Maybe you don’t, but for some people, it’s lethal.

https://www.justsecurity.org/10318/video-clip-director-nsa-c...

Good. Im glad the NSA is doing it's job. I don't want terrorists to feel safe while using our systems.

Keep in mind that you don't decide who's a terrorist and who isn't. You might be "glad" about the NSA doing their job as long as your definition of terrorism aligns with the government's but what if that ceases to be the case?

I'm too young to truly appreciate this, but I have spent my time going through archives of the Cypherpunk mailing list.

The one thing I always think about on HN is what some of those guys would think (or presently think) about the cultural shift among nerds and otherwise techies such that this comment is even possible.

They all projected, correctly or not, such a potentially dystopian/utopian world. And they definitely didn't agree with each other. But there was still this sense of shared belief and shared cause of generally being, to say the least, skeptical and antagonistic to the state, of the kind of formal potential for liberation in code. That things could be different.

But here we are now. Computers and what they do are no longer a source of hope or doom. They either make us money, or they help us catch ambiguous enemies.

I wish I had been around for the golden era. All that is solid melts into air.

It's no mistake that the rise of cyberpunk and postmodernism coincided with the collapse of competing ideologies to market capitalism. As Capital killed its enemies, you see belief in humanity and its ideals in art go up in smoke.

Personally, I find computers to be harbingers of doom. Not essentially, of course, but it's pretty clear at this point we're not going to see the potential of the technology we already have realized within my lifetime, but we will see a good deal of the predicted use to abuse people. Hell, we already see much of it.

Blaming capitalism doesn’t make any sense because it’s a different axis. The security vs privacy debate is quite old and different societies handle the trade completely independently of how capitalistic their economy is.

>completely independently

Well, certainly not completely independently.

The fact that you can make more money when people have less privacy plays a part in the decision-making process.

If only the NSA or the people designating who terrorists are vs who our allies are had such pure, pro-human intentions.

A hypothetical problem that we can tackle when (or if) it's actually a problem. Thanks for your metadata, regardless.

I'd say as soon as this becomes your problem it's too late for you to do anything about it.

Is it really a hypothetical at this point? I was under the impression that relevant cases have already been explored ( to the extent that one can given the nature of IC ). In cases like these, the moment it is actually a problem, it is likely already too late to make sensible adjustments.

>“We kill people based on metadata”

>“metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

Your response to the above quotes is so short-sighted that I don't even know where to begin.

As long as it's the people you don't like dying, I guess it's cool.

Good thing the NSA is the only group in the world that has access to metadata at scale.