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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. It can be used to create safety (as it is by police forces, when authorized by judges, in compliance with democratically voted laws), or can be misused to create terror (and, as we've seen before, it never needed cellphones for that).

We should guard against the misuses and create enough legal frameworks to protect individuals' privacy (and aggressively uphold those protections). Private companies already do that - if I query a database for PII without proper approvals, or I query it outside the approval's boundaries, it'll take a couple minutes for me to receive something between a harshly worded e-mail and a visit from a couple large people who appear surgically incapable of smiling.

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> Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil.

What is it a tool for, it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy.

  Privacy, a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people.

Any tool is (as long as it exists) always used for right or wrong, good or evil. However what might be good or evil is very subjective. Both in the moment and looking back on the use of the tool. Therefore it might be best to consider not creating the tool at all, instead of the current we'll try it and see what happens rhetoric.

> What is it a tool for,

A nuclear weapon is a tool. You can use it to blast a city-killing asteroid, one you just noticed, into pieces that'd burn in the atmosphere (and miss the city). You can also use it to mass murder an entire population.

> it is a tool for observing while no person is present therefore breaking privacy.

The capacity exists, but it's not necessarily used all the time. We should create the legal frameworks to protect ourselves from the misuse of the technology.

This might make sense as some entirely abstract theoretical statement, but in real political theory it's not exactly sound to imagine a government spending a massive pile of cash to create a tool that they never use, and if it's usefulness is greater when misused it will be misused.

Then it hits reality and it takes about 5 minutes for governments to start abusing it and when caught will retroactively legalise their actions https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23769206

> The capacity exists, but it's not necessarily used all the time.

By choosing not to engage with a tool you are deciding that the tool serves you and your goals (perception of good) best by not being used. You can make it illegal to use the tool but as long as the tool exists it does not mean it won't be used.

Think of the millions devices part of a botnet or web accessible camera's that are being used illegally by malicious actors.

Isn't it worth considering if we actually need and/or want this tool to be build in the first place?

  "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should"

This tool is already built. This is why the focus should be on legal frameworks that help us prevent misuse and punish abuses in a way rigorous enough to prevent it.

Not all misuse will be prevented, but we need to build the tools (which aren’t more technology) to prevent the abuse.

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