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Comment by benzingtech | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance isnt a problem until people use it for personal gain

Yes but here is the catch. Surveillance comes with the incentives to us it for the personal gain. Or to phrase this differently: knowledge is power and thus the people who are already in power have good motivation to accumulate as much knowledge as possible in order to stay in power.

It is very easy to take the philosophical stance where every concept can be totally detached from the incentives it creates and the social dynamics it is part of. It is easy to take that stance, but it is very hard to use that stance to explain reality, because reality plays by more complex rules.

Please, always consider the status quo and the incentives involved instead of stating the surveillance equivalent of "weapons don't kill, people do".

The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution would seem to disagree.

Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution protects only U.S. citizens inside U.S.

NSA is allowed to collect any information about non-U.S. citizens outside U.S. and there are some limitations to collection of information about U.S. citizens outside U.S.

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

I wasn't replying to a question of jurisdiction. It was a statement that surveillance is fine until there's personal gain involved. That is not consistent with the text or intent of the amendment. Other countries also have rights protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. Some even explicitly protect privacy.

The US Constitution applies to people in the US, by the way, not just citizens.

I think that's a fair statment, although I don’t necessarily see the Fourth Amendment as disagreeing with my point. If anything, it reflects the idea that surveillance itself isn't automatically harmful, but that there needs to be a limit on how and when it can be used. My post was certainly too broad, but I was more getting at the idea that the problem comes from what people or institutions choose to do with the power surveillance gives them.

> Surveillance isnt a problem until people use it for personal gain

It absolutely can be a problem when used for organizational or ideological gain - e.g., when used by state, religion, business, or political group to spread propaganda, suppress opposition, unjustly favor an in-group, etc.

The classic case of using mass surveillance to help a burgeoning theocratic or fascist state is a pretty standard example.

People or AI...

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