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Comment by Group_B | Hacker News Reader

Gotta love the good old US of A. I feel like we have the worst of both worlds; dystopian surveillance, yet massive crime issues still. An amazing world we live in.

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The problem is that when laws no longer apply to certain individuals in our government, we no longer have rule of law at all, because a law is inherently universal. The US is rotting from the head.

I suspect that in the very near future, the latter will dramatically decrease and the former dramatically increase. I wonder how that tradeoff will be perceived.

What do you mean? What would lead to government surveillance decreasing?

No he means crime will dramatically decrease and surveillance will increase. I’d be inclined to agree.

D'oh, I suppose I just have some default mental schema that processed the sentence assuming "former" before "latter".

Yeah, figured that making it hard to parse would make it more likely people were thoughtful about their replies. In this climate, it's likely to attract a flamewar if I just spell it out.

Don't worry, the crime wont' actually decrease either.

Maybe. If we use our powers too capriciously then they'll deter behaviors other than criminal behaviors. Like that boat of alleged drug traffickers we recently blew up -- that looks more likely to discourage boating within 1000 miles of the US than any particular crime.

As surveillance increases the definition of crime will expand.

Consider the incentives. Surveillance is costly. The only way to justify increasing surveillance costs is to demonstrate increasing intervention in criminal activity. If traditional crime is reduced, new crimes need to be introduced.

Once all the enemies of the state have been eliminated, it becomes mandatory to introduce new enemies of the state so they, too, can be rounded up. Eventually there will be no one left to come for and the surveillance technology will go unmonitored.

You may very well be right about the outcome, though I doubt the government cares enough about justifying expenditures to make money the rationale.

In my experience, it's social crises that tend to be used to justify authoritarian power grabs - whether that's a political killing or a worldwide contagion.

The increase in crime is purely political problem emerging from the demands of a certain segment of middle and upper middle classes, not the government or working class.

> I feel like we have the worst of both worlds; dystopian surveillance, yet massive crime issues still.

One might be tempted towards the conclusion that dystopian surveillance doesn't materially impact crime rates and that if we want to solve the latter, we need a different solution than the former.

At least you have freedom… in some sense.

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