Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Meta, but a question I ponder often:

These turn key totalitarian infrastructures have broad bipartisan support, especially among old hat insider politicians like Clinton and Feinstein.

What is the motivation? Is it just the typical thing bureaucracies do to try to grow their size and power? Or is there a capital-R Reason there is such a global push to put these things into place.

Do the inside players at the top know something?

I've toyed around with two speculations. One is that there is concern over natural resource depletion leading to serious economic collapse in the mid-term future, and these systems are there to deal with the mass unrest of a "permanent recession." Another is that present day oligarchs simply know their history. Major transformations in communication tend to be followed by serious social upheaval and a changing of the guard. The printing press more or less indirectly beheaded quite a few European royals.

Any other speculations? Informed ones would be particularly interesting.

IMHO, there's no need for specific scenarios. From a benevolent desire to protect society against any upheaval, power becomes a goal in and of itself.

One player will worry about resource depletion while another about financial crises and yet another about terrorism. They'll find common ground in needing more power in general.

From their perspective, there are no downsides to implementing a capability because they can always choose not to use it.

> Do the inside players at the top know something?

Maybe it's the other way round: maybe the people doing the surveillance know something about the inside players?

That is distinctly possible-- the cart pulling the horse. There's a lot of money in these programs, not to mention the possible profits in insider trading and corporate espionage.

That's excuse making. The Clinton's have had plenty of misdeeds exposed, they still have millions of dollars and no one cares. They aren't being cowed to silence by the NSA.

I don't think there is a politician that hasn't said "If we only had knew..." Large amounts of raw information represent a solution to almost every problem a professional politician has, and it only look more attractive the older and the more political mistakes the person has made.

Imagine if you could know beforehand whom will become a political rival, or what issues are becoming important, or what trends are happening in the economy. If you ever end up in court, what if you knew everything about the judge, jury members, or the lawyers. What if you knew beforehand what the media find interesting and will use as a headline the day after, as knowing this might give you the ability to prepare blame, or minimize damage, or destroy documents.

On election day, this information is even more valuable. if you knew how people will vote and whom is influenceable, maybe you can start try get voters to change the vote or to not vote at all.

And if all that wasn't enough for a reason to be supportive of totalitarian infrastructures, information access is also a kind of currency between different government departments. The state department wants it for trade, The secret police wants it, the army wants it, the regular police wants it, the tax department wants it, health department wants it, the motor vehicle department wants it, and so many lobby groups from military contractors and insurance companies wants it too. By controlling the access, you gain power over those groups.

Having access to every communication made by most of the population is a hugely powerful tool. People in power want to stay in power. They know they can run these surveillance programs with impunity, so why not do it? It doesn't cost them anything.

If you gave anyone the ability to get insider information on something deeply important to them, they would almost certainly take it.

> Do the inside players at the top know something?

The "inside players" are the ones who are empowered by the established order, so does it really surprise you that they all agree that the established order should be maintained by whatever means necessary?

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