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Ladies and gentlemen. This is how you do blackmail, corporate espionage, and sway politicians on a truly industrial scale. Want to push a bill through the Hous
by junto 11y ago
Ladies and gentlemen. This is how you do blackmail, corporate espionage, and sway politicians on a truly industrial scale.
Want to push a bill through the House of Commons to curb GCHQ's powers? Think again Mr. Politician. Someone might just leak your sexual deviances to the newspaper.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoI think we're due for a second sexual revolution, one where we once and for all settle our relationship between individual, society, and sex, where the only reason you should be concerned with someone else's consensual behavior is if: 1: You're banging them 2: You want to bang them 3: It's your kid and they're underage.
- mkaziz 11y agoI'd correct #3 to *they're underage.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- herge 11y agoTell that to everyone who clicked on a tabloid headline about David Cameron and a pig's head.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoCameron is still in power. Considering what his government gets up to, it's completely clear he has no conscience at all.
- blibble 11y agoGCHQ and MI5 have been up to this sort of thing for decades. I don't expect it'll ever change, as by the time someone's made it to high office, then the agencies will have collected enough material to keep them quiet and on side.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoI'm finding humor in the fact that number 3 has an AND and not an OR in it.
- diyorgasms 11y agoOut of curiousity, why? If your kid isn't underage, then presumably they are capable of making rational decisions about with whom and to what they consent. And at that point it's none of your damn business.
- function_seven 11y agoI think Lawtonfogle meant the opposite. If the minor isn't your kid, but you're aware of it, you should still make it your business.
- sneak 11y agoI think he was pointing out the bug in the rule of (underage, not your kid).
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoYeah I meant "your kid and underage" as your business in a personal sense. I assumed underage being the law's business was implied. I like your choice of the word "bug." That's why I come to HN.
- morgante 11y agoSo if someone else is having sex with their underage daughter, I shouldn't care?
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoIn a legal jurisdiction where the average person has ability to influence the law, the areas of personal business and legal business have significant overlap.
- 11y ago
- leppr 11y agoHow about a political revolution, where legislative power would rest on every citizen in the country thus making the aforementioned tactic impossible (if such system ever came to exist I think we should call it a "Democracy").
- meddlepal 11y agoDemocracy is slow and ill-suited for getting shit done.
- kazinator 11y agoBureaucracy is slow and ill-suited for getting shit done. The question is whether democracy needs bureaucracy, and if so, how much. Obviously, democracy requires certain decisions to be made according to certain processes, which take time. So you can't do away with all bureaucracy. The documents aren't going to push themselves. :)
- gaius 11y agoIn ancient Athens, they managed it.
- tdkl 11y agoAncient Athens, the home of democracy, was a small community.
- JacobJans 11y agoThat is an absolutely horrible idea. Why? Because proper legislation requires expert knowledge. It is simply impossible for every citizen to know enough to be able to be an effective legislator That's why we elect representatives.
- woodman 11y agoSo instead we hope that the results of a popularity contest are experts in crafting 'proper legislation'? No, representatives are theoretically there to guard against majority tyranny - it has nothing to do with building the most efficient legislation generating machine. This design is reflected in the whole checks and balances thing. I do agree with you about it being a horrible idea though, maybe we should reconsider the wisdom in granting some small portion of our freedom to every other voter. 42% of Americans believe in ghosts... let that sink in.
- petra 11y agoI think this is far different from a sexual revolution. Through history, our notions of acceptable sexual behaviour changed quite dramatically, so the sexual revolution isn't that unique. But all through history, human beings had some notion of a private space. The catholic confession booth is the only counter example i can think of, and even there it was just between you and you priest which was trained specifically for that role, and you had some control of what you did expose there. And at least some psychologists ,when asked about this issue, believe that a right for privacy is critical for the psychological well being of people, not something we can give away without consequences.
- personlurking 11y ago> But all through history, human beings had some notion of a private space. This CBC series, The Origins of the Modern Public, would dispute that idea (specifically - and I don't know if this is what you are talking about - the positive sense of privacy). Luckily, a nice HNer ripped the mp3s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984068 Here's the specific episode (8) on privacy http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/Full+Episodes/2010/ID/1498573876/ http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/Full+Episodes/2010/ID/1...
- Asbostos 11y agoIsn't that just a statement of contemporary popular standards? They're not rules set in stone. The definitions of "underage" and "consent" are not nearly as clear cut as you might hope. Lots of people (in couples) have sex as a kind of trade for something they want. Is that consensual? What if it's a trade for something really really important to them? What if it's a trade to avoid being verbally abused by your partner? What if it's for money you need to survive? Regarding age of consent, what if a mature 15yr old seduces a naive and vulnerable 21yr old and causes lasting emotional harm? How is that "none of my business" but the reverse isn't? What if a 16 year old from England travels to America and has sex with a 20 year old? Is that OK (UK law) or not (US law)? What you call a revolution sounds more like the way it already is for many people, and is full of arbitrary and changeable definitions that unfairly discriminate against harmless activity while also allowing harmful activity.
- gaius 11y agoThis is one thing the EU has yet to work up the courage for, "harmonizing" the age of consent, which varies from 13 to 16 in member countries.
- kwhitefoot 11y agoWhy should the EU harmonize such things? I'm not necessarily disagreeing but it would be interesting to see the reasoning.
- gaius 11y agoBecause harmonizing things is what it does, it is bound to make the attempt at some point. It will be very interesting see how member countries react...
- nailer 11y ago> Isn't that just a statement of contemporary popular standards? No. Some sexual acts are still seemed shameful by society.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
- pdkl95 11y agoThe pr0n gets you blackmail material, but the social networks give you relationship maps. Leaning on a politician is an obvious tactic, but it's somewhat heavy-handed. If the politician were to fight back, there could be expensive blowback. Worse, it's a single (or nearly single) point of failure. The bill could pass regardless of the actions of that one politician. A talented blackmailer should only want to directly lean on someone as a last resort. There is much better tactic: find the people who may organize other people against your interests. If you take out the potential future leaders, journalists, and educators - aka, the people that will organize the writing of that bill - then you prevent the problem before it starts. When the FBI was busting up the hippies, this was known as COINTELPRO. It's laughable to think the program ended with the Church Committee - like "total information awareness", the program was simply split up into various existing programs. A politician could be idealistic and fight back against blackmail. With social network information, a counter intelligence program can avoid this risk by leaning on the target's friends or family instead.
- lotharbot 11y agoIt reminds me of the post about using metadata to find Paul Revere: http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metada... Last-second blackmail isn't really the best way to defeat a political movement. Compromising the central figures in organizing the movement -- not necessarily "taking them out", but potentially just reducing their involvement or creating some alienation -- when the movement is still young is the way to really stop it.
- a3n 11y agoAnd thus Angela Merkel has been spied on since her earliest political days.
- caseysoftware 11y agoI was thinking of how to use it to de-cloak anonymous sources for journalists. Many of them are going to use anonymous email addresses, potentially VPNs/tor to further protect that but that's not the weak part. Before you choose to share information, you're going to find out who will actually use it effectively which implies research. Then once you share the information, you're going to pay attention to what they write with it. In both cases, since you're not doing the actual leak then, you're unlikely to take any countermeasures, let alone effective ones. For example, odds are Snowden researched Greenwald before he released anything to him. He probably read a ton of his pieces, looked at his wikipedia, and dug into his professional, etc profiles. And then after the leak, he probably continued to check Greenwald's regularly keeping an eye out for the new pieces. Even if we didn't know who Snowden was, a program like this would uncloak* him relatively quickly. * Or at least narrow down the suspects.
- blazespin 11y agoYou don't blackmail them, you proactively undermine their credibility by just leaking anything that might discredit them.
- j-l- 11y agoIt is done because of data that it brings. Not because of deviances of House of Commons members. Moreover, in western countries like UK it is quite difficult to be classified as deviant.
- bootload 11y ago"Someone might just leak your sexual deviances to the newspaper." Within the services, this is colloquially called the 'sluts & nuts' file.
- rorykoehler 11y agoWho's really the weirdo. The guy watching pr0n or the guys watching the guy watching pr0n?