[kscz]

The difficult thing is convincing people that something could go wrong with all the trust they're investing in the government and large corporations. The thing which I think has been most frustrating is that when demonstrable situations come up [1], people seem eager to dismiss them as "just a few bad actors" and not as evidence that it's a bad idea to continue investing trust. Watching people in interviews like those in the "Inside the Creepy Russian Internet" video [2], feels to me like they're resigned to the fate of having social networks know everything about them, not that they want them to know everything about them.

What I want people to consider, frequently, is whether or not we should fight these anti-privacy measures not because anything is wrong now, but because of who might eventually be given access to that information. We should fight to make sure that tools to oppress and enforce terrible regimes aren't freely available, even if we find the current leaders trustworthy. The current administration in the Whitehouse is trying desperately to dismantle the sweeping powers to exercise drone strikes without oversight [3], because the next administration doesn't feel as trustworthy to them.

I don't know that there is any downside to having the NSA know everything about you now. I don't know that it will be a bad idea within the next administration. But I know that it's a bad idea to let any random person have that trust, and I don't know that the election system has enough safeguards to prevent abuse by the next person elected. Or the next. Or the next.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/08/24...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13102972

[3] https://theintercept.com/2016/12/06/after-8-years-of-expandi...