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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.

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> I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy.

Somewhat ironically IMO, Snowden himself seems to hold the NSA in higher esteem than HN does.

You guys all try to find ways to vilify the lowest-level tech working at Ft. Meade while Snowden complains in his interview that those same techs just trying to do the right thing "have been given a bad rap".

They may be "trying to do the right thing". But they are still working for the NSA. You'll find plenty of people in almost every organization - no matter how vile - that are just "trying to do the right thing".

"You guys all try to find ways to vilify...."

I would appreciate it if you would not hijack my comment to accuse me of something I haven't done.

This is a minor problem now, but it will get much worse if you consider technical development.

Every individual gets more and more power and capabilities with time. In not too many decades, hackers will be able to design bacteria for hobby at home, even if they probably will send for a lab to synthesize the DNA etc. Now, it is still quite expensive to make artificial life.

Consider North Korea and the possibility of a biological analogue to the Stuxnet virus...

Without a 1984 surveillance state, you need some form of immune handling -- everyone as their own bubble boy or intelligent analysis of bacteria/viruses (and hoping that Stuxnet vectors are only oriented towards military installations).

At that time, NSA surveillance like today will literally be trying to stop something as bad as terrorist nuclear weapons. You can't argue analogues about how much liberty costs, since there might not be anyone left to enjoy liberty, if NSA of the 2030s-2040s fail...

I have no clue how to solve this.

How can we be sure that someone on the other side of the apparatus won't use their position as a means towards necessary training and equipment, and as an opportunity to act with authority above suspicion, to engineer this supposed killer virus that destroys us all?

What if they become the problem we tasked them with preventing?

We might even have a middle-eastern dictator creating weapons of mass destruction, even going so far as having mobile biological weapons labs. Something surely must be done before it's too late!

The point is, this will obviously get much more dangerous -- not better. We have only seen the start of this discussion.

Edit: A bit of bad humor: As an old misanthrope which had to accept that all humanity's problems seems to get solved soon (energy from solar or fusion in a few decades, electric cars, better health, etc, etc) it is good to think everything is back to normal! Jingoism from nuclear states (Russia, China and soon Iran) and an impossibility to have humane, liberal societies... "The Road", here we come! :-)

What is the link between futuristic biological terrorism and NSA surveillance? You seem to be assuming that NSA surveillance might stop it, but how?

It does seem like a potential problem and I also don't know how to solve it, but I would personally say that either technology will present us with the solution, or there will not be a solution.

We have plenty of technology right now which, if transplanted back in time a century or so, could cause complete havoc. Imagine, for example, the crime-enabling aspects of cars and highways. A small group of criminals could literally ransack an entire city by using an automobile to drive from one heist to the next, keeping ahead of the police by virtue of their machine's great speed, and finally fleeing the local jurisdiction altogether to someplace safe. What this ignores is that police will have cars too, negating the speed advantage of the criminals, and radios and telephones to alert neighboring jurisdictions, and cameras to identify the culprits, etc.

Or consider the airplane. A small group could acquire a decent sized cargo aircraft, load it up with bombs, and then fly over Buckingham Palace with it and essentially hold the entire country hostage. Firearms don't have nearly the range to reach an airplane at altitude, so there would be no way to stop them. With the great range of the aircraft, there would be no hope whatsoever of tracking it back to its origins and thus apprehending the culprits.

But of course the technology that enables this scenario also prevents it: fighter aircraft, radar, and surface-to-air missiles mean that this attack is laughable rather than terrifying.

Presumably, the technological advances that enable biological terrorism will also enable biological counter-terrorism. If it doesn't, then we are doomed. Either way, massive surveillance systems are an unrelated thing.

The problem with biological attacks is that the agent can be designed for years, then spread quickly and the process to stop it after it has been spread is hard; the virus/bacteria has to be found, analysed and then some specific solution/treatment must be found/designed. In days or weeks.

That is why I selected biological methods as an example. There will of course probably be many other areas where it might be easier to make an attack than to defend against one.

My point was -- this discussion will almost certainly get more intense, because of more extreme threats. [In some areas, the technological development will make it harder for the attackers, in others it will be much easier. And attackers choose how they attack.]

Edit: Clarity.

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