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Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite annoyed that my tax dollars are being used to bring the hammer down on media "pirates" and PS3 hackers while serious crimes like DDoS for money (and the related botnets), phishing, malicious systems intrusion, and all manner of corporate espionage get the cold shoulder.

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It reminds me of how the FBI mostly conducts sting operations on "radicalized retards," where they find someone on a Islamist message board and then encourage and equip the recruit for terrorism.

It's an extremely rare thing (as in I can't think of one off the top of my head) to hear about a credible terrorist threat being foiled by FBI work.

It's happened, you just don't hear about them.

Why not? Wouldn't it be better for the government's PR situation to let us know that they are catching real terrorists instead of just prodding and handholding incompetent fools?

Maybe I don't understand anti-terrorism... but why trot out these phony stings and make the public think that these are just a bunch of incompetent over-hyped organizations (and I mean terrorist and intelligence alike)? If we are supposed to be suspicious and wary, wouldn't it be beneficial to have something really scary to feed the public?

What good would that do? Make you feel your tax dollars were hard at work while you realize you almost got nuked yesterday?

Depends. It doesn't require too much imagination to conceive of scenarios where the present course is better. Besides, the public was fed scary shit for political manipulation. But that doesn't mean that the other isn't true.

But I've said all I'm going to say on that.

Bullshit, such claims require evidence, I won't accept that on faith, and neither should you.

I don't.

So you have evidence?

"I have proof, but I can't give it to you. You just have to trust me."

Business plan of every major religion.

Or rather, real criminals are hard to catch. Going after them would consume resources with no payoffs. Easier targets present more opportunities for publicity.

And the copyright industry has lots of money with which to bribe politicians.

I hear people say things like this all the time. What does it really mean? Do you believe that politicians are bribed with big cases of money? Or are you referring to campaign contributions?

I would probably attribute it to agents wanting to further their careers by catching some people and getting them convicted. All of the agent's office buddies are going after copyright violators, so they do too.

Generally what is meant by "bribe politicians" is twofold. The first aspect is campaign contributions, which help keep the politician in office. But the second one is post-legislature work. A former Senator just got made MPAA head, and similar things happen throughout the business sector - get defeated in the polls (or don't run for reelection) and move over to a cushy job on a corporate board or as figurehead of an industry group, where you get paid a 6-figure sum for easy and part-time work. Both of these are perfectly legal if unseemly.

I agree that it may also be about agents who want to further their careers - because the punishments for copyright violation are so high, it probably looks just as good on the CV as a successful DDOS or spam case, and it's probably markedly easier.

I believe they're compensated in real tangible ways for doing the work of wealthy people.

That is a more severe and pernicious problem than most people realize.

It's too bad the payoffs for the pirates are pretty much nil too.

It's like the police's propensity to attack prostitutes and cannabis growers to look 'tough on crime', but not actually take any risks dealing with the serious criminals.

In a democracy the solution to this would be to form a political party, win elections, and thus force the state to change policy.

Unfortunately I doubt that the USA is sufficiently democratic for that to work. So a better solution would be to write software that makes it a lot harder for governments to know what people are communicating on the internet.

Various attempts at this have been made, but a bigger obstacle to anonymity than good software is mass adoption of that software.

It's not that the USA isn't democratic enough. Quite the opposite. The problem is with public choice economics, and rationally-irrational voters.

The problem is that the government wields sufficient power that it's (very) cost effective for those who have sufficiently deep pockets (corporations, unions, other special interests) to woo the legislators for special privileges and rent seeking.

On the other hand, while voters collectively could wield power to counter this, it's diffuse, and any one particular voter has approximately zero influence, and thus has little incentive to make the significant investment in educating himself about what's going on. Thus, the electorate is generally ignorant (and rationally so), and does not know about (most of) the shenanigans going on with their government.

"It's not that the USA isn't democratic enough. Quite the opposite."

I think the real issue is democracy, no matter how well executed, really just isn't that good at protecting citizens from tyranny. Laws that ensure freedom and privacy are all good and fine, but they will never compete with math that ensures privacy and freedom.

Even were we to devise the perfect system of governance, advancement in technology to ensure the situation would still be essential.

Low hanging fruit?

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