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Signal, NordVPN, Proton to leave Canada over C-22
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- Title
- Signal warns it would pull out of Canada if made to comply with lawful access bill
- Published
- May 14 2026
- Word count
- 888 words
I am so disheartened by this. Canadians had seen this before in bill C-2 but thankfully it didn't pass. Now that the liberals have a majority as of the last by-elections cycle, they're trying again.
Why is it that we keep having to fight the same fight over and over again? I'm so tired of politics in general, but this sort of thing matters deeply to me as a technologist, and so I guess I have to suck it up and do the whole "here we go again..." thing.
I use OpenMedia to try and stay abreast of some of this stuff. It's often annoying to join another mailing list, especially as they often ask for money (apparently they are measured as a lobbying group according to their monthly donors, which impacts their ability to get facetime with policy makers and government panels). A quick search tells me the Electronic Frontier Canada and Online Rights Canada groups seem to be defunct, so I don't know of any other groups doing similar work. Joining an activism group financially, for me at least, has lessened some of the mental burden of engaging with politics.
And that's what really bothers me - the mental load aspect. I know a disengaged populace is easy to control and all the tricks the government uses - "rushing" laws through, obfuscating problematic components within bills, "think of the children" rhetoric, etcetera ad nauseam - actively encourage disengagement. I suffer from mental health issues, same as many people, and this sort of thing makes me want to go full neo-luddite. I want to scream in frustration and hate having nobody to vent to about things like this. Why is it that so few people care? But I recognize that they're the same as me - it's not that they don't care, it's that they're too tired (read: too mentally loaded) to engage meaningfully. So I can't blame them. Our representatives don't represent us. Democracy is breaking down in real time.
Please someone give me some hope.
I can't give you a reason to hope unfortunately, I'm in the same boat.
The idea that a liberal government is spending political capital on this, rather than pushing back against the worldwide rise of fascism drives me nuts too. How is this the top priority?
I've always felt that kids should stay off the Internet, but it's the parents that should I force that, not the government. A kid doesn't need the newest I phone, they need a flip phone so they can call their parents if they are in danger/trouble. The idea of regulating the internet to keep kids off of it is a dumb idea to me, when it should be a parents responsibility. I know parents are overloaded right now, especially with the world wide economic issues and they are also freaking out over the rise of fascism, but heavy handed regulation isn't the solution. Making it easier / cheaper to have kids with child care and tax credits is.
I suspect we'll eventually have to bake protections against this into our Constitutions (or equivalent, I keep thinking of it as a "digital bill of rights"). A right to digital anonymity and a strong protection against unmasking that anonymity seems like a good starting point.
But unfortunately we'll have to wait for all the dinosaur octa/septa/genarian legislators to die off, because most of them are so hopelessly out of touch with modern tech that you can't even begin to get them to understand the need for protections. They're easy marks for lobbyists and vote whips to steer in any direction because they're absolutely clueless about the consequences of their votes in either direction. In a world where a smartphone and a variety of accounts are table stakes, I don't think it's OK for legislators to be this oblivious.
There is every reason for hope!
Teh reason we keep having this same fight over and over is simple:
Counterintuitively, this is great news! Everyone sensible, who follows what happens in courts, wants everyone to pay their fare share in taxes, who wants to be safe, all of these people know (and will sometimes even begrudgingly admit) that we cannot have a high-functioning offline society that is safe and sound if the digital part of life is for all purposes unregulated.
That things fail and fail again is because the most ham-fisted, privacy-spying solutions fail. The next attempt gets slightly better.
One cannot be a sensible person and agree that there should be unfettered access to cheaply and securely hide any and all criminal activity online. We cannot have "but I did all this on my phone, so therefore it's practically impossible to jail me for this serious financial/drug-related, violent or other crime" be the state of affairs.
If you know computers, that's the current state of affairs.
We have cases where dozens of children are live-streamed and molested online and police can't stop children being exploited.
We have cases where drug dealers can sell kilos and kilos of fentanyl with close to zero risk, ruining thousands of lives.
We have cases where financial criminals can avoid taxation on millions and millions of dollars trivially easily.
We have cases where criminals sell hundreds of thousands of illegal subscriptions to entertainment like tv shows, sports, movies, music etc. before being caught or not being apprehended as a service is shut down and another just replaces it.
We need solutions that balance privacy, preventing harm and the rule of law.
Otherwise it's a race to the bottom to do criminal stuff so everyone who's dumb enough to follow the law and therefore pay for everyone else who freeloads more and more.
We need these ongoing discussions to get it right. We'll get it wrong and have to adjust, law by updated law.
Regulation of the online sector, of encryption, etc. is decades overdue. Regulation in this area could have been enacted in much more sensible ways when there was higher trust in many western societies. Now there's a secondary challenge: to get people to understand that regulation is in their favor.
The billionaire-driven anti-regulation propaganda has caught on too many places.
We need to get this right and we need regulation now. People shouting that "think of the children" or "stopping drugs isn't worth it" are giving data at scale for free to corporations exploiting that data commercially at gigantic scale. It's completely, utterly and entirely unprincipled and irrational not to give sensible controls and tools to government for the sake of society. No-one lives on an island independent of society unless they're living in a fantasy: the social contract is to give and to take: we get security, we pay with something. That's necessary and good for our collective sakes.
This is all part of the necessary draining of political swamps with clear rules and elected representatives who put our interests first. This necessary debate just happens to it this field because this is where we have most problems with outdated legislation right now that affects practically everyone in society.
(Yes, this debate gets rehashed on all these topics. I probably won't engage with all the arguments that show up in all the threads on this issue that do not acknowledge the primary issue of underregulation in this field. Those views are not worth discussing because they're detached from reality. See other tagged topics in this area on tildes for those conversations)
Even if you assume the government will never heel-turn and use their newfound spying powers against activists, marginalized groups, political opponents, etc., any technological solution that weakens encryption and privacy protections for legitimate crimefighting reasons necessarily reduces it for all other use cases as well. Hacking tools leak, backdoors get discovered, and now you have a whole new class of trust issues (and crimes) knowing that sensitive data cannot be reliably protected against bad actors. That's not a worthwhile trade.
We cannot have a world where everyone is free to perform crime because they cannot be caught and can effectively hide and plan their crimes online.
That is a problem that has to be solved, like it or not.
The topic at hand is finding a good enough solution for regulation and then building from there. Doing nothing is not an alternative, as is evident today.
The law does not dictate morality.
There are millions of immoral laws.
It is a crime to break immoral laws.
It is a crime to advocate for breaking laws.
Making it impossible to do crimes makes it impossible to fight for morality.
The bankers do far more harm to society than the drug lords. There, I said it.
I'm all for a global clearing system so banks and bankers can't do the things they do to today.
That would also make all other criminal activity with economic components way, way harder to perform in practice.
It'd be a great alternative to other types of regulation that have much higher costs in terms of privacy or otherwise.
The whole concept of civil disobedience is breaking the law to get consequences consequences that forces changes to the law to end up with more moral/ethical laws.
The whole point Gandhi and others perfected was exactly to show that immoral laws led to unreasonable punishments so the laws had to be changed. Demonstrating this to society at large in practice because just saying it doesn't work. (Just like a strike often has to encumber a third party to get support to force a business to accept the goals of the strike)
The whole point, what causes changes in attitudes at a societal level, is that there's a cost there that people are willing to take, that their actions mean something.
(A corollary is that internet activism and other activism that doesn't demonstrate conviction through effort are much, much less likely to enact change, but be mostly performative/feel-good)
That's not at all evident to me. What's wrong with the internet right now that makes it so essential to monitor everyone's activities?
How it's impossible to prosecute tons of crimes because they're organized online?
Homicide clearance rates drastically declining?
The billionaire class being able to steal billions through corruption and illegal market manipulation?
Politicians being able to insider trade without concern so they spend their careers maximizing their own wealth rather than doing their jobs as politicians for us all?
Crime networks propping up human rights-abusing authoritarian states?
The terrible reality of child sex exploitation, ordered sexual abuse online as a service?
Not being able to gather the necessary evidence to prosecute the leadership of global giants for knowingly ruining the climate?
This isn't about "the internet". The internet is an integrated part of society. Not being able to gather evidence from online activities impacts all of society.
Most of those have very little to do with our online presence, and none of them are solved by C-22 or any other privacy destroying bill.
Almost all of your examples are just politicians and rich people getting away with crimes right in front of us because the police and judges refuse to do anything about it. They're not being ignored for lack of evidence; they're being ignored because laws don't apply to the rich and powerful (see: the Epstein Files, the Panama Papers, or even pre-internet stuff like the Catholic Church and Jimmy Saville).
I want to call this one out as being especially ironic. You do understand what this bill is doing, right?
The government can't stop people from encrypting things. They can give people an extra hoop to jump through, but the actual criminals are probably already jumping through multiple hoops to encrypt their stuff, and this law will do nothing to prevent that (because it's literally impossible to prevent). The only thing this does is weaken privacy for people who aren't jumping through those extra hoops.
Your entire premise rests on it being impossible to gather information on crimes committed online. But it's not accurate. From taking down the Silk Road to much more pedestrian concerns, law enforcement services are able to gather information on cybercrime. What are you seeing that makes you think they can't?
Things like how the FBI ran their own encrypted phone company, ANOM, and saw how criminals work and therefore how their tools cannot possibly catch criminals who know what they're doing on other encrypted systems?
The sheer volume of criminal activity they knew nothing about that they randomly saw from this stroke of luck, the randomness of one criminal agreeing to a plea deal leading to over a thousand arrests?
Because we have black swans, random events of massive coincidence that lead to unveiling single instances of crime does not mean that we can catch any but the most unlucky, stupid, or coincidental cases of crime.
It's not about true impossibility, it's about effective or near impossibility. We can all concoct cosmic situations of massive luck that sometimes led to crime solving.
The core premise here is that if I as a simple layman can keep things permanently undiscoverable from anyone else, cheaply and with minimal risk, then all but the stupidest criminals can do the same.
Do you disagree with that premise? Is there any counter-evidence to that?
What evidence gets criminals caught? Is it stupidity, things that can be avoided? If so, wee should expect those that aren't unlucky and/or stupid are getting away with it, no. That's basic deductive reasoning.
Are there trustworthy sources and experts in the area that believe today's situation works well? Do we find and solve these crimes at scale?
There's no evidence to suggest that things are hunky-dory.
I want to reiterate: We're not talking about cybercrime here. We're talking about all manner of crimes where digital communication is used and would be key evidence (because that's where the stuff happens) but that is now undiscoverable.
No, but I think it's the wrong premise. Of course it's possible to keep information secret from anyone else - but the crimes you're discussing require communication and collaboration with others. You're bringing up things like insider trading, for instance. That already requires engaging with the (heavily audited) financial system. The risks of digital communication add nothing to enforcement: yeah, digital information can be deleted, but the mail could've been burned too.
I think you've got everything basically backwards. Crimes being solved isn't cosmic luck, it's what happens more often than not. I grant that the murder solve rate is down since the 1950s, but 1) it's started to rebound and 2) it has a lot more to do with the use of firearms and murders of more strangers than digital communications.
Fundamentally, I think the problem is that you're a law-abiding citizen who doesn't really grasp what crime looks like in practice. (This is a compliment, by the way). The existence of Signal doesn't make much crime meaningfully easier to commit without detection. Like, try to put yourself in the shoes of a cartel boss. Think of everything you need to do to manufacture, export, and sell a hundred kilograms of heroin, then return, launder, and invest the proceeds. Digital technology creates at least as many risks as it solves for you (because now there are more audit trails, etc).
Actually, it's completely the other way around. Clearance rates for all sorts of reported crimes are much, much lower than they were years ago. A quick search will find you the same results all over Europe and elsewhere.
I regularly spend time in court as a witness or on behalf of companies as part of my job. Especially in cases relating to digital theft or network penetration where we try to help customers get their systems back in action.
I know very well what evidence is presented. How reasonable doubt is established by a lack of digital trails. The frustrations of law enforcement investigators and how dumb luck is what results in having legal means to randomly come upon ongoing crimes that have been taking place for years undetected.
I get inside information on a publicly listed company due to my tasks at work. I know precisely how records of who are insiders are made. I've experienced audits on lists from government bodies.
Insider trading often hinges on proving that a perpetrator gave information. It's specifically a communications crime: did x person give y person insider information to trade on?
I know how I could trade on non-public information in ways that'd never get tied back to me and that I couldn't be connected back to. With a political insider, I could bet on markets in general. That'd be completely undetectable unless they could tie communication between me and an insider.
It's precisely because I know how crime works in practice and because I work in networking that I'm saying with such conviction that digital technology has massively reduced risk for organized crime and all other non-stupid criminals. Performing these crime are also way easier and more efficient
We even have digital currencies that are extremely effective in avoiding leaving a financial trail too.
I think you're very right that most people don't grasp how crimes work in practice, have distorted views on how crimes are solved and how often they're solved based on tv shows.
That's why they don't understand the impact of encryption, online traffic forwarding (VPNs) and how that trivializes crime for people who wouldn't otherwise know where to start or dare to start.
I also completely understand why law enforcement agencies don't speak out about the tools they don't have and therefore give instruction manuals for how to avoid detection. Sometimes I think they should speak to this because in many areas they're completely blind anyway.
That needs to change.
Your link not only did not say anything about current vs. historical clearance, it was about violent sex crimes, which have nothing to do with encrypted communications technology.
I'm being nitpicky here because you're the one making extraordinary claims - that modern encryption prevents solving crimes at a meaningful scale - and you've yet to present any evidence suggesting that that's true.
It is true that clearance rates are down for many categories of crime. I will concede that I was wrong to say that crimes get solved more often that not, inasmuch as that's not true for all categories of crime. But: that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with technology. The types of crimes that have the lowest clearance are also crimes for which technology has no clear nexus (property crime, larceny, etc.)
This is equally true whether you use WhatsApp or just have a conversation in person. Again, technology has nothing to do with the crime nor law enforcement's ability to prove it. Insider trading has historically been almost impossible to prove for exactly that reason.
I suspect, in fact - though there's no actual data to prove this - that certain types of crime are easier to clear today because conversations that once would have been face-to-face now leave a digital trail. See the six million pages of digital records (including signal chats!) used to convict Sam Bankman-Fried, for instance. That's in stark contrast to the 2008 financial collapse, in which many regulators were convinced that criminal fraud had occurred but felt that proving intent would be impossible and ultimately no executives were charged.
I don't want to be mean here, but this is literally the opposite of true and that you would say this undermines your claims significantly.
These are just my first five search results in order:
https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/03/01/most-violent-and-property-crimes-in-the-u-s-go-unsolved/
https://www.stephenmorgan.org.uk/record-low-number-of-crimes-being-solved-under-the-conservatives/
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/clearances
Again, it's a simple google search away finding Comey saying as early as 2014 that they don't want a back-door. They want regulated "front door" access, so there's no backdoor for others to exploit:
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/speeches/going-dark-are-technology-privacy-and-public-safety-on-a-collision-course
The 15 countries that make up the Virtual crime alliance have consistently said ad nauseum that their efforts are hampered by encryption:
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/statement-on-end-to-end-encryption
The FBI consistently says encryption means they can't get into thousands of devices they get their hands on:
https://abcnews.com/US/criminals-encryption-avoid-law-fbi-teams-unexpected-partner/story?id=113619427
Quite frankly, I'm not the one making extraordinary claims. To the contrary, the claims I'm making are basic facts that stem from basic logic of how one conducts a search, gets evidence and follows a trail of evidence.
How in the world wouldn't encryption and traffic rerouting hugely impact law enforcement investigations?
Here siple sources that again show that using cryptocurrencies enables crimes greatly:
https://knowledgehub.transparency.org/helpdesk/cryptocurrencies-corruption-and-organised-crime-implications-of-the-growing-use-of-cryptocurrencies-in-enabling-illicit-finance-and-corruption
More into the details of how it works: https://www.merklescience.com/blog/money-laundering-in-crypto-how-criminals-hide-their-tracks
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/07/technology/how-a-cryptocurrency-helps-criminals-launder-money-and-evade-sanctions.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
The extreme claims here are the opposite of what I'm saying.
I mean what even is the purpose of stablecoins other than avoiding sanctions/criminal prosecution or exchanging money across borders without declaring it?
I already conceded I was wrong to say that most crimes are solved. But this does not convince me that encryption is making it harder to solve crimes. In fact, from the first paragraph of your first link --
[Emphasis added]
Not a single one of your links is providing evidence to support the assertion that encryption is making it harder to solve crimes on a meaningful scale. They're all just about how crimes often go unsolved. Several of them seem to suggest that clearance rates haven't changed. If what you're arguing is so elementary, why are you unable to provide data backing it up? Why does some of the data contradict you?
It's not just you; the positions you cited from LEAs arguing that encryption stops them from detecting crime are also short on data.
Look, obviously I agree that there have certainly been crimes protected by encryption. As you say, that's almost tautological. But your argument is that it's a sufficient enough effect to warrant undermining encryption schemes, and you have been unable to demonstrate that's true.
This argument is becoming very circular. I think I've made my point.
The FBI being unable to access content in more than half the phones they wanted to legally search during a stretch of 11 months isn't enough for you to accept that this is hugely impacting law enforcement's ability to solve crimes.
By necessity, we expects huge holes in data: Both for crimes that go unreported, but also for crimes that are never discovered. It a necessary truth that it's nigh on impossible to quantify the size of these unknown unknowns. We'd expect these holes to get larger and larger with pervasive encrypted communications because we don't find those crimes like we used to be able to previously.
Reported crimes are going down hugely. There seems to be less crimes in many areas. Another quick search will lead to finding lots of reports that this decrease may be overstated as crimes are harder to detect because of factors like communication.
It's not like one can magically create new evidence to solve for a crime if digital communication isn't available. You get morsels and see if they lead on to new morsels that in time may put together a large picture. We're not in a CSI world of silver bullet tests. Circumstantial evidence combines to create solutions.
There's also the gigantic issue of the amount of resources for solving crimes increasing hugely if there's poor digital data. That's expensive and with limited resources, it leads to closing of cases without getting close to finding a culprit.
You're right that this is becoming circular. No evidence, nor the combination of many factors seems like it'll satisfy. There's little counter-argument.
Yes we can. Full stop. Because the law already dictates this:
Just because law enforcement has been permitted to break this law easily in the offline world does not mean we should let them in the online world.
Your phone is your modern breifcase. If law enforcement wants something from it, they should be forced to get a warrant dictating what exactly they're looking for, and confiscate it directly from the user. They shouldn't get backdoors and mass surveilance.
While I generally disagree with @nacho’s view, a warrant to access a phone that can’t be decrypted is effectively useless. It’s like having a search warrant to a house, but you cannot even forcibly enter it, let alone unlock it.
I do think a reasonable compromise would be to amend "can't testify against yourself" to exclude being compelled to give up a password.
This allows for full protection outside of legalized means.
What happens when you can't remember your password? Do you just go to jail for the rest of your life?
We've all heard about the people who've forgotten their bitcoin passwords worth millions of dollars, so it's clear that it does happen sometimes.
As one of those people (thanks mania), I propose statue of limitations.
If you forget the password to your daily driver, that's a bit more sus than forgetting one from 10 years prior.
Further, any such warrant will take so long to get that all digital traces have long since been deleted.
Or the legal retention of data is so short that law enforcement can't legally keep enough material to know if it's important to an investigation to prove crimes or not.
That was true in the analog world too.
The optimal amount of crime in society is not 0. Law enforcement should be hard. In the case of drug crimes, if you can't figure out where the drugs are coming to/from without survieling the world, then maybe you shouldn't.
Remember most opiod addicts are manufactured in hospitals, not the streets.
I want to make sure I'm understanding what you're saying here:
Do you actually mean to say that if drug smuglers are good at hiding their drugs by using real-time digital communication and 21st century techniques like 3D-printing, we just shouldn't try to stop them?
I don't think the intention is that we should only catch dumb criminals, those who post pictures of drugs and cash on social media to brag.
I don't think that's what you're trying to say, but that seems to be an (unintended) implication?
The optimal amount of crime isn't even close to 0. It's a balance of resources spent on enforcement, deterrence, harm, the interests of society and the interests of those directly affected by a potential criminal act.
However, we're not talking about near-zero levels of crime.
A majority of cybercrimes that are reported are immediately closed with no investigation. Estimates are often that less than 1 percent of cybercrimes lead to conviction/punishment (I'm guessing it's orders of magnitude lower in reality).
Even back in 2022, estimates in the US were that digital evidence was used in 9 of 10 criminal prosecutions of any type of crime. We're talking about the main way of catching folks for doing illegal things here, tying people to places, to orders, to all sorts of incrimination.
Good statistics are hard to find, but Sweden seems to be trying at least. It's not data from lobbying groups, which seems to be the case many other places.
They estimate (2025) that half of young men consume illegal media content every month [source] (https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-iptv-consumed-by-30-of-swedes-including-50-of-men-under-35-290529/)
It's way, way, way easier to be a criminal today than in the time of wire-taps, physical meet ups and the like.
I'm also pretty confident you don't mean that we should make law-enforcement harder than necessary: society needs digital evidence.
"just get other evidence" is not an option today. We live in a fully integrated digital world.
That's like saying 100% of car accidents involve use of a car. When 90% of all communication is digital, of course 9/10 crimes have digital evidence.
Plenty of ways to get digital evidence without backdoors and mass surveillance.
The good news is that piracy is usually not a crime. Mostly it's just a civil offense, like not picking up your dog's poop. It needs about that same level of law enforcement.
Let's say I have basic digital competence. Which ways exactly? How are they effective? Can they be performed at scale?
Piracy is just an example. We're talking about all sorts of organized crime, crime as a service, billionaire economic crimes and on and on.
You've correctly pointed out that a huge proportion of evidence that used to be available to law enforcement now isn't. This is obviously a problem if we believe in stopping crime.
Society and its laws need to be adapted to the reality of digital mass communication and how that changes how society works. It's that simple.
For anyone curious about how poorly @nacho's weird authoritarian arguments fared the last time he parroted them on Tildes:
https://tildes.net/~tech/1rqt/proposed_amendments_to_denmarks_laws_on_copyright_and_broadcasting_would_see_vpns_limited_for#comment-gyd7
I probably shouldn't engage with someone who immediately jumps to insults in characterizing mainstream views as "weird authoritarian arguments". That's so obviously not in line with Tildes' general principle of treating others with basic civility and trying to contribute in good faith.
However, I feel compelled to remind anyone that the views I've expressed are mainstream views and active legislative debates in a number of western countries right now.
Bubble effects may lead others to think that there aren't massive majorities for regulating the internet to be safer for kids.
Things like age-restricting access to social media sites for the mental health of children have huge majorities of support in the EU, to mention the most lowest-hanging example.
How could these wishes of huge majorities of populations possibly be enacted if a 10 year old can simply use a VPN to view pro-anorexia content, hardcore porn with choking or the like and be traumatized?
These are not issues of debate. They're uncomfortable facets of reality. My summary of the current state of affairs is accurate:
They are uncomfortable facets of reality. Kids get hurt and sometimes die. People steal. Enslavement for sex occurs.
Do something. Help kids. Pay for someone's rent or help get them a job interview. Be someone people can reach out to. Just don't act like censorship, strangling free speech, and mass surveillance help. Every intelligence agency on the planet knew who went to Epstein's island and what for.
You are manufacturing consent for tyranny.
How much more tax are you willing to pay for all the help kids need from having their lives ruined by exploitative social media at too young an age?
Are you confident their literal brains can be fixed after the fact?
I volunteer, I donate to organizations that work on these issues, I speak to issues in my field at conferences etc.
I believe in preventing harm where we can rather than having to try to compensate for harm because people being harmed is a worse outcome from those being harmed, even if we attempt to help them afterwards. Fixing things is often way more expensive, or just doesn't get resources.
We as humans are egotistical. We too often leave the underprivileged and weak behind to solve the problems we leave to them.
Convictions have moral consequences. I'm willing to pay with time and money to help based on the implications of my views.
We have political control of intelligence agencies in democracies. The culture and leadership of public bodies is a responsibility we as an electorate delegate to our representatives.
We must do our best to elect representatives who steward society's monopoly on violence, criminal prosecution etc. in good ways on our behalf.
In many places, we need to revitalize the social contract. People should be having better lives, rather than public many being spent on the good for the few ultrarich, public resources should be spent for the many.
I'm not willing to accept those left behind and harmed by the current state of affairs. It's untenable.
It's a matter of human dignity and worth. The alternative is even more freedom for those who are privileged already. The Roman pariah class had many great views of rights, morals and principles that they were occupied with for themselves, while 90 percent of the population weren't citizens and had no rights.
I believe those less unfortunate than me, those who can't speak up for themselves, shouldn't simply be left behind because I believe my own rights (that I have the resources to easily avail myself of already) could be even more unfettered.
I'm not willing to live my life insisting I know better than others' how to live their lives, nor am I foolish enough to think that blunt legislation will do anything but cause further traumas and rifts in society. I believe you have the right intentions, just like every person who's ever wished to impose their will.
Should we just abdicate so the Trumps of the world and their cronies get to keep doing what they're doing?
I believe you mean well by wishing the government to be as noninvasive as possible. However, we can't throw our hands in the air and go "oh. The internet is here. Guess the world's a free for all now"
Regulating online activity is a necessary part of small government, if we believe in the concept of a constitutional state.
If we don't believe in nations and a law-based society, all bets are off. I don't want to live in such a place.
You are suggesting what the minds behind the Trump administration want. The problems of the internet are simple accelerations of normal processes of sociocultural drift and diffusion, as it affords US interests the ability to leverage their massive wealth to disrupt foreign nations from a position of safety.
The military didn't end war. The police didn't stop crime. Intelligence agencies didn't deescalate the cold war. The more we feel responsible for ills beyond our command, the more violently we invade. We have to accept our horizons and work to better what we see within it, anything else is wishful thinking based on hearsay at best, and someone else's agenda most frequently.
Military, law enforcements, courts, intelligence agencies are technologies that provide immense good for everyone involved. None of them are all-or-none propositions. It's not about stopping crime, it's about reducing it. It's not about ending inter-group conflicts, it's about massively reducing them.
State militaries have reduced the rate of violent death immensely. It gives us resources to live our lives rather than looking over our shoulders.
State punishments and the police's monopoly on violence against the population has hugely reduced people taking their own justice and people doing things that harm others.
Intelligence agencies in the cold war did hugely deescalate the cold war. "Trust, but verify" creates trust and prevents misunderstandings, it greatly reduces the chance of pre-emptive attacks.
The nation state and democracy are massive successes that benefit our lives greatly. Just because they aren't perfect doesn't mean that our institutions are head and shoulders better than all the alternatives. Society evolves one little improvement after another.
Of course bad-intentioned leaders want to misuse institutions. That's because they're so successful and powerful. That's why the regulations both of institutions and what politicians can and cannot do is such an important task for lawmakers, why the division of state powers is imperative.
That doesn't mean we should weaken institutions and therefore cause harm to everyone in society, just in case someone wants to take them over.
If there's an issue in society, the whole role of politicians and government is evaluating what should/shouldn't be done.
You don't seem to grasp any of my deeper points, so I'll say this simply: institutional problem solving is a scourge in a world where every good and service could be manufactured near to its destination. Industrial logic is effective for manufacturing, and we manufactured hard enough that we don't need these petty ledgerline reasonings anymore except to distribute the future.
I totally get what you're saying. I just don't agree with your "deeper points" because they do not match how I believe the world works, what's possible to do in practice.
I think your analysis is wrong. I think civics proves you wrong every day and that the evidence showing as much is all around uss all the time. The massive benefit of global trade is just one example that proves this, also when trade is encumbered.
I believe viewing institutional problem solving as a mistake is extremely dangerous.
There are plenty of problems that necessarily have to be solved at a societal level. There are a number of subset of problems that need to be solved at a societal level that necessarily mean curtailing individual freedom (think mandated drivers' licenses, vaccines, safety standards, global warming - the list goes on and on).
The world would be a much easier place to navigate, but much more nihilistic, if you were right. As far as I'm concerned, that's just not the reality we live in.
The world doesn't mean that anyone who understands what I'm saying agrees with what I'm saying.
As far as I'm concerned, the only reason you appear to be right lies in your insistence to make it so. But I think we understand each other.
Yeah man I don't know I just don't think the government oughtta be able view my wife's cooter pics
I'm much, much more worried about commercial companies sucking up all data they can get their hands on, not following the restrictions set in their own user agreements. I'm more worried about bad actors, AI-coding criminals and so on. The government is not enemy #1, it's not even in my top 5 concerns.
There's a number of things at work we do air-gapped, or only on internal software, don't store in the cloud etc.
I treat my private data more carefully than work stuff, because that's what's got value to me. I recommend anyone who cares about their own privacy to do the same.
So let me get this straight. You don't want my wife, a consenting adult who I know and love, to be able to safely and securely send me pictures of her cooter, with the knowledge that ain't nobody except the neither of us gonna be able to see them pictures, all because some criminal might use the same technology to commit some crime some day?
Yeah man I don't know about that. I like my wife's coochie pictures more than I like hypotheticals.
If you care so much about keeping all your wife's coochie cooter creature pictures secure then ain't the best way to do that to use the same stuff you's been talking about making illegal so governments can look at em and what not?
Yeah man I don't know ain't seem to me like you got this much thought out
It doesn't matter if we talk about sex pictures, business secrets, child exploitation images, mass insider trading, the chatroom organizing a murder spree, or whatever else:
I'm pointing out the reality that if I can send an image completely securely, I can do all manner of illegal things with minimal risk doing lots of harm to individual people and/or society at large.
You don't disagree with this basic description of how these technologies work, right? You don't disagree that steps for keeping data secure are the same for all types of data?
That has the implications I outline in all the other comments in this thread.
I think the implication is that there ain't no reason for my wife not be able to safely send me cooter pics all cause some criminal might use same app to sell drugs or whatever. Sounds to me like you wanna punish my wife all because some other people do bad things but nah we ain't need the government comin up to our house like "hey man this where the coochie pictures live get you one!" no thanks I ain't need none of that only person who gets to punish my wife is me.
I ain't get why you talk about caring about privacy so much and keepin your own cooter pics secure but then you talk about how the government needs to be able to look at wife's cooter pics and that just don't make sense to me cause if the government can look at my wife's cooter pics then them cooters pics ain't really secure is they?
Yeah I don't know mr detective dick pic I don't think you've got the dots connected on this one
No. This is not how society works. I get that you are trying to make a cute point. But this is not it.
But my wife loves it when I punish her 🛏️😈⛓️💥👋🍑🙇🧶🧵➰🔞🍆💦
Related post that isn't paywalled:
https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/bill-c-22s-groundhog-day-why-the-governments-dismissal-of-signal-apple-and-the-u-s-congress-concerns-runs-back-the-disastrous-online-news-act-playbook/
Disappointing. SeraphicSoul: You're not alone in what you think of this.
If Europe and Canada make regulations that stop Meta, Snap, Google, Tiktok and the like from offering their services in those localities, is that a loss for those societies?
Or is it a benefit for society to have sensible regulations in the online sphere for the sake of the whole of society? Canada's issue is doing things half-way so the tech giants can point to the "issue" of losing some of the few valuable conversations in a gigantic sea of noise and engagement-bait.
It's great until it becomes the norm and AfD gets into power in Germany and decides that you shouldn't be consuming liberal content.