Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bucephalus355 | Hacker News Reader

All these reports have the feelings of small rumblings or rumors of purges and famines that leaked out of the Soviet Union in the 30’s. The dismissal of all of them due to China’s size and growth really strengthens the analogy too.

Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people.

The ad-tech companies of the world think they are criticized now, but they have no idea the judgment history will render for some of the attitudes and practices that have been promoted regarding data and privacy. Some of this stuff is as naive as Charles Lindbergh helping the Luftwaffe because he believed airplanes would connect all the peoples of the world and promote global peace. What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?

All totalitarian governments, not being very innovative, have thrived off of inventions that have been developed elsewhere and have been bearable, and then mutated into unrecognizable monsters under them.

> Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime.

I think that is the big issue we will see and have seen recently.

Surveillance tools are better than ever in history. Many times, laws were created as deterrents to some behavior, that maybe shouldn't be laws, because it wasn't easy to nab everyone doing it. Back then cops, judges and more weren't as locked into forced outcomes i.e. three strikes, mandatory minimums etc and there was more humanity in corrections at that level.

Now that we have surveillance at this level and going up, we need to remove the criminalization of certain things otherwise everyone will be locked up.

Moral laws or making illegal non-violent/no civil violations actions will not work in mass surveillance, only laws that are violent and infringe on civil rights of others should remain.

An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.

With surveillance this high and going up, we MUST decriminalize and re-evaluate every law. The problem is our 'corrections' and law enforcement, is that both have turned predatory along with the advancements in technology that have been used to erode privacy.

>An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.

If everyone has a record, no one has a record.

Really? If everyone has a record then they can be detained whenever the authorities feel like it.

Do governments who use this kind of 'selective justice' really need the pretext of an actual law being broken?

I think what carlmr is saying is quite relevant to more democratic countries.

Even the most dictatorial countries operate on the basis that they need the consent of the governed.

> Do governments who use this kind of 'selective justice' really need the pretext of an actual law being broken?

At least one former UK Home Secretary has said that it's a good thing to have laws that aren't usually enforced, as it gives the authorities something to use when they do want to go after someone.

So (for at least one country) the answer is "yes".

Yes. Any government can fall if there's sufficient public outrage[1]. And government employees of basically any government can make use of this. I remember driving with an off duty US police officer once and him pointing out which issue of code every car on the road was in violation of so that he could legally conduct a stop if he wanted to.

[1] AI and robotics might change this later.

Look up 'mortgage headshot'. It's a type of fraud that is very common, but that is only prosecuted when it's necessary to compel a person to work with law enforcement.

Not only surveillance, but the accountability has gone up too. Not only is it easy to be exposed performing morally debatable but illegal stuff but they are also permanently recorded by unknowable number of entities(news sites/blogs), shared across innumerable platforms and get judged by mobs you never knew existed, leading to a possibly life altering effect.

Were that the case, there's unlikely to be the resources to act on every crime. However, having some 'dirt' on everyone means that it'd be easy to take action on any particular 'problem' person.

The Dutch police issued 9.2 million traffic fines on a population of 17 million. Most of this is a fully automated system from connected speed traps, to an 'invoicing system'.

I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.

Last week a judge ruled that the Student Loan administration can use mandatory personal RFID equipped train tickets to detect scholarship fraud.

A mechanism no-one but the strongest privacy advocates had imagined would be used in this way.

>I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.

You don't even need the law itself. If you've got the infrastructure to fine everyone who exceeds the speed limit in a place that it's not a big stretch to use dynamic speed limits set to the 90th percentile speed with only a little bit of lag.

Or just force cars to only be able to drive the speed limit. I don't like this option, but I feel like it's better than turning citizens into rolling ATMs.

Eventually, law enforcement will become dependent upon the speeding revenue, but the people will wise up and slow down to avoid the fines. Then how are they going to replace the lost revenue? Especially if it is "needed" because of onerous contract termination agreements agreed to.

Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population. Now that they could be automatically used against anyone the ruling population which was not supposed to be affected is starting to question those laws. It is OK when mostly blacks, youngsters and poor people get jailed for jaywalking; not so much when upper middle class people are.

That's what a cynical person like me can take from your argument.

I don't think that's a road we really want to go down. Laws exist to solve problems, not persecute minority groups.

I have heard white supremacists use this logic to say that DUI laws unfairly target white people, because in major cities maybe white people have cars and the minority populations use public transportation. You could also use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people.

Not really true. Many laws still on the books in southern states were created _explicitly_ to persecute minority groups.

You couldn't use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people because there isn't evidence that enforcement of insider trading is uneven, whereas there is evidence that enforcement (and sentencing) for loitering, jaywalking, and drug laws are biased against minority groups

That's a good point. I should have been more clear. When i said "that's a road you don't want to go down", I don't mean to say no laws have been created that don't have racial bias. That's definitely a problem, especially in the South.

But I have a problem with arkh's assertion that... >> Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population.

And you have the opposite thing with the war on drugs: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

> "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

>If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.

That is the nightmare scenario: when 51% of a population decides they want to lock up the other 49% and technology makes that possible.

More like 0.01% decide to lock up 100% of their political opponents supporters.

The War on Drugs was started by Nixon to target hippies and blacks, those who supported his opponents. I can imagine a War on X being brewed up by either side to do the same if they have the means to automatically enforce it.

Having recently read a lot more literature about the big picture social issues in the US from the 30 through the 70s the late '60s and early '70s was a time of stupid groups reacting to other stupid groups with tragic consequences.

The militant leftists and their bombs, the hippies and their antiwar stuff, the racists, the FBI/government and it's BS, the black power groups and their violence, they all were reacting to each other while failing to understand in any meaningful way the grievances of the other groups in any meaningful way.

Cracking down on the millitant left was right. They were the second the most destructive domestic terrorist movement (the post civl war KKK is 1st by a mile). The government at the time used it as an excuse to cast way to wide of a net because of personal beliefs (in aggregate) and because they didn't understand the where the problem was coming from. It's unfortunate.

If people hadn't been such idiots in the late 1960s there wouldn't have been a millitant left to crack down on. If civil rights of the late 1960s or the Vietnam war had happened a decade apart from each other we probably wouldn't be mopping it up in 2017. It didn't so here we are trying to wind down the war on drugs and demilitarize the police (and we'll probably revert some gun control too since it's part of the same anti-minority, anti-hippy package of knee jerk decisions).

In the 2040s we'll probably be in the same situation trying to wind down the post 9/11 expansion of government surveillance.

No, the War on drugs was specifically racially and politically motivated to help Nixon and his party. I don't have it at the moment, but there are tapes of Nixon and one if his advisors talking about this openly.

The guy who ran the beta version of the DEA at the time specifically used "marijuana" instead of the more common "cannabis," because he hated Mexicans and wanted to make people associate pot with an unpopular minority.

One reference is upthread:

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...

Ahh but that we can actually call "wrong" the former is "democracy".

I'm pretty sure Nixon was elected in a democracy.

  > If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the
  > country at least would have a record.

That idea seems deeply troubling if you're a White American. Meanwhile, this is the daily reality of Black Americans, because the police have been systematically enforcing these laws against people of colour.

Now we face a world where that same disproportionate enforcement may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).

Source?

> may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).

That doesn't make any sense! To affect elections, you'd need a really huge number of prisoners. Moreover, you'd need to deny prisoners the right to vote. Wait ...

Blacks and Latinos are already overwhelming Democrats... And the overzealous law enforcement is usually at the hands of Republicans.

Not sure why you feel the need to throw political affiliation into the conversation.

Consider a hypothetical police officer who is against "leftists" (the police officer's definition is all that matters, not ours).

Right now, said police officer can and does enforce laws disproportionally against Black Americans because to the police officer, they're all leftists.

But if we give the police officer access to all sorts of profiling information about humans, when making a traffic stop, the police officer can be extra-zealous about performing a search if the person is profiled as being a "leftist."

The point is, prosecuting people for their political views has existed for some time, but it didn't scale well. Now it will scale extremely well, up to the point of wearing glasses and tagging people with certain social profiles in real time.

"What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?"

Hehe, nice framing. I'd say the answer is "power." Collectivising, aggregating and connecting people yields power, new abilities that exist as a product of increased network size.

Yuval Noah Harari (grand narrative historian) identifies this network effect as the defining characteristic of human progress. Increased size of a functional group.

The bottlenecks are travel and (more importantly) communication. To him, the difference between modern palaeolithic sapiens and archaic humans (including archaic sapiens chronospecies) is "fictions:" abstract concepts like kingship, nationhood, religion, law, money and such that allow cooperation between strange individuals. Airplanes yielded similar power.

Increasing cooperative group size and the quality of that cooperation yields power, a lot of it.

Air travel improved group size and quality. You can send a letter, visit or bomb places 1,000 km away within an hour. European ships allowed the subjagation of foreign places, transcontinental trade and centralised global administration.

You yourself are admitting that terrible evil can be done by governments without any of the advanced technology that some fret over.

It's not about the technology.

It's about the will of the government.

Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong.

What this tells us is that regardless of what technology is available, a good government will do good, and an evil government will do evil. That really goes for any entity. You name it.

Sure it’s about the will of the gorvening body. Then you’ll have to agree a good bunch of current western societies have governments willing to do evil or let evil be done for a reason or another.

Nothing is black and white, but the current trends about how people are equaly treated and human life is valued is still in the darker greys in my opinion.

Ok you’re definitely right with the technology thing not being an issue to “govs killing lots of people”.

Let me say that currently, because the technologies are new, not well understood, and not regulated by any kind of international treaty or norms (even national regulations sometimes) they can and will be abused in ways that are hard for other countries to protest against in a credible manner.

In China during The Great Famine under Mao, 50 million people died. I know numbers and history can seem so distant, but that’s more than the number of people who died in WWI and near the low end of estimates for WWII (especially the early estimates).

It was insanity on a level no society has ever perpetuated. A good example of this was that 40% of all structures were torn down during this period. Incredible. It’s all probably worse than we know too due to a lack of records and archives that individuals have access too.

The National Book Award winner this year was about Russian totalitarianism called “The Future is History”. If this is true, the future is a much worse place for the Chinese people.

Why are you so eager to ignore the effects of technology? You'll notice in history that the biggest wars/massacres were committed with revolutionary technologies.

I worry that technology can leave no room for anything except dystopias. For example, it seems privacy is going to become a thing of the past, and there's little we can do about it short of smashing the looms.

Privacy is about individual freedom, and in all societies there is a tradeoff between this and social cohesion. True liberalism aspires to achieve a stable society with minimal encroachment on personal freedom.

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