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Comment by t-a4550 | Hacker News Reader

> “Today it's the war on drugs and terror. Tomorrow it's something else.”

> “This train has one destination, and it's not even clear if there will be any stops along the way. To understand where we're headed, try reading the Bill of Rights with the assumption that your government knows everything there is to know about you, and where those who attempt to reveal the extent of these capabilities are imprisoned or executed.”

Devil’s advocate here. Who’s to say they won’t use it strictly to deter drug trafficking and terrorism? Couldn’t they take steps to be transparent about what data is collected, and where it goes?

The point is, discussions on governmental surveillance usually jump to the conclusion that society is becoming like George Orwell’s 1984.

Could someone explain why these surveillance balloons are bad news for ordinary citizens without using the slippery slope fallacy?

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Existing surveillance technology, as per the Snowden revelations, has not been deployed with 'transparency about what data is collected, and where it goes'. Even today it is very unclear what data exactly is being captured, and how it is being used. I do not see any reason why this proposed new technology will be any better.

The people in power today aren’t the people in power tomorrow. Even if you trust those in power today, do you trust the next 10 administrations to have sufficient restraint not to abuse their power?

If a future administration ever has the political power to implement totalitarianism we're stuffed. The lack of a mass surveillance system will not stop them as they will build one. Horrible totalitarian regimes have existed in the past with quite low-tech systems (e.g. East Germany, USSR).

I lived in a totalitarian regime similar to the ones you mentioned (Ceausescu’s Romania back in the ‘80s) and if his bad guys had had access to today’s surveillance tools we would have been really, really stuffed.

As things were you “only” had to watch out for people who would rat you out to Securitate or to Stasi (in East Germany), not an ideal situation but manageable from a certain point on, one could live a decent life from a “freedom” point of view, to say so, you could say political jokes or complain about the regime to the right people, i.e. not the regime’s informers, or you could directly “steal” from the State things you believe should have belonged to you, like the peasants from my grandma’s village were doing when they were taking stuff at night from the State farms that had been built on lands nationalized by the State from the same farmers immediately after the Communists came to power. All these things were highly illegal, I mean the regime trash-talking, the taking of stuff from State farms, the only thing protecting us was that the regime couldn’t follow us all in order to catch us. With today’s tools that would not have been a problem, you can see that in today’s China where every form of political jokes (even in private online conversations) is prohibited and actively acted against.

Thank you for sharing your experience in a totalitarian regime.

I read The Aquariums Of Pyongyang [1] for a take on life and imprisonment in North Korea. Recommended read.

What is your take on Huawei giving 3G/4G technology to North Korea by proxy? Is North Korea technologically advanced enough to abuse technology to suppress its citizens?

Also, to get an idea of the amount of data collected nowadays [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aquariums_of_Pyongyang

[2] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/frame_en.html

天高皇帝远 (Tian gao, Huangdi yuan)

"Heaven is high and the emperor is far away."

> you can see that in today’s China where every form of political jokes (even in private online conversations) is prohibited and actively acted against.

I wonder how you managed to “see” that, since it’s not true at all. If you know Chinese you’ll be able to find political jokes pretty much everywhere on Chinese language websites, especially forums. Some words may be banned by forum software but people just use homophones. Also not surprisingly, no one actually gives a shit about political jokes in private conversations, unless you’re a foreign journalist or known troublemaker or something, I guess (source: done that multiple times within Chinese borders).

> Who’s to say they won’t use it strictly

Them. Laws passed for one reason have already routinely been applied more broadly, data collected for national security has been passed to domestic law enforcement under parallel construction.

We don’t have to worry if government will abuse its power, we know they are doing it now.

> Laws passed for one reason have already routinely been applied more broadly, data collected for national security has been passed to domestic law enforcement under parallel construction.

For my own research, could you provide examples of this?

It's about the priori. The common slippery slope you mention comes from people who believe that historically government abuses power to the extend that they can get away it, and whoever claims otherwise are the one that needs to provide evidence. Of course if you have the opposite priori, then you will ask for the opposite kind of evidence.

I tend to go with the former, since liberal democracies are rarer than totalitarianism and the like.

> Devil’s advocate here. Who’s to say they won’t use it strictly to deter drug trafficking and terrorism? Couldn’t they take steps to be transparent about what data is collected, and where it goes?

What systems would you put into place to prevent abuse?

What about bad cops who would misappropriate the intel?

What would prevent them from tracking non-terrorist/drug related individuals?

How do you prevent citizens from being followed and tracked without a warrant?

And if misuse or abuse does happen, how is that transparently shared with the victim?

This is a weak place to argue that slippery slope doesn't apply, since the government has already had a lot of incidents in the recent past where they said they weren't doing certain surveillance - and then it was leaked that they actually were...

If you could say 100% that these balloons will only ever capture data based on legal warrants - we might have something to discuss. However, I can't think of a system that would guarantee that.

I can think of a system : at the next election, vote for a president with a program about systemic transparency and openness for all the agencies and organizations.

Transparency is not a passive feature, it requires active and vigilant maintenance to be effective. In this case, any and all access to any and all instances of any and all imagery must be controlled and accounted for in perpetuity or you lose transparency.

Allowing a system like this to be implemented under the guise of 'full transparency' is like a political trojan horse. All it takes is a loss of priority in that objective by the same or subsequent administration and you're left with a snake that you can't get back into the bag.

> Allowing a system like this to be implemented under the guise of 'full transparency' is like a political trojan horse. All it takes is a loss of priority in that objective by the same or subsequent administration

I didn't mean we could implement transparency with Pentagon's balloons, I meant : eventually, vote for a president or a party that would cancel that project for the name of privacy and transparency.

What do you do if the president doesn't implement that plan after they are elected? Not vote for then again in four years and hope your next choice follows through?

You would first try to understand why it didn't work, then judge afterward. The party or president you will vote for won't change everything overnight. The president decides about a direction to take, and the administrative and legal machineries work toward it. Fundamental new concepts such as transparency (build upon new communication technologies) will take time to include in every decisions. Anyway, if after 5 years you feel betrayed, take a look at the recent news about how people deal with it : Sudan, France, Algeria, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, people riot. If you cannot riot because everyone owns a gun, then you are out of luck, I guess.

>Devil’s advocate here. Who’s to say they won’t use it strictly to deter drug trafficking and terrorism?

Anyone paying reasonable attention to either current events or history?

I’m afraid I haven’t been, could you help me out and provide examples?

Town halls resort to spy tactics - https://www.scotsman.com/news-2-15012/town-halls-resort-to-s...

Civil servants attacked for using anti-terror laws to spy on public - https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/feb/28/surveillance-gove...

Terror law used for Iceland deposits - https://www.ft.com/content/abf583de-9546-11dd-aedd-000077b07...

The Further Democratization of Stingray - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/04/the_further_d...

WikiLeaks docs show NSA's 10-year economic espionage campaign against France - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/29/wikileaks_docs_show...

Airbus wants answers from Germany over U.S. spying claims - https://money.cnn.com/2015/04/30/news/airbus-germany-nsa-spy...

Green Party: The police’s secret surveillance of elected politicians with no criminal record is scandalous - https://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2014/06/16/police%E2%80%9...

Police continued spying on Labour activists after their election as MPs - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/25/police-spied...

These points would be much better argued if there were a history of people being able to trust the US government overall. But there isn't. It is prudent to think that the government, in general, will head down the same avenues they have in the recent and not-so-recent past.

There is a history of the government using it disproportionately against minorities and folks that want to change the status quo. There is a history of putting some groups in jail more than others. And so on. This lack of trust and history of power abuses and such things seriously dampens any hopes of responsible use. I'll add that some of their "drug trafficking" is to check to see if folks are selling small bits of weed. Terrorism seems like an obvious farce at this point considering they are keen to ignore terrorism from right-wing folks and instead, look to condemn Muslims and to condemn folks that look like they might be "Muslim" or "Mexican".

The government - at least in the us - needs trust first.

People act differently when they know they're being watched. The government does not have the right to alter my behavior that way.

Next reason is that their laws aren't enforced equally. This tech is more likely to be used for small time crooks (and disproportionately, minorities) than used to stop CEOs or Epstein's, or cops that strangle handcuffed suspects of nonviolent offenses

Can anyone really justify why dictators are bad without resorting to "and they do something bad?" I mean, you couldn't even explain to me why you wouldn't want me as a cosigner on your bank account without resorting to something like, "and then whatshisface does something bad." I think it's reasonable to believe in a slippery slope between "gun is pointed" and "gun is fired." I mean, just to play devil's advocate, you could make me a cosigner and I could help you manage your finances.

You can't prove that dictatorial powers won't be used to perfectly simulate democracy, after all absolute power means the power to hold elections. Likewise, I can't prove that after the surveillance system is completed the government won't put black paper over all their computer screens and never look at anything. But, somehow, that doesn't really change my outlook.

>Can anyone really justify why dictators are bad without resorting to "and they do something bad

If a dictator is bad, the citizenship has almost no method of improving the situation. A benevolent dictator may be the best form of government, but there is no reliable way of ensuring it will be attained.

How would a single person be able to choose what is best for everyone, even if benevolent? Benevolent does not mean omniscient and infinitely wise.

The best kind of system is one which ensures no single entity can amass a great deal of power, ending with a state of many smaller entities in continual opposition.

>How would a single person be able to choose what is best for everyone, even if benevolent? Benevolent does not mean omniscient and infinitely wise.

A benevolent dictator can still make mistakes, but so can the smaller entities you describe. The benevolent dictator would be focused on the good of everyone though, while the smaller entities in opposition would be focused on the good of their own group.

The process of setting up a longstanding benevolent dictatorship is what makes the idea ridiculous.

My point is that it is completely unreasonable to expect a single entity to even approach the optimum for the majority of people, unless this entity is god-like. The numerous smaller entities simply have a lot more manageable task ahead of them.

By distributing power into a large number of entities, there is no power consolidation and hence no single point of failure. With such a power structure, it is much harder for a sociopath to replace the benevolent dictator and take control of the whole. Furthermore, if any of the smaller entities go awry, an individual can much more easily migrate to another one.

>My point is that it is completely unreasonable to expect a single entity to even approach the optimum for the majority of people, unless this entity is god-like. The numerous smaller entities simply have a lot more manageable task ahead of them.

With multiple groups, approaching the "optimum" will eventually involve hurting other groups for the benefit of your own. To me, everybody living adequately is preferred to some living optimally at the expense of others.

The rest of your post is about the nigh impossibility of setting up a benevolent dictatorship. It absolutely should not be attempted, even if it would be the ideal form of government.

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