Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

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First let me say I agree that mass surveillance is wrong and even if it did help, I wouldn't support it. But, the attitude that our side tends to have towards people who believe surveillance is worthwhile is not helpful. Responses like this are not constructive:

> So I guess the time to politicize these attacks has come already. Pity.

Believe it or not the people pushing for surveillance are not villains out of a movie or TV show. They see a tragedy like Paris and they really believe that more surveillance would help prevent these kinds of things in the future. They may be misguided and wrong from our perspective, but that doesn't make them evil.

When it comes to political issues it's very helpful if you can avoid reducing your opponents to caricatures. Usually they are motivated by the same thing you are; they want to fix a problem. It's just they disagree about the solution, or sometimes even what the problem is.

And either way complaining about people you disagree with "politicizing" a tragedy is absurd. Immediately after the tragedy is exactly the time we should be taking steps to prevent it in the future.

> Believe it or not the people pushing for surveillance are not villains out of a movie or TV show. They see a tragedy like Paris and they really believe that more surveillance would help prevent these kinds of things in the future.

Having the character genuinely believe that their harmful actions will serve the greater good is pretty much the most frequent advice to writing believable villains in any context, including for movies or TV shows.

> Immediately after the tragedy is exactly the time we should be taking steps to prevent it in the future.

Immediately after the tragedy is when we should start taking steps to understand why it happened, and how (and at what costs) similar tragedies could be prevented. Jumping based on emotionally-driven haste into steps intended to prevent recurrence without due consideration is a great way to maximize the effect of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and to prove the adage about the paving material used in the road to perdition.

The problem is I think you will find that no one thinks they are doing evil; yet their actions end up causing more harm than good.

Stanford prison experiment, Milgram, etc show this ability to rationalize and do things socially unacceptable in an every day context.

We collectively need to discuss what is right and wrong; point out gaps and bias, and opt for most benefit/least harm.

Mass surveillance/security theatre appears to have high cost, little benefit and negative consequences for those its meant to protect.

To be fair, there are people out there who are pushing for surveillance and war because it is financially beneficial (see: the major rise in weapons company's stock prices since the attack). You have examples of intelligence higher-ups who leave govt work and go on to open private security consultancies where they are paid enormous sums; they reap quite a windfall for their roll in pushing surveillance. They may not be cartoon villains but its hard to argue they are trying to do whats right for the country, and coincidentally it also will make them fabulously wealthy.

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