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Comment by stillsut | Hacker News Reader

Three letters: IRS.

Based on their whim, your privacy can be completely invaded, and you can be thrown in jail. This happens ALL the time.

What is the NSA going to do? Bring you ("meddlesome kids") into court based non-admissable evidence from PRISM? Never heard of it happening once. Please cite a case if you disagree.

And bothersome people working way outside the law like Deepthroat, LulzSec, etc. already do take enormous steps to preserve their anonymity in communications. NSA changes nothing for me.

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Here is how it can go down, the cops are chasing Bill, because Bill is able to demonstrate that fracking is causing cancer, and all the politicians knew about it and were bribed. PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana. Send the cops an "anonymous" tip, and are instructed to make an example of this guy, and throw the book at him. Any hard documents are now confiscated as part of the arrest, and the state simply declares the documents to have been tampered with, but include sensitive data, so the public will never see it.

Why so convoluted? If we're going to make up completely unsubstantiated stories, let's go with a simple one.

Bill gets shot in the head because the cop doesn't like him.

The end.

You greatly overestimate how complicated corruption has to be.

Life is often convoluted as much as it is simple, also that story details an example of parallel construction which is a technique that has been shown to be in current use, while yours seems more of a description of a movie you saw while too drunk to be really paying attention.

No need to be a jerk. I think the "shot in the head" story seems much more plausible out of those two scenarios.

Is not a contest for which story could happen more often though.

Do you really need me to link to all the times cops shot people they didn't like, for no reason other than the cop didn't like that person?

Bad cops shoot people for no reason all the time, relatively speaking, so this story has plenty of precedence, unlike the above story, which is pure conjecture.

Both stories have plenty of precedence, I just thought the first was perhaps slightly more illuminating considering the context.

Someone killing someone they don't like, purely because they do not like them, and then getting away with it because they hold a position of influence or power of course happens, and is nothing to do really with whether or not anyone involved is a cop. That situation has been playing out a lot longer than there have been cops in existence and also has very little to do with the current discussion.

edit -

also, in the simple version of your story, where 'a cop shoots someone they don't like, the end', the story is actually too simple to be about corruption.

You need the rest of the story to know if that particular cop is corrupt. As it stands it is just plain murder.

Now if the cop doesn't then hand themselves in and starts planning on how to get away with the killing, then you are into corruption, but also the story gets more convoluted.

Both stories do not have plenty of precedence. The original story is conjecture - as told, it's never happened. My story (we can add, "and was not punished in any way", for clarity's sake - I thought that was implied), however, has happened many, many times.

Both stories as told never happened, the first invents a character who is then killed to make a point in the second.

Both stories are about things that occur in the real world, however one is about the subject of privacy and surveillance and one isn't, so given the thread I think the one on topic is possibly more constructive.

My story actually has happened, multiple times. Happens fairly often, in fact. During the civil rights movement, all sorts of injustices were actually happening to blacks (not just non-consequential murder), for example.

Yet there are no examples of the story being told in the above comments. It's literally fiction, and it hurts the conversation.

The beauty of the example I provided is it would be almost almost impossible to prove. Shooting a guy in the head, as opposed to arresting him raises more questions, and investigations. Your solution is a product of an unskilled mind. Though the competency of government is weak, the competency of the TLA's is anything but.

Isn't that convenient for you, then?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

> Bill gets shot in the head because the cop doesn't like him.

I assume that cops while having great leeway in how they frame their story, still have to explain such incidents and have a risk to their career if they don't do a good job of it.

So at the very least the cop has to hate Bill enough to go through the pain of explaining away Bill's death and dealing with any administrative consequences.

> PRISIM intercepts bill talking to his dealer, and knows that he will have a small amount of weed on his person for sciatica because his state doesn't have medical marijuana.

Forget the state; possession of marijuana is a federal crime rendering the possessor eligible for jail time in all 50 states, including the states where it is regarded by the general public as "legal".

This strikes me as an incredibly dangerous development that most seem to ignore. Selective enforcement of laws broken by everyone, all the time, is just as terrifying as the loss of privacy.

Wrong. If the Feds try to prosecute someone from Colorado for pot they have now created standing to overrule the Federal law. They can cut their own throats if they like, but that is not in their interest, they are fighting against a rising tide and they want to hold on as long as they can.

There are more than enough examples of people jailed without trial/representation for things they've said on Facebook under the name of national security or terrorism or whatever. Law enforcement doesn't need admissible evidence to wreck someone's life.

Now this I agree with. See: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2013/05/23/a-methuen...

The line I'm trying to draw is between Intelligence/Communications-intercepts Vs. Enforcement.

All the police needed to do in the above case is go on FB, no spycraft needed. It's always a question, like with the IRS, of what they can do to you.

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