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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

Let me play a devil's advocate. Are you (and Orwell) unhappy that people breaking the law get punished? Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you? It doesn't matter if you break the law in the darkness or not.

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The whole point of 1984 is to show how perfect surveillance allows the perfect enforcement of unjust laws, allowing complete control of Big Brother over every aspect of the lives of the country's citizens. The same cameras that can be used to fine you for illegally crossing the street can be used to find and punish you for illegally speaking out against the regime.

This is the danger of surveillance tech: you install it for purportedly good reasons, but once the power to monitor everyone to this level exists, it becomes very easy to start pushing towards more control, both legally and illegally.

1984 doesn't have one "point" it is trying to show, your point is the most recent point to get popularized after the Snowden leaks.

For instance 1984 also is very clear about how this system is engineered for the survival of the inner party, effectively immortal.

No, never in human society have laws been perfectly enforceable. Laws, and society, are shaped by that fact.

The concept of perfectly, uniformly and constantly emotion every law in the books is completely absurd. We need to figure out how to deal with that.

s/emotion/enforcing/

There's plenty of laws that aren't fit for purpose and are immoral, so any kind of automatic system that enforces punishments without any oversight (e.g. by jury) is going to lead to abuse. (It used to be illegal to help an escaping slave, so just imagine if a system determined that you didn't do enough to help with re-capturing a slave and sent you into slavery as punishment)

> Even if you merely cross the road in the wrong place, you deserve a punishment to the maximum extent specified by the law, don't you?

It depends _why_ you did it. This is the precise reason why we have courts and juries. Jury nullification exists for a reason. Laws are not meant to be a rote set of rules and punishments to dole out mechanically.

Lord no.

There are no cars in sight.

Intention of the law > letter of the law.

This went _just great_ in East Germany, which was the last place to seriously try this approach (fortunately the Stasi didn't have modern surveillance tech, but they did quite enough damage with what they had).

Why would the law have any necessary relation to what is right?

> Let me play a devil's advocate.

No. Either stand by your opinion or don't waste our time on it.

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