Schneier 5 days ago:

"Ah, but that's the thing: You can't build a "back door" that only the good guys can walk through. Encryption protects against cybercriminals, industrial competitors, the Chinese secret police and the FBI. You're either vulnerable to eavesdropping by any of them, or you're secure from eavesdropping from all of them.

Back-door access built for the good guys is routinely used by the bad guys. In 2005, some unknown group surreptitiously used the lawful-intercept capabilities built into the Greek cell phone system. The same thing happened in Italy in 2006.

In 2010, Chinese hackers subverted an intercept system Google had put into Gmail to comply with U.S. government surveillance requests. Back doors in our cell phone system are currently being exploited by the FBI and unknown others."

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/03/opinion/schneier-apple-encrypt...

This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage for something like this.

In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.

I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]

At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?

[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.

[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .

> Serious question: why does this even bother you?

Not the person you aimed the question at, but…

I worked as a volunteer counsellor for a few years in my twenties. Some of the stuff I encountered during those years was folk who were going through horrific, long-term abuse.

One of the patterns that you notice is that abusers go to a lot of effort at times to show that their behaviour as normal. Both as a tool to justify it to themselves (this is normal — everybody does it — I'm not a bad person or doing anything bad), and as a tool to further control the abused (this is normal — this is what you should expect — you won't get any better elsewhere).

Anecdotally the ones who can find or create an active "community" of abusers — where two best friends both hit their partners and acknowledge it to each other, where everybody in an extended family beats on their kids, etc. — the abuse is worse because there is little or no sense of shame in what's done.

It's normal.

Now this was the 90s. Before subreddits were around. But this is why it bothers me. Yes, it's just words. But those words are probably making the lives of other people worse.