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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

But that's government surveillance, and HN comments are supposed to say that it's always bad and much worse than ISIS, right?

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Not that I’m speaking for everyone on HN, but the problem is generally with wide-ranging surveillance of the entire populace in the hopes that they can data-mine their way to victory. Figuring out techniques like this to surveil actual terrorists and criminals based on probable cause is what the police and intelligence community should be doing.

Nobody is against using technology against known foreign terrorists. We're against mass surveillance against our own people.

Well sometimes you cannot tell...

Since when it's better to assume that everybody is guilty?

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Here's an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what it seems to say. Not at all.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-ben-franklin-really-said

And maybe it doesn't matter so much what Franklin was actually trying to say because the quotation means so much to us in terms of the tension between government power and individual liberties. But I do think it is worth remembering what he was actually trying to say because the actual context is much more sensitive to the problems of real governance than the flip quotation's use is, often.

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...

from npr link:

>Far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.

>It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security.

So if it were bombs instead of surveillance you would bomb the target when you're uncertain about its enemy status?

And since we're talking about mass surveillance... I guess carpet bombing?

... this is an obviously terrible argument. If you surveil someone secretly and then decide not to act on the intelligence, they aren't harmed in any way. They don't even know. The mistakenly assassinated are still dead.

Yes. They. Are.

EDIT For example the mere knowledge of surveillance changes how people interact. This has a chilling effect upon speech that is not compatible with a robust democracy.

As long as the data is discarded after the fact. People can be harmed if that data is kept and then repurposed in unforseen ways which are harmful to the surveiled non-terrorist.

so you're saying mass surveillance is victimless as long as nobody learns that they specifically have been spied upon?

I am not pro survellience but, in my opinion, sort of surveiling terrorists using the official chat.ISIS distro is basically the narrow usecase where moderates find it acceptable.

Obviously, the problem is that it is not being used this narrowly and that the power to do a global sweep is a negatively skewed power imbalance.

That said, I wonder who Is going to fund the A round.

The app is developed, maintained, and used by a terrorist group where the primary purpose is to showcase terrorist activities and propaganda. There is a world of difference between monitoring citizens on tools primarily used for non-illegal purposes (though sometimes those tools are abused), and monitoring people using a tool with the explicit aim of displaying terrorist activities.

I don't and most people don't have a problem with signals intelligence. I do have a problem with the tools used, how they're used, and who they're used against.

Mainly, a dragnet gathering intelligence on the entire citizen population is scary and terrible. Sigint targeting pseudo-state terrorists? Who has a problem with that?

Most objections to surveillance are not to all forms of government surveillance, instead people are objecting to extra-legal, and arguably illegal, mass surveillance. Those opposing mass surveillance tend to argue along some subset of following lines:

1. it is ineffective compared with other techniques,

2. it is government graft to favored contractors,

3. mass surveillance databases and collection points provide an excellent target for foreign intelligence agencies and others,

4. it is harmful to privacy and liberty,

5. it is rife for government abuse and blackmail,

6. it undermines the rule of law.

I have yet to see anyone argue against lawful and warranted targeted surveillance of known terrorists. I claim that none of the above objections hold in the targeted surveillance case.

I'm pretty sure subverting ISIS' crypto falls under the legitimate purview of state intelligence agencies - mass domestic surveillance and backdooring consumer hardware and software are different.

If these were drug dealers, though, and not terrorists, HN would be in an uproar.

You got a few answers. I'm curious, did you change your mind on the subject of mass surveillance?

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