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Comment by deltree7 | Hacker News Reader

National Security is an incredibly complex, nuanced debate.

You should always take articles written by "an amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic. There's nothing he can't take apart, but many things he can't reassemble".

If Russia attacks your country or a terrorist blows a building, no one and no one blames "amateur woodworker and struggling shade tree mechanic" about intelligence failures.

But, we find this increasingly acceptable to push articles written by people who have absolutely no clue about anything (technology, security, geopolitics, threats, intelligence), just because the headline "hurr durr, Google/Amazon/Uber/Meta/...is evil"

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Do you have any comment about the content of the piece itself?

Yes, being constantly surveilled by AI-enhanced telescreens when in public is so very complex and nuanced, that we need security and geopolitics experts to tell us if that's the kind of society we want to live in. A lay person is simply not educated enough to judge whether having his every move and expression logged and analyzed by some government or corporate entity is a good thing or not.

Yes especially when the lay person is swayed by privileged people leading comfortable lives telling others who are in danger of getting killed or lose sovereignty.

Do you provide good faith argument about the net benefits of such a system to the society? Of course not. You are mostly concerned with "OMG, they showed me an ad about a thing that I almost wanted to buy" and "why should I care about a system that could potentially prevent Isrealis from being bombed from terrorists or Ukrainians murdered by Russians"

Lose sovereignty over occupied territory? I'd imagine what triggered your extreme reaction (and some others') is the bit about Israeli committing crimes against humanity in Palestine. I'd argue the article went too softly on this matter. The ruthless acts committed are clear under the sun and we've all seen videos ranging from unarmed protestors being beaten in the streets to IDF guards throwing live grenades to red cross vehicles, settlers invading civilians houses as they're forced to leave and so on. To question the morality of providing such entity with additional resources (that Israel can easily develop on their own thanks to their massive focus on weaponization of technology) that will further worsen the apartheid in place is entirely legitimate. There shouldn't be an exception just because it's a more western-aligned entity.

Honestly the angle should be "Israel wastes $1.2 billion on cloud-based surveillance it doesn't need". Even without Google and Amazon's help, the IDF is quite capable of surveiling every face and ascertaining whether you are lying, as anyone who has been through Israeli airport security can tell you.

Not sure if you're joking, or think that walking through an airport (for most people) will reveal how great or useless the security are at "ascertaining whether you're lying". Are we all meant to be testing a few lies each time we fly somewhere to judge that airport's security?

They are referring the process by which large numbers of people coming into Israeli airports are questioned by professionals acting like lie detectors.

Ah, thanks.

Large numbers of people coming into Israel?

Israel receives fewer than 5 million tourists per year from what I can find online.

That is less than 1/10th of the top 5 countries for tourism. And as an amusing point of reference, that is 1/4th the number of visitors who travel to the one city of Bangkok each year.

You've misunderstood their comment, what they are saying is that a large proportion of arrivals get questioned, not making a comment on the total number of passengers compared to other places.

Damn, you are actually correct. I have read that whole article, and wasn't even sure what the contract was for, but it sounded like some super scary surveillance program. Your description of it sounded nothing like what that article painted at all.

Then I decided to search for other articles about this that are written a bit more competently[0], and yup, it all checks out. Looks like a typical "we are migrating our infra from on-prem to cloud with GCP and AWS".

0. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/01/google-workers-protest-1-2...

Rather than "evil", I would dub it as a little too much confidence on statistical models running on blackbox computers without checking for edge cases of false inference(which could always be plausible).

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