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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the entire Democratic viewpoint about augmenting the role of government in a number of places via government programs and regulation? I'm sure Democrats will pop up to tell me I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you cannot wish for the expansion of government control and power unless you believe the government is mostly good. It's an interesting line you've drawn to mass surveillance because, yes, if the government has our best interests in mind then surveillance is not a problem at all.

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As is often mentioned in these discussions, the government cannot be treated as a monolithic entity. So when someone suggests a basic income might solve welfare problems, they aren't suggesting the intelligence agencies should be the ones running it.

On that note, while government has been tearing down walls between agencies, in some cases we should be raising walls.

With Mexico, you mean?

But in all seriousness, you're correct, though I temper my enthusiasm with the thought that having the walls tends to make people complacent and underestimate risks.

For example, spying on other countries is as old as governments. So maybe that's pretty reasonable, as long as we put up a wall so that those things can't be used domestically. Now that we've settled that issue, let's build some really good tools so we know what our adversaries are doing and we can always find them. Unfortunately, then the hubris of it all catches up with us when some outgoing attorney general approves massive data sharing from tools that were always understood to be permissible only because they were aimed away from us.

Until we can find some way to make our politicians respect constitutional rights, walls are frighteningly temporary.

There are a couple more necessary requirements for surveillance not to be a problem: A guarantee that the government will stay good (and not for example turn on minorities) and competency to keep accumulated safe from malicious parties come to mind.

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