Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

The bigger threat that WW3 or Global Warming is pervasive monitoring. Whoever survives all the other disasters can be completely controlled by whoever has the ability to monitor everything (and then kill anybody who acts or speaks against their interest. There is no such thing as resistance when your ability to resist is detected and monitored.

View on HN

Currently, you're downvoted to near the bottom, while the top comment is defending this violation of dignity.

What's going on here; are we that out of touch with this community's values?

I'm starting to think the wider community has no idea how bad the possible outcomes of mass surveillance are.

Lucky for them, they have nothing to hide so don't need to worry! /s

Maybe they are downvoting because the apocalypse would have destroyed the physical infrastructure needed for such surveillance? It's sort of dystopia or the other; you can't have both!

Well, if that is their reason for downvoting then they really haven't thought it through. Pervasive monitoring is pervasive in large part because modern monitoring sensors are produced by the billions and are incredibly tiny (I'm talking about custom military stuff - not "spy-warehouse" stuff.) These are distributed systems and even today they spread their data all over the world to many huge secret underground bunkers (I know NSA guys who've describe these to me.) So even today there is a lot more monitoring than people realize. And this is analogous to the old nuclear first strike logic - if somebody strikes first then they have won. Once you get full control, your monitoring can't be fought.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com