Hacker News Reader

Comment by rrrrtttt | Hacker News Reader

The Financial Times has called this the data intelligence complex, by analogy with the military-industrial complex. It's a government--private sector alliance that's spending $80bn yearly on spying on citizens with questionable returns. Can you imagine "how many jobs would be destroyed" if this were to stop?

View on HN

We shouldn't forget how much $80 billion actually is.

For that amount, they should be saving in the order of 40,000 people's lives from terrorism a year to justify the spending.

(I've plucked the intervention per life-year saved from here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/inter...

and assumed each life-save has 50 potential years of their life left)

While I see your point, generally speaking law enforcement is not going to spend a proportional amount of money with respect to protecting citizens. Hundreds of thousands of dollars may be spent on a single investigation into a murderer that may only prevent the deaths of 1 or 2 people. You can't assign a monetary value to it. Protecting people from dying is a necessary service in any society.

If the NSA had a hypothetical program that didn't infringe on anyone's rights (likely impossible, but bear with me), but did consistently stop terrorist plots when they arose, even if all of the successful plots may kill a few dozen or a hundred people in total, most people would agree that spending $80 billion on that program is worth it due to the lives saved.

I don't personally think that $80 billion being spent to protect lives is wasteful, generally speaking. I do see how it is wasteful in this situation, because it has very questionable results, and when the collateral damage of the plan is so incredibly great.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com