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Comment by darpa_escapee | Hacker News Reader

Total surveillance is sold under guise of preventing terrorism, but the main effect is simple: it allows the status quo to become entrenched and permanent.

You are rendered economically exploitable and politically neutered. There is a reason the state and intelligencies, from the Pinkertons to the FBI, have had a historical obsession with extensive spying on political movements and economic assembly. Both have real potential to change society.

Would the civil or labor rights movements be possible under these conditions? Both threatened the bottom lines of powerful people. The FBI tried to persuade MLK to commit suicide by digging up dirt from his love life. He was considered a national security threat[0].

[0] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncens...

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Yes. We are told these measures are taken to protect our national security, but in reality they are meant to protect the government.

Take the ongoing incident with Hillary Clinton's email server, for example. Clinton was quick to support scrapping 4th amendment rights (Patriot Act) in the name of security, but when it came to state secrets, she played it fast and loose (at best). It took 15 years and a scandal before the Secretary of State's emails were finally secured. We started a mass surveillance program practically the day after 9/11.

We are starting to forget we are supposed to have things like civil liberties, and that the exceptions made for wartime only work if war is not permanent. The war on terror has no end. Before terror, it was drugs and communism. The government will never stop coming up with reasons it needs more power.

The war where government agencies compete for more resources probably don't help either.

"Entrenched and permanent" is a bit exaggerated, as the governments of pervasive-surveillance East Germany and the Soviet Union discovered.

The Stasi and KGB couldn't dream of the technology and telecommunications networks that enable today's surveillance society.

They would have considered every citizen paying money to carry around a tracking device with attached cameras and microphones and broadcasting nearly every detail of their private life to public forums fanciful science fiction.

A small correction: The communists (Stasi and KGB) would have made it compulsory to not broadcast it but to unicast/multicast it to servers owned by the Party politburo.

Communism is horrendously corrupt and inflicts great control on all its "lesser equal" citizens. Read this report about how Chinese communists have told microblogging sites to hire “self-discipline commissioners” [1].

[1] https://rsf.org/en/news/weibo-microblog-users-be-deducted-po...

To pretend this is unique to communism ignores that this can happen in any society where rights are ignored and authority has absolute power with no accountability.

I've seen forums shut down because admins got a visit from the FBI and decided that running a site that garners that much attention from the state isn't a risk they want to take. One was a comedy forum that leaned a little more left of center near the 2012 election. Memes and words might endanger national security.

> The communists (Stasi and KGB) would have made it compulsory to not broadcast it but to unicast/multicast it to servers owned by the Party politburo.

Today, we see our government pushing for something similar: unencrypted communication over networks they have captured to servers they can access unimpeded (Google, FB, Skype etc).

This had nothing whatsoever to do with the ideology itself, but with those who implemented it and were in power controlling the state apparatus. Communism shouldn't have a state exerting control on citizens at all.

Governments are horrendously corrupt and seek increased control over all its citizens. The ideology doesn't much matter after the initial revolutionary sentiment settles down.

I think "permanent" in the sense of "until the state collapses and the government, and the nation, ceases to exist" is a fair use of the word.

It's not accurate. "Permanent" means "something that lasts forever," not "something that lasts for a while, until it stops existing."

Language isn't that strict.

It is. The fact that many people use language incorrectly is beside the point.

No, it isn't. I suggest you read some of Wittgenstein's work on perfectly logical languages and how they're impossible.

I've read Wittgenstein, and I wasn't terribly impressed.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is merely ignorant of the superior wisdom and knowledge you have attained.

I got a job, permanent role. Does it mean I will live forever?

No, it means that the role will exist forever at that company, as far as anyone knows. It means the company has no plans to ever eliminate it. You may die or quit, but then someone else will be hired to do that job.

Except permanent jobs are frequently made redundant and cease to exist. The original intention may have been for the job to exist forever but things change, and permanent things cease to be so permanent. Much like countries...

As I wrote above, it means that the role is permanent as far as anyone knows. It does not mean that you will permanently be doing that job. It means that, based on all available current information, the job will continue to exist forever.

Of course, people can and do make mistakes. The fact that someone chooses to use a word to describe something does not mean that it's necessarily an accurate description. They may be lying, or they may simply have judged the situation incorrectly. How many startups say "we are the next Google"?

So then, using your logic, the governments of East Germany and the Soviet Union would, at the time, have been considered permanent, as those governments were expected to last forever as far as anyone knew.

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