Hacker News Reader

It’s not like this stuff wasn’t known to be a problem 10 years ago. We were already in Trump’s first term, it’s not like it was part of the early post 9/11 “secure everything” push. It was WAY after that.

10 years ago is no excuse.

View on HN

It’s not an excuse, but gives some luxury of distance. We have a lot more hindsight now on how rotten things can become, so with that hindsight it’s easy to say that companies like Flock shouldn’t exist, or shouldn’t be invested in. Ten years ago required some more leaps in foresight that some people were making, I was, but even I didn’t think it would get as evil as it has.

IDK. We’d already had plenty of spying by companies, the government, police abuse, etc.

It was all quite plain then. And the very heavy rhetoric made it very obvious which direction things would go.

The NSA spying scandal happened under Obama even! IMO that was the defining moment for electronic privacy as a real political issue; before that we were very much in post-9/11 state of exception mode.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com