| HN Mirror

It's a false equivalence to say that "everyone does it".

1. It's unclear how surveillance does anything for a countries competitiveness. If we're talking security, the US's competitive edge in technology should have enabled them to completely reshape world affairs to their liking long ago. If they can be duped bit some sadistic middle-eastern ophthalmologist in the way they have, it shows how useless those skills are.

Economically, the benefits of surveillance are especially limiting. You may be able to support a few "national heroes" like Boeing here and there, or win a few tenders with your knowledge of some interior ministers passion for really strange pornography, but the economic effects are negligible.

2. "Everyone does it" is a really really bad excuse for something morally repugnant. When did we start measuring morality on scale relative to others?

3. Not everyone does. In fact, barely anyone does it, and even fewer use it for economic competitiveness. Even discounting places like Luxemburg or Qatar because they use non-replicable features for their success, I'd point at the Netherlands, Austria, Canada or Denmark as countries that are successful even though they almost certainly lack the ability to play that game on any level comparable to the US.

4. Even you think it's naive to expect moral leadership in a world of race-to-the-bottom competition, there are long-established processes to avoid playing the prisoner's dilemma with the rights of everyone on earth: cooperation, embodied in the WTO, the ICC, the Oxford Manual of Style, START 1-3, RFC 2616, or actually anything else that is collectively called "international law". I know americans hate the concept because they really don't get a foreigner, of all people, could disagree with them but just underneath the surface these systems have worked extremely well for everyone.

5. It may be right to try to solve these issues technologically. Such solutions may even be preferable because they don't require trust, or the expectation of mora; behavior from everyone. But I'd still prefer a political solution because there is a universe of problems that cannot be solved technologically and I fear a world where we've given up on expecting people's behavior to be limited by anything but feasibility.

So yes, if you can create a protocol or an AI that gives people power over their data do publish it, if you can teach people to use technology, do so. But don't join the cynical masses that don't expect anything from their leaders, or declare ruthless competition as the only "rational" choice, or deny humanity's ability to give shape to their fate in the face of the downward pressure of game theory.