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Comment by urams | Hacker News Reader

> However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there.

This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NYC). Most of the policing naturally happens by aid of the surveillance system and a very strong effort to take action to bring justice for any crime. As a result, everyone believes crime will be punished and so you end up with a very safe society. This expectation of crime being taken seriously actually _creates_ trust because you can have high faith that any criminal action someone may take will have consequences and therefore be deterred.

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There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...).

Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.

So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?

There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.

For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.

> unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it

On the other hand, the government in Singapore is genuinely popular. A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent. For reference, only 32% of eligible American voters chose the current US president.

How meaningful is that in a society where political dissidence is suppressed?

It's somewhat meaningful. No society can go on for very long when a supermajority of it actively hates the government.

Even in the recent past, all the countries dominated by the Soviet Union have gone for a half of century without problems, while a supermajority of their citizens actively hated their government, and by "hate" I mean like really wishing all of them dead.

This was made possible with traditional surveillance.

With the modern surveillance means and with drones and robots, there will no longer exist any way in which even a great supermajority could remove a government.

Those countries were occupied by a foreign empire. You may recall what happened when they attempted regime change - the Soviets would roll in.

As soon as Gorbachev made it clear that he's not going to do that, all of the Warsaw pact states immediately overthrew their governments.

Thank you for providing an example that further supports my thesis. No government can survive very long when a supermajority of the country hates it.

> There are two separate types of events with associated probabilities: 1) the probability of being harmed by criminals, and 2) the probability of being harmed by the government.

#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.

#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.

Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.

#1 is more than annoying, and OP cited a problem with no solutions. In SF who are you going to sue when someone breaks your car window and steal your laptop?

It's crazy to think the amount anti-social / low trust behavior SF/NYC puts up with on a daily basis. It's some weird type of Stockholm syndrome.

I’m glad you only find crime “annoying”. Others find it oppressive. For example the murder rate in New York City (a similarly dense urban area) is around 35-50x the rate of Singapore. This means your chance of being murdered within the first two weeks of living in NYC is equivalent to a whole year in Singapore.

You don’t have to walk around wondering if you will get mugged or shot. You don’t worry that your car or apartment will be broken into. Crime solve rates are very high because police have fewer crimes to deal with.

> #1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.

It's glaringly obvious that you don't live in a major city. Defend yourself? So you're advocating, in the US, that you engage in a shoot out with the criminal? Like a sister comment said, if your laptop is stolen out of your car, who are you going to sue? To live in a US city is to be surrounded by criminals who rule the streets with impunity.

> #2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.

The US is still a democracy (to its own fault) regardless of how many Flock cameras exist and how they're being used. Why not advocate for changing laws around data use and retention. What is being advocated for instead is that we get rid of the cameras because of all of the theoretical potential harms, while losing the benefit that we get as a society right now (700k crimes solved/helped solved per year by Flock, including 10k missing persons cases). It's just maddening that people are leapfrogging to a theoretical scenario while victims of crime are truly suffering today.

> the government in Singapore is genuinely popular.

Easy to say when the opposition rots in prison.

> A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent.

I wish you could have seen the meme-able face I made when I read this.

Putin is similarly popular in Russia, China's government is also incredibly popular with its citizens, and Nicaragua's government is so popular with its people that they just decided not to have elections anymore! There is a remarkable correlation between authoritarian governments and popularity with their citizens, don't you think?

> For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.

Invasive state surveillance and authoritarianism are not the only answers to crime, San Francisco is not the only city in the US, and crime rates in San Francisco have been overall flat or declining for the last few years (https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/02/san-francisco-2025-crime-s...). That's a false dichotomy, cherry-picking, and a false premise ... gotta be some kind of bingo card for this somewhere.

I suspect the true nature of this disagreement is that you feel more threatened by a free society than an authoritarian one. I wonder, how does someone reconcile the ideas of a free market and a non-free society?

Right, and the elephant in the room here: if you aggressively suppress dissent, then of course people will say they're happy and everything is good.

I'm sure North Koreans will tell you to your face that it's fantastic, they love it, it's the best government on Earth. So once the surveillance is powerful enough, truth ceases to exist.

I don't think this is a refutation. You have narrowed the definition of an admittedly soft term like "high trust society" to be an expression of security or perceived security.

But more to the core of the definition of trust. Singapore isn't using trust, it uses control. Which in most contexts are opposed.

Surveillance isn't even important for the formation of a high trust society. On the contrary, with increased surveillance possibilities, formerly high trust societies seem to have degraded.

Japan is not a surveillance society.

UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.

> UK is not a high trust society.

sorry but data and experience does not bear that out. Denending on which source you look at, the Uk is a "high trust" society.

Now, your assertion about surveillance, sounds true but kinda rings a bit false.

The places where there are less CCTV cameras tend to be rural areas, and let me tell you, they do not trust anyone they don't know (I used to live in rural england) why? because there is no chance that the police will help you, unless you're being threatened.

So if I leave my bike unlocked in London city, it will not get stolen?

yes, more that likely it will

If you leave your bike unlocked in Amsterdam will it get stolen?

yes, and its a higher trust country than the uk

remember that trust and crime are not 100% correlated.

To me, the physical property safety is ONE OF the pillars of high trust.

Meaning, you cannot trust people in these places to not take your stuff. And it isn't most of them, its the <1% they tolerate.

Read up a bit on it. You have numerous signs over the town that state explicitly canning in case of participating in any form of protest that government will consider violent. How that is defined is of course on... government. Read up on how they treat immigrants, its basically serfdom pyramid of massive exploitation on all levels of poor from neighboring countries - confirmed by colleagues living there long term.

Its great little bubble, but not of democracy, or freedom, far from it, rather some moebius-esque utopia of few elites above everybody else. They are also openly racist & xenophobic in their laws, ie in immigration they have to maintain exactly same racial/ethnic split as in the past, so people are granted citizenship on quotas of their ethnicity / skin color (so of course white people are not that welcome, just temporarily tolerated). If this is required to keep everybody in check and behaving nicely, I can easily skip that and raise my children away from such twisted panopticon.

You want an actual long term stable utmost free society for past 800 years and counting? Switzerland. People are nice and tolerant because they are nice and not from the fear of repressions on every step. 30% of residents are foreigners yet society doesn't boil in internal conflicts, I'd say by far the best managed immigration I ever saw. One has to experience it personally to understand the massive difference compared to most of the world. Tons of guns yet very little gun violence (compared to US non-existent). All aspects of society work at least as good or more often better than rest of Europe/world.

Saying the UK is a "high trust society" is definitely an interesting choice

Most standards for “high trust society” are astonishingly low.

Respect for private property rights? A court system that’s broadly seen as following the law? Elections where the outcomes are not disputed? Officials not soliciting or accepting bribes from normal citizens? High trust society.

The UK certainly has its problems, but the tricks are often technically legal, and they’re nowhere near as bad as in third world countries.

A high trust society is not only a measure of the relationship between civil population and the state, but also the interpersonal relationships among citizens.

That said, bribery is quite common in UK nowadays: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/millions-people-uk-are-being-d...

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/01/where-mos...

ITs not actually that surprising. Trust is different to cynicism though.

That sounds great! Maybe not so great for the occasional person sentenced to death for selling weed, but that's just the price of freedom.

"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.

"Nope."

"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."

"Um."

"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"

"Nope."

"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."

"What is the hook?"

"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."

Cat's Cradle

Those societies were created way before the level of survelliance modern AI pushes

What they were saying is they prefer people to behave because they want to be good people which are part of a good society than to be good people simply as a byproduct of fear of jail.

When did we start making good people? I thought we were still using the base model.

Wanting to be a good person is different than being a good person. I said the former not the latter. The former is about intent behind actions and what you strive to be. The latter is about thinking people are born in boxes.

In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts. It takes the edge off, when you know that your neighbor's 18 year old kid is working in the police force, rather than some mercenary force

On top of that, the majority of the military consists of civilian conscripts, which arguably holds more power if the system ever goes bad enough to degenerate into martial law

This is all true.

But it’s still a counter-example to “once cameras go up all trust is lost”. Clearly cameras are not the sole issue that makes trust achievable. As demonstrated by high-trust societies with cameras!

> In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts.

I would not have guessed in a million years that someone would argue that country's surveillance doesn't have a dystopian vibe because the country conscripts people into service.

fyi Finland has the same conscription rates, I don't see them being criticized for conscription? Maybe they are too white, or maybe people who injected too much rugged individualism into their veins have rotted views of society

A system that has brought security and cohesion, and thus wealth, is accused of being dystopic

Conscripts policing their own society will almost certainly produce better outcomes than people attracted to power volunteering to do so instead.

Especially if that society is fairly homogenous. (I'm well aware that Singapore is a fusion of cultures, but it's nothing like an empire that can shuffle its conscripts around, so that they always end up policing and brutalizing an ethnic group that's different from theirs.

Does making millions in profit from bitcoin while being a president or getting private jets from other countries count into that?

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