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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> "This technology could be used to blah blah blah," but is it actually used that way?

For one, you're falling towards the "preparedness paradoxon".

But much worse: Yes, we absolutely have examples in the real world just how fucked up surveillance can get. The GDR's Stasi for example tracked people, just using people instead of technology, to an insane degree. Erich Mielke would openly drool in his grave if he knew just how powerful technology has become. In recent times, look at China and their "social credit" score.

Don't believe for a single second the US is unable to sink that low. Even decades-old stuff believed to be safe can be struck down with the stroke of a pen of the Supreme Court. Get your expectations codified in a constitutional amendment, or be prepared to literally have to fight for your expectations. Abortion was just the beginning.

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Okay - do we have relevant examples where the creepy spy-on-everyone technology came before the nasty authoritarian regime? East Germany, North Korea, Soviet Russia, etc. were dire places (for human rights) back when their State Security Ministries had not yet heard of transistors.

Guess what the OG 1933-45 Nazis used for the holocaust? Yup, prior existing databases and census information, to quickly identify Jews.

Isn't one of the reasons why you Americans don't mandate the possession of a valid passport or ID card to avoid the creation of such a database? Or why the ATF is forced to operate on paper card records to prevent the government from having a readily usable database to identify gun owners?

Besides, look up the No Fly list. Have the same name as a terrorist? You're not getting on that flight and it's barely possible to get removed from the list.

I'm looking for "Creepy Tech ==>> Bad Regime" causality. We could ban black robes, crypto, and toilet paper because Evil Overlords find those things useful - but such bans seem unlikely to have much anti-evil effect.

> ...why you Americans don't mandate the possession...

Sounds like you haven't tried to buy a beer in America. Let alone vote. Last time I volunteered for a local food bank (doing bottom-end manual labor), I was told to bring picture ID. I've only been volunteering for them about 25 years now.

The No Fly list is a far better argument against security theater and endless bungling at scale than it is an argument against creepy government. If the U.S. was preparing and serving chicken salad sandwiches as widely and incompetently as they're doing the No Fly list, then Food Poisoning would be the #1 cause of death in the U.S.

I hoped that "examples in the US" and "in modern times" was implied. I'm still waiting for those examples instead of "Remember the Stasi" and your parting slippery slope.

> I'm still waiting for those examples instead of "Remember the Stasi" and your parting slippery slope.

I'm German. Unlike you in the US, we have museums dedicated to the horrors of the NS regime as well as the Stasi and general GDR dictatorship around the country. I can recommend you a visit if you get the chance to visit Germany - there is no argument as convincing as actually seeing eyewitness accounts and evidence of how depraved humans can get.

> I hoped that "examples in the US" and "in modern times" was implied.

Something that happened in Germany in the 80s is not exactly a time long ago in a galaxy far away...

From a modern technological perspective it might as well be, especially when we're talking about East Germany under Soviet occupation.

The lesson you should learn from this is that you don't always get to pick your government.

I try to never learn things from other country's experiences, too, or the past in general. These criticism are always invalid until the society in question goes full fascist. Only then can wring our hands and be sad, but until then it's all abstract and not worth worrying about.

A classic slippery slope argument, free from anything like the burden of pointing to anything real. Where are the examples of this burgeoning techno-fascism? Where are the disappeared? Where is the American version of Zersetzung? Where is the creeping "social credit score" style of monitoring?

We've had this tech for a while now, so where are the examples of it being systematically abused by the government?

Have you heard of the No Fly list, with completely innocent people being flagged and finding it out to be almost impossible to get out of that database? Of people being denied entry to the US because CBP thinks they might be sex workers? About the prosecution of (suspected) sex workers in the US in general? About how marijuana was banned to target hippies and anti-war protesters? About how teachers can lose their license for talking about LGBT topics? About widespread dragnet subpoena abuse using Google Maps as data provider?

The No Fly List failing spectacularly as a bit of security theater is not a good argument against anything other than overly contrived security theater, and poor database controls.

The rest doesn't seem to have much to do with technology, more to do with Florida politics.

The only thing related to Florida was the LGBT bit. The rest are all examples of a government sticking its nose where it definitely does not belong.

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