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The way security and surveillance is developing globally is incredibly worrying. Security establishments are treating domestic companies, infrastructure, data
by dalbasal 8y ago
The way security and surveillance is developing globally is incredibly worrying.
Security establishments are treating domestic companies, infrastructure, data hosting and anything else they can as vectors for intelligence. Legislators are supporting them. No one is taking the higher ground because they're doing it too.
Meanwhile, the meatiest cash cows in tech are advertising businesses, and the technologies that make their money are ad-tech, which at this point is extremely adjacent to spy-tech. Facebook's ad-tech, for example, would be very good at narrowing down a list of people likely to go on Hajj... I'm sure tencent's is too.
China is more open/public/brazen about their domestic activities (we noticed that your friend went to Mecca) where the US is cagey about domestic operations (eg Snowden). They're more discreet about foreign surveillance, where the US is a little more public. Both are doing both. So are dozens of nations and probably few non state players.
Now we seem to have an arm's race, with spooks publicly "outing" rivals and simultaneously demanding (publicly and privately) legislatures and companies improve their access.
At best, we get technology and digital culture balkanization. At worst, we get stasi-on-steriods.
There doesn't seem to be any meaningful political force pushing in the freedom direction.
- Moru 8y agoThe political forces that do exist gets actively ignored. People are just happy as it is, getting everything for free and/or conveniently. And "As long as you don't have anything to hide..." is the mantra of today. The thing is, we don't know what we need to hide tomorrow.
- rjf72 8y agoIn my opinion the sad reality is that societies mostly advance by sticking their finger in their fire. - If not for nukes we'd still be going full-on against each other in war. - If not for Hitler, we'd probably still be engaged in top-down government driven eugenics. Something many do not know is that US "progress" on this topic was an early inspiration for Hitler. And here too the solution will likely be letting things reach their natural climax. It's not difficult to imagine a practically infinite number of extreme scenarios when you have centralized authorities with effectively unlimited informational access on their population and perceived 'enemies' - foreign and domestic. One of these scenarios will eventually play out, at which point this dystopic nonsense can hopefully go the way of government driven eugenics as people realize what this can, and inevitably will, culminate in. Oh no no, governments will only involuntarily sterilize the [not me] people. Oh no no, governments will only use mountains of personal and private information to exploit [not me] people.
- auiya 8y ago> The way security and surveillance is developing globally is incredibly worrying. It's always been that way. We're just more aware of it lately.
- geraltofrivia 8y agoMaybe, but that doesn't mean that the current situation doesn't warrant special attention given the granularity at which surveillance data can be collected, the scale at which it can be aggregated and mined, and the intelligence with which it can be used to compute analytics is unprecedented?
- mark_l_watson 8y agoIt really is concerning. China, USA, England, Russia, etc. - many governments overstepping in addition to 8 or 10 very powerful tech companies. I just can’t help comparing this with William Gibson novels when I imagine the future: not all bad, society will go through interesting transformations, some will be good. But still worthy of concern.
- philwelch 8y ago> Security establishments are treating domestic companies, infrastructure, data hosting and anything else they can as vectors for intelligence. Legislators are supporting them. No one is taking the higher ground because they're doing it too. When, in all of human history, has this ever not been the case?