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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

When COVID is over, the state will not willingly dismantle the new surveillance and information propagation/censorship systems it has built. The loss in liberty from COVID will make 9/11 and the Patriot Act look like a drop in the bucket. I used to think that as people who were more familiar with these issues we might be able to do something. It feels now more like we just won't be anesthetized when the doctor gets the hacksaw out.

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Power is rarely given up by direct request, if ever. Every inch that is given is one that must be fought tooth and nail to be reclaimed.

The silver lining of the past two years of incredible government overreach is an awakening in the minds of the common man of what’s possible if not for the push back of the determined. I’m not sure how this will all end, but I don’t see anymore widespread lockdowns or a total surveillance State taking control. At least not in the USA. There’s enough of us to reject that outright.

Except the thing that got everyone riled up is common sense activities like wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Where were those people at when bush was taking away their civil liberties? Waving their flags. I can at least get behind the folks like you who have a consistent view, but I definitely don't think that's 95% and I definitely think you are very mistaken that people are suddenly going to start trying to stop the other parts of the surveillance state (aka the actual bad parts, not the wear a mask part).

Exactly this. I had the misfortune of experiencing TSA security recently and it's still 99% bullshit security theatre from the 9/11 era. Covid stuff was just a sideshow.

This is been a really depressing reality check for me.

People are happy to let their important rights and liberties be taken away, as long as it's not too overt or sudden. But don't you dare make me wear a mask indoors during a respiratory virus pandemic!!

What's even more frustrating is that these people generally aren't "stupid".

That’s not where the line should be drawn. There is a small group dismayed at every erosion of liberties and drumming for foreign war, and then there are two large groups who take turns eroding the liberties spending munitions and using the other party as the excuse to have their turn doing it.

There's something to this. All too many people are okay with government overreach, and even tyranny, as long as it's in the name of some cause that they personally favour. It's only when this power is used in opposition to their views that it gets to be a problem. That goes for both wings of the American Demopublican Uniparty.

Masks are an undue burden at this point and it's reasonable to oppose them. I'm personally going to choose the state I move to based on opposition to masks, maybe Florida or Texas.

That’s really quite hyperbolic, given that it’s the cell provider’s anonymized aggregate data, for sale to anyone who cares to pay.

Many states and nations built databases to track who is vaccinated, who is infected, and who their contacts are. They will not go away, and they can be used to track anything.

If this were the case, it should be a very big story.

But it's anonymoized data, they are looking at behavioural patterns.

This is probably a really smart thing to do.

>given that it’s the cell provider’s anonymized aggregate data, for sale to anyone who cares to pay.

I heard that's the case for the US, but is that the case for canada as well?

Apparently, yes "The Insights platform was widely used even prior to the pandemic," [1]

I found [1] from the telus site describing this at [2]. The data platform is [3].

They say that they aggregate the data into large buckets, but I haven't figured out exactly what that means.

[1] https://iapp.org/news/a/teluss-data-for-good-wins-hpe-iapp-p...

[2] https://www.telus.com/en/about/privacy/data-for-good

[3] https://www.telus.com/en/business/medium-large/enterprise-so...

That's the problem. Agencies use this vague, meaningless language when what you really need to understand the implications and scrutinize them are the sordid technical details.

The infrastructure wasn't built for COVID. It was already all there far before. The sad truth is that privacy wise we lost barely any privacy because it was already all gone. The only risk is giving another excuse for legitimisation.

20 years ago one guy failed to light his shoe on fire and to this day we’re still taking our shoes off at the airport.

The general risk is there and I think politicians should talk more about it, but I'm wary that your statement is too broad.

Why are you concerned about your government trying to stop the spread of COVID, but hand over, willy nilly, the data to Apple and Google so they can sell you NFTs, microwaves and cars, and then also sell that data to others?

The government is using generic tower data avaiable to any number of sources.

It's like collect car traffic data to improve stoplight efficiency.

This is what we want them to be doing.

They should be transparent about it and contextualize it, but this program I'm fine with.

The lack of constitutional grounds for the 'curfews' is a bit discouraging, I'm shocked to see what's going in in Australia, they need some laws there.

Uh, this is the normal capitalist surveillance that is the business model of the kind of unicorns people here on hn want to found or work at.

The Canadian public health authorities just bought access to existing corporate databases.

Do you really think public health is less worthy of using this data than marketing and sales?

The government has the power to imprison people and can even give themselves the right to put people to death, regardless of the legality of the death penalty in any particular jurisdiction. So yes, I want them held to much higher and stricter standards than the folks at Dunkin' Donuts trying to find a better way to get me to buy coffee from them.

> censorship systems

what censorship system is installed as a pandemic measure by the gov't?

You cannot post anything on major social media if it contradicts what the establishment broadly regards as true. Best case scenario your post is removed, worse case scenario your account is suspended, worst case scenario the police come knocking at your door (e.g. Australia).

Certain topics now get you a big warning banner and maybe a shadowban on major social networks, and they'll openly admit as much. If that's not at the government's request then it's only because those social networks pre-empted the government.

But that's not an innovation caused by the pandemic. Weren't those labels introduced in response to the spoutings of the previous POTUS, even before Covid-19 was a thing? They may have been used to combat misinformation during the 2016 election campaign, I don't recall exactly. But the mechanism definitely existed before this virus appeared.

There was certainly talk about them in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections, but I don't remember them actually being introduced until Covid-19; certainly they weren't used anywhere near this widely.

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