Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Perhaps the most frustrating thing I've heard all day was when Burke said it was OK to collect all the data because it'll be ignored when those who control it are not interested in it.

"They don't care about ME! They only take notice of people when they're connected to an group or event that is being monitored"

Well no shit. Thats like saying a tyrannical government only silences those who oppose them. They don't care about you today, but as soon as you stick your head up everything you've said and all your human connections are immediately tagged. I find that discomforting! And what a poor showing from the interviewer not to mention this.




Having large amounts of collected data on citizens doesn't create a tyrannical government. Nor is it required for a tyrannical government: the Nazis did horrible things with very primitive technology. In the same vein, the U.S. government has had seventy years to become tyrannical with much more advanced technology, but it has not.

The key to foiling a tyrannical government is to prevent a tyrannical government from being created in the first place though the political process--checks and balances, rule of law, preservation of values, citizen involvement, democratic and fair elections. It is not by employing a few lame technological defenses or prohibiting specific practice X, Y, and Z. Those are useless against any sufficiently motivated government, and, if anything, they create a false sense of security. Government is not as it has, but as it does.


I agree that preventing tyranny is not primarily a technological problem. But the abuse of power is not unrelated to how easy it is to abuse either. Technology can make it more difficult to abuse power, more difficult to hide any abuse and hence it makes any checks and balances more effective.

Also, I think we haven't seen all forms of tyranny yet. It is very difficult for a democratically elected government not to enforce something popular they are technically capable of enforcing. Even if there is rule of law and checks and balances there is also a tendency toward ever more detailed control and even prediction of individual behaviour.

I fear that the erosion of individual freedoms is possible even in perfectly good democratic societies if there are no technological barriers to that collective power grab. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely" remains true even if that power is legitimate.

And my last point is that breaking the law is necessary for the advancement of the law and our societies. Law is not something that falls from the sky or magically emerges from the moral conscience of wise men and women. It is often the result of conflict. If you give too much power to the enforcers of current law that conflict could become too unequal for society to advance and avoid tyranny.


I rather think that the holocaust would have been a touch more complete had the Nazis had access to big data.


Sidenote, the funny part is the people who tell you that, "No, the U.S. government of today is the most tyrannical government in history".


yes this is more like giving a would be future tyrannical government a large armory and list of people who may potentially oppose them in the future.

As long as those checks and balances work it will never matter that anything any would be protester has said or done online can be recalled at a whim in the future for ad homimem attacks as needed.


I think further to your point of "They only take notice of people when they're connected to...", the real issue is you have no way of knowing when you are connected to something you shouldn't be. Moreover, a group that was once seen as innocuous can all of the sudden be targeted for persecution when the new powers-that-be decide to move the goal posts.

The HN crowd could be considered worth monitoring.


I have this train of thought lately not unlike Burke's.

It postulates that the key issue is assymetry of collection and usage of our personal information. NSA and other intelligence agencies are basically collecting data for malicious purposes from an individual's perspective.

The data banks have no benefit to us as individuals at this point of time. However NSA's databases and technology could be used for many wonderful things to improve our lives.

PRSM.com is just a tip of the iceberg. Even if it is just a joke.


Looking forward it seems unavoidable that our lives will be fully recorded, and that we will not be able to control this. There are two possible ways to deal with this: either we have strong data privacy legislation which enforces data firewalls that the subject of that data controls, requiring a judicial review to bypass on an individual basis, or we abandon the notion of digital privacy and accept that everything we do and say is known to everyone. In the long term, i imagine it could become the second option, but for those of us who grew up with a sense of privacy it will be a hard transition.


Burke also says that we are in a transitional period and offers a solution for the NSA data collection. Checks and balances from the public would allow us to do queries on the people who queried our data.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: