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> In the meantime, I’ll be in the market for a new tinfoil hat and cone of silence. I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a to

> In the meantime, I’ll be in the market for a new tinfoil hat and cone of silence. I know this is meant as a pseudo-joke and I know there are going to be a ton of comments here on why the guy is overreacting, but is the tin foil hat really useful anymore? We have demonstrated proof that things like this have been exploited on purpose in the past few years. Instead of the tin foil being representative of the crazy person - it now almost seems like common sense. Is that scary to anyone else?

api 12y ago
If anything, the tinfoil hat conspiracy wackos of yesteryear were far too conservative in their paranoid fever dreams. They'd never have believed this. I wonder sometimes: if things like this had existed in the 50s and 60s would we ever have had a Martin Luther King? Or would such things have been picked up at their earliest stages by the data miners and nipped in the bud? Would Ginsburg have read Howl in Golden Gate Park? Would there have been a summer of love, underground basement punk shows, raves? What new civil rights movements or fascinating spontaneous emergences of culture are being silently suppressed today? Is that kind of culture jamming really going on? I really do wonder. I also wonder about the seeming asymmetry. I see protestors in Hong Kong using mobile phones to organize, yet over here it seems as if the same technologies are being used to enforce the most toxic aspects of the status quo instead of challenging them.
- monochr 12y ago
  The real problem here isn't Orwell. It's Terry Gilliam[1]. From Google to the NSA you have no recourse against the automated algorithms lumping you in a category which will never put you in jail but will add ridiculous restrictions to your life, for example no fly lists. [1] http://youtu.be/YeY1dxlC7Sg?t=1m40s http://youtu.be/YeY1dxlC7Sg?t=1m40s
  - logn 12y ago
    I worry more about the chilling effects. The things people leave unsaid, the stories that go unwritten, and ultimately the free thinking that never occurs. In addition, being able to completely data mine all communication gives enormous potential to control future action (in a similar/same way to how marketers can influence future choices). Orwell had a quote about that.
- declan 12y ago
  > would we ever have had a Martin Luther King Here's a possibly-relevant excerpt from an article I wrote for CNET on the topic (before I left earlier this year to found http://recent.io/ http://recent.io/): ...Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was initially intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, but at its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr....
lotsofmangos 12y ago
But tin foil hats were really designed and promoted by the government to help them spy on the paranoid. http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csai...
- desdiv 12y ago
  No, tin foil hats work just fine. That study is about aluminium foil hats. Decades of government propaganda has brainwashed everyone into conjuring up images of aluminium foil hats when they hear the phrase "tin foil hat". /s

api 12y ago

If anything, the tinfoil hat conspiracy wackos of yesteryear were far too conservative in their paranoid fever dreams. They'd never have believed this. I wonder sometimes: if things like this had existed in the 50s and 60s would we ever have had a Martin Luther King? Or would such things have been picked up at their earliest stages by the data miners and nipped in the bud? Would Ginsburg have read Howl in Golden Gate Park? Would there have been a summer of love, underground basement punk shows, raves? What new civil rights movements or fascinating spontaneous emergences of culture are being silently suppressed today? Is that kind of culture jamming really going on? I really do wonder. I also wonder about the seeming asymmetry. I see protestors in Hong Kong using mobile phones to organize, yet over here it seems as if the same technologies are being used to enforce the most toxic aspects of the status quo instead of challenging them.

monochr 12y ago
The real problem here isn't Orwell. It's Terry Gilliam[1]. From Google to the NSA you have no recourse against the automated algorithms lumping you in a category which will never put you in jail but will add ridiculous restrictions to your life, for example no fly lists. [1] http://youtu.be/YeY1dxlC7Sg?t=1m40s http://youtu.be/YeY1dxlC7Sg?t=1m40s
- logn 12y ago
  I worry more about the chilling effects. The things people leave unsaid, the stories that go unwritten, and ultimately the free thinking that never occurs. In addition, being able to completely data mine all communication gives enormous potential to control future action (in a similar/same way to how marketers can influence future choices). Orwell had a quote about that.
declan 12y ago
> would we ever have had a Martin Luther King Here's a possibly-relevant excerpt from an article I wrote for CNET on the topic (before I left earlier this year to found http://recent.io/ http://recent.io/): ...Project Shamrock had a "watch list" of people whose conversations would be identified and plucked out of the ether by NSA computers. It was initially intended to be used for foreign intelligence purposes, but at its peak, 600 American citizens appeared on the list, including singer Joan Baez, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, actress Jane Fonda and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr....

lotsofmangos 12y ago

But tin foil hats were really designed and promoted by the government to help them spy on the paranoid. http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csai...

desdiv 12y ago
No, tin foil hats work just fine. That study is about aluminium foil hats. Decades of government propaganda has brainwashed everyone into conjuring up images of aluminium foil hats when they hear the phrase "tin foil hat". /s