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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Same for Minority Report ("predictive policing" idea) and the 1984 book in general. Just wait until they discover the Black Mirror show, too.

These sociopath politicians and intelligence officials watch and read these things and really do take them as instruction manuals, not as the warnings they were meant to be.

So please stop giving them ideas everyone, I guess.

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There also was the Total Information Awareness project that was seemingly shelved in the early aughts.

How they didn’t see parallels to the stasi I don’t know.

>How they didn’t see parallels to the stasi I don’t know.

Probably some mental gymnastics along the lines of "it's different because we're using it for good."

What I don't get is why these boondoggles keep popping up despite them failing to actually improve the crime stats that the people at the top who approve these things tie their careers to.

Clifford Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg has an interesting and nuanced take on TIA advocate Adm. John Poindexter's ideas. Late in the book Stoll comes to agree at least partly with what he describes as Poindexter's idea that any particular piece of data the hackers acquired was not critical, but when enough information was gathered and organized the new insights available to an adversary were critical. On the other side, Stoll takes extraordinary steps to coordinate government response to the hackers, much of which was ensuring information flow.

Is any sufficiently information sensitive government different from the Stasi? I think the difference may be what is done with the information. Is the information used arbitrarily, unequally or as blackmail, or are laws and rules enforced without favor? Do people have incentives to report the transgressions of others? Does the system increase or decrease trust within a society?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter

The thing is we can’t rely on good governance over the data, even if we accept the premise that the government could govern better (uphold laws) with that information.

Unfortunately we know from history that the propensity to misuse or go beyond original intent is too great and alluring, if not to the designers, to people who follow them in office.

Agreed and since information volume will not decrease, how can incentives be aligned to overcome untrusted governance?

The only iron clad option is to not let the genie out of the bottle. Look at how we got around the idea of torture, for example. (Maybe it was useful, maybe it wasn’t, but despite having restrictions against it, we found a way to skate the periphery, now imagine something less controversial like improving lives through reduction of violence enabled by TIA or the Chinese alternative “Social Credit Score”.

Do you think the genie is still in a bottle?

What is meant by “got around the idea of torture?” That the US no longer tortures, or embraced cognitive dissonance, or brushed it under the rug once blue team held office, or what?

History has vindicated the sociopaths at least once, early and importantly with the Manhattan Project. A letter from Einstein and others to FDR made the case for developing the weapon ahead of others.

We need more examples of the sociopaths being wrong; of projects that no other nation-state found useful but were pursued anyway. This book is good for that: a project that never rises to nation-state importance, so it’s shopped around the private sector.

Hi mtgx, I believe that you may have been shadow banned. It may be a good idea to contact dang and self-correct or fix whatever happened :)

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