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I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100
by beeboop 11y ago
I disagree - digital surveillance state will be gone within a decade, or twenty years at most. Already we see programs like Telegram becoming very popular (100 million users) where the opportunity for surveillance is massively reduced. Platforms are going to slowly transition towards encrypted content and data that not even service providers can decrypt (SpiderOak is a good example).
The biggest holdout will be operating systems - Google and Microsoft very much do not want to lose their backdoors (or front doors) into everyone's data. But within ten years, we will finally have a "year of Linux on desktops" in which both grandma and the young university student can both buy an Ubuntu computer and have it work how they need it to. And phones will run an OS that can't be maliciously updated remotely, and doesn't leak user data to apps and OS providers.
The final step will be near anonymous internet usage, which we are currently in the infancy of. There will be a shift to a more decentralized availability (but not necessarily storage) of data in most of the applications we use most often. Essentially Freenet, but without all the usability problems. The Facebook of the future will have open source (and encrypted) data where your info is only viewable to you and your friends. There are currently platforms that exist like this, but they are mostly in "testing" stages and are not ready for widespread use.
- thom 11y agoI'm not talking about the state exclusively, nor am I talking about your online activities. I'm saying you will have a camera and microphone trained on you, always. My personal AI assistant - smart but not nearly sentient - knows to highlight the most titillating segments, which I have just captioned and published for all to see (anonymously, over an encrypted connection). It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, but 4chan are nevertheless streaming a video of one in the act. I fail to see how this technology - small, cheap, highly capable and connected drones - will fail to come about in the next 50-100 years. And because of that, I seriously think we need to mentally prepare for living much more publicly than we do now.
- newjersey 11y agoThis is why I strongly oppose the drone strikes. Nobody should be killed by the state (except I guess by soldiers in self defense). I especially so not like the idea of killing someone probably at home in pajamas eating Cheerios at five pm in the evening local time. I don't think there is any justification for that even if the person in question is a flight risk and has been the mastermind behind millions of death. Such a killing with no attempt to detain runs afoul of my morals. This is worse than capital punishment which I also strongly oppose for any situation.
- beeboop 11y agoI think your concern about lack of due process should be more focused on the tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian bystanders the US has killed since 2001. We are killing dozens of women and children overseas every week and chalk them up as collateral damage.
- newjersey 11y agoI am honestly not worried about collateral damage. If someone is shooting at you, you shoot right back at them regardless of whether they are standing behind a hundred babies. That is not a problem. When we talk about collateral damage in case of unprovoked attacks, we are minimizing the issue. If we are not willing to risk our soldiers to capture people who are not firing at us, then we should not try to capture or kill those people. I think it is pretty simple. If they are worth killing with a drone, they are worth sacrificing the lives of our soldiers in an attempt to catch them dead or alive. Whether there is any collateral damage is not the issue.
- beeboop 11y agoI guess I thought the drones were a joke or hyperbole in your post. There are a lot of things that make me not concerned about your scenario. Firstly, cameras are easily defeated, especially by technology 50 years from now. You're presently a single curtain away from defeating them. In the future it might be some non-human visible light array that blinds a camera (these already exist today but aren't very common). Who knows. Secondly, most people benefit from security and privacy through obscurity. No one cares about what 99% of people do. The other 1% will have easy means for protecting privacy, whether it be closing their curtains or some futuristic piece of technology. Thirdly, I think expectations of privacy are going to naturally diminish a lot in the future. Sexuality will probably be a lot less stigmatized, and no one will care whether a state senator is jackin it to gay scat porn. However advanced drones get, the technology to counter them bothering you will no doubt be a lot more advanced.
- jrnichols 11y ago> It's great that one's ISP doesn't know what porn site one is visiting, Well.... that seems to be the way Utah is heading, with the support of anti-porn crusaders (many of whom are radical feminists - that's originally where I found this link) http://fightthenewdrug.org/state-of-utah-makes-history-declares-pornography-a-public-health-crisis/ http://fightthenewdrug.org/state-of-utah-makes-history-decla... "One of the proposed directions is to see the government work with internet providers to allow pornography only on an opt-in basis."