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Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

"Their job is to protect the people" is a recent and paternalistic innovation. Better, IMO, is to write and uphold a set of laws that provide the best framework for human flourishing. This means deliberately not protecting people from certain risks, where the costs in terms of other values outweighs the benefits of risk reduction.

Like, the US would be safer if we confiscated every gun and made gun ownership illegal. It'd be a worse country to live in, though, according to our own values. It's not worth the trade - we care about more than simple safety.

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I mean that in an immediate threat sort of way. For instance, if someone robbing a bank it's the governments job to protect the citizens by apprehending the suspect. It's not the citizens job to protect themselves from immediate danger.

Flooding in Houston - it is the governments job to help people to safety. It isn't their job to buy them a new home if they didn't purchase insurance.

In your original post you said "they [the authorities] judged". In the case of a bank robbery, it is the bank owners who are seeking protection of their property rights. It's not analogous to picking sides to stop a protest in the public square when multiple sides have a stake in it. The bar for abridging freedom of speech in the U.S. as a precipitating cause of immediate danger is very high.

I agree it would have to be an extraordinary circumstance. When a protest becomes violent it is no longer a free speech issue though. If jamming radio frequency communication was somehow the best way to stop a bad situation from getting worse then it would be appropriate to do so. But it should be justified.

Honestly, I struggle to come up with a scenario where jamming public internet access would be the best course of action. But hypothetically I don't see it as a violation of human rights to temporarily stop people in an area from communicating through the Internet on public airwaves if it's a reasonable and effective countermeasure to preventing disaster.

Honestly, I struggle to come up with a scenario where jamming public internet access would be the best course of action

Happy to hear it. But it's pretty important to me and I think most other people that any government vested with the power to do that be required to legislate - through legislative representatives into the supreme law, not via FCC or other cabinet regulations - an exact and generalized criteria that can't be tainted by discretionary judgment or classified information without criminal accountability. It's not easy to formulate - as it shouldn't be.

This sounds to me a lot like abdicating personal responsibility for physical safety to governmental organizations. Like, it's absolutely your job to protect yourself from immediate physical danger. Protecting others is supererogatory.

You're parsing now. Protecting yourself from an immediate threat is of course your responsibility. However, the government can hold the person liable for any harm they caused you. So immediate is a poor word as it can be easily misinterpreted and that's my fault.

What I mean for example is it's not the citizens role to form a mob and hunt down a suspected criminal. That's the governments role.

I disagree that "the US would be safer" if we had no guns.

Coming from a place where public ownership of firearms is banned, I can tell you that criminals can do what they want with just the might of their clinched fists.

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