It's an interesting though, that it's possible (no idea how likely) that violence could be decreased through a reduction in laws such that the amount of enforcement -- and thus violence -- is reduced.
I really wish that we had good stats on this stuff so that the laws could be crafted to minimize violence. Anyone who says we're civilized and "beyond that" isn't paying attention, it's just that the violence has largely been outsourced so that a portion of affluent society can feel that we're "beyond that".
>violence could be decreased through a reduction in laws such that the amount of enforcement -- and thus violence -- is reduced.
Gang members seem to have no regard for enforcement of any kind and throw their lives away with abandon, but I still think less enforcement will only embolden them.
There's a school of thought that we inadvertently create terrorists by interfering in the middle east and thus motivating people to want to do us harm. And by 'we' I mean 'The United States'.
I suspect that a similar argument can be made that the illegal drug trade and gangs are fairly well correlated and that gangs arise because individuals don't derive any security from the police for a variety of reasons. So gangs are the result of police policy, not that police policy is the result of gangs.
I'm not suggesting that this is a 100% solid theory. But there's probably some nugget of truth in it.
Gangs tend to organize around any kind of illegal, lucrative market. Smuggling (which is really what drugs and alcohol are about), gambling, prostitution, vote buying/selling, theft. Because those activities are outside the law, the law can't really regulate the market.
Then there is racketeering/blackmail, which is probably more of a problem of ineffective policing, at least as far as the "Hey, you've got a nice business here, how about you give me a cut to make sure nobody comes by [sic buy] and smashes your cabbages" variety goes.
I detected a hint of "the cop is the perp and the perp is the victim" in your other post but wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. This kind of attitude is quickly disabused of when living in a poor neighborhood. Why are gang members practically suicidal? Drugs play a part, but they are not protecting their neighborhood they are trying to get a larger territory to deal drugs. As for the US going into the Middle East, it was probably a bad idea but then people turn around and complain we are not doing anything in Syria.
No, I don't think that the cops are to blame. It's a far bigger problem than that. They don't make policy, they just enforce it. Why blame policy problems on the police?
By your reasoning, though, one might surmise that ending the drug prohibition would then also end gangs, wouldn't one? The gang exists to defend illegal drug territory. Illegal drug territory only exists because drugs are illegal. Ending prohibition would make drugs legal, not illegal, and thus the outsized profits would go away. This would then make operating the gang unprofitable and it would disband or "go out of business".
I'm sure you'll bring something else up like "but drugs are bad!" or some such. But that line of reasoning works, doesn't it? Changing the subject because you don't like the moral implications of legal drugs isn't an argument.
Legalizing drugs would reduce gang violence to almost zero, but whether or not drugs are bad is orthogonal to the argument. I lost a good friend to alcohol and have relatives struggling with heroin. Just for the record I cannot believe the huge comeback heroin is making, I just don't understand. Some kind of affluenza and believing the stupid media telling them that the world is shit. I am in favor of virtually anything that reduces suffering in the aggregate.
I think the real question is "would there be a net drop in suffering as a result of legalization?" and I personally suspect that the answer is "yes".
Forgive me for accusing you pre-emptively of moving the goalposts. It happens a lot and I get tired of it. That's usually what happens once it becomes clear that legalization would end gang violence, another objection to stopping legalization for another, never before mentioned reason.
But transparency is a prerequisite for security. Free software isn't necessarily secure, but only if its free software can we check and verify or fix it and distribute modified versions.
That was true when the incentive was for vulnerabilities to be disclosed and fixed for the good of all, but sadly today, vulnerabilities are extremely valuable and so the incentive is for them to be sold to the powerful.
Clickbait and sensationalism is a thing in journalism. It is morally wrong because it spreads disinformation and is harmful to both individuals and democracy, but it is legal and profitable, and we haven't done enough to shun it, so it happens.
The approaches were analyzed as part of a months-long government
discussion about how to deal with the growing use of encryption
in which no one but the user can see the information.
Using OUR money, they looked into ways to compromise technology that keeps OUR information private. If you claim you're going to be the most transparent administration, the public ought to hold you to that claim. Without leaks and whistleblowers, and reporting like this, we'd be clueless.
Your headline would also only tell half of the story, because we don't know whose "ways" the administration rejected. They, the administration, spent time looking into something that they later concluded was wrong. Right?
WaPo's headline was in the past tense and doesn't state anything else, so obviously nothing went beyond exploring. It's not distorted at all.
Yes it would. Cybercriminals are even more of a threat than spy agencies to most individuals.
[edit: in case it is unclear, I am saying that cybercrime is as strong reason for individuals to use ubiquitous encryption as government snooping not that it is a justification for government snooping]
Direct perceivable damage? Is there even a question?
Did the NSA over stepped it's bounds sure, but did anyone actually got directly hurt? Well not really.
The NSA is only as "bad" as the rest of the government, it's not a rogue agency that whisks people in the middle of the night to re-education camps, if the US ever becomes such state then encryption isn't going to help you.
This isn't an argument against encryption, or in favor of the NSA violating the privacy of US citizens (I am not a US citizen and I do not expect the NSA to care for my privacy) it's just an argument that people should put things in perspective.
East Germany didn't became a police state because of the Stasi, they've created the Stasi to enforce it. The US wasn't turned into a police state because of McCarthy-nism, it wouldn't turn into one because of the NSA even if they continue to violate the rights of US citizens unless there will be a major major political shift across all branches of the US government and it's population.
The responses on this thread seem to prove that Apple knows what it is doing with its security strategy. The fact that people blindly disable protections and end up causing massive malware outbreaks is exactly the reason they are introducing things like Gatekeeper and Rootless. Arguably, this incident is evidence in favor of them locking down Gatekeeper further.
