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> "She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about... " The thing is, they don't need to follow you ar
by amirmc 13y ago
> "She laughed and said that no, I did not understand what it was to have secret police following you about... "
The thing is, they don't need to follow you around the same way as in the 'old days' because, like many things, modern technology makes it easier and more efficient.
The tyranny of the future isn't going to be like that of the past. That makes it difficult to explain the dangers to people.
- angersock 13y agoAll of our intuitions betray us these days, whether it is how to behave on a social network or how to properly handle your privacy.
- msrpotus 13y agoOne of the scariest parts of this is that it seems like surveillance (if not censorship) is much more targeted. If you aren't the NSA's focus or on a TSA watch list, you might not know anything is going on. But if you are unlucky enough to trigger something, you might be visited with unimaginable torment like @chimeracoder was.
- mikegagnon 13y agoExactly. The biggest threat from surveillance and censorship isn't the imposition on average citizens. Rather, the risk is that surveillance, censorship, intimidation, selective law enforcement, and so on are targeted at specific political opponents --- such as Aaron Swartz, Barrett Brown, Glenn Greenwald, Marin Luther King Jr. and so on. Such authoritarian harassment presents a straightforward threat to democracy because it stifles political dissent. Democracy is incompatible with the stifling of political dissent.
- prawn 13y agoToo many people view major, rival parties as opponents. Are they waiting for Democrats to imprison Republicans and vice versa? Those parties are brothers. The opposition includes the names you listed and because they don't have that glossy marketed façade and brand, they're viewed by the majority as crazed or rogues.
- will_ 13y agoThe racist overtones are also scary.
- Doches 13y agoPersonally I find the racist overtones to be the least scary aspect of this story. I grew up in rural Texas; for police/government officials to conduct their work with a base level of racism is, while frustrating and sickening, pretty much to be expected. Kafka-esque detention, authoritarian abuse of power, and the hinted-at FBI search of the OP's apartment scare me a lot more. Hell, casual racism is basically an (awful) American tradition. Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago"Unreasonable search and seizure most emphatically isn't." Anyone who has been investigated for a DWB might disagree. Casual racism and unreasonable search and seizure have been pretty consistently tied together as a common standard in policing, not just in the U.S, but across the world. There is something in the way that police organisations operate that makes them particularly susceptible to treating racist stereotypes as probable cause.
- einhverfr 13y agoActually I found two things very scary. 1. The ignorance on the part of the police and agents was stunning. Conflating Hindu and Muslim? 2. The explosive alarms.... Evidently they are set to detect some very common household chemicals. Based on the story I am assuming the culprit in this case was household ammonia. It isn't clear to me that the agents would have any idea as to what could trigger a false positive either.
- candeira 13y agoAbout the "ignorance" on the part of the FBI guy, I wouldn't believe anything an interrogating officer tells me. Playing dumb is one of the oldest tricks in the book: "So, tell me about the religion you claim to profess and about which I know nothing so you can bullshit me, really".
- foobarbazqux 13y agoTo be fair, that was not unimaginable torment. I think most people can readily imagine what it would feel like to go through what he went through.
- beedogs 13y ago"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
- foobarbazqux 13y agoYes and no. Tyranny always exploits something you previously took for granted as safe, necessary, good.