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Exactly three years ago I would have laughed at you, but three years of COVID has taught me that the powers that be in our society — which include journalists,

Exactly three years ago I would have laughed at you, but three years of COVID has taught me that the powers that be in our society — which include journalists, academics and moderators of online forums — will happily help tear down essential liberties for perceived, small, and temporary safeties. The abuses stemming from a lack of privacy have not been realized because of political convictions, but because of technical limitations. The advent of advanced AI models will remove many of these technical limitations and allow corporations and governments to quickly build detailed profiles of every citizen that touches the internet.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
It is interesting how this is something people only "wake up" to now on a generational basis. Obviously the government wants this to happen, each generations' specific communication modes are presented as "safe" but in reality each generations' social network apps du jour is a new opportunity for even better "total information awareness". This has been apparent since "Carnivore" was revealed to not be a conspiracy theory, but an actual system in THE LATE NINETIES, and ECHELON since the 1960s. And since then I would roughly say computing power is 20-40x more powerful (5x the gigahertz, 8x the cores), and storage is probably 1000x more scalable (40GB/280$ vs 14TB/200$). I have no idea how old you are, but three years ago, heck that is well past the point you should have been aware of this. Look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A That was revealed in 2006. Basically, the crux of it was that there were "secret rooms" like that in EVERY SINGLE telco. Well, except apparently Qwest, which blew my mind at the time because they were the worst regional telco of them all, so the fact they stood their ground was a total anomaly in their usual monopoly extraction sociopathy. One big sign of this is Tiktok. Tiktok is an attempt by the Chinese to subvert the normal monopoly the FBI has with social networks, since the US/EU governments are working with US/EU companies for facebook, twitter, etc. But Tiktok is Chinese. So Tiktok looks like just another social network to a typical social network junkie, but then you read all these headlines where congress and the EU wants to ban it, seemingly strangely up in arms over just another video social network, and .... that's because the Chinese are doing what the US/EU have done for 25+years. The US government has ITS toys, and doesn't want the Chinese to take them. That should clue you in to how much the government likes have total information access to social networks that are US/EU based. A lot of this could be swallowed if the US exhibited healthy signs of a functioning democracy, instead it is another sign of an emerging postmodern totalitarian state. The last hope of this was our judicial branch, which has been so thoroughly compromised by 30 years of partisan nominations (read: pro-elite in all cases) and Iraq war case law that it will never go back. I would stay quiet, but by the time I realized what was going on I had 10+ years of data on me. It doesn't matter anymore.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

It is interesting how this is something people only "wake up" to now on a generational basis. Obviously the government wants this to happen, each generations' specific communication modes are presented as "safe" but in reality each generations' social network apps du jour is a new opportunity for even better "total information awareness". This has been apparent since "Carnivore" was revealed to not be a conspiracy theory, but an actual system in THE LATE NINETIES, and ECHELON since the 1960s. And since then I would roughly say computing power is 20-40x more powerful (5x the gigahertz, 8x the cores), and storage is probably 1000x more scalable (40GB/280$ vs 14TB/200$). I have no idea how old you are, but three years ago, heck that is well past the point you should have been aware of this. Look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A That was revealed in 2006. Basically, the crux of it was that there were "secret rooms" like that in EVERY SINGLE telco. Well, except apparently Qwest, which blew my mind at the time because they were the worst regional telco of them all, so the fact they stood their ground was a total anomaly in their usual monopoly extraction sociopathy. One big sign of this is Tiktok. Tiktok is an attempt by the Chinese to subvert the normal monopoly the FBI has with social networks, since the US/EU governments are working with US/EU companies for facebook, twitter, etc. But Tiktok is Chinese. So Tiktok looks like just another social network to a typical social network junkie, but then you read all these headlines where congress and the EU wants to ban it, seemingly strangely up in arms over just another video social network, and .... that's because the Chinese are doing what the US/EU have done for 25+years. The US government has ITS toys, and doesn't want the Chinese to take them. That should clue you in to how much the government likes have total information access to social networks that are US/EU based. A lot of this could be swallowed if the US exhibited healthy signs of a functioning democracy, instead it is another sign of an emerging postmodern totalitarian state. The last hope of this was our judicial branch, which has been so thoroughly compromised by 30 years of partisan nominations (read: pro-elite in all cases) and Iraq war case law that it will never go back. I would stay quiet, but by the time I realized what was going on I had 10+ years of data on me. It doesn't matter anymore.