I wish we would stop emphasizing the social justice/accuracy concerns so heavily when talking about this. Starting that way will cause a huge segment of the population to switch off as soon as you start talking.
Imagine it works perfectly, and a three-letter agency with practically zero oversight, transparency, or accountability is collecting an accurate history of every single thing you do--everywhere you go, who you talk to, what you say to them, what content you consume and create, what emotions you feel, detailed biometric profiles, and so on. Are you ok with that?
And on the off chance someone reading this is OK with the government doing that for law enforcement purposes, also consider that
>At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
before giving them carte blanche to collect whatever information they want about everyone and store it in a database forever.
I've spoken with people who have said they are ok with it. But, when I start asking questions or sharing details on how this has been abused I tend to find they have not thought it through and are often unaware. In some cases people think I'm crazy until I show them press coverage on it.
I've learned that many don't have the depth of knowledge I have on the topic and have formed opinions with a puddles worth of information. Sometimes helping people learn more can change minds.
This is an important point. Most people are deciding what they're ok with based on today's circumstances, government etc. What happens if some years from now, your past behavior is at odds with the current government. You will be flagged and there will undoubtedly be consequences, which, even if minor are still negative. E.g., flagged for searches at border crossings.
Unfortunate reality is that, abuse and all, the larger society, ie - outside the privacy activist bubble, completely supports this sort of thing.
The police will just tell the average soccer mom that we need to track everything so that we know who to watch in order to stop the next mass shooter. And that soccer mom will applaud the police and say, "Hurry up! Keep the crazies away from my kids' school!"
That some person somewhere has to deal with a snooping spouse is about as meaningful to your average voter as some black kid getting picked up because the system doesn't work on black people. Most don't care. Sorry, but that's just the cold reality.
To think they will care, is to ignore human nature.
To count on them caring in order to stop the government from implementing mass surveillance, is to be not terribly pragmatic.
> I wish we would stop emphasizing the social justice/accuracy concerns so heavily when talking about this
Do you mean like the historical racism and anti-black bias of the FBI, as mentioned in the article? I want it emphasized.
Like someone else said, a lot of people are fine with some authority they perceive as benevolent (or as fighting evildoers) to control every detail of their lives. They would answer your question with "yes, I don't have anything to hide." So it's important to remind them of examples of authorities grossly misbehaving while supposedly acting for the common good.
I believe the point being made is that those points are effective at reaching people who need little to no convincing and who are already politically supportive. The same points about historical wrongs done to other people unlike them are more likely to alienate the readers who are not currently politically supportive.
To put it another way, preaching to the choir doesn't win you more votes.
I think it's baked into a certain conservative mindset that they are the ones who don't have anything to hide, which makes sense because if you don't have many progressive opinions then you probably aren't chafing against authority too often.
And, I think authoritarians (many of them seem to march under the "conservative" banner these days) are fine with surveillance because they see it as a hallmark of an effective authoritarian government, and again they see themselves as members of the "in" group. They want those subversives who are hiding things to be found and punished.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of these people will be terribly moved by the fact that leaders of progressive social movements in the past or present have been targeted by surveillance. Their world-views are shaped by a perception that they will not be targeted by an overreaching government, and such movements are comprised of their explicit political enemies.
However, I think we stand to win over a lot of people with a libertarian bent who might be turned off by an anti-surveillance movement strongly associated with modern leftism. To what degree we risk alienating those leftists, I have no idea.
Unfortunately there has been a major cultural shift in the national ACLU. They are now largely uninterested in defending strong sense personal freedom and instead much more interested in social justice. :( (The frown isn't that I think such causes are bad, but only that I don't think that the loss of a strong defense of constitutional free speech is good). If you think I'm exaggerating, you might find this eye opening: https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621AC...
I'm not aware of any large organization that is willing to defend deplorable persons and groups like the westborough church trolls for the sake of preserving the same freedoms for everyone, not like the ACLU of old did.
I do understand that the social justice oriented activities have been utterly phenomenal for ACLU fundraising, however. Particularly because they achieve significant traction on social media... After all, who really gets all that excited about the ACLU defending some piece-of-crap pedophile? Unglamorous civil rights work just doesn't pay like riding the latest waves.
Sadly, I know a lot of people who are ok with that. They're very much of the opinion, "Well, I'm doing nothing wrong, so I don't care. Especially if it helps catch bad guys". Not really sure how to fight that.
Rather than trying to challenge them on whether they really do have anything to hide, I usually try to challenge their assumption that privacy is an individual right. Privacy isn't an individual right. It's a societal right. It's there to ensure those who want to make change can effectively organize, which is necessary in a democratic society. So you have the right to privacy whether you like it to or not, because society needs it. Keeping your individual porn habits secret is a side effect.
People who tend to argue, "I have nothing to hide," usually think well of themselves. So if you can get them thinking of privacy as a social good, more "we" than "me", then you can show them that supporting privacy protections is more of an altruistic gesture than a vice.
If they want a specific example, the I usually talk about women's suffrage. It's only been 100 years since women didn't have the right to vote in the U.S., and suffragettes were extremely effective in 1919 by organizing privately then showing up in mass to overwhelm legislatures and mount demonstrations that couldn't be silenced or hidden. If lawmakers knew about all those damn women organizing such big events, women likely would not have been successful at getting the right to vote.
Privacy is the lubricant that lets society move, whether it's pro-life movements, pro-pot movements, or any other political movement. They all need privacy to actually be successful.
- do you know anyone who has been stalked, harassed, worse? or: do you have kids?
- yes (hopefully)
- would you tolerate use of software that allows users to more effectively stalk, harass, or worse? [especially your kids?]
- no (hopefully)
- are you aware that software with that power exists today, and that since at least 2007 some of its users have been convicted of using it for stalking/harassing/worse?
Except many people don't realize how often they commit crimes and are unaware of it. Our individual definition of right and wrong doesn't always match up with the laws on the books.
When I heard that from some girls in high school I responded by asking them "if they have nothing to hide, why are they wearing clothes?" I at least hope I made them think.
"I'm doing nothing wrong..." Tell them that they're thinking in terms of today's standards. Imagine someone coming to power in the future, when standards have undoubtedly changed, being able to go back in time and prosecute for crimes committed in the current day. This has already started with Tweets and stuff people made 10+ years ago when they were young and dumb. Viewpoints they probably no longer hold, as they've matured. They're getting fired now for things they said then, because there's now a permanent record of it. Soon, if not already, we will no longer allow people to grow and make mistakes along the way. You will be judged for everything you say and do, places you go, things you spend your money on (cc records), people you associate with, etc. But, you'll be judged by a standard that doesn't exist today, and you don't know what it will be 30 years from now, or who will be doing it.
To take it to the extreme. Ask your friends what they think Hitler (or pick some other mass murderer) would have done if he had such capabilities. How many more would have died, and would it have taken as long? They had to go door to door back then and physically search. Now they could just keyword search and not only find you, but everybody you've associated with, and who they associated with. If you wanted to find Jews, or homosexuals, or whatever you wanted...it's all right there. Just type the query in that little box, on that magical little device in your pocket.
That's too much power, for anyone, at any place or any time to have. To say it will never be abused, now or in the future, is believing humans are perfect as-is and things will remain consistently the same from here on out. There has never been a time in human history where things just stayed the same. Very, very short sighted.
Ask your friends if they've ever done or said anything at any point in time in their lives that would absolutely destroy their reputation, if the world could watch it happen right now.
There was a pretty damn good reason why the founders created the 4th amendment. Sadly, those are just words on paper now. We gave it all up for the excuse of 9/11. That was a long time ago now. Technology/storage have been progressing quite rapidly since then. And many consider the person who lifted the veil to be a traitor.
A fair point, thought the accuracy issue is a real one, and one that may get traction as more people deal with incorrect, misleading, false, and/or outdated information in various records such as credit reports or health records. At scale innacuracies enter into data stores, and are difficult to root out. They can persist for years.
My rephrase of Acton's dictum cuts two ways: Data corrupts, and absolute data corrupts absolutely. That is, it both tends to corrupt the institutions, organisations, and individuals holding, accessing, or influencing it, and the information itself recorded tends to acquire errors and inaccuracies over time. Those inaccuracies will often be far more significant to the subjects of that information than the holders or collectors.
(In fact the original formulation of that phrase referred to a case of data corruption, not institutional corruption, though both were manifestly apparent at the time.)
....people already let that happen with Google, and don't care. And they do it in the open.
What is the fun kicker is because they do that, 4th amendment rights don't apply to that information on Google. So why would a three letter agency even bother with that when they can just subpoena Google?
Most of this could be said about smartphones already and the masses don't care. Maybe their approach of focusing on the consequences for minorities could raise some concern (or not, who knows).
I don't think most people will care about privacy until it has a direct or near direct affect on them.
> Imagine it works perfectly, and a three-letter agency with practically zero oversight, transparency, or accountability is collecting an accurate history of every single thing you do--everywhere you go, who you talk to, what you say to them, what content you consume and create, what emotions you feel, detailed biometric profiles, and so on. Are you ok with that?
A few years ago I met someone, they asked what I did, I said computer software.
Their first response: "Oh, I hope there's no more of those Snowdens out there!"
So I wouldn't assume everyone is opposed to law enforcement mass surveillence.
But the accuracy point is a big deal. The fact that it doesn't work well should frighten the people who claim they are OK with it because they have nothing to hide. (However much we disagree with them.)
Imagine being thrown in jail because somebody who looks like you committed a crime. (You didn't like the social justice angle, but actually, racial minorities get that all the time in the US.) "The computer said so" is going to be convincing evidence to a lot of people, even if it shouldn't be.
Humans have a limited amount of attention. Imagine you're in a debate with somebody and you put out 2 hard hitting points of criticism and 18 easy to solve points of criticism. The other party can now counter/fix your 18 points of criticism and ignore the 2 hard hitting ones. To most people looking at the debate from the outside it will seem as though the other party has defended their argument, because they countered so many of your points.
This same situation applies here. If the government somehow fixes or sidesteps the issue of discrimination, then it's only going to marginally make the mass surveillance issue better for society. What if they deployed this system in a racially homogenous country? Now the argument about discrimination is much less effective, yet the negative impact of mass surveillance is nearly the same.
Thank you! The error rate of facial recognition and similar technologies is a completely moot point and a very easy one for anyone to talk their way out of. The scariest thing isn’t the case where this technology gets it wrong, it’s when it’s used effectively for the wrong reasons.
Why is that causing a huge part of the population to switch off? That's insane.
Starting with a practical, serious, and concrete discriminatory problem sounds like a great place to start vs some general ethical issue with surveillance.
Because the discrimination problem is separate issue here. It leaves room for the idea that "if they just fix the discrimination problem, then this is fine". It's not, because privacy violations affect everyone. Even if they were somehow able to make these systems not discriminate, we would still not have moved even a little on the issue of mass surveillance.
It's interesting to read back over past discussion of this question.
Among the more interesting academics is Herbert Simon, and his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society" makes a strong case for the positive impacts of increased utilisation of computer technology. It also specifically discusses the privacy concerns, in one paragraph.
That, unfortunately for Simon's case, contains an egregious factual error, though one which may not have been known to Simon at the time:
The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
Unfortunately, we're now very well aware that this was not the case. Not only did Nazi German prosecute the Holocaust with the extensive aid of mechanised data processing technologies, but they did so using American technology, provided and supported, with full knowledge, by IBM:
Edwin Black has documented this in his horrific book, IBM and the Holocaust (2012)
It is ultimately a social justice issue no matter how you contextualize it.
Think about it this way: If the government has complete access to your life, that simplifies targeting you for any reason they might select, and history has shown that social justice is a big factor because law enforcement has a history of targeting vulnerable minorities, even if they don't do it as much now.
Are your politics uncommon? Is your skin color uncommon? Is your sexuality uncommon? Does someone in the local police department just plain dislike you? We used to perform witch-hunts on communists. Conservatives already observe (regardless of whether you believe this to be true) persecution by the government, and left-wing and far-right groups actively are subject to the same in some cases right now.
Even if the technology is only partial surveillance and detection, it trivializes applying the "Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him" trope to literally anyone, because now they have access to most of the words we've said in our entire lives, including quotes. And they could do selective editing to recontextualize them.
Yes. I don't believe our government is inherently evil and unjust. They have and will continue to have access to all this information legally anyway (if it exists, they can legally get it).
On the plus side, I see a lot of positives with this. I'm tired of graffiti everywhere. The other day I was walking home and some kid picked up a metal trash can on the corner of 37th and 8th, dumped it in the middle of the road and launched it at a storefront window and walked off. Outdoor restrooms, drugs use / dealing, random acts of violence, theft, vandalism... good bye. In Shenzhen, I'm told that if you jaywalk they will auto-deduct the ticket from your bank account by the time you cross the street. Think about the countless billions of dollars in lost productivity, environmental damage, waste whatever it is that you care about that blatant disrespect for other people's time and property costs us.
All of these bad actors can be weeded out. The possibilities actually excite me.
After listening to Joe Rogan's interview with Edward Snowden I bought and listened to his book "Permanent Record." At this point I have to assume that at least a dozen agencies in a handful of countries are watching me through my webcam as I type this message right now. Snowden suggested (or at least I inferred) that he didn't reveal all there is to know about the scope of government surveillance and it's only logical to conclude that techniques and technologies have gotten more advanced and more subtle since he fled the country.
They aren't watching you. They're recording you. They're running algorithms to classify and index you. They're building massive data centers to house all of this semi organized and raw data.
And when they leak it all they won't be held accountable because terrorists, children, and stuff.
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's real and it's a black hat's wet dream.
Oh yeah, they can use it for political purposes too I suppose. To silence dissent and all that.
Also -- and I swear I read thid in the NYTimes, but I can't find it -- CEOs are now not uncommonly ditching cellphones and laptops before going into important meetings.
In a general sense, this sort of thing seems to have the potential to have incredible conseauences for liberty, justice, the economy and Western society.
Instead of assuming you could lock down your internet pipe. Use a RPi as a security appliance with strong whitelisted firewall policy. At least have some insight into what traffic is going to and from your LAN.
Could also put in an entirely passive NIDS on a physical layer in-line with your network’s service entrance. Very difficult for anyone to defeat, when done right.
> Instead of assuming you could lock down your internet pipe. Use a RPi as a security appliance with strong whitelisted firewall policy. At least have some insight into what traffic is going to and from your LAN.
Not only would a Raspberry Pi be severely under-powered for routing even a small home network, in no way does monitoring that "goes to and from your LAN" defend against an adversary Snowden warns about.
> Could also put in an entirely passive NIDS on a physical layer in-line with your network’s service entrance. Very difficult for anyone to defeat, when done right.
Again, I'm not sure what threat model you think this defends against, but certainly not a three letter agency intent on either tailored exploitation nor passive monitoring of your inbound and outbound network traffic by the same actor.
I think after Khashoggi's death the extent of surveillance could be evaluated based on the fact that US president had the option to review it. Guy was killed in a consulate in Turkey and, at the very least, US had audio ready to analyze.
What a poorly designed site. Nothing but a spinning circle with Javascript disabled - Firefox reader mode doesn't work, either. Completely unacceptable from a privacy and usability perspective.
Javascript required for text rendering is incredibly poor design. For those of us with limited connections, I turn off Javascript because I don't want to download 10MB of Javascript ad tech and frameworks. This is expensive and takes forever to load on satellite and rural connections.
Good design takes these basic common issues into account.
Considering the World Wide Web predates Javascript by many years, and the fact it's possible to create a functional, readable, and accessible Web page without Javascript altogether, this characterization is absolutely inaccurate.
You don't need javascript to show some paragraphs of text with hyperlinks. You don't even need css. If that does not work, this is not a case of poor design, this is simply absolute crap.
Ironically, it's impossible to read this ACLU page without enabling Javascript, which opens one up to more browser fingerprinting attacks, potential Javascript vulenrabilities, and tracking.
Ironically, I suspect people are more concerned now about random people taking their photo, or photos of their children. Remember the outcry over Google Glass?
Readit News
Imagine it works perfectly, and a three-letter agency with practically zero oversight, transparency, or accountability is collecting an accurate history of every single thing you do--everywhere you go, who you talk to, what you say to them, what content you consume and create, what emotions you feel, detailed biometric profiles, and so on. Are you ok with that?
>At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
before giving them carte blanche to collect whatever information they want about everyone and store it in a database forever.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
I've learned that many don't have the depth of knowledge I have on the topic and have formed opinions with a puddles worth of information. Sometimes helping people learn more can change minds.
This is an important point. Most people are deciding what they're ok with based on today's circumstances, government etc. What happens if some years from now, your past behavior is at odds with the current government. You will be flagged and there will undoubtedly be consequences, which, even if minor are still negative. E.g., flagged for searches at border crossings.
The police will just tell the average soccer mom that we need to track everything so that we know who to watch in order to stop the next mass shooter. And that soccer mom will applaud the police and say, "Hurry up! Keep the crazies away from my kids' school!"
That some person somewhere has to deal with a snooping spouse is about as meaningful to your average voter as some black kid getting picked up because the system doesn't work on black people. Most don't care. Sorry, but that's just the cold reality.
To think they will care, is to ignore human nature.
To count on them caring in order to stop the government from implementing mass surveillance, is to be not terribly pragmatic.
Do you mean like the historical racism and anti-black bias of the FBI, as mentioned in the article? I want it emphasized.
Like someone else said, a lot of people are fine with some authority they perceive as benevolent (or as fighting evildoers) to control every detail of their lives. They would answer your question with "yes, I don't have anything to hide." So it's important to remind them of examples of authorities grossly misbehaving while supposedly acting for the common good.
To put it another way, preaching to the choir doesn't win you more votes.
And, I think authoritarians (many of them seem to march under the "conservative" banner these days) are fine with surveillance because they see it as a hallmark of an effective authoritarian government, and again they see themselves as members of the "in" group. They want those subversives who are hiding things to be found and punished.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of these people will be terribly moved by the fact that leaders of progressive social movements in the past or present have been targeted by surveillance. Their world-views are shaped by a perception that they will not be targeted by an overreaching government, and such movements are comprised of their explicit political enemies.
However, I think we stand to win over a lot of people with a libertarian bent who might be turned off by an anti-surveillance movement strongly associated with modern leftism. To what degree we risk alienating those leftists, I have no idea.
Unfortunately there has been a major cultural shift in the national ACLU. They are now largely uninterested in defending strong sense personal freedom and instead much more interested in social justice. :( (The frown isn't that I think such causes are bad, but only that I don't think that the loss of a strong defense of constitutional free speech is good). If you think I'm exaggerating, you might find this eye opening: https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/20180621AC...
I'm not aware of any large organization that is willing to defend deplorable persons and groups like the westborough church trolls for the sake of preserving the same freedoms for everyone, not like the ACLU of old did.
I do understand that the social justice oriented activities have been utterly phenomenal for ACLU fundraising, however. Particularly because they achieve significant traction on social media... After all, who really gets all that excited about the ACLU defending some piece-of-crap pedophile? Unglamorous civil rights work just doesn't pay like riding the latest waves.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/aclu-defends-article-l...
https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/16/politics/aclu-free-speech-whi...
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Rather than trying to challenge them on whether they really do have anything to hide, I usually try to challenge their assumption that privacy is an individual right. Privacy isn't an individual right. It's a societal right. It's there to ensure those who want to make change can effectively organize, which is necessary in a democratic society. So you have the right to privacy whether you like it to or not, because society needs it. Keeping your individual porn habits secret is a side effect.
People who tend to argue, "I have nothing to hide," usually think well of themselves. So if you can get them thinking of privacy as a social good, more "we" than "me", then you can show them that supporting privacy protections is more of an altruistic gesture than a vice.
If they want a specific example, the I usually talk about women's suffrage. It's only been 100 years since women didn't have the right to vote in the U.S., and suffragettes were extremely effective in 1919 by organizing privately then showing up in mass to overwhelm legislatures and mount demonstrations that couldn't be silenced or hidden. If lawmakers knew about all those damn women organizing such big events, women likely would not have been successful at getting the right to vote.
Privacy is the lubricant that lets society move, whether it's pro-life movements, pro-pot movements, or any other political movement. They all need privacy to actually be successful.
- yes (hopefully)
- would you tolerate use of software that allows users to more effectively stalk, harass, or worse? [especially your kids?]
- no (hopefully)
- are you aware that software with that power exists today, and that since at least 2007 some of its users have been convicted of using it for stalking/harassing/worse?
- no, tell me more (hopefully)
Except many people don't realize how often they commit crimes and are unaware of it. Our individual definition of right and wrong doesn't always match up with the laws on the books.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...
"This will make it easier for a Democratic president to know about and take away your guns."
Others just shrug, too ashamed to say it out loud.
To take it to the extreme. Ask your friends what they think Hitler (or pick some other mass murderer) would have done if he had such capabilities. How many more would have died, and would it have taken as long? They had to go door to door back then and physically search. Now they could just keyword search and not only find you, but everybody you've associated with, and who they associated with. If you wanted to find Jews, or homosexuals, or whatever you wanted...it's all right there. Just type the query in that little box, on that magical little device in your pocket.
That's too much power, for anyone, at any place or any time to have. To say it will never be abused, now or in the future, is believing humans are perfect as-is and things will remain consistently the same from here on out. There has never been a time in human history where things just stayed the same. Very, very short sighted.
Ask your friends if they've ever done or said anything at any point in time in their lives that would absolutely destroy their reputation, if the world could watch it happen right now.
There was a pretty damn good reason why the founders created the 4th amendment. Sadly, those are just words on paper now. We gave it all up for the excuse of 9/11. That was a long time ago now. Technology/storage have been progressing quite rapidly since then. And many consider the person who lifted the veil to be a traitor.
Smile, you're being recorded.
My rephrase of Acton's dictum cuts two ways: Data corrupts, and absolute data corrupts absolutely. That is, it both tends to corrupt the institutions, organisations, and individuals holding, accessing, or influencing it, and the information itself recorded tends to acquire errors and inaccuracies over time. Those inaccuracies will often be far more significant to the subjects of that information than the holders or collectors.
(In fact the original formulation of that phrase referred to a case of data corruption, not institutional corruption, though both were manifestly apparent at the time.)
What is the fun kicker is because they do that, 4th amendment rights don't apply to that information on Google. So why would a three letter agency even bother with that when they can just subpoena Google?
I don't think most people will care about privacy until it has a direct or near direct affect on them.
A few years ago I met someone, they asked what I did, I said computer software.
Their first response: "Oh, I hope there's no more of those Snowdens out there!"
So I wouldn't assume everyone is opposed to law enforcement mass surveillence.
We have to give them reasons to be opposed to it.
Imagine being thrown in jail because somebody who looks like you committed a crime. (You didn't like the social justice angle, but actually, racial minorities get that all the time in the US.) "The computer said so" is going to be convincing evidence to a lot of people, even if it shouldn't be.
This same situation applies here. If the government somehow fixes or sidesteps the issue of discrimination, then it's only going to marginally make the mass surveillance issue better for society. What if they deployed this system in a racially homogenous country? Now the argument about discrimination is much less effective, yet the negative impact of mass surveillance is nearly the same.
Deleted Comment
Starting with a practical, serious, and concrete discriminatory problem sounds like a great place to start vs some general ethical issue with surveillance.
Among the more interesting academics is Herbert Simon, and his 1977 essay "What Computers Mean for Man and Society" makes a strong case for the positive impacts of increased utilisation of computer technology. It also specifically discusses the privacy concerns, in one paragraph.
That, unfortunately for Simon's case, contains an egregious factual error, though one which may not have been known to Simon at the time:
The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing.
Screenshot:
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103059230160200494
Source:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...
Unfortunately, we're now very well aware that this was not the case. Not only did Nazi German prosecute the Holocaust with the extensive aid of mechanised data processing technologies, but they did so using American technology, provided and supported, with full knowledge, by IBM:
Edwin Black has documented this in his horrific book, IBM and the Holocaust (2012)
https://ibmandtheholocaust.com
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ibm-and-the-holocaust-the-str...
To paraphrase Lord Acton, it appears that data corrupts, and absolute data corrupts absolutely.
Think about it this way: If the government has complete access to your life, that simplifies targeting you for any reason they might select, and history has shown that social justice is a big factor because law enforcement has a history of targeting vulnerable minorities, even if they don't do it as much now.
Are your politics uncommon? Is your skin color uncommon? Is your sexuality uncommon? Does someone in the local police department just plain dislike you? We used to perform witch-hunts on communists. Conservatives already observe (regardless of whether you believe this to be true) persecution by the government, and left-wing and far-right groups actively are subject to the same in some cases right now.
Even if the technology is only partial surveillance and detection, it trivializes applying the "Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him" trope to literally anyone, because now they have access to most of the words we've said in our entire lives, including quotes. And they could do selective editing to recontextualize them.
Why is that? Is a huge segment of the population in favor of social injustice?
Because talking about Social Justice is bad? And mentioning that black people are disproportionately affected is bad?
Are you sure you aren't suggesting we should simply talk less about activists, minorities, and poor people, and more about affluent white people?
On the plus side, I see a lot of positives with this. I'm tired of graffiti everywhere. The other day I was walking home and some kid picked up a metal trash can on the corner of 37th and 8th, dumped it in the middle of the road and launched it at a storefront window and walked off. Outdoor restrooms, drugs use / dealing, random acts of violence, theft, vandalism... good bye. In Shenzhen, I'm told that if you jaywalk they will auto-deduct the ticket from your bank account by the time you cross the street. Think about the countless billions of dollars in lost productivity, environmental damage, waste whatever it is that you care about that blatant disrespect for other people's time and property costs us.
All of these bad actors can be weeded out. The possibilities actually excite me.
You like mainland, go live there. One more sea turtle, everybody is happy.
There are checks in place for this so they don’t abuse their access; checks that we find so important that we put it directly into our Bill of Rights.
Sure, right up until someone in power decides that you are the "bad actor" and weeds you out.
And when they leak it all they won't be held accountable because terrorists, children, and stuff.
It's not a conspiracy theory. It's real and it's a black hat's wet dream.
Oh yeah, they can use it for political purposes too I suppose. To silence dissent and all that.
In a general sense, this sort of thing seems to have the potential to have incredible conseauences for liberty, justice, the economy and Western society.
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Could also put in an entirely passive NIDS on a physical layer in-line with your network’s service entrance. Very difficult for anyone to defeat, when done right.
Apologies for term misuse.
Not only would a Raspberry Pi be severely under-powered for routing even a small home network, in no way does monitoring that "goes to and from your LAN" defend against an adversary Snowden warns about.
> Could also put in an entirely passive NIDS on a physical layer in-line with your network’s service entrance. Very difficult for anyone to defeat, when done right.
Again, I'm not sure what threat model you think this defends against, but certainly not a three letter agency intent on either tailored exploitation nor passive monitoring of your inbound and outbound network traffic by the same actor.
I hear it is difficult to surveil through books.
The web is made from HTML, CSS and Javascript. Turn off one of them and of course things aren't going to work or look right.
Good design takes these basic common issues into account.
Considering the World Wide Web predates Javascript by many years, and the fact it's possible to create a functional, readable, and accessible Web page without Javascript altogether, this characterization is absolutely inaccurate.
Google, the most popular page on the internet, doesn't force you to use Javascript.
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Why on earth should we accept this situation?
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