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Comment by module0000 | Hacker News Reader

Good job vetting your vendors Uncle Sam! Somehow, we'll end up paying (taxpayers) to clean this up - just like we paid to deploy it. Sure would be nice if we had any voice/vote in these things...

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You think people voting on vendors would somehow result in less data leaks?

It would result in us not approving the project/vendor at all.

edit: We(citizens) don't like being spied on, and it just rubs salt in the wound that we have to pay for it.

Given that this is literally only useful for tracking people, not approving the project would be ideal.

Tracking people is like 90% of what every organization does. It's why we have names, phone numbers, addresses, id numbers, license plates, etc. "Tracking people = bad" is an untenable assumption.

Well go ahead and dox yourself right here for us.

Perhaps I'm not being clear. "Tracking people involuntarily" might be bad. "Tracking people unnecessarily" might be bad. But they will be bad because they are involuntary and unnecessary, not because they are tracking people.

Ok, I argue then that all tracking of people is unnecessary.

Are you going to actually argue it, or are you just going to tease? It means nothing to me that you would disagree in some vague manner.

My username is associated with my real life identity and would be trivial for people to look me up.

I am already "doxxed" and it doesn't bother me.

I don't see it anywhere. Where does it list your personal info?

It's easily googleable, man. In 5 minutes you could find my LinkedIn info, and then know exactly who I am and where I work.

If you think 0% of the citizenry supports scanning licence plates that cross the border, I have bad news for you.

The overwhelming majority of people are probably ok with recording plates at the border. If it's confined to the border it's not really any different than the customs agent jotting down your license plate. It's also not really "tracking", it's just a record created at that single point. It's the whole network that makes it "tracking"

It's the record keeping everywhere else and tracking that that enables that's not ok.

Jotting down on paper is not the same as aggregated and uploaded to an open ftp server.

I honestly support license plate readers on most roads, if they were used for average speed measurements and in conjunction with automated ticketing of people speeding.

If you are a citizen and have not been disenfranchised, and I grant you that many fall outside of these buckets, you absolutely have a say. That say is that you can elect whomever you want to decide these things for you. It is the central mechanism in a representative democracy.

...and then the person we voted for doesn't win the election and the person who does win the election doesn't listen to the citizens they're supposed to represent.

Re representative democracies, why are opinions on disparate issues like the economy, abortion, climate change, etc. all packaged into one party? At least 99% of people won't find a party that agrees with them on every single issue, so it feels like there should be a better system.

Because the US has first past the post. Sure you could vote for someone who matches every single one of your ideologies, but the chance that they win is zero.

Ergo: need a better system

But first past the post already works...

...for the people who would need to vote to change it.

They ain't gunna change something that will work against them after they change it...

Yea, you nailed it.

Is there a country that does it better? I can't think of one. Voting on people seems what's being done everywhere, and the source of this problem.

I'm not sure you are attacking representative democracy, but instead are attacking the US two party system. I'm def not going to argue against you on that. Just wanted to say that in a representative democracy, one does have a say in policy. I do very much agree that the US tries to give us all as little of a say as possible, as the "adults" (read: billionaires) decide things for us

Unfortunately, in the US, we've allowed our representatives to enact a hard cap on the number of representatives. So the representative you elect decides these thing for an increasingly larger number of citizens as population increases. So while you have a say, the weight of that say on choosing a representative is ever decreasing.

Gerrymander strategy dictates that you want as few urban districts as possible to maintain rural power. Raising the caps would weaken the benefit of packing opposition voters into fewer districts.

Yes removing the limit put on in the early 20th century would have broad ranging consequences, most of them would be to the detrement of the existing representatives.

This is a flawed viewpoint. The idea that any single company can stand up to a nation state is absurd. The level of resources that Russia or China brings to bear for a single hack is far beyond what any company or even groups of companies could defend against.

This is the unfortunate weakness of the Western style democracies in the face of totalitarian states. We have a much more obvious divide between private and public entities. In China and Russia, the lines are blurred and often they get much better support from the government to defend and hack the opposition. Even to the point where China will hack US companies and just give the IP to Chinese companies.

> Even to the point where China will hack US companies and just give the IP to Chinese companies.

You can be sure that the USA is giving the "acquired" IP to their us companies as well.

Not to the level that China is doing it, that's for sure. Just by the very nature of how closely companies in China operate with the government, you'd be fooling yourself if you think that's equivalent.

Where do I sign up to collect stolen IP?

I try my best!

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