Hacker News Reader

Comment by blake8086 | Hacker News Reader

Hey, can you post your email username/password here so we can all read your mail?

I worry about random people on the Internet having access to my information about 1000 times more than I do the NSA.

a.) the way the NSA seems to foster security flaws to use them, instead of helping fix them, they are also helping "random people" get access to your data. A backdoor put there by the NSA can be used by anyone else, in theory.

b.) what you personally do not worry about is not relevant, your arguments why nobody else should worry either are. You are not a journalist or activist, so you don't care. It's like saying it's okay that certain food contents are not labelled for the benefit of those having allergies against them, or that kids should be used as bio fuel, because you don't have an allergy or kids.

who are these NSA people that aren't also random people?

They are a subset of random people, and one OP is less concerned about having his credentials than random people as a whole.

an interesting question GP raises...

Who would you be more worried about having access to your email account and why?

  a. NSA
  b. a random criminal (unaffiliated with government)

For me, the answer is not even close, but I'm more interested in understanding how others on HN process this.

In cases like these you have to evaluate the probability of something bad happening times the magnitude of the harm (essentially the expected value). The NSA can do much more damage (excluding the fact that they can do similar damage even without having this information) than a random lowly criminal, however the likelihood they'll target a boring person such as me is much lower. So for me I'd be more worried about b. Of course, ideally I would rather not have to worry about either.

I'm insured against criminality. I'm on my own should the government decide to shit on me.

What leads you to believe that a and b are mutually exclusive? OK a has probably not been caught and charged with anything, but may well have committed criminal acts. Is there not a statistic that the average American commits 3 criminal acts a day without realizing it?

The sets of a and b are not exclusive, until _you_ explicitly declared them to be exclusive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com