Comment by 2ndorderthought
1 day ago
The time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago.
Every single person in the US's future, safety, rights and freedom is currently at stake. There is no more time left to wait and see how things play out.
More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.
I'm old enough to remember AT&T room 641A
> More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
Yeah, obama was president at the time.
A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened.
People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
A couple things you're ignoring or underplaying for some stupid political-score-keeping reason:
1) Many were upset, especially here and in the general tech media, with the Snowden information. Is "a lot of fanfare and then nothing happened" worse to you than "no fanfare and nothing happened"? The fanfare regardless of who was in office on that info is telling, there, no?
2) Many of those policies went back well before Obama
Not sure why you're trying to deflect "we should be fighting this" into "Obama bad, actually!" when the evidence is very clear that it crosses parties, has crossed parties for decades, and will almost certainly continue to if the status quo is maintained.
Possibly because you don't want to fight it?
It's an explicit policy of the Trump admin to not just increase the volume of deportations (regardless of if they've hit their goals yet), but also increase the speed and disruptiveness of them (picking people up when they're at their regularly scheduled "trying to do it the right way" appointments, for instance), and reduce judicial process and oversight.
It's very intentionally NOT the same action, because they're looking for more red meat for the base to distract from any number of other failed promises on affordability, jobs, etc. They've really been unable to do much there other than, at best, "stay on or close to the trend line from 2023-onward as the covid-induced supply chain bullwhips and demand whiplash effects started to recede."
Have you considered that one can protest against those changes independently of doing math on how many happened in 2013? Or that they might also take into account certain notable other actions on immigration taken by the Obama administration as a balancing factor?
If anything, doesn't that suggest that the Trump admin's moves to bypass legal safeguards are unnecessary and are just increasing the militarization of the federal government for nothing?
>People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
That's because most news are (or were) partisan with a liberal bias.
Just like a republican bias makes you miss the fact that whether Obama was deporting more in larger quantities, Trump has moved the Overton window about what ICE is allowed to do, how blatantly they can do it, and what they get away with even if it's still illegal.
Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses?
And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
13 replies →
Flock is a YC company. I don’t think the resistance will be organized on HN in spite of its ostensibly hacker ethos
When it comes to Flock in particular I’ve been seeing a lot more in terms of resistance and pushback in local Reddit communities. At least in my cities sub I see posts regarding anti-flock messaging or related activities at least once a week now.
Yeah, where I live, one guy was like "You know what, I've had it". He then started organizing within the community and got a big crowd to show up at a city council meeting, and we ended up getting rid of the Flock cameras. Yay!
There are enough normal people here it is still worth trying.
Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.
[flagged]
Just a few days ago:
“Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (landlords, CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives…” [1]
Both these positions are examples of an effect that dang called the “notice dislike bias” [2].
From reading the discussions here every day for years, there’s more criticism of Flock, Musk and major tech figures/companies than there is support.
Regardless of that, it’s not cool to sneer at things on HN, including the rest of the community. This is a site for curious conversation, not intellectual strutting and preening. Curiosity and humility are intrinsically linked. Not everyone plays chess but can still benefit from learning about its concepts, even if you feel it’s beneath you. I’ve been in tech for many years and had never heard that knowing all about chess was inherent to the “hacker ethos”.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I can't speak to years past but HN is an off-shoot of a VC firm so it's not too surprising that the culture here is based in the California Ideology milieu.
4 replies →
The HN community is not a monolithic entity. Yes, there are many libertarian SV folks, but there are also plenty of people (like myself) who despise that culture and push back on a regular basis.
3 replies →
Lot of faux-intellectual buzzwords in there, bud
2 replies →
> time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago
The time to resist the next crop of policies and technologies is today.
And I disagree the ground was more fertile for action in Covid. The silver lining to the AI companies’ PR and political ineptitude is that there is widespread, bipartisan pushback against tech in all stripes.
The time was 30 years ago. Back then anyone responsible should have been properly dealt with.
And yet people will wait, and things will play out in the worse scenario.
It's been a lot longer than that. You may have forgotten to include the encroachments that you supported; you seem only to have started with the disaster under Biden.
For example, I never hear about how hard librarians* fought against "National Security Letters" after 9/11. How quaint it is now to imagine that people thought that there should be a fundamental right to be able to read freely and without disclosing what you read to anyone, especially governments?
Technology has only made this cheap to do at scale.
For people who may not be familiar, the government insisted on the right to go into libraries and get a list of the books you've read. Hell, it's basically just a "pen register**," and the culture not only gave up on resisting that this data be considered private, but forgot why anyone would have ever thought that way.
Now we're arguing about forced digital attestation, but we're barely arguing about digital ID anymore ("of course" we need that), or even remember that most people were against federal identification in the US. Federal identification failed at every point to gain any support; it was pushed hard and failed during the Clinton admin, finally passed with everything else of this nature after 9/11, and then it was resisted and ignored enough to force deadlines to be pushed farther and farther back - it's been 30 years of RealID at this point.
There's no evidence that the population ever supported federal ID. The idea was forced upon them, and they just waited a generation for people to forget that the government once didn't even know or care that many people existed. 30 years from now, it will probably be weird trivia that the census was done anonymously: "You mean you didn't have to sign it under penalty of perjury? What would be the point of the data if you didn't know who it belonged to?"
In 5 days, May 27, 2026, you'll have to pay a fee of $45 in order to get on a plane for not having Real ID.
It's so obvious that these claims of necessity are always just excuses for a power grab. British Labour, who spent decades supporting huge amounts of immigration and then calling everyone racist who thought it was too much, now like Trump uses the prevention of illegal immigration as a reason to impose digital ID on everyone. They're xenophobes when it comes to tracking everyone's movements, but xenophiles when they needed to lower wages. Vote Tory, then! Nope, they supported and oversaw every element of all of this. None of this stuff ever sees a ballot.
[*] https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-...
[**] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, and the capabilities in that movie were not far fetched, just lacking in bandwidth.