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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

Loss of privacy has no upsides. The bomb, on the other hand, saved many millions of lives over the last 80 years, so it works as a metaphor everyone shares, but the metaphor itself was always much more arguable with nukes. It's possible to actually rationally love the bomb, but what are the upsides for everything about me being exfiltrated at will?

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The upside is that you can know everything of almost any person as well. Whether that upside is beneficial for you is a different matter.

Oh, but of course there is. He you ever seen arguments from the other side? It is to catch criminals of various sorts (money laundering, trafficking, smuggling goods and people, terrorism etc), to keep children safe etc etc.

Also,it can help you uncover and put behind bars your dangerous political enemies. That the tables may turn and the shoe may be on the other foot soon, that's too abstract of a thought to occur to most of them.

It tracks terrorists' efforts to acquire the bomb.

I don't disagree about privacy being valuable, but I don't think you quite understood my writing. "The Bomb" in this conversation is not the literal atom bomb. Perhaps the Dr. Strangelove metaphor confuses this for some, but "The Bomb" in this context is "all my shit got ganked by hackers and now my indentity is forever stolen by anyone who pays a dollar". I don't believe that this shares any semblance of metaphor with the nuclear threat - the threat is individual, survivable, and its consequences yet-unknown because of these two factors. It's arugably pretty rational for someone to be favorable of a nuclear device in its capability of facilitating MAD (and arguably uneasy peace) at a national scale - I don't believe anyone could ever reasonably argue that global perpetual inescapable indefensible identity theft (with the added bonus of potential for persecution) is worth reading license plates or sniffing bluetooth or capturing residential internet traffic in order to "catch terrorists" or "save children" (neither of which has ever actually been done with these methods).

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