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Comment by icanhackit | Hacker News Reader

The legislation was rushed through to protect what had long been in place now that it was exposed. Politicians, constantly worried about risk exposure, love surveillance. It's cheap and probably effective, as much as we like to argue that it isn't. If someone hurts a bunch of people then a whole lot of bullshit has to take place: inquiries, increases in resources to bullshit cause X, better police funding etc. They're down with having their kid's selfies, wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS data etc sucked into a great spy apparatus because they care about their careers more than the great digital kaiju that privacy advocates have worried about since George Orwell summed up what was to come in his book 1984.

The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.

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down with having their kid's selfies, wife's neurotic texts, dick pics, GPS data etc sucked into a great spy apparatus

I don't think they are, really, it's just that they haven't thought about it and don't really understand that mass surveillance means everybody, not just the bad guys.

(Consider my favourite bit of narrowly-drafted legislation, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act : rather than address privacy in any general way, go after the particular leak that embarrased a particular candidate)

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."

- H.L. Mencken

it's just that they haven't thought about it and don't really understand that mass surveillance means everybody, not just the bad guys

You make a good point which I think applies to most of them, though I'd say the politicians in higher places are more self-aware and accept that surveillance offers more benefits than downsides, career-wise.

> I don't think they are, really, it's just that they haven't thought about it and don't really understand...

Alternatively, they've already been invited to look into the abyss, or they know colleagues who have.

I agree. Similar to how so many people were sure waterboarding isn't torture, tried it to prove the point and promptly changed their minds.

Same thing happened in Australia. CYA laws passed to protect what had already been happening.

Our new BS data collection starts in October.

Unfortunately, it has bipartisan support, because both major parties are thoroughly corrupt and terrible.

I don't think we're actually governed by those people, they're just a front for the eternal bureaucrats.

Can you provide an example of an eternal bureaucrat?

Well, the people with "permanent secretary" in their job titles aren't literally permanent, but they're more persistent than the ministers they serve.

Generally the system is referred to as the "permanent state". The oral and written tradition of various parts of the civil services has a very large influence on what policy can actually get made. Certain ideas keep popping up in a way that suggests the same briefing paper is simply being presented as a new idea to each new minister.

The secret part of the permanent state is even more persistent, as it keeps all information relating to its operations secret. This can include even quite large chunks of the budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zircon_affair

Pullquote from the end of that page: "We saw the spectacle of police being sent to raid the BBC headquarters in Glasgow in the middle of the night.... We saw the Zircon tapes seized as an elaborate blind." Darling said that the cabinet episode concerned "... the election campaign of 1983, and the fact that the Government sought to undermine and spy on the citizens of this country."

Another Secret Society episode "In Time Of Crisis: Government Emergency Powers" is quite remarkable - I wonder how many of those powers are still there waiting to be invoked?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XBdCwWeYzo

Edit: I suspect the answer is "all of them, and some..."

We got a hint of this during the London riots of a few years ago. It only took 3 nights of public order breakdown for the the government to talk of shutting down Twitter and Blackberry messenger, and for Boris to buy his watercannon for the next event.

We know what a state of emergency in the UK looks like, it looks like Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Charles Dickens perfectly described it in Little Dorrit when he described the Circumlocution Office[1].

Having worked with such people, I can confirm they still exist in the UK public sector and have only increased their power. They have an amazing ability to see a cloud in every silver lining. They detest any simple solution to anything.

[1] http://www.panarchy.org/dickens/circumlocution.html

All of them.

When you come to work at a government agency, you learn the tasks and procedures. For the most part, those tasks and procedures carry on regardless of who's in the legislature. Sometimes things do change because of legislation, but mostly policies and practices that were developed inside the bureaucrat's building continue on. Employees come and go, but the manual lives on.

In the case of spy agencies it's even worse, because the legislators have almost no idea what the tasks, policies and procedures are, other than the top veneer that spies choose to share with their overseers. They were truly developed in a vacuum of oversite.

Employees come and go, but the manual lives on.

That's a really interesting perspective. Like an algorythm with a relative threat detection system as opposed to a fixed threat level. So when a major threat disappears, the next largest threat is in its sights. What happens when the next relative threat is a guy buying some drugs from a dealer? The manual is SkyNet for wetware.

You could look at the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the USA as an attempt at getting the manual right once and for all. Unfortunately it seems the manual that survives is the one that best guarantees its own survival. Fancy how that works.

I think that one should add a lack of understanding (or caring) about these principles.

I think they probably do understand these principles or at least the very basis of them as I do with animal rights but I put it aside as it gets in the way of my meat agenda.

I think the bigger challenge is the rhetoric that "there are no absolute rights" and its pervasive use in furthering the erosion of civil liberties.

While I'm inclined to agree with the rhetoric, it's important to understand that "not absolute" !== "not protected", and are constantly using tropes like fire in a theater as an excuse for banning insensitive speech and such.

A lot of it is willful, but if we keep believing the idea that our rights are fungible, then our rights will indeed become fungible. Every generation's erosion of civil liberties compounds to the new normal, which makes the next generation's erosion of civil liberties more possible, and in too many cases, even welcomed.

There can't ever be absolute rights in this context, because at some level, even the most widely accepted and well-regarded rights that we want to protect will inevitably come into conflict. For example, you can't have absolute free speech and protect people's privacy against malicious disclosures, even though as general principles we might agree with both ideals. A balance must be found, and navigating that middle ground is always hard when any decision you make will necessarily be flawed.

I think the problem with the current politics of fear is that it does seek to promote one absolute right -- the right to be safe from attack by bad people -- as more important than all the others. Of course, it is impossible to truly achieve that goal no matter what you sacrifice. But in the quest to do so, more balanced "greater good" philosophies developed over centuries of human civilisation, like preferring to die on your feet than live on your knees, or preferring to risk letting a guilty man go free rather than risk imprisoning an innocent one, or refusing to negotiate in the face of threats, can be cast aside all too easily. That's what is happening today.

| There can't ever be absolute rights in this context, because at some level, even the most widely accepted and well-regarded rights that we want to protect will inevitably come into conflict. |

And people wonder why Americans love guns so much...

Yes they do. Do you really believe you're going to use your personal arsenal against the Federal Government if it decides to take some other right they agree with?

Guns aside I think the idea of personal sovereignty is an interesting one. It a concept that is almost completely lacking in the UK. We wrongly believe that people bodies and property are policed by social values and politeness. The greatest crime is not attacking someone's rights but breaking a taboo. This is very different to the American concept of individual liberty where people are actually allowed to be rude!

Guns no, but encryption yes. The right to "arms" includes encryption. Too bad the NRA sucks up the 2nd amendment discussion and casts it as only pertaining to guns.

Hoarding guns makes it easier for some people to sleep at night because they think that the government is going to come for them, or they are preparing for the fall of civilization.

not on the internet I don't.

MPs must understand this and be treating us like children.

How many MPs do you actually know? Or is your opinion of them solely determined by what you read in the Guardian?

I don't read The Guardian, I don't know any MPs. I have the skill of deduction, perhaps exercised a little too vigorously at times.

Now, what do you disagree with specifically?

>The real conspiracy: we're governed by emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress, and surveillance is a tool that helps them get what they value with minimal effort.

The electorate wished to be ruled by these people, and they pretty accurately represent the majority view on data collection in the face of risk. MPs are a symptom, not a cause.

> The electorate wished to be ruled by these people, and they pretty accurately represent the majority view on data collection in the face of risk. MPs are a symptom, not a cause.

Patently false. The people chose these sad sacks as being the least pathetically awful option out of a torrent of etonian nonsense mongers.

Lesser of two evils etc

The electorate wished to be ruled by these people [...] MPs are a symptom, not a cause.

In that case, would you say the general public are emotionally unsophisticated, intellectually misshapen prunes who value money and prestige over progress?

Yeah, probably.

No they don't reflect it at all.

MPs are totally fine with being in the public eye because, guess what, they've chosen to lose privacy to become MPs. When it comes to privacy MPs are atypical and cannot reflect the general populace.

When did the Guardian become the big bad? Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they are naive, credulous, and open to manipulation. Most people are just trying to get through the day and you should give them the benefit of the doubt. Or at least except that you are as dumb as the rest of us.

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