| Wait ... what (?) ... 'good intentions' are not very relevant here. I don't care what Koch's other objectives might be, this is an ugly transgression of people's rights. Arbitrary government surveillance is an incredibly bad thing and a very slippery slope. We're witnessing governments around the world establishing '360 Surveillance' for all sorts of 'socially positive!', but ultimately dubious reasons. If the government had specific reason to grab information about a specific person and a lawfully obtained warrant given a specific set of circumstances - then yes. Or if we're talking the government buying generalized anonymoized information that is publicly available otherwise - then yes. But slipping spyware onto phones is straight outrageous. I'm generally a communitarian type person who believes we ought to step up and do the right thing as citizens but even I recognize this as the slipperiest of all slopes irrespective of their reasoning, and I can't fathom the tone of the comments here given that this is HN with usually a distinctly more libertarian-ish leaning. "Not everything requires a good guy and a bad guy. "Everybody Sucks Here" applied here. " Sorry but the 'Government of Mass' are the 'Bad Guys' here and the 'Koch Brothers' (or whoever is paying for this, I don't care) are the 'Good Guys' for going after them. That's it. This will hopefully be resolved in the courts. |