RichardSaunders

there were plenty of Japanese Americans who had nothing to hide who were sent to internment camps solely based on their Japanese ancestry, info that the census bureau readily handed over.

in the Weimar Republic (Germany's government between WW1 and WW2), data was collected on who was homosexual. the Weimar Republic didnt do anything with that data, but when the NSDAP came to power, that data was used to round up gay people and send them to concentration camps.

the less data the government has about you the better because you never know who's gonna be in power later and what they might do with your data.

edt: and with the kind of data social media has on people now, the implications are a lot more scary. maybe you shared an article that was critical of a certain party or policy 10 years ago, and now that party is in power and cracking down on dissenters. that could potentially be held against you. or you liked a fairly benign status of an uncle who later went rogue, well that must mean you supported whatever crazy shit he did later.

might sound paranoid in the abstract, but the historical precedence is there.

you just had to go there

WHO DO YOU WORK FOR?!?!!

ramping up the war in afghanistan? whistleblowers? on second thought lets not close gitmo?

still a bit disheartening that when the panama papers were posted on reddit two years ago, it felt like western civilization was about to be upended and now it's like most of reddit has lost interest.