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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists. (from the Guardian inquiry about the same topic).

Every time we allow special laws or special tools to fight "terrorism" or "child abuse" or other evils that get people worked up, they end up being used against the people in general. Every time. Why are we even surprised.

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It might hard to accept this, but "public health" is now a part of the surveillance justification tool kit too. When it's impossible to argue against measures taken in defense of public health without seeming selfish, why wouldn't it be?

Not where I live. Is your request simply not to be seen as selfish while making a selfish argument?

Can you provid examples of this? De we have examples of public health being leveraged for anything other than public health?

... Are you serious? Did you just wake up from a 20 month nap?

It may be better for me to rephrase this part of my post like this:

> ""public health" is now likely to be a part of the surveillance justification tool kit too"

I don't have any specific examples, but this article gives a good gist of what might be at stake. [1]

I think this is a key quote

> "The Snowden disclosures came twelve years after the initial implementation of the Patriot Act, and it was only last year that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the subsequent dragnet surveillance employed by the NSA may well have been unconstitutional."

[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/government-data-collect...

last may, i recall public health officials and figures coming forward to say that mass protests were acceptable because racism was a greater public health threat than covid. you can see a similar push for gun control using the same rhetoric taking shape

What health officers said is that 1st amendment rights supersede health orders. Perhaps you could link to a health officer or health order saying otherwise?

What did public health officials say about those who protested lockdowns?

I don't recall health officers specifically saying this. But it was public policy in NYC to explicitly not trace infections spread through the George Floyd protests:

https://www.businessinsider.com/nyc-contact-tracers-not-aski...

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/racism-pu...

those health officials couldn't bring themselves to offend the protesters by pointing out that the protests were cesspools of shedding virus. even though the protests were cesspools of shedding virus.

Do you have any references for that? I’ve read a few informal attempts and nobody had compelling evidence that the protests caused increased transmission. Seems unlikely since they were outdoors, which is now known to be relatively safe right?

outdoors with a 6' halo is fine in most cases, even with an unvaccinated population. The protests were not that in many cases, but health officials refused to tell people to stop, for whatever reasons they had. I believe the reasons were personal cowardice and dereliction of duty in the face of being scared of being called racist.

it only seems unlikely if you don't understand how covid works. covid-19 is an airborne illness that is passed through moisture between humans. humans radiate moisture when engaged in activities that increase heart rate. protest involve a lot of marching and yelling at each other, which, spread moisture through droplets, perspiration, breath etc. many protestors were mask averse, to put it mildly. so, no, not now known to be relatively safe right?

Several state governments in Australia recently had to enact special legislation to stop law enforcement from using covid tracking data to find witnesses and suspects.

All state governments had initially ensured the public that the data was not available to LE, but none of them had actually passed legislation to make it unlawful until journalists discovered that the Police were using the data.

https://www.afr.com/policy/health-and-education/call-for-nat...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-15/safewa-app-sparks-urg...

https://www.innovationaus.com/qld-police-accessed-qr-code-ch...

In Germany every piece of data you collect has to specifiy as narrow as possible what it is being collected for before you collect it. Using pandemic related data for policing is a data privacy violation.

Of course that didn't stop police from still going into some places and demanding the data. But doing so was a clear breach of law.

Every piece of personal data you collect creates a pull factor for various actors to abuse said data, which is why you shouldn't collect more than you need, you should delete (or anon/pseudonymize) it once it is not needed anymore or you should collect it in such a way ot wouldn't be useful for state actors.

I am amazed how the German Corona-Warn-App was designed with these principles in mind. They managed to allow people to register into locations while only storing the data locally on your phone. Your phone then downloads the data from the servers in an non-revealing way and queries it for warnings/positive cases that have been issued in these locations at that time. If yes, you get a warning and you can decide how to proceed with this without having any other actor knowing of this.

This software is a piece of art from a privacy standpoint.

At the same time the state-level regulatiins require recording name and contact data, thus making CWA not enough of a (legally accepted) solution, leaving paper lists or trainwrecks like Luca.

That is really weird afaik, but I saw stores which used CWA despite that : )

Canadian police departments got caught for this also (Ontario iirc)

Singapore COVID-19 contact-tracing data accessible to police

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-singap...

It's been suspected that enforcing the lockdown was a way to get rid of protests, for instance in Algeria.

How do I allow laws? Or rather what does it mean to not “allow” a law?

You are right. Terrorism and cp are commonly used excuses to enable even more surveillance.

When you talk about “allowing laws” it makes it sound as if we somehow got conned into letting them have these laws. In reality powerfull people want these tools. Powerfull people get these tools. Where does the allowing happen exactly?

And don’t tell me that all would be well if only we would vote for the other guy.

> what does it mean to not “allow” a law?

Voting against any politicians who contribute to its passing, even if they're from your preferred political party.

Vote for approval voting, ranked choice, or even instant runoff at every level of government so that voting against an incumbent at least has a viable candidate.

I worry that making voting more complicated and giving people more candidates to vote for might actually backfire.

We already see this in American primary elections where the incumbent runs against a half dozen or more “nobodies” and seems to win on name recognition and vote splitting alone.

The problem is any winner-takes-all process. Ranked choice solves ticket splitting.

For instance, many Americans heavily favored Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who were both policy candidates in 2020. With ranked choice, they would have been the P/VP pairing. Instead, it went to Joe Biden because the candidates all dropped out and gave him their endorsements months prior to the end of the primaries to prevent Sanders' nomination and to secure a little political capital.

The current system is designed (to be able to) rob any candidate who builds popular support over the establishment. For instance, superdelegates are bullshit, but they're the tool the DNC decided on to prevent another Carter from happening, which is how they viewed Sanders.

Biden didn't even campaign and ended up POTUS, and he hasn't done anything towards enacting any of the promises he gave lip service to during the debates. I just wonder if that's not backfiring, what is?

Primaries are also winner-take-all which is why incumbents have such an advantage. Alaska got rid of party primaries and so it'll be interesting to see how the next primary goes, which will be between the top four candidates voted for in the primary.

Arguably 4 is too low a number to represent the varied interests of any state, and the first round will likely leave people unsatisfied until candidates can start researching the actual values preferences of their electorate and offer e.g. the top 4 ways to order the most important issues and alignments. I think there will be a strong force to abandon divisive hot-button issues that sound good on TV but are actually lower on most people's preference ordering.

Ah yes! The old democracy will fix it argument.

Little evidence for this strategy's efficacy. Single-issue voting doesn't carry a lot of weight and in many cases other candidates would be equally supportive of the policy.

As I often point out, surveillance is bad but so is child abuse and complaining about surveillance without acknowledging that is a good way to get ignored.

Single-issue voting has been effective for gun rights activists. But the problem is that while there is a lot of concentrated commitment among firearm owners to resisting gun laws, fewer people are as motivated on the front of surveillance; if you ask people, they might say they're against it, but it's not a priority issue. Whereas for firearms, a majority of Americans actually are in favour of more restrictions, but for those who are against them, it's a much higher priority for them. It's a classic example of the behaviour of collective action in public choice theory.

Single-issue voting in the primaries can be extremely effective. Case in point is how the NRA electorate dominates Republican primaries, even though the majority of Republicans actually support various gun control proposals (e.g. AWB).

>” When you talk about “allowing laws” it makes it sound as if we somehow got conned into letting them have these laws.”

This is a very Machiavellian and realpolitik take, so please keep that in mind. People in a democracy “allow” laws whenever they just continue to live normally. Sure, you can protest with signs and vote differently in the next election, but we know that’s not particularly effective at shaking the status quo.

What does “not allowing” a law look like? Civil disobedience, defiance, harassing politicians, and trying to force change. In essence, it’s average people and activists using every tool at their disposal to force the politicians to act differently. We saw plenty of this in 2020.

Yes the wording is imperfect. I meant "accept", as in, not protest until they are repealed. Voting is useless as all main political parties typically agree on this.

Any organisation that claims to be defending people's interest needs to do so with completely transparency.

Otherwise we end up with the "who watches the watchmen" narrative over and over.

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