Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week our first place comment on the insightful side comes in response to Tim Cushing's post about the US's trajectory towards becoming a police state. That One Guy zeroed in one particular police comment and offered a fiery rebuttal:

"You have to draw the line between your right as a citizen to privacy and a community's right to live in a crime-free environment. You can't have them both."

Not only does that 'right' not exist, the 'choice' presented is a false dichotomy. Give up all the privacy possible with cameras in every room, every call intercepted and every email scanned, and you're still not guarantee a 'crime-free environment', because, and here's the kicker: those that break the laws tend not to care about the laws.

Cameras in every room? A would-be-criminal will plan out of range of them.

Every communication scanned? Speak in code.

There's also the tiny little detail that any crime not pre-planned could, at best, and assuming it's caught by the (currently mythical) all seeing and flawless privacy destroying system be stopped, not prevented.

They're not offering a trade of security in exchange for privacy, they're 'offering' a trade of something that they can't offer in exchange for something very real and important.

As for the 'woe is us, the police are so unfairly maligned' gist of the rest of the article, from the sound of it Trump's plan of solving that bonefire is to dump a bunch of gasoline on top of it. Pointing to the smoke while ignoring the fire it's coming from. If the public increasingly (rightly) doesn't trust the police, and/or feel that the police get special treatment going even more overboard in 'protecting' them from the mean old public is just going to fan the flames, increasing the divide and intensifying the animosity.

But hey, I suppose I could give him the benefit of the doubt in assuming he's not being completely boneheaded here, because as the title notes, 'Do You Want A Police State? Because This Is How You Get A Police State'

For second place, we head to a discussion about security, where an interesting conversation broke out about what exactly the role is for biometrics. Pegr racked up enough votes to win the spot with a simple assertion, though (as we'll discuss in editor's choice) it's not the only way to look at it:

Biometrics are usernames, not passwords.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll start out with a reply to that comment from Lawrence D'Oliveiro, who considers things in a bit more detail:

Unfortunately, no. Usernames are not confidential information, so there is no point in using biometrics for them.

A username is who you claim to be. But anybody can make that claim. You then have to accompany that claim with some kind of authentication protocol, to prove your claim. Which is where authentication comes in.

As Bruce Schneier has pointed out, there are three categories of ways to provide such authentication factors:

• Something you know (a password)
• Something you have (a physical key-type object, or other object that is easy to keep with you, such as a mobile phone)
• Something you are (biometrics).

What's called "two-factor" authentication means using factors from two different categories.

Next, because it will lead into one of our winners on the funny side, we've got an excellent comment from sigalrm breaking out the many functions of some of the federal agencies impacted by Trump's recent gag order:

You may think you don't care about HHS. But consider that the operating divisions for HHS include, but are not limited to:

• Administration for Children and Families,
• Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality,
• Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry,
• Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC),
• Centers for Medicare & Medicade Services (CMS)
• Food & Drug Administration (FDA),
• National Institutes of Health (NIH),and more.

more here: https://www.hhs.gov/about/agencies/orgchart/

These all roll up under HHS, and are presumably all subject to this gag order, given HHS as the parent organization.

US Department of Commerce? Yeah. That includes:

• NOAA,
• NIST,
• The Patent and Trademark Office,and more.

Also all presumably under a gag order.

More here: https://www.commerce.gov/sites/commerce.gov/files/ media/files/2015/docorgchartfinal.pdf

One or two of those might be important.

I included that comment for the sake of detail, because over on the funny side, our first place winner is Thad responding to a commenter who questioned whether they'd "even notice if all of those agencies just disappeared from the face of the earth" with a blunter and more hilarious version of the same point:

That would depend on how quickly the contaminated food, water, air, and medications killed you.

For second place, we return to the police state post, where one commenter decided to push back by using some un-cited and highly questionable "facts" while accusing us of being inaccurate. Roger Strong nicely summed it up:

The anonymous source with anecdotal evidence from another anonymous source wants you to check your fact checkers. Go figure.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we'll start out with a fun piece of hyperbole anticipating law enforcement's reaction to the return of Lavabit:

This is an outrage! In the old days, all communications however sent could be recovered by journalists. When messages were written on paper, all manufacturers of sulphur matches could be required to provide technical means of reconstructing envelopes from ashes. Manufacturers of hammers, celts, or clubs could be required to provide tools to re-assemble broken cuneiform tablets. In a civilized society, Lavabit would be subject to the same requirements.

And finally, after a commenter took it upon themselves to blankly and repeatedly question what some of our posts about police and civil rights have to do with "tech", That One Guy delivered the best response I've ever seen to this question:

Well clearly it's tech related in the sense that TD has apparently figured out some magical coding for their pages that force you to read every single article whether you wanted to or not, and if so that's a wickedly impressive bit of tech I'd say.

That's all for this week, folks!