Friday, April 13, 2018

Seraphim Hanisch — Russia bans Telegram messaging service

FSB requests for decryption keys refused, prompting a nationwide ban of highly successful messaging platform.
The priorities for which governments are created are in descending order:

  1. national security
  2. good order
  3. general welfare
  4. distributed prosperity

People universally demand this.

Does this permit the abrogation of human and civil rights and constitutional liberties?

To some extent it does.

Here is why.

The first obligation of government to a society is to address existential threats. No right is absolute, even the right to life. It has been universally recognized that it is legitimate for a government to declare serious enough transgressions as capital offenses.

Therefore, a government can legitimately require extraordinary measures that compromise the right to privacy, for example.

Because this creates the opportunity (perverse incentive), fences and gateways must be constructed to ensure that legitimate requirements are not abused.

Whether nations are justified in particular cases must be approached case by case, and their implementation of means also.

I would personally prefer a straightforward way of approaching this, as Russia and China have, rather than a clandestine way that pretends to preserve rights and freedoms, e.g., by secretly requiring backdoors, as has the US.

With the globalization of the Internet, this issue affects just about everyone. It's not going away.

Russia Feed
Russia bans Telegram messaging service
Seraphim Hanisch

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