Hacker News Reader

Comment by salesguy222 | Hacker News Reader

i hope everyone can look at this and see the conclusive proof:

many people in government from all sides abuse technology to control the lives of people in new, shocking, and totalitarian ways

to say "i'm not muslim, or Iranian, or Mexican, or a dissident", or etc, will soon no longer suffice.

Every conceivable activity and word you speak or think will eventually be evaluated if the technology is cheap enough and politicians are daring enough

The constitution doesn't even stop people from doing things like this anymore, so I don't know how to fix this

View on HN

The Constitution is on it's way to becoming a dead letter. There's nothing wrong with rebooting the Republic, many countries go through such disruptions. I'm not saying just do it, but if the existing political consensus collapses we won't benefit from trying to back to how things used to be.

I was just thinking today about Thomas Jefferson's idea that the constitution be rewritten every 19 years (every generation).

I arrived at that thought while thinking about how Dropbox Paper is more modern than Google Docs (which turns 12 this year).

Sometimes it's better to start over from scratch.

It lets you do things you actually couldn't do with lots of small changes.

One of the very first changes of any new version of the Constitution arising from any major quarter would be the deletion of the First Amendment, with the Fourth following closely. I have no faith that a document reflecting contemporary American generational consensus, as Jefferson aspired to, would be better or more free.

Could =/= would. If you're arguing for the status quo because every alternative you can imagine is worse then you're essentially treating it as religious dogma.

We are living all secret police's wet dream.

Though I wish it were different, I can't help but feel that this truly is game over. The statists have won. The technology is too powerful, they're too easily able to afford it, and the public can't do much to stop it

It's sad to see such defeat. The tech is not too powerful, the public just has to care about privacy, that's all. We have the technology to prevent mass surveillance. We can stop it, as soon as we the people want to.

I wish this were true. When you use technology to prevent mass survaillance, they criminalize its usage.

Anyone can be thrown in jail at any time for relatively petty reasons, and you can be physically surveilled by detectives on mere suspicion. It isn't pretty, but it's the truth.

Sure most of us will be fine with basic precautions but 20 years from now is a different story? I prefer not to think about it

It is true; we have tunneling, VPNs, ssh, Tor, FreeNet, I2P. None of these things have been criminalized, so what are you thinking about when you say "its" usage has been criminalized? Do you have some examples of when privacy tech has been criminalized in the past? I might be naive, it probably has happened, but I don't personally know of any privacy or security software or hardware that is illegal to use in the US.

People being physically surveilled doesn't land in the same camp as mass digital surveillance. It requires a warrant, even if they can be obtained for petty reasons. The government doesn't have the bandwidth for physical surveillance of everyone. It just isn't the same thing.

20 years from now is a long way off, long enough for us to make it better. If you give up and don't think about it, people who care and work for what they want will probably get what they want. Money and government power certainly do want to watch what you're doing, if they can get away with it. But if the public, on the whole, really truly started to care about privacy, enough to vote on the issue and enough to make purchasing decisions based on privacy concerns, it would get better. The only reason it's bleak right now is the majority of the world is still giddy about joining Facebook, rather than concerned about the implications of digital public over-sharing. Give it time and get your friends & family to care, and it's more likely to improve than not. If we all look the other way, then we get what we get...

One of the simple ways to fix this is to by simply starving the beast. Constantly demanding lower taxes. In fact a constitutional amendment to limit US government's spending to may be 15% of GDP.

Once US government is faced with either wage a war in country X under the pretense of WMD or Zombie virus or spend on public education I think we will see some sanity. But the war mongering right and welfare mongering on left will not let that pass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com