Comment by champagnois | Hacker News Reader

Comment by champagnois | Hacker News Reader

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We see new technologies emerge that make our day jobs easier as they get more and more automated.

I understand the desire of people in gov agencies to have more access to backdoors than they currently have, but think for a moment the risks that such powers pose to the public when the government itself turns authoritarian.

Unthinkable in our current climate, maybe. To the left and right of you -- at the NSA or FBI -- everyone is a non-partisan patriot who wants a color blind utopia of freedom and democracy.

I would argue two points: (1) That an apparratus has already been built that is beyond the wildest dreams of prior authoritarian states. (2) Democracies are historically rare and notoriously short lived. They do not last.

With points (1) & (2), we can conclude thus that the powers of such government agencies WILL one day be used by an authoritarian regime. It is a question of when, not if. Let us not build the authoritarian tools so as to not tempt a future would-be tyrant.

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance...

I disagree, I only master French democracy, and of that one I can say it is irreversible. As such, I disagree with your conclusion, even more so when it boils down to "let's leave some criminals running around just in case one day our democracy turns into an authoritarian regime like in scifi".

I am affected by the damage caused in the present reality, not by hypothetical damage in an highly unlikely reality, as such, I base my political opinion on facts that happen in the present, factual reality.

I admire your enthusiasm and conviction. I do not doubt that you and your pro-democracy patriotic brothers and sisters at what ever group are probably the right people for the job, currently.

In the United States presently, I am concerned about the health of democracy itself. I assume authoritarian forces from abroad (RU / NK / CN / Iran / others) are abusing our open social media networks to radicalize the public. The infection here is to a point where a very small minority of people even understand there is an infection -- most people don't look at problems from this sort of meta perspective, and they instead hail from either side of the divide, and are begging for a one-party takeover of the system.

I do not see the 1337 folks doing much to fix this. Going to hack some routers, spoof some DNS, send people firmware viruses, break their servers, collect information? That doesn't fix it. Authoritarian attacks on the American mind are mostly succeeding and this is blatantly evidenced by the radicalism that is becoming so popular in our politics.

If it can happen here, it can happen in France. I'm wondering if the only remedy is a government firewall of social media / comment sections / etc to keep conversations limited to real citizens, rather than foreign information warriors.

But hey, what do I know?

If a foreigner has an argument I believe we want to ear it, maybe we refutate it, maybe it improves our understanding.

It is happening here in France, the woke totalitarism has penetrated our universities, we're removing statues too, and soon will also be burning books just like on the other side of the Atlantic ... Unless next elections put a stop to that.

Western governments have not yet fully acknowledged the fact that the strategy of seducing totalitarian regimes like Russia and China with peaceful economic progress has failed. The awakening on this is extremely slow.

Our 1337 have been, on the whole, too arrogant to acknowledge that the status quo of how they operate to preserve democracy has failed in that it is not enough and Democracy is currently receding and morale is at an all-time low.

If the civilization we were born to love and defend is to survive, then it must adapt to the current threats and quickly. Our adversaries are back and more powerful than they ever were. It is time we end the drunken holiday of the 1990s and bring back the creativity of McCarthyism and such.

For the record, I apologize for turning this chat from "law enforcement" to "winning versus the east" ... I acknowledge this is all off topic.

I see it's off topic but I appreciate discussing with you, because I don't think I understand your position correctly but I'm trying to!

Regardless, if you've been truthful, then we are extended family in some way.

Vive la France! Vive la liberté!

I'm always truthful unless I'm saying something so stupid that I'm expecting nobody to take it seriously ... which is pretty french, irony is a bet you take on your audience's intelligence, that does not always go as planned as you might notice in a comment ...

Long live Canada! Or Quebec whatever side you're on xD

McCarthyism was after people with an opinion, I don't believe that's a good thing and that it's going to happen again in western countries.

The current threat here is a rise of criminality, having more evidence would secure more people, this bill was actually a try to "adapt to the current threats".

I do not really disagree with you. McCarthyism was before my time and I admit to having no understanding of it.

I meant to say we should be creative in dealing with the ways in which totalitarian systems infiltrate our society and weaponize our public.

Currently, we do not seemingly have a strong defense against what is happening.

I know a bit about what our side does, and I also know what their side does and how they do it.

1337 folks are not enough and they only know half of what is going on.

But are you really off-topic or are you actually much deeply in topic?

After all, why wouldn't it be the case here: making our own states weaker because "we the public will not negociate our privacy!" ? Is the public in question, strongly expressing their opinion here, really going to benefit from having a weaker state ? Is there no limit about how weak we want our state ? At what point does it starts benefiting forces which are hostile to our civilisation ? Has it even started already ? I think I figured your answer to that last one!

What makes our state weaker is not this public, it's whatever forces weaponizing this public against our states, and indeed I'm aware about them, but the public is in the middle, we must win with arguments, by talking about reality, I beleive that's how we can wake up and face reality and actually debate solutions instead of hiding behind distopian scifi scenarios like we are doing here.

What specifically would prevent McCarthyism from happening again?

It's like if you're asking "what would prevent us from burning heretics alive again" or "what would prevent us from going back into the middle age again", or even "what would prevent us from buying slaves again". I'm not an expert of McCarthyism, I'm not even American and as such have not studied it a lot (barely read a wikipedia article about it and a couple of movies), I'd be more confortable answering "what would prevent us from going back into nazism"? Because I could there build an answer based on the current state construct and history.

But, I wouldn't construct my answer about "one thing specifically", instead, on a whole context of things, such as: evolution, experience, education...

It's a vague but extremely interesting question, I'm sorry I'm too tired to disgress as much as I'd love to but I suppose my answer would boil down to "we've made a long road since McCarthyism, we've learned to appreciate confronting ideas", it would be constructed about exactly why it's important to study history, keep a memory, and keep debating so that every single argument can be studied and refutated by anyone.

Again, I'm not fearing hypothetical realities that look like scifi, but instead, I'm trying to solve problems we actually have right here in our shared present reality, such as criminality. It's fine if you don't want to help me, that doesn't make you a criminal, but it would be great if someone like you with your talent would like to help.

You could start with explaining what exactly do you mean by "totalitarian", and how comes you don't consider totalitarian the country with world's highest incarceration rate, world's largest army, and world's largest civilian death toll.

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