Unfortunately, it's difficult to point out the high-powered shilling for authority that happens on HN because the biggest shills wield incredible influence (and karma).
One learns not to poke the bear.
But a good proportion of prior threads on the topics of NSA surveillance, silk road (or tor in general), CISA, FBI/prosecutorial overreach, etc - has certain somebodies reliably pull the Frank Drebben "nothing to see here" routine regarding abuses of authority.
The shilling that gets upvoted is rarely overt. It's almost always of the "this isn't so bad, citizen, carry on" or "criminals deserve it" variety that dramatically understates or deflects the threat posed to us by authority.
I've definitely seen this. This includes a handful of threads discussing legitimate concerns about BULLRUN-style influence that were suddenly insta-flagged, punted from the front page and hidden form the main index[1] by those same shills. Several times the "nothing to see here" explanation took the form of a sudden concern for "not wanting to tarnish someone's reputation".
[1] which means moderator access
edit:
Anybody that thinks this is unlikely needs to watch PHK's "Operation Orchestra":
https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/nsa_operation...
Of course, understanding the motivation for their use, and oversight of the users is important, and I am in favour of making sure these tools are not abused. However to say that their mere existence implies a police state is laughable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_stop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
http://theweek.com/articles/531458/troubling-rise-swat-teams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_cop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_stop-and-frisk_p...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rao33ZYlrq4 (just watch it and get infuriated)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
You people seem to speak as if the right to privacy is unquestionably good, and don't bother justify your beliefs. Surely, no progress can be made this way.
It would be nice if we could live in an open society, but the reality is that discrimination and abuse still exist. Insisting that everybody forget about privacy is not only going to get some people killed and many others fired. Insisting that privacy is bad is effectively telling any minority that they have to stay "in the closet" if they want to keep their job and not be harassed by the bigots in society.
That's just the practical issues. A stronger argument for privacy is best summed up by Jacob Appelbaum's observation in Citizenfour:
What people used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy.
And we say, in the same breath, that privacy is dead.
Of course, you still believe in privacy. If you really think privacy doesn't make any sense, post your name, address, bank account numbers, social security number, and any email addresses you've used. None of those items are "secret" information (like a password). I could list a lot more things, but you should get the idea.
I'd be quite happy for my country's intelligence agencies to have that information, sure, no problem...
There is zero correlation between the values I hold in this discussion and what best serves my personal interest. I have the capacity to completely detach myself from my arguments in a way that leads to a lack of bias. I am morally and intellectually selfless.
Legislation should never arise from anecdotes or personal preferences. Would I be abused or stalked, the fact that transparency is inherently superior wouldn't change.
> It would be nice if we could live in an open society, but the reality is that discrimination and abuse still exist. Insisting that everybody forget about privacy is not only going to get some people killed and many others fired. Insisting that privacy is bad is effectively telling any minority that they have to stay "in the closet" if they want to keep their job and not be harassed by the bigots in society.
There is no debate to be had about the fact that pain will be involved in the transition to a transparent society. Of course it won't be easy. However, it would be unreasonable to ignore the biggest problem of our time just because of a short-term friction. Like any form of investment in life, there are short-term drawbacks.
Human reasoning is weird as it understands a loss to be worse than a lack of gain. Loss aversion is the reason why we don't change things, which is the reason we can't get nicer things. People have no idea how much they're missing by trying to preserve "their" privacy.
We're all "in the closet" in some regards. We're also all bigots. We must force people out of their closet. We must expose bigotry. Only then will things start to improve.
> We have the freedom to decide what we want to disclose publicly.
Quoting the Bible would have had the same effect.
> We have the freedom to decide what we want to disclose publicly.
Actually we don't. Should I have the right to erase something from your brain because you saw something I didn't want you to see? Of course I'm not suggesting that we should coerce people into doing anything they don't want to do, but a person's actions shouldn't be protected by any external entity. At the end of the day, an honest person has a lot more to gain by exposing themselves to the world instead of keeping things to themselves. IoT, Wearables, Big Data, AI are all concrete examples of how data gathering can improve people's lives.
> Of course, you still believe in privacy. If you really think privacy doesn't make any sense, post your name, address, bank account numbers, social security number, and any email addresses you've used. None of those items are "secret" information (like a password). I could list a lot more things, but you should get the idea.
Privacy and Transparency are not games you can play alone. They're inherently social. The society is built on top of expectations of privacy. For example, there is some information that I legally couldn't disclose, even if I wanted to. Likewise, my identity is only secured by archaic methods of authentication, which completely breaks if my password gets known. Private key cryptography is not a technology we should build sensitive systems on top of, and it will quickly be destroyed once P = NP gets proven and applied.
Your question is like asking a person to not wear a seat belt in an unsafe car. I might not think that humans should wear seat belts forever, yet I still wear one when I drive my car every day.
Fast-forward 1000 years in the future. Total transparency. Ask a person whether they'd like to keep their name, address, bank account numbers, social security number, email address (assuming these things still exist which they won't). Surely, that person would refuse to make this information private as doing so would make his life miserable considering all the benefits this used to enable.
The least I can ask from people is to discuss this issue seriously, and not just accept privacy to be the solution to all of our problems. This whole obsession with privacy is just a distraction.
The easiest person to fool is yourself.
I've read Brin's Transparent Society as well, and I agree that a functioning society along those lines would be much, much healthier than we have now. However, this article is about the privacy-erasing tools used by the powers that be, whose very existence was secret to those on the outside until now. I'll surrender my privacy just after they do.
Never going to happen.
I do detect a bit of ego in your arguments about being a "special person" and it makes me distrust your stance even more.
If the authority at the time had the ability to completely invade their privacy, would they have been as effective? The truth is that the most important progress in society almost always begins outside the status quo and without privacy that status quo becomes much more difficult to disrupt.
Seems pretty obvious to me.
Then... the current power structure will just accept disruption to their system because it's the right thing to do? They won't use their intelligence advantage to maintain the status quo? They won't use their mass of information to slander and render ineffective any opposition?
I also manage to have some empathy, if only because it might serve me well someday. Try it. It's actually part of enlightened self-interest.
What privacy advocates do is reduce freedom of knowledge. They're the kind of person that create PIPA/SOPA and kill the internet. I don't deem them wise.
As for empathy, I fail to understand how it relates to the above.
You're clueless.
These people are ther exact cross section of the population opposed to those sorts of things.
You said;
What privacy advocates do is reduce freedom of knowledge. They're the kind of person that create PIPA/SOPA and kill the internet.
And I said privacy advocates are the exact kind of people to oppose such laws as PIPA/SOPA.
You seem to be making contradictort statements born of confusion over what privacy and civil liberties advocates are actually in support of.
The security services and police are wildly out of control and have been intensely surveilling and scrutinizing the content of innocent people's communications without any oversight. This clearly doesn't make us any safer, as there have been two terrorist attacks on US soil during the era in which these totalitarian abuses have happened, so that argument can be discarded.
In short, we don't have security (nor could we ever have perfect security), and they've taken our liberty without our permission. Disgusting abuse of democracy. How can people attend a political rally or do any political activity when they know that their attendance and discussions are going to be analyzed for weaknesses by a malevolent third party?