341–350 of 785 posts
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The Wikipedia article doesn’t exactly support your claim.
Fair enough, how about this one https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.sky.com/story/amp/1-000-ch... ,
You extend that to the entire UK government.
I wonder why the UK legislators not preparing a new regulation mandating every keys to every door and safe having a bypass mechanism for government officials. Behind every door and every locked place there could be child pornography and illicit materials hidden!! Every house, every hotel safe are suspects! Criminal oversight, criminal oversight! (and if they think their reasoning for backdoors into online chat and co…
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Not only is privacy a fundamental right within a society but it is fundamentally necessary to the advancement, and thus long term survival, of any society.
To be honest that sounds like both an idealised slogan and a sophism empty of logic. Can you expand upon how the advancements in western society since (say) WWII have been neccesarily dependant upon privacy?
If we ignore the open society angle and assume surveillance would be one sided:
Competition is needed for healthy capitalist economies. Competition doesn't work well with great power imbalances. To the extent entrenched business could leverage the government, as they do, powers of surveillance could be used to stifle competition. That leads to stagnation.
Democracy, even in a limited form, doesn't work when everyone is under surveillance by a powerful minority. I don't think I need to elaborate since there's been plenty of writing on that.
Also, people don't want to make civic contributions to a society that treats them like cows with a criminal bent. There's not much argument against being a hedonic leech in a society that benefits from your labor but resents your autonomy.
I haven't answered your question exactly, but it's a bit difficult when framed that way. I still think it's pretty clear that the massive power imbalance that comes with dragnet surveillance can catalyze corruption, stagnation, and malaise, thus impeding progress.
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>attacks upon his honour and reputation Yikes, seems like this is built to keep people from saying things about powerful people that they don't like.
It’s just that there was a time in Europe (about 80 years ago) when among other cruel things, the honor and reputation of a lot of people were actively destroyed for arbitrary reasons.
Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy in this case).
I would rather suggest firmly believing whatever company you chose is spying you (be it true or not), and adjusting what you can accordingly (settings, apps, usage, etc.).
I wonder why the UK legislators not preparing a new regulation mandating every keys to every door and safe having a bypass mechanism for government officials. Behind every door and every locked place there could be child pornography and illicit materials hidden!! Every house, every hotel safe are suspects! Criminal oversight, criminal oversight! (and if they think their reasoning for backdoors into online chat and co…
I'll play Devil's Advocate (because I enjoy throwing myself into the fray — especially when arguing against a point I actually agree with). No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide with thousands of other child-porn voyeurs. The internet and its ubiquitous accessibility combined with digital image file formats has changed the landscape for those that would fight these heinous crimes. It is indeed a n…
I wouldn't call 1 on 1 chats mass sharing
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> how the advancements in western society since (say) WWII have been neccesarily dependant upon privacy? Alan Turing. Hell, Tim Cook, a gay man who grew up in Alabama. Neither would have survived childhood with their personalities intact had their governments had the access No. 10 Downing demands. Privacy preserves society’s margins. The margins, by definition, are where change—growth—is nurtured.
To be clear, I'm in favour of privacy. However your examples don't demonstrate how the many advances in western society depend upon privacy nor do they prove that it would not have advanced without privacy. Alan Turing, for example, was open about his sexuality (an issue that bit him when a robbery took place long after his work at Bletchley). Even had he been somehow taken out of the picture pre WWII it remains true…
Fringe elements are analogous to a society's surface. They, by definition, interact with novel elements and ideas at a higher rate than population.
Internal interactions exchange information. That distributes information (physical and intellectual). It also increases entropy and thus homogeneity. Conductivity (the term of art is legibility [1]) and complexity are at odds with one another.
Ceteris paribus, internal homogeneity shouldn't change the surface. But humans have agency. Homogeneity precedes conformity which drives more homogeneity. Furthermore, less diversity means fewer novel opportunities/interactions between the fringe and the unknown.
Privacy preserves a diversity of fringes which drives social complexity. A society without privacy is simpler, and thus less capable of innovation, than one with it. (There is obviously an upper bound to this phenomenon. A perfectly opaque system is static. But humans, as social creatures, resist isolation more naturally than conformity.)
[1] https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/eprint/27204/1/Linked_da...
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I don't understand this comment the Tsar and the Nazi's were both governments. Another good example is the Dutch housing all the data in an building that was used to track down and kill the right people. The data existing is the problem. The ideal situation is that there is no data.
D'oh, you're right, I misread the GP. Finish coffee first, then post.
Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden for some things if it means supporting a company that has the power to shift policy in favor of human rights (privacy in this case).
>Stuff like this is why I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm happy to pay a premium and be locked into their walled garden @dang Is there any way I can counter-argument this statement without it getting flagged? If so, please let me know how. Because so far I have failed and I don't know what rule I broke by countering this statement.
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As far as "We have never heard of PRISM", that could be true. When you receive a national security letter it isn't like they give you detailed info about the specific operation and why you are receiving it. It's more along the lines of "you're going to do this pursuant to US code section..."
What's more, a National Security Letter is not necessarily addressed to the company's executives and lawyers. A National Security Letter could be send to somebody lower in the organization, closer to the targeted data (for instance a sysadmin) with a clause threatening them with prison time if they tell anybody, even their boss or company lawyers about it. They can essentially conscript anybody in the company to work…
Yes, "evidence for a secret program" is a bit tricky to produce, but the one I know of - Doe v. Ashcroft - the president of the company was compelled to produce data. I'd be very surprised if this wasn't the universal approach.