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> One of the main reasons I feel so strongly about topics like this is that I think we're sleepwalking into authoritarianism, if we haven't already arrived. So

> One of the main reasons I feel so strongly about topics like this is that I think we're sleepwalking into authoritarianism, if we haven't already arrived. So take your comment - that the government surveilling places where there is no expectation of privacy is okay. And now think about the countries that have done precisely this - secret police spying on people in public, building up profiles on people, informants making sure nobody's getting up to anything the government might be concerned about, and so on. These are terrible places in history, literally every last one of them. Doesn't it feel to you that we're on the path to repeating this? I get the concern about authoritarianism, and I share it. Realistically though, intelligence services have been doing exactly that kind of activity since before networks or computers existed. It's the nature of intelligence work that without the proper checks and balances, it can be abused by an authoritarian regime. It's also a reality that the advent of networks and computers has made it far easier to exfiltrate information much more quickly and much more broadly. > I somehow get the impression you're around my age. If I'm correct there then imagine taking yourself back to the early 2000s or maybe even earlier, and describing to your youthful self what America would be like in 20 years. I like the idea that I was youthful in the early 2000's. ;-) I guess I wasn't middle aged then, so that counts as youthful, right? Truth be told, in the early 2000's I was already aware that intelligence services were able to listen in on phone calls, surveil any newsgroups/mailing lists/etc. That was around the time when Skipjack (which absolutely strikes me as authoritarian creep) was having nails put in its coffin. Police could do wire taps on this stuff with a search warrant. This was also an era when intelligence services were deliberately crippling cryptographic protocols so they could compromise them as needed. The "inch-by-inch" change has been the volume of data that is being produced and the volume of data that is being gathered by intelligence services. The "creep" that I'm worried about is less on the capability side and much more on the legal & political side. The PATRIOT Act is a pretty good example of broad, sweeping powers that we've given to the state, with far fewer restrictions, that is unlike what it has traditionally had. I also worry about the broad erosion of our institutions. That's the kind of "inch by inch" I'm concerned about.

somenameforme 2y ago
The only thing I would add here is that I think authoritarianism is more about people than it is about laws. For instance, the so-called 'Stalin's Constitution' guaranteed freedom of speech. But when political bodies begin to toss aside adherence to any sort of normalcy in law and law enforcement, then laws become mostly irrelevant relics of a past time. Obviously I'm referencing the giant orange elephant in the room here, but we can take far less divisive issues as well. For instance there's 0 chance the Founding Fathers would have felt that the current systems of mass surveillance ought be allowed under the 4th amendment. Yet here we are. It's not really laws that have been creeping further and further beyond the pale, but actions. And those actions grow only more extreme by the day. This is why, to me, I think we may have already crossed whatever 'border' there is into authoritarianism.

somenameforme 2y ago

The only thing I would add here is that I think authoritarianism is more about people than it is about laws. For instance, the so-called 'Stalin's Constitution' guaranteed freedom of speech. But when political bodies begin to toss aside adherence to any sort of normalcy in law and law enforcement, then laws become mostly irrelevant relics of a past time. Obviously I'm referencing the giant orange elephant in the room here, but we can take far less divisive issues as well. For instance there's 0 chance the Founding Fathers would have felt that the current systems of mass surveillance ought be allowed under the 4th amendment. Yet here we are. It's not really laws that have been creeping further and further beyond the pale, but actions. And those actions grow only more extreme by the day. This is why, to me, I think we may have already crossed whatever 'border' there is into authoritarianism.