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Comment by amingilani | Hacker News Reader

To me it feels pragmatic.

I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.

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So you think that the state has massive surveillance systems (definitely) that it is willing to use maliciously (maybe), but in the age of LLMs is fooled by swapping some letters around? Seems like the threat model is unlikely to line up with reality.

It’s not a “maybe”. This administration was collecting lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week ago. you really think they’re going to send them gift baskets or something?

the point rogerrogerr is making is that a government is not going to be tripped up by "teter piel", just like you werent.

SOTA LLMs couldn't even correctly answer whether a person should drive a car to the car wash or walk there themselves just a week ago, so it's plausible the government's tech might be tripped up here. Costs nothing to try it, at least!

this isnt particularly against you, knowing your comment is mostly in jest, but: not everything needs to be, or should be, thought about in an "llm-first" way.

a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated" comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst to read.

No worries, I didn't take it that way. I lean anti- llm-first myself. I was actually going to make joke about levenshtein distance but figured since we're on HN, I'd lean into the LLM zeitgeist that everyone can't stop talking about here =P

You think Teter Piel is going to fool Palantir spyware?

> This administration was collecting lists of people who spoke negatively about ICE from social media like a week ago.

Source for this? This goes against many values of the US, so I'm surprised to see this statement thrown out so nonchalantly.

Yup, absolutely I do.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

I didn’t say it was state sponsored mass surveillance, nor did I say the method of obfuscation was good.

Just that it’s a pragmatic approach (no matter how flawed in practice) and concerning that it needs to be done.

I'm happy to name Peter Thiel in a comment here. What's he going to do, come and drip forehead sweat at me?

It hasn’t come to that though, you can freely express that persons point with no repercussions outside of maybe not getting a check one day from the person you hate

Beyond just the concept of thought crime, one of the themes in Orwell's 1984 was that the government could arbitrarily decide that a thing you've done could be punished at any time. You didn't need to break a law to be punished by Big Brother, you just had to be a thorn in its side. In our world, the government/Palantir/ICE collecting the identities of people who criticize them is the kind of infrastructure that makes that arbitrary punishment from 1984 possible.

its important to point out that its not about being a thorn in the government's side. you just have to not submit fully. in fact, even if everyone did submit completely, a fair number of people would still need to be rounded up and tortured just to keep the fear alive.

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