Hacker News Reader

Comment by n0nc3 | Hacker News Reader

The practices should be banned. It's a federal felony to wiretap or open someone else's mail. In almost all states, it's a crime to record conversations without consent from at least one party. Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society.

According to some footnotes in Shoshana Zuboff's book, the FTC was on the path to ban these practices in 2001 but then 9/11 happened.

View on HN

Calling mass surveillance a "fundamentally Soviet activity" weakens your argument here. Is mass surveillance something that happened in the Soviet Union? Of course. But it also happens in the US and many other nations, liberal democratic or not, worldwide. So why shouldn't we call mass surveillance fundamentally American, or fundamentally capitalist?

Mass surveillance is bad. It is toxic to freedom and democracy. Let's focus on that rather than invoking Red Scare tendencies of old.

> Let's focus on that rather than invoking Red Scare tendencies of old.

He's not "invoking Red Scare tendencies of old" to describe modern mass surveillance. He's giving historical context about what earlier generations thought:

>> Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society.

It's particularly confusing since the "earlier generations" were the people who wrote the unreasonable search and seizure clause in the Bill of Rights, almost 150 years before the Soviet Union even existed. The Supreme Court ruled in Katz v US that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional so Congress passed laws creating wiretap warrants [1] for law enforcement. Congress didn't ban wiretaps without a warrant, they passed a law to create such warrants in response to a Supreme Court decision that banned what police had been doing for decades, Soviet style.

[1] https://it.ojp.gov/PrivacyLiberty/authorities/statutes/1284

Not sure how you've taken his comment that way.

He used it contextually for framing, I don't think he was calling mass surveillance a "fundamentally Soviet activity" at all.

You're not being "wiretapped" if the site you visit explicitly included tracking. As an analogy, the sites that you visit are already providing one-party consent (all that is needed with current federal wiretapping laws) by including said intentional tracking.

In the case where non-essential sites are required to disclose what they track to the user, the user is arguably also providing consent on their end even if it's mandatory. Nobody is forcing you to visit non-essential sites.

If you told an American in 1995 that AT&T was selling their call records, or that Visa was selling their transaction records, they would have gone ballistic.

The fact that all this tracking is still hush-hush means that most people would not react kindly if they were aware of the true scope of the tracking, and how widely distributed the data is.

Browser fingerprinting isn't part of "explicitly including tracking".

> Earlier generations passed those laws because they viewed mass surveillance as a fundamentally Soviet activity with no place in a free society

Laughs in cointelpro

Reply on news.ycombinator.com