4 ms·

It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about

It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about them can be used to target them for arbitrary or deliberate police or political purposes. Oh and then there's the peer-pressure gaslighting of anyone pushing back on the "nothing to hide" mantra or pantopticon surveillance state. Ask them to live in glass houses or give over their banking details, suddenly they have less "nothing to hide." Lock up anything you value because no one else will. Also a good book: Three Felonies a Day

jcranberry 8y ago
This comment is unproductive and ridiculous. 1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel. 2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools". 3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen. This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected officials, so they are eventually bound by the public. If you are to any degree right, you haven't explained how this data could be used to undermine, circumvent, or influence these factors and bring about a 'surveillance state'. At this point you're just fear mongering.
- mirimir 8y ago
  > This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Sure. But getting tried is extremely expensive, in money and time. And it tends to fuck up your life in numerous ways. Me, I just don't carry a cellphone that's always turned on.
- salawat 8y ago
  At this point, you're gaslighting. The procedure creates a means that can be exploited for fishing expeditions. The details of exploitability have been well enumerated in previously given literary examples. Every infrastructural/institutional mechanism we implement or allow to be implemented is an undeniable weapon. Just as some people may be nervous when others do something perfectly legal (walking around with a firearm), others get understandably nervous when others clamor in support of instituting new mechanisms to allow our civil institutions to circumvent due process. "Someone was here at a time" is not a justification in and of itself for the casual dismissal of what normatively should be a right: the right to be free of being surveilled. Does the jurisprudence provide for such a protection? No. Would it have an Earth shattering impact on the business world if such a legislation was passed? Absolutely. Should we pass it? in my opinion, yes, absolutely. We've spent decades experimenting and finding out what happens when no one takes a firm stance against these seemingly innocuous forms of data gathering. People build systems with little pieces of innocuous information which in isolation are harmless, but in aggregate allow a terrifying capability to predict and otherwise manipulate or outright harm an individual. Data aggregation protection must happen. We cannot allow the weaponization of data, even sanctioned, against our descendants, or we are as culpable in the erosion of liberty for them as those who came before us. No more. Enough is enough.
  - jcranberry 8y ago
    Claiming I'm gaslighting is absurd and blatant rhetoric. It is reasonable for me to ask how the state can exploit the system in such a way which somehow defeats or undermines the checks on exploitation.
    - salawat 8y ago
      You're asking the previous poster to answer a question he has already sufficiently answered. Rhetoric or not, it's the truth. While you may consider the literary sources he pulled from to be "BS", we've had more than enough precedent implemented in the last 30 years that these literary "cautionary" tales are instead of being used as a warning to not encroach on civil rights, are instead being viewed as instruction manuals for how to do so. I.e. Semantic/linguistic engineering, appeals to nationalism, declaration of 'war' against nebulous but never seeming to disappear enemies, silencing or suppression of journalism/access to information, and engineering of artificial socioeconomic classes. If you haven't read the books, and are just tired of seeing people talk about them, then I recommend you read them and take them to heart. If you have read them, and yet still consider them irrelevant, then I can only question your motives/ position and whether it is fundamentally dependent on slowly eroding others right to be free of surveillance, because in no way whatsoever does the implementation details of the government in the United States proof its' citizens against these forces which are very actively employed by parties foreign and domestic. I don't like to assume malice, but I find it absolutely mind boggling that anyone paying enough attention could not recognize this in good faith. It's just too painfully obvious. So, if you truly aren't gaslighting, please enlighten me as to how you're trying to do anything but undermine actually valid concerns through rhetorically underhanded means? Because I'm honestly not seeing it.
- wurst_case 8y ago
  >"nothing to hide" strawmen Obviously I have no source for this except for personal experience but fwiw about %90 of the people I talk to here in the Bay Area believe the benefits of serveillance outweigh the harms and communicate such by saying they have "nothing to hide". I know my sample could be biased somehow but I've organized groups of activists before and done recruiting for such activities all around the bay (from ghetto to mansion). I have definitely noticed a trend. People here and on the internet seem more perceptive but that's definitely biased by my limited visited websites. I think it's impossible to have a constructive conversation about serveillance without talking about the "nothing to hide" people since, after all, in order to change policy you have to get people to agree on policy change.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  > This information can only be attained by a warrant... ...and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
latch 8y ago
I always find comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a [small] part of the problem. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, mass surveillance is allowed to exist because of the application of force (torture and murder). It's a dystopia founded in violence and oppression. We like to think things are like the book, because it paints us as victims. However, the truth is that, at best, we're complicit. This reality is explored in the far more prescient Brave New World. This surveillance is allowed not because people are afraid to protest, but because they don't care (or rather, they care more about other [meaningless] things).
- mipmap04 8y ago
  Or, in many cases, people have done the mental calculus between free, powerful, entertaining services and their privacy rights and have chosen the former.
  - fhbdukfrh 8y ago
    I know few people who can do mental calculus, fewer who can perform the cost benefit analysis you describe and none who have the right to make that decision for everyone else, but that's exactly what happens
    - markvdb 8y ago
      ...which is why you have some privacy minded people using gmail anyway, or getting biometric passports.
  - OtterCoder 8y ago
    In the real world, maybe 5% do the math. The rest are dazzled or browbeaten by apps and continuous demands for some permission they don't fully understand the scope of.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Correct. It's best modeled by neither 1984 or Brave New World---It's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." People get the basics that there are breakdowns in the system of safeguards and a non-zero chance that they'll be the victim of a crime or injustice facilitated by ubiquitous observation. But relative to the benefits, the odds they'll be the one locked in the dungeon suffering are so low that they'll readily shoulder that risk for the observed, immediate, and obvious benefits.

jcranberry 8y ago

This comment is unproductive and ridiculous. 1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel. 2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools". 3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen. This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected officials, so they are eventually bound by the public. If you are to any degree right, you haven't explained how this data could be used to undermine, circumvent, or influence these factors and bring about a 'surveillance state'. At this point you're just fear mongering.

mirimir 8y ago
> This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Sure. But getting tried is extremely expensive, in money and time. And it tends to fuck up your life in numerous ways. Me, I just don't carry a cellphone that's always turned on.
salawat 8y ago
At this point, you're gaslighting. The procedure creates a means that can be exploited for fishing expeditions. The details of exploitability have been well enumerated in previously given literary examples. Every infrastructural/institutional mechanism we implement or allow to be implemented is an undeniable weapon. Just as some people may be nervous when others do something perfectly legal (walking around with a firearm), others get understandably nervous when others clamor in support of instituting new mechanisms to allow our civil institutions to circumvent due process. "Someone was here at a time" is not a justification in and of itself for the casual dismissal of what normatively should be a right: the right to be free of being surveilled. Does the jurisprudence provide for such a protection? No. Would it have an Earth shattering impact on the business world if such a legislation was passed? Absolutely. Should we pass it? in my opinion, yes, absolutely. We've spent decades experimenting and finding out what happens when no one takes a firm stance against these seemingly innocuous forms of data gathering. People build systems with little pieces of innocuous information which in isolation are harmless, but in aggregate allow a terrifying capability to predict and otherwise manipulate or outright harm an individual. Data aggregation protection must happen. We cannot allow the weaponization of data, even sanctioned, against our descendants, or we are as culpable in the erosion of liberty for them as those who came before us. No more. Enough is enough.
- jcranberry 8y ago
  Claiming I'm gaslighting is absurd and blatant rhetoric. It is reasonable for me to ask how the state can exploit the system in such a way which somehow defeats or undermines the checks on exploitation.
  - salawat 8y ago
    You're asking the previous poster to answer a question he has already sufficiently answered. Rhetoric or not, it's the truth. While you may consider the literary sources he pulled from to be "BS", we've had more than enough precedent implemented in the last 30 years that these literary "cautionary" tales are instead of being used as a warning to not encroach on civil rights, are instead being viewed as instruction manuals for how to do so. I.e. Semantic/linguistic engineering, appeals to nationalism, declaration of 'war' against nebulous but never seeming to disappear enemies, silencing or suppression of journalism/access to information, and engineering of artificial socioeconomic classes. If you haven't read the books, and are just tired of seeing people talk about them, then I recommend you read them and take them to heart. If you have read them, and yet still consider them irrelevant, then I can only question your motives/ position and whether it is fundamentally dependent on slowly eroding others right to be free of surveillance, because in no way whatsoever does the implementation details of the government in the United States proof its' citizens against these forces which are very actively employed by parties foreign and domestic. I don't like to assume malice, but I find it absolutely mind boggling that anyone paying enough attention could not recognize this in good faith. It's just too painfully obvious. So, if you truly aren't gaslighting, please enlighten me as to how you're trying to do anything but undermine actually valid concerns through rhetorically underhanded means? Because I'm honestly not seeing it.
wurst_case 8y ago
>"nothing to hide" strawmen Obviously I have no source for this except for personal experience but fwiw about %90 of the people I talk to here in the Bay Area believe the benefits of serveillance outweigh the harms and communicate such by saying they have "nothing to hide". I know my sample could be biased somehow but I've organized groups of activists before and done recruiting for such activities all around the bay (from ghetto to mansion). I have definitely noticed a trend. People here and on the internet seem more perceptive but that's definitely biased by my limited visited websites. I think it's impossible to have a constructive conversation about serveillance without talking about the "nothing to hide" people since, after all, in order to change policy you have to get people to agree on policy change.
UncleEntity 8y ago
> This information can only be attained by a warrant... ...and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

latch 8y ago

I always find comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a [small] part of the problem. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, mass surveillance is allowed to exist because of the application of force (torture and murder). It's a dystopia founded in violence and oppression. We like to think things are like the book, because it paints us as victims. However, the truth is that, at best, we're complicit. This reality is explored in the far more prescient Brave New World. This surveillance is allowed not because people are afraid to protest, but because they don't care (or rather, they care more about other [meaningless] things).

mipmap04 8y ago
Or, in many cases, people have done the mental calculus between free, powerful, entertaining services and their privacy rights and have chosen the former.
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  I know few people who can do mental calculus, fewer who can perform the cost benefit analysis you describe and none who have the right to make that decision for everyone else, but that's exactly what happens
  - markvdb 8y ago
    ...which is why you have some privacy minded people using gmail anyway, or getting biometric passports.
- OtterCoder 8y ago
  In the real world, maybe 5% do the math. The rest are dazzled or browbeaten by apps and continuous demands for some permission they don't fully understand the scope of.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Correct. It's best modeled by neither 1984 or Brave New World---It's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." People get the basics that there are breakdowns in the system of safeguards and a non-zero chance that they'll be the victim of a crime or injustice facilitated by ubiquitous observation. But relative to the benefits, the odds they'll be the one locked in the dungeon suffering are so low that they'll readily shoulder that risk for the observed, immediate, and obvious benefits.