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Comment by anonym29 | Hacker News Reader

Ding ding ding!

The dark unspoken part? They don't need to worry about you distributing it domestically, because anyone using it domestically is subject to extralegal rendition and rubber-hose cryptography without a warrant.

That's been formally legal since the passage of the PATRIOT Act (and from the infinite renewal of the NDAA), but even Lincoln ended Habeas Corpus on a whim when he found it convenient.

We don't live in a constitutional democratic republic, we live in a totalitarian surveillance state LARPing as a constitutional democratic republic.

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The PATRIOT Act has been expired for three years now.

This is like when people tell you Flint doesn't have clean water (it's been fixed for four years.) Sometimes, time passes.

Yea they allowed it to expire because they can just buy our data from private industry's now... Who needs an act when the "free market" lets you invade anyone's privacy by the petabyte. Call up your local advertising startup and offer some cash, you'd be surprised what's on the table without even getting to the big companies (google, amazon, Facebook, etc).

The relevant provisions of the NDAA haven't!

This article is discussing TETRA, an European system standardized by ETSI. How does US domestic politics apply to this?

he didn't read the article at all and just wants to rant about his favorite pet issue ofc

As usual. Made by an US company (Motorola)

Motorola is just one of many vendors. The Issues discussed are rooted in the standard, not Motorola's implementation.

The comment I'm replying to is about governments mandating weakened cryptography as a form of export control, which is the entire reason this vulnerability exists within TETRA.

The United States has many negative things about it, and its democracy is flawed at best, but you don't get combo points for tacking on adjectives. It is plain by reading the dictionary that the US is not totalitarian.

Very few people seem to make any effort to distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian, and even authoritarian is used very loosely.

I think the tin-foil man is saying that you wouldn't know a totalitarian state if it were successfully masquerading as a democracy.

"Successfully" is the real loaded term here. Those that claim to see the cabal behind the curtain unfortunately have woefully underdeveloped facts to support it.

There's no hiding totalitarianism, totalitarian governments exercise total control over virtually every aspect of the private lives of their subjects. Under totalitarianism, you can forget about choosing your school or career. You might -MIGHT be allowed to choose your mate, but even that isn't certain because totalitarianism is characterized by such an extreme lack of individual liberty that the state may even tell you who to marry.

A subverted liberal democracy secretly run by a cabal of oligarchs but on the surface still playing hands-off with everyday people's lives is not totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is not some generic insult to describe any oligarchy or authoritarian government. Totalitarianism is the extreme absence of individual liberty.

I wonder if there are measurable personality differences that predict how well someone responds to hyperbolic rhetoric.

For instance, the US has been doing down on the Economist Democracy Index in recent years. "Flawed democracy" is not totalitarian, but it's trending away from "full democracy" and cries of totalitarianism may well be responding to real concerns.

In the abstract, I wonder if it's better to raise such issues with incremental language and small arguments, or to raise them with hyperbolic claims, or to tailor to your audience, or some other combination.

> I wonder if there are measurable personality differences that predict how well someone responds to hyperbolic rhetoric.

You don't have to tell me that I'm weird, I already know.. Most people seem to think dictionaries are obsolete because spellcheck exists, not caring that the primary purpose of dictionaries is to look up the established meanings of words. I know I'm weird for thinking these established meanings should at least be acknowledged when deciding to stray from them. If people want to use hyperbole to make a point I think that's fine, and know that even if I didn't think it was fine it wouldn't matter because I couldn't stop them. But my personality is such that when I see somebody doing it without acknowledging the established meaning of the word, I feel compelled to remark on it. Particularly when people are doing it with serious words with heavy connotations, like totalitarianism or genocide.

As for the deteriorating state of American democracy, I share most of your concerns, but I don't see a trend to totalitarianism specifically. For instance the government now exercises less control over who people marry today than it did a generation ago, much less three or four generations ago. I do perceive disturbing trends in corruption, wealth distribution, and administrative competence. But a corrupt incompetent oligarchy is not synonymous with totalitarianism.

The US is owned by the small group of people who have the most money. I wouldnt call it a democracy or totalitarian it's most likely a cell system who regularly has many business deals "on behalf" of the country. Closer to an oligarchy. Basically Russia with a little more modern/recent success.

No.

These are police radios. All of the transmissions are recorded at the dispatch center and routinely get audited and used in various ways.

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