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Comment by deith | Hacker News Reader

"Would you like the government to be able to read private messages so they can investigate and catch criminals?"

Go and ask that, you'd be surprised.

"Would you like the government to permanently have access to all private messages without a warrant so they can catch terrorists, of which they cannot provide a single example of a terrorist this system has caught?"

Look at me, I can write a technically true but biased question too!

Why without a warrant?

Why "to catch terrorists"? There are lots of crimes and even civil matters for which this is useful.

Because that's how it works right now (at least in the US, can't speak for other countries for sure), and I'm intentionally writing a question biased in the opposite direction of how yours was.

Would you prefer it was phrased:

government will archive and index everything you ever write, film and record to search for evidence of:

Watching illegal movies, Smoking weed, Not paying all your taxes, Antisocial behaviour, crossing a red light?

Yeah, but you’re not in charge of writing the referendum question, if it comes to that, and the UK doesn’t have a strong pro-personal-liberty party, so the fact you can write an alternative biased in a nice way doesn’t help.

"Yes Minister" covered leading questions in opinion polls, of course, but I don't have the quotation. For anyone too young or not aware of classic BBC series, Yes Minister (and sequel Yes Prime Minister) is an impressively timeless comment on politics and officialdom.

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