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I don’t think we have seen anything like this in history. In past it was different, because your possibilities for collecting and processing information were mu
by jpalomaki 8y ago
I don’t think we have seen anything like this in history. In past it was different, because your possibilities for collecting and processing information were much more limited. Also the security apparatus had to employ huge number of people, making it harder to control and less reliable.
- evrydayhustling 8y agoAgree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities, but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied equipment that made it possible for WW2 Germany (did I dodge Godwin's law?) to collate evidence of ethnicity at a scale not known before, with disastrous results [1]. I think that to some, surveillance often looks like a way to get the efficiency of distributed decision making while keeping central control (which has definitely been the philosophy behind China's economic experiments of the past 30y). But historically, it has arced towards enforcing centralized organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the tech involved - and that pattern has proven both bad for a population and self-defeating for regimes. [1] http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html
- jdjdhdhhhdshhs 8y agoToo bad about that New York Tims link, though.
- bigmonads 8y agoDefinitely. Remember when the Snowden documents disclosed the Utah facilities keeping ~5 years of every communication record of every person, processed into the most actionable metadata, and the related capabilities to search and correlate the content, interrelationships, and signals implicit across those communications? This is something that could only be targeted decades ago. Now its cost-admissible to run at scale - and to do so adaptively to improve the methods.
- viivaux 8y agoThere was a time when your comments here would be discussed and generally agreed with instead of blindly downvoted and removed. Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time HN had a good discussion about US censorship and surveillance. Weird.
- dang 8y agoWould you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? They only lower the quality of this site even further.
- viivaux 8y agoThere was no legitimate reason to remove this man's comments. He provided a legitimate perspective, and wasn't flaming anyone or being rude. Defending him was your job, not mine.
- dang 8y agoDefending someone is no reason to break the site guidelines. If you keep doing that, we will ban you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19187633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19187633 was particularly unacceptable.
- alexandercrohde 8y agoWell as somebody who is very anti US-monitoring, let me help you understand: Your comments are so unproductive (i.e. emotional/irrelevant/us-vs-them) that they actually undermine the cause you say you're concerned about. You give the rest of us a bad name.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- viivaux 8y agoOh cool, glad to hear it! I certainly don't hear the standpoint here much. Maybe you could show me how to make a comment that's actually productive, maybe you have examples of your own? I don't even know if you can read this, as it looks as if my comment was entirely deleted. Anyway I sure fucking love getting patronised, super cool way to keep "the cause" alive, "tech dude".