Security apparatus position in a nutshell: "If you give up your freedoms, we'll protect you next time." Great, thanks. Pricks.
Current position:
"No, sorry, those freedoms were not enough."
Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
71–80 of 122 posts
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years." The government is not the borg. They don't trust "the government", they trust various good people in the government.
"Trusting good people" is fine for children, but anyone who has observed the system for a few years knows better. The system has been exposed to "good people" before; it knows what to do with them.
Correct. My observation is: The good people that come into politics either stay small numbers in the back-row ... or they get corrupted by the system and the money and maybe end up as top politician, some even as president -- but they are no good people anymore.
That is the requirement for becoming somebody in politics.
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#73IMO, there exist good arguments against surveillance. But why are supposedly rational geeks so irrationally prone to putting forward very bad arguments against it? See almost every reply in this thread to prove my point, but I will list a few: 1) If one took basic statistics, one would deem the proposition that "X is useless because [a target of X] has just slipped through" as outrageously wrong and a prime example o…
1)
This is a good point, but there's very little evidence in favor that /any/ legitimate terror attacks are stopped by most mass survellience. In other words, we have no data points in favor of it, and every time an event like this happens, it's an additional data point against it.
2) >if one seems beneficial but dangerous, propose laws to regulate it Because there's no reason at this point for us to believe that the entities in power will adhere to those laws, as they haven't in the past.
Keep in mind that without Snowden et al there would be almost no one arguing against mass survellience compared to what there is today.
3) The argument isn't that survellience doesn't collect massive amounts of information on everyone. We know it does that, and everyone should agree. The argument is that despite all of this information, it does not help to protect us in any notable way. In other words, mass survellience is effect at collecting absurd amounts of data on everyone, but it is not effective as a tool to protect us and stop legitimate terrorist threats.
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#74So this may be considered hijacking, but here goes. What the EFF, and many others, get wrong is that this is terrorism aimed at the West because of 'our freedoms', or these are religious nutters who want to kill Westerners because jihad, porn, alcohol, the prophet told them to, it's in the Quran, etc.
The larger picture reveals that it's chickens coming home to roost (and I am not going to go into the long list of foreign policy actions that create the resentment). The Western public should not expect that their government's actions do not have consequences.
From a purely selfish PoV, you can expect that if your government is willing to kill/maim/oppress/steal/lie/cheat people of another nation, for whatever reason, that this will soon start happening to you (and it has - look around).
Pushing back against initiatives like this is futile. The fear your government sows will override any concerns for loss of civil liberties. So long as they get to use words like terrorists, Islamic Extremism, radicals and militants they control the conversation. And every time you use those words you set your argument back.
More pertinently, the West has a long, long history of violence against the other. Study that history as that is the only thing that will let you to question your presumption of superiority and allow you to open your eyes to the terrible suffering the West inflicts every day.
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#75IMO, there exist good arguments against surveillance. But why are supposedly rational geeks so irrationally prone to putting forward very bad arguments against it? See almost every reply in this thread to prove my point, but I will list a few: 1) If one took basic statistics, one would deem the proposition that "X is useless because [a target of X] has just slipped through" as outrageously wrong and a prime example o…
1) This is a good point, but there's very little evidence in favor that /any/ legitimate terror attacks are stopped by most mass survellience. In other words, we have no data points in favor of it, and every time an event like this happens, it's an additional data point against it. 2) >if one seems beneficial but dangerous, propose laws to regulate it Because there's no reason at this point for us to believe that the…
1) If you were good at detecting terror attacks, wouldn't you want to keep it secret from terrorists about how you actually do it? This is such an obvious point (a direct counterpart to Dr. Strangelove's "the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret"), yet so many of those who argue against surveillance don't even consider it, thereby revealing that their primary concern is not even remotely close to actually solving the problem of terrorist attacks. Now, someone who completely doesn't care about whether terrorist attacks happen or not -- is that a rational party to have discussion with?
2) Don't democracies have well-established principles on how to deal with entities in power that try to place themselves outside of law -- without actually preventing those entities from wielding any power whatsoever? Wasn't that the entire point of having a president with a fixed term rather than a king?
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#76So this may be considered hijacking, but here goes. What the EFF, and many others, get wrong is that this is terrorism aimed at the West because of 'our freedoms', or these are religious nutters who want to kill Westerners because jihad, porn, alcohol, the prophet told them to, it's in the Quran, etc. The larger picture reveals that it's chickens coming home to roost (and I am not going to go into the long list of fo…
>What the EFF, and many others, get wrong is that this is terrorism aimed at the West because of 'our freedoms',
I'm not sure why that's relevant, I don't see anything like that in this article. I don't see any usage of words like 'freedom', 'islam', 'extremist', etc., either. As far as I can tell this article is neutral or just nonpresenting with regards to what you've mentioned.
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
>to get blackmail material on 100% of people Nonsense.
We had an example not even a month ago. In many cities, there are enough parking spots for everyone, so many citizens will leave their cars for the night near their homes in places where they do not cause significant disturbance, and the police will tolerate this behavior and not ticket them for it. This is a win for everyone: the citizens have a spot to park, and the mayor doesn't have to spend public funds to set u…
> Making common behavior illegal, and then tolerating it, is a great way to harass dissenters in a perfectly legal way.
Which, not coincidentally, is the entire basis for the war on [some] drugs [when used by some people].
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#78Does this EFF post say anything new, or is it voted to the top of the site because (a) anti-surveillance and (b) EFF? I find EFF to be a deeply cynical organization, even though I for the most part share their policy objectives.
Let's calibrate cynical: More or less cynical than justifying surveillance or working with the FBI?
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#79Why should we listen? France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks (the perps were known to them beforehand anyway), and that did absolutely nothing to stop a much larger and more complex attack, also with known perps. A panopticon can't stop terrorists from lashing out violently, but it can certainly chill speech and promote totalitarian government. That's their angle: use the…
> I can't understand how people can still give governments the benefit of the doubt when they've been exposed as liars repeatedly for years.
Because in their model of the world, evidence derives from authority. They value phatic expression and hierarchy instead of deduction and reasoning. Before you can convince such people of anything, you must first learn to speak their language.
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
While this essay is concerned with creationists and evolution, I encourage everybody to read it as it's observations about phatic communication - and how to overcome that roadblock in education - apply generally.
Re: Baseless Calls to Expand Surveillance Fit Familiar, Cynical Pattern
#80Why should we listen? France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks (the perps were known to them beforehand anyway), and that did absolutely nothing to stop a much larger and more complex attack, also with known perps. A panopticon can't stop terrorists from lashing out violently, but it can certainly chill speech and promote totalitarian government. That's their angle: use the…
(French here)
"France already massively ramped up their surveillance state after the Hebdo attacks"
I don't think that's true. When France passed the big intelligence law this summer, the goal was to explicitly legalize the surveillance programs that were already in effect, but were until then in a grey area, legally speaking.
Nobody talked about actually increasing the surveillance, or you have information that we don't.