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25 years of mass surveillance is enough

schneier.com

161–170 of 384 posts

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#161

I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.

[dead]

Oh sorry to disturb the hivemind

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#162

I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.

Don’t be That Guy please. This tired talking point gets walked out in every privacy discussion. Both things can be (and are) bad at once, but just because one problem exists doesn’t mean that others aren’t worth solving. In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.

[flagged]

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#163
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. No, I don't think we need Chat Control in the US or our government forcing ISPs and CDNs to block whole swaths of the internet just because a soccer game is on TV.

Fair points, I did not mean undermining encryption or privacy, I meant like GDPR and right to erasure. It'd be even better if there was some form of royalty structure on our data used by companies. It'd be nice if I, at least, received a royalty check each time a data broker sold my data to the CIA.

"I want the good stuff from an authoritarian dictatorship without the bad stuff"

It will never work like that.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#164

I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.

Phone data requires some actual process to access. It should be more restrictive than it is, but I don’t believe the information is made available to random police officers who can search for whatever they want with no real justification.

The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because then they'll move on to the next victims and in having surrendered without even a fight you've granted them momentum for no good reason whatsoever, and you'll have fewer allies left too.

Is there a reason to believe this is how things work? Rather than "within a democracy as long as 'trans rights' means something that most people disagree with, it will be harder to advance the pro- side of the issue"? Is there evidence of 'momentum' being a real thing in politics, as opposed to the 'pendulum' that I've witnessed over the last decade?

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be That Guy please. This tired talking point gets walked out in every privacy discussion. Both things can be (and are) bad at once, but just because one problem exists doesn’t mean that others aren’t worth solving. In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.

[flagged]

Way to hand wave away all the negative effects of mass surveillance. Car theft is bad, but sleepwalking into dictatorship is worse.

There’s also plenty of options for solving car theft that aren’t dystopian.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#167
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with your take. The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

And yet they still hold immense power to make our lives shittier. It is far easier to destroy a functioning system than it is to build one from the ground up

And yet the lives of everyone on this board has never been this comfortable in the past.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't a fight we can avoid by retreating. They would just advance and the same battle would happen on different ground. If we abandon the trans, the culture wars will be about the gays. If we abandon the gays, the culture wars will be about blacks or hispanics or jews or god only knows. There's something to be said for picking firm ground to fight on, but there will be a fight and it cannot be won by retreating.

Why am I being interpreted as advocating for abandoning the trans? I don't want to do that and I don't need to be convinced by my empathy for gays or blacks- I care about trans people themselves! I'm saying if an issue doesn't matter- according to the trans people in this thread- and it's a losing issue, why are we insistent on fighting it anyway? Who benefits from this?

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#169
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…

That is extremely unlikely. There are definitely some people in Trump's camp who would love to do that, including probably Trump himself. However, Trump does not have enough public or institutional support for him to risk doing something that blatant.

Re: 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

#170
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet there's incentive structures that push it forward. It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement. People think it's a conspiracy of the elite, but the last part of your message is true and it makes me wonder to what extent everyone is being dragged along by everyone else and nobody can stop because nobody can stop. I mean if…

Hold on. Panama papers. Epstein files. CointelPro -> NSPM-7. There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.

The idea that all billionaires work together is hilarious. No real adult could possibly believe such nonsense.
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