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Comment by rambojohnson | Hacker News Reader

the comment thread here is obnoxiously naive, and speaks to the privilege some people having been raised under the calm of supposedly democratic societies.

you're all arguing about the syntax of rights while governments rewrite the grammar. once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification. the "law" doesn’t restrain power, power instructs law where to kneel.

stop treating the ECHR like some talisman that keeps the wolves at bay, as if authoritarian drift politely obeys paperwork. stop playing with this whole “actually, the loophole is X,” “no, the loophole is Y,” like you're debugging a bad API instead of staring at the obvious: when a state wants to expand surveillance, it does, and the justifications are retrofitted later, be it "public safety", or "keeping your children safe."

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Let's be pragmatic about this. Chat Control and this new thing are not post-hoc rationalizations, they are attempts to justify a proposed change.

If this posited wannabe-surveillance state wanted to institute ubiquitous surveillance, it would just unilaterally do so a la PRISM. To our knowledge, they have not done this and are instead trying to rationalize the creep of surveillance somehow, which indicates that public opinion around these initiatives still matters. Public opinion is something we can all influence. Maybe discussing the legalese is a waste of time, but discussing the rhetoric and how to combat it definitely isn't

I don't think it's about public opinion so much as pushing the goalposts. The whole erosion of privacy since the 60s (maybe further but at least since then) has been a 'boiled frogs' situation.

What I think the endgame is here is to be able to do surveillance out in the open, so you can have more human resources doing it, and so you can use that surveillance legally more often. If you have a clandestine surveillance operation, you can only employ people you trust not to squeal and you have to engage in parallel construction (or resort to extralegal execution of force).

A lot easier if you can just point to a piece of paper and say "but you said we could"

across "democratic societies" around the world, they're pushing the goalposts while the elected officials are arguing for pragmatism, which inspires that servile middle of the road idealism in the voting bloc, while everybody knows that in times like these pragmatism is another form of cowardice.

Please don't mistake my post as arguing for pragmatism in the abstract.

The GGP was saying we should avoid idealistic rhetoric and focus on the pragmatics of what these governments are trying to do. I responded saying that, even if we do that, public opinion still matters.

States are not all mighty entities acting without any restriction. Wannabe rulers have to go through that kind of abstract notions to manipulate people at scale, but they have limited skills and abilities to use these tools that people about m accept only under certain conditions.

ECHR is on same ontological level as the notion of state. If no one concrete is willing to enforce it, it has zero agency.

Politicians can ignore constitutions like citizen can ignore laws. Politicians can send military forces on manifesters, and people can make politicians meet the guillotine.

> once a state decides ubiquitous surveillance is necessary, it’ll find or fabricate a justification

This is defeatist, fatalist nonsense.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

No, this is just being pragmatic and realizing that against a sufficiently powerful authoritarian push, legal arguments fall short. Until you address the root causes of something like Chat Control being tried again and again until it passes, any victory is just a brief respite.

You need political will to ensure freedom is respected and wanted by all. After decades of media and reactionary propaganda about crime scaremongering, it's hardly surprising that politicians are able to draft such laws with a straight face.

Alternative take: OP meant that we ought not to trust any justification for the expansion of surveillance like posted.

How?

It’s had to return. “Disguised.”

It was defeated once. It can be again. What might change that is lazy nihilism masquerading as wisdom.

I really don't see how GP's comment is lazy nihilism. There's plenty of that in this thread, but I felt GP made good points.

> don't see how GP's comment is lazy

It’s arguing why something that just happened is impossible. It’s justifying not doing anything because doing anything is pointless. Nihilism justifying laziness.

You do realize the headline matches what you just quoted?

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