https://www.justsecurity.org/10318/video-clip-director-nsa-c...
The one thing I always think about on HN is what some of those guys would think (or presently think) about the cultural shift among nerds and otherwise techies such that this comment is even possible.
They all projected, correctly or not, such a potentially dystopian/utopian world. And they definitely didn't agree with each other. But there was still this sense of shared belief and shared cause of generally being, to say the least, skeptical and antagonistic to the state, of the kind of formal potential for liberation in code. That things could be different.
But here we are now. Computers and what they do are no longer a source of hope or doom. They either make us money, or they help us catch ambiguous enemies.
I wish I had been around for the golden era. All that is solid melts into air.
Personally, I find computers to be harbingers of doom. Not essentially, of course, but it's pretty clear at this point we're not going to see the potential of the technology we already have realized within my lifetime, but we will see a good deal of the predicted use to abuse people. Hell, we already see much of it.
>“metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”
Your response to the above quotes is so short-sighted that I don't even know where to begin.
As long as it's the people you don't like dying, I guess it's cool.
Good thing the NSA is the only group in the world that has access to metadata at scale.
