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It feels like many democratic leaders are starting to think the CCP model—mass surveillance of citizens—is the right direction, with growing demands for chat co

• hsyehbeidhh 7mo ago
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• eucyclos 7mo ago
  I've been in mainland China for the past year and I wish western politicians would get it through their skulls that most of the ccp model's upsides come from CCTVs in public areas and a police force that prioritizes stopping street crime.
  • throwawaysleep 7mo ago
    Eh, if you see the reaction to Flock Safety, people object to that one as well.
    • eucyclos 7mo ago
      Not familiar with that conversation, but is the concern that it will be used to raise ticket revenue from victimless crimes without doing much to prevent the other kind?
      • kvuj 7mo ago
        From what I've seen, it's simply an aversion to mass scale surveillance, even in public setting. The worry being how easy it could slide into a tool used by the state for nefarious purposes (punish political dissidents, etc).
        • lesuorac 7mo ago
          Is there actually evidence of flock being used to stop street crime? I've never heard anything about Flock (or Shotspooter) stopping street crime. Where I am, the local speed cameras have annual documents about the street their on detailing pre-camera vehicle speeds and fatal (pedestrian) accidents and the decreases in both of them since the usage. Afaik, the concern isn't that it "could slide" its that flock _is used_ by say Texas to monitor out of state abortions. That isn't solving street crime and certainly didn't benefit the local residents.
      • frig57 7mo ago
        The concern is losing all your freedom and privacy for no good reason
        • eucyclos 7mo ago
          I don't think any constitution has ever guaranteed a right to privacy in public spaces. I can't imagine how that would ever work even if we were willing to make serious tradeoffs for it.
    • someguyiguess 7mo ago
      The problem is that those cameras aren't being put in areas where crime occurs in order to keep citizens safe. They are being put on busy streets to prevent people's ability to travel without being tracked.
  • ranyume 7mo ago
    Do they de-prioritize or ignore other crimes that are not visible in the streets? This is an honest question, I want to know if actually focusing only on the streets makes people feel safe even if other types of crimes are rampant. EDIT: I guess I could add examples of what "other crimes" could be. Fraud, corruption, sexual abuse, all victimless crimes, hitmen?
    • eucyclos 7mo ago
      Victimless crimes definitely. For example, street vendors without permits are asked to leave, but not fined. Car accidents are investigated but there seems to be no 'ticket quotas' like in the west, etc. I don't know much about the other categories you mentioned but I do know that president Xi is associated with a 'tough on corruption' stance that's widely seen as a major positive of his administration.
• throwawaysleep 7mo ago
  Look at what social media considers to be safe countries. You are absolutely bombarded with messaging about how Dubai and Chinese cities are the safest places in the world. I have friends who live in each who consider North America and Europe crime ridden shitholes because theft is possible to get away with. If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades, there is nowhere else to go but mass surveillance to make sure that even the smallest of visible crimes are stamped out.
  • gib444 7mo ago
    There is also plenty of social media and politicians telling you that because of some statistic that the knife wielding gang you yourself saw in the shopping centre in east London in fact does not exist
  • modo_mario 7mo ago
    >If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades After having to push for a crime to be actually registered and for others to even report small crimes because police has been so useless in Brussels I lost complete faith in this. It also doesn't track with prisons overflowing more and more and damn near half of prisoners not having the nationality. It's safer now! But more and more people have experiences so keep your wallet in your front pocket. Watch out as a woman after dark. Avoid certain areas that your grandma described as posh and the trainstation you went to every day in your youth has stabbings now. It feels like one of a bunch of fronts where we get some kind of hypernormalisation.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  • indiangenz 7mo ago
    The streets of Dubai and pretty much any where in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam etc are orders of magnitude safer than UK, US, France, and other western European countries. Crime appears to be tolerated and reporting crimes doesn't do much, and statistics are managed in western Europe. If you get an opportunity to travel to China, do see for yourself how safe the cities feel, and how advanced (and safe) the public transport systems are.
• _heimdall 7mo ago
  Said leaders are only really democratic based on the literal name of the party they signed with when running for office. There's nothing democratic about these types of programs and I have to assume that a plainly explained referendum spelling this out on a ballot would fail miserably.
• augment_me 7mo ago
  I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this. If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be. One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools. Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one. Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry
  • hn111 7mo ago
    Regarding banning platforms I’d say just ban the attention driven business model online by forbidding all social media platforms from serving ads entirely.
    • thfuran 7mo ago
      Ban all third party advertisement. Or taking payment for it at any rate.
  • worldsayshi 7mo ago
    Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive. But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work: > start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
• personomas 7mo ago
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• b112 7mo ago
  Getting a warrant for each person is not "mass surveillance". Why do you think a warrant is not required? It is.
• HerbManic 7mo ago
  This is a systemic problem of modern information technology. With social media for instance, either you let the technology run rampant and the worst case scenareo plays out. That is misinformation, tribalism, bidy dysmorphia and the pletora of other issues. The worst case pesamistic mode of what the technology can do, that is self termination. The alternative is that you have to have the watchmen over watch everything and you have the full dystopia model. While there is a middle road, it is almost never taken as it is the hardest path. The real trick is to not invent the torment nexus but you cannot know this as the n'th order effects are decades beyond the initial creation. But that is so incredibly difficult to anticipate. Think about it, the transistor was invented in 1947, 70 years later it turned into the surviellance panopticon. Very few could have seen that coming. I dont have answers just explanations here.
• callamdelaney 7mo ago
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  • glass1122 7mo ago
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  • unsupp0rted 7mo ago
    It's the opposite: people are getting exactly what they voted for, they just didn't realize they’re voting for it, because of mass propaganda.
  • whatsupdog 7mo ago
    Plus with all the floor crossers recently, the elections just seem moot. You vote for a party because you believe in their agenda, and then the representative joins the other party without any repercussions.
    • timbit42 7mo ago
      Canadians do not elect parties. We elect Members of Parliament. This is why it is democratic for MPs to cross the floor from one party to another. It has happened over 300 times since Canada became a country. If an MP is not free to vote in the best interests of their constituents, and rather has to vote along party lines, then the failure of democracy has already occurred. Crossing the floor, in order to act in the best interest of your constituents, is a big move that one doesn't decide on overnight. We should be more tolerant of individual MPs not always siding with their team, without them having the fear of being removed from their caucus. Notice how none of the floor crossings happened right after the election. They took time, they saw how government was working, and they took action based on their experience.
  • pydry 7mo ago
    These countries are disguised vassals of the United States. They're nominally independent but in practice are run by a local oligarchy who generally do as they please within the confines of what the US allows. Theyre effectively all as independent as Poland or Hungary were under the Soviet Union. i.e. not. There are the occasional anti-us imperialist and anti-oligarchy candidates who gain popularity but their careers are usually terminated with a deluge of mudslinging or by using bureaucracy to lock them out of the political system.
• rapnie 7mo ago
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• canadiantim 7mo ago
  Canadian leaders are currently very consciously choosing to partner with China as opposed to the U.S. I get diversification, that’s a good call, but adopting policies that actively harm Canada to the benefit of China is where we’re at and it’s so far beyond the pale. Just take a look at Canada, who for as long as I have known, have tried to maintain its industrial base in Ontario, eg the cross-border supply chain for automobiles, but then this "new" government comes in and is like y’know what we really need right now? To compound the effects of tariffs, piss off our biggest trading partner, risk NAFTA (CUSMA) and our entire cross-border supply chains with the US all so we can get some cheap electric cars from China, which won't even be manufactured here (atleast not with Canadian jobs); meanwhile we just spent close to $100 billion in subsidies explicitly to try and kickstart electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada. May have been more productive to turn that $100 billion into pennies and throw them down a wishing well...