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Comment by msrpotus | Hacker News Reader

One of the scariest parts of this is that it seems like surveillance (if not censorship) is much more targeted. If you aren't the NSA's focus or on a TSA watch list, you might not know anything is going on. But if you are unlucky enough to trigger something, you might be visited with unimaginable torment like @chimeracoder was.

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Exactly. The biggest threat from surveillance and censorship isn't the imposition on average citizens.

Rather, the risk is that surveillance, censorship, intimidation, selective law enforcement, and so on are targeted at specific political opponents --- such as Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Glenn Greenwald, Marin Luther King Jr. and so on.

Such authoritarian harassment presents a straightforward threat to democracy because it stifles political dissent.

Democracy is incompatible with the stifling of political dissent.

Too many people view major, rival parties as opponents. Are they waiting for Democrats to imprison Republicans and vice versa? Those parties are brothers. The opposition includes the names you listed and because they don't have that glossy marketed façade and brand, they're viewed by the majority as crazed or rogues.

To be fair, that was not unimaginable torment. I think most people can readily imagine what it would feel like to go through what he went through.

The racist overtones are also scary.

Personally I find the racist overtones to be the least scary aspect of this story. I grew up in rural Texas; for police/government officials to conduct their work with a base level of racism is, while frustrating and sickening, pretty much to be expected. Kafka-esque detention, authoritarian abuse of power, and the hinted-at FBI search of the OP's apartment scare me a lot more.

Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.

"Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't."

Anyone who has been investigated for a DWB might disagree.

Casual racism and unreasonable search and seizure have been pretty consistently tied together as a common standard in policing, not just in the U.S, but across the world. There is something in the way that police organisations operate that makes them particularly susceptible to treating racist stereotypes as probable cause.

Actually I found two things very scary.

1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim?

2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.

About the "ignorance" on the part of the FBI guy, I wouldn't believe anything an interrogating officer tells me. Playing dumb is one of the oldest tricks in the book: "So, tell me about the religion you claim to profess and about which I know nothing so you can bullshit me, really".

Anecdote: my sister in law is in the FBI and I can guarantee she doesn't know the first thing about Hinduism. Or Islam for that matter.

The detectors are most certainly cheap ion mobility spectrometers. They ionize the sample and sort the resulting cloud by the speed at which the ions move in an electric field in a low pressure gas. The resulting spectrum is fairly unique to each chemical.

The obvious problem is that you get a superposition of spectrums of multiple chemicals from the sample and that the devices being cheap and fast produce "blurry" spectrums, so you get a lot of false positives.

It isn't a far leap to theorize that a good deal of oppression and aggression comes from an ancient, primal racism: the desire to remove competitive males and tribes from gene pools. Look at the mass number of black males incarcerated in the War on Drugs, and how eagerly we label any military-age males as "enemy combatants" in the War on Terror. You can even read this into Russia's paranoia that the West's "gay propaganda" is a plot to destabilize their collective male fertility.

To say that we're the only species to engage in murder and genocide is flat wrong: chimps will happily murder other chimps, even infants [1]. Maybe we're not as civilized as we think we are, and all the narratives and uniforms and laws are just theater to subsume and rationalize our animal savagery.

Nothing is ever simple, so I can't imagine this tells the whole story, but it's a big big factor, and it doesn't help anyone to ignore it.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/06/does-c...

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

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