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Comment by realusername | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP but on my case I disagree yes, there's been so much abuse from governments about wiretapping that the risk/benefit of allowing it isn't worth it.

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What sort of abuse and what have been the effects of that abuse?

To add on to this, wiretapping has definitely brought some good including against our own government. For example, it was used to catch Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois trying to sell Obama's senate seat once Obama became president [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich#Impeachment,_r...

You mean something as catastrophic as Prism for example? Or the regular spying of political opponents, green activists or journalists? It's clearly not worth it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Illegal_surveilla...

A covert illegal mass surveillance program is a lot different than a judge approved wiretap on a specific person based on reasonable suspicion. There were literally only 3,168 approved wiretaps in 2016 [0] and as my other comment mentioned, it has even been used to catch politicians of illegal activity [1].

[0]: http://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/wiretap-report-20...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18104461

I don't see any way to keep those ones and to restrict the mass surveillance in the same time. These few lawful interceptions are not doing enough good to me to counter-balance the availability of the mass surveillance programs. So that's why I argue about shutting off interception as much as possible technically.

You mean 3,168 across the US? Poland is like 9 times smaller population and we had 6402 approved wiretaps in 2017.

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