[tor-talk] What are you fighting for? was: Re: Neal Krawetz's abcission proposal, and Tor's reputation

[Lara]

krishna e bera:
> There is no country that respects freedom of speech and there is no 
> country that respects privacy.

Borders are usually lines drawn on a map by old, usually white, males
with almost complete disregard to the humans living in around the area
crossed by the said line.

Countries are the surfaces delimited by those lines. On maps. Hence the
country can do shit.

What you probably meant is government. But the government is also an
abstraction. It is a list of names on a piece of paper.

What might help shaping your argument is realizing there are people
involved.

Try something like "no politician who wants to be reelected".

Proving a negative is also going to prove pretty damn hard.

Anyway, your discourse is a hysterical one as you conveniently avoid to
define the emotionally loaded terms of "freedom of speech" and
"privacy". You also seem to have no clear idea about who or what is the
subject, again, conveniently omitting it. For one, there are a lot of
places, "countries", where the privacy of the spy agencies is protected
up to the death penalty even if that is outlawed. Or so the people
opposing the government say.

And if you do not write in the vein of the aberrant 18th or 19th century
European philosophers, looking for a "perfect" freedom of speech and
privacy, than you already have that in the States. They are perfectible,
certainly. But without having an idea what should be solved, you end up
like all sorts of revolutionaries, meaning killing people marked as
class enemies.

> They all have various legal restrictions and exceptions for various
> reasons that change over time, sometimes drastically.

Perfect freedom would imply a monotheistic god stance. The moment you
have a community of gods you start having limits to that freedom. What
you should ask yourself is "whom does this restriction help?" and "do I
need this restriction?" Of course, there are many more questions to ask
your self, but this is probably a good starting point.

As you have probably remarked reaching for a solution is not an easy
task. And starting on the path towards the solution implies the effort
to identify the restrictions instead of wallowing in the warm and smelly
waters of convenience. Limiting yourself to some concepts turned into
baseball bats to rise "an against the system" gang will only help the
individuals in power expand their powers.

And yes, the legal restrictions change over time because the individuals
that compose a society, including the society named government, do
change. As a football team during a big game they change as individuals,
but they also can change their minds.

Your remark about "sometimes drastically" is cute. But completely
useless. Given enough time ALL restrictions are drastic.

> People will
> argue about such things forever,

See above. Identify the issues. It is pretty much like the security
models or the bug solving in software development. And I assume the
subscribers of this list are fairly familiar with these concepts.

> as we have seen in these sorts of
> threads.

"We" is a populist way of catching the attention. Which is in sync with
the radiating emotion from the entire post. It will greatly help moving
from emotion to reason. Sure, it will gain you less friends and
followers. But the people liking other people for this sort of discourse
are usually good only at pitchfork gatherings or for burning crosses.

So who is we? You and your husband or wife? You and your parents? You
and your other selfs? You write from one email account. Let the other
sock puppets express themselves. How about avoiding the weasel consensus
and just say "I"?

> If we want them we have to fight for them in the political
> arena ("policy").

And you are only one. And the current political system, at least for the
last 3000 years, is based on majorities. But at some of the issues that
bother you were also born because of fuzzy emotional concepts and half
baked solutions designed to show that "we" do make a change. In the case
of goverments, the word is reform. Do not be mislead by form, it is the
same concept.

The excellent part, and I am grateful to that, is that the Tor
foundation and EFF are making progress with identifying the problems and
finding solutions. It is an uphill battle which forces them to make some
compromises.

Cheers,
Lara