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Comment by dangerface | Hacker News Reader

> So what happens if a ban occurs, and it is inevitably discovered (via future Snowden-type leak, or whatever) that [government agency] ignored it all along?

People find this stuff, it gets leaked eventually, with a law against it in place stopping it legally is a lot easier.

> Will legislatures once again retroactively protect those who violated the ban?

Most likely but it's a lot harder to do that once the law is in place.

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>People find this stuff, it gets leaked eventually, with a law against it in place stopping it legally is a lot easier.

But my point is that government agencies can and do ignore these kinds of bans. Will passing new laws make any difference? Particularly if no one is held accountable, which is invariably the case.

No kidding, and talking about laws presupposes the tech works really well, and not worth trying to fool. It also presupposes these govs and corps are really effective. Someone wants to boost these beliefs more than they want to fix any problems.

Noam Chomsky, commenting on 9/11 conspiracy theories, was saying that one of the things that made them impossible in retrospect is that secrets are very difficult to keep, that there are always people who will leak something.

But one thing that really stuck in my craw is how the military intelligence Chelsea Manning had access to later on was accessible by thousands of people, and there are very few who have followed her example. Similar with Snowden, except that much fewer people had his kind of access.

There was a conspiracy to hide waterboarding and CIA torture chambers in the government and it took more than a decade to come out by which time a lot of the original actors were free and clear. It's sad really. I highly recommend the docudrama "The Report" if you have time to watch a movie.

Or all the scary declassified stuff from the 50s onward (MKULTRA being probably the most recognizable).

Manhattan Project. Where workers discovered only decades later what exactly they did there, when they saw their workplace in a documentary, or even themselves. Compartmentalization, need to know only, culture of fear and mistrust, and very strong disincentives to do anything about it.

Pictures: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=manhattan+project+signage&t=ffab&i...

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