Comment by BizarroLand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BizarroLand | Hacker News Reader

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"IT PROTECTS THE CHILDREN!" they'll scream, while using it to take more power away from society and concentrate it into their own hands.

Surveillance isn't some harmless thing, because you can tell a million lies with a drop of the truth in them for any reason you want.

Imagine you get established in life and decide to run for local politics only to have the fact that you've gone to Vegas 4 times in your life somehow turned into a completely untrue "drug use and prostitution" scandal that destroys your credibility and political career before it even started.

Imagine having your grandkids' college scholarships revoked because you ran an incredibly unprofitable and short lived onlyfans for 3 months in your late teens.

Maybe the results won't be as overt as this. Maybe it will be worse.

Either way, it is invasive and gives complete strangers power over your future and your children's future that they simply should not have and have no reason to ever have.

It's morally repugnant and abhorrent to any person who takes the time to think not of what information will be collected but of what that information will be used for and by whom.

The children of the people who as of today are still talking about how great trump is and how he "brought peace to the middle east" and how "evil demoncrats are running a global cabal to turn humans into monkeys" are the people who at best will be the parents and friends and neighbors of the people who will have finely grained and exacting data of everything you have done from well before the day of the passing of a bill like this.

This bill would make America the equivalent of living in an overly nosy HOA city everywhere for everyone. The people who fit in and don't make waves will get the 1950's nuclear family treatment, and those that don't will get the April 26, 1986 Pripyat nuclear treatment.

Can you please not fulminate like this on HN? It leads to more predictable, less interesting discussion.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> "IT PROTECTS THE CHILDREN!" they'll scream, while using it to take more power away from society and concentrate it into their own hands.

I don't think you're wrong in predicting this, and I actually think you're proven correct by precedent already. The answer to this is many and varied, but one core concept that should always be kept in mind is, much like "with great power comes great responsibility":

With great claims comes great burden of proof

What statistics are you trying to improve, and have you got a baseline you can share with us that can be used in 1 year, 2 years, 5 years to prove the effectiveness of this legislation in "protecting the children"? What's your time frame after which, if no measurable improvement to these statistics has been made, then the legislation will be declared a failure and repealed?

(This is, of course living in some kind of utopian thought experiment, and society just doesn't have the memory to allow such holding the decisions of the powerful to account, but it was therapeutic to write, and it's a worthy goal for long term pursuit).

There is no good answer to this. I suggest not wasting your time trying to argue in good faith with irrational or straight up malicious actors. Better invest in ways to protect yourself, your assets and your anonymity through technology.

I know what you're saying is inescapably true, but I feel the need to point out that the fact that is has gotten to the point that it is inescapably true fucking sucks and there is a lot of work that needs to be done to undo it.

True change lies in policy and legislation, not in technical defence. The ability to change policy and legislation is a sign that 'power' is coming back into balance between the people and the government - and if we can't do that, then the power balance needs restorative work.

Technical defence should always exist, but rarely be necessary, especially against the government of one's own country.

(If one can argue in good faith in public, visibly, the bad faith of the opposition matters less than the ability to make aware as many of the public as possible. Bad faith, irrational, or malicious actors should be able to be backed into a corner with their own arguments)

>With great claims comes great burden of proof

Regular people (aka "voters") don't have the power to demand anything. They're driven around like cattle.

Ah yes, “protecting the children”. Meanwhile, some of the most paranoid IT data security I’ve seen was at a department of education.

You see, just statistically speaking, they have pedophiles on staff, staff with potential data access. They have ex husbands that want to abduct their kid after the messy divorce where the wife had to get a new identity, but good luck fleeing from your husband who has DB access at the DoE.

The real world is messy and filled with bad actors in positions of power and access to data that enables their abuse.

The less data there is, the less they can abuse it.

Almost like… guns. The less guns are out there… oh. Oh…

You guys in the States are screwed. I’m sorry for you all.

We keep a gun behind every blade of grass for a reason.

And all these stories will be generated about you by AI bot farms paid for by your opposition

"how do you ensure trust in the providence of the information being stored? - with no direct link to physical proof of an individual typing that message or URL or uploading / downloading that picture at that time, or even necessarily that the individuals device was used to perform the action, what value is there in the data?"

The argument above could really only be used if a case came to court and evidence providence needed to be questioned.

This argument is a poor one in the face of politics or lawyers because the ambiguity is such that it becomes a case of "who do you believe is telling the truth" because a jury is a group of humans, and our nature appears to be to err on the side of guilt over innocence. Hence accusation=at least guilty of "something". It therefore works in favour of the power status quo.

I have some baggage relating to this.

When you step back and look objectively and in an unbiased manner, you see that we (humans) are a species of dominance rather than collaborative partnership. It is a world where individuals must earn the privilege of survival, and by earn I don't mean only in a monetary sense but also a gatekeeper sense. Life is not of precious value; power and control are. This, and the commodification of labour, land, and money are bringing about the disintegration of capitalism with nothing on the horizon to replace it other than anarchy. Welcome to the interregnum.

I really disagree with this. We are not a species of dominance over partnership. We are a species that requires partnership to function, with mostly socially constructed competition for position within our greater society. But fundamentally we need each other equally. We live for two generations so that we can also raise the grandchildren with the parents. We have language to communicate and plan together. Many of us develop empathy and compassion fairly early on, making friends that don’t benefit us except for the delight of a peer. This is our basal nature. I would argue that systems of exploitation are the more unnatural state- racism must be taught from an early age, for example.

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