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Comment by dkdk8283 | Hacker News Reader

If you weren’t old enough to live through 9/11 and witness the transformation of the country you are probably being naive about contact tracing today.

At first everyone was on board and patriot act was justified: we were under attack. There was no clear end of this attack, so the patriot act got renewed.

We caught bin laden and killed him. Great! End of the patriot act? Nope, there was still a “threat”. 19 years later it’s normalized.

I predict the same thing will happen here. There is no scenario in which this will not be abused.

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What do you propose we do about it?

The response to 9/11 seems so disproportionate because it presupposed the existence of thousands more plots, which never materialized. Preserving civil liberties would have been free.

The spread of the virus is not a conspiracy theory or a what-if/abundance-of-caution proposition. It is an observable fact. There is no way the public tolerates the devastation that will definitely materialize if we go back to making arbitrary, untraceable contacts. If contact tracing is intolerable, then so is contact.

At some point, people are going to be ready to repeal the 4th amendment if it means seeing their friends again.

People will just go out, which they're already doing. Nobody would ever agree to repealing the 4th amendment, they would challenge the government's authority to restrict their movement.

The police can't arrest all of us.

I think you overestimate your neighbors’ appetite to murder hundreds of millions of people, or to let others get away with doing so.

There is a whole group of people with an opinion thats different from yours. In my area nobody obeys lockdown or social distancing.

heh, what? in what scenario does contact tracing save hundreds of millions of lives? I think if it were widely agreed upon that it would save hundreds of millions, folks would universally be on board. It's disingenuous to assert that people who are against contact tracing are murderers, because evidence is lacking that it will make the difference between peak caseloads exceeding or staying under healthcare capacity.

> It's disingenuous to assert that people who are against contact tracing are murderers

Thank you. Unfortunately this is a heated / political issue now, it's going to take a long time to restart the economy.

The economy is not getting restarted without a way to mitigate the virus's spread. Maybe for a few weeks, until people see with their own eyes what exponential growth of dead bodies looks like, but not sustainably.

The one where it works well enough to replace lockdown. You're right, that scenario is not guaranteed. Meaning we might be stuck with lockdown until vaccination.

But there is no way responsible adults are going to let people just go back to normal. The threat that required lockdown in the first place has not diminished in any way.

Sidestepping the loaded term.. There are lots of counterexamples, eg muted action in response to in climate crisis and global poverty problems.

> The response to 9/11 seems so disproportionate because it presupposed the existence of thousands more plots, which never materialized.

Did they not? There have been several attacks by al-Qaeda on foreign targets annually since 9/11, most of which targeted the US or its allies. I think it's reasonable to assume there were many more plots that either didn't materialize or did materialize and were halted. While I don't support the measures because I still believe they are disproportionate (at least in the US), there certainly isn't a complete lack of a threat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Al-Qaeda_attacks

I think some of the difference is that we went through all of that, and the NSA/Snowden leaks, and trust in the US government in general is at all-time lows. The fact that all that happened gives me hope and expectation that people are more suspect this time around.

This time around nothing will be different. Panama papers came out and nothing happened, Epstein was involved in who knows what with royals, politicians, and the wealthy and nothing happened, Assange is a prisoner for exposing the truth and even the surveillance that Snowden brought to light is still taking place today.

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