Hacker News Reader

Comment by drevil-v2 | Hacker News Reader

The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute.

This is a necessary "evil". We give up some freedoms so that we have a civilisation and an orderly society.

And this isn't setting up any precedent that is egregious. This is on the front page of Chicago Tribune newspaper and on the front page of HN. This is not some shady in the shadows invasion of privacy.

Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments. Otherwise it just becomes background noise to be constantly and without context offended.

View on HN

Those records are mandated by The State and are very limited in scope. Nobody is idly wondering about the legality of X or Y in them, as one might in a google search, or making a culturally insensitive remark, as one might in a private message to a friend.

Be wary of the motte-and-bailey fallacy - the issue is not that The State can look at certain records in certain prosecutions, its that the records currently being requested are too broad and too potentially intimate to trust The State with.

>Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments

That creates an almost arbitrary, "this fits my worldview so I'll support rights this time" thought process. Like, "Well, this guy's a Nazi so we should trample his rights. But this woman's an abortion activist, so we should be sure to protect hers."

How do you propose we prevent ideological blindness in the protection of rights? Should we take the government's word that, "this time, it's really worth trampling rights"? Or would you create an unbiased oversight board that tells us when protecting rights is appropriate? Or should each person look at a case and decide for themselves whether or not they should take a stand against rights infringement?

There's a big difference between dragnet surveillance & executing a warrant. This was the latter.

This is not some shady in the shadows invasion of privacy.

I would argue that there are no rights being "trampled" here at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com