Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic doesn't forbid DoW from using the models for foreign surveillance. It's not about harming others, it's about doing what is best for humanity in the long run, all things considered. I personally do not believe that foreign surveillance is automatically harmful and I'm fine with our military doing it

View on HN

If we are talking about what's best for humanity in the long run.. thinking about human values in general, what makes American citizens uniquely deserving of privacy rights, in ways that citizens of other countries are not?

Snowden revealed that every single call on Bahamas were being monitored by NSA [1]. That was in 2013. How would this be any worse if it were US citizens instead?

(Note, I myself am not an US citizen)

Anyway, regardless of that, the established practice is for the five eyes countries to spy on each other and share their results. This means that the UK can spy on US citizens, the US can spy on UK citizens, and through intelligence sharing they effectively spy on their own citizens. That's what supporting "foreign surveillance" will buy you. That was also revealed in 2013 by Snowden [2]

[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/05/19/data-pirates-caribbean-n...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/nsa-files-spyi...

This isn't about privacy rights, it's about war

I'm not suggesting that Anthropics models should be used by foreign governments for domestic surveillance

I'm not worried about foreign governments spying on Americans, as long as the US government is aligned. I'm worried about my own government becoming misaligned

But.. the US doesn't perform mass surveillance on foreign people only when it's at war. It doesn't perform mass surveillance only on adversarial nations it potentially could be at war either.

This absolutely is about privacy.

> I'm not worried about foreign governments spying on Americans, as long as the US government is aligned. I'm worried about my own government becoming misaligned

Those foreign governments are spying on Americans and then sharing the results with the US government because the US government is misaligned with the interests of its own people

The United States gets to spy on countries when it's in the interest of the United States to do so. This isn't complicated. We get to spy on quite literally whoever we want abroad, within various legal and well established parameters, at at the risk of offending the governments of the spied-on. "It's only okay for the United States to spy on foreigners when they're in a shooting war with them" is silly.

So you are saying its OK to spy on others because the US say is fine?

Maybe the others on here are not happy that this company is supporting a fascist government in committing international aggressions on other countries which has been condemned by the majority of countries around the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com