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the NSA's surveillance is an unprecedented power grab. add Moore's Law to the mix, let that policy sit for 20 years, and what kind of power do they have? they c

the NSA's surveillance is an unprecedented power grab. add Moore's Law to the mix, let that policy sit for 20 years, and what kind of power do they have? they can predict everything, they can track everything, they have no oversight - what they're doing is setting themselves up to completely replace the government in 2035. hopefully, that's not deliberate. hopefully, they're just that naively convinced of their own goodness. but that's what they're doing. the NSA's unconstitutional surveillance is a total disgrace, a national shame, a total failure to uphold the Constitution. that's the GOOD news. that's what it is today. add Moore's Law and 20 years, it's going to be something much worse. (shoutout to everyone who was on Hacker News back when mentioning how Moore's Law ties into this would be worth an upvote.)

cryoshon 12y ago
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Right now it's Orwellian and sophisticated-- if they have Amazon's level of data crunching and prediction ability, they might be able to predict certain things about you, and, on average, be more right than wrong. Wait until they have 20 more years of data on you, and 20 more years of advancing the quality of their algorithms and machine intelligences. You will be owned, and your buttons will be pushed as necessary to maintain what has already been built.
- LLWM 12y ago
  And the same will be true of all the billions of people that you think are making bad decisions today.
  - EdSharkey 12y ago
    This dragnet collection and _permanent storage_ of all movement and communications data is not justifiable, though. Fundamental risk assessment fail!
    - LLWM 12y ago
      As the cost of doing so diminishes, so does the requirement for justification. These days, the only noticeable cost is psychological. IMO, sufficiently justified by "we might need it one day". Of course, 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago, that wouldn't have been true, and that's the mindset most critics are coming from. That you need a really strong reason to be doing some kind of mass data collection like this. I just don't agree with that claim. If you can do it, you'd be stupid not to.

cryoshon 12y ago

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Right now it's Orwellian and sophisticated-- if they have Amazon's level of data crunching and prediction ability, they might be able to predict certain things about you, and, on average, be more right than wrong. Wait until they have 20 more years of data on you, and 20 more years of advancing the quality of their algorithms and machine intelligences. You will be owned, and your buttons will be pushed as necessary to maintain what has already been built.

LLWM 12y ago
And the same will be true of all the billions of people that you think are making bad decisions today.
- EdSharkey 12y ago
  This dragnet collection and _permanent storage_ of all movement and communications data is not justifiable, though. Fundamental risk assessment fail!
  - LLWM 12y ago
    As the cost of doing so diminishes, so does the requirement for justification. These days, the only noticeable cost is psychological. IMO, sufficiently justified by "we might need it one day". Of course, 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago, that wouldn't have been true, and that's the mindset most critics are coming from. That you need a really strong reason to be doing some kind of mass data collection like this. I just don't agree with that claim. If you can do it, you'd be stupid not to.