Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I got upset about Echelon, almost 30 years ago, and then got further upset with the Patriot Act. The internet kill switch. Etc. Et. al. In speaking with my pastor about these things, he gave me the line, "I've got nothing to hide." Sure, he, personally, is above reproach, and would lay his life bare, but he considers conversations with people he counsels to be sacrosanct. Would he like his text messages and emails published? Of course not. Even he absolutely DOES have things to hide!

My pastor is a superhumanly wise person. Almost everything he has said has turned out to be true. Of the Patriot Act, he agreed that the government probably overreached, but he said these things are like a pendulum, and eventually it would swing back. On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going. The problem is that both sides of US politics are in on it, so I don't know what will ever correct this course. It seems that, eventually, we'll have Chinese-style, socially-scored citizenship, just run by corporations instead of the government.

It's not a pendulum. To imagine such a thing is a very indulgent way of thinking. The liberties experienced in the United States are quite exceptional as human societies go. In the history of human civilization, the tendency is towards the feudalistic, the imperial, the totalitarian. So the natural course is for liberties to erode. It took bloodshed and great will to carve out freedoms enjoyed by the United States.

It's less the dynamic of a pendulum and more the dynamic of oxidation.

We luxuriate in thinking that these "Western-style democracies" are a norm, when in fact on the planet today the best of them are very few and I think the case could be made that all of them are showing signs of withering principles in the face of threats and greed. So you find people arguing whether this or that style of loss is rational today because of some set of de jure reasons, but in the long scope of history it's simply a question of maintaining liberty or lessening of liberty - is the fruit rotting? Are we falling back towards the illiberal norm and how fast? The reasons of the day are irrelevant. The bargain is known - de-risk at the cost of liberty. The dynamic is known - the powerful seek to consolidate more power. The rest is filler.

I think you're right. I think every country is gravitating towards plutocracy, as a modern form of feudalism. Even China. Whatever words we might use to distinguish one form of government from another are largely irrelevant at this point.

One thing Hitchens said that really stood out to me was, "the crucial distinction between systems...was no longer ideological. The main political difference was between those who did, and those who did not, believe that the citizen could—or should—be the property of the state."

I recently listened to Rogan's interview with Yeonmi Park and you get a real sense of this in action - how you go from being secured by the state to being the property of the state. Rather sobering.

For me Snowden’s take says it all:

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say”[1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/36ru89/comment/crglgh...

>>On this subject, he has been completely wrong. The pendulum just keeps going.

Well, the hope is that it will eventually swing back with super strength. Maybe it will take a full collapse of the western society first and it might happen long after we're all dead, but I'm hoping that society will go back on this.

> The surveillance powers of the Patriot Act needed renewal by March 15, 2020, and after it expired, the U.S. Senate approved an amended version of the bill. After President Donald Trump threatened to veto the bill, the House of Representatives issued an indefinite postponement of the vote to pass the Senate version of the bill; as of December 2020, the Patriot Act remains expired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act#Section_expiration...

I did not know this, and I really appreciate the link. However, since Echelon -- the instantiation of the technology to do so in the first place -- the NSA has been intercepting and logging ANY AND ALL "signals" it can, foreign and domestic, the 4th Amendment (and whatever related laws) be damned. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A, and the law that retroactively made it legal, discussed on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166. The Patriot Act was a piece of paper, just thin enough that the courts could point to it if cornered, in order to excuse anything the government did, in the name of terrorism. I don't know what they'll point to now, but I'm sure they'll find something. Meanwhile, the unrestrained wiretapping continues as it ever has. If you aren't using end-to-end encryption, your information is in a database at the NSA. Snowden proved it, and there has been little but gestures since his revelations.

Yeah, it was never just "the Patriot Act" and it wasn't rejected particularly thoroughly so no one would be terribly surprised if the Patriot Act 2: Electric Boogaloo happened tomorrow.

But still, the regular renewals have ended and the Patriot Act is dead. It's not surprising that it wasn't bigger news -- March 2020 was a little busy -- but it's worth taking the win.

> My pastor is a superhumanly wise person.

Now you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. Case in point.

There is no such thing as a pendulum, there is just the never ending fight of peoples rights (in a broad sense, not in the fundamentalists first order sense) versus the tendency and ability for those with power to stack society in their favour. 'Both sides' is missing the point; just follow the money, the names, the direction of influence.

Unfortunately, religion is as weaponized in this proces as any other large power structure. This is what power does, after all, it coagulates unless kept in check.

It has been a pendulum historically speaking, but people that use this argument usually forget just how bloody bad it gets before the pendulum starts swinging back.

And there is nothing that enforces the swings... It's entirely possible for it to stop swinging for hundreds of years, as that's been the case historically as well.

It's usually pointless to argue with religious people though. They have their opinions and there is little you can achieve with logic.

> It's usually pointless to argue with religious people though. They have their opinions and there is little you can achieve with logic.

Why? Every religion or non-religion is based on belief. Even if you are not religious, you have some fundamental beliefs that require some sort of assumption. Logic and religion are not incompatible.

I shouldn't have added that paragraph, as HN is not the place to discuss religion.

Please forget I mentioned it.

Waaay ahead of you. ;-)

Invite him to do the next few masses naked. See where he stands after that..

I think the "you've got nothing to hide argument" is basically a failure of imagination. If you're immediate response is "what's the big deal?", you likely haven't thought about it much. You have to look at all the implications.

That's usually true of so what arguments.

It's going to be run by the government as well.

Ask him if he lives in a transparent sacristy.

It's done by corpos, and gov, in both places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com