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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Silly laws exist because they may not be obeyed. Citizens get around them, enforcers get around them and the message never bites the policy makers in the ass - the people that are responsible for this mess are often not even aware that they made a mistake.

So I am claiming that loss of privacy that I perceive inevitable in face of modern and upcoming technology is not necessary bad thing because it may create the demand for fixing some stupid rules that may cause some of us harm.

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I used to think the same way, but I'm not so sure it's a good idea now.

Problem is that it's much easier to ignore bad rules than it is to fix them. You're assuming that if everyone had to abide by the bad rules, they'd get fixed. I'm not sure that's the case - the examples I gave indicate that when you force employees to abide by bad rules, they just start acting badly.

When I was younger, I used to find it very frustrating that the rules said one thing but the way everyone acted was something else. We even have a word for that: "hypocrisy". But as I've gotten older and occasionally even been responsible for creating some of those rules, I've started realizing that the rules are an abstraction. They're there to set expectations. They aren't followed exactly because they can't be followed exactly, and if you try you end up with absurdities like confiscated toothpaste. I'm not so certain that fixing the laws will work, both because it's difficult and because it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.

> I'm not sure that's the case - the examples I gave indicate that when you force employees to abide by bad rules, they just start acting badly.

If there is a strong asymmetry between law makers and people who must respect the law (such as in case of employers and employees) people will obey because they have no choice. But even then they will vote with their legs leaving environment that is governed by stupid laws. In case of state and citizens in democracy there is no such strong asymmetry because government must maintain appearance that it works for the people.

> it's quite possible that the reason the laws are broken is because they can't take every situation into account, not because their authors were stupid.

Same thing with computer programs or any complex system but it should not stop us from striving for improvement and inventing tools that may make such improvement possible.

I think that surveillance is one such tool that allows to monitor how much harm enforcing given law can cause and may lead to fixing the law.

I think you really underestimate the desire of people to not have to be bothered with this kind of stuff. No matter how insane things get people tend to say "well, it could be worse. We've still got beer and football".

I would, for example, never consider moving to the UK with their surveillance, etc., but they obviously have a large populace that disagrees.

Trying to force people into doing something they just don't want to do never works.

What happens when a stupid rule only affects a small minority of people, and the majority can't understand the fuss? (Remember when some guy got arrested and put on the sex offender registry for his manga collection having some lolicon stuff in it? A few people were outraged; most just laughed and had no idea what the case was about.)

Privacy is nice because it doesn't require large numbers of people to act sanely.

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