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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Maybe, just maybe, this might get the US government to stop, or at least drastically limit its spying operations.

Criminals that go to jail aren't rehabilitated, they just learn to be better criminals.

Governments that get busted doing shady shit don't rehabilitate themselves, they just learn to hide it better.

This post makes no sense. Saying 'Criminals' become better criminals in prison is oppressive and discriminatory and how on earth it is related to this issue at all I do not know.

People that get caught doing something they are inclined to do but shouldn't tend to become better at getting away with it next time.

Perhaps, or they just don't do it again. Not all people in jail go back. Generalising things like you have here is not helping anyones understanding on the issue

No, I wasn't especially precise but it's reasonable to assume that I'm rational enough to understand that not everybody that's released from jail re-offends, but it's fairly common: 60% for the US and 50% for the UK. [1] Likewise, sometimes governments fix their own wagon when they get caught doing some shady shit; often they don't.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recidivism#Recidivism_rates

You mean the next government will be more careful at hiding shaddy deals. The previous won't be reelected ever again.

So better analogy will be a criminal jailed for life, and other criminals perfecting their crimes because of fear.

You just exposed a cynical assumption I tend to make, that government continues more or less unchanged over long periods of time no matter who is elected. Much like a human replaces most of their cells every x years and is essentially the same organism, government just replaces most of the old faces with fresh faces that do much the same as the previous generation.

> Maybe, just maybe, this might get the US government to stop, or at least drastically limit its spying operations.

And the irony would be that the US needed foreign gov'ts to accomplish what its own citizens could not do.

One would think so, but from Keith's mouth, it seems like the solution is to do more of the same (of which has taken us to this point).

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