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Comment by awinter-py | Hacker News Reader

This will backfire. Institutions (large corps as well as police & intelligence orgs) think they want this information to use for 'precrime' projects and also to use as evidence in court.

However -- bureaucracy has always been vulnerable to its own overreach. An invasive legal system is a tax on productivity & innovation. If laws are society's immune system, an invasive police state is a society with an autoimmune disorder.

Tiny countries that can offer alternative systems will become destinations for a new generation of skilled or wealthy expats. Delaware offers benefits to corporations; Estonia is offering benefits to tech expats; this phenomenon will increase.

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Bigger countries can pressure smaller countries to adopt their invasive legal system, unless it benefits the most powerful people like for example tax havens. I don't think there are so many countries that we can afford natural selection to take place.

Anyway, What is the relation between this app and legislation? As I see it this app is perfectly legal right now, even if I don't like it.

Was Russia really drawing many foreigners to begin with?

it's not a russia issue, it's an everywhere issue. snowden stuff aside, police just got caught installing automatic listeners in california. texas police are trading license plate capture data to camera makers in exchange for free LPR equipment.

Private companies are using surveillance technology on their employees and on their users.

So how will this backfire?

If it's an everywhere issue, then I doubt that it will result in e.g. mass migration towards the few places that won't do it; people have shown in practice that they do not "vote with their feet" (or with revolutions) unless the abuse escalates to either very severe state violence or very severe economic hardship.

Sure, a minority of idealists will do so, but in the thousands, not in the millions. That doesn't matter in the large scale - to do so, it would have to match something like the jewish and other refugee flow from central europe in 1930ies. Currently, for every talented person that would consider leaving USA for political reasons, there are ten or hundred talented people that would rather come to USA for economic reasons, even if their current country doesn't do much or any surveillance.

The primary issue isn't the fact that people will leave, it's their reason for leaving -- surveillance-based policing makes life uncertain and work inefficient. Top-down societies will fail whether or not their innovators jump ship.

Look at the shenzhen special economic zone in china; it evolved into something special because entrepreneurs were able to act without extreme government control at every step.

It's forgiveness vs permission. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, i.e. it's more efficient. But surveillance-based law creates a permission society. Opportunities to fail or break the rules are also opportunities to succeed. You can't say 'we're only going to allow you to run the experiments that will work'.

I think the point he was trying to make is that, this type of tech will drive talent out of countries such as Russia.

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