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25 years of mass surveillance is enough

schneier.com

61–70 of 379 posts

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#61
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing about that is - it's a solved problem. The reason you heard about it for a while is that they hadn't tightened up the rules yet. As with anything, problems are highlighted, they are studied, and new rules are put into place to account for what was learned. Right wing media of course discovered a boogeyman that was so useful they will be using it for years still, even if it doesn't exist.

It wasn’t a problem to begin with. Meta studies recently showed trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT, certainly nothing than cis women don’t have biological variation within anyway. All the rule updates did was exclude and further marginalise an already marginalised extreme minority. There are very few trans women to begin with, fewer of us still are competing in sports. Nothing was studi…

Yeah, you have to conjure a really weird scenario for there to be any advantage.

Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.

For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.

A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it. There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written…

And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country: The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent. For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a differen…

> And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country

My entire post is about exactly how this is not the case, American values are defined in a document[1].

[1]https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do it because it wins them elections. It's a 90/10 issue and national democrats are on the losing side.

Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them? Republicans could hardly dominate the discourse with these topics if there was nobody to discourse against.

[deleted]

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#64
post #13

> It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.” So, Democratic candidates who are looking like the…

As a trans woman, enough is enough! I’m tired of us being made into the scapegoat while literal pedophiles and sexual criminals not only walk free but gain ever greater power and idiots keep blaming us for their problems as they close their ears and stomp their feet’s on the ground

It's not while, it's because. They have to create a "threat" that's of the same "magnitude" as their actual crimes, vectoring out from the subjective origin of "traditional" man/woman identity and relations. They do that by casting transgenderism not as the benign and modest personal identity that it is, but as the same kind of sexually aggressive comportment as their own; something that you do or perform willfully instead of what you are compelled by natural and intrinsic impulse to be.

The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.

You are: someone who is biologically non-female, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.

He is: a businessman and politician.

You do: upstanding, normal folk things.

He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."

Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but... but the bathrooms! and the children's sports! /s it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.

They do it because it wins them elections. It's a 90/10 issue and national democrats are on the losing side.

As someone who struggles with my position on some of these topics, one of my major self criticisms/fear is the tyranny of the majority. Even if (and that's a hypothetical if) my values would reject transgenderism, my values of freedom and fairness conflict with forcing another human being onto a specific path, especially with the use of force (government). So even if 90% are cisgendered (I didnt look up the real stat), that doesn't mean we vote to make our world cisgendered... A right and fair leaning is to create the freedoms we'd want if the tables were turned.

I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a fellow enjoyer of HRT, I assure you it didn't enhance shit for me, beyond what I was hoping to get: longer, more full hair, boobies, and smoother skin. My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.

Btw, feel free to reach out to me I love connecting with fellow trans women in tech :)

Emailed!

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#67
I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain.

Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#68
post #13

> It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.” So, Democratic candidates who are looking like the…

This is the outcome that every privacy advocate has been warning about for decades and being increasingly challenged by people who were fine with it as 'they have nothing to hide and do no wrong'.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#69
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skimming the "Aftermath" section and I'm not seeing where Biden's inauguration was cancelled or Trump retained power or anything else? If Trump "refused to peacefully transfer power" how was power peacefully transferred to Biden exactly on schedule the same way it's happened in every other election? I do see this happened on Jan 7th though: > 7:10 p.m.: Shortly after Twitter unlocked Trump's account, Trump releas…

The American people deserve to know that President Trump and his advisors didn’t just ask me to pause, they asked me to reject votes, to return votes, to essentially overturn the election. To keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and to almighty God, I rejected that out of hand and I did my duty that day. - Vice President Mike Pence This is why the Jan 6 crowd was carrying around an improvised g…

That the fate of our entire democracy briefly rested in the hands of Mike Pence is bad enough in and of itself
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