Feinstein isn't stupid. She knows the bill is over the top.
They're deliberately taking an extreme position in an attempt to force a fake compromise (which will ultimately wind up being just as catastrophic to the US software industry). This is a classic tactic, and it works.
Senate Committee on Candy: "Gum is a problem. Okay, life sentences for anyone caught chewing that evil stuff in public."
The Public: "WTF?"
SCC: "Okay, you're right, that's a little harsh. Let's meet in the middle and make it only a $100,000 per stick fine."
The Public: "Whew!"
... and I'm guessing that any "compromise" would take the form of clauses along the lines of the FISA courts being able to rubberstamp people into compliance. In secrecy. In bulk.
I cannot help but wonder if one of the requirements for being on the Senate Intelligence Committee is that the spooks have dramatically compromising blackmail material on you. This would explain a lot. (On the other hand, I believe that Feinstein is a genuinely bad person, and we would be better off without her).
> I believe that Feinstein is a genuinely bad person, and we would be better off without her
As a Californian, I am constantly ashamed at calling her "my" senator. Why the fuck can't someone reasonable run against her? I guess for the same reason that Bernie is having so much trouble: the Democratic Party is sorta like the Communist Party in USSR; you have to be an insider to get anywhere.
The two party system is decidedly broken. Primaries force us into accepting evil or awful because we've been convinced that at least it's the lesser evil and that we should be happy for that.
Bring about instant runoff voting or a similar system and you strip parties of their power and we rid ourselves of self-serving incumbents quickly.
There's a June election and the top two vote winners go on to November, even if from the same party. That's why California has a chance to prevent a second Feinstein in Kamala Harris. It will be two Democrats in November: drug prosecutor Harris and grassroots liberal Loretta Sanchez.
That's a start, but until you can let people stop having to pick between voting their conscience and voting out of fear, the parties and incumbents can still wield a lot of power, IMHO. Having an election that lets people rank their preferences could remove the voting out of fear and let us actually focus on voting for our hopes and our ideals.
That's just a recognition of reality, though. The Democrats are so dominant these days the party primary is the election. They thought it might be nice to hold the election on election day.
> Bring about instant runoff voting or a similar system and you strip parties of their power and we rid ourselves of self-serving incumbents quickly.
Agreed. I believe score voting is the best option. It's remarkable easy to understand (just rate each candidate, like you rate movies or whatever), minimizes voter regret, avoids spoilers/splits, and avoids the two-party rule we suffer with our current plurality voting model.
I prefer score voting to ranked voting for one simple reason: the voter is free to vote any way he or she chooses. It is not necessary to rank the candidates. If you are equally in favor of two or more candidates you can express that with score voting (give them the same score). Ranked voting requires that you rank candidates.
Those are all really good points – I wasn't necessarily focused on IRV – but, rather, the idea that there are many better options than the current single choice system that would allow people to more freely express their preferences without fear that they'd be "throwing their vote away" or "letting someone else win" by voting they way they really wanted to.
Thanks for the pointer to score-voting – I think I probably agree with your take on its superiority.
It's great because it has good shiny examples and serves as a practical and superior alternative to sites like Survey Monkey for those common office elections such as "Where should we go for team lunch?".
That is a sentiment I share at times, however, as a score voting advocate, I'd like to point out that the consolidation of candidates we see over the course of a campaign, and possibly the small size of the initial field of candidates as well, are largely caused by our plurality voting model. I call it "forced field consolidation" [1] and feel it's a poisonous effect of plurality voting. It causes rifts between the electorate as voters are repeatedly forced to select one and only one candidate at the expense of all others; creating a highly polarized voter landscape.
The article you presented on approval and score voting is interesting and I like the idea. I have believed for some time that we need to do away with the party system and let each candidate stand or fall on their own merit.
I don't really fit into any party as I am an independently conservative liberal libertarian with social and anti social leanings.
It seems bizarre a Californian senator would want to introduce a bill that hurts one of the most important industries in her state. It would be like a West Virginian senator introducing an anti-coal mining bill.
> There will be an eventual compromise, but not before her constituency gets the clear signal they should be upping their campaign contributions.
Considering how long she's been selling her constituents out, the clear signal seems to be that they should be upping their campaign contributions to anyone running against her.
I wouldn't assume that the general public is strongly against this kind of legislation. A subset (our subset) is, but the HN demographic is small compared to the rest of the country.
The basic concept of strong encryption is not something that most people understand. People are projecting their ideas of physical locks and warrants onto digital systems because that's what they understand. It's flawed, but it's hardly the first or even biggest/most important issue where poor understanding by the public leads to bad legislation.
Every now and then I have to drive through bumfuck Oregon, and the only radio stations are AM talk radio. It would be "educational" to spend some time listening to that every now and then. There are real people on the other sides of these issues that seem blindingly one sided to us. I think a lot of Congress probably just thinks that passing this kind of legislation (on encryption) will make most of their voters happy. Just like shutting down the EPA, or ...
> Every now and then I have to drive through bumfuck Oregon, and the only radio stations are AM talk radio.
I downvoted you because of this. When you're on this soapbox, please bear in mind that some of the people listening are actually residents of bumfuck Oregon. Also, not everyone in bumfuck Oregon is on the political tack that you associate with bumfuck Oregon. Also, they have FM. (Mostly country, I'll grant you that, but still.)
And I don't really consider it derogatory. It's really an accurate description. I was referring to the literal middle of nowhere, where no one lives, not even small towns. The places you drive to get to the small towns.
edit: I think maybe the confusion here is that I was not intending to make an association between the people of Oregon and the AM radio callers I was referring to. (The shows you get are nationally syndicated, aren't they?) I only said that because that's the only time I listen to talk radio, and unless you drive through places where it's hard to find any radio station, you probably won't have listened to it before. It's very different from e.g. Fox News, where you hear professional pundits talking about these issues. You'll hear real people stating opinions that others in this thread are assuming can only be the result of blackmail. That was the whole point of the post.
> I think a lot of Congress probably just thinks that passing this kind of legislation (on encryption) will make most of their voters happy.
Nope. There's a faction in the natsec establishment that wants this and so they're getting it. Most people don't care or know enough about encryption to apply that kind of pressure on their congressmen.
If you think it's bumfuck Oregon say so. I've come to the conclusion after travelling that whenever people form groups they become idiots. You can have a reasonable conversation with any single person almost anywhere, however, the more people involved in the conversation the dumber everyone becomes. Eventually culminating in elections and/or the UN.
I couldn't agree more, Feinstein has an hidden agenda.
And if they fail this time they have a bill ready the next time 'an attack' takes place. See The Shock Doctrine [0] which centers on the exploitation of national crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically affected by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance.
Don't underestimate their potential for ignorance and stupidity. I think the Feinstein bill represents a genuine attempt to push their solution through and not an attempt to force a false compromise later. For that strategy to work, they'd at least need a decent understanding of encryption in order to draft a proposal that was so over the top that the desired compromise would look palatable by comparison. Have you come across any statements from Feinstein, Burr, or their supporters to suggest that they have anything remotely close to that sort of technical understanding of the issues at stake? I sure as hell haven't.
Their bill's text is actually pretty straight-forward when read in light of the level of ignorance on display in their interviews and the WSJ op-ed piece. In fact, the bill matches up really well with how they think encryption actually works: encryption is bad, so just make it effectively disappear.
Unfortunately, the people who can best explain to them why they're wrong are the same people they've already written off as just another competing advocacy group instead of subject-matter experts.
To be fair, that's pretty common in Washington. But the jadedness it creates is hugely problematic when they mischaracterize things. So instead of recognizing the community's pretty obvious credibility, they see the exact opposite.
Senate Committee on Candy: "Gum is a problem. Okay, life sentences for anyone caught chewing that evil stuff in public."
The Public: "Well, the law's the law. If criminals don't want to wind up in prison getting raped then they should have thought of that before they chewed a bunch of gum. This is fine. Everything is fine."
That's clawed price anchoring tactic. Just make a high price offer and everything below that seems very cheap. Same with this bill, but I guess everyone knows that his bill can't change the reality but badly damage it.
That's why it's so important to add another Feinstein to the Senate from California this fall. Kamala Harris is a classic anti-drug warrior prosecutor with no respect for civil rights to join Feinstein.
Don't even think of choosing a grassroots Democrat like Loretta Sanchez instead. The Washington establishment wouldn't like it.
I have a positive view of Harris and this is the first time I've encountered this line of criticism. She doesn't sound like an "anti-drug warrior" [1]. What examples do you have in mind?
Harris was elected DA in San Francisco in a race against DA Terence Hallinan who was famous for soft-pedaling drug user prosecutions. She immediately stepped them up.
Harris first started barely supporting medical marijuana after constituencies forced her to recently. She's been giving support to federal prosecutions that target dispensaries for years as DA and AG.
She's been saying that she'll tone down drug prosecutions in campaigns and then pushing harder for more vicious enforcement than ever once she gains power in every election she's ever run.
And she still doesn't support marijuana legalization. Still! In California in 2016.
She's smooth and a good communicator, but Harris is all Feinstein inside.
It is very interesting that the richest* industry in the US cannot make their home senator bend to their will. Money can only buy advertising and campaign staff. It can't buy votes and votes are what keep folks in office.
* Apple has $38 Billion in liquid assets [1]. Facebook has $18 Billion [2]. Amazon has $20 Billion [3]. Alphabet (fka Google) has $73 Billion [4]. Microsoft has $102 Billion [5]. In the last quarter of 2015, the largest companies by market capitalization were Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft [6].
So, a the question is, why, despite these efforts are we still seeing this sort of thing? A few reasons, I'd guess...
1) Lobbying efforts by other industries and groups (law enforcement has a vested interest here, for example)
2) A tendency to wanting to look tough on crime and terrorism, especially going into an election year. Moderation and wise restraint are always a tough sell in politics.
I don't believe that's what I implied. I was pointing out the discrepancy in the parent's argument that an increase in lobbying spending should correlate with a decrease in introductions of these types of bills. If these types of bills are viewed as extortionist policies, and lobbying efforts as akin to Mafia "protection" then these supposed discrepancies become more clear.
I'm getting too old to think anyone else has my best interests at heart. Any one but me, that is.
You're assuming they've tried. I honestly think that the encryption controversy is still too recent for the big tech firms to fully engage their lobbying efforts. And I also think they honestly did not think this issue would get out of hand so fast - they would have considered outlawing encryption so insane that they probably have barely even prepared even their own thoughts in regard to how to argue against the idea.
Twenty years is "too recent"? The "encryption controversy" started in the 90s.
> they honestly did not think this issue would get out of hand so fast
Again, this has been building for decades. The problem with the big tech firms is that some of them are collaborators. They don't want real encryption, because that would undermine their spyware-based business models.
You seem to imply (but sort of dance around it) that this is a bad thing. It's a good thing that politicians can't be outright bought.
Most senators are afraid of looking weak on national security, and this usually outweighs whatever financial clout you can bring to bear. Your average voter does not understand encryption, but understands "this will let us crack into terrorist's phones."
I'm not saying that it is a bad thing. I'm saying that it is a contradiction of the beliefs commonly found on HN, reddit, etc. about how corruption works.
>I'm saying that it is a contradiction of the beliefs commonly found on HN, reddit, etc. about how corruption works.
What, specifically, is being contradicted? Because your suggestion that tech companies can't influence one policy issue doesn't seem to contradict the belief that money influences politics.
Who's saying they can't? You don't have to buy into all the conspiracy arguments to believe that this kind of thing is coordinated, probably at her level. And talk is cheap. She can propose next week that we all have to wear funny hats.
There are two questions to ask. 1) Is this a serious effort intended to pass or something else? and 2) If it is something else, how would Feinstein benefit from doing this?
You'd have to be brain dead to think she believes this will pass. So obviously the answer to #1 is "It's not a serious effort"
#2 gets much more interesting. If she's doing this as a stalking horse, why? My money says it's to hold on to blue collar workers come the next election. She'll be first in line talking about how she did all she could to make computers "safer". But that's just my intuition. Politicians have a tendency to propose things their sponsors don't like, that they know will not pass, in order to have both their cake and eat it too. The system has been working like that for decades in both the House and Senate.
Apple has $233 billion in cash in real terms (as of the just reported quarter). They hold most of it in short term assets; it's equivalent to cash in that they can access the capital on very short notice if needed. If Apple had to write a check for $50 billion next week, they can do it.
"It is very interesting that the richest* industry in the US cannot make their home senator bend to their will."
I think they can, and did.
I think the entire apple/iphone/fbi storyline was a ruse. The government went to apple and told them which way things were going to go and Apple pushed back and insisted that they needed some kind of plausible deniability and PR cushion for the eventual state of affairs.
So they worked together to concoct a (fake) dispute between Apple and FBI, which Apple "won", but which still allowed the FBI to get what they needed through a heretofore unknown third party.
I am not sure who I would consider having the upper hand in this relationship, but I know it's not you and I.
Who's to say that those companies are not in favor of this kind of stuff as long as they can get the right provisions in the final bill? If real encryption is illegal for all other software vendors that makes your software a much safer bet for the people who actually care about that stuff.
I've voted against her (and Boxer) every time she comes up for re-election since I've been able because of her support of anti-technology laws. Unfortunately they're incumbents in California, so it's really difficult to get them out because they're incumbents so getting primaried is hard, and California is very liberal so it's hard to get a republican in unless they're an actor.
Given the voters in California, someone needs to mount a primary challenge because no one will beat her in the general election. That how Rep Eric Cantor got ousted.
California doesn't have party primaries any longer. All candidates run in a single primary, and the two highest vote-getters go on the ballot for November. When she's up for re-election, her opponent on the November ballot will almost certainly be a Democrat.
No, it was actually intended to shake up the two-party system. The Republican party is very weak in many parts of the state, so it's entirely possible (likely even) that that second candidate could be another Democrat, or even a third-party Green or Libertarian candidate. The point is that it encourages the non-majority party to field candidates that appeal to the overall populace, instead of to a narrow interest group (like conservative Republicans in Berkeley).
Shaking up the two party system by likely replacing it with a one party system sounds really bad. It also hurts 3rd parties badly by requiring a shorter time frame and a lot more money to be any influence on the election. This sounds like a way to cement the power of the current ruling party.
(so for instance, if there are 4 candidates that get lots of votes in the primary, 2 Democrats, a Republican and an Independent, you can end up with 2 Democrats on the election ballot, I think the Republican would still see that as having their election messed with)
I wonder if someone has gathered the statistics from California elections. Comparing across different electorates isn't hugely meaningful but I would think there would be some evidence about how it impacted third party candidates.
Rather than dealing with these cockamamie laws piecemeal, lets attack the root of the problem: term limits and age caps.
That way instead of waiting for these half senile and all corrupt politicians to meet their maker, we introduce new blood into the system that hopefully understands the modern American people and modern technology.
I've always thought this. Limit all representatives, especially the president, to one term. That way they have no motivation to waste their time and our money on getting reelected. You don't even need to touch age then. If you then make it illegal for all representatives, especially the president, to accept donations and maybe give each candidate a set sum to spend we might actually bring democracy back. I'm certainly not holding my breath though. It's basically asking Congress and the president to commit permanent political suicide.
Consider 3 groups: elected officials, their staffers, and lobbyists.
Strict term limits would remove office-holders and any expertise accumulated in whatever term they served, while the other two groups
would tend to conserve accumulated expertise, relationships, etc.
Persistent incumbency may be bad, but strict term limits seem worse.
Worse how? How can it be worse than a government that isn't run by the people? I'd rather the government doesn't get anything done than the current situation where the government doesn't get anything done and the only focus is on getting re-elected and raising money. Considering that representatives in Congress spend more time raising money for re-election than anything else by far, I can't see how it could be worse to have the actually do the jobs they were elected to do and swore an oath to do.
I would say one 8-year term with a removal vote in at mid-point. It takes 33% (or so) to keep your job in the mid-term and you run unopposed. If the axe is dropped then he becomes a lame duck and we do primaries and the like to pick a new president within a reasonable amount of time, not the shit-show of what we are going through now.
> It takes 33% (or so) to keep your job in the mid-term and you run unopposed.
Who votes at the 4-year mark? The senate, congress, or national election? If it's the latter, electoral or popular vote? If it's via popular vote I think it'd be next to impossible to eject anyone.
I'd rather have a lottery system, like jury duty, where ordinary folks who are qualified could end up running the country for 4 years. I trust ordinary people way more than psychopathic politicians to do the right thing.
Willfully ignorant. She has been a staunch opponent of "gun rights" (where you & I stand on it matters little for this post), with a very long train of making staggeringly ignorant comments about the subject - long enough, with enough intense involvement by both sides, to show she can't possibly be "plain ignorant" as at some point you have to absorb some objective facts about the matter and show some competent basis for your stance (say, when debating a subject you should know enough about the opposing view to be able to present a competent argument on their behalf). With that kind of precedent in place, it's safe to conclude she knows little - and literally wants to know little - about the objective facts of the encryption issue.
For sale to whom? The software industry is among the richest industries in the US. Who could possibly out-bid them?
Apple has $38 Billion in liquid assets [1]. Facebook has $18 Billion [2]. Amazon has $20 Billion [3]. Alphabet (fka Google) has $73 Billion [4]. Microsoft has $102 Billion [5]. In the last quarter of 2015, the largest companies by market capitalization were Apple, Alphabet, and Microsoft [6].
Her husband runs one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the country, if not the world.
Whatever money tech companies throw into the kitty, it pales in comparison to the wealth, patronage and influence that real estate has on politics. Real estate fuels political machinery -- generates lots of fees for lawyers and accountants, lots of bullshit jobs for dumb brothers in law, etc.
It's also a lucrative business -- her husbands firm stands to make $1B selling post office property alone via an exclusive contract.
Feinstein promoted a scam artist and put her in charge of her campaign treasury. That lady did the same to Feinstein as Feinstein does to the federal budget and all the money disappeared.
Feinstein just refilled tens of millions of dollars with her husband's personal check. No sweat. Even Google money means nothing to her. She's like Donald Trump, ignorant and totally exempt from consequences, except instead of blundering she's deliberately evil.
Feinstein is a disgrace. It continues to confound me that the home of the US technology industry is represented by someone so diametrically opposed to technical interests.
If firms actually care about issues (and their international markets), they should be donating substantial sums to get rid of her.
Why is Feinsteins name attached to every piece of shit legislation that comes out. Does she just really hate freedom or something? Literally every bill that had the internet up in arms over the past 4 years had her name on it.
She's more of an equality of outcome person than a equality of opportunity person. It leads to drastically different definitions of what a free society looks like.
Most people aren't interested in capitalist striving, they want to live an average life free from any real danger.
"As a practical matter, the (lawful) production of secure software in the United States becomes the exclusive domain of corporate entities large and rich enough to support (and at least attempt to secure) some kind of key-escrow and law enforcement compliance infrastructure."
That's assuming that anyone still wants to do business with them. Most companies will just wither and die because consumers and especially the enterprise will move on to their competitors outside the US. I really can't think of a better way to destroy the US technology sector than bills like this.
How would this effect hashing algorithms? You can't reverse a password hash for example. Probably the least of the many many problems this bill would cause.
But you're not reversing it, you're only brute-forcing a collision. It won't tell you if you've found the original password or a different string that coincidentally hashes the same with that particular algorithm.
What makes you think that? Anyone who worked on non-compliant software who lives in the US (or in a US-friendly jurisdiction) would likely be found liable, and fined and/or jailed.
She must totally ignorant of the matter, or have hired poor technical staff around her, or pure as the driven snow, since this will only pave the way for more breaches and dissemination of government and governing persons data on the internet, not just private citizens. I don't understand how they think there is a way to meet their aims without knocking down the whole house of cards. Perhaps when her data is hacked, and all of her personal and financial dealings are made public? I can see this becoming an Anonymous headline soon.
Yeah, this is bordering on ridiculous. But, if any of this is contemplated, you can bet it's also being contemplated in China, Russia and everywhere else.
The standard response should be: "would you want us to do the same for foreign governments?"
But what makes the "would have to" follow, let alone be enforceable?
ANY sovereign government can pass a bill saying the same thing about any maker of any software, and they might even have long-arm statutes via agreements between them. It's not like Google doesn't have subsidiaries in China, and it's not like they're not restricted in China.
Would this bill allow USA residents to use sane browsers, mandating backdoors in USA-made browsers but permitting import of crypto software from the free world? Or is the "loophole" closed by other bills?
I think the solution to all of this starts with the creating alternative computer networks to the internet. You should be able to ping your neighbor without paying Comcast for the privilege. Once communities own our own local networks, and once our neighboring communities are linked, private networks will blossom and this nonsense will fade away.
I don't think the layman associates computer network traffic with speech. But if you make private networks associated with localities, I think they'll righly start to see federal regulation as overbearing.
(Aside: if you're in favor of federally mandated net neutrality, I think you owe it to yourself to think about what kind of effect it could have on that type of local network development.)
Here's some 'Truth' for you: your post is indicative of the exact kind of thinking that leads people to demand back doors on encryption in the first place.
"I think the solution to all of this starts with creating alternative means to access encrypted networks. You should be able to key into the someone's computer without doing any crypto work for the privilege. Once crypto comes with back doors, and the keys our in our hands, freedom will blossom and terrorist protections will fade away."
Maybe if your solution were in any way practical or realistic, or if you -- the layman -- knew the difference between how to actually solve a problem and merely proposing fantastical solutions, we wouldn't need this discussion in the first place.
And that's not even mentioning telecom cooperatives and municipal ISPs that are popping up.
> Maybe if your solution were in any way practical or realistic
> fantastical solutions
The broader point was about the idea that the average American doesn't see computer networks as something that can be local, and how that might affect how they interpret computer communication in the context of the first amendment. And (I think, at least) that would be an interesting point in its own right.
But it doesn't have to be, because this is reality, and it's a recent development due to new software and hardware developments. And it's growing.
New networks popping up in no way protects anyone from having their network regulated by the government, particularly if they start interfacing with and replacing the existing networks.
I'm not suggesting it prevents regulation in-and-of itself, but that it will make federal regulation untenable by breaking down the misconception that computer networking is necessarily geospatially agnostic.
If local communities have their own physical networks running internal services, and if average people start using them, I think they'll start seeing computer networks as able to be more than one homogenous cyberspace. Federal regulation doesn't seem so out-of-place when your connections are presumably going all over the world. But if you drop that assumption, I think smaller governments will want autonomy.
(I also want to apoligize for my tone above. Not necessary and not conducive to conversation.)
They're deliberately taking an extreme position in an attempt to force a fake compromise (which will ultimately wind up being just as catastrophic to the US software industry). This is a classic tactic, and it works.
Senate Committee on Candy: "Gum is a problem. Okay, life sentences for anyone caught chewing that evil stuff in public."
The Public: "WTF?"
SCC: "Okay, you're right, that's a little harsh. Let's meet in the middle and make it only a $100,000 per stick fine."
The Public: "Whew!"
... and I'm guessing that any "compromise" would take the form of clauses along the lines of the FISA courts being able to rubberstamp people into compliance. In secrecy. In bulk.
I cannot help but wonder if one of the requirements for being on the Senate Intelligence Committee is that the spooks have dramatically compromising blackmail material on you. This would explain a lot. (On the other hand, I believe that Feinstein is a genuinely bad person, and we would be better off without her).