I know this will be an unpopular comment but I actually somewhat like it when governments show their totalitarian side. It's both a wake-up call for some in denial and also drives my favorite type of innovation. That is, anything that subverts censorship. It won't be a lot of people but there will be splinter groups that break away from the big centralized platforms. It's not usually a big deal but it's also not nothing and that's maybe good enough for me.

In the past this occurred in the US as a result of having a totalitarian style Attorney General John Ashcroft in the early 2000's. Many new protocols and applications popped up around his time and his leveraging of the fears around 9/11. There were many articles written about his time in power if anyone was curious.

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nomel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But, is it possible to undo any of the policies put into place? Seems like once the machinery gets implemented, everyone in government embraces it (my assumption being due to all the spending/enrichment of friends/family gov contractors).

	▲	HerbManic 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It has been said that the worst government is the one in power, regardless of time or location. That is because they rarely teardown the bad ideas of the past. Look to the US, regardless of the two parties, most of the time they just keep building on the pervious groups work no matter what the messaging to the people was. "They look after number one, you ain't even number two" - Frank Zappa
	▲	Bender 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I honestly don't know how things will (d)evolve from here. Official back-doors a.k.a. lawful intercept to encryption is an interesting twist, not a new proposal by any means but in the past this always ended up being hush-hush with small trusted inner circles of people at tech and telephony companies as they could never get such laws passed. If this passes I suspect it will be much harder to monitor terrorist activities as terrorists will just move to self hosted or non technical solutions. That leaves us plebs to monitor and find excuses to make arrest quotas. People will need to be careful how they speak as anything that can be taken out of context will be taken out of context. And you are right, such frameworks never go away even if they officially go away. There have been projects that have changed names so many times I can't even keep up with them. Total Information Awareness was renamed a few times. The lawful intercept code that was embedded in the firmware of all smart phones Carrier-IQ changed names a few times and last I checked it didn't even have a name any more which means people can't really talk about it.

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Yizahi an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You do realize that in all totalitarian states there is no significant "anti-censorship innovation" of note? Basically you are playing with fire and the only way playing with fire end is when everything burns to ashes. Not just the dust in the corner and that broken toy you don't like, but also everything you like too.

	▲	Bender an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Oh I totally agree that once a nation goes entirely totalitarian nobody is circumventing anything. If people act even slightly suspicious it's boots on necks and gets far far worse from there. The UK, US and even Canada have quite a ways to go to reach that level even if people may think otherwise. A sign that we are approaching such levels would be nobody wants to enter those nations legally or illegally any more. Canada is still trying to take away everyone's firearms and still trying to figure out how they will avoid turning many of their citizens into felons by October.