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Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

This is literally years-old information. I was aware of and hollering about this at people as a highschooler at debate and speech tournaments. Same thing then as now, no one cares, or those that do care don't care enough.

Besides, who cares if you have nothing to hide. Right?

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My father-in-law said exactly that to me. I wanted to reach out and smack him. Unfortunately, it isn't just a "mental copout", either. He is a very intelligent person who has arrived at a conclusion that the government oversight is OK because he has nothing to hide and (I have inferred) he is very afraid of those who do have something to hide.

Ask him if he or someone ever had an issue with someone with power in a company or government. Then ask what does the person have in arsenal when the people with power have a ton of information combined with power?

"Who watches the watchers" argument.

Unfortunately, fear of the "bad guys" out-weighs his fears of the government, and I suspect that is likely to be the case for most people.

After all, they have nothing to hide...

Bad guys never get into the government?

Seems like he believes in Us vs Them mentality: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/False_dilemma

I've found that most baby boomers have this mentality. They trust the government to do the right thing.

Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, oh yes, the government always does the right thing...

As korean american, I would love if you would qualify your statement about Korea.

Although none of us are enamored with North Korea, there was a fair share of atrocities that were committed by UN forces on the NK population and the South Korean government against communist sympathizers in their own country. The Wiki article goes into it in some detail. (No, it doesn't make it OK because "they were doing it".)

(As an aside, I sometimes bitterly contemplate how many great Korean minds were lost in that war because of their personal politics)

War is still war, there were deaths, veterans who weren't the same, etc etc. I'm a child of the 80s, so I can't say I remember the details, but war isn't always a pretty thing. Going by what Wikipedia says (yes, I know it's a single source), the US wasn't exactly smart about how it was handled leading up to the Korean war.

Indeed, baby boomers have been famous for trusting the government. Especially on Vietnam.

Baby boomers were anti-establishment, right up until they became the establishment. That's where the "neo" in neocon comes from.

Baby boomers actually have little to do with Neocon ideology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism#History_and_ori...

I bet your father-in-law wouldn't take too kindly to Government workers taking a look at his wife naked when they felt like it or recording (if you'll forgive me) their ahem marital moments.

Privacy is a human requirement, as evidenced by the deprivation of privacy as a punishment in prisons, and is much more than protection of those with something to hide.

Privacy seems more like a cultural thing... that doesn't mean that being deprived of it can't be effective as a punishment. In any case, we'd better hope it's a cultural need and not a human need, since it's essentially going away, and I can't think of anything short of the collapse of civilization that could prevent that.

Maybe he'd like to read http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

It's probably more targeted at a juvenile segment, but an interesting and enlightening book nonetheless.

I knew about it too and I am always baffled at the general population's indifference to it.

I guess when you are in debt, about to lose your house, your job, your health insurance, you don't really give a crap if Uncle Sam looks through your emails ... ?

Actually I think it might be when you start to care. When everything's going great you generally don't rock the boat. If everything's going down the tubes though, people get uppity. I.e. We start to examine what it is we love so much about our country and maybe even demand change (ok, maybe I'm getting a little carried away with the whole demand change thing).

Understand that a lack of privacy isn't a problem until it's a problem, e.g. someone has something against you and needs something to wield against you. The government & large corps. will happily use propaganda against you, and it's easier for them to find dirt on you with little to no privacy.

Think of it this way, the average person has something in their past they're probably not happy about that could be misused against them in a political way, if say, they ever wanted to be involved in politics. Enemies will use this, and enemies now have all of the data they want.

Honest question: do you really think they store every piece of communication that flows through the internet, just waiting for some random teenager they spied on to run for president? The way I imagine it the data runs through a lot of filters that look for evil words/phrases/whatever. Those few emails/sms/etc will be stored and sent to NSA analysts. I doubt they care about the usual type of "dirt" you use against people.

I am against the illegal spying, but what you're saying seems like a conspiracy theory.

It's newly relevant with the AT&T/T-Mo buyout. Do we really want that much more traffic going straight to the NSA?

You say that as if because AT&T was the only bunch of idiots dumb enough to get caught that it's safe or reasonable to assume the VZW and others aren't doing the same.

There's definitely evidence VZW did the same.

I used T-Mobile for years because they were the only ones that there wasn't much evidence against, plus I thought the parent company was a bit more credible, but it's all a black box from the user's perspective.

I wonder if T-Mobile being German-owned had anything to do with that.

In principal it's quite wrong and scary, but in reality I have to believe the government is too incompetent to actually do anything with their mountains of AT&T collected data.

According to paperwork leaked by Mark Klein, they have/had a "Narus STA 6400" in the room. It's described as a supercomputer that sounds, to my ears, similar to Carnivore. I doubt that they even try to collect (too much data), and instead specifically look for things to grab from the firehose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus

http://narus.com/index.php/solutions/intercept

Or, according to TIA, compile giant banks of information on every user based on their traffic & purchasing habits. Combine this with your other online data & there's quite a bit on every person.

I wouldn't underestimate the competency of the NSA. This wiretapping is frightening, especially if it falls into the wrong hands.

Yet. But WE will create the tools that help the government go through reams of data, collate different pieces of information. I think its actually inevitable that the government reaches that stage.

An even scarier thought is that what if they get access to data 30 years down the line, with vastly more computing power?

(Heck, what happens if someone gets a hold of old tossed out ISP hard drives with logs on them?)

Government incompetence should not comfort you.

Go rent the movie Brazil. It's a movie about what would happen in a society with strongly defined elites and suffocating bureaucracy, dominated by a fear of terrorism, practicing torture in secret. The information professional class is relatively privileged, although oppressed at the workplace like everyone else. For fun some can snoop on citizens at will. Yeah I know, it's science fiction, but it could happen some day.

The entire plot is set in motion when a fly falls into a mechanical typewriter and causes the government agents to break into the house of Archibald Buttle (instead of Tuttle).

As the problem lies often not in the data leaking out but in the conclusions someone else draws from it, I'm convinced that incompetence and stupidity only can make matter worse.

As for the mountains of data: how many HN'ers for instance would love to climb them for no other reason than to use some BigData tools on them without questioning that cause?

Even if you have nothing to hide, doesn't mean that you should lose your presumed innocence.

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