Category: Libertarian

It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

-Daniel Webster

The Tor Project (quite understandably under the circumstances) wasn’t willing to put anyone forward to discuss the matter of surveillance vs privacy in a debate on Euronews with Rob Wainwright – smoothest law enforcer in the world, and also the Director of the European Police Office, better known as Europol, who is currently trying to convince the European Parliament to grant police forces more power.

This offends me.

So, presented with the opportunity of a senior government official, I got a little cute, which is always a good idea. To the question:

You must appreciate, Preston Byrne, the problems the police are facing in this area? 

I replied:

I do. But I also appreciate the jurisprudence that most European and western countries have followed for the last 200 years. Which requires judicial supervision of these processes.

When a relative unknown such as myself is the only option to make this – in my view essential – point because a (major, globally-important) project like Tor is unwilling to stand up to a police force that is possibly investigating them with aforementioned extrajudicial powers, there’s a problem with the people’s relationship with the state. A big one, that – for the benefit of everybody – needs to be fixed. It won’t get fixed unless a consensus emerges for (a) law reform and (b) adequate budget provisioning for police retraining so they can work with advanced technology in the context of a more traditional policing model. Absent that, the police will have little choice but to continue to rely on the crutch of mass surveillance to make up the difference.

Preserving liberty is worth some additional budget. 

I know your typical natural-born European isn’t overly keen on standing up to authority, but when it comes to civil liberties, a little sass goes a long way. And American liberals do irreverent lip better than almost anyone else (n.b., I also hold an EU passport, so when I say “we” in the recording I mean “Europeans” – although America has a surveillance problem as well). Check out the programme and the highlights reel below.

When you’re done, read Hannah Arendt. 

(EDIT, 5 FEB 2015: For an example of how awesomely “post-libertarianism” works in practice, check out this superb suggestion from the Adam Smith Institute (of which I’m a fellow) here.)

Thanks to the ASI’s Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood, and the Liberty League’s Anton Howes, for bringing this excellent article by Jeffrey Friedman to my attention:

Libertarians… should understand better than anyone the importance of subverting one’s own natural intellectual complacency with the constant reminder that one might be wrong. The only remedy for the sloppiness that has plagued libertarian scholarship is to become one’s own harshest critic. This means thinking deeply and skeptically about one’s politics and its premises and, if one has libertarian sympathies, directing one’s scholarship not at vindicating them, but at finding out if they are mistaken.

To transcend libertarianism, in short, is to view its underlying concerns as stimuli to research that may, or may not, produce libertarian conclusions. In this sense there is no reason that non-libertarians might not make better post-libertarians than libertarians themselves. But for libertarians, the benefits of transcendence are greater. Only if one divorces oneself from all attachment to libertarian ideology does it become possible to dispel the gnawing fear that the facts will not bear out one’s predetermined conclusions.

This – the perpetual obligation to defend a position before one has the necessary information to assess its accuracy – is a terrible burden to bear. The consequentialist libertarian, having made the leap from skeptic to prophet, comes to identify himself with his political convictions. So he lives, or should live, in fear that the next social problem or environmental threat or economic crisis will be the one that finally shows those convictions to be inadequate.

This is the psychological problem for which orthodox libertarianism is a palliative. Once consequentialism is overlaid with “philosophy,” one should, in principle, have no fear: libertarianism is right, come what may. But among conscientious libertarians the fear persists beneath the surface; as Boaz understands, the consequences of libertarianism remain important to libertarians, even when they try to bury such concerns beneath layers of ideological sediment.

-Jeffrey Friedman, “What’s Wrong with Libertarianism,” 1997

Note that “Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks” was also published in 1997. Consider whether it’s time the practice of crypto caught up with the intellectual tradition it claims as its guidepost.