I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as.
Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power?
Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?
My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."
This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".
People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.
I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.
I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.
So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.
I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control:
...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead,
so that no one can buy or sell who does not have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.
Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets.
Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.
"Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really matter:
The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat group on Discord. - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-...
Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand.
The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..
1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content
2. It applies to social media too
3. It applies to your operating system too
4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such.
Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis?
Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job
>Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices.
They won't have to.
Instead, they'll just make some new essentially mandatory tech which older devices cannot run – update or stop existing, societally.
----
Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") – from my perspective as an internet user whom doesn't use phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no phone, no email" – free-est man alive - their loss is disbelief.
I am very curious how you make it in current society without a phone or email. It does sound incredibly freeing, but I'm definitely having trouble comprehending how it works.
This isn’t just your photos. This is all content displayed on the device, all content captured by the camera - everything. Full take. GCHQ must be wetting themselves.
We all know this is the first political position. They'll walk back half of it, and what remains will appear to be a compromise, but was what was intended all along.
With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue may be one way to get their attention.
The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store.
When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home.
Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze.
Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?
Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.
This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...
Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc...
There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.
Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over by more politically and less technically inclined people (for better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters.
The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.
The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views.
The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example.
Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity, it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state. This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not include your safety.
The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984" and so they support it.
Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government violence in should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift.
Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.
I doubt the average person gives it much thought at all.
This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding this.
It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0" the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture consent.
The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.
>>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach
However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves.
Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.
That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.
Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do my part - https://mediaden.ca
Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.
I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee network access for any iOS app - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188
That only shows the domain eg facebook.com, not facebook.com/tracking-script. There's no reason that they can't put all the bad stuff on the same essential, first-party domain needed for the app which makes DNS blocking and viewing not effective.
That's why you can't block youtube ads with DNS, only with a browser-level adblocker because the browser adblocker is able to block the specific paths.
You can view the full encrypted traffic with something like mitmproxy, but there's ways apps can detect or prevent it.
Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.
The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be “visited” by the police and asked to “voluntarily” come down to the station for an interview about “hateful rhetoric” on social media. Doesn’t matter how you vote if actual political opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading rapidly aided by digital surveillance.
Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files.
Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.
Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does.
Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires personally identifiable information to use their service complains about privacy...
Beyond the fact that this isn't true, it's even less credible coming from a new, anonymous account. If privacy is really so dangerous and has no value, you should have no issue making comments like these under a publicly identifiable account.
People are less likely to commit crimes if they know the state has the tools to identify and prosecute them. Surveillance provides that capability, and reducing it makes solving and deterring crime much harder.
The cost is manageable as long as it's used for the right reasons and that the data is kept secure. The benefits of deterring violence outweigh those risks.
Billionaires may be a bigger threat but criminals are a threat nonetheless.
I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as.
Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30% app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians wouldn't want that same rule-setting, censoring power?
Did they think their employers were going to prevent that transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-dollar companies?
My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is."
This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".
People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.
I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it". But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link in the chain.
That was nicely put.
I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that is helped by compromising on freedom.
So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech, corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever) without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking paths of the future, and none will end up without technical restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things just get worse and someone else then does them.
A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't. You're the next guy.
Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and other such features know very well, but don't care. This is because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers, less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides for the society.
I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this passage while pushing their agenda for control:
Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are disjoint sets.
Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.
"Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein." (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.) - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry and it kept raining during harvest.
I don’t think 1st century Rome had much in the way of digital surveillance.
Or even surveillance, for that matter.
Plenty of hubris, mind.
The implementation might change, but the pattern of absolute control is old as time.
The phrase 'banality of evil' comes to mind.
Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents...
Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.
> Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means?
Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really matter:
The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat group on Discord. - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/rockstar-accused-of-...
Leaked Amazon Whole Foods Docs: Workforce Diversity Helps Prevent Unions - https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 (summarizing https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionizat...)
Microsoft Are Fixated on “Hate Speech” With Lopsided XBOX Live Enforcement Strike System - https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speec...
Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand.
The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a different purpose... seems relevant somehow..
So, in this order:
1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content
2. It applies to social media too
3. It applies to your operating system too
4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably, to work on Facetime calls and such.
Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools handed out Raspberry Pis?
Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in three months, because nobody knows how software engineering works. Great job
>Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older devices.
They won't have to.
Instead, they'll just make some new essentially mandatory tech which older devices cannot run – update or stop existing, societally.
----
Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") – from my perspective as an internet user whom doesn't use phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no phone, no email" – free-est man alive - their loss is disbelief.
I am very curious how you make it in current society without a phone or email. It does sound incredibly freeing, but I'm definitely having trouble comprehending how it works.
This isn’t just your photos. This is all content displayed on the device, all content captured by the camera - everything. Full take. GCHQ must be wetting themselves.
We all know this is the first political position. They'll walk back half of it, and what remains will appear to be a compromise, but was what was intended all along.
With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue may be one way to get their attention.
Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch.
The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street. Every store.
When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get the cops sent to your home.
Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be exempt from their gaze.
Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?
AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.
The ratchet ratcheting: client side scanning, then remote attestation to ensure client side scanning works, digital identity verification, etc etc.
Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.
This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society. Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...
Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc...
There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.
Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over by more politically and less technically inclined people (for better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters.
The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.
> Surveillance Is Not Safety
Maybe not, but as long as the average person thinks it is, it may as well be.
Does the average person think this? Perception of what other people think doesn't always line up with what they actually think.
>Does the average person think this?
The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views.
The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of their children, for example.
Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity, it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state. This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not include your safety.
The average person does not think anything much. They receive the meme, they transmit the meme. No processing occurs.
The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984" and so they support it.
Check out any comment section on transportation policy, environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology can be used by government to enforce it's will and preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy, civil rights or that the application of government violence in should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used when the whims and dispositions of government and society shift.
Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was scheming about how the government should (the implication being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape property listings and fine people for not pulling permits when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just have the government tour their home to prove it.
I doubt the average person gives it much thought at all.
This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding this.
It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0" the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture consent.
The last time they did this they contracted saatchi and saatchi to run an a disturbing campaign: https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-bl...
If only the average person had tools and access to all such information.
It's a great meme, though. Use it more.
https://xkcd.com/610/
isn't more as long as the average billionair thinks it is.
It's not like it's the average person pushing it.
The average person doesn't have any knowledge on this system.
Yes, but this is preaching to the choir.
The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.
>>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort of overreach
However, I do think that “the choir” need to rethink what is and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which is going to happen) can be lost if we don’t allow epidemiology to follow our digital selves.
Detecting one’s word use is slipping might signal a trip to the doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital searches for terrorism, at least let’s get the benefits too.
That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.
Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do my part - https://mediaden.ca
Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.
Looks proprietary. Need fully open source to guarantee that right long term.
I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee network access for any iOS app - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188
That only shows the domain eg facebook.com, not facebook.com/tracking-script. There's no reason that they can't put all the bad stuff on the same essential, first-party domain needed for the app which makes DNS blocking and viewing not effective.
That's why you can't block youtube ads with DNS, only with a browser-level adblocker because the browser adblocker is able to block the specific paths.
You can view the full encrypted traffic with something like mitmproxy, but there's ways apps can detect or prevent it.
Praise
Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.
We'll see. I can't be the only voter fed up with how Labour are handling this.
I find they way that Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have dismissed privacy concerns about online surveillance particularly condescending.
Come the next general election they are going to be paid back for this.
(Oh, and I appreciate Signal speaking up and have just donated to them again for doing so).
The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be “visited” by the police and asked to “voluntarily” come down to the station for an interview about “hateful rhetoric” on social media. Doesn’t matter how you vote if actual political opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading rapidly aided by digital surveillance.
Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files.
Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.
Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does.
Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires personally identifiable information to use their service complains about privacy...
> Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed
"Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
[delayed]
Personally, I only have authenticator apps because my job requires them. I don't see any contradiction in being opposed to things you're forced into.
Being anti-surveillance is the same thing as being pro-crime unless you provide an alternative solution to reduce crime.
Being pro-surveillance is the same thing as being pro-authoritarian unless you provide an alternate solution to prevent abuse of power.
Beyond the fact that this isn't true, it's even less credible coming from a new, anonymous account. If privacy is really so dangerous and has no value, you should have no issue making comments like these under a publicly identifiable account.
This assumes surveillance prevents crime, or even that crime is worth preventing if surveillance is the cost.
In terms of everyday threats to my life, billionaires are a bigger one than criminals.
People are less likely to commit crimes if they know the state has the tools to identify and prosecute them. Surveillance provides that capability, and reducing it makes solving and deterring crime much harder.
The cost is manageable as long as it's used for the right reasons and that the data is kept secure. The benefits of deterring violence outweigh those risks.
Billionaires may be a bigger threat but criminals are a threat nonetheless.