11 ms·

UN privacy head slams 'worse than scary' UK surveillance bill

149 points by stevetrewick 11y ago

PebblesHD 11y ago
Absolutely spot on! I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments, be it in the UK, Australia, France, the U.S., everywhere the government is making a grab for more and wider surveillance powers, the majority of the population seem totally oblivious. There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?
- themartorana 11y ago
  The depiction of humans in the movie WALL-E was one of the scariest and most poignant bits of storytelling I have ever seen, and seems to become more true as apathy grows.
  - PebblesHD 11y ago
    great movie! I re-watched that recently and it still strikes a chord.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Most people don't have time to think about lofty goals like "privacy" when they need all the focus they can get to care about more basic needs like "shelter" and "putting food on the table".
  - PebblesHD 11y ago
    A very valid point and an equally troubling problem with modern society. Worrying about things like shelter and putting food on the table should be a non-issue in the 21st century, instead it is a modern epidemic and must be fixed. Having said this non-corporeal but none-the-less essential concepts like privacy, liberty and an expectation of trust in leadership should also be a given, sadly they suffered the same fate.
    - adventured 11y ago
      People have to worry a lot less about putting food on the table in the 21st century than at any other time in world history. Calorie counts have been going up a lot, for decades, across every country that formerly used to suffer deficits. Major famines are practically non-existent today, and were not uncommon in prior centuries. See: calorie count increases across Africa, Asia, South America. Poverty and global inequality also have been dropping gradually for decades. Instead of being modern epidemics, these things are former, ancient epidemics that are being eradicated rapidly.
      - anon1385 11y ago
        Just because famine no longer exists doesn't mean people aren't having to worry about putting food on the table. In the UK over a million people had to visit emergency food banks last year[1], compared to only 125,000 in 2012. Hospitals are seeing such levels of malnourishment that they have started discreetly giving away food parcels to patients[2]. It's estimated that up to 40% of patients admitted to UK hospitals are malnourished and the number of people admitted to hospital specifically because of malnutrition has risen dramatically in the last year. If you are wanting to suggest that this is due political decisions rather than a famine or overall lack of food then yes that is true, but it doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people in the UK struggling to feed themselves and their children. What's happening in Asia or Africa isn't particularly relevant to the level of political engagement in the UK, which is what this discussion is about. That fact that things are getting worse in the UK while improving in much poorer countries just makes the situation even less excusable. [1] http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects [2] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-hospital-tameside-food-parcels-patients-risk-malnutrition http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-hospital-...
  - dfraser992 11y ago
    And now it becomes obvious why, in the UK, that the Tory government is deliberately trying to shred the social fabric with excessive cuts etc - all justified by their illogical ideology of 'austerity'. The fact is, the tax credits cuts are going to take 4 billion pounds out of the economy - people who get those tax credits spend them, they don't squirrel them away in their pension plans or buy more buy-to-lets properties like the well off... I am actually thinking of moving back to the US, it is getting so incredibly insane here. But if you are trying to prevent a revolution - setting up the infrastructure for monitoring the populace while creating the conditions that would precipitate a revolution makes good sense.
  - jensen123 11y ago
    Many of the people who don't seem to care about privacy seem to have enough money for the newest iPhone, an SUV or a McMansion, though.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Those things are still lower in the hierarchy.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that? Don't posit it as a privacy vs law-enforcement thing. At its heart it's game-theory. Let me get a bit abstract first so we can tighten up the lingo. If we start with Cogito ergo sum - the concept that all we know as an individual is that we think and everything else is up for debate, we can also posit that when it comes to intentions we can only know our own. Some people don't even know what they want...I digress. Back to game theory. You as an individual have no idea what someone else's intentions are. You can trust them, but you can't be sure exactly what they want or what they will do. Do you provide all electronic communications; spoken, typed, captured by an imaging sensor, read, downloaded, listened to, purchased etc to a body that has the greatest capacity to control you? If yes... Do you trust all politicians, bureaucrats, and law-enforcement officers? The answer is probably no but we've gotten nowhere because the majority of people have cognitive dissonance when it comes concepts involving technology and privacy intermingling. So can we posit it like a game of cards? If you had the choice to show 2 cards from your hand, 1 card or 0 cards, which would you choose - knowing that the other player has put down none? I'm sure there's a better analogy but I thought I'd put the game-theory idea out there so others can take a stab at creating an effective metaphor.
- logingone 11y ago
  Increasingly the population are from countries which are technologically and democratically illiterate. *Your country may vary.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  In the face of a breathless and narrative-toeing media, you can only win by using the same tools as they use. You can't fight fire with fire - the more loudly you decry these policies the more rapidly you alienate moderates and hard-liners alike. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Rather, I think change has to come from one (or both) of two places. Firstly, inarguable grass roots initiatives, such as crowd-sourced direct democracy, which alter the fundamental structure (I.e. That nation states and representative governance are the only way to go) upon which arguments rest. The other is to give your opponents enough rope with which to hang themselves - to which end the snooper charter may eventually play. If this government put forth a statement decrying the UN, moderates may scratch their heads and wonder. Hard-liners will join in, as they have against human rights, but moderates will be turned off. Either way, this war (for it is war) must be fought in the battlefield of minds, and with subtlety. The most powerful idea is the one that you think is your own.
zimbatm 11y ago
I don't mind losing some privacy but it has to be symmetrical. Right now the government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward.
- avmich 11y ago
  That's not enough. Government is a service for you - it should be naked by default, while you're clothed by default.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It's impossible as long as there are real actors that are a threat to it - i.e. as long as there is more than one government in the universe and all want access to the same resources.
    - avmich 11y ago
      Can you explain why? "Default" doesn't mean "always" - we can talk about hiding something, which is related to external threats. Why this can't work?
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I stupidly misread you as saying "all-public". Let's call it a brain-fart. I'm all for government transparency, but I also accept that as long as nations compete with each others, there are areas in diplomacy, trade, espionage and military that need to stay secret.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  Right now the government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward. That's a fantastic metaphor for the situation. That could be quite an effective advertising campaign against government surveillance because it visually shows the disparity of exposure while capturing the impropriety of the act. Perfect.
lukasm 11y ago
Cannataci read Cerf's full quote: > Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization. >This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb." I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the modern taboo?
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > "privacy is dead" "What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead." (Jacob Appelbaum) Framing and language are important. Unfortunately, a lot of people have accepted the new doublespeak. edit: subject-verb agreement
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I wish people would taboo[0] the word "privacy" in such discussions. They often mean too many too different things; the whole discussion is done at too low resolution. [0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo
  - PavlovsCat 11y ago
    Also: > I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit. -- Jacob Appelbaum, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
hoodoof 11y ago
The worse something is for the citizens, the more governments seem to want it. Government: "Oh it's REALLY bad for the people? Well we certainly need that." The more complaints, the more valuable it must be to the government.
Umn55 11y ago
"I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments" Human reasoning doesn't work on logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ So you shouldn't, the vast majority of the public is stupid, uneducated and illiterate. Lastly capitalist societies are not set up to defend themselves vs the rich... see here, the spying is for dissidents not terrorists. Important: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137
- dang 11y ago
  We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507 and marked it off-topic.
musha68k 11y ago
I always wonder if UK politicians had to read Orwell in high school, 1984 was mandatory reading for me here in Austria.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Probably. As a textbook. But if you look throughout UK history - the only freedoms they really cared about are the strong individual property rights. When property is equal-ish distributed - all the other rights also are. But with property increasingly concentrated ... So this bills are not unexpected - they don't infringe on anyone's property - so they get a pass from the powerbrokers.
- ionised 11y ago
  I'm 29 years old and I had only heard of Orwell in school when one of my English Literature teachers mentioned Animal Farm in a passing comment about Russia. I had never read any Orwell works until 18, and that was entirely recreational and extra-curricular.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  No book is mandatory for English study, teachers have some choice within a set selection of texts. Animal Farm is one of the options. http://www.educationumbrella.com/curriculum-vital/gcse-english-literature-set-texts-for-teaching-from-2015 http://www.educationumbrella.com/curriculum-vital/gcse-engli...
wicket 11y ago
It's shame that The Register had ruin a good story with their shoddy, tabloid-esque journalism by claiming that the UN privacy head called Vint Cerf "dumb". He never called him "dumb", he actually highlighted his intelligence but claimed that he said something "dumb". There's a huge difference. One implies a personal trait whereas the other refers to a single occurrence which may be an anomaly.
envy2 11y ago
After all of Cameron's "let's ban end-to-end encryption" remarks, it unfortunately seems like many key interests are just relieved it isn't worse. Nice strategy, now that I think of it.
benevol 11y ago
Cannataci read Cerf's full quote: "Privacy may actually be an anomaly. [...]" "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb." What's happening here is not Cerf being dumb, because obviously he's not. He's been bought by Google a long time ago and Google has destruction of privacy as their business model (just like Facebook, and the rest of them). Good money has allowed Vint to brainwash himself into actually thinking that destroying privacy is acceptable. He's basically just attempting to find a way out of the inner conflict he must have, working for Google. (So yes, he'd actually benefit from seeing a shrink.)
- icanhackit 11y ago
  Quoted ad nauseam on HN but always fitting: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes
gorhill 11y ago
Imagine a new device to read and record people's thoughts at all time is invented. That UK surveillance bill is "worse than scary" because according to how its proponents/supporters rationalize it, the logical consequence of this rationalization is that it's perfectly acceptable that all citizens should be permanently hooked to such device if it existed.
snowdensgranny 11y ago
Hi - I've been sent here from a lovely techie at reddit. I am THE most non-technical person but, this subject fascinates me. I've been following Snowden and some of the related issues and I am passionately against government mass surveillance (GMS). I have to read most things twice or three times - I am not as clever as all you in this thread but I hope I can contribute a new angle. I recently asked a friend in the UK about the Snoopers Charter and she said, 'Hey, I've got nothing to hide and if it stops terrorists then carry on.' Nothing I said or sent her to read resonated... even when I said, 'Mass Surveillance hasn't stopped a terrorist, it's driven them underground making you more unsafe and the fact your shit is being stored and could one day be hacked by terrorists is making you more unsafe and...Sweetie, I was 18 with you...I KNOW you have shit to hide." She, I believe, is a good example of the average person in the UK at least. So why does she not care? Probably for the reasons you all mention however, I thought further. What is 3-for-2 at Tesco's has relevance to her life...if the government want to record her posting about it on facebook, she cares nothing. Or so I thought. I considered further. I think, on a deeper level, she actually does care and this may be the problem and the reason why the pitchforks are still in garages. Years ago, we all lived close to our families and saw them a lot. We cared about their lives a lot. What my child buys in the shops matters to me. As humans the only thing that actually matters is that we 'matter' to others and as this kind of interaction happened, it validated us as important beings. Once, I managed to sit through 4 minutes of Big Brother reality TV show when it first came out before my eyes and ears bled with the utter triviality of it. People are very, very trivial. They don't matter. But they desperately want to believe they do. As we have spread out and live far apart, these validations from family have decreased - yes, skype. Yes phone calls. But I'm still not there, physically, discussing 3-for-2 shampoo deals with my daughter if she's 350 miles away and, frankly, some people may actually be aware enough to sense that that's not worth discussing in a skype call, even with their mum. So, on some deeper level, the fact that the government cares enough to, not just listen but actually record and store all our details, means we must be important enough and that we matter. When I explained to my friend that the governments can actually pull together ALL your records and analyse it so they can actually predict when you will run out of shampoo...I know she shrugged it off, but did I also see her flush? Flush with a sense that someone taking THAT much interest in her meant that she mattered? I posit that THIS is what we may be fighting. Those against mass surveillance are people who either have this need satisfied or don't have this need in the first place. It struck me that my rants about this are falling on deaf ears because I am, in effect saying, 'Why on earth do you think you're interesting enough to be under total surveillance?" People don't want to admit that they need validation but they sure as hell don't like feeling they don't matter - hey, only interesting people who MATTER actually get spied on. I believe that if more and more common people (i.e. the non techie, 3 for 2 deal type people) cannot be brought into this debate and made to see, nay, feel, the consequences than our freedom and privacy and the right to develop without scrutiny and our freedom to speak when we do have something interesting to say will continue to be eroded to the point where humanity will lose the ability to debate hence, ironically, becoming more uninteresting. The very thing that people fear will be brought to bear.

149 points by stevetrewick 11y ago

Absolutely spot on! I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments, be it in the UK, Australia, France, the U.S., everywhere the government is making a grab for more and wider surveillance powers, the majority of the population seem totally oblivious. There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?

themartorana 11y ago
The depiction of humans in the movie WALL-E was one of the scariest and most poignant bits of storytelling I have ever seen, and seems to become more true as apathy grows.
- PebblesHD 11y ago
  great movie! I re-watched that recently and it still strikes a chord.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Most people don't have time to think about lofty goals like "privacy" when they need all the focus they can get to care about more basic needs like "shelter" and "putting food on the table".
- PebblesHD 11y ago
  A very valid point and an equally troubling problem with modern society. Worrying about things like shelter and putting food on the table should be a non-issue in the 21st century, instead it is a modern epidemic and must be fixed. Having said this non-corporeal but none-the-less essential concepts like privacy, liberty and an expectation of trust in leadership should also be a given, sadly they suffered the same fate.
  - adventured 11y ago
    People have to worry a lot less about putting food on the table in the 21st century than at any other time in world history. Calorie counts have been going up a lot, for decades, across every country that formerly used to suffer deficits. Major famines are practically non-existent today, and were not uncommon in prior centuries. See: calorie count increases across Africa, Asia, South America. Poverty and global inequality also have been dropping gradually for decades. Instead of being modern epidemics, these things are former, ancient epidemics that are being eradicated rapidly.
    - anon1385 11y ago
      Just because famine no longer exists doesn't mean people aren't having to worry about putting food on the table. In the UK over a million people had to visit emergency food banks last year[1], compared to only 125,000 in 2012. Hospitals are seeing such levels of malnourishment that they have started discreetly giving away food parcels to patients[2]. It's estimated that up to 40% of patients admitted to UK hospitals are malnourished and the number of people admitted to hospital specifically because of malnutrition has risen dramatically in the last year. If you are wanting to suggest that this is due political decisions rather than a famine or overall lack of food then yes that is true, but it doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people in the UK struggling to feed themselves and their children. What's happening in Asia or Africa isn't particularly relevant to the level of political engagement in the UK, which is what this discussion is about. That fact that things are getting worse in the UK while improving in much poorer countries just makes the situation even less excusable. [1] http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects [2] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-hospital-tameside-food-parcels-patients-risk-malnutrition http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-hospital-...
- dfraser992 11y ago
  And now it becomes obvious why, in the UK, that the Tory government is deliberately trying to shred the social fabric with excessive cuts etc - all justified by their illogical ideology of 'austerity'. The fact is, the tax credits cuts are going to take 4 billion pounds out of the economy - people who get those tax credits spend them, they don't squirrel them away in their pension plans or buy more buy-to-lets properties like the well off... I am actually thinking of moving back to the US, it is getting so incredibly insane here. But if you are trying to prevent a revolution - setting up the infrastructure for monitoring the populace while creating the conditions that would precipitate a revolution makes good sense.
- jensen123 11y ago
  Many of the people who don't seem to care about privacy seem to have enough money for the newest iPhone, an SUV or a McMansion, though.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Those things are still lower in the hierarchy.
icanhackit 11y ago
There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that? Don't posit it as a privacy vs law-enforcement thing. At its heart it's game-theory. Let me get a bit abstract first so we can tighten up the lingo. If we start with Cogito ergo sum - the concept that all we know as an individual is that we think and everything else is up for debate, we can also posit that when it comes to intentions we can only know our own. Some people don't even know what they want...I digress. Back to game theory. You as an individual have no idea what someone else's intentions are. You can trust them, but you can't be sure exactly what they want or what they will do. Do you provide all electronic communications; spoken, typed, captured by an imaging sensor, read, downloaded, listened to, purchased etc to a body that has the greatest capacity to control you? If yes... Do you trust all politicians, bureaucrats, and law-enforcement officers? The answer is probably no but we've gotten nowhere because the majority of people have cognitive dissonance when it comes concepts involving technology and privacy intermingling. So can we posit it like a game of cards? If you had the choice to show 2 cards from your hand, 1 card or 0 cards, which would you choose - knowing that the other player has put down none? I'm sure there's a better analogy but I thought I'd put the game-theory idea out there so others can take a stab at creating an effective metaphor.
logingone 11y ago
Increasingly the population are from countries which are technologically and democratically illiterate. *Your country may vary.
madaxe_again 11y ago
In the face of a breathless and narrative-toeing media, you can only win by using the same tools as they use. You can't fight fire with fire - the more loudly you decry these policies the more rapidly you alienate moderates and hard-liners alike. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Rather, I think change has to come from one (or both) of two places. Firstly, inarguable grass roots initiatives, such as crowd-sourced direct democracy, which alter the fundamental structure (I.e. That nation states and representative governance are the only way to go) upon which arguments rest. The other is to give your opponents enough rope with which to hang themselves - to which end the snooper charter may eventually play. If this government put forth a statement decrying the UN, moderates may scratch their heads and wonder. Hard-liners will join in, as they have against human rights, but moderates will be turned off. Either way, this war (for it is war) must be fought in the battlefield of minds, and with subtlety. The most powerful idea is the one that you think is your own.

zimbatm 11y ago

I don't mind losing some privacy but it has to be symmetrical. Right now the government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward.

avmich 11y ago
That's not enough. Government is a service for you - it should be naked by default, while you're clothed by default.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's impossible as long as there are real actors that are a threat to it - i.e. as long as there is more than one government in the universe and all want access to the same resources.
  - avmich 11y ago
    Can you explain why? "Default" doesn't mean "always" - we can talk about hiding something, which is related to external threats. Why this can't work?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I stupidly misread you as saying "all-public". Let's call it a brain-fart. I'm all for government transparency, but I also accept that as long as nations compete with each others, there are areas in diplomacy, trade, espionage and military that need to stay secret.
icanhackit 11y ago
Right now the government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward. That's a fantastic metaphor for the situation. That could be quite an effective advertising campaign against government surveillance because it visually shows the disparity of exposure while capturing the impropriety of the act. Perfect.

lukasm 11y ago

Cannataci read Cerf's full quote: > Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization. >This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb." I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the modern taboo?

pdkl95 11y ago
> "privacy is dead" "What we used to call liberty and freedom we now call privacy. And now people are saying privacy is dead." (Jacob Appelbaum) Framing and language are important. Unfortunately, a lot of people have accepted the new doublespeak. edit: subject-verb agreement
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I wish people would taboo[0] the word "privacy" in such discussions. They often mean too many too different things; the whole discussion is done at too low resolution. [0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Rationalist_taboo
- PavlovsCat 11y ago
  Also: > I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit. -- Jacob Appelbaum, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago

hoodoof 11y ago

The worse something is for the citizens, the more governments seem to want it. Government: "Oh it's REALLY bad for the people? Well we certainly need that." The more complaints, the more valuable it must be to the government.

Umn55 11y ago

"I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various world governments" Human reasoning doesn't work on logic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ So you shouldn't, the vast majority of the public is stupid, uneducated and illiterate. Lastly capitalist societies are not set up to defend themselves vs the rich... see here, the spying is for dissidents not terrorists. Important: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137

dang 11y ago
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507 and marked it off-topic.

musha68k 11y ago

I always wonder if UK politicians had to read Orwell in high school, 1984 was mandatory reading for me here in Austria.

venomsnake 11y ago
Probably. As a textbook. But if you look throughout UK history - the only freedoms they really cared about are the strong individual property rights. When property is equal-ish distributed - all the other rights also are. But with property increasingly concentrated ... So this bills are not unexpected - they don't infringe on anyone's property - so they get a pass from the powerbrokers.
ionised 11y ago
I'm 29 years old and I had only heard of Orwell in school when one of my English Literature teachers mentioned Animal Farm in a passing comment about Russia. I had never read any Orwell works until 18, and that was entirely recreational and extra-curricular.
Symbiote 11y ago
No book is mandatory for English study, teachers have some choice within a set selection of texts. Animal Farm is one of the options. http://www.educationumbrella.com/curriculum-vital/gcse-english-literature-set-texts-for-teaching-from-2015 http://www.educationumbrella.com/curriculum-vital/gcse-engli...

wicket 11y ago

It's shame that The Register had ruin a good story with their shoddy, tabloid-esque journalism by claiming that the UN privacy head called Vint Cerf "dumb". He never called him "dumb", he actually highlighted his intelligence but claimed that he said something "dumb". There's a huge difference. One implies a personal trait whereas the other refers to a single occurrence which may be an anomaly.

envy2 11y ago

After all of Cameron's "let's ban end-to-end encryption" remarks, it unfortunately seems like many key interests are just relieved it isn't worse. Nice strategy, now that I think of it.

benevol 11y ago

Cannataci read Cerf's full quote: "Privacy may actually be an anomaly. [...]" "I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so dumb. It's just dumb." What's happening here is not Cerf being dumb, because obviously he's not. He's been bought by Google a long time ago and Google has destruction of privacy as their business model (just like Facebook, and the rest of them). Good money has allowed Vint to brainwash himself into actually thinking that destroying privacy is acceptable. He's basically just attempting to find a way out of the inner conflict he must have, working for Google. (So yes, he'd actually benefit from seeing a shrink.)

icanhackit 11y ago
Quoted ad nauseam on HN but always fitting: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes

gorhill 11y ago

Imagine a new device to read and record people's thoughts at all time is invented. That UK surveillance bill is "worse than scary" because according to how its proponents/supporters rationalize it, the logical consequence of this rationalization is that it's perfectly acceptable that all citizens should be permanently hooked to such device if it existed.

snowdensgranny 11y ago

Hi - I've been sent here from a lovely techie at reddit. I am THE most non-technical person but, this subject fascinates me. I've been following Snowden and some of the related issues and I am passionately against government mass surveillance (GMS). I have to read most things twice or three times - I am not as clever as all you in this thread but I hope I can contribute a new angle. I recently asked a friend in the UK about the Snoopers Charter and she said, 'Hey, I've got nothing to hide and if it stops terrorists then carry on.' Nothing I said or sent her to read resonated... even when I said, 'Mass Surveillance hasn't stopped a terrorist, it's driven them underground making you more unsafe and the fact your shit is being stored and could one day be hacked by terrorists is making you more unsafe and...Sweetie, I was 18 with you...I KNOW you have shit to hide." She, I believe, is a good example of the average person in the UK at least. So why does she not care? Probably for the reasons you all mention however, I thought further. What is 3-for-2 at Tesco's has relevance to her life...if the government want to record her posting about it on facebook, she cares nothing. Or so I thought. I considered further. I think, on a deeper level, she actually does care and this may be the problem and the reason why the pitchforks are still in garages. Years ago, we all lived close to our families and saw them a lot. We cared about their lives a lot. What my child buys in the shops matters to me. As humans the only thing that actually matters is that we 'matter' to others and as this kind of interaction happened, it validated us as important beings. Once, I managed to sit through 4 minutes of Big Brother reality TV show when it first came out before my eyes and ears bled with the utter triviality of it. People are very, very trivial. They don't matter. But they desperately want to believe they do. As we have spread out and live far apart, these validations from family have decreased - yes, skype. Yes phone calls. But I'm still not there, physically, discussing 3-for-2 shampoo deals with my daughter if she's 350 miles away and, frankly, some people may actually be aware enough to sense that that's not worth discussing in a skype call, even with their mum. So, on some deeper level, the fact that the government cares enough to, not just listen but actually record and store all our details, means we must be important enough and that we matter. When I explained to my friend that the governments can actually pull together ALL your records and analyse it so they can actually predict when you will run out of shampoo...I know she shrugged it off, but did I also see her flush? Flush with a sense that someone taking THAT much interest in her meant that she mattered? I posit that THIS is what we may be fighting. Those against mass surveillance are people who either have this need satisfied or don't have this need in the first place. It struck me that my rants about this are falling on deaf ears because I am, in effect saying, 'Why on earth do you think you're interesting enough to be under total surveillance?" People don't want to admit that they need validation but they sure as hell don't like feeling they don't matter - hey, only interesting people who MATTER actually get spied on. I believe that if more and more common people (i.e. the non techie, 3 for 2 deal type people) cannot be brought into this debate and made to see, nay, feel, the consequences than our freedom and privacy and the right to develop without scrutiny and our freedom to speak when we do have something interesting to say will continue to be eroded to the point where humanity will lose the ability to debate hence, ironically, becoming more uninteresting. The very thing that people fear will be brought to bear.