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Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

Fact: the worlds biggest and most spectacular privacy-breaching operation is being run by veritably democratic states, the "west". It's not some evil dictator who dictates this, it's the majority of citizens who demands spying on the rest. Another fact is that there are no major (think, ukraine-size) protests about this anywhere.

My conclusion is that even democracy demands some privacy breach. Privacy may be protecting individual rights but it's not a prerequisite for democracy.

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Given that many of these democracies arose in conditions of substantial individual privacy, your conclusion is unproven.

It could be equally true that democracies die from insufficient privacy, but it just takes more than a decade or so of massive invasive snooping. In particular, the surveillance apparatus may not yet have been sufficiently corrupted to be used as a source of political power.

I should note that the US had a previous wave of improper snooping [1] which was seen as a threat to democracy and fought off. It provided a lot of the legal restrictions that prevented massive surveillance up until 9/11 got Washington's undies in a bunch.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

You follow two fallacies: The fallacy, that democracies will stay forever and that people in a democracy act democratic. Democracy is no virtue of its own.

Your other logical errors, I will not comment.

For the latter yes, why call it a democracy if the majority of people people don't act democratically, the opposite would be absurd. I didn't claim the former at all.

I don't understand your arguments fully, but I think you just follow a black and white path. And that does not help in the real world.

Actually people who live in the US don't live in a democracy, it's actually a constitutional republic. It's a subtle, but important difference.

"A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%." — Thomas Jefferson

"Democracy is the road to socialism." — Karl Marx (father of communism)

"We can keep a Republic, or we will eventually end up with an Oligarchy - a tyranny of the elite." — Benjamin Franklin

"We are a Republican government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy." — Alexander Hamilton

"We can keep a Republic, or we will eventually end up with an Oligarchy - a tyranny of the elite." — Benjamin Franklin

Your best quote, because it shows, where we are today.

I am fully aware, that when we talk democracy in such forums as here, we all have our own artificial picture of democracy in mind, that is not the same as democracy in its genuine sense.

I would be very interested in seeing the source of the quotations from Jefferson and Franklin. "Mob rule" and "elite" do not at all sound like the expression of their day.

Watch the talk ex NSA executive Thomas Drake gave on why spying is kryptonite to any democracy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgg8K26dcXs

Now, I hate to invoke this, but... Hitler was democratically elected.

And, to be fair, he did completely follow through on his pre-election promises. He might be the only democratically elected leader to not waver from the plan he laid out before he got elected to power.

That still doesn't mean it was a good idea.

Edit: I don't mean "the sheeple will elect whoever has better PR"; I mean that under specific social and economic conditions electing Hitler starts to seem like a good idea to normal, rational individuals. Same as with taking away privacy.

Except he wasn't, at least not in the usual sense of a party winning the majority of votes in an election. NSDAP was insignificant in the parliament, and Hitler became the chancellor through backdoor deals with industrial tycoons. His coming to power is great example of how to subvert parliamentary process (and in fact how it's regulary subverted only without the catastrophic consequences that it had in Germany's case) in a legal way.

He didn't waver from the plan, that's true, but the thing is, no significant number of people ever voted for the plan either.

One could counter-argue by claiming that these are not true democracies.

That is a valid question.

Good speech about it: Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g

The west has the best functioning democracies, unless you can provide better examples. No true Scotsman.

Still you cling on black and white thinking and to the notion, that things will never change.

They do!

Also: Who on earth says, that there is even one good functioning democracy at all?

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Churchill

I'm not disagreeing with that, nor am I packing up my bags to move out of the United States at the moment.

However, "the best we've got right now" is just a local maxima.

That's something, that makes me shiver, too!

Note that "best functioning" can be worlds different from "well functioning."

"no true scotsman" only applies when you are attempting to continually redefine something after the fact, it has nothing to do with the claims made here.

There are very few (if any) states that practice true democracy in its purest form (i.e. every decision is voted on by every person in the state). It is an ideal like pure capitalism that you can get very close to but not emulate.

I think it's a given that we're actually talking about republics, and not about spherical cows.

And here I thought it was private enterprises running these mega privacy breaching operations.

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