"Chilling effect" has always been a profound term for me, because I imagine the "cold" (numbness really) sensation a human body often senses when something truly awful (disembowlment/dismemberment) occurs. The body's way of protecting itself is to go "cold", and in many ways that's exactly the effect taking place here, as well.
There's also an undeniable part of this conversation that rarely gets addressed simultaneously, and I'd like to see it sussed out more in concert; what about the folks who are doing Evil in these private channels? It's unacceptable to me that TOR gets used for child pornography, and it's unacceptable to me that my government finds out I'm gay before I come out to my family.
I don't want to provide those who would do Evil any safety or quarter. I also want to give people a powerful shield to protect themselves against judgement and persecution from the public and sometimes the law.
We should talk about achieving both of these goals, but we generally don't.
Evil is agnostic of location. Your question is of no significance. You might as well be perturbed over "Evil" people living in houses or eating food. Unsurprisingly, evil people are people and will tend towards the same activities people generally engage in.
We need to talk about how to create "no Evil/privacy", or at least how to approach something of that kind, even if an absolute version doesn't exist.
I agree, but it's nearly impossible to have the best of both worlds.
You have not established the slightest bit of an operational definition, and resort to pathologizing neutral transmission channels as hosts of "Evil". This is a complete non-starter and not worthwhile to deliberate. "Evil uses Tor" is as useful as "Evil uses paper".
Secrecy does not exist any more
Privacy is the politeness of your neighbours.
Now everyone is your neighbour
As such we choose to not be polite to paedophiles
However only a limited number of us choose to be polite to people still in closet. Others will impolitely sell pink insurance, others scrawl hate messages
I am not sure where I am going other than politeness is hard to enforce.
I could rob whole countries of their future (say Greece) with paper treaties.
I can rob people of most of their democratic power (see lots of tries at treaties like TTIP or some things like this).
All on paper and in my eyes tending to the evil side.
The problem with evil though is, that it isn't an objective term, it is not empirically measurable and it has so many definitions and perspectives, that it has none.
Evil is a weasle-word, is propaganda, nothing more. So we really need a better word, a better definition. And breaking the law or something like that does not work either, as for example the laws in Germany, the US or Saudi Arabia or China tend to differ massively. They are ideologically tainted and do not provide an objective framework/reference either.
So we should work on a actionable and helpful definition first and not go partisan on the medium to be controlled.
The principle that governments should have covert back doors into our information and communications channels is no different from saying they should automatically get a copy of all of our physical keys, a way to secretly remotely activate and use every camera we own, or remotely activate and listen in on every microphone in our houses.
In fact, as everything moves to electronic, always-connected internet of things platforms these things become increasingly not just equivalent but identical. Soon electronic privacy will be the foundation of every kind of privacy.
It would be better to ask whether someone, who is not a willing participant, is harmed by the activity. That's easier to establish.
It's infrastructure, so it's all inherently neutral. SSL is used by banks, protesters, and criminals alike. You can't weaken it for one group without weakening it for everyone. It's also global: you can't backdoor an IRC client only for marijuana users in the US, for instance.
So if you get to surveil pedophiles in the US, it means that Saudi Arabia gets to surveil homosexuals. We're on the same infrastructure.
Also, it's important to recognize that illegal behavior is a critical part of Democratic change. If SSL could discriminate based on your intent to break a law so we could arrest them all, people campaigning for marijuana legalization would all be in jail, and the law would not be changingl. So would people in the 60s campaigning for civil rights, and every homosexual in the country. There is always a grey area period of time in which people break a law because they don't believe in it. That period of civil disobedience is how laws end up getting changed. Even (especially) morality laws against things like sexuality, drugs, or alcohol. It's important to a living democracy that the police are not a perfect force.
However, the true wins will come by doing real-world police work, educating parents and children on how to protect themselves and what are the potential offender profiles (hint: not guys in an ice cream van). They will come on a diplomatic level by negotiating better laws in countries where such materials are produced (Japan was a recent success AFAIK) and where sexual tourism is rife.
Finally, those individuals that haven't abused anyone should receive support from a mental health specialist if they come forward and admit to their urges, like in e.g Germany.
I have the feeling that this is a taboo subject, that is not discussed frankly in most societies. The authorities focus mostly on harsh punishments instead of prevention through education and mental health treatment.
Thinking about what happens on tor is mostly a reactive policy that doesn't do much to treat the causes.
The fact is, our collective idea of good and evil is internally inconsistent. It's still skewed by our repulsion to sexual deviancy and our fear of being judged by our peers. We really can't distinguish right from wrong. We aren't even able to apply the simple test you proposed.
Quick test - is looking at a photo of a naked child evil?
Because it is a logical fallacy. To enforce something implies using violence which is considered mean and not polite.
The same logical fallacy applies to gun control. Oh you want to ban or restrict access to guns? How are you going to do that? With guns of course.
About the first one, physical, what king of stupid incompetent secret service lets an entire terrorist organization train their people on physical training centers, physically dispatch them to their targets, get their hands on weapons and explosives, and successfully commits their crime, while doing nothing because they are really focused on breaking Tor?
Universal surveillance is not just useless for fighting terrorism, it's actually harmful, in several ways. And most of those apply to almost any use you can came up for it.
About the last one, digital - inside of your mind (that is, inside of the criminal mind), those people need help, not punishment. Stop punishing them and they'll seek you.
Now, the real problem is the second set, digital - real Evil. I have no good answer for those, but the surveillance people also lacks this answer, and are almost completely useless against that too. I'm not willing to accept an argument claiming that mass surveillance needs to exist so those people may start doing that work in the future, when they discover some way to do it.
If that was an available option, it would be fine. I'd choose no evil and no privacy because I'd know that my information, and more importantly the information of public officials and company leaders; folks who wield power; wouldn't be abused.
But that's not an option that's on the table, and whatever it is they intend to pick it is not what people accomplish when they endorse surveillance. Our governments do some pretty evil stuff and those are the people who end up with the power in these sorts of arrangements. What people are being given the choice between is 'a dubious promise of safety; an evil that doesn't offend them personally; and no privacy' - or 'a perceived higher rate of evil that does offend them personally; you're under threat, they're coming for your kids, hate freedom etc; and privacy.'
You seem to be taking the no evil part of things as essentially solved. But it's not. We do not have systems we can trust not to abuse this.
There might be a way to stop pedophiles and kidnappers, and rapists that we haven't thought of simply because we're not willing to talk about how we could do it.
Highways have police. Where are the digital police? I'm not sure I prefer such a thing, but why don't we even discuss it?
Seatbelts, airbags, traffic lights, food safety, drug safety, pollution control, national defense and many more benefit pedophiles just as they protect good people.
This isn't a conversation about absolutes, it's a conversation about shifting degrees. I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow.
I considered it, but I didn't grant it since it was not clear that it applied - nor for like discussions would it be clear in the future. You adopted an extreme position which is not analogous to the discussion you wished to have, and that is not an act of rhetoric; discussion as an art and a skill. It is simply poor communication - as evidenced by how widely your claims would imply you to be misunderstood.
Rhetorical license doesn't cover that. The charity of understanding others extend a speaker is not an unlimited effort.
> I'd like to shift towards the "less Evil/more privacy", but no one here or anywhere wants to try to come up with ways to do that, because everyone just assumes privacy gives Evil room to grow.
It does. You gave such an example yourself: TOR and child pornography. More widely speaking, it's possible to lessen the 'evil' in society through a great many means - better school, better welfare provision, stronger community links. More to the point many, even on this site, seem in favour of taking those steps: Strong encryption? Please. Better schools? Yes please. Better community organisations? Yeah. There are of course people who'd say no, but that does not change the fact that people in favour of them are easily found.
Many of the steps that could be taken in that regard seem orthogonal to the larger discussion at hand, (encryption security - as structured by reasonable context,) mind.
Or rather, we could if you were being intellectually honest.
Most people, if given the choice, will nearly always pick safety over privacy. It's simply not enough to say you can't have both, because privacy will eventually get thrown out by the electorate, of any country.