What if said software is being used to manipulate national interests from a civilian level and its owned by an adverserial nation?
That’s one of the costs of liberty. The government will need to find another way.
The barrier to banning something in the interests of national security must be much higher than “this could be used by our enemies.” That’s the entire basis for the War on a Terror, the Patriot Act, and the NSA spying on Americans, and I won’t stand for it. It’s also the same idea as banning books, that’s just not how a free society works.
You combat misinformation through integrity and transparency, not bans.
That’s one of the costs of liberty. The government will need to find another way.
No, that’s not liberty. If the average user would have any way of detecting when software is doing nefarious thighs, then sure, you’d be right, but the average user can’t possibly know that software is misbehaving just like they couldn’t have possibly known that asbestos or lead was bad for them. Software is opaque. As long as it remains opaque, consumers are unsuspecting victims and need help.
Side tangent, but your oopsie of Nefarious Things to “Nefarious Thighs” fucking FLOORED me xD Wish I could detect nefarious thighs!
average user can’t possibly know
Hence the information campaign to make people aware.
Look at cigarettes, they are harmful and therefore have a strong information campaign to inform the public. I highly doubt you’ll find anyone today who isn’t aware of the dangers of smoking, but just 100 years ago, it was considered classy and largely innocuous. The difference was a big information campaign to counter the tobacco lobby’s attempts to spin smoking as somehow healthy.
The government’s role should be to make opaque things transparent, not to bad things that could be harmful. At the same time, they can spy on other countries to get an idea of what types of control they can exert, which would help them better inform the public.
But at the end of the day, it’s up to the individual what they choose to believe. Liberty is having the freedom to make poor choices, and to live with the consequences. The government’s role should be to earn our trust, but they violate it at every opportunity in the name of “security” (NSA, TSA, etc). Yes, a lot of people will ignore it, and that’s a part of having liberty.
Banning software is not the same as banning books, lol. Books are passive ideas, software is active and can be used for espionage. You’re creating a false equivalence here.
They’re absolutely in the same category.
If the government can ban things in the name of “national security” based on little more than “it’s potentially dangerous,” what’s stopping them from labeling any platform that doesn’t censor information the way they want as “dangerous” and subject to bans?
The government doesn’t get to choose what I run on my computers, nor do they get to choose what books I read, what movies I watch, etc.
