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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization.

In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today's technology (the Gestapo or the Stasi would have done anything for this kind of power), it is very well possible that a revolution might simply be made impossible or crushed before it even begins, as you can simply single out and eliminate potential "leaders" based on AI analysis of what people do... and what people think, as they post it on Twitter, Facebook or their own "private" cloud space.

In addition, the future of AI is already showing its first signs - and governments around the world have not shown any interest in planning for the inevitable millions that will lose their jobs or for the social unrest caused by this. Quite to the contrary: governments and right-wing parties are "looking back in time" and promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" and snatching up the votes of the Frustrated Old White Men - and are very successful at this.

Scary indeed.

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one lesson can be drawn from Solzhenitsyn'a Gulag Archipelago. he talks about how the number of people to be dealt with vastly outnumbers the police state's employees.

Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 people to be liquidated take out one secret police guy, then the civilian population as a whole will be safe. This assumes the army is distracted with a war somewhere, which seems likely to me.

> The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit.

I'm sorry, it's hard not to be a little snarky here. Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. I don't like guns, but they represent a failsafe that we hopefully never have to use.

> the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression.

That is an appeal to authority. Those guys were not handed down the word of god from heaven. They wrote down what they thought was best at the time. They were not infallible (see the amendments), what they wrote down was not unambiguous (or the supreme court wouldn't be necessary), and society and technology has changed in the intervening 200+ years. Do you think they would come up with exactly the same text if they were alive today, with the benefit of hindsight?

> Those guys were not handed down the word of god from heaven.

No, they wrote down rules to prevent the forms of oppression and protect the means of opposition that they knew from experience.

Has society changed so much in 200 years that armed opposition to the government has become impossible? The US govs failure to control Afghanistan would argue: no.

> Has society changed so much in 200 years that armed opposition to the government has become impossible? The US govs failure to control Afghanistan would argue: no.

As your Afghanistan example illustrates, you don't need a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution, nor 101 guns per 100 inhabitants as in the US. Afghanistan has an estimated 4.6 guns per 100 inhabitants. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...

> you don't need a right to bear arms enshrined in the constitution, nor 101 guns per 100 inhabitants as in the US

You need armed people, however you get them.

> Do you think they would come up with exactly the same text if they were alive today, with the benefit of hindsight?

With respect to property rights and a citizen's right to arms, yep pretty close.

> That is an appeal to authority.

Isn't that kind of required if we are to live under rule of law? There must be an end-all authority, and in this land it tends to be the constitution and it's assorted related documents.

I have no problem with that appeal to authority. It may be the sole legitimate time to use it.

The rules were written down and hard to change precisely because of threads like this. If parts need to be updated, there is a mechanism to do so. Therefore, appealing to the Constitution as the ultimate authority of the land sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Perfect? Of course not. But the founding fathers certainly were prescient about the whole "slippery slope" slow erosion of rights - the entire last 100 years (at least) has been a story of the slow erosion of personal liberty. I imagine that would have gone much faster without such hard to change "final rules" of the land.

> Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression.

The Articles of Confederation were the original rules of the country.

The base Constitution which replaced them as the rules for the country also didn't include anything about that.

The package of 12 amendments to the Constitution formally proposed after the Constitution was ratified did mention it, but only the third through twelfth of those were ratified fairly quickly by the states. So, it wasn't part of the original rules or the original replacement, and the drafters of the package known as the Bill of Rights put it fourth behind the right to minimal levels of representation in Congress, the right to a Congress without the power to raise its own salary between elections, and freedom of expression, not second behind freedom of expression.

So, aside from being a fallacious appeal to authority, your argument is grounded in falsehoods.

In George Mason's original onjections to the Constitution, from which the Bill of Rights was drawn, the right to bear arms was seventeenth!

17. That the People have a Right to keep and to bear Arms; that a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free State; that Standing Armies in Time of Peace are dangerous to Liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided as far as the Circumstances and Protection of the Community will admit; and that in all Cases, the military should be under strict Subordination to, and governed by the Civil Power.

That is a fascinating quote which I don't think I've seen before. Although I appreciate the desire, on the part of the authors of the Bill of Rights, to boil each amendment down to its essence, in this case I wish they had kept more of the original context. The vision presented in this statement -- of "a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to arms" -- is very different from what we've wound up with. There's nothing resembling a trained militia organized by the states, nor do most gun owners seem to feel any duty to engage in such organized training if it existed (of course, many do engage in individual training, but not all). The exceptions are private right-wing militias whose presence probably doesn't contribute to the overall security of the community, and, of course, organized crime, which is destructive to that security. And then on the other hand, we do have a standing army, indeed an entire military-industrial complex, which is evidently necessary, at least to some extent, in this modern world with its machines of war that were unimaginable to the Framers. The one part of this article that has worked out more-or-less as Mason envisioned is the last clause: the military has indeed remained under civilian control.

To me, all this adds to the difficulty faced by those who want to disregard the opening clause of the Second Amendment ("A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, ..."). It's all about collective self-defense; there's nothing here about individual self-defense. While I agree that individuals have a right to defend themselves when necessary, I believe that defending citizens from one another is primarily the responsibility of the State; only when the State is clearly failing in this duty do citizens have the right to take that defense upon themselves. Allowing individuals to arm themselves in the absence of such necessity — for sporting purposes, for example — is a choice a community might make, but is not a right.

And what you are entirely missing in the philosphical basis for the constitution is the principle that we have natural rights that are independent of any government and that government is established in order to protect those rights, and that government cannot and does not grant those rights, which was the original argument about what we call the bill of rights. That by listing what rights the government was specifically not able to revoke (negative rights) the government would then think anything not listed would be ok for them to control. Which is not the case!

In this case, the right to self defense is a natural right, what Locke called the first natural right, and the right to bear arms is simply an extension of that right.

So you are the one ignoring the context of the argument and cherry picking. You are the one basing your argument on falsehoods and fallacies.

Also, I consider the Declaration of Independence the real "original rules" (considery myself a declarationist), from which the constitution had authority to be made, so while the constitution did take heavily from the articles, it's not correct to say they are the original rules.

The right to bear arms should never go away, and the people who call for it to haven't experienced enough of the world to know why it's timeless as an extension of the natural right to self defense. So you people arguing about what place the right to bear arms came in at is just a foolish exercise in self-masturbation that has no bearing on the issue at hand. Parent poster was basically just saying "it's damn important" and instead of addressing the meat of the argument it's turned into "no it was $placenumber"...

The real problem is most Americans these days aren't taught these basic principles because of a lack or corruption of civics in education.

For example, if you don't know what the difference is between negative rights and positive rights, then you didn't have a good civics education.

I'm so tired of hearing people shit on the constitution and it's principles just because they think the current implimentation is imperfect, usually coupled with logically fallacious retorts about how it was written by slaveholding white property owners as if that negates all the real hard work that went into it. Madison studied just about every government known to man in preperation, including the native american systems of government.

The scary thing is people don't realize how slippery the slopes are they clamor for.

Where were they “shitting” on the constitution? The original post was trying to make the point that the right to bear arms was important to many of the founders because it was the second ammendment to the constitution. They are the ones that made the case that the ordinal number of the ammendment was important. The commenters responding are just taking issue with their reasoning. Really, your issue should be with the person that agrees with you but uses the fact that it’s the second ammendment (as opposed to the third or the forth) as evidence for the point you agree with.

> And what you are entirely missing in the philosphical basis for the constitution is the principle that we have natural rights that are independent of any government and that government is established in order to protect those rights,

That is among the purposes of government in the view of the “philosophical basis of the Constitution”, but not it's sole purpose that stands alone. Now, on the one hand, I really deeply understand that and the balancing of multiple interests that went into the Constitution because I have a degree in Political Science that was focussed predominantly on the theory and practice of government in the United States, but on the other hand I would probably know it without that because the first sentence of the Constitution, while not going into detail about the whole conflicting set of concerns that led to the drafting of the Constitution, lists six purposes, including a different phrasing of the purpose you identify (as the last of the six.)

> I'm so tired of hearing people shit on the constitution and it's principles

And I'm sick of people lying about its content, it's principles, and its role in American history to advance political agendas, and I'm sick of people treating it like holy writ, too.

> Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 people to be liquidated take out one secret police guy, then the civilian population as a whole will be safe.

That argument only works if it were an all-out battle between the population as a whole on one side and the secret police on the other. That is not how authoritarianism works. They start by isolating minorities, and target individuals one by one. In every single 'battle' the secret police outnumbers their opponents. Any resistance is used to justify the use of more force.

Imagine what would happen if 'illegal' immigrants (which number in the millions) that are being deported by ICE (about 20,000 employees [1]) start fighting back with guns. How do you think Fox News would react? Or public opinion?

Or just look at police brutality against minorities in the US. Do you think that the use of more guns by minorities is likely to lessen police brutality, or exacerbate it?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...

More than half of all people killed by police are white.

There's a lot of intersection between class and race when it comes to police violence, and I don't think the phrase "minorities" is sufficient in discussing the issue.

In the reports I've read, white people were the largest group, but weren't more than half. Where did you get your data?

I'm not sure which point you are trying to address, but where did you get your data?

According to the data collected by the Washington Post [1], in each of the years since 2015, less than half of the victims (excluding 2018 the percentage varied between 49.9% and 46.3%) of fatal police shootings have been white.

There is some uncertainty because for some cases the race is unknown. That data also only deals with shootings, so it is possible that if you count all killings the data is different. Can you share your data source?

[1] https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings

I got my data from The Guardian [1]. Their data only covers 2015 and 2016 but appears to be more comprehensive for those years, listing 1146 killings in 2015 and 1093 killings in 2016, vs 995 and 963 in the Post data, perhaps simply because they list all killings rather than only shootings.

They list enough "white" victims that more than half were white even including victims of unknown race. But this is a minor point. It's very close to 50% in either source so perhaps we should simply say "half of all people killed by police are white".

1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...

Even if half, it's still true that driving while black is a thing with police.

Just 12% of the US population is black.

To quote madam secretary, "at this point, what difference does it make".

People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public.

It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities, or will they just get used to it and accept it?

We'll have to see. Some technologists, libertarians and interestingly an intersection of right wing and left wing ideologies will oppose this for different reasons, but in the end, I think they will be a minority in total.

> The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public.

Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state.

The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that their business model). Given the massive amounts of money involved, I have no doubt who will win that fight.

But that's only because at the moment they align with your PoV. An alternate example might be Tencent, Baidu & others.

Anything Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook store on you is available to the government. If they want to get hold of it to get something to arrest you with, all they have to do is ask. While they may push back on some requests, there's actually very little they can do with FISA/NSA requests, they're almost always complied with.

I've heard them grumble about mass surveillance laws, but I haven't heard about them openly defying them, or using any of their substantial lobbying muscle in Washington against them. If they really cared, they could encrypt a lot of communications data, and simply not store things like real names, GPS co-ordinates and IP addresses as soon as they're not necessary to provide a service. The data wouldn't be as profitable, though.

If it makes you feel any safer, your license plate data is already being sold to private companies who want to build a file on you for profit.

From the EFF[1]:

> Vigilant Solutions' subsidiary Digital Recognition Network, along with MVTrac, are the two main companies hiring contractors to collect ALPR data across the country. The companies then share the data not just with law enforcement but also with auto recovery (aka "repo") companies, banks, credit reporting agencies, and insurance companies. Data collected by private entities does not have retention limits and is not subject to sunshine laws, or any of the other safeguards that are sometimes found in the government sector.

[1]: https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...

The difference is that, the government has to ask for the data, they can't just casually sift through the universe.

(I'm assuming that FISA courts, at the very least, won't agree to a warrant for "all of your data on everyone forever")

> "all of your data on everyone forever"

As far as we know (which is as little as possible), they can get all the data on you as an individual, if you’re on a data retention list. This is outside of data you generate happening to hit certain search terms

I qualify for such a list; I was/am a subscriber to The Linux Journal, an ‘extremeist publication’ according to the NSA, at least at the time of the Snowden leaks.

Am I still? It’s illegal for me to know. But it’s reasonable to assume that the maximalist approach to data collection is shared by the government and Google et al quite happily.

You trust a non-government organization more than you trust the state?

Why? As detailed in this article, the government doesn't need to collect the data -- they just buy it from these private companies and get it anyways.

At that point, there's no difference whatsoever. They have the data, it doesn't matter who they got it from.

The license plate cameras are actually a special case.

If you don't like most types of surveillance there are a lot of countermeasures a concerned party can use. Run your own servers, use encryption, etc.

The problem with license plates is that the equivalent thing is to obscure your license plate, which is prohibited by law. So it's not just that the government is collecting publicly available information, it's that you're prohibited by law from not making the information public. Which is a different kind of thing that deserves to be treated differently.

Obscuring license plate might be prohibited by law, but so far I been pulled over twice for not having license plate AT ALL. Twice got ticket to show up at court, twice case was dismissed because cop did not show up.

I don't think there is law for not having a license plate. License plate are only required in case you commit a crime or break the law using your vehicle so identifying you is required. I was ready to argue in the court that I should be presumed innocent when it comes to driving my car, just like walking on the street I m presumed innocent and do not have to have my state ID plastered to my forehead, in case. I'm currently awaiting to be pulled over for the third time.

> I been pulled over twice for not having license plate AT ALL

Where did this happen? I see tons of cars without plates in California and Oregon. When I was living in New York I saw zero cars without license plates. I can't imagine one is going to get too far without plates in the tri-state.

Not tri-state. Sorry doesn't want to reveal my location but USA indeed.

It's well within the rights of a state to regulate the vehicles that operate on its roads. Those regulations may (and do) include having a visible license plate with up to date registration stickers.

You are free to drive unregistered vehicles on private land.

Out here they make you come in twice if you're going to fight a ticket. The second time is so they can schedule the cop, and they come in on every fought ticket.

You are welcome not to drive on public roads. Driving is a privilege that you have to take on a wealth of regulations to enjoy.

> You are welcome not to drive on public roads. Driving is a privilege that you have to take on a wealth of regulations to enjoy.

That is just a canned argument applied generically in favor of any citizen-hostile rule that touches cars.

And it's completely inane. The government has created places without access to meaningful mass transit and outside of walking distance to necessities like grocery stores or, for that matter, government buildings, or any piece of land zoned for anything but other private homes. Saying "driving is a privilege" is like saying to those people "leaving your house whatsoever is a privilege". No it isn't.

With companies you can sue them. You can find them, break them up, throw them in jail. With the government, not so much.

I'm playing around with a thought experiment in my head and would like your opinions. Considering this topic in comparison to getting a warrant for a criminal's cell phone location. Here's some considerations:

1. What is the status of an illegal immigrant who might get queried? There's two categories of illegal aliens. The first is unlawful entry (people hopping the border), this is a crime. Then there's unlawful presence, or outstaying your visa, this is a civil infraction. If ICE knows enough about this person to specifically query this database for them, surely there must be a bench warrant or something? I genuinely don't know this.

2. Unlike the cell phone location warrant, it appears this will not require a warrant. This to me is THE problem. If they were required to get a separate warrant for every query, then I would likely not have much concern.

3. ICE is not creating a database itself, but purchasing the ability to query commercially available data. This distinction possibly matters legally. Does it matter ethically?

> but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization.

Yes? I would say this is a very strong statement which would be hard to put into actual numbers.

However i highly doubt that a huge country riddled with historic issues like the U.S. could beat a fast growing country like South Korea in technical advantage.

I don’t understand, Europe has national ID laws I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU (you need cause but it’s not verified in most cases it would land you in trouble if it’s abused tho), and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this.

> and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries yet no one here yells Stasi about this.

A huge chunk of Europe doesn't use driving as their primary means of transportation.

I'd love to see you break out the stats on that, country by country, and support it.

There are 300 million cars in Europe. France as one example, has about one passenger car per adult between the ages of 18-65. The high prevalence of diesel autos in Paris, is why the city started to look like Beijing not so long ago due to pollution.

So exactly how big is a huge chunk?

This should visually help put how vehicle dependent the US is in context a bit. That's just Texas overlayed on France.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/fran...

I'm not sure what is this supposed to mean. Yeah the US are huge and sparsely populated. The EU has almost 200 million bigger population.

>Yeah the US are huge and sparsely populated.

Mostly you just answered the question. The primary factor is that the US just simply doesn't have the same public transportation infrastructure the EU has, not even close. I could travel just about anywhere in the EU without ever getting in a car... that's impossible in the US.

It's easier to build a train network in a sparsely populated space.

We are't talking about hypotheticals, we are talking about what is current, now. You are moving the goal posts...

Are those alternative modes of transportation subject to tracking? E.g., electronic transit tickets or the like?

In London and Amsterdam you have the equivalent to the Bay Area's Clipper card with can be tracked. In Paris and surrounding areas you use paper tickets with a magnetic strip that has a given amount of trips (1/10/etc.). There the only tracking you can do is on aggregate, without ways to deanonymize people other than facial recognition on CCTV feeds and your phone's wireless signals.

In Amsterdam you can buy anonymous tickets as well (for 1h or 1-7 days). Just go to a corner shop like Primera and pay in cash. The same as been true in every city I've been to in Europe.

In general, it would be very hard to do away with anonymous tickets. There are always many citizens who only use it occasionally (but when they need it, they often can't wait for a personalized card to arrive), plus tourists.

> and automated license plate tracking is pretty darn common across all EU countries

No it's not. It may be legal in some countries, yes, for example the Italians are doing it for speed-tracking in certain highways, but the data is not shared between the countries, aggregated to form movement profiles or stored longer than required.

With ICE one can be sure that: a) nothing ever gets deleted b) it WILL get data-mined c) it WILL be abused.

> I can fill up a form and get the details including owner details for any license plate in the EU

That's a new to me - in Germany if you want the data e.g. for a lawsuit you have to file a complaint at police and before you get the data the validity of your request will be checked. In addition, this does not allow everyone to build a movement tracking system.

> yet no one here yells Stasi about this.

Oh hell yes people did. In Germany they went to the Bundesverfassungsgericht (~ Supreme Court) and got the legal base for automated tracking banned: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urteil_des_Bundesverfassungsge...

I’m sorry APNR has been deployed in virtually every EU country that matters for a few years now including Germany.

The DB is maintained and I know of at least a few countries within the EU that share it for border control reasons.

You also do not need to fill a police report to get the license plate details you may have too if you list the reason as a hit and run but you don’t need have too for every occasion.

Speaking of Germany how is that going with requiring a passport or a national ID to buy a prepaid sim? ;)

Automated tracking from road cameras is everywhere on literally all major roads in western and central EU (not sure about eastern EU).

> promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times"

Are they wrong?

Low-skilled immigration seems like the worst possible idea at a time when millions of low skilled locals are going to be out of work.

With no net immigration most western countries are slowly shrinking which would help a fair bit as well.

There are many facets to this debate that aren't discussed in the news. One is that without immigration, the population of the US would decrease based on birth / death rates. If the population of the US decreases, social security and other social programs become insolvent. In other words, our social programs are based off the current working generation paying for the current retired generation, and has since their inception.

It's a complex issue, and benefits vary from region to region. The powers (with big microphones) that are trying to sway you one way or the other only focus on a few simple things.

> One is that without immigration, the population of the US would decrease based on birth / death rates. If the population of the US decreases, social security and other social programs become insolvent. In other words, our social programs are based off the current working generation paying for the current retired generation, and has since their inception.

Which is a fine argument for granting citizenship to skilled workers in industries with low unemployment, but a counterargument to taking large numbers of unskilled workers during a glut of unskilled workers.

To make the system solvent, you need to increase the number of gainfully employed middle class people, not increase the number of unemployed and underpaid people who need net social assistance because there are more unskilled workers but only the same number of unskilled jobs.

Won't those unskilled workers return if there is no work, just like we've had seasonal migration of farm workers in the past?

Farm automation will probably take care of a lot of those jobs.

> Won't those unskilled workers return if there is no work

It depends - if there is no work in the US then there is probably no work where they have come from.

> Won't those unskilled workers return if there is no work, just like we've had seasonal migration of farm workers in the past?

It isn't that there are zero jobs, it's that there are more workers than jobs. Add even more workers and some of the new workers will get some of the jobs.

And they could get a disproportionate share of the jobs by being willing to work for less money. Which compounds the problem, by both reducing wages for the entire class (increasing the consumption of need-based services) and reducing the government's tax receipts from each lower-paid worker's social security and other taxes.

Flooding the US with vast quantities of low skilled labor for four decades, is also why wages for the bottom 50% do not climb like they should. It's simple, and obvious, supply & demand.

It's bizarre that so many tech workers easily spot this concept in effect when big companies try to undercut their salaries in exactly the same manner by importing cheaper tech talent from other nations, yet they're oblivious to the exact same being done to lower income Americans.

It's also why the Koch brothers are aggressive supporters of unlimited low skill labor immigration. It's good for certain types of businesses involving traditional labor. The Kochs use it to suppress wages for their blue collar workers.

There's a reason why Canada - and most prosperous, developed nations - have strict immigration policies against flooding their nations with large amounts of low skill labor. Scandinavia flirted with it briefly, and now they've almost entirely shut down the immigration spigot. Most of Europe has turned back against the same thing, because it's harmful to the weakest working classes.

The primary argument is whether the US should match eg Canada and switch to a merit system. At a time when low skill labor is going to be automated away, it's extremely obvious which way the US will have to move. And if the US does not move that way, the cost will drown the fiscal budget and continue to hammer the poorest workers.

Exactly. In a capitalist country like the US supply and demand is king.

Ignoring this and slowly trying to turn the US into a socialist democracy (against the will of a large fraction of our citizens) has caused immense suffering and hardship for the poor already.

>It's also why the Koch brothers are aggressive supporters of unlimited low skill labor immigration. It's good for certain types of businesses involving traditional labor. The Kochs use it to suppress wages for their blue collar workers.

This is something that benefits both sides of party lines. I've definitely overheard conversations in cafes of people talking about how their "gardeners have families" and in the back of my head I wonder if they're paying that gardener enough to take care of those families.

Yes, the laws need reforming (I think the last time was in the sixties and everything has been piecemeal since then?) but I think both parties have ulterior motives unskilled labor, Dems just are dicks about it and recognize they are humans as well. But useful humans.

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