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I Want Privacy for Illegal Things

When in Thailand, I sent a postcard to my mum. “The man on the stamp is the local despot”, I said. “He’s a cunt”.

I later found out that this sentence made me eligible for jail time, or death, which makes this the biggest crime I have ever committed. Post cards, unfortunately, cannot make use of end-to-end encryption (at least not when writing to my mum), but a privacy respecting protocol would undoubtedly solve the problem.

Canadian law recently changed to allow people to smoke cannabis. If the initial laws had worked in clamping down the use of cannabis, none of the pro-cannabis campaigning could have succeeded. Nobody would have thought ‘I miss back when I could smoke cannabis, so I’ll start the campaigning again, and one day have a joint’. They valued smoking weed because they already smoked weed. If police could have enforced anti-cannabis laws perfectly, no campaign or informed debate could have taken place, so nobody could have fixed the bad law.

Police could never have perfectly enforced the law, or even enforced it well, without mass surveillance. The crime hurt nobody, so nobody could have informed the police of any illegal acts with a clean conscience. The change in law required a healthy cannabis culture, which required a large populating of people who habitually smoked weed without being caught or causing any fuss.

Moving back in time a little, people wanted privacy to go to gay clubs. Police attacked and imprisoned these people for centuries, but the gay clubs survived, and re-emerged every time someone destroyed one. They survived simply because people could attend discretely. They even had a sort of encrypted language - a ‘cant’ called Polari[a], which allowed them to discuss hookups in the open.

[a]

And before that, we have Feminists, anti-monarchists, et c. ad nauseum.

Anyone embracing mass surveillance for the benefits must either claim they don’t want to see a gay marriage with a cannabis bar, or claim that bad governance is a thing of the past.