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Comment by banku_brougham | Hacker News Reader

I would figure state actors don’t need to go through the trouble of a browser extension. But, yeah.

I'm not a spy so I don't know, but surely in most scenarios it's a lot easier to just ask someone for some data than it is hack/steal it. 25 years of social media has shown that people really don't care about what they do with their data.

Wasn't there a comment on this phenomenon along the lines "we were so afraid of 1984 but what we really got was Brave New World"?

The apathy of the oppressed is a core theme of 1984.

Not really? In 1984 you were made an active participant of the oppression. The thought police and 5 minutes hate all required your active, enthusiastic participation.

Brave New World was apathy: the system was comfortable, Soma was freely available and there was a whole system to give disruptive elements comfortable but non disruptive engagement.

The protagonist in Brave New World spends a lot of time resenting the system but really he just resents his deformity, wanted what it denied him in society, and had no real higher criticisms of it beyond what he felt he couldn't have.

1984 has coercive elements lacking from Brave New World, but the lack of any political awareness or desire to change things among the proles was critical to the mechanisms of oppression. They were generally content with their lot, and some of the ways of ensuring that have parallels to Brave New World. Violence and hate were used more than sex and drugs but still very much as opiates of the masses: encourage and satisfy base urges to quell any desire to rebel. And sex was used to some extent: although sex was officially for procreation only, prostitution was quietly encouraged among the proles.

You might even imagine 1984's society evolving into Brave New World's as the mechanisms of oppression are gradually refined. Indeed, Aldous Huxley himself suggested as much in a letter to Orwell [1].

[1] https://gizmodo.com/read-aldous-huxleys-review-of-1984-he-se...

Why wouldn't they? It isn't that you need to, just that obviously you would. You engage with the extension owners by sending an email from a director of a data company instead of as a captain of some military operation. The hit rate is going to be much higher with one of the strategies.

Huh? Of course they would: It's way less work than defeating TLS/SSL encryption or hacking into a bunch of different servers.

Bonus points if the government agency can leave most of the work to an ostensibly separate private company, while maintaining a "mutual understanding" of government favors for access.

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