zlacker

Please, help me understand something!

Private, remote communication was not a thing until a couple of decades ago: how can we consider it a basic human right?

>>pif+(OP)
Private mail is thousands of years old.

>>burkam+a2
It goes well beyond that. There are other means of communicating remotely and privately that are probably at least as old as human self-awareness. Technically speaking, we would need to consider many of the prehistoric cave paintings remote and private communications since no one knows what they mean besides the small group of humans that made them 20,000–40,000 years ago.

>>pif+(OP)
That it didn't exist is not really that relvant. I.e. the US classified secrecy as a munition so under the US' framing it is a 2nd amendment right necessary to balance power between people and government.. Take it away from all and it is no longer essential.

>>burkam+a2
In how many of those places was there due process for the government searching that private mail?

>>some_r+dd
Encryption is also thousands of years old.

>>dogsle+O7
Has this framing ever actually been tested in court? Between the dramatic re-interpretation of the 2nd as a collective non-right and the precedent of laws like ITAR and other munitions controls I can't imagine this would hold up.

>>some_r+dd
I don't know, but that isn't relevant to this conversation. Slavery was legal for the vast majority of history, but we still all agree today that freedom from slavery is a valid human right. "Due process" itself is a relatively new concept. All human rights were routinely violated for most of history, that's the whole point of enumerating them and discussing them. It's very new that any of these rights are even close to universally accepted.

I can tell you that government surveillance of private communication has at least been a widespread concern for thousands of years. See for example: https://classicalstudies.org/imperial-spies-and-intercepted-....

Many countries have centuries-old constitutional guarantees of the right to secrecy of correspondence: https://www.marottaonmoney.com/right-to-privacy-of-correspon....

>>some_r+dd
Due process? I don't think they bothered with that in the past. Many of the debates about privacy that erupted in the 70s and 80s came because people discovered that the government didn't even bother.

>>dogsle+O7
Has anyone used the 3rd amendment to argue against the government forcing them to include backdoors and surveillance mechanisms?

>>some_r+2h
Remember the 90s cryptowars and the "illegal shirts with math on them"?

>>armini+Ek
Yeah that was largely about export controls vs freedom of speech, I don't know of any actual court case involving the second amendment a la https://xkcd.com/504/