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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I find it frusrating how the conversation around this almost always focuses on one side of the equation. Why is it always about preventing tools from being built in case authoritarians comes to power rather than preventing those authoritarians from coming to power in the first place? I'm far more scared off the authoritarian aspect than the tech. The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions. It seems like focusing on the actual bad guys is going to be more effective because if the state wants to bear its weight on you, it rarely requires tech to do it.

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People have incentives to become more powerful - through wealth, power, leverage, or in other ways. So unfortunately, authoritarianism tends to have gravity going for it.

The Nazis relied heavily on IBM technology for national census data (to identify jews), military logistics, ghetto statistics, train traffic management, and concentration camp capacity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

I fully agree with your base perspective, that the main focus should be on preventing authoritarians from coming to power in the first place.

I also agree with your final point, that the government doesn't need tech to lean on a person.

We disagree in the middle, on how tech that makes evil orders of magnitude easier might be a contributing factor and might enable the government to lean on many more people than it would otherwise.

They also used Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi, Siemens, Hugo Boss, Bayer, Deutsche Bank, Allianz.

There is obviously a spectrum here, but none of these companies are inherintly evil, the people working at these companies aren't either.

The evil ones are committing the crimes.

My comment was made knowing and understanding the Nazis use of tech. But it's an argument of efficiency and efficiency matters less and less when dealing with the state due to their relative resource and power imbalance compared to individuals. Tech might have sped up the Nazi death machine, but the desire and intent for murder is all that matters in the long run. Their efficiency was of note really only because their time in power was relatively brief. If they were like some other authoritarian regimes and remained in power for decades, they likely would have eventually racked up the same death toll with or without the tech.

We also never seem to accept this answer for other forms of tech. Should we ban encryption because it makes it easier for terrorists to hide? Should your phone run ever photo you take through a CSAM database to catch preditors? Should we ban 3d printers because someone might print gun parts? For some reason we understand that people motivated enough to commit crimes will find a way to do it. This is much truer when it comes to the actions of the state than it is for individuals. I'm never going to learn to smith parts for a gun, but I could figure out 3d printing pretty easily. If the state wants me dead or in jail, I don't think the Flock cameras are that meaningful.

See:

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/

* https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png

* https://www.cfr.org/education/learn/reading/what-fascism

The water flows whichever way there's a gradient of height.

Don't create gradients you don't have dams for.

>The Nazis didn't need Flock cameras to kill millions.

No, but they were extremely happy to hop over to France and realize that we kept lists that indirectly listed jews. Actions have consequences that we may not be able to predict.

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