#2 is somewhat related to #1. It's so slow and inconvenient, the only user base are people who absolutely need the one feature it does deliver: very strong anonymity and censorship protection. Unfortunately that's to protect something gross and abusive to other human beings, not to protect legitimate free speech.
I'm very socially liberal. CP is not like drugs. It's not a victimless crime, unless you want to argue that all those 8yr olds agreed to have their pics posted and fully understand all the implications of that. Then there's the stuff that actually shows sex, nearly all of which is coerced through deception or physical coercion.
This is the problem with naive cyber-anarchism. We really do need both police and intelligence agencies because there are bad people out there who want to do very bad things. There are people who want to rob, kill, rape, con, and generally abuse other people. The problem is when governments and their agencies abuse their power and themselves engage in abusive behavior. That's a political problem, not a technical one, and has mostly political solutions.
I'm not opposed to using crypto, privacy software, etc. Privacy is also very important, as is security. To some extent these things are needed to protect you from bad actors, not just from unwarranted surveillance. They're also needed as a check and balance to limit government intrusion. It should be hard to spy on people, as this discourages overreach by increasing its cost.
All these things come down to questions of balance. How much policing do we want? The answer is "enough but not too much," but where's that line? It's a hard question. There aren't many easy answers. People who like to think in absolute black and white terms don't like that, but that's the real world.
Comments
#2 is somewhat related to #1. It's so slow and inconvenient, the only user base are people who absolutely need the one feature it does deliver: very strong anonymity and censorship protection. Unfortunately that's to protect something gross and abusive to other human beings, not to protect legitimate free speech.
I'm very socially liberal. CP is not like drugs. It's not a victimless crime, unless you want to argue that all those 8yr olds agreed to have their pics posted and fully understand all the implications of that. Then there's the stuff that actually shows sex, nearly all of which is coerced through deception or physical coercion.
This is the problem with naive cyber-anarchism. We really do need both police and intelligence agencies because there are bad people out there who want to do very bad things. There are people who want to rob, kill, rape, con, and generally abuse other people. The problem is when governments and their agencies abuse their power and themselves engage in abusive behavior. That's a political problem, not a technical one, and has mostly political solutions.
I'm not opposed to using crypto, privacy software, etc. Privacy is also very important, as is security. To some extent these things are needed to protect you from bad actors, not just from unwarranted surveillance. They're also needed as a check and balance to limit government intrusion. It should be hard to spy on people, as this discourages overreach by increasing its cost.
All these things come down to questions of balance. How much policing do we want? The answer is "enough but not too much," but where's that line? It's a hard question. There aren't many easy answers. People who like to think in absolute black and white terms don't like that, but that's the real world.