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Comment by sgt101 | Hacker News Reader

Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others.

Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing!

Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.

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Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach.

Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same?

We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”).

We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch.

The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.

How does this play into how we perceive security threats? As far as I understand it, the general model to reduce threats to any system is to create bottlenecks (reduce attach surface) where you can focus the majority of your countermeasures. Is it at least not a valid consideration that one model of society/government effectively forces a bottleneck of social/political decisions at the government level in order to head off any issues? Citizens in this model would presumably have a higher level of vested interest in the proper functioning of the government, and therefore have higher involvement.

Not disclosing your religion or sexuality to the government isn’t living a closeted life. I could be out and proud to my friends and family, but have little desire to allow some nasty actor in the government to include me in a query like

    select * from citizens where sexuality != ‘straight’

In my book you have an absolute right to present yourself to others as you choose, when you choose.

Taking that right is a violation.

This is as asinine as the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" trope. People use guns to kill people. People use privacy breaches to kill people.

People also use ideology to justify killing people, so you're not wrong there.

People who got the idea to kill her after breaching her privacy... this is like basic cause-and-effect.

Are you worried that imagery from CCTV cameras will be used to identify homosexuals?

https://newatlas.com/ai-detects-gay-faces-criticisms-study/5...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

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