On Hacker News
Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]
627
points
251
comments
4
notable voices
The 5-second version
- Public perception of surveillance as safety is often mistaken or manufactured rather than genuinely held.
- Privacy-threatening infrastructure is frequently pushed through using emotional appeals like 'think of the children' rather than democratic demand.
- Technology reveals character by showing what people do with power, especially when they impose on others without accepting reciprocal treatment.
- Even technically knowledgeable communities can support authoritarian policy tools when they align with their preferred causes.
- Developers should be skeptical of surveillance infrastructure regardless of which political cause it supposedly serves.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
Surveillance is a tool. It's neither right nor wrong, good or evil. It can be used to create safety (as it is by police forces, when authorized by judges, in compliance with democratically voted laws), or can be misused to create terror (and, as we've seen before, it never needed cellphones for that). We should guard against the misuses and create enough legal frameworks to protect individuals' privacy (and aggressively uphold those protections). Private companies already do that - if I query a…Read on HN ↗
That doesn't really answer the question. Suppose there is some peon at Microsoft who is ordered to write code for Pluton and then does it because they don't want to be fired, expecting to hide behind the Nuremberg defense. The people in your second group will naturally disapprove of this. But regardless of that, we can ask the same question of the person giving the orders. Someone in these companies initiated these programs, so are they merely fools who couldn't predict the obvious consequence…Read on HN ↗
I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and de…Read on HN ↗
> Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster. I'd argue that giving governments and corporations control over our devices has also been an unmitigiated disaster. You could say the same thing about any kind of freedom though couldn't you? Freedom is so dangerous after all. Look at all the problems it's caused. Giving up all of our freedoms would surely make the worl…Read on HN ↗