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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I remember running into a programmer at a MacHack conference (so you know it was a long time ago).

He was an Australian contractor, working for the UAE.

He was working on a database system, for tracking citizens. He flat-out told me it was a tool for their monarchy, to wield power.

In the US, people keep talking about the Second Amendment, as some kind of guarantor of liberty, but their eyes glaze over, when I tell them that the computer database is the biggest threat to human rights in history, and now, AI will make it much worse.

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At the end of the day, someone has to do the actual enforcement though right? I'm not saying a government super database that knows everything about you isn't a threat to human rights as you say, but the biggest threat? I would have to disagree.

They don't threaten you per say but really they absolutely hamstring the one ability that matters if your incentive is to hold the seat of power: the ability to organize the population and form a new government or at the very least claw back some power that has been granted to certain individuals and groups. 1776 would be impossible today.

This NYT article had an article with some interesting history of one of the character who saw that opportunity. I see almost all tech focused on advertising as an unfortunate continuation of this trend. And it feels like people are fooling themselves to say it will not be used for restrictive purposes. But maybe I'm wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/magazine/hank-asher-data....

Even before that the Nazis used IBM machines to create a pretty efficient analog database of the Jewish population to track and murder them.

An evil regime didn't even need computers for a database to be dangerous, computers just made it much more efficient and scarier.

Well Nazis had like ~30% support in Germany so that's probably enough to monitor the remaining 70% (1 person to monitor ~2 others)

However, if your regime is even smaller like 5% or 10% it's going to be extremely difficult to manage the remaining 95% without more advanced technology than pen and paper.

There is more to it than that.

The notorious example is the Dutch Jews who basically filled in a register of themselves and provided it to the Nazis.

I tried to watch Joodse Raad and I just can't.

Yet, they killed the Jews in occupied countries as well. Shockingly, the Nazis were the least efficient at doing their genocide at home where the support was highest.

I'm not sure that's accurate. By sheer numbers, it's pretty much Poland taking the lead and that's because the rest of Europe killed/displaced their jews in previous events (turns out hating jews is basically an European tradition).

Statista agrees you with in that comparing the deaths by country to its initial population by country shows Germany around 32% while say Poland is 75% [1]. But the big problem with that is it omits emigration; I would suspect jews in Germany saw the writing on the wall and left. The Germany jewish population dropped from 525k to 37k [2] (with 165k dead [1]) which means 323k jews must've left Germany while Hungary dropped from 445k to 190k (with 270k dead) which means -25k jews emigrated (aka 25k jews immigrated).

So it just appears that Germany is less efficient because the local jews emigrated to other countries where they were then killed juicing those countries stats.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070564/jewish-populatio...

[2]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/remaining-...

Not that surprising. They needed slaves to build their war machine and you want these factories far from the front.

I think it's inverted: their support was highest where they weren't doing the worst things.

People getting back to 2nd amendment are a funky bunch, they talk about need for automatic weapons to defend against government, when in reality they would be bringing say ar-15 to a drone fight.

If war in Ukraine showed anything its that armed single guy, or bunch of them, are meaningless against any modern threat. Other, say SHTF scenarios, are just wet fantasies of big kids doing some obscure form of LARP.

What liberties are you worried about (in the context of the US)?

Not the OP, but the US has a shitton of laws that make basically everyone a felon [0] and only the sheer impossibility of tracking everyone everywhere makes ad-hoc prosecution complicated/impractical.

The advent of AI may bring down this last obstacle.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

I get your point but suggest finding better source material. Harvey Silverglate has made a great living out of telling just-so stories with lots of emotional activation, that fall apart on closer examination. For example he'll tell a sob story about someone being charged for collecting oysters on a Sunday, only it turns out that it's a large commercial operation that ignores environmental or employment regulations and has been defying regulators for years on end.

I don't think it's the lack of tracking. It's that almost all of those "3 a day" violations are only technically violations. If you try to actually charge someone in front of a jury, they're going to return something along the lines of "not guilty because the prosecutor is an idiot".

That's assuming that the judge doesn't find a way to throw it out long before it ever sees a jury. Courts don't like wasting their time on stupid stuff.

Most trials in the US never go to jury, right? The risk of receiving a crushing sentence is just too big, so almost everyone accepts a plea bargain.

Notoriously, Hans Reiser (who is guilty, never doubted that) refused a rather low plea bargain of IDK six? years, tried his luck with a jury trial, and got life.

Assuming I don't want to pay money for that book, can you give me a single example of a law that your average American is likely to feloniously violate by accident?

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