25 Years of Mass Surveillance: Cohn & Schneier's Audit Meets a Fatalistic HN
Bruce Schneier and EFF's Cindy Cohn published "25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough" (also on the front page via Lawfare; combined ~517 points across the two posts). The essay's argument: the post-9/11 shift from targeted to mass surveillance never got the cost-benefit analysis national security owes the public, and the private/government pipeline has fused — "Surveillance is the business model of the internet," and "FBI Director Kash Patel recently confirmed in congressional testimony that the agency is purchasing information on Americans from data brokers and intends to continue to do so." Concrete 2026 details: Flock license-plate networks "used to track people seeking abortions across state lines," ICE running facial recognition on protesters, and Section 702 — Congress let it "officially expire in 2026, although the previously-approved mass surveillance itself continues until at least Spring of 2027."
The HN discussion (420 pts) wasn't about the essay's claims — it was about whether any of it is stoppable. The emergent-determinist position: "I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition" (api) — "if I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss." The conspiracist rebuttal: "Panama papers. Epstein files. CointelPro -> NSPM-7. There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class" (Varelion), with RajT88 quoting the NSPM-7 language about "rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist" and predicting midterm candidates get arrested as "domestic terrorists." The practical counter-thread: smalltorch proposing easy self-hosted services as First/Fourth Amendment infrastructure, answered by the adoption reality — "the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to" (tacomagick) — and convolvatron's argument that a standard RSS-like publish mechanism could "completely obviate Facebook" and remove Meta-style leverage.
Why it matters for engineers: the surveillance stack is now mostly purchased from private vendors (Flock, Vigilant, data brokers), which means the leverage points are procurement, interop standards, and self-hosting UX — all engineering problems. The thread's fatalism ("nobody can stop because nobody can stop") is itself a signal: the community that built the panopticon no longer believes it can be dismantled, only rerouted. Related: The Guerrilla Archival War: Nitter's Resumption and the Battle Over the Open Web, Age Verification: Regulatory Backlash, Biometric Leaks, and the KIDS Act Speech Attribution Trap.