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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

So, you know, what the hell do we do? Every day there's a news story like this: "Man/woman/child does totally innocuous thing X; is expelled from school/arrested and jailed/has house raided and burgled by police/beaten/shot." Every single story, it could have been me. I make offensive jokes, do funny-looking stuff with technology, and hang out with other people like myself. I have an interest in not getting fucked over for no reason.

What do we do? I don't have any idea what to do. As far as I know, no politicians are offering to change this situation. Is there some way to fix this system?

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I'm moving. I you look at history, the way it's historically worked is that a country, for whatever reason, finds itself in a position of global power, it becomes hyperactively restrictive over the course of decades by slowly eroding civil liberties via "think of the children" bullshit campaigns. Then, when the time is right, a person who is perfectly willing to fully use all the draconian powers granted to him--the ones that people naively assumed would be interpreted "reasonably"--will create some of a police state.

Those states tend to implode after a while (normally with the death of the leader). But when it's all happened, it's too late. It's difficult to escape after that, and the damage is done.

So you leave. You leave the USSR for Europe. You leave China for the USA.

Then when the USA, UK, et al start feeling suspiciously like the USSR used to, you find a country that's on the correct side of the political pendulum, and go there.

The first phase of my plan to leave was to get geographically and financially independent. That's done. The next is picking the right place, and getting there.

That's what you do.

OTOH we occasionally read the story: Terrorist posted comments on Twitter feed before smuggling bomb onto plane.

In a way, it's our fault (us being the public). When we demand childishly that our security systems be comprehensive and infallible enough to catch every single would-be attacker, we inevitably end up catching a bunch of false positives in the net as well.

I have to say, I am quite skeptical of that "we." There's a small media feeding frenzy every time there's any kind of "security" hubbub, but how many normal people actually support these measures after reading accounts of them? How many would support them if the media climate were more levelheaded? Precious few, I suspect.

(Based purely on my anecdata talking to friends and family, it's 0%, but I'm sure there's a minority of folks around who really do support such things.)

Look at the recent "underwear bomber" escapade. There, we had much more credible circumstantial evidence pointing at the suspect in advance (e.g. the dad's phone call about him.) That is a hundred times more damning than this Twitter post -- although still not terribly damning, if you ask me -- and yet, he flew. Was there some great popular outrage that we didn't catch him in advance of his flight? Not as far as I can tell; mostly, there was a great CNN and op-ed outrage.

I'd guess the way the Paul Chambers incident was dealt with was as harsh as it is because the underwear bomber story happened about three weeks before his tweet. No one in the chain of people he dealt with wanted to be in the position the person who said don't worry about the underwear bomber is in.

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