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Comment by middleclick | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder - will it ever end? We are nowhere even close to seeing this stop. Or is 1984 going to come out to be actually true rather than just a work of fiction? Orwell thought of the future in 1947-1948. Wherever he is now, I am sure he is going all "told ya so!".

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We will have to start voting for people who will end it, instead of promising us free stuff (which often as not, is a lie too).

You're assuming that NSA data is not yet being used to influence the outcome of our elections.

Voting is pointless when you can't trust anyone. If we want improved privacy, we have to do it on our own. That means improved, open source tools for encryption, anonymous browsing and messaging.

The problem is that you can't know wether they'll do that until after you gave them power, and after that there is no real recourse (not in practice anyway). That's kind of where the whole thing falls down, and the idea that wanting to get re-elected keeps politicians in line turns out to be naive and simplicistic.

Heck, if I buy a piece of bread and there is a dead mouse in it, I can actually return it and get my money back! So many small transactions have safeguards against fraud or fucking up, but handing over the keys to whole nations? Right this way sir, make yourself at home. Imagine hiring a babysitter, and they just eat your baby, clear your fridge, and the cops force you to pay them for their hours regardless. That's kind of where democracy is at.

The solution is to assume that anyone who gets power will act in a 100% corrupt, cynical, and self-serving way. It's a bit like building fault tolerance into a distributed system. Even if each of your servers will only be unreliable a very small percentage of the time, you must assume that at any given time, any given server could be down, or your whole system will be fragile.

Similarly, a government that relies on the moral character of its officials rather than institutionalized checks and balances is a weak and easily exploitable system of government.

If you have the checks and balances, you can still hope for politicians that will keep their promises, but when many of them inevitably don't, they will be limited in the amount of damage they can do.

That's right. The argument I often hear from people about the Snowden stuff is that, in contrast with a corporation, the government is there for "its people" and "will never abuse its power". What they forget is that the government is run by people, and people are by nature selfish and are looking for personal gain. So as you say, I think that "a government that relies on the moral character of its officials" is doomed to get corrupted and exploited, sooner or later.

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