It is worse than just crazy. Government is made of people, and people are corruptible. If the encryption backdoor key leaks from the government to a bad actor, it will create a "national security" issue of magnitude never seen before. If this line of reasoning is correct, then proposing an encryption backdoor is akin to committing an act of treason in itself, because it is purposely weakening the technological infrastructure of the businesses and people in the country and thus the country itself. Attempts like these are either doomed to fail, or they will doom the country to fail.
They don't even have to be corruptible. People are fallible. Someone could just make a mistake. No bad actors needed. (Bad actors exist, and make the problem worse. But the problem exists even without bad actors.)
The TSA used essentially this system for luggage locks. You could have a lock on your luggage, but the TSA had a master key that could open any luggage lock.
This is an apt reminder that the question is not "how likely is it that backdoor keys will be leaked/stolen?", but rather "how soon until the first backdoor keys are leaked/stolen, and how frequently after that?"
And to make it much worse, we would now also have to ask "how soon until the required systemic weaknesses themselves are used an attack vector for a mass breach?".
Just for a moment, ignore all arguments about citizens' rights to privacy, potential for abuse by the organizations authorized to access the secrets (and their many fallible and corruptible employees), and so on. Of course all that _is_ important, but just for the sake of argument, ignore it. The problem remains that if anything resembling the "EARN IT" bill passes, then attacks against encryption will _scale too effectively_, and the USA will have exposed itself to having the secrets of thousands of politicians and civil servants leaked to an adversary at once. What do you think happens to democracy when that happens?
I get that many people are short-sighted, or even simply apathetic to the long-term consequences of a law that might make their job easier today. But it seems that whenever computers are involved, lawmakers become _so_ incredibly short-sighted that it verges on madness.
Consider this: a bill requiring a small GPS and remote-controlled bomb to be installed in the engine of every car would allow the police to entirely avoid dangerous high-speed pursuits. If it could be done cheaply enough, should it be done? It's pretty easy to understand the myriad ways this could be abused, so it would never happen. But add computers to the mix, and suddenly any kind of foresight goes out the window.
You're completely correct. I think the deeper issue is that the people responsible for directing US policy right now (and for the last few decades by varying amounts) generally do not care about the welfare of the country or the rights of an average person relative to how much they care about preserving and increasing their own power and advancing an ideological agenda to the same end.
The game is different than it once was; They aren't out murdering like Genghis Khan, but they are no less indifferent towards the people they harm in their conquest. The extent of their love for their country and it's people is the extent to which they can control it all. I've gotten to know this kind of sociopathic power-obsessed personality up close, and have no doubt certain mega-rich assholes out there influencing the political sphere have the same "defect".
Fear-mongering is strong. Look at all the freedoms we lost after 9/11. Pedophiles and terrorists and porn are always the scapegoats.
It is also a very electable sound bite. Everyone is against the "bad people". Re-election at any cost is the goal. We have government of the people and by the people but we stopped being for the people long long ago.
The fearmongering list has also been expanded to Russia and the far-right. As the list of perceived threats grows more varied, so does bipartisan support for undermining encryption.
With communists, especially in the 50s you would have been arguably justified in being extremely sceptical of them in power. Not to the extents of McCarthy but keep in mind that around that time the KGB were really flexing their muscles.
In the UK, the soviets were almost totally successful largely because the British establishment could not believe that someone who came from the right place and went to the right place could really be a communist spy. Even after, with or without hindsight, it was obvious Kim Philby was almost exonerated and re-entered MI6 to an extent purely because the people above him decided it was simultaneously too damaging and unlikely for a Cambridge man to be a communist.
Of course everyone wants those bad people stopped. But every law that claims to be "to stop the bad people and save the children" end up not actually getting used to that end, but instead to further harm the people. They all have far more collateral damage.
I used to investigate computer crime. You know what would have made my job really easy? Unlimited access to all computers worldwide.
Luckily I had to learn alternative investigative methods because we value privacy more than we value catching criminals, which is a good thing. I'd rather a criminal go free once in a while than a complete loss of privacy.
Isn't that more-or-less what the NSA have already?
What I mean is, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA already have most criminals' dirty laundry. The only thing keeping the law from rolling 'em up wholesale is the Overton window around parallel construction.
Do you remember the bipartisan consensus on SOPA/PIPA?
"This bill, COICA, was introduced on September 20, 2010, a Monday. And in the press release heralding the introduction of this bill, way at the bottom, it said it was scheduled for a vote on September 23 — just three days later.
And while of course there had to be a vote — you can't pass a bill without a vote — the results of that vote were a foregone conclusion. Because if you looked at the introduction of the law, it wasn't just introduced by one, rogue, eccentric member of Congress. It was introduced by the chair of the committee — and co-sponsored by nearly all the other members — Republicans and Democrats. So there would be a vote, but it wouldn't be much of a surprise, because nearly everyone who was voting had signed their name to the bill — before it was even introduced.
I can't stress enough how unusual this is. This is emphatically not how Congress works. I'm not talking about how Congress should work, the way you see on Schoolhouse Rock. I mean the way it really works. I think we all know that Congress is a dead zone of deadlock and dysfunction. There are months of debates and horse-trading and hearings and stall tactics.
I'm most curious on when they'll be knocking on the door of open source projects next. Notably, anyone who uses any crypto.
As much as I hate it, I can at least understand the back door argument from a [ignorant] lawmaker perspective. If I pretend and say their intentions are noble, I understand.
What concerns me though, beyond the obvious backdoor problems, is the who is next? Because I doubt big corporations will satisfy their greed for power and information. Especially since anyone who has anything to hide or cares about security will move into open source.
As a developer with a passion for developing distributed, encrypted software - when are they going to threaten me? Worse yet, the software I write I purposefully do not have control over. So am I going to be held liable for the fact that I literally cannot help them?
No matter what they threaten me with, the best I could do is break the application for future users. So what are they going to do to control these distributed systems? Especially ones who truly aim to be distributed, P2P & self hosted by every user?
As terrifying as the current anti-encryption behavior is, I'm oddly more concerned about the move after this.
>I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?
There's clearly a valid argument from the other side. For example:
>Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material, according to people familiar with the reports.
It's not clear how many of those lead to convictions but even a tiny fraction of a percent represents a significant number of children being rescued. Encrypting Messenger, as an example, will stop 3/4s of abuse reports and make it much safer and easier for paedophiles to exchange images. There's a pretty direct line from that decision to an increase in abuses like:
>“inserting an ice cube into the vagina” of a young girl, the documents said, before tying her ankles together, taping her mouth shut and suspending her upside down. As the video continued, the girl was beaten, slapped and burned with a match or candle.
>“The predominant sound is the child screaming and crying,” according to a federal agent quoted in the documents.
as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself? I'm actually convinced that all this does is reduce the sharing of such material, e.g. what people are outraged with is usually not only the act in itself but the fact that some sickos get off on this material. but I wouldn't think for a moment that because of some law less kids will be abused.
I'm actually fine with some kids biting the dust (yes literally being killed) to prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives. I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything (especially in poor volatile countries where cops are in fact part of the problem and happy to look away ...)
>as horrible as this is do you think that banning encryption will put an end to the abuse itself?
No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse.
>prevent the greater evil which is that of normalization of mass-surveillance within society (any more than it is already) which will ultimately destroy more lives.
Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
>I'm not saying these kids don't deserve justice but more power to cops never solves anything
Facebook helped develop a zero day exploit that the FBI used to catch a predator that abused dozens of girls. In this one specific case clearly more power to the cops solved something.
I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones, computers, or from sites like Facebook. It stands to reason that if we saw default E2E encryption across the board it would be a lot harder for the police to get evidence and would lead to a lot fewer convictions.
> It stands to reason that if we saw default E2E encryption across the board it would be a lot harder for the police to get evidence and would lead to a lot fewer convictions.
I am firmly-albeit-reluctantly OK with this, if the alternative is widespread surveillance of what should logically be private correspondence/communication among private citizens.
I value the privacy of the hundreds of millions of the citizen population over a slight increase in the conviction rate of the tens to hundreds of thousands predators.
For people like Hernandez, and I don't know how many there are, as it is never mentioned anywhere. You could think of restricting Tor anonymity with children you have no shared contacts with. I would be very, very wary of going a step further than that as it's very easy to justify "just another step.
To prevent someone from growing dependent on or vulnerable to an external abuser, we could invest in mental healthcare and counselling for conditions like depression which is all too common in teenagers nowadays.
Facebook should not be in the business of writing malware. Malware which could well be used against activists.
To my knowledge, a vast majority of crimes are committed in the home and without uploading evidence of it online. It would never be dealt with by outlawing any sort of encryption.
Would it not be better to figure out ways we could tackle that? Counsellors taking a close look at children? Teachers trained to identify abused children? CPS making a closer examination of suspicious households?
I know you're coming from but online crime really is a tip of an iceberg. An iceberg that is easy to spot but one which masks the true scope of the insidiousness going on below and makes it all too easy to say mission accomplished.
Agreed.
Making encryption the boogeyman is the wrong way, too broad. Ensuring the easily accessible comm channels are accessible to law enforcement, seems like an OK compromise. What those channels are should be the focus of the discussion imo.
This is my issue with the act, it doesnt spell out who would be subject to this rather leaves it up to the DOJ to spell out the rules later.
I am probably in the minority here on HN but I think bundling together encryption with platforms like Facebook/IG is a bad idea given how easy those platforms make it for bad actors to meet/identify potential victims. Signal/whatsapp etc I am ok with since they dont provide that same ability.
> No, but there's a huge excluded middle between the level of abuse with easy E2E encryption and no abuse.
call me old fashioned but every time I look at porn (which is very rare these days) I am disgusted by the meta-data that is added to these videos. It shows that people love to click on videos that read "stepdad and stepdaughter ..." and similar taglines. America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho and it's the main reason why I hate porn. It looks like it's hard to find videos where some form of domination (rough sex) isn't part of it. the way women are treated is IMO the gateway which normalizes violence first against women (even pretend rape is a genre here pushed by pornhub & co). why do people get off on this and why do porn companies get away with it ?? <- my opinion is to start the crackdown on this type of messaging here and before even cracking down have a discussion about wtf is wrong with people? why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
> Facebook has been around for 15 years now without E2E encryption. I have not noticed lives being destroyed but perhaps you can share examples?
the problem with FB is mostly that it many countries FB _is_ the Internet. Myanmar (the Rohinga's) would be a fitting example. Also the Philipines where the Duarte government is currently using it on their brutal war on drugs. If there would be justice Zuck and anyone working at FB would be rotting in jail even before we discuss pedophelia. thousands in the Philipines have been killed thanks to Duarte's messaging. FB literally kills and gets away with it.
FB agreeing to develop 0days to crack down on a few cases doesn't make them the good guys. I believe the world would be better off if FB wouldn't exist at all.
Vice is also known to push a pro-cop pro-LE agenda. I stopped watching their videos and reading their content when they showed how cannabis production in Albania hurts Europe (wtf) ... they are a pro-cop & ultra-conservative outlet. Screw vice and screw cops.
> I can't cite any numbers, but it seems the majority of convictions I've read have some variation of evidence being found on phones,
I know security companies love to cite their work with law-enforcement and how they help fight crime. when I had an interview with the biggest Swiss security company few years ago they bragged about their work with Interpol and how they help fight the bad guys. But nobody ever mentions that the software companies like NSO, Gamma, HackingTeam makes doesn't just allow LS to compromise phones (people assume it's read-only) when reality is the features are always read-write. Putting things on these devices is possible because from an engineering pov why would you limit a feature and not allow write access ... I know enough cops who brag about how they abuse their power . So why would I trust them not to plant shit on these phones (especially when they're convinced that they're dealing with a bad guy).
> America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho
I would challenge that. I would argue that it is a that there are a lot of people (regardless of country) that get a rise out of things that are taboo. One of those things is the step-parent/child thing (because parent/child is too far for many people).
> America has a problem with the whole "call me daddy" fetish. I never understood what this is about. It's deeply pedophelic imho
It is impossible to have a discussion on this topic when some people use the word Pedophilia to cover "babies and small children" and others are using it to cover zero to eighteen year olds. While it might be immoral or illegal if a 55 year old is having sex with a 16 year old it isn't pedophilia. A Daddy kink is incest, again not pedophilia. Please use the correct terms. Otherwise it muddies the discussion until no one can discuss it at all.
>why do they have to strangle each other during sex?
Okay, now it smells like SJW and white-knighting. Many women fantasize about being raped, dominated and strangled. There's nothing bad or wrong in living out those fantasies. It doesn't normalize violence or cause rape.
How many of these images are re-circulations? How many of them are new images? How much abuse is actually facilitated on the platform? Does directing more resources towards this take away resources and mind share which could be used to tackle more serious crime than someone posting images over and over?
> I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption.
Most differences between republicans and democrats are superficial. Republicans don't really believe in small government no more than Democrats really believe in social justice.
It’s one of those things that people think is a grand idea, right up until it’s been in force for a few weeks and it turns out that China is reading all the internal US message traffic.
Then everyone will be like “Whoa?! Who would have thought something like this could happen!”. I feel like this is a tale as old as time.
There is always bipartisan consensus in whatever gives more actual power to powerful people. It's just that some would rather the power be for billionaires and others for the government.
Doesn't surprise me at all and it was painted on the wall pretty clearly in my opinion. It is of course a sad state of affairs. I think it shouldn't need to be mentioned but apparently it does.
I can. Our representative government represent corporations and the deep state, in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term (as opposed to the more recent abuse of it), and not the people.
They have continually made moves like this, in a boiling frog fashion. Until we the people wake up from the two party divide and conquer system, very little will change, excepting very rare circumstances of pressure exerted en masse (SOPA/PIPA is a good example outlier).
I've thought about solutions to this problem for a long time, and my conclusion is the things needed are the following (in order to prevent a long term overton window shift as has been happening):
1. Renewed participation in local politics and elections, especially at the state level, but also county, city, etc.
2. Once that is achieved, voting in ranked choice voting initiatives. This will enable the next step.
3. Stop voting for anyone based on party, in particular the main power structure is based on the majority rule in the house and senate... the end goal would be to take away the majority from both parties. This is a huge undertaking, so I'm not saying it would be easy, or even possible, but I think it is what is required. I think those paying attention enough and not enured to the tribalism of the parties understands they cannot be reformed from the inside. They are simply too entrenched, and have too many mechanisms to get rid of those who seek to do so. The point is that we don't need to gain a majority with this new coalition party of independents and third parties, we simply need to take the majority away from the two main parties. To get this done though, [1] must be done, because many of the state laws have been manipulated by the duopoly to prevent third parties and independents.
3.1 To avoid fracturing of the coalition, there should be some very rudimentary and base document that all persons running can agree on. This is also difficult but, since all congresspeople swear an oath to the constitution (5 U.S. Code § 3331), something that reaffirms the principles of the constitution would be the best start. If they violate this, the coalition should work to remove them immediately. (something similar to Gingrich's "Contract with America")
4. Currently, and many don't know this, congresspeople have to sign an affidavit (5 U.S. Code § 3333) confirming their oath. I think we should then work towards enforcement of the laws against violation thereof, the primary one being perjury, or something similar (18 U.S. Code § 1918, 5 U.S. Code § 7311). For example, how many people have straight up lied to congress and had no action taken against them? (Clapper is one of the more egregious ones that comes to mind, but the point is congress is in dereliction of duty in enforcing perjury laws)
This would give the people a real opportunity to start passing laws that represent the people (such as term limits), but are still constitutionally sound.
The legislative is the branch closest to the people, and this is why it should be the focus. From a cleaned up legislative we can begin to resurrect the separation of power between the branches that has been egregiously eroded, primarily by the executive. The current checks and balances system is crumbling. A huge part of this erosion is the surveillance system, which enables compromise of congresspeople by the executive and the MICC. We must fight for privacy, both encryption and anonymity, as a fundamental part of protecting the checks and balances system.
Dear lord man. You've actually thought about this. I'm flabbergasted to see someone actually attempting to solve this problem. Out-grouping for the sake of sharing logic.
Oh geez, it's been at least a decade since I did a MBTI, but probably you are right on the money.
I've thought about it because I honestly considered running for POTUS, but even that is because I consider my oath the the constitution still valid even though I've been out of the military for a long time, though I'm still recovering my brain.
I'm pretty sure it is designed that way on purpose. Nothing will ever change as long as both sides are fighting each other and no one is willing to fight the system.
Just a quick reminder that in California, a bill allowing statewide ranked-choice voting in all cities (not just charter ones) was passed by both the state assembly and senate by a wide margin, before being vetoed by Gov. Newsom last year.
RCV or any voting system isn't better than what the current prescription is for CVRA lawsuits: having districts. It enables more local elections, lower cost of campaigning, and more minority representation. Edit: It's also easier to have neutral district lines drawn (like in CA and a few states by boards) than to pick a voting system that might not achieve the objectives of the CVRA.
If you're wondering why it was vetoed, maybe look at the history of CVRA lawsuits and how having districts has helped communities more than RCV. RCV is an apportioning method, which doesn't necessarily make it a good voting method.
Major this. Also plug for CGP Grey's "politics in the animal kingdom" video series that explains exactly why we have that 'lesser of two evils' problem, and how exactly RCV and Alternative vote systems resolve that problem, in a very simple, understandable way.
The problem with Fair Vote and the CGP Grey videos, while I like them for an introduction to the subject, both have two very misleading points.
1) When they say RCV they specifically mean Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). There are many other, and better, RCV methods.
2) They overclaim IRV's ability to solve the spoiler effect (see my other comment for links). While other RCV methods have strong resistance to spoiler effects, IRV has a weak resistance. CGP actually hints to this when he talks about that IRV doesn't prevent a trend towards two party systems.
I think when people talk about RCV (in the context of single-winner elections), they're almost always talking about the same thing as IRV.
"Ranked voting" is the more general term.
> Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to determine which candidate (or candidates) is (or are) elected (and different methods may choose different winners from the same set of ballots). The other major branch of voting systems is cardinal voting, where candidates are independently rated, rather than ranked.[1]
> The similar term "Ranked Choice Voting" (RCV) is used by the US organization FairVote to refer to the use of ranked ballots with specific counting methods: either instant-runoff voting for single-winner elections or single transferable vote for multi-winner elections. In some locations, the term "preferential voting" is used to refer to this combination of ballot type and counting method, while in other locations this term has various more-specialized meanings.
I share your frustration with FairVote and CGP Grey (and recently an episode of Patriot Act) painting an unrealistically rosy picture of RCV/IRV as the solution to our voting problems.
There are some other systems that aren't ranked voting at all that I think would be significantly better than IRV, such as approval voting, range voting, and STAR voting (which is basically range voting with an immediate runoff between the top two).
For some reason, FairVote persists in claiming that in approval voting (which is like traditional first-past-the-post voting except that you can vote for more than one candidate), you somehow maximize your voting influence by voting for only one candidate. They call this bullet voting. I don't know what possible reason one could have for believing this.
They show "resistance to strategic voting" as "high" under RCV and "low" under approval voting. This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them. Under RCV, it's only safe to put you first choice first if they are either clearly in the lead or so far behind they have no hope of winning. If the outcome is in doubt, it's possible to cause your first place candidate to lose by putting them first. (That's a weird problem for any voting system to have.)
For this reason, I don't trust FairVote; I don't think they're presenting their preferred voting system or the alternatives honestly. They're more of an advocacy/PR organization that's pushing their chosen solution out of a sense of inertia or something.
The Center for Election Science is a smaller, less-well funded group that advocates for approval voting (and similar methods) that I donate to from time to time. They had a successful campaign to convert Fargo ND to approval voting back in 2018.
"Resistance to tactical voting" is a dumb, essentially nonsensical, concept. What we care about is how well the voting method performs given there is some amount of strategic voting. I made a simple chart here to visualize this fallacy.
Thanks for donating to CES. I'm the co-founder who filed the 501(c)3 incorporation paperwork back in 2011. We've come a long way, and Fargo was very exciting indeed.
> This is somewhat subjective, but I think they've got it backwards. Under approval voting, strategic voting and honest voting are basically the same: you vote for as many of the candidates as you can tolerate, and maybe if there's a candidate you really don't want to win you vote for everyone but them.
Except elections rarely work like that. There isn't a set of options I can tolerate and a set I can't. I want my preferred candidate to win more than I want any of the "fine I guess" candidates. And if I have to pick between "bad" and "horrible" I still want to vote for "bad".
With approval voting, I am forced to vote strategically, considering what point in my preference order to draw the line at in order to maximize my chance of causing the highest possible position in my preference order to win.
I realise that IRV isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than any non-ranked choice voting method as far as I can see, and honestly I think the risk of the situations where honest voting results in a sub-optimal outcome is massively overblown, though I don't have data to back that up.
I would note that IRV has the advantage of being actually put into practice at scale (Australia, Maine), and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV), so you can have systems like Australia where IRV is used in single-winner races and STV in multi-winner ones without the voting public needing to learn two systems.
STAR, the system we're advocating, solves a lot of these issues though. Score voting is "like" approval voting but with more precision (really approval is just the binary version of score). STAR05 is often suggested because experimentation shows that it has enough expressiveness to generate good winners but is simple. You can always add more expressiveness by increasing the range in which you can score candidates, but there's diminishing returns as you increase it and added complexity (I don't think people will have a problem rating 0-10 though since we actually do that a lot).
I cannot think of any way that IRV beats out STAR. In STAR's worst case scenario (1-sided strategy) it still has a VSE equal to IRV's best scenario (100% honest). Any more honesty that people have in STAR just improves peoples' satisfaction. This is actually one of the main arguments of cardinal systems over ordinal systems (e.g. STAR vs RP/IRV).
If you're really into the ordinal camp, I'd also strongly encourage you to look into Ranked Pairs. The satisfaction is A LOT higher than IRV does. On the ballot side it is no different than what the voter sees in IRV (really this is fairly consistent for ordinal systems, by definition).
But I want to stress that STAR and Approval are not equivalent. I also want to stress that scoring is an extremely familiar concept to most people. "Rate this drive out of 5 stars." "On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate..." etc. So I'd argue that STAR is fairly expressive (which seems to be your major complaint) and is a simple and easy concept for voters to understand (since they are already familiar with it).
I'm a co-inventor of STAR voting. I explain it as, STAR voting is score voting on a 0-5 scale followed by an automatic ("instant") top two runoff. Whereas approval voting is score voting on a 0-1 binary scale. STAR voting performs a tiny bit better in computer simulations of voter satisfaction, but approval voting has the practical benefit of being super simple and requiring no voting machine upgrades. Both are superior to IRV.
Here's the first email I received from Mark Frohnmayer where he discussed STAR voting, following my speaking at his conference at University of Oregon, that gave birth to it. :)
https://twitter.com/ClayShentrup/status/1278118075972202496
STAR sounds very reasonable. And yeah, I'm definitely open to ordinal systems besides IRV. I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good (which is of course the whole point of voting systems to begin with). I'd consider IRV or MMP vastly better than FPTP, and something like STAR or Ranked Pairs only slightly better than that. Which is a good example of a preference that STAR would be good for expressing :P
> I guess my argument is about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good
I see this as more when you're creating something. Like if you're writing software if it is good enough then don't continue if you have other pressing matters. Essentially this saying is about Pareto.
But when you already have things invented and you're just selecting things, this saying doesn't apply. We have 3 options: option 1 sucks, option 2 is meh, option 3 is pretty good. Which do you choose? It is pretty obvious that you should choose option 3. There's no other conditions on this problem. You don't have to spend more resources to get option 3. Option 3 is just objectively better, so why not pick it?
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I'll note that IRV is a 6% VSE improvement on plurality. STAR and RP are both 15% improvements on plurality. This is part of why people are frustrated. There's options that are objectively better, so why pick the worse one? And it isn't like they are differing in "betterness" by small amounts, we're talking about a pretty big amount!
You're calling 6% "vastly better" so doesn't that make 15% "astronomically better?"
> and also comes with the nice property that it can be fairly easily adjusted to work with multiple winners (ie. STV)
Score voting (and by extension STAR voting and approval voting) have a proportional multi-winner analog that's much simpler than STV and arguably better.
I'm basically agreeing with literally everything you are saying, I just want to expand on certain things.
> RV vs RCV
These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people.
> STAR
Anyone who is advocating for STAR has my approval. It is the preferred system in my mind. I want to plug my longer post that has a lot of links and expands on all the topics you described
I think this is a style of argument that is increasingly becoming more common and is destructive. Pushing the your argument past the point of validity in an effort to make it stronger. Their use of broad classes is a gross mischaracterization. When they discuss Condorcet methods they discuss several types, lumping together the worst features from different ones. But they ignore the good methods like RP and Schulze. The comparisons are unfair. But then again, they aren't trying to appeal to people that are informed on the subject, they are trying to appeal to the masses which are completely unfamiliar with the subjects. But I do not think this justifies the outright lying and mischaracterizations.
> Spoilers and Strategy
In my other post I actually link an example of where IRV fails, and it is the specific type of spoiling that we are about: when similar candidates spoil (e.g. Bernie and Biden, not Stein and Biden). IRV doesn't solve this (but FV claims otherwise).
For strategy, this is the argument that I get into with the Condorcet camp (though we're clearly on the same side and these are nuanced friendly arguments not hostile). To me STAR is good because its range of VSE is more compact (i.e. resistant to strategies). The Condorcet camp claims that there is enough dis-incentivization to not vote strategically therefore just maximize VSE (VSE is only slightly different between STAR05 and RP). So for anyone listening on the sidelines, this is really what we're arguing, minutia. I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
> I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.
Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.
It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
This is fair and I won't really push back against it. This is the reason I push so hard against IRV. Because once IRV is the status quo it will be hard to continue moving forward. After all, we already have the capabilities. If you have to chose to eat acid, plain oatmeal, or chocolate pudding you don't eat the oatmeal then the pudding, you just jump straight to the pudding.
> It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.
While I'm in this camp I do think it is unfair to completely rule out Condorcet methods. The interview I linked to with Dr. Arrow I think expands on this well. If asked to advocate for a system, advocate for score (STAR). But that isn't to recognize that there's so much uncertainty in Social Choice Theory that we can trust theory alone. There's smaller experiments that have been done, but nothing on the scale we are advocating for. Of course we expect the theory and experiments to be relatively accurate, but we must acknowledge the lack of empirical large scale data. Frankly, you can only get that by doing it.
> Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.
I'm pretty similar. I like STAR and score about the same because I like simplicity, and don't see STAR as that huge an improvement over score. So maybe:
What I, as a European from a country that elects proportionally (which isn't perfect, but anyway), cannot understand is the blank stare Americans give me when people point out that the two-party system and FPTP are the things that need to be fixed for the US to have a democratic future. It's like so many of them cannot wrap their heads around something being fundamentally broken. The same goes for Canadians and UKians.
Americans are deliberately and explicitly indoctrinated from a very young age to believe our system is the best system in every way: most democratic, most free, etc. It’s not surprising that even the slightest challenge to those beliefs would be met with blank stares by many Americans.
We've literally been brainwashed from birth to believe that we have, by far, the best government that's ever been built. It's a major part of the school system.
Cognitive dissonance around the idea that there is room for improvement is inevitable.
I'm surprised that this attitude survives along side the attitude of "the government sucks at everything and it should be made as small as possible" that seems to be so pervasive in the US.
And I'm surprised that I get the same blank stares from Americans that have lived for a decade in Europe. It's like they've never contemplated any other way of electing. Of course it's not true about everyone. I'm generalizing a lot here, but it still surprises me.
Most people who believe the “the government sucks at everything and should be as small as possible” probably still worship the Constitution and “the forefathers” and believe it’s completely compatible.
Well I guess I am not part of most people, as I believe Government is inherently inefficient, and should be microscopic..
I also believe that "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." -- Lysander Spooner
To be fair, the UK did have the "Alternative Vote Referendum" where we got the second-worst voting system proposed as an alternative to the worst voting system (FPTP). That might explain why nobody thinks "alternative voting systems" are any good; they just think of instant run-off.
This frustrates me to no end. IRV has a 6% improvement of VSE over plurality. But STAR and RP have 15% improvements. Not only that, but both are strongly resistant to spoiler effects and the trend to two coalitions dominance (in the States that's the two party system, outside the states that's two major parties being the dominant ruler over their coalitions).
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks it is because IRV doesn't effectively change things. The realist in me thinks it is just trendy.
For others: See me other comment (it is large, you can't miss it) explaining these topics in more detail (with links!)
> Lesser evils aren't inevitable; they're a product of a bad voting system.
It's made much worse by the bad voting system, but it's perfectly possible that I simply disagree with enough of my fellow citizens that any compromise we can reach will be some "lesser evil".
I think that's probably the case. Nonetheless, I would claim "lesser evilism" would be greatly reduced due to RCV (and Approval) being better at capturing preferences: you get to vote for your favorite option, and against your least favorite option.
I think there's a strong argument that RCV/Approval would shift the incentives and game-theoretic landscape away from polarization and turnout, and towards big-tent coalition building, to appeal to the greatest quantity of left, right, center, and independent. That does mean compromise, and likely policy concessions; but i think that would be a huge improvement over (a) taking turns at obstructionism, and (b) a de-facto one-party system regarding corporate interests, the military-industrial complex, etc.
> would be greatly reduced due to RCV (and Approval) being better at capturing preferences
The problem is that IRV/RCV doesn't capture your preferences, because it ignores all your preferences except your top choice, until your top choice is eliminated. IRV is reasonably good at making sure that third-parties can't prevent first-parties from being elected, but very bad at actually allowing third parties to actually be elected even if they have widespread approval.
Approval is a good compromise, and fully ranked systems (e.g. Condorcet) would be even better but much harder to enact. I would happily support universal adoption of Approval.
While I’d take approval voting over FPTP, to me it exacerbates the issue of voting being highly tactical. Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins. If there’s someone I believe to be an existential threat to the country on the ballot, my best choice might be to check everyone other than them even if that means checking the box of someone I dislike. Essentially, you again have to choose how much you care about voting for your favorite option vs voting against your least favorite option. If I truly did check the box for anyone I was okay with being President then approval voting would be okay, but that would never be the right way to vote on the ballot given my preferences. In this way I prefer IRV, despite it’s shortcomings.
That all said, full ranking systems are definitely the superior option, and I’d certainly take approval over our current state.
> it exacerbates the issue of voting being highly tactical.
No. Approval voting has been extensively studied by game theory experts like NYU political science professor Steven Brams, and found to be one of the most resistant to tactical voting. Computer simulations show it performing exceptionally well even with highly strategic voters.
There's even a mathematical theorem (proof) that, given plausible strategic behavior by voters, approval voting always elects a beats-all "Condorcet winner" when one exists. This is mild (some would say GOOD) reaction to strategy.
> Checking approve on someone I believe to be more popular than my favorite candidate lowers the chance my favorite candidate wins.
Yes, this is beneficial not harmful. The alternative is that the voting method must ignore all preference data about the relative support of X vs. Y as long as the voter prefers X to Y. That causes big problems.
It is precisely why ranked voting methods like Instant Runoff Voting are so vulnerable to tactics. If I prefer the Green, my general best strategy is to tactically rank the Democrat in 1st place, thus "burying" the Green and making the mere appearance of un-electability a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The major moral of voting theory is to AVOID RANKED VOTING METHODS, favoring RATED voting methods like score voting, STAR voting, and approval voting. Here's a presentation I gave in 2015 to the Colorado League of Women Voters explaining more.
I would disagree about Condorcet. Score voting and variants, such as STAR voting and approval voting, are vastly simpler than any ranked method, and perform better in voter satisfaction efficiency calculations, and plausibly make better Condorcet methods than real Condorcet methods.
> I think there's a strong argument that RCV/Approval would shift the incentives and game-theoretic landscape away from polarization and turnout, and towards big-tent coalition building, to appeal to the greatest quantity of left, right, center, and independent.
I think most people wildly overestimate the popular appeal for compromise. Only about 20% of the population would support an opposite-side moderate over a near-side extremist. A true centrist party is doomed to lose in any system that knocks out unviable candidates, since it's the first choice of almost nobody.
It's almost as if you didn't even imagine what a "no 'opposite side' per se" would even look like.
I think there's a LOT more room for nuance than "this" or "that" even among the ignorant and/or unengaged. Just look at sports-team divides in the US for evidence.
Except there ARE two sides. Capital controlled means of production, and worker owned means of production. These two systems are diametrically opposed to each other. This just comes across as enlightened centrism. I am vehemently opposed to the economic system of capitalism, and I think that it stands in opposition to the very concept of democracy. How am I supposed to see the capitalist as "the same side"?
Workers owning the means of production is not in fact one of the major factions in US politics, regardless of how much Twitter leftists and Republicans would like you to believe that.
Lesser evils aren't inevitable; they're a product of a bad voting system.
Other countries with other systems don't really do much better.
The fundamental problem is that the people who want this sort of power are the last ones who should ever be allowed to wield it. When people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get a job that pays $500K a year, you have to wonder what's really going on.
Does "select a president [senator, etc] uniformly at random from the voting population" count as a voting system? I feel like that's about the only way to fix things at this point.
(I'm partial to approval voting (vote "yes" or "no" for each cantidate separately and if the winner doesn't have at least 50% "yes", the office is vacant until the next election), but I suspect the party line would immediately become "you're a traitor if you approve anyone but the Party's candidate".)
Also, yes, approval voting is a great approach and we should absolutely use it. We'd still get people who vote party-line, and it'd take a while for people to truly internalize that they can safely vote for other candidates they like, but it'd be a massive improvement.
I want to push back against this, and specifically fair vote.
- What they are referring to as RCV is called Instant Runoff Voting (IRV). IRV is a RCV, but RCV isn't IRV. Think "Rock and Roll is The Beatles" vs "The Beatles are a Rock and Roll group."
- IRV isn't that great when it comes to Voter Satisfaction Efficiency (VSE)[0]. There's even other RCV methods like Ranked Pair[1] that are exactly the same for the voter. Essentially IRV is a 6% improvement upon plurality (what we currently use) but RP is a 15% increase from plurality. So I ask, why go to IRV when we can do twice as good? (or better! Keep reading)
- Fair Vote claims that IRV has a high resistance to spoiler candidates (a candidate that takes away votes from another similar candidate). This is actually why the distinction from RCV and IRV is important and why Fair Vote is misleading. While RCV is better than plurality in this respect, some RCVs are better than others. IRV doesn't adequately solve this issue (but there are other RCVs that do!). IRV fails when two candidates are similar in positions and similar in popularity. [2] This is specifically the kind of spoiling that we are trying to prevent. We're trying to prevent a candidate like Sanders from spoiling Biden (or vise versa) not Jill Stein spoiling Biden. IRV prevents the latter, but not the former. I am specifically upset with Fair Vote because they are misleading in this context. Because they claim IRV := RCV, they take all the things different RCV methods solve and claim IRV solves them. This is simply not true (and why I make the first bullet).
- There are just better methods besides ranking (also called "ordinal" methods). There's a class called Cardinal[3], that is actually simpler. The simplest is called approval. An example of approval is Netflix's rating system (binary). It does pretty well. Better yet is range/score voting. This would be the old Netflix system where you rated out of 5 stars. The difference in ranked vs cardinal is that you rate each candidate or policy independent of the others. This allows you to be more precise/honest (you may actually like two candidates equally!). It also reduces complexity because a common accident in ranking is rating two candidates the same. In ordinal systems this is a bug, in cardinal this is a feature.
- I want to specifically mention STAR voting[4]. While STAR isn't perfect, it much better handles various types of spoiler candidates, has a high VSE (similar to that of RP), and handles strategic voting well. The last is the major reason you should choose STAR over RP (and there's no reason you should choose IRV over RP, because RP is strictly better). While all three systems encourage honest voting (in a single agent scenario) strategic voting is always an issue. Under no circumstance is STAR worse than IRV because STAR handles strategic voting. Specifically the most important kind is the "1-sided strategy"[5] which is arguably very common.
- Lastly, I want to appeal to authority. Kennith Arrow (who you may be familiar with from Arrow's Impossibility theorem and Gibbard's extension) is a Nobel Laureate and said cardinal systems are "probably right."[6] And I think many of us know science speak into the confidence that conveys. That link is a full interview with him from Election Science. It is a good read/listen.
TLDR: We want a good voting system, use STAR, not IRV.
Thanks for your post, I'll dig into your links. I hadn't heard of STAR in particular.
Two counterpoints:
- I'm aware of Arrow, but I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good". :) Whatever the flaws of IRV, it still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences. (We suffer so much status quo bias, it takes a lot of activation energy just to communicate to the average voter that better options exist at all!) But I happily cede the point: IRV is not the best choice of all the available options.
- My favorite is actually Approval, and I don't always bring it up because it has lower mindshare and is less self-descriptive / "sticky-branding" compared to Ranked Choice. My reasons for the preference:
(a) There's no nitpicking over counting methods: whoever gets the most votes wins.
(b) Easy to explain to voters (including the counting system), and degrades gracefully for those who still want to vote for only one candidate. (I've heard objections that some voters hit a cheater-detection trigger, that "some people get more votes than others"; this can be solved by reframing as "Y/N" per candidate, so X candidates = X Y/N votes per voter).
(c) I believe it largely sidesteps Arrow by redefining the success condition: rather than attempt to perfectly measure ideal preferences, it definitionally represents "Consent of the Governed": not who's your favorite, but who are you willing to live with? This would make it more difficult for bolder and more unconventional candidates, but at the benefit of rewarding coalitions and consensus-building. Polarization and sowing distrust would cease to be a viable strategy.
(As an aside, in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held.)
> I file it under "perfect being the enemy of the good"
This is 100% how you should think about it. But what I'm trying to say is that we already have substantially better methods, so why not use them? Perfect is the enemy of good, but if I have the choice of eating acid, a bowl of oatmeal, and chocolate pudding, I'm going with the pudding. Perfect is the enemy of good when we don't already have the choices sitting right in front of us.
> [IRV] still represents an order of magnitude improvement over FPTP at capturing political preferences
And here's where I'm disagreeing, but only slightly. It is definitely better, but not an order of magnitude.
> Approval voting
I love approval voting. It is great because of its simplicity. That's why they use it in systems like Netflix. Easy to collect and gather results from. Honestly I use it all the time. It is how I solve the "where do you want to eat" problem with friends. You just list things until you get a unanimous vote or if you exhaust your list you just take the most approvals. Simple and easy.
The reason I don't like it for elections is that it makes tying easy and I do not believe it has enough precision. The interview I linked Arrow talks about this so I'll deffer to him (he's clearly smarter than me). In elections you need a clear winner.
Why I like score voting (and Condorcet methods, like RP, which is again RCV) is because I actually hate party systems, but I recognize that they can't be destroyed. But these methods drastically reduce their power (I don't think IRV does).
And I highly encourage you to dig more into the subject and am happy to provide links. I also highly suggest looking deep into everything that the Fair Vote chart discusses, mainly because I believe you will be as frustrated as me (and others, like Condorcet proponents) when you learn what each of those topics are. Everyone I know that is well read in the subject is frustrated by Fair Vote's mischaracterizations.
> in a perfect world, a blank ballot would be counted as a meta-vote for "None of the Above"; and if it wins, a whole new election of all-new candidates must be held
I think this, all by itself, would be a great thing to have in elections. If this had existed in every election in which I have voted, I think I would have used it at least half the time, quite possibly more.
I think the argument against would be pragmatic: the cost and time it takes to run a new election, and the mad scramble for new candidates, presumably leaving the incumbent in office in the interim. (For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%? What if literally no one else wants the job?)
At any rate, I'm very much in agreement, I think it's a sound policy across the board, even in the context of FPTP. One thing our election system fails to do is disambiguate between voter apathy, and the implicit protest vote of staying home (Australia's mandatory voting being another solution, albeit lacking the teeth of a "None of the Above" reboot).
> presumably leaving the incumbent in office in the interim
An alternative for many posts would be to have no one in the office once the incumbent's term expires. For example, suppose no one wins a race for a seat in the House of Representatives: when the incumbent's term expires, that seat could simply be vacant, and could be deemed to have voted "abstain" for all votes during the term in which it is empty (or until a new special election is held to hopefully fill the seat).
(For an office like the President, there might have to be some other provision made.)
This would also handle the other case you mention:
> For more local elections, where running unopposed is not uncommon, there's also an interesting conundrum: should that candidate be rejected if they only receive a plurality, ie under 50%?
I would say yes: that counts as no one winning the election, so the seat remains vacant until a new special election is held (assuming someone does win that).
> What if literally no one else wants the job?
Then I would say the will of the people is that they prefer to have no one doing it, if they do not approve of anyone who wants it.
Most of what you write is good, but I want to point out that non-ordinal methods suffer from a problem that is at a level more fundamental than most analyses address, to wit, that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask, and thus no clear “correct” honest ballot marking given a set of voter preferences.
There are conditions which resolve this (e.g., when ballot markings in a method like score voting represent the amount of some valuable resource the voter commits to paying if the given choice is elected, or where markings in approval represent a binding commitment to not participate if an non-approved option is chosen and/or to participate if an approved options is chosen.) But these resolutions are typically not available or desirable in most public elections.
> that there is no objective question about preferences that they ask
I don't see this as an issue. I also don't see it as a problem to specifically non-ordinal, but to every system. I like to try to explain a STAR05 ballot simply to people with a forum they are very familiar with. A ballot might look like below
How do you feel about ___x___ candidate?
Very Unfavorably, unfavorably, neutral, favorably, very favorably
Those are your 5 options. Yes, this isn't exact, but we can't have an infinite score. But as we understand distributions, we know that the fluctuations won't matter much. If a group of people have an "honest" opinion that a candidate is rated "favorably" (or a 4) we'll see a distribution around this (a fairly tight distribution). So you'll get some 3's and 5's, but most people will give 4's and the average will be 4. So it isn't an issue. Similarly, if you are ranking people and view two candidates equally 50% of people will put candidate A in front of B and vise versa (well real world there'd be a bias for things like: who is listed first, "nicer" sounding name, familiarity, etc. But still, that's not too big of an issue because at the end we get pretty close to the optimal efficiency that the system can provide). You have to remember that there is no perfect system, Arrow and Gibbard showed that. But the question is if we statistically come close to the optimal (that the system can provide).
I want to point out that simple approval voting is VERY effective, even though it is low precision. You're literally choosing "like" and "dislike." Analysts aren't that concerned with the lack of objectivity in the difference between a 4 and 5 or a 3 and 4 because it is much more refined. If this is a major concern, then extend the expressiveness by increasing the range, e.g. 0-10.
I would also encourage you to listen to that interview that I linked. Arrow briefly discusses this topic. He makes some criticisms of score voting but also says it is the option he would push (question is which he'd advocate for). Remember, there is no such thing as a perfect voting system. There's always a trade-off. We're just trying to minimize the trade-offs.
And personally, if someone made RP popular I would gladly advocate for it. But because we're trying to trade one shitty system (plurality) for something only slightly less shitty (IRV) I am going to be vocal about the issues and lying that is happening. I don't really have an issue with RCVs, but specifically IRV. This is why I wanted to make a clear distinction between the two. Because when the discussions come up we end up using different languages, using the same words to describe different things. This may have been a smart move by Fair Vote, but we're on Hacker News and there's an expectation of more nuance than we'd have in other places like Reddit or in person.
Social Choice has been a hobby of mine ever since I saw the CGP Grey videos back when it first came out (2011!!!). The issues I have are that when you dig deeper you realize how much was lost.
So I am happy to try my best to answer questions and provide more resources. If you like game theory, this is a great subject to learn and has clear and immediate applications (even outside of elections).
Then we're choosing the lesser of five evils, except now, none of the evil parties alone have a strong enough electorate to squash any sixth party that emerges from the disenfranchised of the other five. That's completely unlike the current two-party system, where no third party can gain any traction due to not having a sizable enough electorate to take on "the big kids".
> to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
The two major American parties have more in common than not. They agree on most political issues, particularly defense and economics, and make a big show of arguing over a tiny corner of issues in order to desperately try to differentiate themselves.
The two parties do not significantly differ on indefinite detention of American citizens on US soil.
The two parties do not significantly differ on domestic spying, dragnet-style data collection and warrantless wiretapping.
The two parties do not differ on their support for backdoors in encryption.
The two parties do not significantly differ on allowing extra-judicial targeted killings.
The two parties do not significantly differ on the use of unmanned drones, either for combat or domestic surveillance.
The two parties both support pre-emptive "cyber" war and non-defensive hacking.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for continuing the War On Terror and War On Drugs.
The two parties both support maintaining US military bases around the world.
The two parties do not significantly differ on favoring Keynesian economics.
The two parties support delegating monetary policy decisions to the Federal Reserve, including support for quantitative easing.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of earmarks and pork barrel spending.
Neither of the two parties have (recently) proposed plans for balancing the budget.
Neither of the two parties plans to significantly cut defense spending.
The two parties both favor taxpayer-funded foreign aid.
The two parties are largely backed by the same corporate sponsors and special interest groups, with a few key differences.
The two parties both backed TARP and in general favor bailing out companies too big to fail.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their general support of "economic stimulus" as a tool to prop up the economy.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their support for and allegiance to Israel.
The two parties both favor and continue sanctions on Iran.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of super PAC funding and their support of unlimited spending from corporations and special interest groups.
The two parties do not significantly differ on their use of gerrymandering to gain political advantage.
The two parties oppose any measures that would strengthen the viability of a third party.
As an American, I don’t see any country in the world that doesn’t have exactly the same problems.
The EU has been considering similar anti-encryption legislation for years. Primarily supported by France, UK and Germany. The main opponents to it in the EU have been NGOs, which mirrors the American experience on this issue.
The cynic in me speculates the reason the EU parliament hasn’t pushed the issue further is simply because it’s waiting for it’s influential members states (or the US) to pass the legislation required to gut these services, so that they won’t have the potentially unpopular task of doing so themselves.
EU doesn't have the authority to deal with things like encryption. American federal government is much more powerful and much less dependent on the states.
Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
> EU doesn't have the authority to deal with things like encryption.
It most certainly does. Security and Justice are very clearly established as areas of “shared responsibilities” in the EU, granting the EU parliament has full authority legislate.
> Also Germany is very, very, pro privacy. Germans would probably lynch any government official that suggested anything resembling Stazi surveillance programs.
The EU has also explored a number of backdoor-by-another-name options, including a very concerning Function Encryption initiative [0], and forcing E2EE service providers to refresh secrets to insert government actors into conversations.
My primary motivation for posting the parent comment was that any EU resident who thinks their governments are above this sort of thing is absolutely wrong, and if you’re complacent and fail to hold your governments to account, this is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to happen. You can’t just read the feel-good press releases and hope for the best. European politicians are politicians too, and if there’s anything politicians of all stripes have always been good at, it’s accumulating power and lying.
It literally doesn't. EU authority over the national security is very limited and the treaties only state that member states should cooperate amongst themselves.
Define "regular people's interest". American values? Health and security? There are governments that are pro-people (as opposed to pro-money) but they are generally not big global players, or if they are, they are designated Enemies of the West and it is enormously politically incorrect to discuss critically about them.
Section 215 is the major one. Allows government to obtain secret warrants for surveillance via a secret court system(FISC, FISA).
Lindsey Graham(R) tried to extend this- but Trump has been somewhat vocally against this extension due to his own allegations that the FISA courts were misused to spy on him.
Exactly, we need way more political parties with direct representation. However, power seems to do a great job of consolidating itself so that won't be an easy task.
First past the post voting tends toward a two party system, because there are strong incentives for smaller parties to consolidate to get to a majority.
Since this is a subject I find fascinating, I'll add this link that I first encountered here on HN long ago: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
It's a mathematical model and accompanying explanation that shows that simple plurality (first past the post) voting produces bi-polarization, while other voting methods like approval voting do not. It also shows that the instant-runoff voting method that people are trying to replace FPTP with is non-monotonic, meaning that gaining a few points of support can actually hurt a candidate.
Torture was heavily repelled by Democrats, and was only "legalized" in that John McCain intentionally put in loop holes into his own bill that allowed the CIA to continue it because Bush threatened to veto the bill otherwise. Those loop holes were later closed under Obama both by legislation and an executive order. This was very much a partisan issue.
Trump threatened to veto the Patriot renewal bill, which includes the FISA court, despite bipartisan support. The bill is now withdrawn pending rewrite.
> As a european, I don't see any party that actually have american people's interest in mind.
To be fair, us Europeans have the same issues with our politicians, with the exception of socialists, communists and Greens. Just look for the article13 fiasco.
We have bipartisan consensus[1] that tech companies have acted badly and that Section 230 should be repealed or significantly amended. I think EARN IT will probably kill Section 230, not strong encryption, so I think EARN IT is pretty great. Tech companies probably should be coming to the realization by now that it's only a matter of time (probably 4-8 years) before we close the 230 loophole: So if they're given a choice, they should choose to protect strong encryption, and forego Section 230 protection, since it's going away anyhow.
[1]Kind of, Democrats think tech companies got Trump elected, Republicans think tech companies are suppressing conservative viewpoints, but either way, they agree on the problem.
What is the problem here? Having federal interference in tech is a terrible idea as any laws are usually overbroad and stifle large amounts of innovation that we haven't imagined yet as an unintended consequence.
What multiuser system would survive a libel-law attack from a highly unfriendly jurisdiction? Email, forums, comments, and other forms of posting opinions would immediately cause any small operator to shutdown.
You just need a friend to make libelous comments on discus and then sue any site you want. 230 isn't a loophole, it's essential for speech on the Internet.
Then the platforms that host social media need to stop suppressing speech.
The President wants to kill 230 because Twitter is censoring his tweets. His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
It's politics; everything's always about politics. Whether this will be good for the industry and society is another question.
> Then the platforms that host social media need to stop suppressing speech.
They clearly state in their ToS that speech is limited on their platform.
> His response was to suspend their protection from liability lawsuits under 230.
Well, his response was to state he was "looking to see if he could suspend their protection". There is nothing to be worried here, because anyone can tell him that the answer is that he can't suspend their protection.
It was just infantile bluffing that in most other situations would cause the person bluffing to lose face, but not in the current political reality. In most situations, it's best to not state orders that you can't possible enforce and that reveal your weakness.
They have a right to suppress speech on their platform. If I show up at your house and demand to install campaign signs in your yard because of my first amendment rights what are you going to say?
I suspect “get off my property”.
Twitter and Facebook and everyone else have those same rights.
Honest question, why do you think that Section 230 should be repealed?
I myself believe that companies should be doing a better job at moderating the contents they host in their websites, but also that by repealing such provision, smaller ventures with not enough money to enforce the rules, would either go bankrupt or simply suppress any third party content to avoid issues with the law enforcement.
Tech companies don't just host harmful content: They make money off of it. The fact that Google and Facebook take a cut off malware, scams, and fraud perpetrated over their advertising platforms, while bearing no responsibility or liability for them gives them an incredible disincentive to shut down bad actors.
A huge portion of Google Ad income is malicious content, and as long as they can't be sued or indited for it, they're going to continue to automatically approve and profit off criminal activity.
The problem with Section 230 isn't about one guy who posts something bad, the problem is with systemic abuse on platforms which are financially motivated to allow the abuse to continue.
> A huge portion of Google Ad income is malicious content, and as long as they can't be sued or indited for it, they're going to continue to automatically approve and profit off criminal activity.
Citation needed.
Also, wouldn't this also apply to broadcasting companies? Say, potentially harmful commercials airing on prime time.
I was going to challenge you to find me a company selling malware on CBS or NBC, but then I remembered Google runs TV ads, so fair point. /s
And importantly, broadcast television doesn't get Section 230 protections, and does just fine. A great example of why tech companies don't need immunity. Broadcast TV ads are sold on a smaller scale, such that humans are involved in the process and bad actors are caught early.
> Citation needed.
The general problem here is that Google is the only one with meaningful data, and obviously they're very motivated not to reveal how big a market illegal activity is on their platform. Note that even in legitimate verticals, scams push the bidding higher for advertising on their platforms. So not only does Google make money directly off scammers, they also make more money off legitimate advertisers because the bidding was higher. Google both claims that there's no data proving their business is illegitimate, while keeping all the data secret. So we have to rely on the evidence we can see.
A great example is what The Verge uncovered in 2017 with rehab scams: https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-go... where they found some insane CPCs: "If you’re in Arizona, and you click on the top ad, you’ll cost that advertiser around $221", and Google was actively soliciting business in this extremely valuable market: "The search giant actively courts treatment centers, both online and off. In May, a Google “digital ambassador” was a featured speaker at the Treatment Center Executive & Marketing Retreat". They had multiple people directly focused on cultivating business in this particular market. Scammers were both harming consumers directly, and also pushing the CPCs up to insane levels for real drug rehab centers, hurting consumers indirectly as well.
You can also see an interesting way Google helps bad actors stay hidden here: "The 800 number was ephemeral. ...Google offers advertisers unique “tracking” phone numbers that forward to a company’s phones, so they can understand which ads are bringing in the most clients. The phone numbers only stay up as long as the ad does." So you can't even meaningfully trace out a phone number on a scam ad back to the company that pays for it. Everything is laundered through Google accounts.
After this piece, of course, Google finally acted and more or less shut down their entire drug rehab vertical for a while, and retooled it. I'm sure it's drastically less profitable now. But the problem is, they got to keep the millions and millions of dollars profit they got from engaging in a business practice that was directly harmful to people.
My long time example, which Google still refuses to address, is searches for "mapquest". MapQuest is a top search term for seniors, who don't realize that other directions sites exist. To it's credit, MapQuest is still pretty decent. Problem is, Google sells ads for "Maps Quest" that look like the real site, but redirect you to sites that require you install browser-hijacking add-ons in order to proceed (add-ons hosted in the Chrome Web Store, I might add). No matter how many times I've attempted to report them, these sites are allowed to continue doing this. A Googler actually had them removed once, and Google re-enabled the same sites' ads within a couple of hours.
Another fun part of this, is that if MapQuest wants to be presented above those malicious ads, MapQuest has to outbid them... for it's own trademarked brand name! Ad squatting is another way Google rakes in massive revenues via essentially blackmail: Pay us or we'll let scammers place higher than you for your own name.
I wouldn't hazard a statistic, because it'd be a guess, but I imagine if Google were forced to disclose advertisers and spends, you'd find a substantial portion of Google's profits were ill-gotten gains.
This doesn't address my question though: is it true that a significant percentage of Google's Adsense revenue comes from such ads?
I'm not denying that Google profits from these, that would be silly. My point is that broadcast companies run morally questionable ads all the time, yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability.
Take for example drug commercials. If you are concerned about scams targeting seniors, then you must have reservations about these, since the way they portray drug positive effects, and downplay the adverse ones, is clearly misleading. Or, say, political ads. Facebook is taking a lot of flak because of these, but local TV stations have been running misleading and often borderline hateful commercials for ages, e.g.
I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe. I just can't tell you if it's 30%, 60%, or 90% of their revenue, the public doesn't have access to that information. I'm confident that how ever much you believe it is, it's higher.
> yet it seems that we should be holding Google for a higher level of accountability
On the contrary, repealing Section 230 would place Google on the same level of accountability as broadcast companies. Section 230 carves out a special immunity to prosecution and lawsuit that only applies to online platforms. Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
> I did address it, though the answer is disappointing: Only Google (or someone with Google's private business data) could give you that number. But it's absolutely much higher than they'd like you to believe.
Well, that's pretty much wishful thinking.
> Broadcast companies are already held to all of the laws and risks that Section 230 is protecting Google and Facebook from.
Are they now.
Let's put it this way: section 230 protects Facebook from being held accountable for the anachronistic opinion about Jewish people, and violent tendencies derived from it, of a random user. Such random user, as a TV show guest, could spout a call to arms to an audience of 2,5 million spectators, and the broadcaster would not suffer any legal consequences.
Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News.
> Repealing section 230 _without_ a reasonable alternative would indeed held Google for a higher level of accountability than, say, Fox News.
Under what law? Section 230 is a special exemption for tech companies. Without it, Google is indeed subject to the same laws as Fox News. Now, it's possible those laws aren't strong enough... but they'd be equally not strong enough upon both Google and Fox News.
Currently, Fox News is held accountable poorly, and Google is not held accountable at all whatsoever.
Section 230 protects companies by not making them responsible for what third party actors publish in their platforms.
Name a single US based TV station prosecuted because some of their guests made false or hateful comments on air. Heck, it is in fact easier for the FCC to nail a broadcast company for "indecency", rather than hate speech.
I am going to stop here and not reply further, because I think we're going in circles. Again: Section 230 is an exception for tech companies. It allows them less accountability than other businesses. There is no law enforcing stricter responsibility for tech companies than broadcast companies.
Which means, if Fox News isn't held accountable enough, you shouldn't see any reason for Section 230 to exist: It's not protecting tech companies from any effective law as it is, so removing it won't harm anyone.
Can you clarify what you mean by the "230 Loophole"? Many believe that tech companies should be fully responsible for anything said on their platforms. If this were the case, I believe this would have an extraordinary chilling effect on speech.
There are already extraordinary chilling effects on speech -- try criticizing Black Lives Matter on any major social media, for example, and you will likely be censored, doxxed, and even receive death threats.
Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. The tech platforms have been shielded from lawsuits by 230. Once 230 is suspended or repealed, they will no longer be shielded from lawsuits.
As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob.
You are suggesting a technical solution to a cultural problem.
Speech is supposed to have consequences. How else could it be?
> Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists.
I guess nazis can be seen as conservative voices by definition. But isn't that the same thing as Fox in the other direction? Corporations suppress viewpoints they don't like. Have you read the ToS?
> As a result, someone gets doxxed, fired from his job, threatened with violence etc., he now has the wherewithal to go after the platform that facilitated the cancel mob
So newspapers will be unable to report the news because people might lose their jobs? People lose their job all of the time when newspapers report on their crimes/actions.
Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.
> Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.
I started writing a reply to parent before I saw yours but I stopped when I saw this sentence because there's no way I could put it better.
So imagine 230 is repealed. Facebook can now be sued for what crazy people say on their platform. Do you think this will be better or worse for free speech on the internet?
To the extent that a cancel mob was created by the editorialization of a company (eg promoting specific posts), they can already sue the company for its part - section 230 does not apply to the data that the company itself publishes. And to the extent that the cancel mob organized itself organically, attacking a company for providing a conduit is a direct attack on free speech.
That said if this does pass, we can only hope that the attractive nuisances of webapps will fall out of fashion. User-advocating client software is the real anti-censorship future. Of course what will likely happen is the frog will slowly continue to boil, and the censorship regime will be extended to p2p communications as well.
It dangerously goes two ways. Twitter tried to claim their banners on Trump's (and other public officials Tweets) were allowing because of 230! They're trying to have it both ways and it's a very very dangerous game to play. Viva Frei, a Canadian litigator, does a great breakdown of 230:
> Twitter tried to claim their banners on Trump's (and other public officials Tweets) were allowing because of 230
I doubt it (though feel free to link to a statement), because they aren't "allowed" to put labels on tweets because of Section 230, they're allowed to do so by the first amendment.
Repealing 230 would give them an even greater incentive to suppress conservative views as someone could argue they're looking the other at people being radicalised by hate speech. You could say 230 is what protects platforms like Gab who knowingly host conservative speech.
I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?