The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” —Benjamin Franklin
For those who care, here’s the actual context of that quote, which has everything to do with taxes and nothing to do with privacy or safety from the government.
The “Safety” he’s referring to are bribes paid from certain landowners in order to be exempt from having their land be used defensively by the then-British colonies of America during the French and Indian War. So, literally paying for their physical safety.
If anything, it was very pro-government control, and an example of the shit modern politicians do as well because he was speaking about the these actions being for the “greater good” of the people.
But quotes gonna quote, I guess. I assume the tech-libertarians picked it up at some point and it spread from there. Feels very much like something from the “don’t tread on me” mid-2000s Tea Party era.
Not that I think the modern sentiment is wrong, to be fair, but the meaning of the quote has changed so much that I think it’s kind of pointless to attribute it to Franklin now unless we’re talking about taxing private land for military purposes.
This quote has been popular since long before tech-libertarians were a thing.
Of course, otherwise we wouldn’t still be using it.
But in the context of internet privacy, specifically, my guess is it was initially popularized by tech-libertarians or those who hung around on the conspiracy theory areas of the internet (Venn diagram overlaps a bit there, though not entirely).
There’s no doubt it was used as a quote for privacy in general before that.
I should hold back on my assumptions, though, so thanks for reminding me of that. Could obviously be very wrong.
I think they were referring specifically to the use of the quote in the context of privacy in tech.
At least, that was the whole reason they pointed out the discrepancy to begin with.
Edit: had the comments loaded up an hour ago, finally had time to read and respond, and then immediately saw their response to you from 49 minutes ago… rip.