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Comment by motters | Hacker News Reader

Mass surveillance isn't inevitable, it's a political decision and a decision which is reversible. PRISM and Xkeyscore didn't invent themselves - they took money and manpower and above all political will to come to fruition. We have nuclear weapons, but nuclear proliferation isn't inevitable.

Dismissing people who are opposed to the abuse of technology for purposes which are fundamentally anti-democratic as "illogical" is just a cheap piece of rhetoric. You should think more carefully about what you're supporting.

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Technology is like water, it finds its own level. When you make sensors and storage as cheap as dirt then you're going to end up with widespread deployment. In many polities, people seem to think that the costs are outweighed by the benefits (of improved security and so on). I'm not sure that they are and you are clearly sure that they aren't, but ultimately the criteria for arriving at a given position are arbitrary.

I mean, lots of people think technology leads to economic inequality by devaluing human labor, resulting in unemployment and pay stagnation, but you probably agree with me that it would be futile to pass a law for the express purpose of limiting industrial productivity per worker.

It is an economic inevitability.

Even if lawmakers passed rules preventing the government from doing it, you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap. The value of the data is quickly outstripping the cost of obtaining it.

Better to focus on safety than on prevention.

"...you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap."

Not if doing so was a felony. Sometimes, safety IS prevention (see toxic waste / dumping of).

There's lots of felonies the private sector commit anyway. Industrial espionage is already a major market in the world.

Uh, sure. And maybe we should legalize murder on the grounds that not every killer is in prison.

Try again.

Don't be so juvenile. Should we ban all axes from the private sector because someone could use it as a murder weapon?

What about torrenting? How about we ban vehicles because they can be used as getaway cars for bank robberies?

Obviously the economic of inevitability of marijuana was stopped by the drug war.

>Better to focus on safety than on prevention.

I was referring to things that are illegal (murder, kidnapping, assault, theft etc.),because they severely harm the life, limb, or property of others. I was pointing out that just because our laws against these crimes do not stop every instance, there is no reason to abolish the law itself.

You're talking about things which have a wide variety of perfectly legitimate uses which we (quite properly) allow in spite of the fact that they can, on occasion, be used to harm. This is obviously and substantially different.

Indeed, when you think about it, these very different things are nevertheless complementary. We allow potentially dangerous things to exist because we're (reasonably) well-assured that any truly harmful applications can be dealt with using the laws we reserve for handling grievous harms.

Regarding the "example" you brought up, the difference between robbery and pot is that pot is actually quite popular and the war against it is being waged with profound incompetence and for reasons that are increasingly suspect. Robbery, on the other hand, is - and remains - widely unwelcome in nearly any setting, even among thieves.

I'll do you the favor of assuming you're actually intelligent enough to grasp all this and that you're simply trolling. God help you if you're stupid enough for these distinctions to be truly baffling.

You were being juvenile by grouping murder with meta data. How does meta data "severely harm the life, limb, or property of others"?

It's an appeal to emotion on your part, and judging by how you're now lashing out like a child, you still have quite a ways to go before you mature in this conversation.

Note the direct parent. It referred to industrial espionage, not metadata.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

The market always finds a way.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/when-mexican-surveilla...

> When you make sensors and storage as cheap as dirt then you're going to end up with widespread deployment.

The surveillance technology gets cheaper over time, but so does the counter-surveillance technology. If they store everything then we encrypt everything, etc. But that balance doesn't exist in a vacuum. It very much matters whether we allow what the government is doing to be considered legitimate. If they're not allowed to do it and you find out that they did then you can have the evidence thrown out or file a lawsuit against the perpetrators; if they are allowed to do it and you employ or develop reasonable counter-surveillance technologies to prevent them from doing it then they may charge you with a crime just for thwarting their surveillance. That is a distinction that matters regardless of how cheap the technology gets.

If they store everything then we encrypt everything, etc.

In theory, but in practice most people can't be bothered. What I was thinking of above was not so much personal surveillance like the NSA tracking how often you called your mother, but more the mass impersonal stuff that yields an enormous amount of utility in the aggregate and that's totally public.

For example, consider people walking around with mesh networking devices. Even if you don't identify any of them personally, you could still extract a vast amount of intelligence from watching the pattern of anonymous dots swarming on a map. Or a sufficiently dense number of surveillance cameras plugged into a machine learning system would facilitate all kinds of surveillance, even if the cameras were private and the contents had to be subpoenaed.

As I've said numerous times, you're certainly not going to see any constraints on government until people bite the bullet and define what constraints should be on private entities for the gathering and storage of data.

I'm not supporting shit, I'm just saying whether you like it or not, the technologies eventually going to get to the point where you can't prevent it.

Whether it's incredibly small drones, nanotech or your own cellphone, operated by either the private or public sector. Public sector information surveillance is just a small part, a minuscule part of what's possible.

I don't agree that because a metaphorical 'decision' is a part of a development, that it isn't inevitable.

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