Ask HN: Anyone Else Tired of All The Leak and 'PRISM' Stories?
We get that civil liberties and privacy are important but for three days straight that's all there is on HN.
"Until the early 80's there was no widespread use of mobile telephony and internet. It's not crazy to think that the surveillance state has ruined the internet and that there is more value in avoiding it than in using it. Maybe it's over.
[...]
The car industry is facing a generation of buyer who find cars a burden. It's crazy to think that we can't screw this up."
He may well be right, it could be that these wonderful toys are so subject to government abuse that we'll realize we would have been better off without the rush to adopt them.
Perhaps we need to develop proper institutions, methods and control over their abuse, but that process is going to be painful. The story of the West's adaptation of the printing press and government controls over them is not a pretty one, after all.
Anyway, if he's even somewhat right, it's hard to imagine there's a more important topic for HN to discuss right now, it impacts everything, from our daily lives to the things we build and expose to the Internet.
On the other hand, I'd happily see the public go back to actually talking about surveillance instead of Mr. I-Read-Too-Many-Spy-Novels-And-Want-To-Be-Famous.
As of 2011, the internet's monthly traffic[1] amounted to about 27.5 petabytes per month, or about 2.6e-5 yottabytes. A yottabyte would be about 3300 years of 2011 traffic.
What we are seeing is the recurrence of Admiral Poindexter's vision of Total Information Awareness[2]. It got shot down last time around, but not with sufficient finality. That's what the "three days straight" is about.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_traffic
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office
HN is being swamped here and IMO it's degrading the impact of the story. I'd appreciate fewer, but more detailed/technical/analytical links.
Civil rights: use 'em or lose 'em.
Plus, I bet Greenwald has a lot more to show us next week. He's probably just letting the administration stumble over their own lies, and then uncover more stuff to contradict them, which would be pretty brilliant if he did that.
Don't expect this to end too soon, and I sure hope it won't.