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One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand... Why do 300m people have to suffer for the boogeyman terrorist? I mean isn't this t

by oliv__ 9y ago

One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand... Why do 300m people have to suffer for the boogeyman terrorist? I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Where does this stop? This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with control and mass surveillance. It's pretty depressing.

erric 9y ago
>One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand... It was already well out of hand when congress approved the patriot act as a knee jerk reaction to terrorism. That was the proverbial straw and everything since has just been gravy for the MIC and other companies milking the government teat.
- sebnap 9y ago
  Read Carroll Quigley, read Gioele Magaldi, combine.
- zeep 9y ago
  thanks Obama for repealing, not signing the extension and for not expanding the "PATRIOT" Act /s
microcolonel 9y ago
> To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat People are willing to curtail the right to keep and bear arms (and it is a right, whereas there is no official right not to be surveilled in public) for a threat which is within an order of magnitude of it; and we can only really tell what the rate is like with the current countermeasures. If the rate climbs after removing countermeasures, will your opinion change? I'd still be against pervasive surveillance if the rate went up maybe tenfold.
- hammock 9y ago
  It could be argued that all the lawful gunowners together are causing less harm and/or hassle than all the TSA combined. In other words, having a gun as last resort protection against a tyrant isn't hurting anyone the way an extra hour of unproductive scanning and associated privacy intrusions are.
  - krapp 9y ago
    It could also be argued that having a gun and not using it is, in terms of societal effects, precisely the same as not having a gun to begin with. So the comparison of potential force on the part of gun owners with actual force by the TSA is a bit disingenuous. Other than that, you're right.
    - thinkmassive 9y ago
      When you’re unarmed you have no option to use a weapon to defend an innocent life. When you’re armed and have the option, you need to determine whether the risk of using a weapon is worth the potential risk of unintended side effects causing unintended damage. These are two very different situations. If you fail to understand the difference then I hope you never go out into public armed, and maybe you should consider never owning anything primarily used as a weapon at all.
- macintux 9y ago
  It's a "right" by way of an awkwardly-phrased amendment that could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today, designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today. (In fact, the NRA itself wasn't all that upset about gun control in the fairly recent past.) And "mass surveillance" would have meant something very different 200 years ago. Why bother writing something into the Bill of Rights when no government could possibly afford to do what they can today? So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
meddlepal 9y ago
Devil's advocate: What is so bad about everyone being tracked and accountable for where they are at any point in time? It would seem a lot of mistaken identity, fraud, and he-said she-said issues could be removed if we can locate people at any point in time.
- poorleno111 9y ago
  ..............
  - meddlepal 9y ago
    It's just technology: Some will use it for good and some will use it for evil. Isn't that the mantra we've been repeating since forever within the hacker community?
    - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
      > It's just technology: Some will use it for good and some will use it for evil. Isn't that the mantra we've been repeating since forever within the hacker community? This smells like a troll.
      - meddlepal 9y ago
        Why? Seriously, the same argument has been used to defend BitTorrent and various other tools that might be used to circumvent laws.
        DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        Yes...if you strip out so much context for the similarity to become meaningless.
    - Too 9y ago
      It's not just technology. It's technology given exclusive right to a single party. The state can watch you but you can't watch the state.
csallen 9y ago
> I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Is that really the point of terrorism? Is there even such a thing as a general "point" to all terrorism? I would assume there as many different goals as there are terrorists, or at least terrorist organizations. Rather, what's more interesting is what the people in power do to take advantage of terrorism. The policies they implement, programs they put into place, etc. Terrorism (and other external threats) can act as a convenient cover for domestic actions that would otherwise be scrutinized. And then there are the more mundane issues. Sometimes the changes that become visible to the public come from relatively low-level managers and officials, who simply enjoy playing with a bigger budget and new toys. It's not all conspiracies in dark rooms at the top. We have to give democracy its due as well. Just because people can vote doesn't mean we inspire the most desirable behavior in our leaders, because the masses aren't rational. Who wants to be the politician responsible for having weakened security before the next terrorist attack? It's similar to being "soft on crime." The public will hold you responsible, right or wrong.
- closeparen 9y ago
  Terrorism is the deployment of asymmetric warfare techniques by an organization we won’t dignify as a state or military. Getting the victim to raise its defenses doesn’t have to be a goal, but it can.
zxcmx 9y ago
Suppose your job was to work out whether the identity of people entering or exiting your country matched what was stated on their travel documents. How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors? Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem. The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right? [I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process]. DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable. I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too? Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement. If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points. Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?
- saguro 9y ago
  > and results aren't logged There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged. Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?' The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.

by oliv__ 9y ago

erric 9y ago

>One step closer to our amazing future. This is really getting out of hand... It was already well out of hand when congress approved the patriot act as a knee jerk reaction to terrorism. That was the proverbial straw and everything since has just been gravy for the MIC and other companies milking the government teat.

sebnap 9y ago
Read Carroll Quigley, read Gioele Magaldi, combine.
zeep 9y ago
thanks Obama for repealing, not signing the extension and for not expanding the "PATRIOT" Act /s

microcolonel 9y ago

> To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat People are willing to curtail the right to keep and bear arms (and it is a right, whereas there is no official right not to be surveilled in public) for a threat which is within an order of magnitude of it; and we can only really tell what the rate is like with the current countermeasures. If the rate climbs after removing countermeasures, will your opinion change? I'd still be against pervasive surveillance if the rate went up maybe tenfold.

hammock 9y ago
It could be argued that all the lawful gunowners together are causing less harm and/or hassle than all the TSA combined. In other words, having a gun as last resort protection against a tyrant isn't hurting anyone the way an extra hour of unproductive scanning and associated privacy intrusions are.
- krapp 9y ago
  It could also be argued that having a gun and not using it is, in terms of societal effects, precisely the same as not having a gun to begin with. So the comparison of potential force on the part of gun owners with actual force by the TSA is a bit disingenuous. Other than that, you're right.
  - thinkmassive 9y ago
    When you’re unarmed you have no option to use a weapon to defend an innocent life. When you’re armed and have the option, you need to determine whether the risk of using a weapon is worth the potential risk of unintended side effects causing unintended damage. These are two very different situations. If you fail to understand the difference then I hope you never go out into public armed, and maybe you should consider never owning anything primarily used as a weapon at all.
macintux 9y ago
It's a "right" by way of an awkwardly-phrased amendment that could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today, designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today. (In fact, the NRA itself wasn't all that upset about gun control in the fairly recent past.) And "mass surveillance" would have meant something very different 200 years ago. Why bother writing something into the Bill of Rights when no government could possibly afford to do what they can today? So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
- microcolonel 9y ago

meddlepal 9y ago

Devil's advocate: What is so bad about everyone being tracked and accountable for where they are at any point in time? It would seem a lot of mistaken identity, fraud, and he-said she-said issues could be removed if we can locate people at any point in time.

poorleno111 9y ago
..............
- meddlepal 9y ago
  It's just technology: Some will use it for good and some will use it for evil. Isn't that the mantra we've been repeating since forever within the hacker community?
  - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
    > It's just technology: Some will use it for good and some will use it for evil. Isn't that the mantra we've been repeating since forever within the hacker community? This smells like a troll.
    - meddlepal 9y ago
      Why? Seriously, the same argument has been used to defend BitTorrent and various other tools that might be used to circumvent laws.
      - DashRattlesnake 9y ago
        Yes...if you strip out so much context for the similarity to become meaningless.
  - Too 9y ago
    It's not just technology. It's technology given exclusive right to a single party. The state can watch you but you can't watch the state.

csallen 9y ago

> I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Is that really the point of terrorism? Is there even such a thing as a general "point" to all terrorism? I would assume there as many different goals as there are terrorists, or at least terrorist organizations. Rather, what's more interesting is what the people in power do to take advantage of terrorism. The policies they implement, programs they put into place, etc. Terrorism (and other external threats) can act as a convenient cover for domestic actions that would otherwise be scrutinized. And then there are the more mundane issues. Sometimes the changes that become visible to the public come from relatively low-level managers and officials, who simply enjoy playing with a bigger budget and new toys. It's not all conspiracies in dark rooms at the top. We have to give democracy its due as well. Just because people can vote doesn't mean we inspire the most desirable behavior in our leaders, because the masses aren't rational. Who wants to be the politician responsible for having weakened security before the next terrorist attack? It's similar to being "soft on crime." The public will hold you responsible, right or wrong.

closeparen 9y ago
Terrorism is the deployment of asymmetric warfare techniques by an organization we won’t dignify as a state or military. Getting the victim to raise its defenses doesn’t have to be a goal, but it can.

zxcmx 9y ago

Suppose your job was to work out whether the identity of people entering or exiting your country matched what was stated on their travel documents. How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors? Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem. The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right? [I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process]. DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable. I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too? Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement. If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points. Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?

saguro 9y ago
> and results aren't logged There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged. Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?' The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.