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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state. The people who control the consolidated tech platforms are either spearheading or collaborating with that process. Privacy as a concept isn't even in the cards.

You need to be prepared to avoid saying naughty things on the internet. Otherwise, perhaps someone will figure out that you great-great grandfather didn't sign in the right spot in 1897 and you're presence in the United States is void, retroactive to your birth. Off to El Salvador with you, enemy of the people.

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Just want to clarify that "naughty" doesn't at all mean "bad" or "immoral". It means "Anything any current ot future regime will dislike"

Pretty safe to say that you pointing that out counts as naughty.

And so does my response to your comment.

But I do wonder if self-censure is really the best strategy.

>The US is building out the infrastructure for a police state.

Take the Utah Data Center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center), combine it with the Disposition Matrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix), informally known as a kill list for even US citizens, and it does seem like you're getting a Police State!

A lot of our current privacy and liberty woes were exacerbated by 9/11. Can you imagine a Church Committee in 2026? Me neither.

Three letter agencies have way too much power and they've shaped our culture+laws for the worse. Osama Bin Laden has done way more damage to American citizens' lives than he could've ever dreamed of.

By design.

Just like the KGB and Putin's minions, Bin Laden correctly saw fault lines and weaknesses in the US an exploited them. He did what he did with a long-range context in mind. The "three letter agencies" were neutered in the 90s as part of the peace dividend which is why he was successful. The Russians used "active measures" with intelligence in the US 2016 among other times and Bin Laden chose terrorist violence. The Russian misinformation strategy is tried and true and corporate actors now use it successfully as well.

The whole thing sucks. This Iran adventure lays the vulnerability of the US military machine pretty bare. More, escalated conflict is probably in the world's future for decades to come.

This wasn't by design. Obama had options. He campaigned against mass surveillance but flip-flopped once in office, installing the very surveillance levers he criticized. “No more secrecy,” he said. “That is a commitment that I make to you.”[1] If his only option was to install these surveillance levers, then I guess American democracy is just a lost cause.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-gov...

It feels to me Europe and the UK, in the western world, are further ahead on the legal road to surveillance than the US.

Someone pointed out something to me and it's really struck a chord with me.

In the USA, we hate the government collecting information on us, but shrug our shoulders when corporations do it.

In Europe, it's the exact opposite. They created GDPR to restrict how corporations collect and share data about you, but they shrug their shoulders at government doing it.

Obviously, this is incredibly reductive and over-simplified, but the general idea of it feels pretty true.

Sorry, this is just not true. Stasi was a government agency, and it was from this kind of thing that European privacy advocacy sprung up.

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