, there's always a risk they're corrupt. Democracy gives the people more of a chance to prevent bad laws than a monarchy, even if it's a small chance.
Maybe one day we'll something better than Democracy, like an AI-controlled government, but nobody's come up with anything so far.
>A monarchy of genuinely good rulers is a better government than a democracy, but it's hard to ensure a good ruler because whoever gets chosen, there's always a risk they're corrupt. Democracy gives the people more of a chance to prevent bad laws than a monarchy, even if it's a small chance.
No, this isn't the problem with monarchies at all (or maybe I'm just disagreeing with your wording). The problem with monarchies is heredity: sure, you can get a great ruler like Marcus Aurelius, but the problem is the great ruler doesn't live forever, and eventually he dies (or is secretly murdered) and this his shitty son takes over. Then the Praetors have to murder him in his bathtub before he completely destroys the empire.
Ok, an oligarchy of genuinely good rulers for each region and specialty...which is exponentially harder to ensure, because it only takes one to cause problems.
The point still stands that we're better off with a democracy.
That's more an argument to keep states small, for optimal internal governance. Interstate conflict drives states to become larger though so it's a balance.
this does not prohibit its discussion as a theoretical ideal model. It's true that benevolent dictatorships outperform democracy as long as they remain benevolent, which is not long.
This is not an inherent problem with democracy but with representative democracy. These problems go away when the populace have actual power, in a direct democracy.
And why on earth e we liked i want to be ruled by a machine?
A problem I see with direct democracy is that "the common man" doesn't have time to get educated in everything they'd have to vote for.
The swiss model where things can be raised to referendum seems pretty reasonable to me (Swede). I'd love it over here, so we can tell our government (including the party I voted for) to kindly shove it sometimes.
This may be the wrong conclusion to draw. Larger populations present different governance challenges than small ones do, since decisions that affect fewer are easier to make. Switzerland has about the same population as NYC.
Yes, I believe these massive superstates(U.S., China, India, E.U.) need to be dismantled into smaller components - move the power closer to the people.
You can still have interstate trade, regulations etc.
Direct democracy has other problems. Perhaps the biggest is it just isn't practical to ask the entire population about every question of policy and law.
Look into Switzerland. They have found a great balance, with three levels of decision making(Gemeinde, Canton and Federal) and where everything is put to vote if a proposal get enough signatures.
Many of these "dogshit" laws make sense, when viewed with narrow enough lens.
The problem is twofold...
Politicians have limited capacity to research/understand potential side-effects of these laws. So they rely on lobbyists from the interested parties. Or their own staff, who have their own biases.
Additionally, politicians face re-election. So, they have to balance the whims of their electorate with what might be a better long-term view. "Think of the children" syndrome, if you will.
That's because liberal democracy is indeed broken. The capitalist class use state power to advance their own material interests. Why wouldn't they pay for laws that give them an immediate advantage or at least divide the working class?
I am not sure that the American public cares much about what has become the norm in other countries so that line doesn't really carry any weight here.
I'd argue that instead, its more that the public is so apathetic about bad-turns of law that they'll just shrug with a sigh and begrudgingly tolerate the new paradigm.
Europe besides the UK too. Don't be fooled by the EU is privacy heaven smoke and mirrors.
Just because the EU is not US doesn't mean they're not doing the same Draconian shit funded by similar or the same people.
They use the same excuses of "needing it to catch heinous crime/think of the children" and "it will only be used for criminals" but we know that's not true. We know that these laws are used against those considered adversarial to gov, including those engaging in journalism, whether they have a degree on it or not (which shouldn't be the bar to not get surveilled and treated like an authortiarian state)
> Wiewiórowski said this type of indiscriminate scanning of private communications “will always be illegal under the Charter of Fundamental Rights (and probably under several national constitutional laws as well),”
I don't see how calling it nuanced negates anything I said.
From the top of my head, Spain, Sweden and Ireland (but not limited to them) absolutely support getting access to e2e encrypted information if they can get away with it.
Obviously most countries that face this have to deal with reality and the insecurities they might introduce but it's not moral qualms or privacy advocates that usually stop them.
And just because someone in a eu body said something is illegal doesn't mean we won't get a big propaganda push down the line if they decide to implement it, like what happens in vaccine passports in Europe (which clearly broke all kinds of rules of freedom of travel and human rights).
I don't care what HN "wants me to believe" and I certainly don't generally represent popular HN views. We can argue on the merits of what I say.
You're right, but we see a lot of people saying EU wants to ban encryption with the CSAR proposal, using it to argue that they don't care about privacy.
I wanted to bring nuance in the discussion, by posting sources to EU bodies (EDPS, EDPB, many associations, and probably the ECJ if it came to that) and members (Germany, Estonia, Finland per your own link) that disagrees with the proposal, or are outright denouncing it as illegal.
EU, as HN, is not uniform, and while it is not the privacy heaven some claim it is (I don't -- I think GDPR is not strong enough and not correctly applied; the ePR proposal seems to be nightmarish thanks to my own country), nor “they don't care”.
The post literally opens with “Europe besides the UK”, and then goes on to mention the EU. There is a lot more scope for confusion in your writing than you appear to think!
It does seem that at some point they will get the right mix of executive and congressional branches to get it done, unfortunately. They really despise not being able to surveil all of us 24/7.
This bill is a gift to the Russians and the Chinese! Now they will be able to read anyone's communications, and do you think they are going to stop encrypting their communications?
Link to the actual bill [1]. The worry is that it has some vague language that would make social media companies drop E2E encryption.
I’m definitely not a legal expert, but the proposed law specifically says:
g) Protection Of Privacy.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a provider to—
“(1) monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider;
“(2) monitor the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1); or
“(3) affirmatively search, screen, or scan for facts or circumstances described in subsections (b) and (c).
It seems like the goal is to make it so that when people complain to websites about specific instances of illegal conduct, the website is not allowed to ignore the complaint.
Of course you're not "required to monitor", you're just also required not to be "deliberately blind". The combination of these is that you are required to maintain the capability to surveil users upon request (ie, no scary encryption) - and once that capability is in place, the next step is pseudo KYC and SAR functionality.
The words “deliberately blind” aren’t in the text I linked to.
I see a paragraph that says you can’t knowingly and willingly fail to make a report or you get fined. But the very next paragraph says this doesn’t mean you have to monitor anyone or screen or scan anything people write.
I’m just not seeing it. What I do see is that a bunch of internet companies really don’t like the idea of being fined a lot of money every time their customer service AI makes a mistake when categorizing a complaint about drugs, because they know their customer service AI is garbage.
It's possible it's a versioning discrepancy - the language being referred to is here. Your version is "as introduced". During the committee process I believe it is possible for language to be altered before an actual vote without a formal "amendment".
The bill left the committee with a substitute as amendment. In other words a different version was introduced in committee and that is what was reported out of committee. The text of the version reported out of committee can be found at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23876061-ell23484-ma...
The words "deliberately blind" can be found in this version.
Hmm, very interesting - your link to the bill's text is specifically missing the section about being "deliberately blind" to misuse (it's the 4th bullet point from this tweet, https://twitter.com/JakeLaperruque/status/167888722551627776...), and that's what people are so concerned about.
Perhaps the bill has already been updated? Or maybe the offending 4th bullet point was added later?
Call your senators and let them know you DO NOT SUPPORT THIS! It seems hokey and feels like it doesn't matter, but Senate staff really does keep track of this kind of stuff.
So, uh, what right to be secure in person and property without a warrant approved by a judge?
The US Bill of Rights was so contentious at the time and the supporters so adamant that they ended up being the first 10 amendments to our constitution. The supporters could have very well held out and either forced them to be included in the constitution or left us with the original Articles of Confederation (not the Southern State's one) but compromised. Even if the Bill of Rights were in the constitution, and not amendments, I expect they would be just as disposable.
And for what? So the DEA and CIA can continue to operate with the same privilege as the East India Company?
How does this, or the drug war, serve the average American? I do not for a second believe this provides any benefit to the average American. I do believe it will allow executive agencies privileged access to markets and information of felonious goods, likely to their benefit and not the citizens.
Imagine living in NYC, hopping on a subway car to go to work from your apartment in the Bronx, and getting stopped/searched by CBP, agents seizing your cell phone and laptop, and demanding your social media account passwords and threatening to detain you if you don't comply: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/give-...
It's fucking insane that US citizens are now advised to make sure a family member, friend, or attorney is aware of you traveling across a US border in case you're detained.
This country just keeps slipping further and further towards fascism.
Don't forget that CBP has essentially unlimited vehicle search authority within 100 miles of federal borders.
I don't think you read your own link.
"The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against arbitrary searches and seizures of people and their property, even in this expanded border area."
>The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against arbitrary searches and seizures of people and their property, even in this expanded border area.
Laws differ between ports of entry and interior checkpoints.
>It's fucking insane that US citizens are now advised to make sure a family member, friend, or attorney is aware of you traveling across a US border in case you're detained.
You have always been advised to leave emergency contact information with someone when traveling abroad, and also to register with the US embassy at your destination if it's an extended stay. Most people don't bother because usually nothing happens and they come back in one piece, but who knows if some deity of the day decided that this was your turn to get fucked, after all?
This is all just long standing common sense grounded in practical reality.
The issue they always raise is that encryption that is properly implemented (along with the relevant devices that are encrypted properly) is effectively unbreakable and equals a "get out of jail free" card to the extent that it invalidates the second half of the statement (without a warrant approved by a judge) which grants lawful justification for invalidating that right/protection.
I think this is a part of what's driving the adoption of passkeys (which seem to only require biometrics) because the biometrics part invaliates the entire protection (producing your fingerprint or face is not protected, only speech/testimonial). They eliminate phishing (unlawful theats) and facillitate bypassing encryption (lawful threats), no matter how strong.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, ***PAPERS***, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
... from a time when all communication occurred via writing upon paper.
Weirdly enough approximately 100% of the DEA's budget goes towards restricting the supply side, so this would be quite the realization for them to undertake.
I don't think the DEA really wants to end the war on drugs. Because without that there is no DEA. At least not as we know it.
They just want to show a big win in the news every once in a while to show they are still 'protecting' the world and justify their budget. And those big wins are found in the supply side. All the while not doing anything to solve the real problem to society. Which is the pain and suffering caused to drug addicts and their unproductivity and care costs.
But actually helping them is not glamorous. This is particularly pronounced in the US where spending billions on heavily armed agencies kicking down doors is guaranteed re-election but spending a few dimes to help someone in need is 'evil communism'. So all the budget goes to the boys with the toys for the big busts pretending to make a difference.
All the other issues like the surrounding crime and cartel megaprofits and corruption are a result of the system of enforcement (strict laws make crime more profitable and hard punishment makes the criminals having nothing to lose and thus more ruthless). It's not the root problem of drugs in general.
This is cynical conspiracy theory conjecture. The DEA, like an organization, has self-preserving inertia. Sure. But mostly it is hard working, well intentioned people who want to end a scourge on society. You may disagree with the policy, but that doesn’t mean the whole organization is a malevolent, self-serving farce.
I'm sure the DEA man on the street is hard-working and well-intentioned yes. My comment was more about its leadership and the political forces that created it and the current system of policy.
But I'm sure even the lowest DEA agent knows they are fighting a never-ending battle. They will never 'end' this scourge this way. The better funded they are, the more scarcity they create and thus their cartel enemies make more profits and become more ruthless and well-equipped. They will never solve this problem by force and it's the only thing the DEA is designed to do.
I'm not blaming them per se. Rather the system that created the DEA and the current policies. They are just slaves of the system like we are. No politician wants to be seen to be 'weak on drugs'. Funding 'winners' with guns is politically great. Funding help for 'losers' sleeping on the street is not. So the theater continues.
I think what's needed is a realist approach. Think about the pain and suffering some drugs cause. Prioritise there. Heroin for example is a real hard path down to destruction and death once you start. It should be banned at all costs. I totally agree there.
However meanwhile America has finally realised that Marijuana is not so bad recreationally, but why is it still a Schedule 1 drug just like Heroin?
And at the same time Cocaine is heavily used in nightclubs and bank trading floors and really has heavy addiction and long-term damaging properties (though people seem to be managing ok with recreational use) yet still it's only Schedule 2?
I don't think drugs like Cocaine and Marijuana will ever stop being commonplace. So why not just accept and regulate them? America took 10 hard years to realise prohibition didn't work, yet this time it takes far too long to get the message.
In Holland we have always lead the way on legalisation though the current government has backtracked this somewhat leading to big cartels springing up, doing gunfights on the streets of amsterdam, with people ducking for stray bullets on the tram. Sometimes it seems, the message needs to be learned multiple times.
PS: I'm saying this as someone who has never used any drugs beside alcohol.
I should have elaborated that they are certainly interested in PR and media coverage. And going after congress to go after China for precursors to fentanyl is just not very media friendly.
...But I am starting to get sick of unencrypted Big Tech's liability shield.
It was enacted to let the nascent social media platforms survive. But they aren't startups running out of garages anymore. They are some of the richest entities on the planet, they can patrol their own platforms, but they will not patrol their own platforms out of the goodness of their hearts unless it affects their bottom line, or a law makes them fear prosecution.
>they can patrol their own platforms, but they will not patrol their own platforms out of the goodness of their hearts unless it affects their bottom line, or a law makes them fear prosecution.
We already see what happens when government delegates law enforcement to corporations: AML/ATF regulations that financial institutions have to follow. The idea is basically the same: "banks can patrol their own customers, but they will not patrol their own customers out of the goodness of their hearts unless it affects their bottom line, or a law makes them fear prosecution". The result? People getting randomly banned because some aspect of them or their transaction info contained something tangentially related to something that's sanctioned[1]. The calculus clearly favors companies being trigger-happy than not. If some Al-Qaeda transaction goes through and the media gets wind of it, they'll get fined and/or raked over the coals by regulators and legislators. The reverse happens and the most is some grumbles but you still stay in business. I fully expect the same dynamic to happen for social media companies. Anything that can vaguely be considered offensive will be taken down. Imagine the youtube demonetization debacle, but worse.
The right middle ground may be some susceptibility to court orders. E.g. Google shouldn't have to patrol files stored in Google Drive, but a court should be able to get a search warrant for a Drive or order files to be removed. YouTube shouldn't have to proactively search for ElsaGate content, but should have to comply with law enforcement orders to help law enforcement find out why it is happening.
I mean should a private company like Snapchat be making money off of fentanyl dealers? There are plenty of alternatives. I guarantee Snapchat already reports child pornographers.
So now instead of a democratically elected government writing laws and appointing people to enforce them, a private corporation will "patrol" my online interactions...
Prior to S230 providers could be shielded from liability through common carrier status. But they couldn't enjoy that protection and remove crap. For point to point services, a very hands off approach makes sense. You generally don't need to remove crap: Garbage in, Garbage out, people can ignore or locally filter what they don't want. But for public online forums a degree of moderation is required (otherwise someone can just flood it with garbage and make it useless to everyone) and generally desirable. S230 is as much about letting people moderate with immunity (both for the things their well intended efforts missed, and for harms created when their moderation goes over broad) as it is anything else.
By count most of the deplorable material that shows up on platforms is not illegal or tortious. Material which is offensive, abusive, demeaning, misleading is often lawful and it often doesn't create doesn't create substantial real liability-- except in the form that without broad brush protections like S230 people can sue over whatever frivolous thing they want anf unless you're a multi-billion dollar entity you may well be bankrupt before your inevitable win. A world without powerful liability shields is one where you can't safely irritate or offend parties with significantly more money or power than you.
And we can see that already platforms facebook, google, twitter, etc. are effectively immune already to civil suit by virtue of their size and wealth-- just look at the lack of effect litigation over their privacy breaches or shutting users out of their own data with no notice causing them grave harm. ... Or incidents like Apple & Google's wage fixing conspiracy, which while they were eventually convicted cost them less than they saved in wages. Their bad policies are in part because their size, wealth, and power make them significantly immune to public opinion.
To the extent that the bad governance of social media sites is harmful to the public we've be better served by having more alternatives. Facebook, Twitter, etc. could survive in a world with S230, but the smaller and better curated alternatives you'd presumably like to see move over very likely couldn't.
When we look at laws like the proposed what we can see is the government trying to deputize corporations to investigate and enforce the law on their behalf. One of the drivers of this is that it throughly undermines due process: The constitution established safeguards against government search but we've figured out that we lack the same safeguards against corporations (since we've "voluntarily" handed our data over to them) and so if governments coerce corporations to search they can substantially bypass our fourth amendment rights.
> By count most of the deplorable material that shows up on platforms is not illegal or tortious.
The court case that inspired S230 was people ranting about a wall street investment firm on a Prodigy message board. Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy for defamation and won, which was kind of the first big blow to the platform that ultimately sunk Prodigy (a really cool platform at the time, but maybe that's just rose glasses). Later the statements on the message board were pretty much shown to be factual, but the damage was done.
Imagine if dang could be personally liable for the things other people said on this message board. Imagine if Moxie Marlinspike was liable for everything anyone ever sent on Signal. Imagine you had a small blog and didn't check the comments section for a couple of days and got sued for everything you had. Sound like a good future?
> Material which is offensive, abusive, demeaning, misleading is often lawful and it often doesn't create doesn't create substantial real liability
The bits of Twitter, Facebook, and Google I am exposed to are filled with scammers, spam, and explicit threats. These posts would get you arrested shouted from a street corner in the U.S, much less if they were amplified in printed entertainment or whatever.
Even the AppStore is filled with straight up fraud.
These are only minimally culled because that is the most profitable thing to do. Spam apps and fraud create engagement and generate revenue. Moderation costs money.
230 shouldn't be repealed (that would be apocalyptic), but it needs some more holes punched through it, kinda like the existing CSAM holes.
Where the posts are that serious and actionable why aren't their authors being arrested or sued? S230 provides no protection for them. Why do you think civil liability for the platform is going to be effective where criminal liability for the speaker wasn't? Why won't the criminal threatener send an email or a letter where the platform won't have any opportunity to see it?
Why not assume the same bad actors would just use expanded liability as a weapon themselves? and that it would still be ineffective just as the existent non-platform criminal and civil liabilities are ineffective for the things you're concerned with?
Because no one cares or can afford to go after a few hateful posters, especially anonymous ones.
Fraudsters aren't necessarily even in U.S. jurisdictions.
> Why not assume the same bad actors would just use expanded liability as a weapon themselves?
Oh, the big platforms would not let this happen. Otherwise trolls would already be wielding CSAM as a blunt weapon, but look how effectively that is quelched.
Two multi-billion dollars lawsuits by a fraudster that I'm personally being victimized with right now beg to differ. Scammers and abusive people absolutely do abuse the courts, the rate is lower than other kinds of abuse because they have to be well funded to do it-- but unlike rude or threatening comments online you can't just ignore a court.
I can also say that first hand that Wikipedia likely would have been destroyed in 2006 by vexatious litigation if it weren't for S230. I've been involved in a number of other online forums and people trying to extort through legal threats is basically a constant, I'd be surprised if HN doesn't get them. With S230 these threats are fairly toothless. If they had any bite at all most smaller services just couldn't exist because the cost of dealing with them quite easily dwarfs the cost of providing the forum.
The fundamental issue I think your view faces is that even without S230 protection there is a lot of bad stuff in the world that we just can't stop. You could conjecture some further restriction of S230 that was narrow enough that it wouldn't make the liability an abuse vector, but since there is so much bad that we can't stop even where S230 is helpless, and even when the parties aren't like the big social media platforms and nearly immune to litigation... it's hard for me to imagine how limitations narrow enough to avoid abuse won't just also be pointless/ineffective.
I fully agree that there is bad crap out there-- but that doesn't mean that something can actually be done about it.
It's hard to discuss without a concrete proposal. Advocating for it absent one as you've done also seems dangerously close to advocating for any reduction, well considered or otherwise. I think at the end of the day our problems are anti-trust not content liability. The horrible practices of platforms wouldn't be such a big deal were it not for network effect lock-ins.
Yeah, I would never want these exceptions to apply to smaller companies.
> I think at the end of the day our problems are anti-trust not content liability. The horrible practices of platforms wouldn't be such a big deal were it not for network effect lock-ins
Yeah, touche.
Antitrust just seems like an intractable problem in the current political climate, while punching large-cap-only holes in 230 (even if for the wrong reasons) feels reachable.
230 should also apply to CSAM. If a provider has good faith unknowledge that their platform hosts CSAM, that absolutely should not get the provider a life sentence.
Would YouTube need to report [1] (a news report about a police officer accidentally overdosing on fentanyl due to exposure on the job) because it is a fact or circumstance regarding the unlawful distribution of a fentanyl?
How many rap songs and lyrics would need to be reported just because they appear to contain lyrics about potential actual drug use?
Would every "{celebrity_name} dies from drug overdose" news article and discussion on social media need to be reported?
Should USPTO patent US3141823A[1] (a method for synthesising fentanyl) be reported? Perhaps that social media user who linked to this patent is involved in the unlawful manufacture of fentanyl?
Should the National Institutes of Health published article "An Efficient, Optimized Synthesis of Fentanyl and Related Analogs"[3] be reported? Perhaps that social media user who linked to this article is involved in the unlawful manufacture of fentanyl?
Given the proposed bill prevents notification of the preservation request for at least 5 days, is the platform meant to delete the offending content for terms of service violation, or leave the content in place so as to not alert the user(s)? If the platform can't delete the offending content, what happens if the content was uploaded alongside copyright infringing material, pornographic material, or other content that the platform would typically immediately remove?
The "cops ODing on fentanyl they touch in crime scenes" thing is not medically possible.
It's always the cops having a panic attack from thinking they're about to OD because they touched some fentanyl. They get taken to the hospital, tested, and no trace of fentanyl is found in their bloodstream...but the media (and police) make a huge deal of it all and leave out the "and no fentanyl was found in their blood" because it's embarrassing.
The only way an officer could be exposed to fentanyl is by ingesting it, not touching it.
Do you really think that's why they make such a big deal about it? It seems like a heavily exaggerated type of virtue signalling to scare people into voting heavier restrictions. I am extremely cynical towards the notion that they are actually "afraid" of it in any sense at both the individual and bureaucratic levels.
How hard would it be to develop an add-on app of some sort that GPG-encrypts messages before you send them. Something like a textbox that encrypts its content, copies it to the clipboard, and then pastes it into the message app. Vice-versa on the receiving side.
It's becoming clear that if you want to keep the government and tech companies from snooping on your messages you need to take matters into your own hands.
GPG is probably not the best choice for IM because it lacks Perfect Forward Secrecy. Meaning if someone obtains the key they can read all consent ever encrypted with it both past and present.
PFS requires that both endpoints communicate together so for email's "fire and forget" structure it didn't make sense. But for IM it sure does.
note that with email, you can still choose to advance the ratchet every time a round trip happens by pure coincidence or whatever.
There's also deniable authentication: in the case of email, a simple pre-shared key (instead of public/private) means that the recipient of an email can't prove they didn't forge it.
Of course it does. The attacker just has to steal your token and pin. Because it's unique (well it should be if you generated the key on token as you should have) it's not possible to do so without the target's knowledge. But you can still decypher all past intercepts with it.
Also, some types of tokens like the original openpgp card don't have touch to sign functionality. So it's possible to 'milk' them for decrypts though the gpg agent. This is why I only use Yubikeys now that do have this functionality (though by default it's off!)
Definitely. I was doing EE2E with friends using Pidgin and OTR plugin (just because it was possible, not that we were discussing anything sensitive) over ICQ and MSN... so ages before TextSecure (now Signal) was even a thing.
The tricky bit is the auto-paste into and auto-copy out of the message app where the people that make the app might be actively hostile to your activity. See Mailvelope[1] for an example of doing this sort of thing for webmail.
If you are willing to do things manually then PGP works with anything already.
That is the banner from the last battle. TLS is exactly the type of centralizing protocol that these people now want - "security" that is fully contingent upon (ie vulnerable to) corporate middlemen and other centralized entities.
It is if you're doing it end-to-end. Don't remember which, but there are protocols where you directly connect to your recipient through the Tor network.
Come to think of it, does anything stop you from running TLS over a messaging app? It only takes an extra 1-2 round trips at the beginning of the connection, right?
>A Thursday press release from sponsor Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) highlighted statistics from the DEA supporting the need for the legislation.
>Within a five-month period, Shaheen said, DEA investigated 390 drug-poisoning investigations and found that 129 had direct ties to social media.
>“Unfortunately, federal agencies have not had access to the necessary data to intervene, which has allowed the crisis to worsen,” the press release said.
Sincerely The cost of a free society. To prohibit private communication between people is a key step for any future totalitarian regime.
Or we could pass universal healthcare and get drug addicts the healthcare they need to fix their addiction problems and thus lower demand for the products. Nah, let’s create a massive surveillance state and keep drug addicts homeless and living in poverty. It’s what the private health insurance companies want.
>A handful of members of Congress, allied with the nation’s major drug distributors, prevailed upon the DEA and the Justice Department to agree to a more industry-friendly law, undermining efforts to stanch the flow of pain pills, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and “60 Minutes.” The DEA had opposed the effort for years. The law was the crowning achievement of a multifaceted campaign by the drug industry to weaken aggressive DEA enforcement efforts against drug distribution companies that were supplying corrupt doctors and pharmacists who peddled narcotics to the black market. The industry worked behind the scenes with lobbyists and key members of Congress, pouring more than a million dollars into their election campaigns.
Drug addicts don't buy much stuff. If it's some great conspiracy to push drug addicts to buy more pharmaceuticals, you want to sell them high end antidepressents like xanax, not cheap pain pills and fent.
So either the masterminds of your brilliant conspiracy are idiots, or it's not a brilliant conspiracy and just plain old drug trafficking.
Most drug addicts of the fent variety don't want treatment because treatment means no longer indulging in their drug of choice. It's the same reason why they tend to be fighty when you fix their OD via narcan - you "ruined" their high.
I recommend actually spending some time with the drug addicts likely living nearby. Bring them a few sandwiches. Ask if they would seek care and if not, why not.
Yes and the legislature would have one less argument to enact mass surveillance if there wasn’t this “convenient” drug problem in the US. And if we had a universal healthcare system then maybe this wouldn’t be as big of a problem and politicians wouldn’t be able to use it as an excuse. Of course this wouldn’t prevent them from using other nonsense like CP to do it (see
: UK), although arguably that problem could also be reduced with healthcare.
These two issues are related in this case. What I’m basically saying is the government could attack the root causes of these problems but they won’t because mass surveillance benefits them in other ways such as monitoring dissidents and protecting the status quo.
Perhaps the phrasing suggests a dichotomy but it’s worthwhile to point out that this organization uses resources to attempt to increase their surveillance capabilities while ignoring strategies which might obviate their existence.
I assume that by "this organization", you are referring to the DEA.
The organization that's considering legislation is the U.S. Senate.
The DEA can lobby for funding and capabilities and whatever they want, and the HHS and FDA can lobby for funding and capabilities and whatever they want too.
Speaking of health care, the DEA would not go away if illicit drug addiction were solved. They are the ones who license physicians to prescribe medication. So are y'all advocating for OTC-everything, and no controlled substances? Like, propofol for all? Chemotherapy at your corner drugstore? Complimentary COVID vaccine with your Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream?
> Speaking of health care, the DEA would not go away if illicit drug addiction were solved. They are the ones who license physicians to prescribe medication. So are y'all advocating for OTC-everything, and no controlled substances? Like, propofol for all? Chemotherapy at your corner drugstore? Complimentary COVID vaccine with your Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream?
No I’m advocating for fixing/reducing the drug problems in the US by enacting universal healthcare instead of giving another law enforcement agency unprecedented surveillance powers. I’m advocating for a solution that 32/33 developed countries have already adopted but the US hasn’t because it’s run by immensely corrupt conservative politicians that happily take bribes and give corporations what they want at the expense of regular people.
The DEA should be abolished, it's a ridiculously corrupt organization. Incorportate it into ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms) and be done with it alreadty.
Should be replaced with an organization that does comprehensive drug interventions like rehab, harm reductions, and maybe some enforcement. At least this would be an answer for what to do with all the people and bureaucracy, which is apparently an issue.
This is the AML approach's "platform providers must presume their clients guilty until they prove them innocent"/"criminalize privacy" philosophy being applied to communication.
Here's a law review argument that encryption is constitutionally protected by the 4th amendment.[1] That might succeed today. Court decisions have been moving in the direction of stronger protection of 4th Amendment rights against law enforcement.
The encryption issue is nuclear bad, an imminent threat to speech & freedom & liberty.
It's not as immediately catastrophic, but telling everyone running a site network or service they now have to actively police that shit &tell the DEA everything is also a pretty awful walk back of safe harbor. Discord is going to have to go through hell to survive & comply with such a measure.
Where does it even stop? Do the feds now get paged every time someone says they got high? And it's the feds... are the feds here trying to route around an ever increasing number of state's decriminalizations/legalizations? It may be legal but the feds are listening in all online places?
Government's ability to concern-troll the world into illiberal shitty authoritarianism is so manifestly endless & diverse. They are just horrible pathetic chumps, in nation after nation after nation. This is why the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace was written: because there is a moral obligation to obstruct deny & prevent exactly this sort of illegitimizing intolerable nonsense that these power grabbing maniacs would gladly foist upon us.
If you can get a bit, you can get a file. Limiting communication of criminal organizations, you are raising the barrier to entry. However, drugs are big money at scale, so big organizations can solve it. Most people with a technical background could figure out how to solve comms too. I don't think it'll move the buck.
We need better methods for tracking physical shipments, decriminalization of use, and investment in schools, science and other programs which build viable alternatives to trafficking.
At some point we have to say no to government overreach. This looks like that to me. The question is, do we collectively have any gonads, or are we just a bunch of well-fed kept poodles of the aristocracy?
What is the context of the last paragraph by Carl Szabo from NetChoice
He said that if the bill is enacted all reporting by social media sites “would be subjected to Fourth Amendment processes, and it will actually become harder for law enforcement to identify these threats."
We had the same debate when they were thinking about pulling down backpages in that if it is out in the open it is easy for LEOs to find and bring justice to bear unlike something not happening out in the open.
Would that mean there would have to be a process of SM account take downs that goes through the courts via 4th Amendment?
"...when the companies have “actual knowledge” that illicit drugs are being distributed on their platforms"
chat providers could also pivot to a pfs model with deniability that effectively removes them from ever knowing about chat at all.
Frankly I think providers are in a bind. Federal agencies using this regulation could tank the product through repeated action against the public interest (like disclosing an abortion for example.). The compliance overhead is also nontrivial.
Then again it could force the hand of companies like signal into a supreme court showdown.
> it includes particularly controversial language holding companies accountable for conduct they don’t report if they “deliberately blind” themselves to the violations.
So it sounds like the "actual knowledge" is false advertising that doesn't reflect the actual dynamic of the bill.
"Deliberately blind" implies the use of encryption (by a platform or provider).
One solution I think is to provide a user side toggle or option to enable encryption. Then it is not deliberate from the provider's perspective, but a user choice/preference. And it is not unreasonable for the user to expect privacy (encryption), ergo this choice defaults to encrypted.
At worst the provider is intentionally blinded by the user, and not deliberately blind.
But do we move the argument back to whether including (the choice of) encryption to mean deliberately blind?
I think that is putting an awful lot of faith in a few legal hypotheticals. If this draconian bill passes, companies mitigate the damage this way, and things shake out that way in the courts, then great. I just think before the bill even passes, it's much better to focus on nipping it in the bud. The reason we have the first amendment is because by the time government is trying to police speech based on its results, things have gone horribly wrong and it's better to make them to address those root causes rather than go even further down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism.
AFAIK in law "deliberately blind" would mean if they see some drug sales and then pretend they didn't. It doesn't mean if they deliberately hide message content, or at least, it doesn't mean that by itself.
Signal, which is deliberately E2EE, would not be considered deliberately blind to drug sales, as that isn't its main use. Tor might be in hot water and might be required to block specific .onion addresses. Of course new ones will pop up, but the Tor project will be accidentally blind to those, not deliberately.
The DEA was invented as part of the most successful effort in human history to create a totalitarian police state, and it is no surprise that they want to further clamp down on civil liberties at a national level
Drug enforcement was always a massive totalitarian project, has destroyed millions of lives, and continues to make the world a more dangerous and less free place for nearly everyone. It is both incredibly unethical and, from the perspective of its purported aims of actually reducing the harms of drug use, a massive policy failure at every level (though if you agree with me that its true purpose is a police state, it is an incredible success).
It's not just users of so-called "street drugs" that suffer, it is everyone who has to interact with the massive police state we have built, or receive any medical treatment. Even very privileged people who have never used an illegal drug can run afoul of the kafkaesque rules about identifying "drug-seeking" behavior, even if they are spared the worst of the violent enforcement apparatus that has ravaged countless neighborhoods and communities throughout the world as police departments have become more and more powerful paramilitary organizations with more carte blanche mandate to search for an ever-widening array of substances in people's private property, up to and including their bodies.
As with most things, the outcomes this puts on the majority of the people affected are much, much worse. Drug enforcement has destroyed countless lives for the mere act of possessing substances - or sometimes even equipment associated with their use or manufacture - that any enemy, especially anyone with official authority, can easily plant on someone. It is the primary driving factor for the unprecedented incarceration rates of the US in particular and has also through second-order effects ravaged the economies, infrastructure, and communities of numerous other countries in the massive US sphere of influence
If we purport to care about things like civil liberties or human rights, the continued existence of drug enforcement is an emergency situation that has been actively on fire for a very long time. We need to repeal the Controlled Substances Act and every piece of legislation that has ever resulted from it. Deciding what drugs consenting adults can use on themselves should never have been the purview of the government, and the harms of this have grown worse every year for nearly half a century. The DEA is a key and irredeemable part of that. You can't expect a monster you created to eat people's faces to suddenly voluntarily stop
The issue isn't criminals communicating over E2E encryption. The issue is that social media uniquely facilitates fandoms for crimes (mainly CSAM) where criminal influencers can easily build audiences for fame and fortune. This is only possible with the specific combo of E2E _plus_ VLOP.
If VLOPs can't use E2E encryption for their social graph interactions, (or, a warrant could open a backdoor) then these criminal influencers would no longer be able to grow an audience as easily. They can't simply make their own VLOP, just like the free speech absolutists failed again and again to create their own Twitter.
So, if the result of this legislation was that criminal networks all switched to Signal or a proprietary E2E comms app, the world would actually be a better place. They could still communicate, but they couldn't recruit as easily.
Sufficiently large? The software is there, I could deploy something like that in an afternoon. I'm not a criminal organization. Anyone can deploy their own e2ee infrastructure.
But where will you put the server? Not in the USA, that's for sure. Not in the UK. Not in Europe. Maybe you can broadcast your encrypted messages illegally on shortwave radio, until the FCC catches you broadcasting illegally on shortwave radio. Maybe you can bounce them off the moon (that's a real transmission technique) or hijack someone else's satellites (more trivial than it sounds because a lot of them are quite dumb). Or you can put a server in somewhere like Myanmar where they won't care about servers hosting E2EE apps, but they also won't care about strange men in black suits turning up and stealing servers hosting E2EE apps. Either way you'll have some difficulty.
You could just use onion services to to hide the server, and store some backup onion services (whose private keys are kept offline) within the application or its files. When the server goes down due to seizure, you spin up a new one under the backup service's pubkey, and sign a list of new backup keys which will also be kept offline until the next seizure.
You could also combine encryption with steganography, if you strip non-random 'protocol information' from your encrypted bits. Doing that, it would not be easy to prove that you are sending encrypted messages at all without having obtained your keys.
And with seemingly far more public interest in GDPR-like stuff than protecting encryption rights.
It almost seems like they're both driven by the same anti-tech sentiment, and encryption isn't as important when you really want no tech at all. Scary!
