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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

People here live in a bubble. We're afraid of an orwelian society, but in the case of france, we're still unable to catch those guys eventhough they : - killed people in the center of Paris, including cops protecting the area.

- left their id card at the back of the car

- had 2 car accident while running away inside Paris and changed the car twice

- stopped at a gas station a few kilometers away from paris to get some gas,where the owner recognized them.

- were already under monitoring by the counter terrorism, for having tried to go to war in iraq ten years ago.

- have 8000 cops chasing them all over the country, and 24 hours later, they lost their tracks, for the second time.

We don't live in an orwelian society. We REALLY don't.

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1) The inability to instantly catch potentially well trained and prepared people on the run in a large capital, does not exclude a surveillance state.

2) The revelations of the recent years has not garnered so much attention because of live tracking abilities, but because of the intelligence services almost incredible omnipresence, their ability to store and therefore retrieve data over many years and lastly the enormity, sophistication and agression of the whole endeavour.

You should know that if you have followed the debate even slightly.

3) Plenty of people in the hacker and rights communities has pointed to the fact that the this grand effort will probably both be failing in catching terrorists with enough technical training and be used to target non-terrorist activity in the end, i.e. regular citizens.

Your argument is a classic straw-mans argument.

*added

4) For me to grasp that technically minded individuals like yourself, is accusing the vast majority of the most intelligent people in the computer science community of crying wolf, and to be living in a fantasy after the ever increasing revelations over the past years - is very difficult.

Arguments like yours based on completely made up premises makes me hope people like you are either a paid shills, completely out of the loop or just an infinitely small minority.

We need to stand up for our rights more than ever today.

> We don't live in an orwelian society. We REALLY don't.

1. This is France, so it really only speaks to how things are happening in France. The majority of the people on this site are probably concentrated in Bay Area, which is not in France. Life in East Germany under the Stasi was pretty bad, but it also didn't describe conditions everywhere.

2. You could almost view this in the same light as DRM on media. The criminals easily skirt it, but the normal people are left paying the price (a degraded experience in the case of DRM; a watchful government eye in the case of surveillance).

> The majority of the people on this site are probably concentrated in Bay Area

Please, we're everywhere.

"the majority" though?

The majority only need be greater than 50%.

Note: I've never been to the Bay Area, so this isn't some "omg, we're all SanFran start-up bros" line of thought.

Whether a society is Orwellian or not, is not measured by how easy it is to catch evildoers.

This. The purpose of an Orwellian society is not to catch criminals.

Exactly, in Orwellian societies there should always be an enemy to justify more control and surveillance. Even better if they are on the run for a while then later you can pull them out for the 2 minutes of hate. Wars on Terrorism, terror cells, terrorists in caves, Eastasia/Eurasia, and on and on are used to beef up defense, tracking and police force through fear.

I was watching a BBC documentary on Vikings and they cited multiple occurrences of early British leaders using the threat of Viking invasions in order to influence the populace. But the number of occurrences of invasions actually taking place in historical records are nearly non-existent.

So to further this point, the threat doesn't actually have to be tangible or to actually have taken place to be well utilized.

Considering the vast number of tangible, actually occurring, problems that are being neglected there seems to be a long history of poor resource allocation in human culture thanks to fear.

Well it's just more proof that mass surveillance doesn't work...to catch terrorists or those willing to commit massacres. If someone wants to go at a subway station tomorrow and start stabbing random people or shooting them (especially in US), a surveillance state isn't going to stop that.

What does work, however, is being able to use mass surveillance for economic espionage, high-level blackmail, spying and building cases against activists and those wanting to "harm the government" (in a "revealing the truth" kind of way), selective oppression, and so on.

Perhaps that makes it even more terrifying though; a society with Orwellian capabilities (surveillance, spying, death and imprisonment) but without that singularity of vision or execution? These capabilities in the hands of people who frankly don't deserve to be within an ocean's width of power is what I fear, not the society as depicted in 1984 itself.

I understand your frustration that those guys have not been caught yet (they will eventually) but now I feel the same frustration but didn't we know that "anti-terrorism" laws and surveillance are ineffective in practice ? I remember this objection being made at the time these laws were proposed.

Then again this is actually beneficial to a surveillance state as this can be used to put even more surveillance and get the population to accept it.

This is no different as using CP and piracy as pretexts for Internet censorship, or from a web company running on investor story time admitting that advertising revenue currently sucks but this means there is much room for improvement.

If you drank the koolaid and actually believe that surveillance was effective in preventing terrorism or catching terrorists afterwards, well I'm sorry you got duped.

i'm sorry but the argument saying that surveillance would only affect innocent civilians is just as sily as saying it would only affect terrorists. Either the state has the effective ability to track people's activity, or it doesn't.

My comment was just to show that, currently, the state's ability to monitor people ( in general, in france) is, contrarely to what all the posts about privacy on HN tend to suggest,still very very limited.

This argument is based on a simple assumption:

- surveillance is effective

That assumption has already proven to be incorrect.

The "problem" seems to be with how fast you can communicate the sightings and how quickly you can deploy an arresting force on to the moving targets.

> - left their id card at the back of the car

They left other peoples' ID in the car as a false lead.

Perhaps when you're enough of a grown-up to have readin comprehension 101 you can join the adults talking, but until then...

> They left other peoples' ID in the car as a false lead.

Incorrect.

Quite correct. The first person arrested off the ID in the car turned out to be sitting in his classroom at the time the attacks took place.

The two suspects were identified and the manhunt began because an ID one of them left behind in their car. Police arrest the wrong person? Sure, but the ID wasn't faked to lead them to someone else or anything like that according to any reporting I've seen.

> His identification card was found in the vehicle abandoned after Wednesday's attack, Cazeneuve said.

> "It was their only mistake," Dominique Rizet, BFMTV's police and justice consultant, said earlier.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/08/europe/paris-charlie-hebdo-sho...

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