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U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

wsj.com

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Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#211

Post by jkaunisv1 »

FeeTinesAMady wrote: post #181
jkaunisv1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, I really don't think it's at East German Stasi-levels. Known dissidents were gaslighted, had objects in their homes moved around, and had informants reporting on them in their apartment buildings/family/workplace. It's bad, it's dystopian, but it doesn't seem to be THAT bad yet.

The FBI does that. They've done it since J. Edgar Hoover. They did it to Martin Luther King .

Good point. My initial comment was thinking of the pervasive, doing-it-to-everybody style the Stasi achieved, which I guess isn't far off from the mass digital surveillance + individual targeting that is probably happening now.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#212

Post by dvcc »

sroerick wrote: post #152
superuser2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade): - Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion - Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine - Use of force against peo…

1. The War in Iraq killed over a million people. We have death robots that kill people from the sky. 2. Snowden, Manning, Barrett Brown, Jeremy Hammond 3. Don't know about this one. I think it's worth mentioning Racism, Islamophobia and Islam or race related violence here. 4. #opDeathEaters 5. I don't know about this one either, but school seems mostly like a tool to incur debt. So not necessarily a plus. 6. You watc…

I won't address each individual issue, but this comes across as a bit unsubstantiated. Here are the first two, the rest slowly turn a little crazier down the list.

The Iraq war has not killed over a million people by almost any estimate. Actual body counts are around 100,000 and most estimates place it around 500,000 for all lives lost. This is not explicit in deaths caused by American troops.

Snowden, Manning and all are not always looked at in the same light as some see it. Not all state secrets are inherently bad.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#213

Post by tsenart »

JonCox wrote: post #190
stegosaurus wrote: post #6

Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads. Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have: Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few y…

I sometimes feel the Hacker News crowd are a bit out of touch with the rest of the population. Here in the UK most people I know feel safer with surveillance, it's used primarily to keep law and order. We don't live in some authoritarian state where it's used for nefarious means, it's used to keep the public safe. And seriously, why would you care if you're sitting on a database? What difference does it make to anyth…

"Innocent data does not exist, it is only a matter of the right time and the wrong hands to turn it into a weapon." - https://www.trilightzone.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=3190

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#214

Post by stainednapkin »

freehunter wrote: post #210
stainednapkin wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong. As citizens we can grant and revoke government powers at will. Cutting off or significantly curtailing their revenue would have a similar effect. EDIT: There would need to be a concomitant cultural change as well. As it stands folks are not aware of or engaged with what their government is doing. Even if we replaced every government official today, it could quickly devolve back to its current state.

>You are wrong. As citizens we can grant and revoke government powers at will. Theoretically. First you would need someone with these beliefs to run for office. You would need them to win office, in a position where they have the power to change the laws. Then you would need them to resist the temptation to listen to lobbyists trying to change their mind. Then you would need a vote to pass. Then you would need the go…

Nope. These are rights granted by the Constitution. The difficulty would be in getting people to care.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#215

Post by stegosaurus »

JonCox wrote: post #190
stegosaurus wrote: post #6

Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads. Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have: Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few y…

I sometimes feel the Hacker News crowd are a bit out of touch with the rest of the population. Here in the UK most people I know feel safer with surveillance, it's used primarily to keep law and order. We don't live in some authoritarian state where it's used for nefarious means, it's used to keep the public safe. And seriously, why would you care if you're sitting on a database? What difference does it make to anyth…

The key point is interpretation and use of the data.

I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to essentially manual viewing of feeds to follow criminal suspects. In that world, ordinary citizens walking around a city centre are items of data that are discarded forever as soon as the tape reels run out. Even if they're kept, the volumes of data involved are so huge that they're effectively lost in time anyway.

The world we live in today is not that world. We are not far from being able to use facial recognition to track the whereabouts of every single citizen and save it forever, indexed along with the video recording of them at the time. We already have the capability to do that using cellphones. We can save the entire life history of individuals using these records and collate them into a viewable form near-instantly.

As I alluded to in my earlier post, the way we're going it's not a huge leap to imagine voice recognition allowing for phone calls to follow suit. Why is voice recognition important? Because it turns weeks and weeks of trawling through transcripts into a search query with instant results.

It's a completely different ball game. It's permanent, searchable, indexable super-fast memory. 'Forgetting' becomes obsolete.

In the old world of tape CCTV cameras, my neighbours knew more about me than the Government. Now, it's almost certainly the other way around, and if not, only because they've decided not to type 'stegosaurus' into the Big Database of Everything.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#216

Post by spenvo »

woodman wrote: post #47
stegosaurus wrote: post #6

Same deal in the UK with the national ANPR system (Automatic Number Plate Recognition). Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads. Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have: Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few y…

There is no way to reverse this. Trying to cage this with paperwork will just lead to more of the same creative interpretations à la NSA. So the rulers don't feel the rules apply to them, big surprise. With that in mind, the futility of fighting the tide, what is the next step? As the ideal solution of reversal is unavailable, we need to go with harm reduction - but what is the harm that we would reduce? Most would s…

Thought experiment: if gov programs were forced to be transparent, would they be any less brazen?

Not at this rate. I think officials see the Snowden-fallout and say, "hey, that wasn't so bad. the public barely cares. Yo Comey, hit the press & equate encryption to child abuse; we can win this narrative." Lack of transparency is certainly an issue, but i'd say the bigger one how to make sense of this information to the public.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#217

Post by snowwrestler »

flycaliguy wrote: post #148
superuser2 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you read the news? Because here are some things that other states are up to that we aren't (at least, not in this decade): - Systematic execution for the crime of belonging to a particular ethnic group or religion - Open and openly arbitrary disappearing, detention, and torture of intellectuals for the crime of writing articles critical of state-sponsored religious and political doctrine - Use of force against peo…

Can somebody good with their logical fallacies let me know if this falls under "Fallacy of relative privation"? This definition [1] even uses this very argument as an example: "The counter to the relative privation argument when applied, for example, to compare America with other more tyrannous countries is to note that the proper comparison to make should not be between America and other tyrannies but between Americ…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#218

Post by mikeash »

kw71 wrote: post #59
mikeash wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's used for monitoring pressure so the driver can be alerted if the tire starts to go flat.

No. That is a different mechanism, and part of the wheel, not the tire.

I just assumed it was a misunderstanding of TPMS. Apparently some tires have RFID directly embedded as well for tracking purposes, but from what I can find it doesn't sound like it's all that common yet.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#219

Post by roc »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #151
woodman wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to reverse this. Trying to cage this with paperwork will just lead to more of the same creative interpretations à la NSA. So the rulers don't feel the rules apply to them, big surprise. With that in mind, the futility of fighting the tide, what is the next step? As the ideal solution of reversal is unavailable, we need to go with harm reduction - but what is the harm that we would reduce? Most would s…

> There is no way to reverse this. It's easy to reverse some of this. If they're recording license plates and they or someone else will do it regardless, then stop having license plates. The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway. Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical. That clearly isn't the case -- the constitut…

> "The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway."

Because self-driving cars will be in constant contact with some central digital infrastructure that will be tracking everything ("for quality control purposes") and the authorities can far more easily and effectively tap into that data than place license plate readers along the roadside. Tying the "session" together between purchasing information (that's already centralized and freely accessible), car route, and user history, is a piece of cake.

Re: U.S. Spies on Millions of Cars

#220

Post by bunkydoo »

It goes deeper than even what this article describes - a ford exec admitted last year that they put GPS in all vehicles (post 2004 i think) but they "don't release the data" not sure how much I trust that statement in today's world...
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