Yes. If the alternative is a worldwide police state.
Being held accountable for crimes is your definition of a "police state"? Interesting.
What you're trying to hint at is political persecution, and there is the possibility of asylum for that. But let's differentiate between persecution and running away from crimes, and not muddy the waters. Not all crimes are the result of persecution.
Otherwise what's stopping anyone form breaking into your house, murdering your family to rob you and then fleeing abroad on asylum to avoid legal repercussions? If that was the status quo, you probably wouldn't exist anymore right now.
The "police state" is the one ensuring your family's safety. In our modern societies, we have outsourced the monopoly on violence to the police state, so that we can focus on work and hobbies, and that comes at the expense of trusting the state and holding it accountable through democracy.
The state will always go through cycles of opinion, witch hunts, political interference, and other malfeasances of power. It will probably be corrected, only to temporarily careen off the rails again. This is -the best case scenario- for a healthy democracy.
The only way to limit the effect of this meandering pathfinding on individuals is to place some things intentionally out of reach of the state. To abuse their power, then they must break the law. This triggers the correction that brings democracy back towards the just path. Without limits to break, the state will careen so far off the path that it may have a hard time righting itself.
We must force the state to use open coercion when it wants to stretch the limits of its reach. This is a critical element for democracy to function… its reach must have well defined limits that stop well short of any legal activity, even if it means criminals and deviants will face less obstacles. This is the cost of freedom.
That's not what I said.
>We must force the state to use open coercion when it wants to stretch the limits of its reach.
That's exactly what I said.
>even if it means criminals and deviants will face less obstacles
Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.
Like Franklin said, he'd rather 100 guilty people go free rather than a single innocent person jailed. He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.
You said earlier that the solution was to change the laws, and this is what we're saying right now. Change the laws so that VPNs are allowed and cryptography is allowed so that we can avoid the police state.
What does this have to do with anything? All jails now have innocent people in them due to process failures. How does quoting Franklin make them feel better?
>He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.
If by "free sate" you mean a high crime rate state where toothpaste needs to be locked up in CVS due to criminals being let free, then yeah.
My family is approximately infinitely more likely to be considered a "perpetrator" of a crime internet deanonymization will be used to prosecute (piracy, bad opinions, dealing in the wrong kind of crypto coins, ordering the wrong kind of chemicals from India) than to be a "victim" in our own estimation, so at least in this particular domain the "police state" is only ensuring the interests of some others, at the expense of my family's safety (which they could and would directly compromise using the violence they have monopolised).
