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by _Understated_ 1991 days ago
> There is literally no technology that the Stasi having would be a good thing, including pen and paper.

Not sure I agree with that analogy... pen and paper doesn't scale!

Having the ability to do something at global scale, like facial recognition or real-time tracking and saying "Honest! We won't use it for dodgy things" is not sufficient...

It'd be naieve to say I'd rather it didn't exist, however that cat is out of the bag now so there _must_ be incredibly robust and tamper-proof checks and balances round its use and the penalties for subverting that should be incredibly severe.

3 comments

Pen and paper scaled fine for the Stasi. They operated for 4 decades: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/adrian-fish-the-stasi-archives...
Everything scale if you are evil enough. Even doing things manually, alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin#Role_in_the_Kat...

> Not sure I agree with that analogy... pen and paper doesn't scale!

Most of what the Stasi used didn't scale. They used it anyway.