alt Hacker NewsDepends on the health of our institutions. In the US at least they're legally obligated not to by the highest law in the land. It gets ignored now, but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.
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Unfortunately, the Constitution has been flagrantly ignored by the federal government for close to 100 years now, if not longer. Everything that FDR did was blatantly unconstitutional, but nobody stopped him, nor did they roll it back when he was gone. The Constitution has no real practical power to restrain the government if the people don't exercise their rights as voters to hold it accountable, and it is abundantly clear that the unconstitutional stuff the government gets up to is (largely) actually pretty popular.
Oh, I think it's been ignored for a long time. Remember Snowden?
> but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.
The history of governments suggests otherwise.