Hacker News Reader

Comment by stegosaurus | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the battle here is about privacy, encryption, or any of that stuff.

It's really about trust in government.

It's about the specific meaning of the word 'trust' - the idea that 'trust' and 'distrust' are not equivalent to 'good' or 'bad'.

I can distrust my government, without thinking that they are bad.

When speaking to friends and family about this, that feels like the barrier. They believe that current western governments are generally 'good', and that historical ones were 'bad', accidents of some sort, that can't or won't happen again.

That troubles me, more so than any specific issue of the day.

View on HN

As a programmer... in some ways I feel like it's an issue of abstraction. Naming variables is hard. Right?

We have this 'Terrorism' abstraction. But that's not really what it is. You might have an instance of Terrorism, that affects two people. Then is it really Terrorism? Shouldn't it be something else? I'd say it's just Violence.

The same happens all over the place. Child abuse, theft, piracy, etc. The battle seems to be fought and won by the media when we decide on how to categorise and name things.

So we end up in some frankly absurd situations, because we think we're discussing Y, when actually we're discussing X.

I don't know how to solve this, I just want to get it out of my brain, because it really frustrates me and stops me bothering with debate most of the time when people don't even seem to realise they've done it.

If I thought that eliminating privacy would save 1 billion lives, I would do it. No euphemisms. That would be a sacrifice I'd feel sensible in making.

But I don't want to talk about 'encryption' and 'terrorism' because it's just bollocks, really. It's an absurd simplification; it's a euphemism. You're not discussing anything real anymore, you're just giving platitudes.

The real issue is that people are even talking about terrorism at all. By the state definition more people have died from tripping over their own feet than from terrorism in the last thirty years.

It is not about degrees of abstraction, it is about composition. Terrorism is a wrapper function to obscure the true intent behind the militarization of the police, the expansion of the military, and the implementation of the surveillance state - as a politician, you fear uncertainty and a lack of control. The natural state of affairs is to trend towards totalitarianism - the centralization of power and authority in a society absolutely - and it takes the vigilance of participants to repel its advances.

We have been doing a very poor job of that for quite a long time now, and the results of that gradual trend become more and more evident and indisputable.

Mmm.

I think what I'd say about this is that essentially 'Terrorism' has been defined as some sort of catastrophic instance, of collapse of society, fear of going outside, whatever.

But it's being applied to relatively trivial crimes (e.g. one soldier was stabbed in the UK, and that becomes 'terrorism', when really it's just premeditated murder).

I agree that there seems to be some sort of campaign to deliberately misuse terminology in this way. I'm just not sure what we can do to stop it other than to educate people about these 'tricks'.

Terrorism is just the threat. The nebulous conceptual threat - in the same way the US thought declaring war on psychoactive recreational plants was a sane proclamation, declaring war on the fundamental idea of violent political dissonance through fear is also equally untenable but also equally effective in placating the population through fear of the "other" / "sin" just by the simple animal brain logic of different == dangerous == threat == destroy.

You don't want to finely define your threat when you want the threat to be perpetual to justify your seizure of power. Is it sad that this is literally what the awful Star Wars Prequel's did? The evil sith lord orchestrated vacuous foes for the much larger, much stronger Republic to fear, and then used that fear to see himself given absolute power so as to seize total control of everything once the curtain was pulled back and he was revealed the ultimate puppet master.

In much the same way, terrorism in the modern world is constructed with American arms and money, to create the strife that funds private defense contractors and military arms manufacturer's profit margins. It is a fabrication to instill fear, to enable the expansion of authority in exactly the same way - and everyone agrees those movies were terribly written because the Emperor's plot seemed so impossible with so many people around him to see it, yet we are living it out ourselves in much the same way today - and the super majority of people are entirely ignorant, or even protective, of the fear-mongering.

I think declaring war against pot fit nicely into the puritanical history of America, and a few crazy controlling people like j edger hoover. We do seem to let those types get into power. Hopefully it won't happen with Trump. I would believe that some of those types of people would try things like that to control people.

But I think there's a lot larger group of conservative law enforcement and politicians that just go along with those restrictions.

Now I have even seen some republicans coming out against this national surveillance as they think about what it would be like if trump had access to that, instead of "their guy".

It will be hard to reverse the national surveillance state. The first step is contacting your representatives and reminding them of your objection.

I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but later redefine them to mean whatever crazy thing they actually meant. People seem to use this intentionally and unintentionally a lot.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

I'm with you, and want to add that the government is not at all monolithic.

I am a state employee, but I work for a University nonprofit. Needless to say they didn't open up the Book of Secrets during orientation. ;)

I distrust the FBI much more than the Supreme Court. I distrust the House more than the Senate. I distrust federal level more than state level.

It is a privilege to live under a diverse governing body and some of those bodies are, imho, more functional than others.

The most relevant quote i can think of:

    First they came for the Jews
    and I did not speak out
    because I was not a Jew.
    Then they came for the Communists
    and I did not speak out
    because I was not a Communist.
    Then they came for the trade unionists
    and I did not speak out
    because I was not a trade unionist.
    Then they came for me
    and there was no one left
    to speak out for me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

I do like the quote, but the part which isn't incorporated there is the conversion of the populace against the group.

It seems as if 'they' are another entity; but they're not, right? The government isn't some external group - they are an extension of you and me.

The current examples we have are pedophilia and terrorism, which have been painted as crimes so heinous that they must be eliminated from the planet, at any cost. And the general populace do seem to agree with that.

Once that happens I feel like we're done for, because all ability to debate rationally has been shut down.

There doesn't seem to be a cost benefit analysis going on - it's just all or nothing. One case of child abuse, 20 people shot in a school, and people lose their minds. How can we stop that? Is it the media? Is there something more nefarious going on? I don't know.

It's like - imagine that 90% of Jews were murderous villains. If that were true, perhaps civilization would be on the brink of collapse, and we'd have to forego the principle of innocent until proven guilty in order to prevent a descent into chaos.

But what we actually see is some tiny, minute fraction. 0.001% of users of encryption, say, are murderers. One so small that the world would continue to spin for quite a while, possibly indefinitely, if we simply did _nothing at all_ and waited for suspects to get caught.

And people go insane and call for actions against innocents.

It's just odd. Really odd.

> And the general populace do seem to agree with [getting rid of terrorism/rape/etc].

when framed that way, anyone would agree. However the measures being taken is eroding liberty, asserting more control over people. And yet, people agree to having such measures imposed, because they've been convinced via propaganda that those measures are effective.

The quote is apropo, because by the time they 'come for me' - me being the fact that the new rules instituted is now restricting me from being able to live the way i want - it's too late. Imagine if the gov't had a recording of you at all times - you'd be immediately identified as soon as you have an inkling of civil disobedience, or any hint of activism that the gov't disagrees with.

This _must_ be nipped in the bud, before you no longer have a process to affect change because you'd be too scared of the secret police.

You removed the 'at any cost' fragment from the sentence, which I think basically describes what you're saying.

I think it's about the tinkering occuring at all - basically, people are giving the government authority to fix problems which don't exist to begin with, or have minimal impact - and those fixes have negative side effects.

It's like re-writing a piece of software entirely to fix a radio button that doesn't work. Even if it's the only possible way to fix the radio button, is that really a good idea? Can't we just live without the radio button?

A more fleshed out example:

I could, tomorrow, drop a glass whilst retrieving it from an overhead cupboard, and blind myself when it smashes over my head. Something like that.

If I were worried about it, I could fix that particular situation by not storing glasses above my head.

What I wouldn't do, is go and remove every instance of glass or ceramic from my house.

That's what I often feel like these situations are coming down to. Someone gets shot in a school, and rather than looking at that problem, we go insane and look at 'how do guns get into the country at all' or 'how can other people end up with different thought patterns to me' or something utterly bonkers.

Glass falling over your head isn't exactly the same as a gun shooting in a school. When a glass breaks, that's an accident. When a gun fires - it does what it was made to do. Living in a guns-free society is not similar to a glass-free one IMHO.

> me being the fact that the new rules instituted is now restricting me from being able to live the way i want

The 'come for me' has a completely different meaning than 'restricting me from being able to live the way I want'.

A huge part of the problem is that when people start talking that way, they sound like that peasant on Monty Python's and The Holly Graal that keeps screaming "Look! I'm being repressed!"

When one goes through that route, however relevant and pressing issue he's taking about, people just tune out and ignore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com