This is what people mean when they say “turnkey surveillance states”: you end up 1-3 laws away from almost instant total government surveillance of all citizen activity. The trillion dollar infrastructure was built by you and me for free from their POV (we paid them to do it with taxes), and now they can just say they want to use it
Access to all peoples communications is simply incredibly lucrative. If it is out there, and it is, those with interest in it will attempt to get it.
If it's not done openly, will be done secretly(like in the USA as revealed by Wikileaks).
Normally I support the position of political progress("We" and the politicians are not different subset of people, EU is not bunch of Belgians) instead of technological solutions. However, this time I think we need a technological solution.
No matter who is in charge, the temptation is too big if the access is possible. They don't even have to have malicious intents, all kind of people's job will get much easier if they had access to the communications of others.
GPG doesn’t solve the problem of metadata surveillance. One of the major problems with technological solutions to privacy problems is that metadata surveillance is extremely useful to begin with, and it’s hard to make communication anonymous.
For what it's worth, implementations like Delta Chat support encrypted subject lines[0].
Also, it would be relatively simple for mail providers to act as two halves of a Cypherpunk remailer[1]. By that I mean that when alice@sender writes an email to bob@recipient, the sender server only sees "remailer@recipient" as the recipient and the recipient server only sees "remailer@sender" as the sender.
That approach just requires some onion-layering of the emails with encryption, and a reserved key-pair advertised per mail server.
True but people with private communications don't usually need to hide their metadata. Who cares if they know you are communicating with your friends and family if they don't know you are complaining about the thin skinned government.
Anonymity is an issue, but it is far from the most important issue.
Rather than fixing our democratic systems, the digital revolution may have just made them worse, by encouraging societies to entrust the counting of ballots to machines, and then unsurprisingly stop trusting those machines as soon as they give an answer that half the population don't like.
Even in societies that still rely on analogue vote counting, it is unclear whether instant access to digital information has made societies more informed or misinformed on average.
If you send a letter, the USPO automatically takes and stores a picture of the envelope, and will show it to law enforcement upon request - no warrant required. Pen & paper has is a meta-data leak.
Well you can do what we did in the UK: the non apathetic portion of propagandised society collectively decided to exit the EU backed by some dubious political and financial motives, immediately followed by slow deregulation and privatisation of everything while embracing corruption and nepotism.
So you can live in a rising socialist surveillance dystopia or robocop style capitalist dystopia. It's political hysteresis and the only thing that reverses it is war.
What has been privatised recently? Train operating companies have been nationalised, but I'm not aware of any privatisation taking place. There is talk of Channel 4 but that is it as far as I can tell.
They haven’t finished the deregulation bit yet. They need to do that so they can hide the funding streams and private market involvement. Watch this space.
What would a world war have to do with reminding people of privacy?
World War 2 gave China and Soviet Russia a new sense of privacy?
WW2 made the US worse as a place in most regards, not better. That's what caused the US to build its military industrial complex, to install a massive standing global military, to primarily guard against the Europeans going on rampage again for the nth time (which was guaranteed to happen with the USSR very eager to conquer even more of Europe in the days post WW2).
From WW2 the US got a dramatically expanded (and more intrusive) Federal Government, surveillence state and war machine, encouraged by Hoover's aggressive domestic actions and all the newly minted three letter agencies (CIA 1947, NSA 1952, NRO 1960, ATF 1972, DEA 1973).
A third world war would make the governments even more paranoid, scared, and intrusive, not less.
You wouldn't want to see what the involved governments would do to their people as a war involving the US, Russia, China, and various countries in Europe and Asia broke out. The stakes would be as high as they could possibly be, given the nuclear arsenals in existence now. Privacy would rapidly sink toward zero, and that conflict would be an extraodinary argument in favor of zero privacy (according to the governments): for no mistakes can be tolerated, the dangers are too high, no privacy can be afforded (they would claim).
If we accept the (unconventional) view that the Cold War was WW3, then it could be argued that the countries which escaped Russian domination learned the value of privacy (even if their appreciation of it has waned over time).
You're right, though, that it's probably not worth getting our hopes up about what sort of societies would exist after WW4 (based on that numbering system).
> A third world war would make the governments even more paranoid, scared, and intrusive, not less.
Exactly, and the consequences to the average person would be so severe that they would begin valuing privacy again. A lot of people in WW2 quickly learned that not having information about their religious or political affiliation public was a matter of life or death.
