I think most people who say "I have nothing to hide" are just mimicking a slogan they no doubt heard someone they respect or at least think talks well say
Another common refrain, especially since Snowden, is just glib defeatism ("they already have all my info anyway") which is also a poor way to think about policy (and to make personal choices, but I won't argue those with most people)
I really think the main reason people are complacent is more often that the spying is abstract to them. They wouldn't like it if someone were pointing a big camera through their window, but data being aggregated through their phone and smart home gadgets and computer and CCTVs in public places and leaks on distant websites doesn't register in their actual attention, so it doesn't emotionally feel like a big deal to them
>so it doesn't emotionally feel like a big deal to them
I wonder how people would feel if there was a single site that aggregated all of the data that has been harvested about them. Potentially showing where/how the data was collected and setting aside protecting that data from prying eyes would be problematic. In the world of today where evidence is just fake news, how [in]effective would something like this be in changing minds?
Viewing the off-site data Facebook has collected was enlightening. There were events from when I paid for food and other goods at brick-and-mortar stores.
I disagree that people are complacent. What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi.
The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently.
When you have people as a group lie for profit, and they corrupt your representatives and there is no one to hold them to account. They don't give you the choice, and you can't hold them accountable first because you find out about it later, but you still have no choice and you reach out to the people whose job it is to solely represent you in government and they do nothing, and the courts are inaccessible so you have no means.
At that point, despite declarations, there really isn't a rule of law then, it along with most of what people think of as their rights were taken by collusion gradually and quietly.
When that type of problem occurs, every citizen has a choice based upon the individual risk. Totalitarian governments kill people, or lock them up from kafka kangaroo courts (before they kill them) to give a semblance of legitimacy when that legitimacy has already passed. You show me the person, I'll show you the crime; is a famous saying.
When feedback systems fail, and can no longer respond, things will get worse until people will do something, and that will be destructive. The only choice they are given is when.
Totalitarian governments make no distinction between peaceful protests, they may not go after you initially, but collecting all the information upfront of everyone that does to black bag you later; or keep you under their thumb through enhanced coercion (given the systems) and harassment from every direction is not unheard of.
The moment you start surveilling peaceful protests is a known indicator that you are in fact in a totalitarian government.
Its not the people who are the problem. Its the fact that feedback mechanisms have been corrupted and are now broken.
Privacy is a necessary and requisite element for any insurgency in its beginnings, so by eliminating it no corrective action can take place and abuses will continually get worse.
You've had agency stripped from you without your consent and told all your life you live in a world that doesn't exist while misleading you at every step.
These situations historically always cascade, which is why we almost certainly will have a violent civil war in the near future. Its destructive, but that is the inevitable outcome when feedback systems are interfered with to the point where they can no longer function to keep people within reasonable bounds.
> primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently
Are you a regulator voter? Do you have a dialogue with your electeds’ offices? If not, try starting there. Express, as unemotionally as you can, why you believe this is something you believe in. If possible, get your views seconded in writing.
If you’re in America or Europe, there are plenty of non-violent remedies at the ready. The problem is privacy is uniquely afflicted with the uselessly cynical, to the point that it’s considered electoral junk at the national level.
> What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi
Please don’t do this. It’s one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz. (Archer can do it. You can’t.)
I regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion. Fake job postings, and interferance in labor relations have been a recent subject that only receives boilerplate responses. No action has been taken, its been 5 years since I started doing this which is an appropriate measure of sampling time to show trends and inform on larger systems, though 10 years is better.
I vote every time I have a chance. The problem with voting systems is first, the money vote (tweedism) just to get on a ballot. It's a filter and acts to make the system captive to those with concentrated wealth, by limiting those who can successfully run.
Second, the concentration of representative power in few representatives leads to dynamics where many are not represented simply because there are too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000).
Seniority by committee limits power to only those who get re-elected regularly (further concentrating power).
Third, the voting as a plurality which is also exclusionary. You can skew any system holding at least 66 percent of the vote.
It is also an all or nothing vote (not ranked choice), where inherently when a representative can't win the majority, none of the people who voted for them technically have much representation among other competing and more favorable members of that group who voted for that person.
Finally,
> Please don't do this. Its one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz.
These are not petty complaints. They are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole. Its not funny... at all. Archer is meant to be absurd and funny; its not a fair characterization or comparison.
There are many experts that are claiming the same thing because rational observable indicators are all showing that this is a growing existential problem. Rome fell largely because of corruption alongside external invasion. There are important lesson's which could be learned but are largely being ignored.
The dynamics are the same with most Empires (where a country seeks hegemony), and the majority of people have not been adequately educated to be able to even hold to rational conversation, instead putting forth beliefs in luei of observable facts being confident in their blindness.
That too is a problem because our enemies take advantage of that blindness.
If you've read any history about the Stasi, you'd know the systems they used to disunite the population, most of those system's have been used by government's today. They also enrolled others in a constant fear of betrayal by those close, and that's very similar to all the embedded devices (where a digital automata/soldier is embedded in each household spying on them).
These things are serious, and deserve rational respect and following rational rules to have any discussion.
> regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion
Where are you? Can you share a sample of the text you reach out with? Have you ever organised a group of people to sign on to what you’re advocating?
> too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000)
You have no state representatives with smaller parcels?
> are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole
It’s hyperbole: the Stasi used violence as a political tool. Normalising them with rhetoric such as yours legitimises all of the mechanisms you describe escalating to including violence in their portfolio.
This point is extremely silly. In the modern US, violence is an essentially omnipresent political tool, both at home on every level and abroad. In many cities across the country we just saw police violently crack down on protestors in universities protesting the US support of Israel's present massacre in Gaza, but this also happened at the protests against police killings and bigotry throughout 2020, or at Ferguson before that, or before that against students protesting the Vietnam war, or before that against civil rights protestors, and those are just the really famous cases in living memory. Relatively recently, an activist in Georgia protesting the demolition of a big chunk of forest for the planned enormous training facility for the already armed to the teeth police of that area was essentially gunned down by a whole firing squad of said police, extrajudicially, and you likely didn't even hear about it.
On a federal level, the FBI has been constantly deployed to attack political dissidents with national fame in more targeted ways, and the DHS and DEA were both essentially invented to do this with more impunity under very broad mandates surrounding very nebulous crimes. You could argue that ICE often functions this way too. The NSA's PRISM program is a surveillance apparatus the Stasi couldn't have dreamed of, and that's just what got leaked, and it was at this point like a decade of both capabilities growth and political unrest ago
Political violence is so normalized that when people are scandalized by our use of it abroad (usually via the CIA), it is when they use the tool of political violence for the benefit of American businesses rather than some perceived "pure" political motive, because it smacks of corruption of one of most important functions of US foreign policy, "necessary" political violence against the sovereignty of perceived potential threats
I agree that it is hyperbole to compare the modern US and its various forms of police to East Germany and its Stasi. The Stasi employed a much smaller scale of political violence than the modern US has, and had nowhere near the capacity nor appetite for widespread surveillance, which nonetheless is further dwarfed by that of its corporations, although of course these are often intertwined
Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability. Recipients included assembly members, house, and senate. To date, only boilerplate responses, no action, and only an increase in spam related to requests for donation for support during re-election.
> It's hyperbole.
It is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole.This is false.
The observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods. Social contract theory is well established, so is much of the referenced history.
Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated, which is an 'all' claim which are the most trivial to contradict as an overgeneralization and thus be shown to be false.
The claim that communicating facts about past events somehow legitimizes and justifies unrelated acts of violence, and causes it, is fundamentally unsound.
Violence absent survival (existential threats) as a general rule can never be justified, or legitimized.
Any good person knows this, and wouldn't try to justify because false justification is an act of self-violation, and this is how you become an evil person (who has willfully blinded themselves).
There was a time when evil people were killed because they had to be stopped otherwise they would bring destruction on everyone, these times were existential threats. WW2 against the Nazi's was one such time. They threatened the world, and your argument against communication for organization and response is an obvious contradiction during those times.
The structured reasoning you use is a foundational example of flawed thinking (fallacy) and an example of tautology, ad absurdum (by contradiction).
The consequence of an action or event, being the causing action of the event may be narrowly valid in some cases, but never sound (and it must be true in all cases to be sound), this is why it is generally considered fallacy, and by contradiction discounts agency and environmental factors, and overgeneralizes by claiming supposition-al elements are the same when they are not. You can't use circular self-reference when seeking sound argument.
As a result, you have made false claims, while choosing to ignore rational norms (given the ambiguity and dissembling). This is twisted.
Needless to say, there can be no rational discourse if you do not follow rational norms. I've shown that several of your statements are false claims, this informs on your innate credibility for future claims.
Without credibility, you don't have any basis for standing and by necessity, your future rhetoric must be considered false and discarded until you can prove rationally that it is not.
The nice thing about following rational rules and norms is it does not require credibility; only unbased rhetoric has that requirement.
Lies, deceits, and falsehoods are easily discarded under rational methods. Dissembling, discrediting, nullification all cease being useful when you have lost credibility and have no standing.
> Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability
On multiple occasions the text I drafted was passed into state and twice federal law, in red states and blue. I’ve also guided staffers, when they were dealing with a new field which I was familiar with, on how to sort the nutters from the informed but powerless. (They’re good at identifying those who can organise a constituency, informed or not.)
I was trying to figure out how you can be more effective. Not fight you.
> observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods
By classic rhetorical methods, you left unchallenged my inequivalence claim in respect of the use of violence by the Stasi and our present governments. Herego, I win by default. (Obviously not how conversation works. But at least more precedents than “rational norms,” which is not standard rhetoric.)
Also, “it is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole” is argument by tautology. Hyperbole means exaggerated. You say it isn’t hyperbole because it isn’t exaggerated. You say it isn’t exaggerated because…well, that’s never argued.
You called out argument ad absurdum, too, though I’m not sure you know what that means—neither of us used it, correctly or not, except in misinformation.
> Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated
…did you use this tone in your letters? “Rational norms” are not conventional English.
On a stylistic level, you used the word “rational” in almost every sentence. That’s fine. But it puts your writing into a specific corner of the internet better known for flat Earthers than reasoned policy.
> The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently
I think that’s a rather absurd claim. The real problem is that most people couldn’t care less, they neither understand the issues and/or are in the “don’t have anything to hide” camp. Unfortunate I guess that’s just how democracy works..
It is not absurd, it is frightening, because when you look closely at the details of how the systems currently function it shows they are not functioning.
The rule of law is meant as a safeguard for non-violent conflict resolution. It requires 4 components. Accessibility and independent judiciary are two of the most important.
It currently costs an average person's yearly (unspent for necessity/food) salary to bring a case before a superior court to conclusion excluding some niches. That's roughly $50,000, and that was in 2020 dollars. Wages have been suppressed to create a cost wall that excludes those who don't make enough money. There are also other aspects such as forced arbitration, and front of line blocking (i.e. being unable to show standing until an agreement is nullified for discovery, when information that would show standing would be available once done).
You are mistaken. This isn't how democracy works. It is historically the early stages of totalitarianism, and those type of governments resort to menticide which is well documented (but largely not taught outside certain niches).
Robert Lifton, and John Meerloo both are experts and wrote books if you care to actually do your own research.
There's a lot to fear from revolutionary uprising, and I think people are very risk-averse, so this becomes a coordination problem even when there's perhaps widespread discontent
I agree with your conclusion that most rich countries are totalitarian in character, and it feels so fundamentally absurd that a lot of how we got here was merely developing the capability and not doing enough to prevent it
However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. One of the most powerful uses of these panopticons is the pre-emption and disruption of coordinated resistance efforts. Is an effective uprising even feasible if not supported by some faction of the extant powerbrokers? Hard to say to be honest. A lot of these capabilities are unprecedented, if not in nature then certainly in responsiveness and scope
> However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable.
Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s.
When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff.
This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary.
The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it.
In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back?
To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals.
If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish).
Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger.
As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires.
Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures.
What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.
And the last decade has been a master class in solidifying faith if not worship of the very thing that facilitates it all: "democracy", our most sacred institution.
Not just spying, but for many/most - the harm is also. Most people struggle on the day-to-day; getting worked up that a random boogieman is compiling a profile on them to serve ads leads to a big pile of 'so?'.
When Windows Recall was announced as an example; I started asking (non tech, mostly boomer) people their take on it. I almost universally got a 'neat!' response. The security implications simply didn't register or matter, even when I explained them. I felt like I should be wearing a tin foil hat.
Because who you are keeping something private from is often more important than what you are keeping private. For example, there are plenty of things I would be fine sharing with the anonymous internet that I wouldn't share with my coworkers. My coworkers knowing something embarrassing about me has obvious harm. There is no real harm in strangers knowing something embarrassing about me. And companies and governments are both largely strangers.
I think the fundamental problem with the pro-privacy side of the debate is an inability to communicate why privacy matters in way that makes sense to people who think like this. The argument always seems to come down to some dystopian future in which this information is abused, but hypotheticals like that are just never very motivating when people have so many more pressing issues that are causing clear and immediate harm rather than some hypothetical future harm.
You are mistaken. There is real harm in strangers knowing sensitive information about you. You seem to have a blindspot for how coercion works. There's harassment, struggle sessions, and blackmail as well as many other things.
If someone knows the normal hours you are at home, they can enter your home without much risk. They can plant evidence, Interfere in your life in ways that you can't easily fix, or even create situations where you get harmed or die from an accident. Information gathering is a necessary pre-requisite for a successful attack, and by itself it is an act of hostile intent.
The argument doesn't come down to dystopian future. It comes down to the fact that people in corrupt systems lie, and those lies can torture the victim without any recourse.
Information is abused regularly.
Once you see it, you can memorize it and transmit it without a paper trail. You can even have a plausible reason for needing to access that information in the first place.
It is ephemeral and its security relies on trust of an untrustable entity that trends towards corruption as a structural flaw.
All centralized hierarchies as a structure involving people either perform action based on a distribution of labor that is incentivized (away from a loss function), or they do so through corruption (in its absence).
In either case, there is incentive and there is no other means to overcome the natural friction towards inaction.
> You're describing what a hypothetical future-booggieman can do...
Unfortunately no, being deadly serious here I'm describing what can be done today fairly trivially (to any target), and done in a way without alerting the victim that its even happening. They simply seem to have bad luck with a monkey on their back that they can't see everywhere they go in society. They are deprived of opportunities without their knowledge, be it gender relations, labor relations, citizen-government relations etc; its applies equally at all levels.
There are multiple ways than just what follows to do this:
Shall we go down the rabbit hole?
Starting off with a compromise and transparent SSL proxy termination through failures at the network edge (firmware level, between Router or Cable Modem and ISP/Internet).
Note the point the guy makes that Cable Modem standards require 56bit encryption to remain working, and there being no authentication for sensitive requests (i.e. query then update that firmware for one of something like 8 models of microcontroller architecture).
From here, middle man most traffic (it says encrypted to the victim, its not encrypted), Deny service selectively (delayed update of antivirus, certificate revocation, etc), deny service selectively of inbound email and/or remove specific emails (breaking communication with a non-response you never receive), close opened resolution processes posing as the user, or the vendor CSR using generated correspondence or voice AI based in unofficial versions of GPT. The more induced frustration the better (higher cost).
Analyse traffic behavior for time spent on entertainment as potential targets. Isolate communications, prune social networks gradually.
Delay interrupt driven communications to the point of uselessness (friends ignore you, relationships wither and die, they see it as you not being interested/flaky, you see it as them not being interested; no way to validate and a lack of belief that it follows you across services; they firmly believe you are either crazy or are ghosting them and withdraw because you don't respond to communications they send you which you don't know about, and communications on their side are not impaired with other people).
ISPs may extend their cellular coverage through edge-based repeaters/mesh network allowing interception. Prevent or delay SMS/Voice Communications of all forms targeted and intermittently. (i.e. medical communications to coordinate scheduling/testing for cancer/mortal diseases early? etc...) Failures are systemic failures of the company not an adversary... or so they perceive. "It is just everyone is so incompetent, it can't be malice", someone would have ensured this is unthinkable.
If they love something (what your identity is based on), like chess, pose as the chess server and always match and win against them using an engine to demoralize. They would see perfect play 7/10 times, assume its representative of the state of thing, and despite having the expectation that they are playing against people they are constantly being the victim of deceit. This Distorts Reflected Appraisal changing their worldview subtly, the more wide in subject/situation, the worse the distortion gets; it destructively interferes with Self Concept and their Identity hollowing them out inducing hypnotic states commonly known and seen in torture from WW2/Mao but without that physical threat (its just an omnipresent threat). The mind in these states is malleable and remembers details more easily, this is where ads come in. Induce hate, disunity, derision, disgust in every one and thing they love; segment the victim into a cohort.
Make what they love shit, pose as the user for any number of harmful effects (i.e. request mail forwarding to some other address now the victim gets no mail and it goes to lost mail once the forwarded address says not here), report the property as vacant, intercept e-file make it so it appears to be submitted (when it doesn't); what happens when you don't file taxes or pay taxes?, or replace with incorrect taxes posing as the user (fraud, whose responsible?).
Google Information Services can have a fake business listing registered at an address. The victims own devices generate a busy time graph as they do for any business which is public. This is when they are home.
A Roku/Smart TV may be remotely triggered to enable the voice control mic to turn on regularly and place shows that destructively interfere with your view in their queues. They would see this as the company.
All this happens outside the users ability to perceive or largely control. It forms the basis for a struggle session (mental coercion/torture) they cannot escape from it.
With isolation and distorted view of the world you can ramp this up continually until they break psychologically, no physical presence needed. Slow, steady, and increasing the anaconda coils. If you don't minutely adjust within some arbitrary viewpoint the anaconda eats you.
If you've made fun of those insane Trump Supporters that are still with him despite everything he has done, this is a perfect example of the long-lasting permanency of mental coercion with persistence that naturally comes with demagogues, but is also being engineered using the same elsewhere for purpose.
The victims of this menticide either disassociate no longer contributing anything to anyone or reacting to anything, commit suicide, or become psychotic taking it out on other people violently until they are stopped. No physical presence needed because every single IOT/tech system has been shimmed towards benefiting a malicious adversary without a trace (since detailed network logs aren't kept longer than a certain period due to storage costs).
Need I continue?
Psychologically unstable people can be easily manipulated by timely showing solutions or ways out that temporarily resolve difficulties (pay for play to be that solution) in the middle of such torture.
Ever talk about purple dog collars with friends for awhile repeating the word and then see purple dog collars in all those ads on all your devices for up to 2-3 days later?
How do you think they know to show you those ads? The devices largely don't have the hardware specifications to do that computation at the edge so its collected, aggregated into a profile centrally, and used against you in sophisticated brainwashing/torturous ways that are simply claimed to be harmless marketing/adtech (you have to prove otherwise).
Incidentally, this is the why and how false confessions to crimes people didn't do are made, its been known since the 1950s.
Tech makes the links ephemeral with a false but generalized presumption that they are working in all cases unless you can prove otherwise which has no paper trail because it vanished immediately after it happened.
If you'd like to research these mechanisms for Thought Reform and indoctrination from sound expert material further (its dark), I'd suggest Robert Lifton "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism", and John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" for the foundational material. Its not absurd like most people are conditioned to believe from the irrational association of this depicted subject in media.
Communists use this as a divide a conquer strategy for regime change (most governments do too).
Monopolists use this to pressure consumers to buy things they wouldn't normally buy. This is how they capitalize on the inducements of anxiety and other emotional states they paid for via their marketing budget.
Governments use the shimmed parts to spy. Everyone benefits but the individual.
It is why the world today feels like torture to many rational people; it actually is torture and you just didn't realize it because you were not educated properly, and it was snuck in when you were not looking. It is also de-facto protected by the first amendment because of lack of standing and any interference by government to correct is a violation of the constitution.
It has been known by experts that free-will isn't guaranteed and has largely been broken for quite some time absent few exceptional individuals. These things warp people into stilted lesser versions of themselves that are incapable of further growth (by purposeful design).
Yes most of these things are very much against the law, but those laws are not self-enforcing and you have no proof, and opsec is simple when so many things are shimmed and ephemeral. Outside extreme measures coupled with extreme expertise it is impossible to detect, and equally challenging to hold those engaging in such evil to account.
Even most IT professionals lack an appropriate background knowledge to properly analyse firmware or log signal data between non-standard interfaces (i.e. coax beyond the demarcation point of responsibility, where law may punish any observer) which would be needed to overturn that irrational presumption that everything is working (uphill battle in any centralized/corrupt structure).
If you are thinking, this is crazy-making nightmare fuel...
It is, and it has valid and sound basis, and few outside the deepest niches and technical circles know (not belief).
It is an uphill battle just communicating the danger, in opposition to indoctrination caused by the many hidden systems designed for malign corruption and influence.
Edit: If you want to rip some of that indoctrination conditioning to shreds, I'd suggest Bazzel's book: Open Source Intelligence 10th Edition.
I think we do ourselves a disservice by making "conspiracy theory" the common parlance for what is quite often just being swayed by a popular kind of diversion propaganda (the fact-thin doppelgangers of real controversies or investigations of the various complicated systems of surveillance and control that surround us) when in fact the issue is inadequate capacity for assessing the plausibility of a particular theory, the sources it comes from, identifying and resisting motivated reasoning and especially the hijacking thereof by others, or doing the cost-benefit analysis for both accepting a theory and courses of action conditioned on it
Organizations are secretive by default, countless intersecting ones have influence over our lives, communication and information are pervasive but can also be fully encrypted. It is effectively impossible that there is no conspiracy anywhere that's relevant to your life, and there is no perfect way to get accurate information about all such conspiracies
I really don't have much means to epistemically assess the threat model you've presented here except to say that it seems obviously technologically feasible, especially given that many overlapping approaches here don't need to all work for the stated aims
But perhaps more importantly, elucidating this motivates me to be more skeptical of my internal reasoning for feeling malaise, depression, and aimlessness, and as a belligerent person, even an irrational belief that this is being induced (even stochastically rather than in a targeted way) is likely going to be an enduringly effective way to resist it. Something about having an intention to defy an adversary rather than some less agentic explanation seems to benefit the underlying problem regardless of whether it's true
> Something about having an intention to defy an adversary ... to benefit the underlying problem regardless
For the most part I am in agreement, albeit as you might imagine I do have 1st and 2nd hand knowledge and experience interacting,remediating, and mitigating these types of situations, which are not that uncommon at the VP/executive level of global companies (insofar as it being on the IT side).
I am sure some people reading what I previously wrote would have thought, that is oddly specific for the disparate subject matter being covered. Many of the specifics are based in actual observations, first or second hand.
Unfortunately even a process you mention taken to an extreme has its own failings that need to be assessed and addressed.
I would add that it is equally important to be mindful and maintain a balance of healthy skepticism about one's own reasoning in this context, and in doing so consistently test whether discarding opportunities is appropriately supported or irrational (i.e. jumping at shadows). Having an awareness of the dangers provides forewarning which forearms and empowers us to not be mindlessly swayed.
It is a tough habit to get into for most, because frankly it is a lot of work, and when starting out fresh simple things take a lot of effort to engram, and the benefits need to outweigh the cost (which coercive methods adds to).
People generally also want to believe in goodfaith in their fellow man, and with any want comes an almost imperceptible bias. Also adversaries seek out and take advantage of presumptions, to turn it towards their advantage. Even an automatic response towards defense or discard could be used by them to deny you opportunities, which result in similar inducements in a round about way.
If one is not careful of these drawbacks you can miss out on a lot of opportunities naturally.
Like with any propaganda/influence I've found the most benefit in a few simple practices. First, withholding agreement automatically to avoid psychological consistency traps, as Cialdini notes as well in his psychology book on Influence.
Conditioning an almost automatic response to question or discard ambiguity where language has been rationally corrupted, such as where words have conflicting underlying meanings depending on misleading context (a common deceitful tactic), also where one gets a sense of confusion as these are often indicators of hypnotic influence on your mental state.
Taking the time to appropriately review what is said. When one is hurried, people often rely on their unconscious habits, or fixed action patterns of tasks/muscle memory. Speed reading for example often converts text to images/concepts, but also largely removes the filters we have for discernment.
Finally, minimizing attack surface by default, and limiting exposure/opportunity for attack while still performing the necessary 'critical' evaluation checks.
This seems to be the best balanced approach I've come across so far, albeit it does run the knife's edge; and mistakes in judgment are inevitable given incomplete information, and that few today take care that their words have no conflicting ambiguity. There were much more words in use during the 30s-50s largely because they had a hyper-rational view, and subscribed to a rational approach with one word to one non-conflicting meaning.
It is generally not a good thing to close off opportunities automatically without rational cause, and few people today actually consciously have the framework or tooling to evaluate credibility, based on observed deceits of a source. It requires a lot of discipline.
As a side note, in hypnotism, they often refer to inducing covert hypnotic states as bypassing the 'critical' factor. Conditioning oneself to maintain a critical view dulls or negates a lot of the benefit, for an adversary.
Concluding, with a small side note, ironically, these type of environments which we now find ourselves in actually provide a very sound and practical argument for internalizing strong religious beliefs with regards to the associated values, as a defense mechanism, albeit alongside an equally rational framework and principles.
From a interesting perspective, there may be very little difference between conditioning an automatic response to stimuli for this purpose, and the feelings one gets when subject matter violates their deeply held religious beliefs. When properly functioning, both would draw the required immediate attention, criticality, and wariness needed to avoid destructive outcomes (i.e. evil, as Illyin defines it when refuting Tolstoy's pacifism).
The problem with making this case is that the threats are kind of stochastic. Usually what happens to an individual is that either a mistake occurs or some unpredictable factor changes to suddenly get them targeted. I had a relative who was blindsided by identity theft, fending off creditors for bills that were in her name because she was in some breach (I think maybe the sony one? Often not even easy to say how it happened). This is a consequence of erosion of privacy. American Muslims didn't have any more inkling that 9/11 would happen than anyone else, but suddenly received a ton of suspicion from both crazy wingnuts and actual government agencies despite often having "nothing to hide". Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.
You can't really predict what factor is gonna get you targeted. You also can't predict the particular manner in which data that's being collected about you will be used to harm you. Sometimes it's about secrets you'd want to keep private, but often it's about correlations drawn that may even be wrong. Like if public sentiment or government scrutiny were to turn against tech in a huge way, maybe even just a post history on hackernews existing for you, regardless of what's in it, correlates you to some kind of cybercrime they're pursuing with a dragnet, and this gets your credit pinged when you try to buy a house, and someone freezes your bank account because something's going on here and we should just lock it down to be safe until we figure this out. Who knows? The erosion of privacy is a powderkeg that makes everyone more vulnerable to these sorts of things, but the effects aren't felt by everyone all at once, but chaotically based on circumstances beyond your control, sometimes even truly random ones. I can't predict the actual threat model that will become relevant to you because the attack surface is enormous already and the problem is about how it's ever-growing
It's hard to convince people that "you are more likely to be targeted and there is more that can be done if you are but it may never happen to you in particular and there's basically no way to know" is something they should care about. Intuitive risk assessment that our brains are good at can't fucking fathom the world we actually currently live in. Nonetheless, that is the form risk takes, and you should care about factors that expose you to it, even probabilistically
You inadvertently hit on another problem with this debate. The three historical examples you chose were identity theft, Muslims post 9/11, and trans people. The root of all those people’s problems isn’t privacy, it is some other broken part of society. So why focus on the symptom instead of that root issue?
Muslim and trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status. Their effort would be more efficiently used advocating for acceptance than advocating for privacy.
Same goes for identity theft. That isn’t caused by bad privacy regulations, it is caused by bad financial regulations that put too much of the burden of fraud on the individual and not the company who fell for the fraud.
In any debate about privacy, it never seems like privacy should be the number one concern for the people involved. Like if you are worried about your credit report being hit for your HN comments, maybe spend some effort trying to change that credit system rather than trying to hide your HN account.
Fair point, but in the context of an oppressive society the variance from the perceived norm is what presents the problem. That makes the hypothetical "hidden" status I was discussing their gender and not their non-binary status.
I mean I think as with many broad groups of people, different individuals likely want each of those things, as well as many wanting both or neither. My comment referred specifically to a subset that wants to assimilate, as they were more likely blindsided than activists who fight for acceptance, but we're nitpicking here
Regardless, the way in which surveillance harms them, as well as other minorities, whether political, racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious, isn't that their "secret" is revealed, it's that they are monitored and can be targeted. Their status can be used to aggregate and group them, but other information can be used to harm or target them. My point in bringing up minorities that suddenly become more prominent targets isn't that they need to hide their minority status and thus are uniquely harmed by surveillance. My point is that surveillance is a weapon, and you only feel the harms of it when it is used on you, not when it's being built
Again, the issue isn't that particular information is especially dangerous. It's that information is power, and there are lots of very concentrated and unaccountable powerbases being built through mass-surveillance, which can be deployed to harm people in all manner of different ways for all manner of different reasons. People feel violated when their privacy is invaded because it is an incursion of power that violates their autonomy, and power is quite versatile in the harms it can do
> Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.
The reason they're getting more scrutiny is because of the negative impact of pro-trans ideological policies on women's rights.
I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the turning point was a combination of two things: firstly, the right-wing Conservative government announcing that they were going to remove all barriers for anyone to change their "legal sex", with no medical diagnosis required at all. Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.
This caused an uprising of women, initially groups of left-wing feminists who most rapidly organised, to push back against this "gender self-id" policy proposal and against men in women's prisons. And then against the whole principle of males identifying themselves as female and being given special privileges because of this.
Only later on did right-wing groups take an interest in this as a division against the mainstream political left who were still very much in favour of these policies. Though we've just got a new centre-left Labour government and it seems likely now, based on what they said during the election campaign, that they're going to prioritise protecting single-sex spaces for women over the desires of males who demand to access them.
And this is because they've realised that they can't just unilaterally diminish women's rights and expect the electorate to follow along. The increased scrutiny worked.
Civil rights are not a zero-sum game. One group of people gaining rights doesn't take away the rights from another group, but that is commonly used as an argument to manipulate people into opposing the expansion of rights without confronting what that opposition really means. We saw it with integration in the US often presented as an infringement on the rights of white people. We saw it with gay marriage when people argued that it was somehow an affront to traditional heterosexual marriage. And now we are seeing it with people claiming that trans people are infringing on women's rights.
>Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.
This is a good example of what that manipulation looks like in action. I agree that prisoners should have a right to safety despite their crimes. But what should the priority be for someone with this position? It certainly wouldn't be putting more attention on a single case of assault over some 999 other examples of a prisoner getting assaulted[1]. The focus on the one case involving a trans person shows that the motivation isn't actually prisoner safety.
Sometimes they aren't zero-sum. For example, trans-identifying people being protected from employment discrimination. This takes nothing away from anyone else, but makes this group's lives easier.
But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example. If a subset of males are given the right to use such spaces, they cease to be female-only spaces. By doing so, this right is taken away from women and girls.
As another example, we can see this principle very starkly in women's and girls' sports competitions. There can only be one winner. If that winner is male, or is a team that includes males, this takes this prize away from female athletes. There are also a limited number of competition spots in most sports. Any of those taken by males denies a female athlete the opportunity to compete. This is a zero-sum game.
Regarding prisons, the expectation is that penal authorities work towards the goal of no sexual violence in prisons. Policies that demonstrably make this worse are of course going to be protested. In this case, removing the most important safeguarding measure for inmate housing: segregation by sex. The motivation is actually the safety of women prisoners. It's not an isolated case either, this was the first of many.
>But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example.
How is this different from a white person wanting a "whites only space"? Because you are seemingly arguing for a right to segregation. I think we are better off reconsidering the root desire and how that should manifest itself in a concrete right.
For example, what right do you think the children have in youth sports?
Do they have a right to win?
Do they have a right to be on a team?
Do they have a right to compete?
Do they have the right to compete against someone with equal talent?
Should it be allowed to force a younger kid to compete against older kids?
What about a short kid against tall kids?
Should a Muslim fasting for Ramadan have to compete against Christians with no dietary restrictions?
Can a white child complain about having to compete against black children?
What if only one girl wants to play a specific sport, is it legal to force her to compete on the boys team? What if all the boys are better than her?
I just don't know how you answer these questions consistently and end up in a place in which trans athletes are your only fairness concern.
I see you're no longer claiming that this isn't zero-sum. Instead you now seem to be advocating that every single-sex space should be mixed-sex.
Just eradicate all female-only spaces entirely, is that the suggestion? This seems to be your logic here.
We had this arrangement with prisons, by the way. Up until the end of the 19th century prisons housed both sexes in the same estate. Female prisoners were routinely and regularly sexually assaulted, raped, impregnated. By men. That's why prisons are segregated by sex in most places today.
Now some prison authorities are trying this arrangement again. Converting female prisons to mixed-sex prisons. With the same results.
And for some reason you're making a parallel of this to racial segregation? Make it make sense, please.
I'm not conceding that rights are zero-sum. I'm trying to get to why you think people have the right to single sex spaces. What is the motivator for that belief and would that same motivator suggest that people have a right to segregation from other protected classes?
I think women have a right to safety. They have a right to privacy. They have a right to being given the same opportunities as anyone else. A girl has a right to compete in sports. She doesn't have a right to win at sports or even a guaranteed spot on the team. Those rights are not zero-sum. The rights of a cis girl are not violated when she competes against a trans girl.
There are many, many reasons why we have sex-separated spaces: privacy, dignity, modesty, safety, fairness, peace of mind, personal hygiene, santiation, cleanliness of facilities, lesbian and gay socialising, group bonding, therapeutic efficacy, organizing and campaigning. And probably others that don't come to mind right now. This is generally for the benefit of women, but also for men too on some of these principles.
Tearing all this up and insisting that any man who says he's a women must be permitted to impose himself on female spaces quite obviously encroaches on this.
For example you refer to girls competing in girls' sport. When a boy who says he's a girl (or "trans girl" as you put it) is allowed to compete, this violates several of the above principles for actual girls. Fairness, due to male performance advantage. Safety, when it's a contact sport. Privacy and dignity, if he's also imposing himself on the girls' locker rooms. Peace of mind, as the girls are forced to contend with all of this for no reason other than to keep the male happy.
More generally, all this does is disadvantage women and girls, solely for the pleasure of some males who, by definition, don't even belong in these spaces but decided that they want to impose themselves anyway and, to them, that's all that matters.
>There are many, many reasons why we have sex-separated spaces: privacy, dignity, modesty, safety, fairness, peace of mind, personal hygiene, santiation, cleanliness of facilities, lesbian and gay socialising, group bonding, therapeutic efficacy, organizing and campaigning.
But that was only half of the equation. Why are these "rights" only relevant for women? How can you define these as a right if other groups do not have the same protection?
>privacy, dignity, modesty,
Can a straight man cite his right for "privacy, dignity, modesty" when kicking a gay man out of a locker room?
>safety
Do you think it would be safe for a trans woman who has surgically transitioned to be housed in a male prison?
>fairness
I dedicated almost that whole previous post trying to get you to define what a right to "fairness" really means, but you ignored all those questions.
>peace of mind
Do you think a passenger should be able to force an airline to kick a Muslim off a plane to get "peace of mind"?
>personal hygiene, santiation, cleanliness of facilities,
Are my rights violated if I walk into a public restroom and the person before me didn't flush?
>lesbian and gay socialising
If homosexuals have a right to their own segregated socializing environment, can a school host a dance for only straight people?
>organizing and campaigning
Could a campaign event for a local white politician kick someone out for simply being black?
I'm sorry that you spent so much time writing out so many irrelevant questions when the topic we're discussing is the threat to women's rights from males who feel entitled to usurp every space that's intended solely for women. I'll answer the relevant ones and ignore the others. I don't see much point in encouraging gish gallop discussions, let's keep it focused.
> Do you think it would be safe for a trans woman who has surgically transitioned to be housed in a male prison?
Depends on how well the prison is safeguarding its vulnerable male prisoners. I expect your implication here is that he should be moved to a female prison. That's usually why this question is asked in this sort of discussion. However this would obviously be nonsense, as he is male and therefore his safety is the responsibility of those running the male prison. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the female prison estate.
> I dedicated almost that whole previous post trying to get you to define what a right to "fairness" really means, but you ignored all those questions.
No, sorry but you asked a load of questions irrelevant to the topic. Just to expand on my earlier response: female-only sporting competitions exist for the most part because male performance is such a huge categorical advantage that sex segregation is needed for the competitive advantages amongst women and girls to play out. Allowing a subset of males to compete in women's sport just because they demand to is fundamentally unfair, because of this categorical advantage.
>the topic we're discussing is the threat to women's rights from males
And that is a perfect summary of the conversation because I would say I was discussing universal rights. I believe that central to the idea of rights is that they are applied universally. You were advocating for women to be a legally distinct and implicitly lesser group than any other class of people because you think they need explicit protections from men. I intended for my questions to show the flaws in defining rights that way by applying those concepts to other groups. I was pointing out we don't define gay rights in relation to straight rights or the rights of black people in relation to white people. Defining women's rights by their relationship to men is codifying a gender hierarchy. "Separate but equal" is not a desired end state of civil rights.
That is because the boomer generation was raised in a time where technology publicly wasn't turned on them in undisclosed ways. They were in control, and the laws had more teeth than they do now. Their cohort was incentivized to help themselves as well. Look at social security.
In my experience, their idea of the way the world works seems to have crystallized for them about the times of the 1970s.
They have significant blind spots which they likely won't ever recover from, they were blined and in many respects behave like children in a indoctrinated way.
They certainly didn't have to deal with arbitrary high costs because someone spied on them secretly and used that information as a false justification for increasing their auto rates since non-regenerative breaking is hard breaking and is therefore reckless driving (Lexis Nexus reports).
Heaven forbid that traffic conditions go from 65 to 15 in less than 200 feet. No, the fact tha you avoided getting into an accident is the same as reckless driving.
All parents want their kids to be better than them, some parents through circumstances largely in their control set the bar so low that it is a horrible feeling when their grown children exceed them at most levels.
Being more educated, rational, and mature at almost every level, then they were at a similar age, where there growth remained perpetually stalled in their 20s is a very damning situation. Especially since they blew their inheritance like a playboy at a party and will be leaving you almost nothing but debts except in rare circumstances.
Indoctrination and Menticide is real. Its subtle, and it blinds perception of issues.
Many "nothing to hide" proponents implicitly assume the only problem involves fact-based investigation by mostly-principled agents of a non-corrupt regime that has the same values people are comfy with today. However that's nowhere near the whole issue.
We should also be scared of cases where some investigator or agency goes: "We need to make an example of somebody and That Dude is close enough."
Or where regime changes and suddenly everything you didn't care about is dangerous and does need to be hidden, like where volunteering in a pro-democracy group or having an abortion retroactively becomes a sentence to the reeducation gulag.
> Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.
The real issue is companies are incentivized to be hacked, and to collect everything so they can sell it as a subscription.
They have almost no liability for improperly securing their own systems and they allocate their budget accordingly.
There is a general presumption of no liability for software flaws. The execs gamble at whether or not they'll be hit with a data breach, or hit the jackpot (before they move on with their shares vested).
Its a simple calculus of headcount affected by cost of identity protection services for x time vs. ongoing recurring costs.
> If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.
I've always taken issues with this phrase as many people would be lead to believe the opposite as well: If you have something to hide, you have something to fear.
Which further suggests that as soon as there's anything you want to hide, that has to be something criminal.
Of course, this is utter garbage. People _do_ have things to hide, and it is rarely criminal / unlawful.
Any politician pirring forth this stupid statement needs to be asked if they are willing to submit to having their lives filmed 24/7 with no censorship of anything.
They won’t even let us see their “private” messages to other politicians let alone let us see them neglect their families.
> If you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear.
Almost all politicians have something to hide, as part of their job. Even fairly low-level politicians get messages from voters which can contain sensitive (i.e. should not be shared) information.
The problems are:
1) those who don't recognise that almost everyone else has this going on, too.
2) those who think that it's OK because the intelligence agencies are the ones gathering it (never mind that the methods enable others to do likewise), and those working in the agencies are above reproach and won't misuse that data (which we know isn't the case).
This won't work, and they know it so they'll just lie and say yes knowing it can't ever happen. They also have influence and control over this information through the nature of their positions. Look at the recordings that went missing during Watergate.
The reality is those in power must deal with additional threats both foreign and domestic.
Any one of them would say yes, but then claim it would open the country to greater threats if controlled independently (which it does given the sensitivity of the access they have to make decisions), and the mere suggestion continuing this would be unpatriotic since the person suggesting this is opening up the nation to even greater danger. It is not unreasonable.
The Nazi's were clever, and evil, for those who haven't heard this paraphrase, it follows what was said during the Nuremberg trials by Goebbels.
Many people alive today have learned from them. Whether it is to prevent it from happening again (by warning people to action of the subtle indicators), or to follow in their footsteps (to quietly seize power as a demagogue).
Who can know the mind and character of another who only has to lie to get in office then can't be removed for failing to perform. Especially in times where there is little if any credibility or trust left.
No it doesn't imply anything criminal. Many people have things they wish to hide that have nothing to do with being illegal, from reasons for being fired from their last job to the amount of alcohol they're drinking alone at home to nude photos they shared with an ex, to... anything.
There's a huge number of things to be potentially embarrassed about, ranging from things that most other people would say there's no need for embarrassment all the way up to things that could be career- or relationship- ending even though fully legal.
Agreed, and sensitive information can be used to coerce and harass/bully.
Imagine situations where pregnancies and the mere fact that it happened is grounds for the family to throw you out, based on intolerance of their religious beliefs.
Anything that runs contrary to social moors which are no longer cohesive or consistent thanks in large part to marxism (woke/cancel culture) and an undue nihilistic influence, is fair game under critical theory.
There was a big article about 10 years ago (iirc), where as a result of Target's marketing department (data aggregation), the father knew before the daughter that she was pregnant based on her shopping habits (which they correlated to pregnancy).
When people say, “I have nothing to hide.” I remind them that they have a door on their bathroom and curtains over their windows for perfectly innocent yet no less valid reasons.
>...When people say, “I have nothing to hide.” I remind them that they have a door on their bathroom...
This was my 'go to' question for several years but it wasn't long until I met someone (we're actually now good friends) who gladly leaves the loo door open and do whatever in full view of anyone. From there I ended up with sturdier concepts, some listed below.
Another way to deal with this is to comment on their smartphone perhaps saying something like "Oh is that the new iPhone? Can I have a look" then ask them to unlock it. If they do so turn the phone away from them and start clicking on random apps or the settings and take a photos of the screen.
Governments will always seek more surveillance of citizens - it's like crack to them. If we don't push back and work hard to protect our freedoms and privacy then we will end up in something like Orwell's 1984.
See what's happening in China. The surveillance and oppression are particularly severe in the Xinjiang region, where authorities have implemented a multi-layered system of monitoring and control. This includes facial recognition cameras, mobile police checkpoints, and the collection of biometric data. See also [1]
We must demand transparency and accountability from those in power, whilst supporting organizations that work to protect our privacy.
Similarly, private sector business will always seek more of our personal data in order to make more money, and the tech industry is enabling more intrusive government surveillance.
I just got my local government to drastically ratchet back surveillance powers they already had, through patient organizing and advocacy. It wasn't even all that difficult. This "governments will always seek more surveillance" thing isn't axiomatic; in a lot of cases, it's probably just lazy cynicism.
We got the cameras rolled back even further; we now, by municipal policy, don't trust the Illinois LEADS stolen vehicle hotlist, so cameras can no longer be used to stop "stolen" cars (too many of the stops we were doing were mis-listed), only cars with stolen license plates (for which there is no innocent explanation). We're also the only muni in Illinois that won't automatically share camera data with out-of-state LEOs.
They will seek more surveillance because the majority of the citizenry desires safety and a competent and efficient government over personal freedom.
We continue to have societies because the average person realizes that their life would be better on average if they outsourced their personal security to the strongest third party available. Until this third party becomes inconveniently corrupt.
The money part of the issue is based from preferential money printing which gets spread around, without this there's a finite amount of money that can be made. The market in this area would collapse.
Surveillance capitalism would disappear overnight the moment the Primary Dealers and Options Market (perpetuity) stop funding it with preferential treatment and funny money.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we already live in 1984. The system's described are turnkey, so its just a matter of time before they turn it on all at once.
The elites behind the decisions made in the backroom of the Fed are 'the party'.
Successful activism was always based on the inherent underlying threat of violence. Even with Ghandi, it was the British officials at the time being responsive which allowed change to occur. If they were unresponsive no change would have occurred until abuses became so abhorrent that violence forced them as a matter of rational self-preservation.
This threat is largely ignored today, leaders then are unresponsive to activism instead seeking to undermine through covert channels.
Of course, it also doesn't help the fact that many activist movements are funded by dubious origins (such as communism, and global elites [effectively the same cohort]), and often don't follow rational principles, and/or are sabotaged from the outset.
People have demanded these things for awhile, peacefully, nothing came of it.
If nothing happens in a generation (20 years), it won't happen until someone forces it to.
A quarter of that time is generally sufficient to indicate a trend in the run-up.
Privacy is the right to sovereignty over one's personal/intimate sphere - whether it's insight to information about oneself or physical contact. The right to consent, for instance, would be a component of the right to privacy.
It's about power. And by extension it's about the power balance between the people and any intruder of their private sphere, whether it's a friend, a stranger, the public, the state, the law and so on.
In other words, the less privacy there is the less effective power both the individual as well as the entire people have.
On a side note, it is also a critical dependency to safeguard that right in the first place.
A right to history and culture is also another dependency since people are functions of the culture they learn from their parents. The burning of books which destroys culture is universally accepted to be a bad thing, but its still done indirectly today (libraries budget is dependent on circulation metrics, classics may not be checked out often, books not circulated well get donated to third-parties who pulp, or resell and then pulp if not sold within a period of time.
Even Goodwill does this for content they deem is unsuitable, which is a value-based decision from some unstated individual.
you self-censor as a result, the rest of us lose your perspective, and the development of further ideas is stifled.
This component of privacy reminds me of “Preference Falsification,” a phenomenon described by Taimur Kuran. Although Kuran’s examples are often of Eastern Europe, this essay puts it in terms of US politics of 50 years ago.
Important paper to recommend as always, Soloave’s “ 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy” written after the article but by a thinker who is cited in it.
The problem is that people have not seen it directly. They have not seen that someone used their data against them especially. It is done mostly 'behind the scenes'.
However it is easy to dismantle these thoughts:
- With system of surveillance every politician can be 'under foreign surveillance', which is not a good thought
- There were some cases about somebody not receiving insurance due to surveillance. What if you will not receive social money, or benefits. You may even not know why you were treated by government in certain way
- You do not know if your data were sold, or trained for AI, or for robot dogs, or for war, or to China (Facebook sold data to china)
- Your data can be used against you potentially during your whole life. What if your DM comment might lead to problems with your employment in the future?
- Governments change with times. What if some nasty figure, nazi like, becomes a president of let's say for example America. How you can be sure your data will be treated with care, and that it will not be misused, or used against you?
If you have nothing to hide, here is simple and quick to do list:
1. Post all your personal information online is a public place on the internet. This should include all your personal records, your bank accounts, your drivers license, job history. Also include a list of all websites you have visited, the user names and passwords for all online accounts.
2. List the same information for your spouse or partner, children and parents.
3. Take your car keys, house keys, credit cards and such object and leave them in a public place with a note showing where someone can find the information you posted in item #1 and #2.
Congratulations! You have provided conclusive proof that those of us you who protect our privacy are completely silly people. You have won the argument and demonstrated that without a doubt you "have nothing to hide".
Please get back to us in a couple of months and let us know how it is going so we foolish people can join you.
[edit: people and join you => people can join you.
The problem with privacy isn’t the rhetoric. This is just crap we, HN visitors who are already of one mind, entertain ourselves with.
The problem is the overlap between those who prioritise it and political nihilism. If you want to have fun, argue with a totem. If you want to be effective, find an argument that will motivate making voting and calling electeds a habit. Particularly those who think both are a farce.
Another argument I hear often is that "they have no reason to surveil boring ordinary individuals." Sure nobody might have bothered to look into your private exchanges past aggregable metadata until half a decade or so ago, but with recent advancements in LLMs it takes mere moments to summarize or search through large batches of messages.
This can quickly evoke Godwin's law by stating jews living in europe (and the US) were boring ordinary individuals, until they weren't. Likewise, currently in Europe there's been an anti-muslim (boring, ordinary individuals) sentiment, where if certain people / factions gain enough power, they will be targeted - insofar as they aren't already.
>"they have no reason to surveil boring ordinary individuals."
Tell that to Parsons, Winston Smith's loyal to the Party neighbour who's betrayed by his own child. If surveillance is allowed to become pervasive enough, nobody is safe.
"Ah yes, we can see that boring Johnny goes to Starbucks every Tuesday at 9am, nobody will believe the crime we're about to pin on them! Thanks to 1984 Incorporated for giving us all their data about him to make it look like the perfect crime."
Yeah it is a heavily flawed argument too. You really can't have a rational argument where someone accepts falsehoods as legitimate. Those people are inherently blind.
The people who were massacred at Hue would likely attest to the falsity of that fact if they had somehow survived.
The general story is the VC (communists) took Hue during Vietnam and their leadership had information that had been collected by the Russians on who spoke with Americans as dossiers.
Once they took Hue, they went door to door clipboards in hand and killed every single family that had an American connection.
Even today, the death estimate is not solid as they burned a lot of bodies before a count could be determined after-the-fact.
That massacre largely wouldn't have been possible, or as targeted without information gathering done beforehand. Any covert information gathering is an openly hostile intention and act. Its a necessary pre-requisite for any successful attack on your person.
A better argument is "I choose to sacrifice my privacy for the convenience" which I honestly think is a fine attitude.
And by "convenience" it doesn't have to be something substantial. Sometimes, it's just that "I'm too busy with my life already so I choose to not think about the privacy implication and wish the odds are in my favor".
freedom is so often the shadow of privacy, thinking of being “secure in your papers against search” in the 1700s makes me imagine the authors didn’t want the government to easily know private things such as my income which back then required a lot more physical access
Oh and on that note the reason for a warrant is to show YOU that the government has invoked the law IN ADVANCE, it’s not for anyone else but YOU, “no-knock warrants” take a very important aspect of why we require a warrant out of the equation, it’s absurd
Let's turn the tables around. I care about free speech but I have nothing to say. Most people don't have much to say but when they do, they need to be able to play their free speech card.
Similarly, I think most people don't have much to hide, but when they want their legitimate privacy, they should have all the tools and rights to it.
"Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say."
Something people never seem to understand is data leaks and/or mishandling of your info. Even if you have "nothing to hide", companies that hold your data, and subsequently sell it/abuse it/get it leaked somehow, can be a powerful tool used to take advantage of people, and manipulated leaked data is frequently blindly trusted, which could easily be used to frame someone for a crime for example.
The only way to keep your privacy is to not let those companies have your data in the first place, so in that sense everyone should care about privacy even if they don't inherently do anything wrong in the moment.
Another related quote I like to share is "if you have nothing to hide, then pull down your pants and hand me your unlocked phone."
Imagine this scenario: When I was 18, I openly expressed my hatred for gay people and even reported someone to the police just because they were gay. Now, 60 years later, I’m 78. Society’s values have changed a lot, and those views are now illegal and widely condemned. If someone were to find an old paper where I wrote those hateful things, I could face legal trouble and social backlash for something I once openly believed.
The point I want to make is that even if you don't have something to hide today does not mean that you won't be convicted tomorrow.
Edit: Someone else gave an example with the abortions, and that they are now illegal in many places.
People who believe "I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear" have poor judgement about their own vulnerability in the modern world. They are not fit to make policy decisions about the privacy of others.
These people should be told this in no uncertain terms.
My go to reply when this topic comes up IRL and someone has "nothing to hide" that can I have a look at the photos on their phone and the messages? No one ever unlocked their phone for me and they realized they had "things to hide"
disclaimer: some of these groups hate each other, I have no affiliations and don't know the history of them, I'm just compiling resources in no particular order here.
I'm not sold on the lack of privacy affecting free speech.
If you care strongly enough about a topic or an issue that you want to speak your mind and share your opinion, you accept that your position and words will become public knowledge.
The real issue, I would argue, is that of governments becoming repressive and using force or threats against those who assert their right to free speech and civil disobedience. The first issue does not imply the second and I found that they were often confounded in comments, making it sound like they both go hand in hand.
I don't believe that to be the case. I'd like to think we can have a healthy democracy while living with increasing surveillance.
Let's keep pushing back on governments when they actually infringe on free speech. Like when they start firing people or limiting their rights based on political affiliation or beliefs.
Do we still have curfews or vaccine passports? No, people pushed back. Does the government know who got the shot and who didn't and what their stance is around it? I imagine they do.
Privacy also allows rich people to hide their wealth and avoid taxes, it allows secret government agencies and other powerful organizations to publish anonymously and influence public life in illegitimate ways, and other bad things. Finally, privacy is inherently anti-"information wants to be free".
This is a common anti-privacy talking point, it meaning criminal behaviour will stay hidden. That's the cost of having that right. Like hearing someone say something you don't like - free speech. People believing something you don't - freedom of religion.
Anyway, rich people are failing more and more to hide their wealth and avoid taxes; their lives are private, their businesses are not, not when they are beholden to the laws, rights, and duties of the country they live or do business in. Secret government agencies are not secret in a democratic country - since if they were, you wouldn't know about them.
You're conflating privacy with secrecy and / or hiding shady things; those are different things. It took whistleblowers like Snowden and Assange to uncover these things. That said, that's an interesting case to look at; it uncovered immoral government activity on the one hand, but especially with the Assange cases, because they were not careful with people's privacy, it also uncovered the identity of agents (= violated their privacy), which cost them their life.
People can create whatever email address they want. People can choose to disclose whatever information they want. Privacy is about not being forced to disclose things you don't want.
Guess what, your home address is in many public registers as well. It's an e-mail address, publically addressable, even guessable, not the contents of their mailbox.
I'll admit I'm someone who has always said "I have nothing to hide." Do I want someone physically recording me outside my window while changing clothes? No. But the majority of the time, we're just talking about targeted advertisements (which I actually prefer over random crap). Or a system that listens to keywords on phone calls that may identify and deter a terrorist threat. I don't see how this relates to "freedoms of expression." Before the downvotes, please give me an example of where I should be scared. I'm open to learning.
During the cold war and the GWOT, people were profiled based on their race, religion, suspected opinions, or association with people suspected of {commun,terror}ism. A ton of these correlations were spurious, sometimes corruptly motivated, and yet the justification of fear caused people to be blackballed in their careers, targeted by law enforcement entrapment, or even just spirited away on thin pretexts. This is in the USA, not East Germany or North Korea. Now, we have much more sophisticated data collection and analysis, and false positives are still very frequent
Also, more mundanely, among the data that's collected by various unaccountable agencies, including nonconsensually, as in the case of things like Equifax, can be used to impersonate you and frame you for crimes, or just steal/use your money. This happens to millions of random people every year and is a direct consequence of a loss of privacy.
A loss of privacy has systemic consequences that change society for the worse. But even if you don't care about anyone but yourself, privacy erosion creates an ever-increasing chance of your life being ruined by overzealous governments making a mistake, or criminals targeting no one in particular but randomly getting you by happenstance
Would you be okay with people reading and questioning your search history, and any activity or messages ever posted on any site? How about your family members, or doctor, or insurer? How about during a job/school/TV interview?
Are you happy to share your net worth, bank and credit account balance and activity with advertisers?
Are you ok with some AI determining (based on its opaque reasoning) that you are a potential terrorist threat, and should be imprisoned?
Even if you are okay with all the above, do you recognize that not all of society would agree and that some people could even be put into grave danger due to eg: political, religious, sexual etc views? In an extreme case, if "most" people are open and "have nothing to hide", it means that everyone who isn't open must "have something to hide" and should be persecuted. Normalizing this openness actually inches us toward this extreme.
Also you should recognize that your answer based on today's government and political parties may not resemble the parties that hold power in the future. Does an extreme group -- who is the farthest from your own views and in fact violently disagrees with your lifestyle choices -- taking power in the future not worry you at all?
Secrets are real (and hard to keep), but privacy is just the politeness of your neighbours.
We should never confuse the two - people seem to think that a right to privacy means a right to secrecy. It does not and never can. People have behaved badly enough with so called online anonymity.
We will have our entire lives stripped bare and laid out on a digital plate - this will enable an incredible outpouring of new lessons, psychological, criminal, mental health and happiness - if we treat it right. If we give individuals control over who can use their information, if we ensure PII is treated like a lawyer treats their clients confessions, that epidemiology can get what advertisers never can, we shall find that it’s not “no-one can ever know” but “health researchers can know, but I would rather my employer does not and I hope my friends understand”
We spend 20 years training children as to what is and is not acceptable in polite society - and it’s going to take a generation to figure this new set of etiquette out - but I am betting the juice is worth the squeeze
Edit: in short, it’s not the data that’s collected, it’s who uses it and how. Focus on that.
it’s not the data that’s collected, it’s who uses it and how
any data that is being collected is at risk from being misused. only data that is not collected is safe. until we are able to fully protect data from misuse (which i believe is impossible), it is better to not collect data in the first place.
We either live in a society with laws that can protect us or we don’t.
If we don’t believe in our society, if we need to carry guns all the time to protect us from the anarchy, it is of course really hard to believe we can build enough protections to prevent retargeted adverts.
it is of course really hard to believe we can build enough protections to prevent retargeted adverts
and that's the issue. now what is easier to enforce? banning of targeted ads? or banning of collection of data?
laws can not protect us from everything. because if they did we'd loose all of our freedom. laws need to focus on protecting us from things from which we can't protect ourselves. that is already difficult enough to decide.
Sorry that was sarcasm. We can easily build laws that stop adverts in our Facebook stream. Hell those laws are basically “duck duck go”.
We don’t need a lot of laws for data privacy, it’s mostly making looking at someone’s data a bit like looking at bodily fluids - socially unacceptable unless under certain circumstances
we can stop ads, but i don't believe we could stop only targeted ads because then we'd have to prove that they are targeted. that's way to hard except for extreme cases (like the infamous ads for a pregnant girl)
but ads are not the only problem. we'd also need severe, and i mean bankrupting a company severe punishment for data breaches if we want to get companies to keep our data secure.
in a very advanced future where tech is so advanced that anyone can easily scan a planet to get the data they want, punishment for the abuse of data is the only option. but until then, i think we are better off to simply prevent the collection of data in the first place.
No friend, it's also absolutely the data that's collected and how it could changeably be used for good or bad and vice versa at a whim down the road. If modern times have taught us anything it's that centralized troves of data almost inevitably get leaked and misused sooner or later. You're ridiculously naive if you trust anyone with that kind of information no matter how nicely they presented their reasons for wanting it.
I don't give a damn how wholesomely the reasons for stripping one's ability to be private and anonymous are couched, they should be no excuse for actually applying such a magnifying glass to human lives en masse.
Individuals do have a right to privacy and, by extension, secrecy. You are not entitled to information others do not want you to have, no matter how well-intentioned or well-resourced you are.
The only sort of society where your view should be acceptable is a society where every individual accepts their every thought and action is observed equally by all other complicit individuals.
> You are not entitled to information others do not want you to have, no matter how well-intentioned or well-resourced you are.
Counterpoint: taxes. By living in a country, you are subject to their laws. Said laws require you to pay taxes on things like income and property. I'm aware this is attempted to be kept secret at a large scale, but when it comes down to it, by living in a country you agree to submit or have collected that information to the responsible authority.
No. We build our societies to be as beneficial for us whilst accepting the compromises.
Cars are waaaay better than horses. So now we have systems of licensing, proving you are capable of driving safely, ways to track your car ensure it is driven safely - perhaps originally if a police officer saw you and now every minute of the day we can see if you are speeding or potentially dangerous
We did all this over time, but the current system woukd give Sherlock Holmes a heart attack.
But we had to find ways for millions and millions to live on top of each other - it is not perfect and can be improved - and should be done with care.
so we collect the data that is needed to track cars. but that doesn't mean we should just allow the collection of all data. the collection of data must server a purpose where the needs of the society outweigh the needs of the individual. this must be proven on a case by case basis.
so for example it is not necessary to track the route you take with your car, or who is inside, in order to find out if you are speeding. speed can be measured anonymously, and only when you break the speed limit, the camera saves the recording, scans the license place and identifies the owner/driver of the car. there is no need to collect any data on cars that are not speeding.
It's pretty easy to find the sex offenders in my area through online registries. I can imagine that is information the sex offenders don't want me to have. Not sure what conspiracy this makes me complicit in though. Maybe you can enlighten me.
If we want a society where all humans are equal, my point still stands. I am imagining a future society that fulfills its obligation to equality among all its members. Perfect openness is the only solution.
In your sex offender example, the sex offender would still be allowed to maintain their secrecy, but they would forgo their right to observe the thoughts or actions of those members who are completely open.
Another common refrain, especially since Snowden, is just glib defeatism ("they already have all my info anyway") which is also a poor way to think about policy (and to make personal choices, but I won't argue those with most people)
I really think the main reason people are complacent is more often that the spying is abstract to them. They wouldn't like it if someone were pointing a big camera through their window, but data being aggregated through their phone and smart home gadgets and computer and CCTVs in public places and leaks on distant websites doesn't register in their actual attention, so it doesn't emotionally feel like a big deal to them