Comment by nhaehnle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhaehnle | Hacker News Reader

Some food for thought about who is organizing this rally: http://www.salon.com/2013/10/21/dont_ally_with_libertarians_...

It's a difficult topic, of course. Opponents of libertarians are quick to point out that the libertarian agenda leads into quite the dystopia. In particular, on the topic of surveillance, it seems fairly clear that at least the hardcore libertarians (in the direction of anarcho-capitalists and the like) are actually happy with surveillance - as long as it is done by private companies and not by the state.

Now these groups are co-opting or even running this campaign which is ostensibly against mass surveillance. That seems something right out of the libertarian propaganda playbook (for a recent collection of quotes out of this playbook, see here: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/lying-to-liberals/).

On the other hand, protesting mass surveillance is still a worthy cause. I am not a USian myself, and I can't really tell where I would land on this issue (support stopwatching.us or not) if I were, but it's an important issue to think about.

What we really need is a political movement based only on a very few things that we can all agree on. Leave economics, morals, guns, abortion, and everything else completely out of the story and focus on one or two core issues. Like upholding and strengthening the Bill of Rights.

Guns are clearly part of the Bill of Rights, and the SC had ruled the same of abortion.

The Salon writer seems angry that libertarian-ish organizations are even listed as allies or allowed to participate in the event. Apparently, shunning libertarian-leaners as if they were 'unclean' takes an even higher precedence than opposing illegal mass surveillance. It's almost like how hard-core racist movements consider 'one drop' of disfavored ancestry as contaminating.

In the real world of people who aren't professional ideologues, it's good to work with people on common projects even when there are severe disagreements elsewhere. Appearing together doesn't imply any general endorsement, or risk any sort of infection by diabolical libertarian heresies.

I generally agree, and I tried to make that abundantly clear in my comment. It's not even about having to agree on every topic. There is reasonable doubt that I wouldn't even agree on the topic of surveillance with many libertarian backers.

The troubling thing is when you implicitly lend support to somebody who then turns around and basically backstabs you on the same topic.

On the topic of surveillance, it seems quite likely that some of those libertarian backers would be more than happy to implement their own mass surveillance. They don't object to mass surveillance on principle, they just object to the state doing it. Simply put, it seems quite likely that they are not friends of individual privacy.

Case in point, as discussed elsewhere in this thread: Why are there so many tracking scripts on the stopwatching.us website?

On a personal note: It's interesting that this was my first negative voted comment on HN in a long time.

"...seems quite likely they are not friends of individual privacy" is a vague and unfair slur without specific examples of organizations and anti-privacy stances.

True, the libertarian-leaning groups are not going to mind so much about something like audience-tracking scripts, because such things are a pea-shooter threat to privacy, compared to the government's privacy carpet-bombing.

We can defend ourselves and others from Google Analytics, and not wind up in prison for trying. Not so with a state program of total, secret, compulsory surveillance, that's linked with the government's unique scale, permanence, legal immunity, and ability-to-punish.

Against such a threat, those who emphasize the common cause are the good coalition partners. Someone on the sidelines, like the Salon writer, withholding support based on a partisan ideological purity test? Not an impressive coalition partner!

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