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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

> Even if you are a person who will never in your life end up as any kind of person of interest for the government

Literally no way to ensure that.

It doesn't even have to be the government itself. Let's say the sheriff in your town takes interest in your partner. Or his kid gets in a spat with your mom because the kid was DUI.

The chances of becoming a person of interest will always be non-zero, but I think I a lot of people can be reasonably confident that they are not likely to become a person of interest.

Given that 0.5—1% of the US population is incarcerated[1], and that getting a prison sentence is far from the only way to become a person of interest, it is quite reasonable to say that chances of getting some unwanted attention from various government and government-adjacent institutions are too damn high to ignore it.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/01/16/percent-incarce...

While US justice certainly can be capricious and arbitrary, it is not entirely a random lottery whose eye it falls upon. And while those who believe in the centrality of personal responsibility and try to tell you that anyone who comes into contact with the police must have done something to deserve it are clearly deluded, there are things you can do in your life, or elements of your personal background and lifestyle that, though you never really opted into them, you may benefit from (one might call them 'privileges'), which will reduce the chances that you personally will run into trouble with the law quite considerably.

Your own personal odds are rarely the same as the average odds across the whole population. For anything. That's why insurance companies can exist.

> there are things you can do in your life, or elements of your personal background and lifestyle that, though you never really opted into them, you may benefit from (one might call them 'privileges'), which will reduce the chances that you personally will run into trouble with the law quite considerably.

They are always watching. Always collecting your data and trolling through it looking for things to use against you. You might not face consequences from the ongoing surveillance, but it never stops and something as simple as being in the wrong place at the wrong time or typing the wrong combinations of words in a search engine can be enough to get you questioned by police.

You can always make choices that will make your situation worse, but no matter what you do or don't do there's really no telling what might cause you harm.

> You can always make choices that will make your situation worse, but no matter what you do or don't do there's really no telling what might cause you harm.

People resist this notion because psychologically, on a basic level, we wanna feel safe at home. In Maslow's ordered sets of needs, the need to feel safe at your resting spot comes right after "not being beaten", "not freezing" and "not starving". The idea that it's entirely unknowable to you what (completely innocent and legal) things you might have done ten years ago turn you into a "PoI" today is - obviously - quite scary and contrary to that.

That's what makes the panopticon so disturbing. You can't (or at least shouldn't) ever feel entirely safe/free because the threat is always looming and strikes at any time. I think on some level most people do realize that, even the ones who have never known things any other way, and I think it's only getting harder and harder to ignore. Difficult to say what it's been doing to us though. There' are a lot of other things contributing to the background level of dread these days.

When pretty much every single person in the country is being spied on doesn't that make everyone a "person of interest?"

The only thing that differentiates you from anyone else is how much interest they have in you and that likely changes by some percentage with every scrap of data they collect or whatever they happen to be fishing for in the moment.

At any time your phone's GPS history and your Google searches can land you on a suspect list. Somebody is interested.

This discussion is sorely lacking the nuance that you don’t even have to be a person of interest. You just have to be a convenient fall guy. There’s always a right time for anybody to fit that description.

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