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Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

Er, no.

I don't want to be spied on, no matter how "open" the process is. My problem isn't the openness, its the spying in the first place. I don't care if its a select few, or the whole worlds population, I don't want to be spied on. I have done nothing wrong. I am not a suspect. I don't expect to be treated like one as some sort of evil default, thank you very much.

Get your suspect first, then do the spying. Not violate the population's privacy to find a suspect. Do that and people who say the West has become some sort of Nazi/Communist terror state will begin to sound less mental.

Sorry, but bending over and taking it rectally is no solution what so ever. It is a weak, lazy, cowardly, surrender.

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We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

The internet permits much more anonymity and privacy than people had previously: we no longer need to mail physical letters, post physical signs, or tell people things in person in order to communicate some piece of information. Humans have more privacy, not less, because they don't need to physically go to adult cinemas, video stores, or peep shows; and the walls of a house are much thicker than those of a shack, a straw hut, or a teepee.

What has changed over the last few hundred years has not been a decrease in our abilities to be anonymous or private, since in the past it was harder to be discreet. The change has rather been that instead of a town or a village knowing through the grapevine what's going on, it is a central authority who is collecting all the information, with all the attendant power that having such information affords.

The problem is thus not a lack of privacy and anonymity -- we have more of it than we ever did. What we suffer from is massive disparities in who knows what about whom (as compared with most of human history). This is the problem which is rectified by greater transparency.

  > We know that people behave better when
  > they're accountable for what they do and say

The majority sometimes holds the minority 'accountable' for things that are clear violations of human rights. This kind of transparency would enable persecution on a massive scale.

Surreptitious, massive Internet surveillance does nothing to address your first paragraph.

We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

For some definition of "better" that's probably true. We also know that feeling like they have no privacy causes people to stop taking risks - creative, financial, personal, etc.

A world with massive surveillance is a world of joyless automatons and basically zero social progress.

Only automatons if people ACCEPT being watched and self-censor.

A recent post suggested that without secret communication, much social progress wouldn't have come about.

Consider this though: a surveillance world where people break the law en masse - London Street Riots, 4/20 (see tumblr, reddit) in the USA.

I think this is true for most definitions of "better". Our definitions of good, in the first place, are learned, reinforced, and enforced, from observing social norms. In their absence (as we get on Freenet, Tor, 4chan, etc.) we see people behaving much more anti-socially much more often.

Society, culture, and cooperation are almost entirely responsible for the wealth we've accumulated and were born into. (Potential) social scrutiny and the internalization of social norms are required for ensuring that people behave in ways that don't hurt others. When this scrutiny comes from Big Brother then, yes, we have horrible tyranny. When it emerges, messily, from the intersecting interests and values of the crowd, then the outcome tends to be pretty good.

>We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

What you're saying here is that people conform to social norms better when they can be "held accountable" for not doing so. Now imagine some of the unhealthy social norms of the past and how people were "held accountable" for violating them.

Anonymity has a cost, but it is a cost that must be paid or we do not have a free society in any sense of the word.

We also know people behave better if guarded by people with guns and dogs.... "Better"? What you really mean is they conform. They do as told. And lose individuality and creativity.

Well, Heil yourself, 'cos Im not interested. I want to be part of a human race, not a damned Borg Collective.

Do you wait for someone to perform a public illegal act before they become a "suspect"? Rely on tips from informants?

The scale & invisibleness of PRISM is part of what makes it so repugnant to us. If the NSA had 1000 guys in "NSA" t-shirts walking the streets in every major city, it would be irritating but almost laughable.

I would say sarcastically that if NSA is spying without much efforts, just pushing a button and analyzing the data with well known algorithms then US can reduce their deficit by a big amount firing all those "analysts".

They can even anonymize the information and crowdsource the analysis like Kaggle.

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