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Comment by retsibsi | Hacker News Reader

> And, from now on, if you ever criticize the government you will lose your bank account and your job.

We could have a real conversation about tradeoffs (and maybe this one isn't worth it!) but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real. I'm Australian and I'll happily bet that N years from now I'll still be able to criticize the government without being debanked or sacked.

If we do ever fall to authoritarianism, I doubt this will have been a crucial step; it's already easy for the government to deanonymize most posters if it wants to, and an evil future government that wanted to go further could probably just... do it, regardless of precedent.

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> but not if you just assume/pretend the worst-case scenario is real

Just want to point out that Canada weaponised war time powers to debank truckers protesting during COVID. The rubicon has already been crossed. While I didn't support their cause, the writing is on the wall about what governments want to be able to do to people it finds inconvenient.

Social media posts are getting people arrested in the UK. Even if mostly "fixed" in appeals, there seems to be a cross national trend.

https://redact.dev/blog/how-and-why-people-are-being-arreste...

  Police in the UK continue to arrest people for online posts that are reported as threatening, harassing, or grossly offensive.
  Cases are commonly brought under communications and public order laws, including offenses tied to harassment, malicious communications, and hate incidents.

There's a lot I don't like about the UK (enough that I left the country), but these things are not "criticising the government".

Closest the UK got, in recent years, to people getting punished specifically for criticising the government was that Mock the Week got cancelled. But not, say, Have I Got News For You, which has spent its entire existence doing nothing but.

your government already has an online censorship department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESafety_Commissioner which is being used to silence social media posts with bogus "informal" takedown notices

Governments never give up power. They will only take more. So considerations on what power should be given over should be done carefully instead of having knee jerk reactions based on "think of the children".

It's my impression that the shift from 'basically normal government' to 'authoritarian nightmare', when it happens, tends to happen quite abruptly rather than via the ratchet effect/frog-boiling. And there seem to be plenty of examples of democracies that have remained basically normal despite decades' worth of policies that libertarian-leaning observers would decry as the thin end of the wedge. I'm open to being convinced that the risk of a policy like this clearly outweighs its benefits, but I think I need a specific causal pathway and/or historical precedent rather than general arguments.

The US is kind of an obvious example of this ratchet effect. The powers that have been given to the executive over the course of decades and consistent moving to the right for decades has led us to where we are now. Similar cases in Russia and China where more power is handed over to a centralized leadership role over time.

I'm not a libertarian or follow the thin end of the wedge belief system. It's a simple observation that governments operate under the idea of growth of power. That is not to say an absence of government or reduction of government is good or better. But to recognize our role in maintain the social contract with the government. Abdicating that role entirely does not improve your life.

The only benefit of this legislation is that VPN's will get a bump in revenue, the web becomes more unusable and critical information gets stored at third parties who become high value targets for hacking. Not to mention these data brokers can easily turn around and begin to monetize this data. I'm not a privacy nut by any measure, but this seems like the most obvious major hit to personal data privacy. Instead of addressing the problem that is being claimed to be resolved, it's just lining another corporations pockets who will sell your data. We've seen this story play out many many times already. but you think this time will be different? I don't think so.

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