

Ask HN: What are good things about PRISM? - Balgair

With all the news about PRISM and it&#x27;s obvious darker side towards privacy and freedom, I thought we should ask what some good things are about it. How does it help, if at all? How will it affect the future in a positive way? Since it is here, are there any ways we can look on it in a good light? Thank you.
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pontifier
PRISM seems like the biggest information leech in the world. For good to come
from it, they should "accidentally" let the whole world see everything they
collected. Then they'd be the biggest seeder ever. It's not that I don't have
anything to hide, I have lots to hide. But sooner or later everyone will know
everything they want to know anyway.

Almost every bad movie plot I've ever seen has one point where someone says
"We have to keep this secret". From that point on, things always go wrong.
Light can always help a situation.

How are we ever going to get to a true collective consciousness if we are
always keeping secrets from one another. Just realize that we are all human,
we all have hopes and dreams, and we all have things we are ashamed of. A
public panopticon could be just what the doctor ordered for our society to get
to the next stage.

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DanBC
Someone somewhere is learning a lot about big databases and data mining and
big storage.

I guess there's a bit of trickle through with academia getting funding to
study that stuff.

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Balgair
Yes, the neuroscience research could use this, also sociologists

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krapp
They should charge people a fee and rebrand it as a data archive /cloud
storage service. Every email you've ever sent, every phone call you've ever
made, every online purchase, the whole architecture of your online existence,
preserved forever with no effort on your part. And maybe someday when you die,
they'll finally copy _you_.

Won't that be fun?

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Balgair
The 'Digital Twin' idea. I like it. I saw it earlier on HN, and I'll repeat it
here: I wish I could just skip the middle man and use the NSA as my cloud
provider directly. Ya think they'd just let me telnet in?

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rdouble
It provides high paying jobs for high school drop outs.

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Balgair
Haha! Love that one!

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blakerson
The plot of the TV show 24 is a bit more plausible.

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Balgair
Amen

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e3pi
Popularizing cryptography, hate of state-institutions and more so their
people, growth market in constructive paranoia, enforcing boundaries and
greater respect(fear) of the individual.

What part of "best left alone" and "shearing a pig(ty Vlad)" they don't
understand?

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godgod
NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Stupid question. You might want to consider that
the government is breaking the law of the land and spying on citizens. That is
unconstitutional.

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Balgair
Well, nothing in this world is entirely bad or good. I thought, if it all
became public in a hundred years or so, we could gain insights into sociology
and whatnot. Like psychohistory could actually exist because of this data.
Also, it 'levels' the playing field quite a bit if the data is publicly
accessible; the world is not only flat, but concave in that scenario.

