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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

can someone explain to me in simple terms why governments have constant obsessions with IDing/tracking everyone everywhere all the time?

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Nobody in the government ever got fired for "erring on the side of caution".

Yes, this is it. Things like this are almost never due to some inside conspiracy, but rather result from systemic incentives applied to different actors over time. Absent laws that forbid security bureaus from being too cautious, they will inevitably tend in that direction, precisely because the careers of the actors involved depend on it.

Are you sure? Everything from the Snowden disclosures tell us otherwise. Take the US for instance, in which the government ramped up its surveillance capabilities in ways they knew were illegal. They had to rely on secret interpretation of the law to "justify" their actions, an interpretation that even the author of the law was reportedly not aware of. That's no accident. Instead, it was directed by the highest ranks of government who knew very well what they were getting into.

Similar story for other countries as well, apart from totalitarian regimes that does the same thing openly.

It seems pretty natural to me. Government is dominated by people who want power and people who want power pretty much always want more power.

It's only natural that they don't see themselves as the threat. To them the threat is criminals/terrorists, etc. and sacrificing our civil liberties would typically let them catch one or two more of those.

I can easily agree that the majority want power, sometimes even to do good.

The second point, that they don't see themselves as the threat, assigns them with too much of a lack of self-awareness. I believe many in the current ruling party do see themselves as a threat but they hate the woke/immigrants/workers so they're fine with it.

> Government is dominated by people who want power and people who want power pretty much always want more power.

And most upper management, CEOs and billionaires never wanted power but aquired it by accident?

Who said anything about billionaires?

Without assuming any kind of malice...

If your directive is to protect the public, the best way is to know what everyone is doing at anytime. Think of overprotective parents and their kids. A "the road to hell is paved in good intentions" kind of deal.

They always could do this in the past, so it's more about "it's gone dark, we can't see that now" and trying to put genies back in their bottles.

Because they are terrified of what will happen to them if people decide they have had enough of it.

Power

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