Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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> And it is always pretended that the bad guys can only exist on the client side and not on the supervisor side.

This is very much the crux of it.

Back during the immediate post-9/11 era there was a huge push to restrict all kinds of civil liberties (and the birth of today's surveillance state) in the name of preventing the next terror attack, which could be "a mushroom cloud" in the words of George W. Bush.

There's a problem with this reasoning.

Osama bin Laden wasn't some random dude who got radicalized. He was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world. He was born rich, grew up rich, attended Harvard, and had a family that rubbed shoulders with heads of state and were directly connected to the Saudi royal family.

Osama bin Laden was a member of what I've heard described as the "superclass," those who are beyond just being "merely rich" in that they possess not only vast wealth but internationally diversified wealth and powerful political connections.

He was of the social class that is behind the glass of a surveillance state, and if he wanted to avoid any possibility of surveillance himself he and other members of his class could easily afford expensive security consultants and specialized devices. They could also afford armies of attorneys to get them off any lists and out of any trouble.

If someone detonates an atomic bomb in Washington DC, it will not be some random middle class youth who got radicalized on a 'chan board or a Facebook group. It will not be some random protestor or dissident. It will be someone like Osama bin Laden. It will be someone with the money, expertise, connections, and background to find, recruit, and pay the personnel required to obtain or build a nuclear device. It will be someone with the connections to organize the logistics to smuggle it into the country and put it in position.

It will be a member of the global elite.

People with bin Laden's level of wealth and privilege are the dangerous ones. The lens of scrutiny should be aimed at them. One member of the middle class radicalized with toxic ideology might shoot up a school, but one elite radicalized with the same ideology could blow up a city or engineer a super-plague.

The risk to the existing order comes from outsiders with leadership abilities.

Osama bin Laden's $30MM (per Wikipedia) inheritance from his estranged family no doubt greased some skids, but mission-driven people with charisma come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, and some of them succeed. (FWIW he did not attend Harvard, and AFAIR never set foot in the US.)

The general pattern is that the wealthy are, on average, supportive of the existing order. They are the winners of the current game. Of course there are always rebellious children who are motivated by religion or power or fame etc, but most of them are feckless due to their upbringing. And ultimately, there are so few of them.

Leadership abilities can be found across all economic strata. Most are happy to leverage their talents into moderate economic advantage, but some are driven by "larger" causes.

I would say that the intersection of leadership abilities, belief in a "larger" cause, belief in victimization, and a willingness to harm innocent people (or to blame them for their inaction against your oppressor) ... is what leads to the risk of violence against the existing order.

Looks like you’re right about Harvard. I’ve heard that claim for years but it seems to be a confusion with another member of the (large) family and controversy about Saudi money at Harvard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden

My point is that people with money and power are far more able to execute large scale crimes, and not just terrorism. Meanwhile surveillance is experienced more and more as you move down the socioeconomic pyramid.

Apple is catching flak for this but overall their devices respect privacy more than most cheaper devices. They also cost a lot more. Your average cheapo phone or laptop comes absolutely stuffed to the gills with spyware and runs older OSes with bad security. The poorer you are, the more spyware riddled and insecure your devices probably are.

Bin Laden did take a course at Oxford and palled around with Britain's best and brightest of the young. So there is some connection with the West's elite universities.

Bin Laden certainly has been to Oxford, but I’ve not heard of any connexion with the university.¹ I wouldn’t say that those attending language schools and similar tend to interact much with students of the university. With the exception of a few cramming programmes for admissions, the ‘best and brightest’ (I assume by this you mean those sufficiently academically able to get into Oxbridge as matriculated students—I daresay the average Imperial mathmo is brighter than the average Cambridge land economist) tend not to take courses in Oxford outside the university, since they mostly use the name ‘Oxford’ to entice gullible tourists who don’t realise that these places have nothing to do with the university.

1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1595205.stm

You are forgetting that if the alt-right movement is not itself a product of GamerGate, it got an enormous JATO boost from GamerGate. One of the darkest eras in recent American history -- the Trump administration -- happened in large part because some basement nerds were pissed that a woman wrote a God-damned video game.

Do not discount the effects of chan boards and Facebook groups so foolishly.

I lived through that idiocy and you're not wrong, but I really don't think all those trolls and Pajama Nazis would be particularly dangerous without elite backing.

Some of it may have been organic at first, but things don't stay organic for long these days. The instant there's even a whiff of a popular movement that can be exploited the propagandists are on it... especially if it's a movement that can be exploited so as to win an election or make money. The thing that made that stuff dangerous was elites and their water-carriers like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopolis, Rupert Murdoch, etc. empowering and steering all those useful idiots.

The Pajama Nazis have a camp of doppelgängers that I've come to call Basement Bolsheviks, but they haven't had much impact since that camp of idiots doesn't seem useful to anyone with money and power (yet?).

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