The government is emergent behavior of evolutionary pressures.

For most of human history, war of aggression was a matter of a cost-benefit analysis which often have more benefit than cost. That has changed (relatively) recently because of how destructive it is that even the winner does not gain from it.

Point being, hierarchical authoritarian structures are very good at war (and other kinds of competition). That's why they exist. But they should no longer be needed.

They are entrenched and we need to evolve away from them.

If they can be private indefinitely, then you wouldn't need to keep them secret.

These attacks on freedom will continue until every computing device is mandated to have an ML system tracking your every input. And no communication method is safe from that.

Not even steganography would save you because more and more people would do it and they'd make it illegal too.

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EDIT: Technology can give us tools to fight it but this has to be defeated at the political level, likely by enshrining privacy is a core human right.

I say stupidity should be punished the same way as incompetence. Exactly to stop malicious people from faking incompetence to avoid punishment.

And yes, this is an attack on basic human freedoms and should be punished, not just prevented.

It's not about people's safety, it's about politicians' safety. See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331829

Of course they don't need to spy on themselves. The goal is to stop targeted attacks against politicians and any attempts to overthrow the government. The government is uniquely unlikely to overthrow itself.

Assuming there's a tradeoff between safety and privacy (which might be a false dichotomy pushed onto people), I am perfectly fine with the current level of safety. I feel zero need to give up privacy for more safety.

I feel:

- The most danger in my life is from deranged people like some rando homeless person who decides to push me under the subway out of the blue. The second biggest danger is unemployed drug-using losers who might try to rob me in the street. The third danger is aggressive groups of teenagers (which happen to usually be a certain minority where I live) who might try to beat my up because somehow that is how they gain status among each other.

- If I was a woman, the fourth would probably be getting raped. Most probably by an immigrant, usually from a Muslim country. This might be incredibly controversial to US people but in the EU, we hear about these cases regularly. I am not saying every immigrant or Muslim is a rapist. I am not saying they rape at a much higher rate than the native population. This is why I prefaced everything with "I feel" because these 4 reasons are the narrative I see from the media. OTOH I would be surprised if there wasn't _some_ measurable correlation - I would love to see this quantified but at the same time it's the kind of thing where you get accused of being an -ist or -phobe no matter which result you get.

Anyway, taking away people's privacy does not help with any of these.

But that's not the point.

The most danger to a politician's life is from:

- Terrorists.[0]

- Non-deranged (sane) people who are so ideologically opposed to the politician's views and actions that they decide the only way to stop them is to attack them physically.

Taking away people's privacy helps with both of these. If performed by a group of people, there's the obvious need to communicate and organize. If performed by a single individual, then he still has to perform reconnaissance and acquire tools, both of which are likely to be done online to some degree.

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So you see, it's not about people's safety. It's about politicians' safety.

[0]: Terrorism is by definition the intention to cause fear among the population. It was later redefined as trying to affect political change through violence, which is stupid but it serves the purpose of politicians using terrorists as a source of fear, despite the average person being incredibly unlikely to be hurt by one.