Oh but it will get worse. Legislation to force companies to install survtech in their devices/apps is already being pushed left and right. We are still screaming a little about it, but I think it's a matter of time before it gets normalized and the state goes for the next level, which will be to prosecute individuals who try to evade the surveillance net. The recent case with GrapheneOS[^1], while still far from being an example of it, it is sufficient to inspire some legislators...
That's why we need to get as many people on surveillance-free devices as quickly as possible. 400K users [1] may be easy to ignore or make suspect, 4M is a little harder, 40M is a serious blip on the radar, 400M is a major force (one can dream).
If you do not like surveillance capitalism (which enables government surveillance), get a compatible phone and install GrapheneOS now. Help family and friends get set up tomorrow. Make it a force too large to reckon with before the legislation is there (legislation is somewhat slow, so there is a window of opportunity).
A surveillance state was always inevitable once wireless networking, GPS, and cameras were ubiquitous. If you say this isn't true, show me anywhere in the world with these technologies that is not headed down this path.
Europe is, compared to the US, doing a lot more for protection of private data. That includes strict guardrails on what data can be collected and how it is used.
Secret courts still exist but the phenomenon of random Flock employees spying on children in locker rooms at gyms is so much harder to get away with in a system with a modicum of decency.
Chat control was actually shot down, and that was the UK not Europe (anymore).
Laws are different in different places. The world is not composed of America and other-Americas.
Saying something was shot down isnt that strong of an argument. The US government has proposed and shot down surveillance laws hundreds of times, until one finally passes.
A scene from the Chinese 1980s period drama "Like a Flowing River 2":
Lei Dongbao, party secretary of a small village, is courting the owner of a restaurant in a nearby city. He persuades her to let him care for her young son over the weekend.
As he's heading back to his village on his motorcycle with the boy seated behind him, he drives by some women resting in the shade by the side of the road. One of them remarks to another, "Why does the secretary have a child?"
By the time he arrives at his office, all of his subordinates - and one of their wives - have turned out to meet him and say hello to the child.
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
The time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago.
Every single person in the US's future, safety, rights and freedom is currently at stake. There is no more time left to wait and see how things play out.
More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.
> More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
Yeah, obama was president at the time.
A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened.
People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses?
And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
When it comes to Flock in particular I’ve been seeing a lot more in terms of resistance and pushback in local Reddit communities. At least in my cities sub I see posts regarding anti-flock messaging or related activities at least once a week now.
Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.
The hacker ethos of this site is gone. This website is so full of faux-intellectualism it's insane. Literally one of the top stories on the site right now is a basic chess concept, literally week 1 shit, called "Zugzwang". Not to mention all the Apple and Musk dickriders on this site, which is highly disturbing.
The ethos of this website is mostly just anarcho-capitalist but lacking in any foundation of even the most basic understanding of ideological concepts.
I can't speak to years past but HN is an off-shoot of a VC firm so it's not too surprising that the culture here is based in the California Ideology milieu.
But it isn't the VC that brings the users here for the most part(I'm literally assuming this, but it seems reasonable), it's word of mouth. Did you join because you love YC, or was it because you thought it was an interesting website at some point?
Such as? Was it "shit" or "dickriders"? Or was it "anarcho-capitalist", a well-defined concept? Sorry if I'm not receptive to waxing poetic about mass surveillance and the fact that you can't skip a move in chess.
The HN community is not a monolithic entity. Yes, there are many libertarian SV folks, but there are also plenty of people (like myself) who despise that culture and push back on a regular basis.
“Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (landlords, CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives…” [1]
Both these positions are examples of an effect dang called the “notice dislike bias” [2].
From reading the discussions here every day for years, there’s more criticism of Flock, Musk and major tech figures/companies than there is support.
Regardless of that, it’s not cool to sneer at things on HN, including the rest of the community. This is a site for curious conversation, not intellectual strutting and preening. Not everyone plays chess but can still benefit from learning about its concepts, even if you feel it’s beneath you. I’ve been in tech for many years and had never heard that knowing all about chess was inherent to the “hacker ethos”.
> time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago
The time to resist the next crop of policies and technologies is today.
And I disagree the ground was more fertile for action in Covid. The silver lining to the AI companies’ PR and political ineptitude is that there is widespread, bipartisan pushback against tech in all stripes.
One idea I haven't seen much discussion on is "provably beneficial surveillance" [1], which builds off of Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis. It seems like the best path forward.
>We can turn that conventional wisdom on its head, by reframing it as a question: is it possible to do surveillance and consequent policing in a way that is (a) compatible with or enhances liberal values, i.e., improving the welfare of all, except those undermining the common good; and also (b) sufficient to prevent catastrophic threats to society? I call this possibility Provably Beneficial Surveillance. It's a concept expanding on an old tradition of ideas, including search warrants, due process, habeas corpus, and Madisonian separation of powers, all of which help improve the balance of power between institutions and individuals. In particular, all those ideas help enable surveillance in service of safety, while also taking steps to prevent abuses of that power.
Nope. That's not how any of this is trending at all. Being optimistic is good for getting through tough times. Albeit sometimes. It might help people sleep at night but sleeping our way into technofacism won't make it any better for us or our children.
All the known history of humans is evidence against the possibility of existence of "beneficial surveillance".
This is a utopian idea of the same kind as the idea of theoretical communism.
The communist theory argued that because the owners of assets can use their power in nefarious ways against the others this can be easily solved by dispossessing them of their assets and transforming all such private assets into assets that belong to the common property owned by all people. Then all assets will be used for the welfare of the entire society.
The fallacy of this theory was that when something belongs to all people it is impossible for all people to manage it directly. So there must be a layer of relatively few middlemen who manage the assets directly.
In all the communist societies, instead of managing the assets for the common good, those middlemen have succeeded to become the de facto owners of the assets, despite not being de jure their owners. And then they managed the assets according to their personal interests, like any capitalist billionaire.
The only difference was that the communist elite was much less secure in their positions than rich capitalists, because not being the legal owners of a company or of other such valuable assets meant that they could lose their privileges at any time if their boss in the communist party hierarchy no longer liked them and sent them to an inferior position.
This hierarchical dependence ensured that the communist elite had to obey more or less whatever the supreme leader ordered. Except for this obedience, there was no real difference between a communist economy and the extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, despite what the naive theory of communism hoped to achieve by nationalizing everything of value.
Similarly, I see no hope for a theory of "beneficial surveillance". Such beneficial surveillance could exist only if it were controlled by good-willing people. But this will never happen, like in practical communism, some of the worst people will be those who would succeed to control it.
What’s the fix? What’s a simple rule change that would, at the very least, take these data out of law enforcement’s hands outside the most-necessary situations?
You may not realize it but this isn't even about law enforcement. It's also about tech companies having the data. What they will do with it, who they will sell or leak it too.
It's about the amount of data. It's about what it can be used for from military adjacent organizations under a fascist regime. Whether you think the us is headed toward fascism or not, what if it did? That's the point.
> this isn't even about law enforcement. It's also about tech companies having the data
One is a clear and present danger. The other is a hypothetical danger. Both deserve being addressed. But if only one is going to get political capital, it should be the first.
(I've worked on technology privacy issues. My takeaway is the public is broadly fine with the tradeoff. Folks in tech are not. But folks in tech with strong views on privacy are politically useless due to a combination of self-defeating laziness and nihilism.)
You may not realize it but this isn't even about law enforcement. It's also about tech companies having the data.
This. The lesson of the past decades is: if some organization has the data, eventually it becomes too attractive not to (ab)use it. Even Apple, which sold itself as a privacy-first company is slowly adding more and more ads. Squeezing out more profits is just too attractive with the pile of data that they are sitting on. Similarly, bad governments will require access to the data if they can.
Employees inside companies should push back collection of data as much as possible (the GDPR helps a lot in Europe). If you do not have the data, you cannot use it in a user hostile-way in the future and governments cannot request data that you do not have. If you have to store data, go for end-to-end encryption.
Citizens should try to escape the Apple/Google duopoly (e.g. by installing GrapheneOS), block trackers, and only install the necessary apps (no app = no easy tracking). For apps that you do need, revoke as many sandbox privileges as possible.
An open source community driven surveillance network that alerts the community when it is accessed by a select list of “trusted” governing officials. Clearly outlined access rules that are policy driven, technically controlled and auditable.
Sure Flock, we buy your safety pitch. We just don’t trust you.
> surveillance network that alerts the community when it is accessed by a select list of “trusted” governing officials
This is the worst of all worlds. Actual criminal investigations get thwarted or the reporting requirement gets diluted to the point of being useless (“someone looked for something today!”). And a burden of vigilance shifted onto the public.
And it will be public and someone can be held accountable. Heck put an AI in it that scans for a list of items and reports when they see it. An actual investigation will have public pressure to access data. Lax policies will show the increased usage.
Funding the police is the burden of vigilance already on tax-payers. We’re already approach the worst of worlds. Your perspective just points to human organizations being unsustainable, not this concept in particular.
> it will be public and someone can be held accountable
What would be made public? If it isn’t verbose, it’s useless for accountability. If it’s too verbose, it’s a privacy issue per se and burden to legitimate investigations.
Though. Now that I think about it. Maybe a delayed notice requirement for anyone whose records are queried. That’s personally hitting in a way a public record is not.
None, because they are above the rules. You need actual enforcement.
Or the other guy's community network idea but it would have to also publish the realtime activities and whereabouts of all politicians who voted against making this illegal.
Much like the law that stopped video rental companies from telling what their customers were renting, that passed after some politicians had their video rental histories leaked.
They’re above the rules for a political cycle because we’re shifting to a system of spoils. That doesn’t change that everything they’re doing right now is legal. (Outside ICE. They’re a warren of criminality right now.)
The straightforward broad brush fix is a US port of the GDPR. Make mass surveillance commercially unlucrative, and most of the data currently available to the government won't be collected in the first place. Furthermore, it's a basic line in the sand that gives individuals an idea that privacy is an actionable right, not just something to powerlessly complain about.
That this culture shift would need time to trickle down into positive bans on surveillance performed by the government (eg Flock), or requiring audit trails for government use of commercial data that still gets collected, shows how far we're behind.
The older and more jaded I get, the more I think that the only way to fix this mess before we all die of climate change is to dump the entire US government off a cliff and write a new constitution.
> the only way to fix this mess before we all die of climate change is to dump the entire US government off a cliff and write a new constitution
We don't have public consensus on major questions, in my opinion, to make this a fruitful endeavour.
One thing we need is a political movement to push for Constitutional amendments. My five are, in decreasing order of priority, (1) multi-member Congressional districts, (2) striking the pardon power, (3) abolishing the electoral college and creating a referendum requirement for major legislation, (4) changing the first sentence of Article II to "the President shall execute the laws of the United States," and (5) permitting the Congress to charter independent agencies for up to 20 years.
and soon from space? radio engineering breakdown of starlink radar capabilities, it’s a pretty impressive bird if you were designing it only for that: https://youtu.be/jbp3kdJZ1_A
Psychopathy is a serious disease. Without control it's proven to be the most destructive force human beings have ever faced. We have to keep it in check or we risk everything. These personalities by definition are never satisfied by any level of suffering. They can't feel anything.
If you want less petty crime, bring back social safety nets. Pay people better.
I'm dead serious.
-
Addendum: People generally don't resort to petty crime for no good reason. They do it because some need is not being met, or they have become socially outcast due to some systemic failure. When people feel they have little autonomy to exist in a meaningful way, and even being poor is expensive and criminalised, of course you'll see petty crime everywhere. Cracking down on the "undesirables" won't make them go away, it'll just make the issue more pronounced.
A better economy would help more than surveiling every single persons every moves and all of their communications.
I would literally buy you a bicycle to change your mind. Or sit down and review countries where theft is minimal so we could brainstorm real solutions.
Maybe the U.S. could stop normalizing and modelling blatant criminality as a first step, in lieu of mass warrantless surveillance. Just yesterday, the U.S. president was giving what could be generously construed as a speech, in which he said of U.S. naval activities around the Strait of Hormuz: “We’re taking the cargo. We’re taking the oil. We’re like pirates.”
Or solve the problem by addressing the root causes of crime like other societies do. The American prison industrial complex is not a cure for a sick society. It's a profitable black hole that encourages recidivism at the expense of tax payers.
Your goals are petty and short-sighted. One nice thing about the current state of economics, technology, labor and inflation is that we'll have fewer people who can only imagine suffering to the extent of having a bicycle stolen, and would not give the worst people in the world an infinite amount of power in order to prevent this from happening to them again.
The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.
I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.
You don't have control over whether petty reactionaries exist. Model them as non-sentient beings if it helps you analyze it dispassionately. They're going to react to public disorder by voting in pubic safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte with or without your permission. Thus everyone should care about shoplifting, the only disagreement is whether you care about the first or second order effects of it.
Also, all property crime is a drop in the bucket compared to white collar crime. The people who are super concerned about petty theft are often the ones stealing massive amounts of money from everyone else and creating the situations that lead to petty theft.
Wage theft (minimum wage violations, forced off the clock work, withheld pay, etc) dwarfs robbery, burglary, and auto theft alone in dollar value. And that's just one kind of white collar crime.
We also have market manipulators, embezzlers, cons selling "wellness" bullshit, companies like Flock and Palantir conspiring to break constitutional amendments, Polymarket grifters, what have you.
I'd be happy with unlimited bike theft if those fucks all ended up in prison, but realistically it would lower the bike theft.
You're free to move to Singapore/South Korea/Japan whenever you want. Your USD (assuming you are one) will go far there, and if you are lucky enough to be white you will get treated like a king/queen there.
As it turns out, society is a lot more fun when there is just a bit of risk of crime. I'll 1000000000% take the additional freedom to do "stupid shit" in the USA over living in one of these boring dystopias.
Oh but it will get worse. Legislation to force companies to install survtech in their devices/apps is already being pushed left and right. We are still screaming a little about it, but I think it's a matter of time before it gets normalized and the state goes for the next level, which will be to prosecute individuals who try to evade the surveillance net. The recent case with GrapheneOS[^1], while still far from being an example of it, it is sufficient to inspire some legislators...
[^1] https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
That's why we need to get as many people on surveillance-free devices as quickly as possible. 400K users [1] may be easy to ignore or make suspect, 4M is a little harder, 40M is a serious blip on the radar, 400M is a major force (one can dream).
If you do not like surveillance capitalism (which enables government surveillance), get a compatible phone and install GrapheneOS now. Help family and friends get set up tomorrow. Make it a force too large to reckon with before the legislation is there (legislation is somewhat slow, so there is a window of opportunity).
[1] https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/2047321144601071673
A surveillance state was always inevitable once wireless networking, GPS, and cameras were ubiquitous. If you say this isn't true, show me anywhere in the world with these technologies that is not headed down this path.
It’s inevitable that some country would do it, but not inevitable that any given nation would do so, except maybe the CCP.
its inevitable if you do nothing to organize politically against it.
Europe is, compared to the US, doing a lot more for protection of private data. That includes strict guardrails on what data can be collected and how it is used.
Secret courts still exist but the phenomenon of random Flock employees spying on children in locker rooms at gyms is so much harder to get away with in a system with a modicum of decency.
Chat control was actually shot down, and that was the UK not Europe (anymore).
Laws are different in different places. The world is not composed of America and other-Americas.
Saying something was shot down isnt that strong of an argument. The US government has proposed and shot down surveillance laws hundreds of times, until one finally passes.
Chat Control was proposed and rejected in the European Union
You're right, mixed up the names, in UK they called it Online Safety Act.
A scene from the Chinese 1980s period drama "Like a Flowing River 2":
Lei Dongbao, party secretary of a small village, is courting the owner of a restaurant in a nearby city. He persuades her to let him care for her young son over the weekend.
As he's heading back to his village on his motorcycle with the boy seated behind him, he drives by some women resting in the shade by the side of the road. One of them remarks to another, "Why does the secretary have a child?"
By the time he arrives at his office, all of his subordinates - and one of their wives - have turned out to meet him and say hello to the child.
https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2019/9/...
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.
The time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago.
Every single person in the US's future, safety, rights and freedom is currently at stake. There is no more time left to wait and see how things play out.
More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
And over the domestic surveillance, that had some complaints back in that time, there is the point of foreign surveillance and intervention, that had no slowdown back then, so you can figure out where that should be today. At least Americans have some saying on their government and policies, but for the rest of the world is just the new normal.
> More like 13 years ago, when Snowden revelations made the reach of this public. Nothing was done, and this kept expanding till today state of things. No one should be surprised.
Yeah, obama was president at the time.
A lot of fanfare and then nothing happened.
People were also being deported by ICE, in larger quantities, but that didn’t even make the news.
It’s always “weird” when the same action get different a connotation depending on who’s president…
Ever think that maybe it’s not the deportations that are the problem, but the murders and other human rights abuses?
And the fact that there was a lot of fanfare over Snowden rather undermines your point. People did make a big deal about it. It didn’t go anywhere because at the end of the day, the establishment on both sides is in favor of that stuff. It didn’t get any more action after Obama left office.
Flock is a YC company. I don’t think the resistance will be organized on HN in spite of its ostensibly hacker ethos
When it comes to Flock in particular I’ve been seeing a lot more in terms of resistance and pushback in local Reddit communities. At least in my cities sub I see posts regarding anti-flock messaging or related activities at least once a week now.
There are enough normal people here it is still worth trying.
Well yeah, YC is a tech incubator plugged pretty deep into the SV hivemind, and the leading figures of it seemed to have decided that fascism is a better alternative to any kind of regulation on their activities.
The hacker ethos of this site is gone. This website is so full of faux-intellectualism it's insane. Literally one of the top stories on the site right now is a basic chess concept, literally week 1 shit, called "Zugzwang". Not to mention all the Apple and Musk dickriders on this site, which is highly disturbing.
The ethos of this website is mostly just anarcho-capitalist but lacking in any foundation of even the most basic understanding of ideological concepts.
I can't speak to years past but HN is an off-shoot of a VC firm so it's not too surprising that the culture here is based in the California Ideology milieu.
But it isn't the VC that brings the users here for the most part(I'm literally assuming this, but it seems reasonable), it's word of mouth. Did you join because you love YC, or was it because you thought it was an interesting website at some point?
Lot of faux-intellectual buzzwords in there, bud
Such as? Was it "shit" or "dickriders"? Or was it "anarcho-capitalist", a well-defined concept? Sorry if I'm not receptive to waxing poetic about mass surveillance and the fact that you can't skip a move in chess.
The HN community is not a monolithic entity. Yes, there are many libertarian SV folks, but there are also plenty of people (like myself) who despise that culture and push back on a regular basis.
Just a few days ago:
“Regardless, it's acceptable here to mock climate deniers, capitalists (landlords, CEOs, Billionaires), SUV or truck drivers, religious fundamentalists, various flavors of conservatives…” [1]
Both these positions are examples of an effect dang called the “notice dislike bias” [2].
From reading the discussions here every day for years, there’s more criticism of Flock, Musk and major tech figures/companies than there is support.
Regardless of that, it’s not cool to sneer at things on HN, including the rest of the community. This is a site for curious conversation, not intellectual strutting and preening. Not everyone plays chess but can still benefit from learning about its concepts, even if you feel it’s beneath you. I’ve been in tech for many years and had never heard that knowing all about chess was inherent to the “hacker ethos”.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47932456
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> time to resist against these policies and technologies was 2-5 years ago
The time to resist the next crop of policies and technologies is today.
And I disagree the ground was more fertile for action in Covid. The silver lining to the AI companies’ PR and political ineptitude is that there is widespread, bipartisan pushback against tech in all stripes.
The time was 30 years ago. Back then anyone responsible should have been properly dealt with.
Enemy of the State came out in 1998, and the capabilities in that movie were not far fetched, just lacking in bandwidth.
One idea I haven't seen much discussion on is "provably beneficial surveillance" [1], which builds off of Nick Bostrom's vulnerable world hypothesis. It seems like the best path forward.
>We can turn that conventional wisdom on its head, by reframing it as a question: is it possible to do surveillance and consequent policing in a way that is (a) compatible with or enhances liberal values, i.e., improving the welfare of all, except those undermining the common good; and also (b) sufficient to prevent catastrophic threats to society? I call this possibility Provably Beneficial Surveillance. It's a concept expanding on an old tradition of ideas, including search warrants, due process, habeas corpus, and Madisonian separation of powers, all of which help improve the balance of power between institutions and individuals. In particular, all those ideas help enable surveillance in service of safety, while also taking steps to prevent abuses of that power.
1. https://michaelnotebook.com/optimism/index.html
Nope. That's not how any of this is trending at all. Being optimistic is good for getting through tough times. Albeit sometimes. It might help people sleep at night but sleeping our way into technofacism won't make it any better for us or our children.
All the known history of humans is evidence against the possibility of existence of "beneficial surveillance".
This is a utopian idea of the same kind as the idea of theoretical communism.
The communist theory argued that because the owners of assets can use their power in nefarious ways against the others this can be easily solved by dispossessing them of their assets and transforming all such private assets into assets that belong to the common property owned by all people. Then all assets will be used for the welfare of the entire society.
The fallacy of this theory was that when something belongs to all people it is impossible for all people to manage it directly. So there must be a layer of relatively few middlemen who manage the assets directly.
In all the communist societies, instead of managing the assets for the common good, those middlemen have succeeded to become the de facto owners of the assets, despite not being de jure their owners. And then they managed the assets according to their personal interests, like any capitalist billionaire.
The only difference was that the communist elite was much less secure in their positions than rich capitalists, because not being the legal owners of a company or of other such valuable assets meant that they could lose their privileges at any time if their boss in the communist party hierarchy no longer liked them and sent them to an inferior position.
This hierarchical dependence ensured that the communist elite had to obey more or less whatever the supreme leader ordered. Except for this obedience, there was no real difference between a communist economy and the extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, despite what the naive theory of communism hoped to achieve by nationalizing everything of value.
Similarly, I see no hope for a theory of "beneficial surveillance". Such beneficial surveillance could exist only if it were controlled by good-willing people. But this will never happen, like in practical communism, some of the worst people will be those who would succeed to control it.
What’s the fix? What’s a simple rule change that would, at the very least, take these data out of law enforcement’s hands outside the most-necessary situations?
You may not realize it but this isn't even about law enforcement. It's also about tech companies having the data. What they will do with it, who they will sell or leak it too.
It's about the amount of data. It's about what it can be used for from military adjacent organizations under a fascist regime. Whether you think the us is headed toward fascism or not, what if it did? That's the point.
> this isn't even about law enforcement. It's also about tech companies having the data
One is a clear and present danger. The other is a hypothetical danger. Both deserve being addressed. But if only one is going to get political capital, it should be the first.
(I've worked on technology privacy issues. My takeaway is the public is broadly fine with the tradeoff. Folks in tech are not. But folks in tech with strong views on privacy are politically useless due to a combination of self-defeating laziness and nihilism.)
You may not realize it but this isn't even about law enforcement. It's also about tech companies having the data.
This. The lesson of the past decades is: if some organization has the data, eventually it becomes too attractive not to (ab)use it. Even Apple, which sold itself as a privacy-first company is slowly adding more and more ads. Squeezing out more profits is just too attractive with the pile of data that they are sitting on. Similarly, bad governments will require access to the data if they can.
Employees inside companies should push back collection of data as much as possible (the GDPR helps a lot in Europe). If you do not have the data, you cannot use it in a user hostile-way in the future and governments cannot request data that you do not have. If you have to store data, go for end-to-end encryption.
Citizens should try to escape the Apple/Google duopoly (e.g. by installing GrapheneOS), block trackers, and only install the necessary apps (no app = no easy tracking). For apps that you do need, revoke as many sandbox privileges as possible.
An open source community driven surveillance network that alerts the community when it is accessed by a select list of “trusted” governing officials. Clearly outlined access rules that are policy driven, technically controlled and auditable.
Sure Flock, we buy your safety pitch. We just don’t trust you.
> surveillance network that alerts the community when it is accessed by a select list of “trusted” governing officials
This is the worst of all worlds. Actual criminal investigations get thwarted or the reporting requirement gets diluted to the point of being useless (“someone looked for something today!”). And a burden of vigilance shifted onto the public.
And it will be public and someone can be held accountable. Heck put an AI in it that scans for a list of items and reports when they see it. An actual investigation will have public pressure to access data. Lax policies will show the increased usage.
Funding the police is the burden of vigilance already on tax-payers. We’re already approach the worst of worlds. Your perspective just points to human organizations being unsustainable, not this concept in particular.
> it will be public and someone can be held accountable
What would be made public? If it isn’t verbose, it’s useless for accountability. If it’s too verbose, it’s a privacy issue per se and burden to legitimate investigations.
Though. Now that I think about it. Maybe a delayed notice requirement for anyone whose records are queried. That’s personally hitting in a way a public record is not.
None, because they are above the rules. You need actual enforcement.
Or the other guy's community network idea but it would have to also publish the realtime activities and whereabouts of all politicians who voted against making this illegal.
Much like the law that stopped video rental companies from telling what their customers were renting, that passed after some politicians had their video rental histories leaked.
> they are above the rules
They’re above the rules for a political cycle because we’re shifting to a system of spoils. That doesn’t change that everything they’re doing right now is legal. (Outside ICE. They’re a warren of criminality right now.)
The straightforward broad brush fix is a US port of the GDPR. Make mass surveillance commercially unlucrative, and most of the data currently available to the government won't be collected in the first place. Furthermore, it's a basic line in the sand that gives individuals an idea that privacy is an actionable right, not just something to powerlessly complain about.
That this culture shift would need time to trickle down into positive bans on surveillance performed by the government (eg Flock), or requiring audit trails for government use of commercial data that still gets collected, shows how far we're behind.
The older and more jaded I get, the more I think that the only way to fix this mess before we all die of climate change is to dump the entire US government off a cliff and write a new constitution.
As the founding fathers intended.
> the only way to fix this mess before we all die of climate change is to dump the entire US government off a cliff and write a new constitution
We don't have public consensus on major questions, in my opinion, to make this a fruitful endeavour.
One thing we need is a political movement to push for Constitutional amendments. My five are, in decreasing order of priority, (1) multi-member Congressional districts, (2) striking the pardon power, (3) abolishing the electoral college and creating a referendum requirement for major legislation, (4) changing the first sentence of Article II to "the President shall execute the laws of the United States," and (5) permitting the Congress to charter independent agencies for up to 20 years.
and soon from space? radio engineering breakdown of starlink radar capabilities, it’s a pretty impressive bird if you were designing it only for that: https://youtu.be/jbp3kdJZ1_A
Age verification is part of this. Submit your IDs to use AI. Now they know all about you. All done for “safety” but we know that’s an excuse.
https://reclaimthenet.org/senate-panel-backs-guard-act-ai-ag...
So is AI and the push for more data centers than the country can afford or supply power too.
And the ever increasing desire to break encryption.
And the increase in technology companies who have metadata about us citizens becoming offense and defense contractors.
And... The list is so long.
They love control almost in a fetishistic way. It gets them off.
Psychopathy is a serious disease. Without control it's proven to be the most destructive force human beings have ever faced. We have to keep it in check or we risk everything. These personalities by definition are never satisfied by any level of suffering. They can't feel anything.
Hopefully this will translate into less petty crime- most theft now goes unpunished. I want to live in a society where bikes aren't stolen
If you want less petty crime, bring back social safety nets. Pay people better.
I'm dead serious.
- Addendum: People generally don't resort to petty crime for no good reason. They do it because some need is not being met, or they have become socially outcast due to some systemic failure. When people feel they have little autonomy to exist in a meaningful way, and even being poor is expensive and criminalised, of course you'll see petty crime everywhere. Cracking down on the "undesirables" won't make them go away, it'll just make the issue more pronounced.
Surely you realize that police states exist to protect the ones on top, and have no incentive to give a shit about the ones on the bottom.
A better economy would help more than surveiling every single persons every moves and all of their communications.
I would literally buy you a bicycle to change your mind. Or sit down and review countries where theft is minimal so we could brainstorm real solutions.
1984 was not an instruction manual.
Maybe the U.S. could stop normalizing and modelling blatant criminality as a first step, in lieu of mass warrantless surveillance. Just yesterday, the U.S. president was giving what could be generously construed as a speech, in which he said of U.S. naval activities around the Strait of Hormuz: “We’re taking the cargo. We’re taking the oil. We’re like pirates.”
Doubtful, it's never really deemed worth LEOs time to pursue bike thieves.
Then we need to make it work their time by bringing back broken windows policing.
Or solve the problem by addressing the root causes of crime like other societies do. The American prison industrial complex is not a cure for a sick society. It's a profitable black hole that encourages recidivism at the expense of tax payers.
Wait until you get targeted politically.
Your goals are petty and short-sighted. One nice thing about the current state of economics, technology, labor and inflation is that we'll have fewer people who can only imagine suffering to the extent of having a bicycle stolen, and would not give the worst people in the world an infinite amount of power in order to prevent this from happening to them again.
The 20% of the country that thinks that shoplifting is the real problem are a problem. They will always vote for the biggest liar.
I'm right now imagining a counterfactual world where there is no property crime or physical assault, and petty reactionaries are demanding surveillance in order to keep people from swearing.
You don't have control over whether petty reactionaries exist. Model them as non-sentient beings if it helps you analyze it dispassionately. They're going to react to public disorder by voting in pubic safety authoritarians like Bukele or Duterte with or without your permission. Thus everyone should care about shoplifting, the only disagreement is whether you care about the first or second order effects of it.
Also, all property crime is a drop in the bucket compared to white collar crime. The people who are super concerned about petty theft are often the ones stealing massive amounts of money from everyone else and creating the situations that lead to petty theft.
Wage theft (minimum wage violations, forced off the clock work, withheld pay, etc) dwarfs robbery, burglary, and auto theft alone in dollar value. And that's just one kind of white collar crime.
We also have market manipulators, embezzlers, cons selling "wellness" bullshit, companies like Flock and Palantir conspiring to break constitutional amendments, Polymarket grifters, what have you.
I'd be happy with unlimited bike theft if those fucks all ended up in prison, but realistically it would lower the bike theft.
You're free to move to Singapore/South Korea/Japan whenever you want. Your USD (assuming you are one) will go far there, and if you are lucky enough to be white you will get treated like a king/queen there.
As it turns out, society is a lot more fun when there is just a bit of risk of crime. I'll 1000000000% take the additional freedom to do "stupid shit" in the USA over living in one of these boring dystopias.
If it's a choice between stealing a bike and homelessness, I'll steal a bike. So the problem is the threat of homelessness. Right?
> If it's a choice between stealing a bike and homelessness
This is a vanishingly-rare hypothetical in America. (Stealing food? Sure. A bike? No.)
But still a hypothetical, unlike rampant desperation and wealth inequality in America.