Venezuela: My experience in the surveillance state

This is terrible and it's good that it's seeing some press as a result of Snowden's plight. But the author tries to imply that Snowden is somehow approving of Venezuela's policies.

Seeking asylum isn't an endorsement of Venezuela. It's a last-ditch-effort to stay free against government oppression.

> Seeking asylum isn't an endorsement of Venezuela. It's a last-ditch-effort to stay free against government oppression.

It's not clear that jumping out of the pan and into the fire is the best option though.

Excellent article.

I would like to say that I was aware already of Venezuela's tactics, but I knew nothing until this article and the follow-up research I've done. Makes Snowden's choice seem rather odd/silly now.

There are more than a few steps from surveillance of Facebook accounts to Orwellian dystopia. There is more to 1984 than just surveillance (mind control, etc). Whether one leads inexorably to the other depends in large part on what you think of democracy. If you think that an educated people can be easily manipulated and controlled with doublespeak, as they are in 1984, then some sort of dystopia is likely, and frankly that's the case whether we have a surveillance state or not. If, on the other hand, you think people are mostly rational and capable of determining rationally what sort of world they want to live in, then that will always create a bulwark against tyranny.

I'm personally in the latter camp. I think that a generation of millennials, who don't particularly value privacy and don't see much wrong with the government monitoring certain communications when they voluntarily post every little detail of their lives on Facebook for hundreds or thousands of people to see, are still nonetheless rational people who will stand up against any infringement of the things they really care about: house and home, family, their means of making a living, etc.

My bigger concern is actually with regards to automation and robots. Despotic regimes depend on having military force. That is they only way they can suppress the will of the majority. But soldiers are just people, and pitting soldiers against their own countrymen is an unstable equilibrium in the long term. It's not sustainable in the face of actual public opposition. But automation and robots changes that equation. It makes it possible for a few to rule the many without relying on the inherently unstable situation of trying to keep hundreds of thousands or millions of soldiers loyal to the despots against their own families. To the extent that dystopia keeps me up at night, that's what I worry about, not surveillance.

I think most people would prefer the US's version of government oppression to Venezuela's, but might change their mind if they thought they were going to go away for long time if they stayed in the US.