Comment by duairc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duairc | Hacker News Reader

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> There's no possible reason for people to support these programs and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons.

I almost agree with this, were it not equivocating two different senses of the phrase “possible reason”.

There's no legitimate reason for people to support these programs and so it is pointless and even harmful for us to talk about possible reasons.

There are possible reasons to support these programs, but they're not legitimate or sensible or reasonable or good. And that's precisely why it is harmful to talk about possible reasons to support these programs. You make it harder for people to be sure in their own minds that they are as fucked up as they seem, which makes it harder to build resistance to them, which is an urgent necessity. It might sound like what I'm talking about is immaterial, but it's not. To build resistance you need morale, to have morale you need at the very least to have the surety that you're right. To participate in the endless repetition of half-baked, rational-sounding defences of the indefensible is to make it harder for those who want to attack the indefensible to believe that they're not crazy. But we need them to believe that they're not crazy.

So I agree with the article and I agree that NSA has gone too far. But your comment feels like you have bought a jump to conclusions mat from "office space". If, for example, during the process of obtaining clearance, you were to receive certain information that you don't have now, perhaps that would change your opinion of legitimacy of these programs from a binary 0 or 1 to a more nuanced probability distribution

This reminds me a bit of Russell's teapot[1]. Basically, you're saying, imagine if there existed “certain information”, which nobody can tell me about, but if they could, it would change my beliefs? Okay. Given what I do know, I think the chances of these programs being legitimate are about the same as the chances that there is “between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit”.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

You have heard Iranians chant "Death To America" at their official rallies right? How do you know that the chance that they don't mean it is zero ? Based on what information? Even at the height of the cold war nobody ever chanted "Death To America" in the Soviet Union.

I feel like you're assuming that I'm American and that I don't want America to die. I think most people in the world will be delighted when the American empire inevitably collapses. Not just “Iranians” — as if there are “official rallies” for an entire country of people.

There are official rallies in Iran orchestrated by those who are in power and dictate policy and when they chant "Death To America", I don't think they are talking about collapse of the empire but literal death. In any case, most of us on this forum do not want the American empire to collapse. My personal opinion is the United States, for all its flaws is a force of good in the world. Often times, Europeans adopt holier than thou attitude, conveniently forgetting their own troubled history with colonialism and heavily relying on the United States for defence

..and while the intelligentsia are busy debating the theoretical possibility of the existence of said teapot, the powers that be are acting decisively and defining the reality.

If such information exists, why not just reveal it to a few influential and reasonably trusted individuals and groups (such as Schneier, EFF, EPIC, ACLU) to get the public off their backs?

Who decides what's legitimate and what's not?

The short answer is: you.

Obviously there is no objective universal criteria for legitimacy or morality or anything like that. It will come down to what your personal politics are, a fact which will itself be hugely influenced by your material position in the web of power relations that structures your social reality.

This is true.

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