Ask HN: What are good things about PRISM? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are good things about PRISM?

6 pointsBalgair12 comments

With all the news about PRISM and it's obvious darker side towards privacy and freedom, I thought we should ask what some good things are about it. How does it help, if at all? How will it affect the future in a positive way? Since it is here, are there any ways we can look on it in a good light? Thank you.

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PRISM seems like the biggest information leech in the world. For good to come from it, they should "accidentally" let the whole world see everything they collected. Then they'd be the biggest seeder ever. It's not that I don't have anything to hide, I have lots to hide. But sooner or later everyone will know everything they want to know anyway.

Almost every bad movie plot I've ever seen has one point where someone says "We have to keep this secret". From that point on, things always go wrong. Light can always help a situation.

How are we ever going to get to a true collective consciousness if we are always keeping secrets from one another. Just realize that we are all human, we all have hopes and dreams, and we all have things we are ashamed of. A public panopticon could be just what the doctor ordered for our society to get to the next stage.

Someone somewhere is learning a lot about big databases and data mining and big storage.

I guess there's a bit of trickle through with academia getting funding to study that stuff.

Yes, the neuroscience research could use this, also sociologists

They should charge people a fee and rebrand it as a data archive /cloud storage service. Every email you've ever sent, every phone call you've ever made, every online purchase, the whole architecture of your online existence, preserved forever with no effort on your part. And maybe someday when you die, they'll finally copy you.

Won't that be fun?

The 'Digital Twin' idea. I like it. I saw it earlier on HN, and I'll repeat it here: I wish I could just skip the middle man and use the NSA as my cloud provider directly. Ya think they'd just let me telnet in?

It provides high paying jobs for high school drop outs.

Haha! Love that one!

The plot of the TV show 24 is a bit more plausible.

Amen

Popularizing cryptography, hate of state-institutions and more so their people, growth market in constructive paranoia, enforcing boundaries and greater respect(fear) of the individual.

What part of "best left alone" and "shearing a pig(ty Vlad)" they don't understand?

NOTHING. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Stupid question. You might want to consider that the government is breaking the law of the land and spying on citizens. That is unconstitutional.

Well, nothing in this world is entirely bad or good. I thought, if it all became public in a hundred years or so, we could gain insights into sociology and whatnot. Like psychohistory could actually exist because of this data. Also, it 'levels' the playing field quite a bit if the data is publicly accessible; the world is not only flat, but concave in that scenario.

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