| ▲ | mirzap 3 days ago |
| We like to think surveillance is something you can turn on for one problem and turn off afterward. In practice, that never happens. Once the machinery is in place, it stays and looks for new work. Tools justified today by "illegal immigration" won’t stop there. They drift into credit scoring, health insurance pricing, hiring and firing decisions, school admissions, housing access, travel permissions, banking, welfare eligibility, and even which online accounts are allowed to exist. Not because anyone set out to build a dystopia, but because systems, once built, naturally expand to whatever can be measured and enforced. As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back. |
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| ▲ | stevenjgarner 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| There is a gradual chilling effect of self-censorship to mass surveillance and loss of anonymity. When you know you are being watched, you change your behavior. You don't visit the "wrong" protest, you don't meet with the "controversial" whistleblower, and you don't seek out the "unpopular" doctor. Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism where citizens police their own movements to avoid falling into a "high-risk" algorithm, even if they've done nothing illegal. At its extreme, such societies end up with no outliers, no more of "the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels." (Steve Jobs). Safety and compliance at all cost. The peer-reviewed consensus of this in psychology describes a three-step internal process of Anticipatory Anxiety, Risk Aversion and Self-Censorship [1]. The Conforming Effect (Conformity Theory) has been measured in studies such as those by Jonathon Penney (2016/2021), where use of Wikipedia data and search traffic shows a statistical drop in "sensitive" searches (e.g., about "terrorism," "human rights," or "health") immediately following news of government surveillance. [2] [1] Surveillance as a Socio-Technical System: Behavioral Impacts and Self-Regulation in Monitored Environments, https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/13/7/614 [2] Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use, https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1127413?v=pdf |
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| ▲ | mirzap 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Yup, I agree. And this is why I think mass surveillance isn’t just another technology to regulate. The chilling effect isn’t misuse; it’s the default: continuous, opaque observation changes behavior by itself. Because it’s centralized and unavoidable, people self-censor and conform; you don’t need arrests once everyone assumes they’re being scored. We don’t yet have long-run examples of fully algorithmic surveillance societies, so the outcome isn’t certain. But if these dynamics scale, the risk is trading experimentation for legibility. Problems get hidden, metrics look clean, and warning signals vanish. When real stress hits, responses are late and blunt - overcorrection, cascading failures, accelerated exit. Stability holds until it doesn’t. | | |
| ▲ | stevenjgarner 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think especially heinous is the use of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Proof technologies where a centralized attestation authority (e.g. government agency) verifies compliance, and the verifier (e.g. business needing to prove compliance) relies on the ZK cryptographic proof of compliance without revealing the individual. This revocable privacy can unmask the real identity in the case of asserted "suspicious" activity. This is the current direction of mainstream technology, and all it serves to accomplish is a normalization of loss of privacy and anonymity. | | |
| ▲ | heavyset_go 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Tech-minded folk will clap like trained seals, as second-option bias takes over, when someone big on the fediverse suggests implementing ZKP algorithms to comply with identity attestation laws. It's sad, but not surprising, to see. We'll design the most secure systems with the new shiny just to confirm whether the government believes you should be able post on Reddit or not. | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | potato3732842 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism And every step of the way the enablers will defend it on the grounds of "well you still technically can do the thing if you're willing to put up with some absurd risks or jump through some insane and impractical hoops specifically designed to be non-starters for many/most." |
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| ▲ | greenavocado 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This specific point is addressed in a famous 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski. Specifically paragraphs: 127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. ... 128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. ... 129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. ... https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab... |
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| ▲ | ikamm 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Who ever said facial recognition wasn't going to threaten freedom? None of those points feel at all relevant or substantive to the topic of discussion | | | |
| ▲ | cindyllm 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | idiotsecant 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Melodramatic slop from the original edgy school shooter. There are plenty of technologies that increase freedom. For example, I am substantially more free to not die of smallpox, which would have been quite limiting to my options. | | |
| ▲ | dleary 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Melodramatic slop from the original edgy school shooter. This is a very arrogant, judgemental, dismissive comment that adds nothing to the conversation.
It is also a textbook example of ad hominem. “Why are you paying attention to what that guy said?” > There are plenty of technologies that increase freedom. […For example. Smallpox vaccine…] If you think that Kacynski or OP were talking about all technologies then you lack reading comprehension. Since they’re not making the assertion about all technologies, holding up a specific technology as being good does not address the point that was being made. > from the original edgy school shooter. Regardless of your views on Kacynski, he is a philosopher of note. His work is regularly quoted and referred to 30 years later. As opposed to, say, Bin Laden’s manifesto. > Melodramatic slop It’s ironic that you chose this phrasing, when “slop” has come to mean “low effort, low quality content pushed out without much thought”. How humiliating for you, to put your foot in the mouth in front of everyone in this distinguished forum. This isn’t Digg, or even Reddit. Put some thought into what you write. | | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | First: Much of your post is against site guidelines. You should perhaps re-read them. Second: My opinion of Kaczynski is colored by having met one of his bombing victims, both before and after. More generally, he is philosophizing about what is good for society. That is, he's making claims about what is moral. But his actions show that his moral compass is hopelessly skewed. So why am I going to take his judgment on moral questions? I'm not. As a philosopher on moral questions, his actions destroy his credibility. His ideas may sound credible. If that's where they led him, though, no, I don't want to start down the road of his ideas. | |
| ▲ | josefresco 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >How humiliating for you, to put your foot in the mouth in front of everyone in this distinguished forum. This isn’t Digg, or even Reddit. Put some thought into what you write. This tone is not welcome on Hacker News. Please read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | |
| ▲ | simianparrot 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think ad hominems are fine when the lunatic in question mail bombs and injures/murders innocent people. Like what the eff are you talking about!? | | |
| ▲ | greenavocado 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is the justification for the killings (Paragraph 96) in case you are curious: 96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right; it is very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people. | | |
| ▲ | simianparrot 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Given how many impactful books I've read by both small and large authors, even before the age of the internet, I'd say this murderous fuckwit was simply justifying murder. This does not justify murder. Had his moronic ramblings been worth the paper it was printed on, the murders would not be necessary to spread it. | |
| ▲ | goatlover 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | There was no justification for mailing pipe bombs to kill and maim people. That's batshit crazy and has no place in society. |
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| ▲ | pepperball 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | idiotsecant 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm almost as interested in debating this as I would be debating the livejournal girls who worshipped manson. It's the same thing. The guy was a gutless stinking murderer who was so afraid of debating his ideas on the merits that he spent his life shitting himself in a shack tying barbwire across bike trails to decapitate kids he didn't like and mailing innocent people instruments of death, torture, and terror. He was one of the more worthless and useless people to live in recent memory, and that's quite a list. | | |
| ▲ | fruitworks 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | What would debating the ideas do? You either get it or you don't. There is a large sum of people who are categoricially indifferent to the idea of debate. They just support the status quo blindly, no matter what. For example, you haven't even read the first sentence of the relevant material and you are already in a soylent-driven tizzy making lists of synonyms and debating whether we should even be allowed to debate. |
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| ▲ | ikamm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nothing about this forum is distinguished. Are you being serious? It's just reddit for tech nerds with the same problems | | |
| ▲ | greenavocado 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The moderation team makes all the difference in the world. | | |
| ▲ | ikamm 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The moderation team makes no difference on how people here interact with each other and the posts. | | |
| ▲ | greenavocado 2 days ago | parent [-] | | It absolutely does | | |
| ▲ | phantasmish 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Any troll or shitposter who can't operate extremely effectively on HN isn't very good at it. The site basically has a house style for those activities, and you can go crazy insulting and stirring people up all day long and not get moderated for it, as long as you stick to the approved style. Bonus: if you're not just half-competent, but actually good, you can probably get people calling you out on your behavior moderated, if they don't beat around the bush about it in just the right ways! That's why the majority of posts on here are trolling and shitposting, or fallout thereof. If you stay under the moderation radar, trolling this place is like shooting fish in a barrel, even easier than most sites (no, I've not done it, but it's very obviously most of what goes on here). If the site cared about this, it'd have ignore-lists. | |
| ▲ | ikamm 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Right that's why everyone here still acts like redditors that don't read headlines, downvote without explanation, have massively long threads arguing without listening to each other, spam for self promotion... | | |
| ▲ | otterley 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | |
| ▲ | ikamm 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say it was turning into reddit, I said they suffer from the same problems | | |
| ▲ | otterley 2 days ago | parent [-] | | That sounds like a distinction without a difference. The point of the guidelines isn’t about the specific words chosen; it’s about making meta-complaints about HN itself. |
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| ▲ | thrance 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't think this is a useful framework for understanding these issues. What you are saying can, in essense, boil down to "any law enforcement is bad". ICE and its inhumane practices are just symptoms of an increasingly authoritarian administration that receives sufficient mandate from the population to push for increasingly authoritarian practices. The tools are just that, tools. The situation will keep getting worse until the population gets sick of it enough to push the wannabe autocrats out of power (and not replace them by other wannabe autocrats), and have the new administration dismantle these tools. Easier said than done, I know. |
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| ▲ | SauciestGNU 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I think we're finally seeing the culture that's been present in law enforcement forever playing out to its logical end. The solution is pretty close to "all law enforcement is bad". We're seeing that the people most prone to violence and abuse seek out positions of power in law enforcement. Basically anyone who wants to be a cop should not be allowed to be a cop. We can blame autocrats while also blaming the complicit tools. In Grand Rapids, Michigan yesterday the local police arrested the organizer of a protest against the invasion of Venezuela while she was on camera interviewing with the local news for "obstructing a roadway" (marching in a lane with other lanes open to traffic) and "disobeying a lawful command". When we have local beat cops colluding with national secret police and suppressing dissent, we have a very serious problem and are running out of options very quickly. | | |
| ▲ | thrance 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I usually fall in the "all law enforcement is bad" part of the population too. But I don't think law enforcement in any society has ever not attracted these type of people you describe. I believe the "culture that's been present in law enforcement forever" you describe is completely unchanged. To me, the more interesting question would be: why is law enforcement getting away with so much as of late? And the answer ties back to the current administration and the signicant part of the population behind them. If so many americans weren't cheering on ICE and cie., none of this would fly and it would blow over almost immediately. You get authoritarianism when authoritarian thinking wins. Authoritarian thinking wins when complex socio-political and socio-economical reasons I don't care to go into today. The main thing I'm trying to say here, I guess, is that I reject the slippery slope fallacy ("get age verification today, get 1984 tomorrow"). If you want to fight authoritarian practices, find their source and fight that instead (the "how" is left as an exercise to the reader). |
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| ▲ | gorgoiler 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That first sentence of yours really struck a chord with me. I tried to think of other examples: Cars — essential for leveraging time to travel longer distances and carrying multiple passengers and heavy loads; ens up being used by one person to drive three minutes to get coffee. Guns — to quickly précis a … complex topic: good guys, but also bad guys. Electricity — power generation goes up decade after decade, but so too does consumption with wasteful consumption going hand in hand with productive consumption. As you might be able to tell, I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation. |
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| ▲ | mirzap 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think those examples miss an important distinction. Cars, guns, and electricity are consumer technologies. They’re widely distributed, regulated, and constrained by market forces and law. Individuals can choose how to use them, and misuse is at least partially visible and contestable. Surveillance is different. It’s inherently centralized and asymmetrical. By design, it gives one side - the state or large institutions - persistent visibility into everyone else, with little reciprocity. You can regulate how it’s used on paper, but the power imbalance remains. It’s closer to nuclear technology than to cars or electricity. I can’t build a nuclear weapon or possess fissile material, not because it’s inefficient, but because some technologies are considered too dangerous to be broadly accessible. Mass surveillance belongs in that category. Once it exists, citizens don’t get to opt out, and meaningful oversight tends to lag far behind capability. Licensing works when the technology is decentralized. With surveillance, the risk isn’t misuse at the edges - it’s concentration at the center. | |
| ▲ | haritha-j 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | clothing i think is a big one. Once the poster-child of industrialisation, now results in millions of tons being thrown away each other at a massive environmental cost. | |
| ▲ | rssoconnor 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation. In the golden age of the 90's we were able to ban CFCs, but I'm skeptical we could do that today. We no longer have that political ability, and I doubt we will get it back any time soon. |
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| ▲ | potato3732842 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Your comment should offend far more on HN than it will. Heck, drop into any comment section about transportation infrastructure or environmental policy (or a few years ago public health policy as well) and there's all sorts of evil mustache twirling going on about how to use basically the same sort of technologies to deploy state violence in pursuit of some goal and they are either unable or unwilling to think a few steps ahead see that what they're advocating for will over time if not quickly lead to dark places as policy and priorities change incrementally. As I'm concerned the people who are happy to peddle this stuff when it suits them are just as complicit as the people who are cheering for it right now when it's being used for "obviously bad" things. >As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back. This quote is like a lightening rod for exactly the kind of people I'm talking about. |
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| ▲ | renewiltord 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Indeed, that's true. Payment for autism, originally intended for sick children, now a Somali scam. Veteran's disability, originally a means to allow people who were injured while serving the country, now a way for a desk-jockey to receive an annual stipend. Any mechanism, once built, seeks to expand its scope. Until it delivers mail ;) |
