Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

The way the average american thinks, if the police slowly came every other day and disappeared one of your neighbors, they'd shrug it off and say "oh well what can you do, we need to be safe".

Until it was their turn and there was no one to protest.

This is why we still have the TSA grabbing your genitals and the NSA grabbing everything else. "oh well what can you do, we need to be safe".

Meanwhile congresspeople would write in exemptions for themselves and figure out how to do insider trading to profit from the activity (btw, they gave themselves back the right to do the insider trading).

View on HN

> "oh well what can you do, we need to be safe".

I think that's a touch of a generalization. I'm a guy that flies 4+ times a month, and I'm on a team of people who keep the same travel schedules. Not once has anyone I've ever known mentioned "safety" when the subject of TSA, or any invasive government program, comes up.

No, the thing that we're scared of is not some vague notion of a terrorism, but being caught up in some power tripping TSA agents wet dream. You get groped because the alternative is causing a scene, getting detained, missing my flight, and thus missing out on the job which was my entire reason for entering the awful airport in the first place. A missed job means that there's no repeat next year, which puts my line of work and lively hood in jeopardy. Is it exciting? No. But it's reality.

Talk of standing up to "the man" is easy, but action is several orders of magnitude harder. I have student loans, I have an apartment and family which would go under if not for my income. Things really aren't bad enough yet to put all of that on the line. So you go through "security," get your balls groped because it's better than the alternative, and you press on.

I suspect that there are more like me than there are mindless "Gotta catch the terrorists at any cost!" people. Things would have to get much worse and actually tip the balance to where it makes sense to fight before I actually will.

Don't think of us all as terrorist fearing surrender monkeys.

I don't, and won't, fly for as long as the TSA gropes and scans people. That limits my rapid travel abilities and has prevented me from doing certain things, but I would rather maintain my principles on that matter. Does it actually do anything? Probably not. Nonetheless, I refuse to ever subject myself to such treatment.

The problem with the NSA outrage is that it's about what the NSA could do with the data, not what they have done.

The abuse of power is mostly theoretical at this point, and until we see confirmation that the NSA is using their knowledge of people for evil, it's all just speculation.

The privacy violations are simply not enough for people to care, and I'm not 100% sure they're wrong.

This is all true, but it still doesn't mean the problem shouldn't be addressed.

And yes, the outrage is going to die down somewhat, the question then becomes how much is the media going to sell out their principles? Most people have to go back to their lives. But for journalists, it's their job to report on this sort of thing.

Are they going to continue hammering for answers? Are they going to continue to report on whether anything has been done about secret warrants and the FISA court?

Or are they going to give up at the first sign of fickleness in their audience and cater to their whimsy? Are they going to skip writing an article about the issue and instead write a meta-article about how people are no longer outraged about the issue?

If they are collecting and storing everyone's data, it will be abused. It's only a matter of time and gradually weaker requirements for accessing it.

It needs to be stopped now before they can abuse it.

Frankly, you don't know that.

We can wax Orwellian as much as we'd like, but until you actually have evidence of these supposed abuses happening, most people will recognize your slippery-slope for what it is, and stop paying attention to you.

Pre-crime goes both ways; are you really prepared to string up an organization for a crime it could commit, because you've "seen the future"?

When it's a government agency violating my privacy against my will, and against the spirit of the law, then yes, absolutely I am prepared to put limits on their ability to do that due to the extreme risk of abuse. Limits on government power exist for a reason. Because governments inevitably expand and abuse their power.

It's very very far from a foregone conclusion that they're a) violating the letter or spirit of any law and b) even violating your privacy in the first place.

Besides, the whole point of a democracy is that you, specifically, aren't supposed to have very much power. What you're prepared to do isn't what most people are prepared to do, because this perceived threat is not an actual threat, not yet.

And if you think governments inevitably expand and abuse their power, then you must believe that this fight is a useless and hopeless one, one you're doomed to lose. It's a nice line, but it doesn't fit with anything else you're trying to say.

They're collecting phone records of everyone. They say they haven't been collecting location data yet (I don't trust them, but we'll leave that aside for now) but a court just ruled that they are free to do so, so I expect they will start to if they haven't already. That violates my privacy even though it is technically legal.

Furthermore, collecting business records of everyone without a warrant requiring probable cause absolutely violates the spirit of the law they claim authorizes it, as evidenced by the authors of that very law saying so.

Your second paragraph is meaningless to the discussion, because what I, and others, are trying to do is raise awareness of the threats to convince others to act, which is something everyone is free to do on any subject.

Governments do inevitably push at the edges of everything they're allowed to do, which is why we have to keep enforcing and adding limitations as necessary to keep them from pushing out in new areas. It's not hopeless, as long as there are still independent branches of government that don't all work together on everything. Congress needs to establish firm limits and close the loopholes and twisted interpretations of law the executive branch continues to find and exploit.

They're not collecting everyone's phone records or location data at all times, that's absolutely untrue.

Can you provide a reason why collecting business records against the spirit of the law, or am I just supposed to take your word for it? Who, specifically, voted for and wrote the law that says this? What court agrees with them? There's a process in place for what you're talking about, and why hasn't that process been worked through?

You said, and I quote, "Because governments inevitably expand and abuse their power." If this is true, then there is nothing you can do to stop it (that's what the word inevitable means). Do you not think this is true?

You just take what you've read, and extrapolate it ten times over. It's making an open debate impossible. You're harming the process. Stop it.

Whenever I fly I request a hand screening and it seems that more often than not the person screening me is more uncomfortable than I am. In the past I have literally walked a TSA employee through the procedure because he was to shy to touch me like he was "required" to.

It's not only passengers who struggle with this stuff but also the employees of the companies that require this kind of behavior.

This was pretty much my experience as well. Also, a lot of the time, these TSA folks were just kids. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them are still barely out of high school.

I flew out of Newark twice last month, and both times I was the only person who requested a hand screening, and both times the TSA employee doing the screening just seemed pissed off with me for making them do it.

It does seem that sadly most people will just accept what ever ridiculous rules are forced upon them,

I request a hand screening every time I fly as well. But I don't kid myself into thinking I'm effecting change.

"First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."

-- Martin Niemöller, 1946

Then they came for the basement dwelling nerd, validating his entire existence.

Hm? Was that meant to be an insult to me? I'd appreciate hearing your full reasoning for the disparagement. From my perspective, I was only sharing a classic piece of literature that had a theme relevant to the parent's comment, with a message we all could learn from, that happens to be one of my favorite poems. I didn't claim to be out there, throwing myself on the line—though I did attend a protest on the matter, and have previously actively participated in a political campaign to support my views. Anyways, you were saying?

This and also never forget that on a global scale we are all living in the very upscale parts of the metropolis.

Of all those sci-fi stories I've read where there is one major oppressive force with their boot on a smaller oppressed group, WE ARE THAT BIG TOTALITARIAN NATION!

I'm saying we as in, we in the over-developed world. I'm personally a slav living in Sweden.

In many ways it resembles the story of Weimar republic and Hitler's ascension to power. There have been of lot of speculation about why that may have happened, what kind of social forces have made the population behave in a way that ultimately harmed everyone etc. but there was no way to test it experimentally.

Now there's a window of opportunity for social scientists to test the hypotheses and maybe even find out what's really going on in these kind of situations.

> (btw, they gave themselves back the right to do the insider trading)

I've seen that claimed with regard to the amendment passed to the STOCK Act a few months ago, but those claims were wrong. Is there some other change I missed?

They removed the disclosure requirement so it's impossible to find out who is doing what, so it's impossible enforce.

http://nyulocal.com/national/2013/04/15/congress-quietly-rep...

They are really good at loopholes for themselves, really good.

They did NOT remove the disclosure requirement. What they did was change the disclosure requirement so that except for members of Congress, candidates for Congress, the President, and the Vice President, the disclosures are not placed in an online database.

So, enforcement against members of Congress, the President, and the Vice President has not changed. You can still look up their disclosures online. If you want to look at the disclosure of one of the other 28000 people covered, you can go look at the physical form they filed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com