Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"the difficulty of proving terrorists were even thinking about using games to communicate"

The article is pretty good in most areas, but an epic fail in this specific small subpart. The solution to the problem is simply follow the cultural trend of redefining what terrorism means. The article fails by listing some actual real terrorists. The article succeeds by listing non-terrorists as terrorists such as academic scientists who are employed in a perfectly legitimate capacity by a government that our government doesn't happen to like at this moment. The article fails by not mentioning that most of the terrorists they're tracking are prank telephone callers, internet bullying, anyone who ever disagrees with anything our government does in any manner or the actions of any individual government employee, anyone who belongs to a religion or no religion at all, political candidates and supporters on whichever is the losing side, teens toilet papering houses, minorities who do illegal things like drive while black in white neighborhoods, you know, new school terrorism as opposed to the old school stuff they used to be concerned with like crashing planes and stuff.

What we really need is a .gov organization oriented against old school terrorism instead of the new school 1984 stuff.

I'm hoping one of the results from the NSA reform will be that we'll properly name who and what exactly is a terrorist. The government spies on everyone, and then to justify their spying they're calling all of them potential terrorists. That line of thinking must go.

Yes the funny part is the scientist they labeled as a terrorist is not a terrorist at all, but is a perfectly legitimate surveillance target. They not only have the wrong label for the wrong people, they have the wrong label for the right people.

As a followup to my original post we probably need two new .gov agencies not just one. One would focus on state level threats to the country like foreign nuclear scientists, pretty much the pre-1984 style CIA stuff, or at least the fraction of CIA activities that were actually legal. The other would be more police like and focus on nutty individual threats, that aren't national threats, more or less James Bond evil villain type stuff. Both groups might or might not "fit" under the same gov org. Probably neither fits under the existing 1984 organizations, and unfortunately no one is apparently working on those two problems, in favor of the much more exciting "stamp out political dissidents / implement Stasi/SS secret police in the USA" model.

I think what you're trying to say is, since they have no proof of terrorists using virtual worlds to communicate, they have no legal reason to be spying on those innocent people who use them legitimately.

Redefine and water down what it means to be labeled as a terrorist such that harmless mainstream people are now given that label, and by definition anything that's mainstream will of course be used by terrorists.

With a side helping of the .gov orgs who used to defend us from "THEM" are now going all 1984 on us, so who, if anyone, is still watching "THEM"? Well... no one, anymore. Which is in itself kinda scary. .gov no longer defends us from that kind of stuff anymore, so the only way to justify spying on foreign nuclear scientists (which used to be a perfectly legit .gov job...) is to mislabel them as terrorists.

If you convert all your police to secret police to spy on political dissidents, who's left to pull over drunk drivers? Well, unfortunately, no one.

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