"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Who was Joseph Goebbels? Per Wikipedia: Paul Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels)
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Hacker News has officially jumped the shark when not only do we have 300 stories about the same (political) topic on the front page, we have a top rated comment following Godwin's law.
Can I get an email or something when this site decides it wants to return to technology and not be r/Politics?
I can't think of any single topic more important to the health of the Internet as we know it then this, right now. Sorry to be harsh, but dismissing these discussions as merely "politics" is short-sighted and naive.
If you think this is anything different from what has been happening over the last 30-40 years, (and probably longer than that) you are the one that is naive, not me.
There is nothing new coming from this, other than the fact that people seem to have had their bubbles of ignorance burst.
The internet is the same today as it was yesterday, because a large majority of people simply don't care. You may find this disturbing, but it is undeniable.
The circle jerk of the last few days has more properly resembled a university politics class than it has technology and entrepreneurship. I'm not saying politics isn't important though, I'm saying it is better discussed elsewhere.
There is nothing new or insightful being added at this point. It's all just meaningless twaddle.
If you care, get off your ass and go join a campaign for a person that will stop this stuff.
If you knew this was happening and had proof before two weeks ago then you've got a great point.
This is different. Now there's proof. Leaked documents implicating the largest consumer Internet companies that are recognizable names for every US citizen. Now these large Internet companies have to stand in front of their customers, their shareholders and say something about this. Now's our chance to demand answers from them and from our government. Now there's money involved; this strikes me as a very nice lever with which to move the world.
I agree, standing around saying, "Well, I know there's spying going on but, oh well!" is not productive. My ass has been gotten off of for a very long time.
But thinking that nothing is different today is over-the-top cynical.
Call me cynical, I don't care. I've grown out of my desire to completely change the world. Right now I want a nice safe place for my family to be allowed to go about its business. I have that now, like I had it yesterday, and based on all available data I'll have that tomorrow. Yes, even with someone possibly monitoring that I called Indonesia 10 times over the past 15 years.
In case you haven't noticed, none of the nonsense around constitutions, human rights, legal decrees and such really matters. They're just guidelines, and how we interpret the words can and does change every damn day. The same law that upheld segregation is the same law that maintains that it is unconstitutional. It's all just interpretation.
Get enough people to agree with your interpretation, and you can justify anything. Good luck fighting against that.
The majority of what you said here is right, but the key is in your last sentence. How better to get enough people to agree with our interpretation (that we want privacy and accountability) than to get everyone pissed off about what's going on (and has been for years, so what).
For the last few days, these huge comment threads have been completely empty of information. People are complaining about "NSA spying" or simply "this" and calling it unconstitutional without defining what these actions were and why they are unconstitutional. In the absence of detail, people are substituting their own worst fears. For the most part, that is also the case in the linked articles.
So far, by my understanding, we have:
1. A court order for Verizon to create a database of phone transaction metadata and make it accessible to the NSA. We don't know what (if any) procedures are in place for controlling access to the data.
2. A non-technical document claiming that the NSA has direct access to "the servers" and is getting information from several companies. News reports imply that this refers to internal company servers. The companies named unanimously deny that this is the case. We don't know the details of what information the NSA is collecting or how they are collecting it; specifically, we do not know and cannot say that they are failing to follow the 4th Amendment and other legal procedures.
3. Something called PRISM exists. People are fearmongering about PRISM being some horrible unconstitutional crime when nobody knows what it is (my guess: it's just a UI for collecting reports from the companies that they send enough information requests to for them to use a standard data format).
None of this justifies the current panic, the uprating of spammy slogans, and the top-rated comment in a 300-point thread saying this is just as bad as Hitler.
First, for the record, I think it's helpful to not define this surveillance in terms of illegality or unconstitutionality. By definition, if the branches of the US government have enacted this (executive made the policy order, legislative reviewed it, judicial signed off) then it is constitutional and legal. It's not very useful to debate it on those terms.
My primary objection is the lack of transparency by my government. Democracies simply do not work without the informed consent of the governed. How do I know who to vote out if my elected representatives don't tell me what they're doing? Thus my definition of "this" includes "keeping the extent of the surveillance a secret". Every time you say "we don't know" you are agreeing with me.
My secondary objection is the institutionalization of easy spying. Every defense I've seen from the administration includes some proviso that they're only gathering data about foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. I prefer my governmental legal structures built with the understanding that they could be used for ill. Having no public, non-governmental discourse about these processes prevents the electorate from making that judgement call.
My third objection is to the easy reliance on xenophobia and fear-mongering in the defense of these policies that we don't know enough about. "Oh good," I (am supposed to) sigh with relief. "This network is only to be used for spying on foreign terrorists." Given that global relations are the new reality I find it deeply troubling that my government is defending itself by throwing the rest of the world under the bus.
I wouldn't call my reaction panic. I never said this was "as bad as Hitler" which, in itself, is a meaningless and unhelpful statement.
The "discussion" this comment is part of is one step away from "wake up sheeple." Comparing PRISM, about which we know very little, with the propagandists of the third reich is disingenuous, unoriginal, and unproductive.
Sounds fine to me, no Nazi comparisons needed here. But I was speaking to the grandparent comment's world-weariness WRT politics being all mixed up in his/her technology.
>If I wanted to know what the major cybersec/surveillence stories were in the country with defacto control of a large portion of the world's internet, a hotbed of technological innovation, and the home country of this website, I'd turn to one of the least reputable news sources in that country.
Which would give you a ridiculous caricature of what's actually going on in the US. As much as I'd like to just ignore the US, they don't seem willing to let us.
The reason why this is very important for Hacker News (and my business) is that me and my business depends on "internet" and "cloud". If people starts loosing confidence (i.e., that their data in cloud is mined to find "things"), we will be losing customers, people will be more and more hesitant to use "cloud" and "internet" (especially ones outside US), etc.
Even for those who don't accept it, the fact that so many others do means your data do effectively live in the cloud (at least to a significant extent). Particularly in the case of email. So ... it still matters.
"Ingram’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of an improper invocation of Godwin’s Law approaches 1.
"...it should be evident Ingram’s Law does not excuse irrelevant, improper mentions of Nazism in any discussion. It is not a purely rhetorical device. But it ought to be used to counter any attempt to side-step proper mention or comparison with Nazism and Hitler or avoid admitting the similarities between Nazism or Nazi practices"
In the comments to that article, Godwin himself showed up, and wrote that his Law was intended only to discourage frivolous comparisons to Nazis, not substantive ones.
Fool? What sort of word is that? I'd look it up but I don't trust wikipedia... Wait, what? Fool? Really? Did you call someone on HN a fool? My oh my... What strong words! Sheesh, whatever happened to courteous discourse? Has that gone the way of the dodo?
Yeah, when you've been here more than a year you can lecture me on "courteous discourse".
Making a comparison equating a US spy/wire tapping program to a homicidal antisemitic lunatic that played a major role in exterminating 9 million people is naive at best and idiotic at worst.
Believing such a comparison is apt does in fact make you a fool, by definition, because what you are displaying is foolishness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness
By all means though, continue to believe in nonsense. That's your right. Don't attempt to tell me I can't call a spade a spade however.
>Yeah, when you've been here more than a year you can lecture me on "courteous discourse".
I've been around here for more than a year. More than a few years, actually. It looks like you're throwing a temper tantrum over these NSA-related posts on HN. Come back next week, I'm sure there will be something new over which you can complain.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of us for whom this is a very important topic. No, government spying isn't new, whether in the US or elsewhere (I'm in Canada). But there is a place to talk about how we ought to handle this, as the targets of that spying.
Regarding your later comment claiming to be banned, I think you might've just used a word or phrase that tripped an automatic filter for that one comment. Note that I don't have any inside knowledge of how HN's banning system actually works.
Regarding this thread, it was probably time to let it die before it started. There's nothing to be accomplished by arguing over wording and metaphorical choices from five posts back.
The comment did not say that the spying is as morally bad as the Holocaust. It compared to specific propaganda tactic advocated by Goebbels to propaganda tactics in use today.
It's on point. Obama claimed a day ago that "nobody is listening to your calls". Give me a break -- that defines "the big lie".
Nobody said the US government is a bunch of Nazis. But the US government is following a public relations play book that is similar many ways... A deeply disturbing development.
I wish people would stop carrying on about "Godwin's Law". It's completely meaningless and references to it are no more than just another Internet meme.
Actually, having been around long enough to watch the fall of the Berlin wall on TV and not only remember it, but understand its significance, the more I hear of this story, the more it seems exactly like business as usual.
You want the dog, but not the poop it is making, huh?
"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." -- George Orwell
I'd argue something similar goes for HN. Especially since "Politics" basically means how people live together in cities, and here a lot of the architects of our virtual city hang out. Yes, surveillance and effectively autocracy is older than technology, but with how the marriage is going lately, it's very much our concern. It's not like any of this would be possible without engineers and mathematicians who made it so.
Interesting, there are still correctly attributed points that fit this whole debacle:
"But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success."
"War Propaganda", in volume 1, chapter 6 of Mein Kampf (1925), by Adolf Hitler
I'm referring to the constant reuse of the term 'no direct access to servers'cough propaganda cough
<sarcasm>And what? You dare to question the absolute veracity of wikipedia? You will be sent to the Re-Education Camp immediately?</sarcasm>
<notsarcasm>Having to use the sarcasm tag means enough people are unable to recognize sarcasm. I blame the education system. It's a damn shame though.</notsarcasm>
The sentiment has value, but it feels misleading to need to back it up by aligning the idea with the Nazi Germany. (The closest quote by Goebbels appears to be about England rather than Germany, not sure if that makes it more or less relevant here)
Sarcasm is a word that has been so misused by Americans, that people have tried to actually re-write the definition.
-the use of irony to mock or convey contempt -
It does not mean 'joking'.
Funny, that quote could be said about the "FISA ruled PRISM unconstitutional" mantra that is implied in the title. We have no idea if FISA ruled about PRISM, if they feds changed it to comply with those rulings, or it was something else completely. We ought to know and that in and of it self is enough.
Correct. This is an awfully misleading title. The blogs cite blogs upon blogs, not any actual court filings, which do not reveal any ruling whatsoever about the merits of the constitutional matters. The coverage of this looks like an out of control telephone game.
No, that's not true. There's an actual source document, which I link to in the post. It's the argument by the Obama administration that the secret ruling should be kept secret. The contents of the secret opinion was revealed by two U.S. senators. See the EFF article for details.
There is a link to the motion to keep the court filing secret. The entire point of the EFF piece is that the constitutional merit of the legal argument underpinning PRISM is being kept under total secrecy, so obviously they don't have access to the actual ruling.
Of course there must be many, but the parent comment drew particular attention to this possibility. Using the Economist house style offers an elegant alternative, wherein virtually all people and organizations are identified explicitly, no matter how prominent. For example, you might see "Google, a search giant", "GE, an American conglomerate", or "Tim Cook, boss of Apple". In this case, the first line of the post could be changed to "A quote by Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany:", and the final paragraph could be eliminated.
There is nothing wrong with the fact that he didn't know it either. Only willful ignorance is a sin, not accidental ignorance. Nobody can know everything, you shouldn't judge someone for prioritizing different knowledge than you.
The state of history education is abysmal, at least in the US.
I sure as hell was not taught enough (and most of what I was taught, prior to high school history classes, was whitewashed propaganda. Things like "The Russian space program was awful", "The Native Americans and settlers got along swimmingly", or "Columbus thought the Earth was flat". Stuff no adult familiar with the material believes for a moment, but that we teach children anyway.)
The meme I more recall is "Columbus uniquely thought the Earth was round." Really, most people thought the Earth was round; Columbus thought the Earth was 1/3 its actual size...
Knowing that Hitler heavily leveraged propaganda to further his cause might be of use to an individual. I don't think knowing Goebbels' name is necessary for learning such lessons though.
Possibly true, though I would question the quality of any lesson about Nazi propaganda that did not mention Goebbels' name. If you are doing the "3-lesson 10,000 foot overview" of the 1930s and 40s then I can see how Goebbels' would escape mention, but otherwise he is definitely in the top 10 figures to mention.
I don't know about you, but I tend to forget details that I don't regularly use. I have learned about Goebbels and forgotten his name at least once. I focus primarily on remembering the lessons learned because I know I am likely to forget details such as names. I can usually remember the overall lesson learned because it resonates with my intuition and world knowledge.
Not knowing the names of prominent figures is some (quite inconclusive) evidence of insufficient familiarity. Any encouragement of the type I was speaking of should recognize that (and should be polite on other counts as well, of course) or is not entirely appropriate.
How should I approach learning more about this sort of thing? I mean obviously reading about Nazi Germany, but what sort of materials? I had no idea who Goebbels was.
Something like "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" following would probably be reasonable, if a bit hefty.
The Nazi's managed to document things exhaustively, so it serves as a jumping off point into a bunch of other places you will very likely find interesting books and articles about most of the aspects of the regime.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
Who was Joseph Goebbels? Per Wikipedia: Paul Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels)