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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to understand the outrage here. It's quite possible I'm missing the point and am open to being educated, but what's being described here is essentially running data analysis tools on the public postings people are making on Twitter right?

Everything described in the anecdotes, unless I missed it, was basically someone going on Twitter, a global media platform designed to convey your postings to a mass audience, and then reading the things people wrote. Right?

I can think of a variety of things that could have been done after that which would be bad, oppressive things. But are they alleging that?

The headline here is "U.S. Marshals spied..."

Did they? Like if I post something WITH THE VISIBILITY SET TO PUBLIC VISIBLE BY EVERYONE WITH AN INTERNET CONNECTION EVEN NON-LOGGED IN PEOPLE and then someone reads it, then I can claim someone is spying on me?

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That's true. It would be more appropriate if the headline was "U.S. Marshals stalked Abortion Protesters" or "U.S. Marshals are creeping Abortion Protesters out".

People don't communicate well. They use the word "spying", when "surveillance" would be more appropriate.

How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?

I mean, it's all public information, right?

How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?

I get the concept. But there's a pretty obvious difference between just sitting in my home and going to work and posting on a global media platform that is literally intended to reach every other living human as its core reason for existing.

The argument seems bizarre to me. A much better pre-technology analogy would be if I wrote lots of letters to the editor of a newspaper and people read them.

Maybe it would even be a little creepy if the government had an FBI agent in every small town that read letters to the editor and sent them to be filed by topic in Washington or something.

But it wouldn't be spying right?

Who cares whether it's "spying" or "surveillance"?

Here's the real issue, which this semantics argument is derailing. Several times, a shooting spree has occurred, and all the government agencies say, "Oh, yeah... We knew about them! Anyways, the mass shooter's community is very much under attack..."

Pretty hard to swallow when the federal agencies are spending time and resources holding a magnifying glass over political opponents (with a long, LONG track record of nonviolence).

It doesn't really matter what label you put on it. The fact that you say it'd be a "little creepy" should start setting off alarm bells. Do we really want people with guns and the force of the state behind them doing creepy things to the populace, routinely?

That's what Google does, pretty much. People seem OK with ubiquitous surveillance these days. "Hey wiretap, got any good recipes for risotto?"

Unfortunately we ended up in a world where corporate spying/survelliance is out of sight and out of mind. Never mind the fact corporate spying has achieved something dictatorships of the past could only dream about in their wet dreams.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgan-chase-employees-des...

I wouldn't be fine with that, but:

1) I would at least have a chance of knowing about it, and could lodge a complaint with the relevant agency, or take them to court, if necessary. This may not work, but there's at least some level of recourse and accountability.

2) The chilling issue is that of mass surveillance. The kind of surveillance you describe is time- and resource-intensive, and doesn't scale. If agencies can collect and analyze data on a vast number of people with a few clicks of a mouse, that's a danger to everyone's freedom.

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