Comment by lettercarrier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lettercarrier | Hacker News Reader

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I enjoy reading what and how you write. Which is why I enjoy HN.

<< I should be largely invisible to the enforcer class.

The genie is out of the bottle. My health suffers if I think and express myself like you just did, although very eloquently. My roots are academic but my current state is prole. (ever read Fussell's Class?" [1] It is WONDERFUL!)

<< far more threatening to me than individual criminals.

I disagree. If you ever lose a relative to a gun or a drunk or cocaine, then storing a googol of data on me is never as threatening.

<< Any tool that can be used for legitimate police work can also be used for political oppression.

Maybe because I am political only one day of the year (or 2, depending), the day I vote, I do not feel oppressed.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/d...

> ...because I am political only one day of the year (or 2, depending), the day I vote, I do not feel oppressed.

You do not feel oppressed until you are the target of political oppression or personal persecution. Then you will likely understand why many folks are just as or more concerned about pervasive data collection than they are about random violent crazies or unfortunate events.

> The genie is out of the bottle.

The genie is out. However, -if we work at- it we do get to control how it behaves. (Remember reading about how the "mandatory quartering of troops" genie had been let out of the bottle ages ago in English territories? Do you also remember how the American Rebels muzzled that particular genie in their country?)

I feel doubly oppressed on the day that I vote, because I see race after race with a single, uncontested candidate on the ballot. That brings to mind all the nasty, restrictive ballot access laws, gerrymandering, and official corruption that systematically restrict my choices on election day. And when I feed my paper into the electronic black box to be tallied, I think about all that unaudited code inside, and about how I can easily run any program inside a debugger or trainer and change values in ways the program itself does not detect.

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