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Comment by planetjones | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree with the quote above, but I don't find this as clear a cut issue as perhaps many on HN do. It's undoubtable that surveillance is becoming harder now and that groups who would bring great harm to innocent people are using the internet for research and communication. I don't know what the answer is, but encrypting everyone's communications end-to-end with no-one able to ever intercept does sound like it will make protecting us very hard indeed. And yes, I know these tools for strong encryption are out there and they can't be un-invented - but I can see why Governments want to do "something". I am just saying what that "something" is becomes difficult to define.

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The problem is that domestic mass surveillance is not that effective at stopping these people. Everytime there is a terrorist attack or mass shooting it seems that we get the same story of "they were known to the local police/FBI" or that their family had concerns. Spying on everyone is just increasing the size of the haystack and making it harder for someone to follow up on actual hard intelligence.

Another alternative is to have limited surveillance that requires a judge to sign off on it after seeing a good reason to suspect someone. Personally I have no issue with that - it's a model that has worked for decades and strikes a balance between public safety and personal liberty.

Terrorism and mass shootings are going to continue until we address the root causes and even then we will still have occasional incidents. The public need to have realistic expectations and stop with knee jerk reactions that result in security theatre like the TSA.

  > Spying on everyone is just increasing the size of the
  > haystack and making it harder for someone to follow up
  > on actual hard intelligence.

No no, you see, because big data. Probably also clouds. /s

Seriously, I think this ship has sailed; we can only find new ways to operate under our new circumstances, rather than preventing them from coming about as we could have done up until maybe 15 years ago.

The most charitable interpretation I can find for the nascent global surveillance state is that world governments are (quite reasonably, in my view) collectively anticipating great upheaval in the near to mid-term future, and recognise that they must do something to keep a hand on the rudder.

I do not believe that a unilateral panopticon (i.e. "we are watching you, but you may not watch us") is the right response, and I dislike that it is being presented as an anti-terror/anti-piracy/anti-{localized-name($bad-people)} measure, rather than described honestly. What worries me enormously is that the nationalist right is also on the rise at the same time.

If we are lucky, it may all lead to greater worldwide unity in the long term, but I am not hopeful that this will transpire within my lifetime.

> If we are lucky, it may all lead to greater worldwide unity

In order to reach that point, we need to protect diversity in the middle of all this integration that is happening with the internet. "Integration in differentiation", and "differentiation in integration", are necessary principles for a healthy society.

Practically protecting diversity would mean protecting privacy, the right to express political views the right to be different. If we can't protect diversity we get to the regime of 1984.

There is a profound biological reason for this concept - neurons in the brain are differentiated by being differently connected, and are integrated by virtue of said connections. So they are both diverse and integrated, and the result is conscious mind - a system that can handle both highly complex dynamism and balance. The theory of integrated information is one of the most respected theories about consciousness. We should strive to be more like the brain.

Another practical point is that concentration of power is detrimental. It leads to a decrease of diversity.

If we want to become a happier society we need to protect both integration and diversity. These two principles have many other social and technological applications.

You're describing a fear of civilisation becoming "unconscious"?

That's not a possibility that ever struck me before, so thanks, you've just fuelled my nightmares for months to come now :-s

>" we can only find new ways to operate under our new circumstances, rather than preventing them from coming about as we could have done up until maybe 15 years ago."

Could you elaborate on what you mean here?

Succinctly, I mean that the only route forward now is VPNs, crypto, and educating the gen-pop properly. We are too far down this road to stop it without breaking society wholesale.

>> Everytime there is a terrorist attack or mass shooting it seems that we get the same story of "they were known to the local police/FBI" or that their family had concerns

This isn't enough to judge the effectiveness of mass surveillance, because of course there would be misses - the question is how many - and of course we don't know.

But there's a natural "experiment" recently happening: lone wolf terrorism , which unlike terrorism before it , don't require communicating and planning together with others , all activities that can be detected by surveillance(see john rob's blog for more details), and even it's marketing is imprevious to surveillance.

And i get the general impression that this has led to a marked increase in terrorism , noticed strongly in Israel's latest lone wolf wave, for example[1] , and probably in france/Germany/US too.

[1]Israel lone wolf terrorism has mostly been done using cold weapons, so it's harm has been greatly decreased, but without mass surveillance, it's pretty reasonable guess that a lot of it would have been much more deadly.

I don't know what the answer is either, but I would like governments to invest more time, money and effort into researching ways of achieving peace, rather than fighting to suppress war.

It may, indeed, be more difficult than tracking what everybody does and incarcerating those that are suspected of plotting acts of violence. I think the payoffs may be significantly better, though.

I hate to compare these kinds of cultural issues on the internet, but I have lived in many places in the world. Culturally they are very different. How we act in our countries, states, cities and even houses is governed by our culture. Some cultures value peace greatly. Some prefer justice to peace.

When you look at the people around you, you may think, "There is nothing I can do. There are evil people and I can't change that. I can only fight them so that good will win." In my experience, this is not true. Many people have problems and it is only society and culture that can save them from those problems.

How do we extend a culture of peace and create a global society where we help people in need? That's what I would rather spend my money on. I'm willing to suffer from the attacks of those that need help in the mean time.

"Fighting to suppress war" has got to be one of the best examples of false consciousness (wrong term? I mean a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy based on internal contradiction) ever...

During all history of mankind, wrongdoers were using "words spoken by the mouth" to do all kind of bad things. Yet I miss total surveillance of privately spoken words.

Even without total online surveillance, by the nature of computers you are leaving so many traces that full surveillance is not necessary to at least find something. And in countries without Big-Brother like surveillance, police often got good hints by searching the equipment of a real criminal. It is just not needed to include everyone. And even with encryption, you can often see who talked to who.

The "something" you are talking about is the following: good old police work. You have a reason to be suspicious? Search the guy. Just as police did the last hundred years. Just do not search everyone. Police work should be hard if we still care about citizen rights.

It's undoubtable that surveillance is becoming harder now

I disagree, that's very doubtable. Modern law enforcement has access to an amount of information that exceeds that available in any other era in human history, by an order of magnitude, both in breadth and in depth. The surveillance programs revealed by Snowden and the remote sabotage of Iranian nuclear faclities are but two examples. Surveillance in the developed democratic countries we both (I assume) live in is broader and is done with less oversight than at any point in the 20th century, and not just on the Internet, either. In addition, while I don't want to go quite as far as to state that the trend is clearly upward, I'm also not convinced it's clearly downward; the recent law passed in the UK is evidence enough to discard that notion.

Even if we encrypted all our communication today, there are still weak points in our system that governments can and do exploit when a clear need arises. On the technical side, 0-day exploits are not cheap, but well within the budgets of the law enforcement agencies we depend on to protect us from real threats. And on the legal (and not so legal) side, Certificate authoritities can be compelled to hand over the keys required to compromise secure communications.

Finally, even if we're indeed "Going Dark", as the spokespeople of law enforcement agencies would have us believe, then that can only be true relative to the last decade. As far as I'm concerned, that's a return to the right balance, not a decline into an age of death and despair, where evildoers can commit crime at will, without fear of repercussion.

Collecting all that data is harmful simply because it can be assumed to be hacked at one point or another. Massive potential for misuse by criminals or authoritarian governments.

It's undoubtable that [..] groups who would bring great harm to innocent people are using the internet for research and communication

They sure are. But are you proposing to cut off internet access for politicians altogether?

Yet society somehow protected itself when terrorists learned from books and communicated via mail, meeting in person, and telephone calls.

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