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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

This stuff is a ratchet. You can win a battle here and there, maybe slowing the progress, but the long term trend is one directional.

The way privacy norms and abstract rules about limiting power come about is *not" through gradualism. It's through hurdled events. The american revolution. The 1989 revolutions. Particular points in time where you can say "Stazi bad. Never again."

The reality is that these chouces involve compromising security. Slightly freer, and slightly less safe is not a winning political argument.

Imagine a system where detectives can plug it back a name or a face and retrieve location information from that person's phone, city-wide CCTV video, etc.

Creeoy, but more crimes will be solved.

Gradualism favours security over freedom in the long term. There are 19 rapists walking free in our city today, because limits on police power.... There's only one way this argument goes.

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I really don't like the fact that any argument or concern perceived to be outside a commonly-held value system is usually shut-down by some meta-argument about the strategy being wrong, without even a chance of being evaluated on its merits. I mean, if you're right and no one will bother to listen to these concerns then you shouldn't have to say anything at all, just let it be ignored. If you have a specific better way of communicating these concerns then do that. But the discussion about any given issue often ends up being primarily about how the issue will be perceived, and everyone's perception of the subject is then colored by what commentators think people will think about it, leaving no room for actually discussing the issue honestly and trusting that people are generally smart enough to take in both sides and make their own decision, not because one side had better strategy, but because they heard someone actually discussing the issue and not some meta-concern about how the issue should be discussed. Yes I realize the irony in this comment.

> If you're right and no one will bother to listen to these concerns then you shouldn't have to say anything at all, just let it be ignored. If you have a specific better way of communicating these concerns then do that.

I agree with your general concern, but I'm not sure I accept this part.

At the moment, a lot of smart, tech-savvy people channel a lot of energy into fighting this sort of thing directly. They look for weaknesses in the systems, analyze potential abuses, go to town hall meetings and Senate hearings. If that's ultimately a doomed delaying tactic, it doesn't mean the entire problem is unsolvable - but it also doesn't mean the people who think it's hopeless have a better answer on hand.

I think there's room to say "fighting this directly isn't going to work, so let's use the time we're buying to look for a better answer". It could perhaps be said with more positivity or focus on the 'elsewhere', but the lack of a proposal doesn't mean the criticism is invalid.

(Of course, we should also directly ask if the pessimism is warranted. The crypto wars never ended, but for all the fatalism over that issue we're in a far better position today than "RSA is a munition, install this Clipper chip". I worry that the common axis is not "activism wins" but "containment fails", which argues crypto and surveillance will both spread. But I think it's an open question.)

> Slightly freer, and slightly less safe is not a winning political argument.

It should be when the reality, despite the publicity of occasional terrorist incidents (9/11 included), is "slightly freer and slightly less safe against an event so vanishingly unlikely you should simply forget about it. You're hundreds of times more likely to die in a car accident or falling off a ladder. We should not let the terrorists win by ruining our way of life and associated freedoms".

Surely that's not that hard a message to sell when it has been a winning message for many years in the past?

No, it's the current fashion. I expect more of politicians. Of course in today's world I am regularly disappointed.

You can argue it's not worth paying the price to catch more murderers, to protect more children from pedophiles, to stop more rapes. But that's a subjective value judgement and society doesn't have to agree with you.

Be disappointed all you want, but try actually taking their position seriously first.

> but try actually taking their position seriously first.

That's a mighty big presumption. Upon what grounds do you say I am not?

> I expect more of politicians.

You might want to update this prior.

>Slightly freer, and slightly less safe is not a winning political argument.

True, however "slightly less prone to abuse" is a very strong argument, especially if you don't really trust the people who hold the power at the moment.

The sad thing is that it probably won't help much against identity crime anyways. Criminals will figure out how to get around it, but ordinary folk won't.

The security industry turns your data into there money by reminding you that’s it’s protecting you from criminals turning your data into there money.

Marijuana used to be illegal for safety concerns. Now thanks for the ability of people to break incorrect laws it's slowly becoming more and more legal.

No, thanks to ballot measures in various places and voters supporting them, it's becoming legal.

Would the ballot measures have existed if every single person every trying marijuana would have been arrested the next hour and put in prison for ~5 years?

Maybe, but I imagine the progress would have been significantly slower (than it already has been).

Interestingly, I've seen several police officers or ex-officers raise this argument against always-on body cameras.

In one sense, it's exactly what always-on cameras are meant to do: prevent police from ignoring the law when no one is watching. The goal is to limit brutality and baseless charges, but the mechanism works equally well against neglected charges and officer discretion.

The places that moved first on legal marijuana were the same ones that started with détente; I think there's some real substance to the idea that bans on harmless things erode because we see that nothing bad happens when they go unenforced. (For that matter, it's the same idea as people leaving cults when they break the rules in private and discover "hey, nothing bad happened!") Universal enforcement takes away a natural experiment on the results of non-enforcement.

Good point. The long history of breaking the silly law has likely softenned up the public perception of it.

Thank goodness the founding of America was done through ballot measures and voters support of the succession of the colonies.

Oh wait sorry my bad. It was done by illegal bloody revolt against repressive laws.

You make this sound like an inevitability, but you discount the radical idea of rights and due process evolved over hundreds of years specifically to claw back investigative power. The King used to be able to search anything he wanted because it was all "his" anyways.

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