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Comment by sievebrain | Hacker News Reader

The UK has never had to deal with a truly oppressive government, at least not within anything like living memory.

There's also the problem that nobody outside of the software engineering community really understands what the tech can do, or what GCHQ is capable of. My mother's primary comment on the whole thing was, "well we're much too boring to spy on" and that's a sentiment you see a lot. It reflects a misunderstanding of how cheap it is to create robotic law enforcement on top of the 5-eyes infrastructure.

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In fact all non-establishment groups - CND, anti-nuclear power protesters, anti-globalisation protesters, trade unions, animal rights activists, UK's own Occupy movement, anarchists, even worthy intellectual left-leaning blogs, and so on - were and are routinely infiltrated and manipulated.

There's nominal press freedom, in that it's possible to call politicians rude names.

But if your movement or leaders become powerful enough to have a hope of influencing policy and to challenge establishment cash flows and power relationships, expect some blow back.

Fortunately the non-establishment groups sometimes infiltrate and manipulate the establishment too [1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/17/jeremy-corby...

Highly unlikely this happens very often at all. Counter-intelligence by the FBI (the primary intel agency dealling with domestic political organizations) is very thorough. It would take an extremely skilled person to get through their interviews, background checks, mandatory polygraph tests, etc.

The FBI are the best trained people in the world at eliciting information from people unwillingly/unknowingly - which is enough of a barrier on it's own.

> There's also the problem that nobody outside of the software engineering community really understands what the tech can do (...)

I think that's the main problem.

The IPB is all about allowing GCHQ and other government agencies to collect all the data they want, but we shouldn't be worried because there will be "safeguards" against the data being accessed arbitrarily.

Those of us who are more technically minded realize that's a false distinction, but most don't.

> "well we're much too boring to spy on"

Have you asked her why her government feels that it is necessary to spy on her if she is so boring?

I think the narrative is that the government doesn't spy on her. They also would probably say that they take in the fire hose and only access the communications of the bad guys™

The Snowden story was vast and limited to the Guardian. In the UK the other media outlets didn't cover it at all, or actively attempted to undermine the reporting (e.g. with stories planted by the British government that were carefully worded to sound like they were from Snowden even if they weren't).

The vast majority of people have not read any of the Snowden leaks and have no idea what they contained beyond "the government spies a lot". So the concept that they might be targeted themselves is just unimaginable to them.

Tell them then!

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