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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting to see, on the one hand, the claim from the former Alexa engineer that they're not doing this and take privacy seriously, and on the other hand, the claim that they're government surveillance devices.

Because it's possible that they could both be true. The engineers take privacy seriously, think they're preserving it well, and then the man from the government comes in and PRISMs their servers and only he and one other person at the whole company knows about it.

But obviously privacy legislation isn't going to fix that.

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You know it's a crackpot theory when it's so unfalsifiable as to be absurd. You think one person--just one person--can manage the data of millions of people, the backups, the government requests, the exporting, and the IT troubleshooting? That's awfully convenient, and I expect you'll never be proven wrong and have to feel dumb for believing it.

The rest of the people work for the government, not the corporation? All they need is someone inside the company whose job it is to keep other people inside the company from finding out. It's the same model as police use for informants and intelligence services use for espionage.

It's also kind of pointless to talk about how to falsify a class of thing we have affirmative evidence is happening. When we found out about PRISM, the heads of the companies said they didn't know anything about it. So either they were lying or their subordinates successfully kept it a secret from them.

Moreover, the interesting question isn't whether it's happening right now. It's that given we know it can happen, how do we prevent it from happening? For example, by using software with published source code that runs on your own device instead of someone else's.

>It's also kind of pointless to talk about how to falsify a class of thing we have affirmative evidence is happening.

Can you elaborate on the logic behind this a bit more and perhaps explain how it wouldn't justify McCarthyism as well? (e.g. we know that there was a Soviet spy in one office, so every office that acts displeasingly is filled with Soviet spies)

Sure.

The problem with McCarthyism is that you're accusing people of being spies without any real evidence. They are, in all likelihood, innocent people being punished for no reason. It becomes a witch hunt and a pretext for punishing anyone you don't like but have no legitimate reason to punish.

By contrast, "spies exist" is a thing that we know is true. There have been documented instances. We don't need to know that there is there is a spy in a particular company at a particular time to know that we should take rational countermeasures against them. Encrypt everything. Eliminate centralization to avoid a single point of compromise for millions of people.

This can't be used for a witch hunt because it's defensive rather than offensive and isn't singling out any particular entity for special scrutiny. If we don't know which particular company or technology is targeted at which time, if we don't know if the adversary is Russia or China or organized crime or corrupt law enforcement, the course of action is still the same. Make mass surveillance as difficult as possible for everybody everywhere.

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