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Comment by egocodedinsol | Hacker News Reader

fwiw, it has worked reasonably well for nuclear weapons, both in the sense that only nation-states have access (hopefully) and that only a select few nations have access.

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I agree, but it's also essentially impossible to use nuclear weapons in a way which isn't transparent, which is not the case with PRISM.

I do not agree with giving everyone access to surveillance tools for use, but I think improved transparency into those programs is something that can be done and should be done.

Yes, a nuclear blast is a lot more visible than an ongoing mass surveillance program. However, I would say that it is extremely hard to keep something like PRISM secret forever. Even if there is only a tiny probability of the information leaking each year, over the years the chance of keeping it secret decreases geometrically. All it takes is one upload to wikileaks.

I agree that more transparency is a good idea. In fact, I think more transparency and less funding is a good idea for the intelligence agencies in general. We're living in a comparative time of peace, which means the incentives for these agencies (and the closely related private contractors) are to inflate their budgets and create work for themselves. Currently this seems to be driving an obsessive mission to monitor everything and everyone. This is bad enough of itself, but it could easily turn into creating enemies where none exist.

Restricting technology has worked in many areas in addition to nuclear technology, e.g. eugenics, abortion (in some places), access to firearms (in some places), wiretapping (previously), degraded GPS, etc.

There is also no reason why commercial organizations should not be constrained in what information they are allowed to collect.

There is no reason, technological or otherwise, why governments should not be restricted in what information they can collect on citizens without just cause.

I would argue that it has not worked reasonably well. The part that worked well, is that only nation states have access to the technology. The part that hasn't worked well is that only a few nations, most of them being allies to each other, have access to them. And the countries have gone to great lengths to keep their own enormous stockpile of weapons while aggressively forcing other nations to not work on militarized nuclear technology (and at times civil tech) on the argument that once they have it, they will be able to bully their neighbours.

And of course my stance is quite biased, because I am an citizen of one of the very few countries that has not signed NPT and agrees with the stand my government has made.

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