Comment by steve1977
7 hours ago
Also always keep in mind that what is legal today might be illegal tomorrow. This includes things like your ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
You don't know today on which side of legality you will be in 10 years, even if your intentions are harmless.
The reaction from the masses: "But that isn't true today, anything could happen in the future, and why should I invest so much work on something that's only a possibility?"
People do not have justifications for most choices. We watch YouTube when we would benefit more from teaching ourselves skills. We eat too much of food we know is junk. We stay up too late and either let others walk over us at work to avoid overt conflict or start fights and make enemies to protect our own emotions. If you want to know why Americans are allowing themselves to be gradually reduced to slavery, do not ask why.
It's disingenuous to say Americans are "allowing" themselves to do anything in the face of countless, relentless, multi-billion corporate campaigns, designed by teams of educated individuals, to make them think and act in specific ways.
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I sometimes imagine that HN was a professional collective. Maybe working with the supply chain of foodstuffs. Carciogenic foodstuff would be legal. Environmental harzards getting into foodstuff would be legal. But there would be a highly ideological subgroup that would advocate for something that would very indirectly handle these problems. And the rest of the professional collective are mixed and divided on whether they are good or what they are actually working towards. A few would have the insight to realize that one of the main people behind the group foresaw these problems that are current right now 30 years ago.
That people ingest environmental hazards and carciogens would be viewed as a failure of da masses to abstractly consider the pitfalls of understanding the problems inherent to the logistics of foodstuffs in the context of big corporations.
The older I get the more disconnected I feel from some of the posters on this site. I can't remember exactly when I joined, 2012ish maybe? But the takes people have seem to be getting wilder and wilder.
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Don't forget your comments on HN, which, as we all know, don't go away. I think the chilling-effect is absolutely real now.
Privacy itself can become illegal just as easily as religion, etc. if we follow your argument.
What point do you think you're making?
My interpretation: advocating for privacy without making effort to avoid a large part of the society goes "crazy" will not protect you much on the long term.
I do like "engineering solutions" (ex: not storing too much data), but I start to think it is important to make more effort on more broad social, legal and political aspects.
EU is literally debating about "Chat Control". Its purpose is to scan for child sexual abuse material in internet traffic. But its at the cost of breaking end to end encryption.
I wouldn't be surprised that Trump goes one step further. He is so unleashed, and irrational. This guy is a liability for humanity
> Its purpose is to scan
That's its ostensible, purported, show purpose.
The real purpose is to break end to end encryption to increase government surveillance and power. "But think of the children" or "be afraid of the terrorists" are just the excuses those in power rotate through to to achieve their true desired ends.
Yes, that is indeed the point.
Absolutely - there are quite a few attempts in this direction.
It's a hell of lot harder to enforce...
Harder than ethnicity or sexual orientation or religion?
Data are immortal times of peace are not!
Which is why I generally vote for people who believe in freedom versus an overreaching state.
I need to get this super power.
I am lucky to get to vote for people that don't believe in a religious ethno-state.
I think it must depend on the country, right?
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They want to declare "Antifa" a terrorist organization. So anyone that is against fascism (ANTI-FAscist) will be labeled a terrorist. Let that sink in for a moment.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/desi...
Don’t forget about social media posts. In the UK, people are being jailed for those today.
Imagine if they used your past post history against you.
Which posts are people being jailed for?
Here’s Googles response:
Yes, arrests for social media activity occur in the UK under laws like the Communications Act 2003 and Malicious Communications Act 1988, targeting offenses such as sending offensive/menacing messages, false communications, hate speech, or child grooming, with thousands arrested annually, though charges and convictions vary, and new laws like the Online Safety Act 2023 add further regulatory scope.
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In the US if you make a social media post threatening the president you are breaking the law and can be sent to jail just as much as if you said it
These are both true statements, but there's a huge difference in scale.
The UK arrests 12,000 people per year for social media posts ( https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/... ), for a broad range of vague reasons including causing offense. That's far more than much larger totalitarian nations like Russia and China.
The US arrests folks for direct online threats of violence - a much higher bar.
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Link?
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No they're not. An incredibly small number of people might get arrested if policing cocks up. Nobody is being jailed.
Laws can not be applied retroactively.
>ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and much more.
In this case you will very likely be given an option to leave or change (not possible for ethniticity).
Wanting to be able to break the law in the future is not a just motivation.
Challenge.
Laws cannot an action a crime after it was committed. However,
- Civil rules can and do impact things retroactively
- Laws may not make something illegal retroactively, but the interpretation of a law can suddenly change; which works out the same thing.
- The thing you're doing could suddenly become illegal with on way for you to avoid doing it (such as people being here legally and suddenly the laws for what is legally changes). This isn't retroactive, but it might as well be.
It is _entirely_ possible for someone to act in a way that is acceptable today but is illegal, or incurs huge civil penalties, tomorrow.
> Laws can not be applied retroactively.
I mean, I've read stupid takes on this website but this really takes the cake
despots don't care about the law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
>despots don't care about the law
This is such a low probability scenario that I don't think it's worth the average person to worry about.
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> Laws can not be applied retroactively.
I would not be surprised if SCOTUS disagrees at some point.