251–260 of 261 posts
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The FBI doesn’t appear to do a great job at preventing white supremacist domestic terrorism, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make.
Relative to what? We have no idea how much terrorism there would be without the FBI.
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These are just isolated demands for rigor. I gave you a concrete list. You're welcome to dispute any of them on the actual facts. Until then, I think we're done here.
You gave me a press release from an organizaion that has a history of being deceptive. Why would I, or anybody, take it as a "concrete list?" The thread of discussion here is that the FBI needs to have broad survaillance capabilities to catch crime before it occurs. The list you gave has verly little support for that in that almost all of the acts in the list were not stopped due to any survaillance, but rather inves…
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But this information is already being cataloged. It's being published on a platform that explicitly catalogs it, for the public. Anyone tweeting on Twitter is doing so with the full knowledge that anything they say might get signal-boosted by someone with a high follower count and become a major public incident. It happens with extreme regularity. The idea that there is some kind of expectation of privacy here seems…
We as a collective seem to treat the government as a natural person online, but not in person. If a police officer sits down at the dinner table next to me and listens in on my conversation with friends and family, I'd be quite uncomfortable. I'd feel equally uncomfortable if they sat across the restaurant and pointed a microphone at the table to record everything. However, suddenly we treat them like normal people i…
Answering these questions are difficult because the protests were against the police, and any admission of nuance lessens the passion against injustice. With less emotional investment comes less participation. Questions: Were these protests legal or during coronavirus effectively temporarily illegal? Another question is, given a police precinct building was evacuated and set on fire during a protest, should those att…
"In the UK there are stronger hate speech laws." The UK is an odd place, legally. Stronger laws against free speech yet looser laws around freedom of the press to do normally illegal things. It's a surveillance state with cameras on every street corner, yet a big advocate for protecting private data online. A nation of paradoxes.
This is a stretch but recall in 1984 where the ministry's slogans were all the direct opposite to what they really did, and how details about the past were always chopped and changed so no one could keep track.
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I think you're barking up the wrong tree here. A cursory glance over my comments would show that I don't have a desire for big government. I think we should immediately abolish the IRS, ATF, DEA, and NSA
My comment was not directed at you, but more broadly what I read on HN. There is a very strong anti-gov't stance when it comes to privacy and surveillance, but a very strong pro-government stance when it comes to solving issues like healthcare, capitalism, R&D, housing, food, etc. I don't see how those two can jive.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by anti gov't though, I just mean having laws and mechanisms that protect privacy
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Why is this comment downvoted?
Maybe because HN is full of people that work for similar privacy-destroying tech companies. I find that people on this board get a bit touchy when you talk about FAANG companies doing immoral things. (I know this isn't a FAANG company but its affect is in the same vein).
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We as a collective seem to treat the government as a natural person online, but not in person. If a police officer sits down at the dinner table next to me and listens in on my conversation with friends and family, I'd be quite uncomfortable. I'd feel equally uncomfortable if they sat across the restaurant and pointed a microphone at the table to record everything. However, suddenly we treat them like normal people i…
Twitter is not a dinner table though. Twitter is a public square. I think you could make a reasonable case for Facebook being dinner-table like. But Twitter has privacy settings. You can protect your tweets if you want to. If the police were breaking into protected accounts, I would agree with you. But Twitter seems about as public as it gets.
Innocent people should not be surveilled ruthlessly on the off chance that every now and again we catch one evil person. In my mind, it's like the TSA invading everyone's privacy without ever catching a single terrorist. It's a waste of resources, on top of being a disgusting behavior.
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Um. Yes I can. It's in the same vein as letting a few guilty people go free to ensure that less innocent people get sent to prison. I'd rather still have Matin Luther King around than to have whatever the FBI claims to have disrupted.
The FBI didn't kill MLK, though. If you eliminated the FBI, you woulnd't get MLK back. But you would have a few hundred more serious terror attacks in the US history, probably a decent number of them against minorities.
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Twitter is not a dinner table though. Twitter is a public square. I think you could make a reasonable case for Facebook being dinner-table like. But Twitter has privacy settings. You can protect your tweets if you want to. If the police were breaking into protected accounts, I would agree with you. But Twitter seems about as public as it gets.
Imagine every person in a public square has a police officer following closely behind them with a microphone in one hand a video camera in the other. And we're not even touching on the 3-letter-agency relationships with tech companies which almost assuredly gives them access, even to 'private' profiles. Innocent people should not be surveilled ruthlessly on the off chance that every now and again we catch one evil pe…
On the other hand, there are tons of cameras in public spaces too. So, even though people have had a built-in expectation of ephemerality, that's already been violated for quite a while now.
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Imagine every person in a public square has a police officer following closely behind them with a microphone in one hand a video camera in the other. And we're not even touching on the 3-letter-agency relationships with tech companies which almost assuredly gives them access, even to 'private' profiles. Innocent people should not be surveilled ruthlessly on the off chance that every now and again we catch one evil pe…
The difference is that in a physical public square, you have a built-in expectation of ephemerality. Everyone expects that their behavior in some random physical space is not going to persist forever. Twitter, on the other hand, is explicitly build with the expectation of what you tweet persisting forever. On the other hand, there are tons of cameras in public spaces too. So, even though people have had a built-in ex…
That said, in my view, surveillance against the average person has got to go.