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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

Bull. Shit.

> If you read the history (and these days there are tons of resources) this sequence of events (of overreach) has unfolded a thousand times. There are a whole bunch programmes that have been shutdown because one group or the other got carried away or did damage.

There are many such programs, says you, and yet you fail to name even one.

There has never been this level of government overreach -- if only because of the technology involved. Never has it been like this. Or at least, never has a government survived this.

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I didn't provide links, cause they are well known and easy to find.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass-Observation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Camelot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr...

I don't really get what the line of argument is here, exactly. The CIA & FBI engaged in massive abuses in the past, including psychological and biological experimentation on unwitting US subjects, so therefore we should be blasé about their ongoing mass surveillance program (which, incidentally, has the potential for much more wide-reaching political and societal damage than anything that's come before it)?

I guess one could also argue for calm on the basis that the Stasi once existed and these days East Germany is an okay place.

And the solutions to these issues are perfectly well known: the intelligence agencies need to be curtailed and reined in, and their ability to indefinitely store massive reams of data about every private citizen brought to an end.

I said know the history. Such programmes were shut down in the past. Knowing how and why doesn't just reduce anxiety, it gives you a bag of tools to improve on. Assuming everyone knows the history is a big mistake. On top of that there are lot of characters around who benefit from ignorance and stoking anxiety.

”There has never been this level of government overreach -- if only because of the technology involved. Never has it been like this. Or at least, never has a government survived this”

They always has been overreach. This is not new.

The parent's post means that the overreach has never had the technology we have now. This drastically changes the situation. The government could secretly mandate that all phone manufacturers must secretly record the phone microphone all the time and then this data gets analyzed. If this happens in 10 years, then the general public might not even find out for years, and even if they do, most of the public will just shrug and move on.

I guess that makes sense but if you take into account technological capabilities then the next overreach will almost always be the biggest because the technology makes larger and larger scale possible.

And this is why we need to care more and more about this issue as a society.

True. With current and soon to be tech we can build surveillance much more pervasive than what the book 1984 describes. It feels like it’s almost inevitable for this to happen.

It's only "inevitable" because so many people are proscribing the boundaries of political and legislative action on the issue by discussing it with this sense of fatalistic unavoidability. The mere existence of this technology does not imply that the NSA & CIA have to construct a massive data center in Utah which stores all internet traffic forever -- that is a political choice.

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