alt Hacker NewsIn most countries, death by terrorist is at least an order of magnitude less likely than death by bee. Strangely, we do not seem to be on a campaign to lock all humans in-doors to protect them from bees, nor have we declared a global war on beeism. These stats hold from before the modern surveillance regime, and so can hardly be credited to it. It's not actually a problem in particular need of urgent solving. Regular people are safe from terrorism, much safer than they are against most kinds of tragic accidents. What regular people are actually in danger of is losing all of their human rights to fearmongerers, who constantly invoke terrorism to erode them further and further.
Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism, so I don't know why you thought it relevant to bring them up. I think it is really sad to see comments on HN of all places advocating that if we don't implement chat control we'll spiral into a lawless hellscape.
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India saw 779 million dollars lost to cyber fraud in the first 5 months of 2025.
The degree of cyber fraud in India is beyond insane.
Also - funnily enough - Indian telecom companies are meant to be fined for every SIM card given out under false data. There is already meant to be a check that stops this.
Sincerely, you misunderstand what I am saying, or you didn't read until the end where I said that some level of terrorism is a price worth paying in my subjective judgment.
My point is that my subjective judgment counts for nothing, because the negative feedback loop that I described is a society-wide phenomenon beyond my control as an individual. Asking the majority of people to think the way you do about terrorism is somewhere between wishcasting and virtue signalling. It doesn't interrupt the causality behind the negative feedback loop, so it therefore fails to outline a path that can be trodden in the real world to achieve your desired vision of no surveillance.
I urge everyone to banish this mode of thinking which fixates on what "should" happen without first checking whether that desired end state is a possible world we can exist in once you factor in the second and third order effects beyond the control of any individual.
> Bukele and Duterte did not rise out of an environment of terrorism
Move your abstraction one level higher. They arose out of public safety concerns around murder and drugs and gangs. Those are not terrorism, but they fit under the same umbrella of public safety concerns that motivate regular people to demand authoritarian solutions.