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Comment by Zarath | Hacker News Reader

Better not be openly gay in Russia! Or openly gay 15 years ago and have them scrape old data and find out.

Or openly gay 15 years ago and have them scrape old data and find out.

Do you have any sources on this? This kind of retroactive censorship seems to be the latest fashion in the English-speaking world [1][2][3], and it's reasonable to expect such fashion to spread in Russia, but I haven't heard of any examples.

[1] https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/zmdwk3/here-are-the-homo...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/01/10/everton-defe...

[3] http://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/23138/conor-dalys-nascar...

I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that.

I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies.

I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can.

Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish.

I'm actually going to reply to you twice with a similar idea. You're blatantly telling people that technology can never be trusted to be private. I just don't see why such a cynical outlook on the situation is needed, especially when it's obviously not true and the odds are not necessarily stacked against people who want privacy online or on technology.

"obviously not true"

If you want privacy, you must first have security, and no system is secure.

I mean, just for starters, there are a constant stream of zero day exploits in OSes and Browsers that would allow me to install a keylogger on your computer, completely undetected.

So why are you so anti-cynical?

The situation is dire.

I highly recommend "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez, who was a Security Consultant.

Privacy is literally life and death for people. I think trying to minimize the dangers is reckless.

Cheers.

> Privacy is literally life and death for people.

This is what loses most people, because they don't think it's a big deal if someone reads their Facebook messages.

Privacy is what prevents gay people from getting purged in Chechnya[1]. Privacy is what keeps political dissidents and religious minorities out of concentration camps[2]. Privacy is what keeps our spies from being executed.

And for those who scoff at the idea of a state-level actor coming after them: privacy is what prevents someone's abusive partner from murdering them when they choose to leave the relationship[3].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/685192372/https://www.npr.org...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/oct/20/...

I think you're right in principle but too binary and extreme. You sort of make it sound like people think the internet is completely secure, and you're encouraging them to assume it's completely insecure. In reality it's more like fairly skeptical people using a secure-ish internet. If you're pretty obscure and conservative you're secure enough in practice.

Once upon a time, a country started killing their own citizens. Because of some ancestry they had, or disease, or were a member of some religion, or they used their genitals in a certain way, or co-habitated with someone like that.

Oh wait, that's happened again, and again, and again.

Which specific kinds of people were the targets has changed repeatedly over the years. Literally no one has an absolute guarantee that either they, or their family or children, are without a shadow of doubt free from this concern ever happening to them.

We thought we were anonymous. We thought we were secure. We underestimated how easy it would be to track, correlate, and analyze us.

None of us are safe. None of us have the privacy or security we should.

> If you're pretty obscure and conservative you're secure enough in practice.

You're ignoring the black swans of politics, hackers, militias, etc.

Yes, sure, we're probably all 99.99% safe. But 3 billion people are online. That math alone says 300,000 of the people online are not safe.

Do you really think we're 99.99% safe?

I think we're already tagged and manipulated like cattle. I already think that mega-corporations know entirely too much. I think we're already not safe. Equifax leaks alone prove that to me.

Heck, later down the HN front page today:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/wifi-firmware-bug-affects-lapt...

Or openly conservative in the USA

I’m sorry, but what? Are you suggesting that being conservative in the United States is somehow equivalent to being gay in Russia?

Yep. Assuming you live in SV, would you like to disprove me by putting a TRUMP 2020 sign on your lawn?

Sure, because that won’t have me thrown in jail or possibly even killed.

Conservatives control our federal and most state governments. They recently had control of all three branches of the federal government.

The idea that conservatives are a disenfranchised or endangered group is absolutely ludicrous.

I disagree entirely. Being a young white male with some moderately conservative ideals in [West coast city] makes you entirely unlikable by most people who find out. This is my first hand experience.

Being conservative is the new taboo.

In Russia you can get to prison for being gay.

In West Coast US a few people might refuse to date you.

These don't seem like the same thing.

https://www.google.com/search?q=moscow+gay+club

You can also Google for prostitution services in places in the US where they are illegal.

Pretty sure I don't need to link to the California Republican Party website.

I posted the link hoping to convince you that your claim is inconsistent with the existence of huge multi-storey gay clubs in the center of Moscow. Guess I was wrong.

I don't doubt that such people experience friction, but the comment I was responding to made an analogy between being conservative in the US and being gay in Russia.

The former group is the ruling class in the US. The latter group is criminalized, shamed, and sometimes murdered.

Further, being gay can't harm someone else, while being conservative in a (theoretical) democracy certainly can hurt people.

Are you trying to make the claim that, since one instance of discrimination is worse than the other, then we shouldn't try to discuss and explore other controversial examples of the discrimination, simply because they're not as bad? Even if they are more relevant to us, the commenters? I didn't see the parent claiming that their version of bigotry was worse/equal to grandparent's version, that's something you falsely assumed.

Interestingly, the GP is making that exact claim: that being conservative in SV is the equivalent of being gay in Moscow.

> Are you suggesting that being conservative in the United States is somehow equivalent to being gay in Russia?

>> Yep. Assuming you live in SV, would you like to disprove me by putting a TRUMP 2020 sign on your lawn?[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18944526

Or openly racist

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