Hacker News Reader

Comment by gene91 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t like the collateral damages of many policies. But it’s not fair to say that the policies “have not prevented anything” because we simply don’t know. The policies could have stopped in-progress evil acts (but they were never revealed to the public for intel reasons) or prevented attempts of an evil acts (well, nothing happened, nothing to report).

View on HN

It also could have stopped the Gods from smiting us all, but there's no evidence that it has.

This article[1] is a good start at realizing the costs outweigh the benefits. There's little or no evidence of good caused, but plenty of evidence of harms caused.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/top-5-claims-defenders...

There is evidence of that, in fact. There were many serious terrorist attacks in Europe, like in Spain's subway (300 dead) and Frankfurt, in the aftermath of 9/11 and other...uh howmy gonna say this...other stuff, the Spanish terrorist attacks were done by Basque nationalists or such, not Muslims.

So there's your control group, Europe.

I find it rather funny that we know about the parallel construction which they attempt to keep hidden, yet don't know about any successful preventions. I would assume they would at least want people to know if a program was a success. To me, the lack of information speaks volumes

This is on top of all the entrapment that we also know about, performed by the FBI and associated informants on Islamic/Muslim communities

The purpose of a system is what it does

Considering that they do not obey the law, if they had actually stopped any terrorists we would be hearing all about it from "anonymous leakers" by now.

The bar for public policy should be set quite a bit higher than "it could have done some good at some point, maybe".

In comic books, we read fanciful stories about the good guys saving the world in secret. But the real world doesn't really work like that.

When the police seize some illegal drugs, what is the first thing they do? They snap a picture and publish it for society to see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=police+seize+drugs&tbm=isch

because citizens want to see that their tax money is being used successfully. The same would likely be done by the surveillance authorities if they saw significant success in their mission.

One cannot prove a negative, but given how much public recording of everything there is these days (and in the last decade+), I'd say it's safe to err on the side of them not having prevented much of consequence. ("Absence of evidence..." doesn't really apply when evidence should be ample for the phenomenon to be explained.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com