3 ms·

At this point I'd be more worried about the government giving me a heart attack in my sleep. They can't and shouldn't be trusted with this kind of power.

• logfromblammo 11y ago
  Let's be realistic here. The government isn't going to give you a heart attack in your sleep. The government is going to give millions of people heart attacks, all at the same time, at 5 pm Eastern time on a weekday. I cite the recent bonehead maneuver, wherein someone--likely backed by a foreign government--managed to access the data for every last person cleared to handle U.S. government secrets, which necessarily includes any embarrassing datum which could be used by foreign governments to apply leverage. This is Murphy's Law in action. If a catastrophe is possible, it will eventually happen. Combine with Acton's Law. Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The result suggests that, for the sake of sane risk management, government should be structured such that no person working in it (or hijacking its infrastructure) can single-handedly do more than one nuclear bomb's worth of damage. This means the fundamental principles that have to be engineered in are robustness, trustworthiness, and voluntary cooperation. Built-in backdoors are completely antithetical to all three.