And long before that too, it's just taken different soundbites that play on people's fears at the time.

In the UK, they've used variously terrorism, illegal migration and pornography to push this.

It's actually much more older argument. Hurr durr muh children is so common in history yet so effective that this is beyond absurd.

I am unconvinced from a practical standpoint that this vision of the world that you wish to live in is even possible today due to the increase in sectarian communal tensions, dense cities, widely available cars/guns/etc and stresses from cost of living and income inequality, as well as the spread of ideas that mass casualty attacks might be a thing to do (the US did not have school attacks until it became an unfortunate "thing" in the culture that sick people glommed onto).

An absence of surveillance causes increased frequency of terrorist attacks which causes people to demand solutions (necessarily involving surveillance and other authoritarian measures) which leads to increased surveillance. It's an unfortunate negative feedback loop.

If you lack solutions for too long, the negative feedback loop becomes severe and instead of just surveillance within a liberal democratic context, you get public safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte.

"Surveillance doesn't materially reduce terrorist attacks" - I am not sure about that based on the number of arrests of plotters and the lack of visibility I have into the tools and methods they used to find those plotters.

"Terrorist attacks still happen even with surveillance" - Yes, but if they happen less frequently, this reduces the demand from the public to ratchet up authoritarianism. See the problem?

"Terrorist attacks are a price worth paying for our freedom." - I mostly agree, but feeling like this doesn't make any difference to the negative feedback loop, does it? Regular people want public safety from physical danger almost as much as food and water.

In most countries, death by terrorist is at least an order of magnitude less likely than death by bee. Strangely, we do not seem to be on a campaign to lock all humans in-doors to protect them from bees, nor have we declared a global war on beeism. These stats hold from before the modern surveillance regime, and so can hardly be credited to it. It's not actually a problem in particular need of urgent solving. Regular people are safe from terrorism, much safer than they are against most kinds of tragic accidents. What regular people are actually in danger of is losing all of their human rights to fearmongerers, who constantly invoke terrorism to erode them further and further.

Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism, so I don't know why you thought it relevant to bring them up. I think it is really sad to see comments on HN of all places advocating that if we don't implement chat control we'll spiral into a lawless hellscape.

Sincerely, you misunderstand what I am saying, or you didn't read until the end where I said that some level of terrorism is a price worth paying in my subjective judgment.

My point is that my subjective judgment counts for nothing, because the negative feedback loop that I described is a society-wide phenomenon beyond my control as an individual. Asking the majority of people to think the way you do about terrorism is somewhere between wishcasting and virtue signalling. It doesn't interrupt the causality behind the negative feedback loop, so it therefore fails to outline a path that can be trodden in the real world to achieve your desired vision of no surveillance.

> Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism

Move your abstraction one level higher. They arose out of public safety concerns around murder and drugs and gangs. Those are not terrorism, but they fit under the same umbrella of public safety concerns that motivate regular people to demand authoritarian solutions.

India saw 779 million dollars lost to cyber fraud in the first 5 months of 2025.

The degree of cyber fraud in India is beyond insane.

Also - funnily enough - Indian telecom companies are meant to be fined for every SIM card given out under false data. There is already meant to be a check that stops this.