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Comment by forgotmypassw | Hacker News Reader

I'll quote Kim Dotcom as a counter argument:

>Our Governments: "We spy on all of you to keep you safe". But why have your mass surveillance systems failed to prevent the Paris attacks?

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If you've ever seen the spies running those programs you'll understand why it happened. They look and act much like the terrorists. Drunk on power with a feeling of invincibility (e.g. sociopaths).

They ARE the terrorists.

The cycle of government:

1. We need this tool to stop terrorists. if you don't give up liberty for safety, the terrorists win.

2. (Inevitable terror attack happens)

3. Our tools weren't strong enough to stop the terrorists. We need _more_ tools and a larger mandate to stop them.

I've been told that, due to the above cycle, we should all realize that the primary purpose of government is to pretend to fail.

Why do you say their purpose is to only pretend to fail? Governments have very little incentive to succeed in many areas. Terrorism appears to be much like regular crime in that if there is little, the government is lauded, and if there is a lot, the government is given more money and power to fight it.

*edit: I do not mean to say that government officials were willfully negligent; they have been given an impossible task, and their jobs depend on believing that a little more money and power will allow them to succeed.

I don't think we need complicated conspiracy theories that demonise intelligence workers to explain this sort of narrative. There's now a group of people whose job is to use bulk data intercept to predict and stop crimes before they happen, essentially a Minority Report but real (they do other things too, but let's ignore that for now).

As no group of people can be 100% effective, they will always occasionally fail even if they succeed most of the time, and when they do their explanation for their own failure will always be "we needed more". And they will truly believe that! No secret agenda needed. From their POV it's the only answer they can possibly give.

I fully expect in the coming weeks to learn (shock) that the terrorists had Facebook accounts, used WhatsApp, searched on Google, used iPhones and the DGCE will undoubtably claim that if they had access to all those things the plot could have been detected earlier and stopped. What else are they gonna say? "Whoops, our bad"?

I completely agree with all of your points, and did not mean to imply that governments caused these attacks, or were willfully negligent. I apologize if I did not express this in my previous post.

The assumption is that governments (and the people supporting it) assume mass surveillance keeps people 100% safe. That is not necessarily the case, anything higher then 0% if you disregard social costs is a win in their view.

Then they should publish annual or quarterly reports detailing their counter-terrorism ops and how many terrorist attacks they foiled thanks to the surveillance and smart data algorithms and how many they failed to avert and why that happened and who are responsible for the fiasco and what measures to be taken in the future to avoid this outcome, you know a true and functioning democracy in a free society.

The argument shouldn't be that mass surveillance doesn't work. It clearly does something or they wouldn't want it. The point is that even if it does work, we shouldn't do it because it goes against our values. Freedom has a price.

There is currently no law for mass surveillance in France, and the soon to be voted laws are the application of lawful wire phone tap to the 21 century : IMSI catcher and computer spyware

I hear on the news from time to time that terrorist attacks in my country are stopped from time to time thanks to surveillance systems, I guess it's the same for France, so I don't see what the problem is.

propoganda

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