10 ms·

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

by treis 5y ago

kelnos 5y ago
In theory, but often the level of freeness, and your access to democracy, depended on the color of your skin or your gender. (Which is still the case today, to a great extent, but it was even worse 30, 50, 70, 100, etc. years ago.)
pixl97 5y ago
There were many attempts by the same people to monitor phone and mail communications.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  The international standards do just fine for enabling spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller ID. Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23 This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting! I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down. Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that. So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms? I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons! The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.
  - tomc1985 5y ago
    > reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down. I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.
    - Terry_Roll 5y ago
      Obviously I'm not going to be making copies of it to report because then I can get done for making illegal porn, that is the way the laws are written. Here is an example using whatsapp. https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_conviction/ https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_convict... Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal porn and because they were part of the group they got convicted of downloading. I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to report it. Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the world in plain sight masquerading as good guys! The laws are not fit for purpose.
      - tomc1985 5y ago
        Ok but whatsapp and reddit are very very different. It is very easy to see how people can dissemnimate kiddie porn in an unmoderated WhatsApp group. But for a post to make it to the global reddit front page (not your personalized homepage) it would have to make it past the eyes of probably millions of people. Short of botting or hacking I can't see how it would even be possible.
        Terry_Roll 5y ago
        I do think there is an element of "botting" as you would put it. Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.
kragen 5y ago
Yes, intermediating so much of our society through the internet has made it extremely vulnerable. The internet offers would-be totalitarians a temptation of pervasive surveillance that goes far beyond what the Stasi could ever have dreamed of. Free society and democracy are not likely to survive another decade, although they will probably be born again later in a new form.
whatshisface 5y ago
Not really, no, not with the media deciding what everybody heard. We had as much of a free society as convenience combined with the interests of every individual running TV news allowed. It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far ahead of anything that existed then.
- treis 5y ago
  >Not really, no, What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about when you say "free society." It sounds like a weird mantra. edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society or democracy people think of when they say "we have a free society and a democracy." From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.
    - kragen 5y ago
      It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks, much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New York without paying all your profits out to the cops. People in Peoria had enormous freedom in 01930, 01960, and even 01990 that people in Minsk, Shanghai, and Alexandria just didn't. Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.
nirav72 5y ago
You must not have been around when the government was pushing for backdoors on Telecom products in the 1990s. Before the internet was a thing for most people.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
  - nirav72 5y ago
    Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to have a backdoor.
    - kragen 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... actually passed in 01994.
omeze 5y ago
Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific candidate and a compromise between political parties on military presence sounds like a very precarious position for free society to be in. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)
- cnelsenmilt 5y ago
  One way to look at it then is that we have dealt with similar issues before and survived.
  - pooper 5y ago
    Not really. I mean logically would you also play Russian roulette repeatedly with no payout just because you haven't died yet?
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Actually, no one involved in the 1876 US election survived.
  - vore 5y ago
    Well, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns".
- pyuser583 5y ago
  I heard a story that at the 1864 National Union (Republican) Convention, there was a bunch of haggling about who would be Abraham Lincolns VP. A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans. Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it. It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination. The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.
pessimizer 5y ago
Is this sarcasm?
- vkou 5y ago
  Depends on whether or not one believes that we live in a free, democratic society today. In many ways, yes, we do, in many others, no, we don't.
EarlKing 5y ago
We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That is not by any means a free society. Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. Legislation like the EARN IT Act is meant to turn back the clock to silence the voice of the people so that, once again, only the voice of the bourgeoisie can be heard.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. And we still do. Some of the corporations have changed, some are the same. What else is new? > That is not by any means a free society. And it still isn't. No "EARN IT Act" needed for that.
- mgerdts 5y ago
  I believe that the period you refer to had local newspapers, tv stations, and radio stations that were largely independent from this handful of corporations (ABC, CBS, NBC?). During this period, there was limited opportunity to perform population-wide surveillance on the discussion of this coverage. In those days your TV tended not to be equipped with technology that could report what you watched.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    In those local markets you had reporters who were friends with those in power and very little got reported.
  - jackcosgrove 5y ago
    I think it's fair to say that pre-internet, there were fewer media voices but there were a lot, lot fewer attempts at surveillance.
- thomassmith65 5y ago
  Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire comment just sounds like speculation about a time that is, in fact, fairly recent history. We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That only makes sense if you ignore all sorts of pivotal historical events (eg: uprisings and revolutions). Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s
notriddle 5y ago
If the government has the benefits of the internet, and no one else does, isn’t society less free than if no one has it?
throwhauser 5y ago
> We had a free society and democracy before the internet. But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.
wayoutthere 5y ago
Some of us did. America has never been a free and Democratic society for all, and we’re actually closer to achieving that than ever if you’re not white/straight/upper-middle class, which is why they’re so desperate to push this bill through. The government had de-facto control of all mass media before the internet. They could control the narrative to a degree they didn’t need tight surveillance. They lost control of that with the internet and are desperate to get it back.
defiUs88 5y ago
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Yes, but if you shut down the most "free" information platform, and make it only free to those who are rich enough to pay for anonymity then you are doing aggregious harm to democracy and freedom. Perhaps moreso that anyone has ever done in human history. Look no further than China to see the wrong way of doing things and that is precisely what this bill seeks to do. It is not to "protect the children" it is to protect the elite power centers from criticism and transparency by forcing you to open up all your secrets and communications to them to judge and eliminate the challenges and criticisms of their power under the guise of "law and order".

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

by treis 5y ago

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

In theory, but often the level of freeness, and your access to democracy, depended on the color of your skin or your gender. (Which is still the case today, to a great extent, but it was even worse 30, 50, 70, 100, etc. years ago.)

pixl97 5y ago

There were many attempts by the same people to monitor phone and mail communications.

Terry_Roll 5y ago
The international standards do just fine for enabling spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller ID. Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23 This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting! I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down. Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that. So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms? I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons! The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.
- tomc1985 5y ago
  > reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down. I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Obviously I'm not going to be making copies of it to report because then I can get done for making illegal porn, that is the way the laws are written. Here is an example using whatsapp. https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_conviction/ https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_convict... Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal porn and because they were part of the group they got convicted of downloading. I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to report it. Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the world in plain sight masquerading as good guys! The laws are not fit for purpose.
    - tomc1985 5y ago
      Ok but whatsapp and reddit are very very different. It is very easy to see how people can dissemnimate kiddie porn in an unmoderated WhatsApp group. But for a post to make it to the global reddit front page (not your personalized homepage) it would have to make it past the eyes of probably millions of people. Short of botting or hacking I can't see how it would even be possible.
      - Terry_Roll 5y ago
        I do think there is an element of "botting" as you would put it. Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.

kragen 5y ago

Yes, intermediating so much of our society through the internet has made it extremely vulnerable. The internet offers would-be totalitarians a temptation of pervasive surveillance that goes far beyond what the Stasi could ever have dreamed of. Free society and democracy are not likely to survive another decade, although they will probably be born again later in a new form.

whatshisface 5y ago

Not really, no, not with the media deciding what everybody heard. We had as much of a free society as convenience combined with the interests of every individual running TV news allowed. It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far ahead of anything that existed then.

treis 5y ago
>Not really, no, What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about when you say "free society." It sounds like a weird mantra. edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society or democracy people think of when they say "we have a free society and a democracy." From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.
  - kragen 5y ago
    It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks, much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New York without paying all your profits out to the cops. People in Peoria had enormous freedom in 01930, 01960, and even 01990 that people in Minsk, Shanghai, and Alexandria just didn't. Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.

nirav72 5y ago

You must not have been around when the government was pushing for backdoors on Telecom products in the 1990s. Before the internet was a thing for most people.

oceanghost 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
- nirav72 5y ago
  Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to have a backdoor.
  - kragen 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... actually passed in 01994.

omeze 5y ago

Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific candidate and a compromise between political parties on military presence sounds like a very precarious position for free society to be in. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)

cnelsenmilt 5y ago
One way to look at it then is that we have dealt with similar issues before and survived.
- pooper 5y ago
  Not really. I mean logically would you also play Russian roulette repeatedly with no payout just because you haven't died yet?
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Actually, no one involved in the 1876 US election survived.
- vore 5y ago
  Well, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns".
pyuser583 5y ago
I heard a story that at the 1864 National Union (Republican) Convention, there was a bunch of haggling about who would be Abraham Lincolns VP. A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans. Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it. It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination. The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.

pessimizer 5y ago

Is this sarcasm?

vkou 5y ago
Depends on whether or not one believes that we live in a free, democratic society today. In many ways, yes, we do, in many others, no, we don't.

EarlKing 5y ago

We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That is not by any means a free society. Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. Legislation like the EARN IT Act is meant to turn back the clock to silence the voice of the people so that, once again, only the voice of the bourgeoisie can be heard.

CRConrad 5y ago
> We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. And we still do. Some of the corporations have changed, some are the same. What else is new? > That is not by any means a free society. And it still isn't. No "EARN IT Act" needed for that.
mgerdts 5y ago
I believe that the period you refer to had local newspapers, tv stations, and radio stations that were largely independent from this handful of corporations (ABC, CBS, NBC?). During this period, there was limited opportunity to perform population-wide surveillance on the discussion of this coverage. In those days your TV tended not to be equipped with technology that could report what you watched.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  In those local markets you had reporters who were friends with those in power and very little got reported.
- jackcosgrove 5y ago
  I think it's fair to say that pre-internet, there were fewer media voices but there were a lot, lot fewer attempts at surveillance.
thomassmith65 5y ago
Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire comment just sounds like speculation about a time that is, in fact, fairly recent history. We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That only makes sense if you ignore all sorts of pivotal historical events (eg: uprisings and revolutions). Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s

notriddle 5y ago

If the government has the benefits of the internet, and no one else does, isn’t society less free than if no one has it?

throwhauser 5y ago

> We had a free society and democracy before the internet. But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.

wayoutthere 5y ago

Some of us did. America has never been a free and Democratic society for all, and we’re actually closer to achieving that than ever if you’re not white/straight/upper-middle class, which is why they’re so desperate to push this bill through. The government had de-facto control of all mass media before the internet. They could control the narrative to a degree they didn’t need tight surveillance. They lost control of that with the internet and are desperate to get it back.

defiUs88 5y ago

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Yes, but if you shut down the most "free" information platform, and make it only free to those who are rich enough to pay for anonymity then you are doing aggregious harm to democracy and freedom. Perhaps moreso that anyone has ever done in human history. Look no further than China to see the wrong way of doing things and that is precisely what this bill seeks to do. It is not to "protect the children" it is to protect the elite power centers from criticism and transparency by forcing you to open up all your secrets and communications to them to judge and eliminate the challenges and criticisms of their power under the guise of "law and order".