Mass surveillance is antithetical to liberty, but direct, concrete harm is hard to identify. The surveillance complex has been pretty good at using secrecy, and perhaps even good internal controls, to limit everyday impact. How can we find real harms to win this fight? Or how can we get people to care?
Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
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Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#22Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
The self checkout tsa is the opposite.
It used to just be x-ray and a bag scan. Now it is a backscatter plus a pat-down if required plus a bag scan. If you get flagged on either, your hands get swabbed down as well. The tech and number of searches is only going to increase over time as more contracts get in on the TSA grift.
I have zero doubts at some point they will also begin domestic device scans ("just plug the handy USB-C into your device and hang tight for a few while we ~~download all its contents~~ search for terrorism!) like they already apparently do for international flights under the guise of national security and making sure you aren't plotting something.
The self-service TSA booths are to save money on their minimum wage security staff, not to relax security. It increases the amount of surveillance they can pack in by putting you individually through a chokepoint.
Think of what you could do if you could lock people into a booth by themselves as they do tasks to be let out. I am being a bit hyperbolic but singling out a person in a potentially enclosed box opens the door massively to techniques such as strip searches (you don't even have to move rooms, how convenient, thanks TSA!) and illegal searches (ugh, really, just let us do it. It'll take 3 minutes and besides, no one will ever believe you that we asked because it's just us here), etc.
Then you get into the fun tech that is opened up by having a person isolated such as bomb detection through analyzing residue in the air, far more cameras that can be analyzed by AI/ML ("your left eye twitched 27% more than average: TERRORIST") and analysts at scale, mandatory facial recognition and other biometrics collection (a big issue with facial rec is making sure no one interferes, it's very easy to detect a face when there is only one in the room and you can have the perfect solid color background)
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#23That's a textbook case of "lol. lmao even", if I've ever seen one.
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#24[flagged]
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Governments regularly do this s/regularly/rarely It's a generalization, there's always occasional exceptions to the rule.
> It's a generalization, there's always occasional exception to the rule The point is it’s not a rule. It’s a meme that results from misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics and power competition.
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#26Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a generalization, there's always occasional exception to the rule The point is it’s not a rule. It’s a meme that results from misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics and power competition.
One can explain the phenomenon and understand the history yet it's not wrong to say governments (or any other large org really) rarely give up power and only ever do so under coercion.
It’s incredibly wrong to say this. More modern states fail due to gridlock and fragility than violent coercion.
Individual actors rarely give up power without coercion. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole doesn’t ebb and flow as interests diverge and align.
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#28Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
> government will never willingly give up power Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#29Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
American Exceptionalism means the power is derived from being able to make exceptions to the rules.
Actually, the idea that being an exception to the rules and having the ability to make an exception to the rules are the same, or one implies the other, is pretty interesting and might be worth elaborating on.
Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> government will never willingly give up power Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
what are some recent examples of governments giving up power?
You do get governments willing to give up power if you elect progressive democrats or libertarians. Republicans lie hardcore about wanting to do this though. Republicans used to be the party of federalism, now they’re the party of “unitary executive theory”
Anyone with the idea that governments never give up power is so pathetically unobservant that I honestly don’t want them voting in our elections.