Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

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> However, when you have some experience working in defense you find out reality is more like: there's real criminal to catch, real victims to protect and to save, it's not like we have any time for non critical stuff such as going after pacific dissidents

This is wildly self-serving. Security services all over the world absolutely go after dissidents and whistle-blower and many other undesirables. Just look at the COINTELPRO papers in the USA to see this, for a well documented historic example from a free country - not only were security services investigating peaceful protesters, they were actively infiltrating, trying to coerce them to commit crimes, blackmailing MLK into committing suicide, they payed for the assassination of the Black Panthers leader and many others.

Or look at the recent 'governor kidnapping plot', bravely foiled by intelligence services, who were actually 10 of the 12 people in on the 'plot'...

> at the same time they are against using tech they create to increase security. How do you live in such a contradiction? Not to mention mass surveillance will create tech jobs you are probably part of the small number of people who can apply and get hired and actually work on it with their own ethic.

A solution to a problem can be worse than the problem. I am all for solutions to the huge number of car fatalities, but that doesn't mean I support banning cars, even though that would fix the problem. Surveillance states create way more problems than they solve, and are invariably used against political minorities. The ethics of individual operators are irrelevant - if the institutional drive is there, workers will be selected until they match the institutional drive.

The Chinese are doing it as part of 'reformatting' Hong Kong, but it happens in our own backyards as well [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22yqoDs1_TE

In our current world societies the university students are the most important visible protestors, because they're the smartest people that have the most to lose from incoming forced change. They're young and they see personal freedom disappearing.

However given the recent selling out nature of universities in Australia, we might lose this early-warning signal too...

Students are hardly the smartest people, unless you believe that growing up and acquiring decades of practical experience actually makes you dumber.

Canada: A "filmmaker" claims that one of the police officers had a rock in their hand, why would I believe a "documentary filmmaker" without any actual evidence (you'd expect a video evidence from the guy) participating in a protest more than actual police officers? or than the minister of public safety? or than the journalist who obviously could not verify it and as such did no mention it?

There's only one logical reason that comes to my mind: because you want to, like the person who choose the title "Canadian Undercover Police Officers Caught Trying to Start a Riot", that's not an honest title, "Canadian Filmmaker Pretends Police Officers Tried to Start a Riot" would have been actually honest. Who's manipulating who now?

Nice description under the video too, but it's only one side of the story: we also hold tons of evidence that people actually lie and plan to lie just to cause agitation, protests and so on. Is that something that you would be interested in as well? Or are you just interested in "anything against the elected government"?

I just posted a video. You react with a lot of minimal information. Heed my earlier comment about all the pieces. (I am guilty of this behaviour too).

If you dig deeper, there are(/were?) other video sources that had the union leader saying things along the lines of "this guys not with us, we don't know who he is, take of your mask and protest peacefully like the rest of us". The Canadian police got caught out trying to incite things presumably for political grandstanding.

Trust in authority is broken for those of us aware enough of it.

The students have the most 'potential future value' to lose, that's why they fight the most. They're fighting for the possibility to be the smartest rather than have it denied and have their freedoms conformed by the powers that are attempting to dictate.

> If you dig deeper, there are(/were?) other video sources that had the union leader saying things along the lines of "this guys not with us, we don't know who he is, take of your mask and protest peacefully like the rest of us".

It's actually in the video you posted so I've seen it. They were there with masks, they were not protesting, but they were standing peacefully: that is what I see in the video.

> The Canadian police got caught out trying to incite things

That's why I was talking about the "rock in their hands" part of the story because that's the only part that would be valuable at all to support the claim that they were there to "incite".

But actually you're probably wondering about the reason why they are dressed like other violent protesters (which we can see in an earlier part of the video in another street), there's a reason for that, and it's pretty simple: it makes it easier to catch them. And when you do you're burned so it's not like the costume is going to last forever.

Why did they then go to the peaceful street then? Because they were expecting the violent protesters from the other street to refuge there and take off their masks and blend in with the peaceful protesters. By being there first they could have caught them, but the "peaceful protestors" who "caught them" didn't let them do their job.

I don't believe one second that they did that to incite things, that they would be throwing rocks at their own colleagues, and have seen absolutely no reason let alone any evidence to think otherwise.

But even if their presence did incite you, then you would get caught extremely fast, and that would probably be a better ending for everybody including yourself, before you become a bigger danger.

I found the video I actually wanted to post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ6cdLNWzlI

This is what happens when you don't have continuity/all the pieces.

Watch it and weep. Welcome to the misinformation age. John Perry-Barlow was right.

This was from 2011. They've presumably gotten a lot better at it now.

All right, we can see he has a rock in his hand in that video, however...

He's facing the crowd of actually masked protesters, surveilling them which is probably why he got caught, they completely outnumber him, which makes me thinks it's probably better for his defense to hold a rock in his hands.

I mean, look at this crowd of masked people, some even wearing gasmasks, holding red flags, with god knows what in their backpacks, claiming that the infiltrated agents are there to "provoke them", what a joke of bad faith.

You don't want them to do that? Letting them do more preventive surveillance would be a solution then, that'd be an upgrade for everyone. But you don't want that either so I guess we're stuck in this status quo.

Just took a quick look at COINTELPRO (1956–1971) and we're going to have to disagree that their priority was "investigating peaceful protesters", but rather "violent groups threatening national security" when I read: Ku Klux Klan, Black Panthers, Black Power, Nation of Islam, Young Lords ... Does that mean COINTELPRO was flawless? Certainly not, but pretty founded IMHO.

There's also the communist party, well I guess that's over now you're absolutely free to be communist, same goes for feminism.

And the groups in question have all won, their ideologies have won, you know have blacks, muslims, feminists, communists inside probably every government agency - even though, they will probably not be extremists, and love their country.

If these ideologies have won, and that freedom has stabilized for everyone, what's the point of going into yet another civil war now? If you agree it's pointless, then why are you afraid that the government would go after you if you are not dangerous?

You're saying the ethics of individual operators are irrelevant, does that mean you think that the ethic of Minutemen was irrelevant? It's half the story from my point of view, even you are criticizing their ethics ("trying to coerce into committing crimes").

Psychological warfare goes both ways you know, for a government to try to counter it seems pretty sane to me. It's not like you're not free nor have many means to publish all the agitation propaganda you want these days.

But we get it, you just want to keep your tech to overthrow elected governments instead helping the government to protect your family and people, because "solutions can create more problems than they solve": let's not do anything about our security problems and let's especially not try more tech nor tech upgrades.

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