Hacker News Reader

Comment by ctyc | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if our governments are still capable of this…

Yes, absolutely nothing has changed. The national security complex regards itself as above the law and superior to all democratic control mechanisms. It does not see any reason to bother itself with public consent or constitutionality. If anything, it has gotten much worse.

There are things like this going on right now. We won't find out about them until later, absent somebody leaking the details. Indeed a lot of stuff in the Church committee findings mentioned by a sibling commenter has not only been massively expanded, but is widely accepted as normal and a good thing, actually.

The difficult thing is that the concept of law implies law enforcement, which leads to a national security complex.

Ideas like human rights etc are great but only get applied to the extent that the most powerful entities allow them to be applied.

This is why a proactive and well-informed (and some would say well-armed) citizenry is crucial. All entities like governments, corporations, the UN, the EU, down to individuals, will obey the laws of physics because they have to, and the laws of humans... if they are made to.

Now it's psychological warfare testing :)

Personally I think what private companies are doing in that department is more egregious than what governments (even other governments) are doing.

Just pick up a mobile phone and start grabbing random games and apps and look at how they're built. They're all Skinner box devices built using the same control techniques as slot machines to suck people in and gradually addict them and then get them to make endless purchases or invite other people to the app. It's really incredibly toxic.

Then you have social media whose weighting and manipulation of content to "maximize engagement" drives not only social media addiction but a host of mental health problems across our entire culture including among the young.

If governments did half of this they'd be compared to Nazis.

That does not mean that governments are not doing it as well, or that we should discount their practices just because corporations are doing it a lot as well.

Even just the fact that the US army allows Hollywood directors access to military equipment with a say on the script as an exchange, so that they can brainwash young uneducated men to enrol and go fight an imperialist war in some foreign country could easily be labelled internal propaganda.

Maybe governments just outsourced the work?

Profit motive provides plenty of motivation without government prodding. It's all about making you stare at that device as long as possible so you watch ads or making you send payments for loot boxes. It's just amoral profit seeking behavior.

Not saying there couldn’t be government involvement just that it’s not necessary to explain this stuff.

I wouldn't be surprised. There are a large number of historical examples of human experimentation before 1975 when the Church committee did it's work.

I think these shady agencies figured out a new way to hide this kind of research after that date in ways that have made it much harder to show the world the truth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com