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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

Also an unpopular opinion is that some people (I am not one of them FYI) think mass surveillance of the population is a good thing. It can be hard to understand that position, but there are people who believe mass surveillance, security theater, and the like really are protecting them and that it is all for their own good.

As long as sufficient numbers of these people exist there will be not shortage of people who are not ashamed to staff the government agencies implementing these things and the private companies that support them. Some will even see it as a duty.

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It a tool like any other. It can be used for good or evil. What you are doing in the middle of a Baltimore street isn't in any way private information. It's a public as you get.

Sure, it could be used to perpetrate a Holocaust or something, but so could the 101st airborne.

If the government wanted to go all Hitler on us, they already can get google data, facebook data, medical records, essentially everything that is kept on you. Hell, I bet google location services tracks me better than a drone does (if the war in the Pakistan tribal areas is an example).

And drones are way easier to shoot down than googles datacenters.

Put your privacy in hacking and system security terms.

Sure, it might be easier to exploit a webpages sql injection vuln to hijack your server, but does that mean you should stop running software updates?

In other words, yes, you need to fix google and all the rest, but that doesn't mean you should stop caring about other sorts of surveillance.

And, fwiw, not everyone uses those services for this reason.

Do we really want to tie a noose at the end of all the rope we already hand the authorities?

There are tools people with power shouldn't have access to, because people with power do not have a good track record of using them in good faith.

We trust the federal government with the power to, no exaggeration, annihilate the world.

If the government were going to use its power for evil, it'd go knocking on google/facebook/visa/amazon/comcast/grocery store/school/medical/whatever database to find its enemy.

What do you honestly think is a bigger risk for you? Getting murdered by a criminal or the US government via drone. Cause it's like 40k:2 for the past couple year.

The government has quite a bit of power to do things other than actually kill people. It can take away people's lives in many other ways.

Which is are the bigger risks for you? Getting your money taken from you by the government via fines or getting it stolen from you by a criminal? Being forced, under threat of imprisonment, to show up in a location at a specific time and account for your actions by the government or by a corporation, your work, your neighbor? Getting locked up in a basement by a criminal or locked up in a prison by the government?

We give the government quite a lot of power. It behooves us to ensure that power is kept in check.

It's in everyone's best interest that the world isn't annihilated, that power shouldn't be in the hands of people, yet is. That isn't an excuse to hand over more power.

The biggest direct threat to my freedom, and the freedom of the masses, is the expansion of executive power.

Times I've been arrested for expressing my views: 3

Times I've been murdered, injured or locked up by another person: 0

The government already uses the data the private sector collects. It wants better, real-time data using public and invasive techniques that aren't profitable for consumer businesses yet.

I am against both access to that data collected by the private sector and the expansion of mass surveillance. The fact that the data exists is a problem and, ideally, we wouldn't live in a world where surveillance at this extreme for advertising was acceptable.

> What do you honestly think is a bigger risk for you? Getting murdered by a criminal or the US government via drone. Cause it's like 40k:2 for the past couple year.

The fact that there are bad actors in one arena does not obviate the need to push back against bad actors in other arenas. Additionally, one could argue that if the government doesn't follow its own rules, it risks undermining its authority to enforce those rules for others.

>What do you honestly think is a bigger risk for you? Getting murdered by a criminal or the US government via drone.

Non-sequitor. The gov't doesn't use drones to murder people in the US. OTOH, the gov't does inform local authorities on citizens' behavior. Local authorities sometimes go and kick peoples' doors in based on these and other sources of information. Sometimes their information is faulty, sometimes they make another kind of error. It is terribly difficult to hold police accountable when a mistake or abuse has occurred.

That's a hell of a straw man since I don't think anyone was talking about getting murdered by a drone, and the government doesn't seem all that great at catching real criminals.

On the other hand, if I ever disappear in the woods on a hiking trip, I really want the local PD to have twenty drones on standby they can use to canvass the area instead of hoping their one helicopter spots me.

If we're assuming bad faith in the part of the government, and we assume the private sector collects all that information, then there is no point opposing surveillance efforts. It would be trivial for the government to storm a Google data center if they really wanted that information.

There is absolutely a point. It's possible to oppose surveillance on multiple fronts.

The whole point of checks and balances is that the government doesn't do everything it can do, nor does it act as a unified whole. A bad actor in one branch can be held in check by a good actor in another. If the police/FBI/whomever wanted to storm a government center, it's theoretically up to a court to determine if that is legal and constitutional.

ok i do already. my only real concern is the CA system.

even so, there's no harm in supporting the opposition of surveillance efforts in case it might work.

> (if the war in the Pakistan tribal areas is an example)

Does the US govt ask Google and Apple for data from android and iphones which are in that area.

> It can be hard to understand that position, but there are people who believe mass surveillance, security theater, and the like really are protecting them and that it is all for their own good.

Not only that, but supplying the infrastructure for mass surveillance and security theater pays REALLY well.

Along the lines of people who think mass surveillance is a good thing:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

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