Feels like laws are needed around this. Explicit, unambiguous laws. If you go above and beyond the law in terms of invasion of privacy, while acting as a law enforcement officer or on their behalf, you serve time in prison.
Provide a handbook to all law enforcement members explaining these rules. Give them access to whistleblower hotlines. Make an agency whose job it is to look into such complaints and file charges. The problems would vanish in a very short time.
But naturally, such a change would have to come from the top- and the government does not want to give up this power it has over its citizens.
I think it's not only the power over citizens but also the support of the police, otherwise they will start to protest and say the govt is blocking them from doing their job.
The police wants these tools to satisfy their ego and complexes as much as the govt wants power over citizens.
Or we could set up specific members of the legal system who are responsible for deciding which invasions of privacy are permitted and which ones are prohibited.
Maybe we could give them a special title, such as 'judge' or 'your honor'.
And yet, the majority of the people do not care at all. I am actually over preaching the need for privacy, I just try to practice opsec daily and identify my failures and weak spots.
I tried to be a privacy purist: a smartphone without internet on a prepaid card running opensource software (likely with a backdoored baseband chip, but). Internet through rotating VPNs only on incognito browsers with anti-fingerprinting plugins, no sms'es, personal email on a self-hosted server with at-rest encryption...
All while gaining absolutely nothing out of it, but inconveniences like filling out captchas and needing to go extra steps to open up wikipedia. That behaviour itself was a failure in opsec - I am sure that it put me on a watchlist somewhere.
I'm a "normie" now, trying to emulate the "noise" that is around me. I believe that's much more a viable approach than being a hardcore privacy-ist(?)
The majority of people do not care because the police can legally blow your door of its hinges, kick the shit out of you, drag you into a van, and stuff you in a cell all before you get to the due process part of the justice system. They have accepted that this is fine. Telling them that they can be spied on by the government and that the only way to stay safe is to accept a quality of life drop and also learn up on half a dozen relatively complicated technological concepts is not going to work.
"The majority of people do not care because the police can legally blow your door of its hinges, kick the shit out of you, drag you into a van, and stuff you in a cell all before you get to the due process part of the justice system. They have accepted that this is fine."
No. The majority don't care because it hasn't happened to them or someone they love.
Once it does you can believe they'll start caring pretty quick.
So he spearheaded an accountability bill that mandated the state police to publish a yearly report on how often SWAT is deployed, for what reasons, how often lethal force ends up being used etc (it should be noted that police unions fought this tooth and nail, even though it didn't actually hold them accountable for any of it - only exposed how SWAT is actually used most of the time).
But there's a catch. You might notice from the link above that the reports end in 2014. That's because the law had a 5-year sunset clause, and nobody bothered to renew it.
So, even when a fairly influential politician from a privileged background gets involved for personal reasons, that's not still enough long-term.
I'm in favor of the Black Mirror approach for politicians; Give the people full transparency into politicians' activities. This shouldn't be so controversial, given that they work for us, but of course, that is when you would see some real concern for privacy!
Sure, if you compare it to scenarios that aren't remotely the same. I think we were supposed to take it as an obvious given that this applies to scenarios where the side giving away the power is watching the side that was given the power.
Where I work "CUI" is just the header we slap on all of our PowerPoints on NIPR[1], and basically means "don't email this to your civilian email account, or otherwise share it with people outside of work"...but it's still feasible, from a technical standpoint. It's just wrong from an administrative policy perspective. CUI doesn't automatically entail/require encryption. Most people don't even bother to encrypt their emails in Outlook even when chock-full of CUI documents, or worse, high-impact PII/PHI.
If politicians want encrypted comms they'll probably have a //SECRET Blackberry or iPhone.
Years ago I worked on a Special Access project. Everything that got thrown away went into the burn barrels, whether it had a classified label or not. Of course, when California took away our license to burn stuff, we acquired a grinder type shredder.
That is just an easy general policy to adopt, secret project or not. At this point I would call it as basic as using HTTPS, just a general good practice.
The majority of people do not care because the police can legally blow your door of its hinges, kick the shit out of you, drag you into a van, and stuff you in a cell all before you get to the due process part of the justice system.
No, the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you", they can use reasonable force if you decide to ignore or refuse instructions when they have a warrant which has been obtained via the courts. The warrant will only be granted after presenting substantive evidence that the person they are wishing to arrest has committed serious crime i.e. possession / distribution of indecent images of children, drugs, money laundering etc which required rapid entry to secure evidence. They don't get to enter your property for minor offences or on a whim.
the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you"
I realize that we don't feel such behavior is legal, but recent history has shown that when police misbehave at this level (cf. Breonna Taylor), there are no meaningful consequences.
So many engineers live and breathe P.O.S.I.W.I.D. (purpose of a system is what it does) in all technical areas and then are violently opposed to that kind of thinking when it comes to politics or sociology.
I'm honestly baffled by it. I get that people can be ignorant of how police act in the real world because they have no experience with it and watch cop shows on TV, but once you learn what the actual behaviour is ...
My God, I'd not heard that one before. Like I'm fully aware of the philosophy, but not of the acronym as a name for it. Thank you. Filing that for later use.
"[a] person is privileged to use such force as reasonably appears necessary to defend him or herself against an apparent threat of unlawful and immediate violence from another."[1]"
Not in the USA, they don't. Not as long as the cops in question don't know for a FACT that their behavior violates established law - even if it DOES violate established law, they aren't held accountable unless a previous court case established precedent under almost the EXACT SAME CIRCUMSTANCES. As you might expect, finding a previous case in which the exact same circumstances applied is not an easy thing to do. Read up on qualified immunity: https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-qualified-immunity-and-what...
> Not in the USA, they don't. Not as long as the cops in question don't know for a FACT that their behavior violates established law - even if it DOES violate established law, they aren't held accountable unless a previous court case established precedent under almost the EXACT SAME CIRCUMSTANCES.
This only applies to civil liability; criminal prosecution of unreasonable use of force is not affected by QI, though there are other problems with that.
There are some other answers already regarding whether or not these rules apply to on-duty Police officers but I think you're missing the point.
There seems to be a broad based perception these days that the Police don't obey the rules regarding use of force and they are not proscuted when they break them.
This might mean that the original statement: "the police can legally ... kick the shit out of you" is technically innacurate but it is functionally accurate. The Police do not appear to large swathes of the general public to be at risk of prosecution for beating the shit out of suspects (which basically means anyone they want to).
For police officers its defined by the policy of their department because they have training, less-lethal weapons, and are (at times) obligated to initiate force on subjects. The reasonable person in this case is a law enforcement officer who has the requisite training and experience.
> As far as I'm aware these definitions apply to police officers
They do, the problem is qualified immunity rules out most civil liability in practice, and relying on criminal prosecution has problems because of the relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement.
US Marshals straight up executed an American citizen in Portland (to wit, Michael Forest Reinoehl) on order of the President. Trump himself all but admitted it, in classic Trump style. I'd say that ranks as "kick the shit out of you" and, since there was no consequence for the police or the one who ordered the hit, it sure appears to be "legal".
> No, the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you", they can use reasonable force if you decide to ignore or refuse instructions when they have a warrant which has been obtained via the courts.
No, we require extensive training, and re-training, of doctors. On top of that, they need malpractice insurance, which balloons for the individual if they're royal fuckups. They aren't demonized, they're held accountable.
Demonization is a consequence of bad behavior combined with radical unaccountability.
>Yeap, there are bad actors in the police just like in all other walks of life.
Irrelevant. It's evidence that refutes your earlier claim that police can not legally "kick the shit out of you". They can. Dismissing them as "bad actors" doesn't change that fact.
I'd take it a step further after having read the article associated with that horrifying picture. Two of the officers were found not guilty. The third had charges dropped. This isn't just "bad actors", this is bad actors with the backing of the court system.
>And yet, the majority of the people do not care at all.
I really, really dislike this meme. Try to put yourself into the shoes of a non-tech person, remembering that "non-tech" is in no way a synonym for "stupid" or "lazy". They may be a doctor, lawyer or professor, a construction worker, service industry person or driver. Maybe they make a reasonable amount of money, or maybe they're on minimum wage working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Now please QUANTIFY what "care" means. I'll give it a shot: 1 hour a week. I think that a non-tech person is going to need to average putting in at least that much time, consistently over a year or two, to make major advances on defending their privacy in a Digital Wild West environment. We on HN tend to have not merely significant digital system knowledge, but also significant meta knowledge. We don't just know answers, we know questions and where to look for answers and how to try to find them, the kinds of keywords to use, the kinds of other people to ask and where to find them. This is of course true in any area, but it's easy to take for granted how much of a difference that makes. Someone starting from scratch is going to spend a lot of time even learning that things like firewalls or personal VPNs or the like exist at all, let alone what ones to use and how. They probably won't already have their own technical infrastructure either, like owning a a personal domain with email, and understand the various factors involved with that. Which in turn makes it harder to use unique addresses per site (hence services like Apple Sign In stepping in, which itself has concerns). It's deep, deep waters.
But at $15/hr, even just an hour a week is $780 a year. That's real money. Maybe they'd be better off just spending more of that directly. But on what? I think the answer for some is "Apple devices" which they've heard are somewhat more updated and private, which could be some fraction of the premium for those that care. Or maybe it'd be better to put some into political donations and activism. But how exactly to do that effectively is itself an area of expertise that will take time. Etc etc.
A sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly overwhelming force isn't the same as "not caring at all", nor ignorance that improvement is even possible. Contrary to your assertion, we've repeatedly seen the public being quite uncomfortable with mass surveillance. Large percentages polled don't like the idea of personalized advertising. Laws trying to enhance it have passed repeatedly, despite overwhelming concentrated interest opposition. The laws sometimes get watered down or are misaimed, but that's not surprising for technical things pushed by the public. But the desire is certainly there for a majority, even if many have given up, or are merely quietly getting more angry about it.
So please be careful about blithely ascribing motivations to swaths of hundreds of millions to billions of people from our perch of expertise. Life is more complicated than that, and furthermore it's self-defeating. We, people who care a lot about this and have some idea of what to do about it, need large numbers of regular people who care but don't know what to do. Writing them off instead is stupid. Of course, that means we also need to care about satisfying their needs on the reverse too.
I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble convenience is king. Privacy is not something desirable, because people "have nothing to hide". It's something they don't consider at all. They are not stupid or uneducated, they know stories about stasi. They don't care. And they care even less if privacy brings inconvenience. And this is where we, techies, should step in: provide privacy-friendly platforms which have the same level of convenience. Is that going to happen, tho? No. The problem is too hard, the status quo too deeply entrenched, no better (!) money is to be made here.
Our business/regulatory environment reflects the values we wish to have, they are not a given and require work. We need concrete use cases to convince the public that privacy matters and to make it clear that technology can deliver it.
For example, in our local swim team, I pushed back on using Facebook live-stream for broadcasting a time trial (parent audience was not permitted due to COVID) and instead we distributed heat videos with a password protected server. It seems other teams went with the convenient approach, and now they are banned from recording (since a few parents, correctly, complained). Since then we have gotten permission to continue what we were doing, because we put privacy first. But even so, this begs the deeper question... why is privacy not the default? It's about monetization (cost) and convenience.
I've noticed that some people seem to have an intrinsic desire for privacy. Desire is possibly even to weak of a word, but I can't come up with a better one. I have it, one of my daughters has it. My wife does not.
I would say that I do not feel like me if I don't have time that is unobserved by others (and I'm not using this as a euphemism for masturbation). Even though the things I do then are typically inane. My browser history is fairly inane, and yet I would not publish it.
I had kind of noticed this before, but didn't really have to put it into words until trying to explain my daughter's need for privacy to my wife. She is a very empathetic person, but it took several conversations for her to start to get the idea that "I want to do something without someone looking over my shoulder" is different from "I want to hide what I'm doing from someone" (though absolutely the latter can be used as a smokescreen for the former, particularly by teenagers).
>I am only speaking from experience. In my social bubble
If all you're speaking from is personal anecdote from a tiny biased subsample of people, then don't speak about "the majority of the people". Because objectively, millions care given the chance. Measures like the GDPR were popular. Or in the US the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which in fact just this past election got an attempted[1] enhancing provision passed by popular referendum (2020 Proposition 24) with 56% of the vote, or about ~9.1 million people.
Of course people care about convenience and security as well. So again it's very important to make it clear that those don't have to be zero-sum games with privacy, and for technical people to not merely blindly oppose flawed efforts to improve that but put up better solutions. I think we've repeatedly made big mistakes there over the past 20 years, failing to get out in front of efforts like Apple's iOS and then ending up with no way to create standards with the good but not the bad. But that doesn't mean, all else being equal, that people don't care, or in major cases won't make some sacrifices for it. One of the real nasty strategies of anti-privacy forces in fact has been trying to twist it into zero-sum, claiming that privacy can't be convenient or secure.
----
1: Proposition 24 is itself also illustrative of how popular support doesn't always translate into perfectly written legislation, I know the EFF had reservations about it saying it was a mix of steps forward and backward. But again, the desire is clearly there.
No really most people don't care. Out of a group of 4 tech people that I spoke about privacy, one is concerned but won't go further than having an iPhone (even if he knows privacy is just marketing from Apple) and the others though they have the technical knowledge to make some changes really don't care.
One even told me that he wished Google knew him better so some functionalities worked better for him.
The non tech people don't even let me talk to them about privacy. I lost half my Whatsapp contacts that didn't want to install Signal.
> But at $15/hr, even just an hour a week is $780 a year. That's real money.
Please stop with this meme that every second of one's life is equal to some amount of money.
For example I'm learning Flutter on my spare time right now. It doesn't cost me a dime because otherwise I would watch YouTube videos or some other unproductive activities.
If you push it too far soon you're going to calculate how much sleep "costs" you!
This is so different to the people I speak to in my region (not a tech center!). Most visible is push back against Facebook. During COVID, the local volunteer (mostly retirees) steam railway paid for and setup a good old emailing list, and not a Facebook group as many people seem to expect. At the most recent local election, a young candidate (who ended up winning a seat) in her platform had stated not using Facebook for communications and was even quoted as saying 'Fuck Facebook' from Q&A sessions. I have four elderly parents, none of whom use Facebook. During COVID, Zoom birthdays have taken over from face-to-face gatherings. While I have Signal installed, mostly people are sticking with SMS for messaging. One of the neighborhood groups uses Telegram. Google really means the search engine, email and Youtube. Nobody logs into Youtube and find it creepy when it remembers what they have been doing. It is not entirely like this, with a number of active community Facebook groups for things like 'free stuff' and 'want to buy/sell', and some businesses that are only online on Facebook, from when that was still cool. But it isn't cool any more.
The majority of people do not rationally save for emergencies, let alone retirement.
It is roughly equally true. I have no idea how to compare the relative impacts on social stability; keeping a sizable percentage of the population in economically precarious positions is likely more destabilizing, but spying and blackmail can have massive effects, too.
> A sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly overwhelming force isn't the same as "not caring at all"
I look at this as:
(1) Roughly the same proportion of people at any given time will be [failing to save, feeding the surveillance beast].
(2) Change the environment, and you change their behavior on the margin. (Opt-out 401K increases overall savings rates; safe defaults frequently don't get changed.)
(3) Change the incentives, and you change behavior permanently. (Ownership stakes encourage savings; close channels that leak personal information.)
This is a really excellent answer - I especially appreciate that you quantified the cost. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say ‘people just don’t care’ again without at least second guessing myself...thanks for that shot of perspective!!!
>> And yet, the majority of the people do not care at all.
> I really, really dislike this meme.
I dislike it too, but for a different reason.
This story is a conspiracy theory. Literally.
At least one difference I notice in this case is that neither the article itself, nor the comments in this thread (at the time of writing this) contain either of the terms "conspiracy theory" or "QAnon" - but attach either of those, and you'll find all sorts of people who will suddenly develop a very passionate sense of caring/interest of a different kind: in discrediting, downvoting, and silencing anyone who in any way supports or perpetuates this type of a story.
In this case, I suspect the main difference is that the "public relations" departments of the Canadian Government and CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) are bush league compared to that of the US. In the US, this story would probably have been preemptively "taken care of" in the media before it even broke, or in 24 hours via a full court press if it did happen to accidentally fall through the cracks, and people would fall in line as they always do.
How is this story related to QAnon or a conspiracy theory? I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
Who in the US is "taking care of" stories? If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
It isn't related (more precisely: a relation has not been established) - that was my point.
I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...and how this can act upon people's interest levels and thinking styles.
> I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
I feel like this sort of rhetoric is a fine example of the very phenomenon that I described ("...but attach either of those, and you'll find...).
> Who in the US is "taking care of" stories?
Not sure who it is exactly. And unless they for some reason decide to voluntarily confess, I suspect we will never know for sure.
Are you under the impression that the United States government never uses propaganda? Maybe you guys have the state on a much shorter leash than the Canadians.
> If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
Regardless, to answer your question, here is an example:
This article implicitly(!) asserts that the Dominion story is an invention of QAnon. How it works (from a neuroscientific, "belief formation" perspective) is, these stories are printed in the news, and then people who read them believe what is in the story.
Whether it is actually true or not has very little bearing. Not only do most people (who voice an opinion) not care what is actually true, they will go to great lengths to discredit anyone who mentions the very notion of 'What is Actually True'. This is not just an opinion - the phenomenon can be observed.
To me, this behavior is absolutely fascinating. Why most people have such a strong aversion to the topic is also interesting.
Back to the article...
> "While the theory has already been debunked — including by Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with national security related to the internet and technology..."
Notice the language used in such articles, words like debunked.
If you have an eye for detail, you may notice that this is a very popular word with journalists these days. You may also notice that "debunk" has a fair amount of uncertainty and wiggle room in its explicit definition (if not so much in how it is interpreted by people who read it). This sort of wiggle room can come in handy if one is ever called to testify in court.
I won't bother doing a full analysis of the article, I have not once encountered a single non-conspiracy-theorist who is able to discuss this topic with the same attention to accuracy as they would if we were discussing a technical topic like programming - I am merely drawing people's attention to the phenomenon. I have no illusions whatsoever that I am going to change a single person's mind (and believe me, I've tried), in the slightest.
You are free to believe whatever you would like, as is everyone else. And Mother Nature will reward us accordingly, in the long run.
But I will say this:
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
To some degree I think, but I think burden of proof is kind of shared int his situation.
The general topic of the thread is ~government agencies "being bad", with several people complaining that ~"people don't care" about privacy.
I submitted for consideration the notion that governments engage in "conspiracy theories", and covering them up. Evidence can be provided for this - there is plenty on record.
A point of contention then arose:
>> How is this story related to QAnon or a conspiracy theory? I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
>> Who in the US is "taking care of" stories? If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
And then:
> I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
So what would be an inverse of my idea. By my reckoning, a valid example would be where someone asserts that a story should be ignored because it is attributed to QAnon, or even better, when someone disputes that claim, and then the channel goes silent.
I don't mind "losing an argument" on a technicality, the elephants in the room being discussed (or, explicit mentions of them "not being seen") is more than enough for me. To me, this is kind of the logical equivalent of asking conspiracy theorists where the evidence is that substantiates their characterization of the state of reality. One would think, at some point at least one person might realize and acknowledge that indeed, there are some things that occur (or do not occur) in reality that we do not know all the details of...that some portions of reality are unknown. One would think.
> I submitted for consideration the notion that governments engage in "conspiracy theories", and covering them up.
I don't think anyone disputes that governments have conspired and kept it secret before. The "teapot" in this case is QAnon or any specific conspiracy theory, not that any government has ever had any conspiracy. Prove or argue for a specific conspiracy and don't hide behind that "people have kept stuff secret before".
> To me, this is kind of the logical equivalent of asking conspiracy theorists where the evidence is that substantiates their characterization of the state of reality.
Isn't that exactly what we should do? If someone (the conspiracy theorists) has a theory they should also put forward evidence for that, right?
> The "teapot" in this case is QAnon or any specific conspiracy theory, not that any government has ever had any conspiracy. Prove or argue for a specific conspiracy and don't hide behind that "people have kept stuff secret before".
Am I "hiding" behind that?
Alleged conspiracies happen, or they do not happen. I make no specific, strong assertion either way. Many others cannot say the same though.
> Isn't that exactly what we should do? If someone (the conspiracy theorists) has a theory they should also put forward evidence for that, right?
Most definitely.
How do you feel about those who assert things like:
- "<X> did not happen - that idea (<X>) is just a conspiracy theory" (implicitly) [and therefore it can be accurately dismissed as false]
- "<X> did not happen, (implicitly)[we know this to be true because] there is no evidence" (which ignores the largely unappreciated facts that human beings are not omniscient, and all that occurs in physical reality is not known)
Personally, I see such assertions being problematic in a number of ways, mainly: in excess quantities, describing reality in this fashion can highly distort the public's perception of reality.
It seems like you have narrowed your point all of the way down to "generalizations about truth are bad because humans are not omniscient".
People make generalizations about truth because they are not omniscient. Social cues combined with critical thinking allow me to believe that over a billion people live in India even though I have never been there. Something is broadly considered a conspiracy theory when there is broad evidence for it being false and circumstantial evidence for it being true.
You are absolutely hiding behind generality by not defending any specific conspiracy theory. Assertions of the forms you mention do not on their own distort the public's perception of reality.
The Earth IS round. The Holocaust DID happen. These statements do not distort the public's perception of reality. Quit hiding behind rhetorical tricks and give an example statement that does distort the public's perception of reality.
> It seems like you have narrowed your point all of the way down to "generalizations about truth are bad because humans are not omniscient".
That's a rather imperfect characterization, but at least you realize that it "seems" this way, not that it --is-- this way.
An improvement would be something like: "[Generalizations about the truth that are presented as the accurate, comprehensive truth] is bad, because it distorts the public's perceptions of reality. One can often know(!) whether these generalizations are manufactured truth. An example of one such way is when knowing a truth would require omniscience (ie: "there is no evidence)".
However, what one cannot know(!), for sure, is whether this manufacturing is performed consciously. That the "just so" stories are so consistent in their timing, and details (or lack of details), suggests that this process may often not be purely organic. That many confirmations of conscious and coordinated behavior have been discovered (but mostly in the past, funny that) lends further support to the idea that it does actually occur, at least sometimes (a funny sentence if you think about it).
> People make generalizations about truth because they are not omniscient. Social cues combined with critical thinking allow me to believe that over a billion people live in India even though I have never been there.
This is true, but not comprehensive - but many people perceive it as comprehensive.
> Something is broadly considered a conspiracy theory when there is broad evidence for it being false and circumstantial evidence for it being true.
This is what people are told (about how they themselves and others behave), but it's not the actual reality of how people behave. If this was actual reality, it would require that the masses ("broadly") actually think ("considered") about the ideas [1] contained within each conspiracy theory.
For the most part, people do not do this, and this can be seen in the comically inaccurate way they discuss the ideas, on the very rare occasion that they do. They discuss (and believe, as fact) the distorted and simplified "just so" version that the media tells them, not the actual one that exists within the conspiracy theory ecosystem [2]. I suspect you likely have a fairly strong belief [3] about whether what I say here is true or not - whether you have any curiosity about what the actual truth is, is likely a different story - this applies to a large percentage of conspiracy theorists as well.
> You are absolutely hiding behind generality by not defending any specific conspiracy theory.
No, this is how your mind is conceptualizing it. I am not "hiding" behind anything, I am simply discussing the general nature of conspiracy theories. Is this a violation of some natural law?
> Assertions of the forms you mention do not on their own distort the public's perception of reality.
Actually, this is your perception of it. Think about it: By what means do you know the thoughts of the public, which is composed of hundreds of millions of people? Of course you have no way of knowing what people think! Yet, it sure doesn't seem like you don't, does it! It seems rather crystal clear that you know this, does it not? But if you trace the lineage of that knowledge in your mind, what do you find? Go ahead, try it!
> The Earth IS round. The Holocaust DID happen. These statements do not distort the public's perception of reality.
Here you have resorted to a strawman rhetorical technique, and a rather obvious one at that. I doubt this convinces even you.
> Quit hiding behind rhetorical tricks and give an example statement that does distort the public's perception of reality.
How does one make sense of all of this complexity and uncertainty? What should a person believe? Shall we believe what the newspaper man, and telly man, or conspiracy theory man, tell us is true (even though it's very often obvious that they literally do not have the technical means of knowing(!) what they say is true, is actually true?
One novel approach, taking The Clear Pill, is offered by Curtis Yarvin (Mencious Moldbug):
Now I'm not suggesting you adopt this approach, I'm just pointing it out as an option [4], and as a demonstration of how things are not as they seem (to the mind).
Most people can conceptualize and accept the flawed nature of human cognition when discussing it in the abstract, but this skill seems to vanish when the point of focus turns to concrete reality. Then, perception is perceived as 100% accurate. I imagine there is an evolutionary explanation for this strange inconsistency, but I suspect that explanation may not be comprehensive.
--------
[1] the actual ideas, as opposed to the distorted allegations advertised in the media
[2] which is very often an inconsistent mess full of contradictions - but not always
[3] many people incorrectly consider these beliefs "knowledge", or even/usually "facts"
[4] there are many available options to choose from, and you've already "chosen" one (or had one chosen for you - see: culture), whether you realize it or not
> I feel like this sort of rhetoric is a fine example of the very phenomenon that I described
I see your point, that by attaching certain labels (like a logical fallacy), many people write off information without independently judging its veracity (whether the fallacy actually occured)
Yet in your case, you still fail to support your key claim:
> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...
Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.
I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me. I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense. There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.
I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth. I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist. Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills. Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.
> Yet in your case, you still fail to support your key claim:
>> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...
> Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.
You seem to be framing the conversation as if I have made the assertion that 100% of people fall for these techniques. I made no such claim.
> I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me.
Now you are addressing the example I provided, rather than the general phenomenon I am describing.
> I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense.
There is some Truth to the story, or there is No Truth to the story. Our respective personal opinions or understandings have no bearing on the actual state of reality.
> There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.
Perhaps there would, perhaps there would not.
Perhaps this would be noticed, perhaps this would be not. Can you point me to anything that demonstrates that an extremely thorough statistical analysis has been performed?
> I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth.
I am not pushing the premise that "only conspiracy theorists care about truth". You are framing and characterizing my comments as if I am stating that.
> I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist.
How much any one person perceives themself to "care" (a slippery concept) about something does not always match "the actuality" of the situation. This is kind of what sayings like "Watch What People Do, Not What They Say" are getting at. To make it even more complicated, the level of caring can often vary significantly with the smallest of modifications to certain variables in the model.
To be clear, I do not mean to accuse you specifically of any particular imperfection - if I have done so, then that was done in error. I have no way of knowing your true beliefs or intentions. I am speaking of a general phenomenon that can be observed - and furthermore, I am in no way asserting that it applies universally in all situations.
> Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.
This is absolutely correct, and I have said nothing to indicate otherwise.
> Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills.
This is an estimation. It is not possible to know with any kind of precision what the complex chain of causation is behind any individual conspiracy theorist, or conspiracy theorists in general.
> Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.
This is also an estimation. You do not have any way of knowing the actual, comprehensive beliefs of even one individual conspiracy theorist, let alone what "most" of them believe. Ironically, this neurological phenomenon (the mistaking of heuristic predictions about reality, for reality itself) is to a large degree the type of thinking that many conspiracy theory beliefs are based upon.
I happen to believe that both sides are very wrong on this general topic, and most other popular "culture-war" category disputes. I would like for the counter-productive and harmful "he said, she said" meme wars (of which this topic is but one) that are going on in the world between the various tribes to stop. I would like us to move more towards a public discourse based on calm, measured, truly evidence-based reasoning, and trinary logic (True/False/Unknown), rather than our current binary (True/False) approach (which forces people to guess).
I feel like LEO's going out and saying this over and over is just them trying to move the window, with a little help from Silicon Valley executives[0]. The more they say, it the more the Jedi mind trick will work.
For a while now I was struggling to put into words why my l changed from being a "privacy activist" to being a "normie". But you just hit the nail on the head. Security, both technical and operational are still very much important to me.
But before recently, I would've preferred Firefox over Chrome for example, since it's more private.
Being a zebra in the middle of the pack is probably the most practical solution. However as things move forward with the great reset its going to become increasingly more difficult for that to maintain its effectiveness.
Its obvious now that "vaccine passports" and "contact tracing" are going to become defacto required. Therefore, the level of data they will be collecting will be so granular that 'blending in' won't really matter. A simple SQL query 5 years in the future will establish your every movement and health history for any given point.
>50% of average people are going to go along with this (or outright support it) and anyone who speaks against it will be called "anti-science" and selfish.
It's literally mind-boggling we are at this stage, but we must open our eyes and accept it.
One of us will wake up in a gooey casket attached to some sort of harvesting machine in the future. We will have to fight an army of men in black suits as we try to save the human race from the robots.
There is also the other side, most people do not realize what is happening, and full out consequences of various things.
Once you actually tell them the reality of things, they really don't like it. Like why can the FBI force my therapist to give them their notes under the Patriot act? Most don't know it, most will not like it either.
Another part of this is the power is unexercised and/or covert. Because if it was overt, it would create huge public backlash. They know this and it's why they use things like parallel construction.
I actually came here specifically to comment that based on my personal experiences with the RCMP, their ineptitude and moribund bureaucratic nature makes me surprised they're able to actually do anything useful with the tools alleged in this report. And then I saw that a number of other people have already commented essentially the same thing.
As a Canadian I find this article pretty funny since there’s no news in it whatsoever. It’s not a particularly reputable news source up here.
“There’s little privacy anymore” is a reality not a joke. Citizens chose to engage in social media and to buy technologies which expose their private lives.
The RCMP bought some script kiddie toys to explore Facebook and the dark web... because they have things like child exploitation units meant to look in places like that. Not news.
If anything it’s funny that the RCMP is so much worse at hiding this stuff from the public than the FBI.
I feel no threat to my privacy based on what’s written here... at all.
What I really don't like about these kinds of tools is that they are generally pretty bad at intercepting new threats, but are really, really good at pursuing known actors, like journalists, activists or political rivals.
It seems common for people to assume that privacy is about hiding something. Most people close the door when they're using a toilet in a public place. Is it because they have something to hide? Or is it that they want some privacy?
Privacy can be about hiding things, but it's also about space and boundaries. I want to have some control over who gets to know me, and how intimately.
So much of the "I have nothing to hide" retort misses the fact that it isn't about big secrets, but rather a collection of little secrets (if you want to call them that - they are just facts that are sensitive).
Less about are you planning to violently overthrow the United States Government. More about what genre of porn do you like to entertain yourself with.
These little things can be used against you. We all have them.
So I take it you would be fine with sharing all of your credit card and location history for the past 10 years with at least 5000 people you've never met?
When I do give out my CC data I do this voluntarily and make an active decision each time to do so. I'm NOT giving it out to random people, some of which might be fraudsters
Everyone I know who hates this stuff says so on the edge of normal conversations, couched in a wait-and-see vibe. Google Home gifts go unopened and tech devices are excluded from certain areas.
This is exactly what happened. Five years ago, I got sick of being called a conspiracy theorist, shut my mouth, and focused on my own privacy.
Now the public generally seems to have a sense of what's happened to privacy, but has given up do to the upkeep required to avoid our ubiquitous surveillance machine.
The people in my circle who still think there's hope won't buy smart devices, but won't go further, because to do so would lock them out of large chunks of modern society, or require them to maintain a level of technical skill and perform certain kinds of upkeep which would disadvantage them in the long run.
The world's complex, many of us are living at the margins of insolvency. The bandwidth required to fight the panopticon is too damn high, and unless done very well, only produces a moral victory ('I'm fighting the system as best I can').
"for the collective" ... what collective? This is textbook top-down control, a small elite group spying on the masses. And when the masses find out it is considered a scandal.
>Why can't an innocent individual have private communications with other innocent individuals if so desired?
>Most private stuff is banal and not worth a government budget to look at.
Private conversations are potentially a threat to government as an organization. People might convince one another to vote for less taxes and more accountability <clutches pearls>.
As the cost of keeping tabs on this kind of stuff gets lower the government does it more. It's no different than BigCos tracking your mouse on their eCommerse site "because its, cheap, we can and it might be useful".
I don't disagree but clearly common sense is clearly not prevailing in the bureaucracies that cook up this shit.
I think this is a fundamental problem with how we've structured modern organizations in a way that removes all personal accountability and responsibility. Everyone is accountable to the organization. Nobody has "be reasonable" as part of their job duties or performance evaluation. It's not wholly their fault but I blame the MBA-ization of everything for a lot of this.
Relative to MDs and JDs, is there a credible and in-use ethical creed for MBAs? MDs and JDs have some figment of doing no harm to try to help people. MBAs do anything legal to make a buck?
Not to mention that there are lots of things we should have precisely because they are a threat to the state: encryption that the government cannot break, automatic weapons, individual autonomy, etc. These things all can be abused by "the bad guys", and will be, but we accept those risks because they are inherent to being free.
Someone needs to always immediately follow up with questions asking people who want others to give up their privacy to give theirs up first in turn.
“Could I please get all of your phone records, browsing history, Internet account credentials, details of your friends and family, and anything else that you wouldn’t want me to have but legal for me to have so long as you provide it to me willingly? If the answer is no, then why ask me to give up my privacy when you refuse to give up yours?”
I'm not sure that's always a good start to a line of questioning? Don't get me wrong, I like the reasoning, but perhaps, "what expectations of privacy do you have for yourself or your family?".
Their answer to that might be a better starting point?
If they don't have any, then at least they would be consistent =)... You can also then discuss what kind of a society comes from that position and whether that's a good one to live in?
Alternatively another question is, "do you and your colleagues want to be stewards of this data you collect?"
What's an appropriate / reasonable punishment for failing to be good stewards? Jail time? Fines? Personal or organisational? Paying money into charities designed to act as public oversight?
Starting off combative feels nice, but just gets people's hackles up in my experience =)...
> Don't get me wrong, I like the reasoning, but perhaps, "what expectations of privacy do you have for yourself or your family?".
I feel like some people flippantly respond "none" to this, which they can afford because they are not expecting to really be compelled to give away their personal information on the spot. The response suggested by the OP would give them an opportunity to prove their position immediately.
My answer, since I love to play devil's advocate, would be, "No, you can't have any of that information, because I only trust governments and corporations with it!" Then watch them twitch a little.
That's true, but starting the question on that basis and also framing the question around it is important.
The public / audience of the debate need to be constantly reminded that these rules apply to them as well and they need to ask themselves, what am I comfortable with living under? Do I trust this administration? The current law enforcement? Forever? What could they do to me or my family if we suddenly become persona non grata?
To be honest even under this system people can reason that this is just giving the police etc powers, so even then their "privacy" isn't really at risk.
They aren't necessarily thinking that:
- data can be leaked
- data could be sold
- you can get malicious officers
- the data can be used for other purposes
- etc
These are the other parts of the conversation that need to also be thought about because otherwise this is just another security blanket.
They’re probably not the best people to be asking that question anyway. Police, politicians, and especially anybody who works in a national security role, are all people who have already accepted living with seriously diminished privacy in order to do their jobs. It’s also not terribly surprising the journalists are mostly rather delinquent when it comes to privacy controversies, as privacy gets in the way of a journalist doing their job as often as it does a police officer.
This is a really good point and I'm not sure how to really tackle it other than ask if they're also comfortable with the same being true for their families as well as themselves?
There were cases where lack of privacy for public figures family members have caused issues[0][1]. I don't want to focus on that specific story, it's just an example.
This might be a case where people are happy about that information being public? Or maybe they have a more nuanced take? For example, report that it happened, but don't print their name / picture? (for example both articles below did name, but only nytimes seems to have also done picture)
Where you draw the lines on this stuff can be really important.
Your phrasing is definitely a better initial starting point. I do think that my phrasing has its place if a non-answer is given after the second or third time.
Your follow-up questions are great too.
This sort of dialog / FAQ for “what do you have to hide” needs to be available somewhere online with a catchy URI e.g. https://privacymatters.org (I don’t know if this is real just an example).
Definitely agree that your stronger take is needed if people say none.
But that's why in my opinion, a question about what society people are looking to live in is important. We can start to draw out what people are and aren't comfortable with.
Personally I think that in addition to websites, more media needs to be available for the public to discuss this topic more and get a feel for it.
EG: Mr Robot raised some questions about whether the hacking and casual discovery of personal information they were showing was realistic.
Perhaps "Man in the High Castle", I've not seen it, so not sure if it covers the notion of the nation state turning hostile and then leveraging collected information to attack specific citizens, but something along those lines.
Also things like the munk debates to foster discussion.
In my experience media does a much better job of getting people to empathise with different circumstances which would get them really thinking what these things might mean for them.
Quote of my coworker about why he doesn’t want to vote yes on a referendum to overturn a law that expands our intelligence agencies rights for surveillance with oversight from a single judge and no transparency and accountability: „As long as they catch at least one of these assholes, I don‘t care about me being surveilled. You will understand this when you become a father.“
This opened my eyes most people have an irrational fear and think that these capabilities won‘t be abused. At the same time our state abused their surveillance capabilities during the cold war and gathered data on almost a million people. But people seem to have forgotten already.
I‘m talking about Switzerland if you are wondering what which of authoritarian regime I‘m talking about.
> You will understand this when you become a father
Such a BS attitude. For one, it's self serving and selfish. It serves only to comfort the parent and has no consideration for the life their child will be handed when they become adults. Heck, even children and teenagers will suffer from freedom sapped by people who offload their agency to the government time and time again in exchange for an insulated "life". How can you make mistakes and learn if everything is under the eyeball of an authority who has the freedom to do as they please as long as it's in the name of public safety.
Life entirely without risk and danger, at all costs, is not a life at all, and that's what you want to hand your daughters and sons?
When you blindly let this legislation through because the first page of the draft reassures you it will get "assholes" off the streets you also tend to become entirely passive about the rest of the legislation. All sorts of side effects and detriments to society can be ushered in if you don't question big changes like this.
People with the mentality of "at all costs we must be safe" are doing damage that is irreparable. We must accept that life is implicitly hazardous at times.
I recognize my objection is futile, it's impossible to argue any case in the face of "think of the children". Genes want to survive and project themselves into the future, it's hard wired into us. The more technology and organization we have the more we are going to use it to abstract ourselves the human monument rather than mere organisms. We really can't help ourselves.
This is possibly one of the most defining and interesting times to be alive. We get to witness the beginning of a madness, what happens when life is able to achieve its goal only to find out it's a meaningless dead end.
You can get them thinking by making them realize that more than one of the assholes they are afraid of will be hired there and will have access to their and their kids most private data.
It’s astounding how many ordinary regular humans want a father or a big brother to take the responsibility of looking after them and keeping them safe.
The world is a scary place. The problem is that it doesn’t become less so by giving up your privacy, it becomes more so.
The world bought the idea that privacy and security are at odds, and that by giving up one, you gain the other. It’s the biggest lie of our generation.
I hope I don’t live to see the chickens coming home to roost. It’s happening in China and Russia, and what happened to Assange is a preview of what will eventually happen in the USA.
Eventually? You mean already is happening. It has started. But that only as a side note.
The "problem" is, that there is not one universal "freedom". Freedom is many concepts packaged into one single word.
Coming from Germany, I still remember the division by the Iron Curtain. Having lived on the western side few miles from the border and having talked to a lot of former GDR people (my father fled with his parents before the wall was build when he was still a little kid) during the years I came to understand two totally different forms of "freedom" at play in the different regimes:
A lot of people in the east got away with critizizing their bosses and sometimes even becoming physical. Up to a certain point they even got away with being somewhat critical to the system and the problems within the system.
In the west people got away with critizising the state quite well, while it became problematic to critique your bosses at your workplace. I know a lot of people in my father's generation who got fired for pointing out flaws in their workplace.
We were able to travel to a lot of places (once we were well off enough to afford it). While my parents still struggled to pay for me being able to attend sport clubs.
My while my SO's parents (she was born few years before the wall fell in the eastern part of Germany) were only ever able to travel to the east German coast, other eastern countries like Slowakia or what is now the Czech Republik, Romania or Bulgaria, Russia or Cuba (and they were by far less well off than my western German parents).
I don't imply one system was better, one was worse. Well yes I do - the GDR was worse. But what I wanted to show is, that there are different kind of "freedoms" and that is just one example. Every form of freddom comes with inherent trade-offs.
Because of preferences, personal values and said trade-offs other people tend to prefere different kinds of freedoms (while maybe not grasping that their choices impact others - like a tragedy of the commons thing). They seem to have a different hierarchy of what is important to them - and decide based on that. Be it in Germany, the US or as OP pointed out in Switzerland.
I was in China for a friend's wedding and his fiance's family was adding another floor to their house. I asked what kind of permission they needed. They said they didn't need anything. They just went ahead and did it.
Contrast that to the US and, depending on the place, you could spend months arranging to get the proper paperwork and inspections to be able to do something like that.
So while the Chinese person may not have the freedom to strongly criticize their government, in this case they did have more freedom to make an individual improvement to the quality of their immediate life.
I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean? In a society you're never truly free. There's always some form of constraint. You could go live as a hermit and be free but then you're constrained by the physical limitations of the environment.
While walking to work (pre-covid) I'd see homeless people and wonder "Are they freer than me?" They can wake up and do whatever they want for the day. I'm the one that has to stick to a fairly regular schedule.
> I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean?
Someone smarter than me once wrote “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
If you can point out that someone in authority is wrong, without fear of death or persecution, then you have freedom and from that germ everything else can be reformed eventually.
Dictators know this and it's why they don't let people laugh at them even when they clearly look stupid.
I can’t agree with this. Life is hard but isn’t scary. I’m far more concerned about losing my home to a natural disaster than terrorism. Fear is the media’s new currency.
There’s nothing to be scared of, except maybe a dystopian future where you can be jailed or killed for your beliefs.
There is a nice counter-balance to the "I've got nothing to hide" idiom, which is "I've got nothing to hide, but I've got nothing to share".
Changing the focus from "hiding", which insinuates underhandedness or immorality, to "sharing" - often allows the conversation to extend to "What would you be comfortable sharing with (the government | the police | your neighbors) etc.
In my experience, this angle helps people grasp more quickly that they'd be uncomfortable sharing many things with most people.
>I‘m talking about Switzerland if you are wondering what which of authoritarian regime I‘m talking about
That's part of the the problem. Hundreds of years of (relative to everyone else) peace and stable not too abusive government makes people complacent.
You won't hear many people from places that had repressive governments within their or their parents' lifetimes saying "but if it catches one terrorist."
I don‘t care about me being surveilled. You will understand this when you become a father
He's OK with random strangers surveilling his children then? Because no child molesters have ever been employed by the public sector, of course. And no government has ever leaked data onto the dark web. Honestly, there should be a parenting license people need to pass with exams.
> "As long as they catch at least one of these assholes, I don‘t care about me being surveilled. You will understand this when you become a father"
I would probably make enemies very quickly as I would be sorely tempted to respond "So you want your children to live in a police state? God you are a terrible father."
Well I have done this in the past to people I know who say they have "nothing to hide" and the answer they give is super simple - "I'm happy to provide all of the above and more to law enforcement agencies at any point. I don't have any problem with authority and I don't understand why you do.".
You can then explain that the data does get misused, but they always just say that it won't happen to them or if they do get in a hairy situation they will always explain themselves since after all they have nothing to hide.
The thing people don't realize about the 'nothing to hide' mantra is that it only makes sense if someone looks at your whole life. If you really did have someone examining everything you ever did, watching a playback of your entire life, through your eyes - and this was the only form that anyone would get your data in, by watching everything - then yeah, you probably wouldn't need to hide anything. That person would see everything you do, and understand you pretty well by the end of it. All the things you did, even the seemingly weird things, would make sense in context. They'd sympathize with you.
But that isn't what happens. What does happen is huge amounts of data are recorded, but only little pieces are looked at at a time. And suddenly you do have something to hide, because the people looking at the data on you won't have the full story, and will therefore jump to conclusions based on what they have - and because you won't know when and where this is happening, and what specifically they're looking at, you won't be able to set them straight. Suddenly your every action has to look innocent on its own, you can't do anything that is justifiable given prior events or knowledge. Your wife has been treating you like shit for months, and finally you snap and yell at her? If they only see the end of it then you look like the bad guy. You're researching bombs because you're interested in the historical development of technology, including explosive technology? Tough shit, you don't get to explain that, to them it will just look like you're a big bad terrorist wanting to blow up the government.
You might say that they will have all your information so they can fact-check. This is wrong, they have neither the incentive or the time to trawl through your whole life working out your motivations for everything. It's easiest to just jump to conclusions. And employers will look at this and make judgments on you - without you having any idea what they're seeing and what they're concluding from it.
In public, people carefully monitor their behavior so they appear normal to anyone who only sees them for a second. They're only willing to show their weirder sides to people who know them, who won't make big judgments on them based on minor quirks. With total surveillance, everyone will be in public, all the time.
---
I wonder how much a version of the fundamental attribution error is responsible for "nothing to hide" kind of thinking.
Also adding to the FAE angle, we have to consider what a potentially "bad" action looks like not just outside of context, but in aggregate, because in these systems you're probably looking for outliers, unusual sentiment, not just key terms.
This has a chilling effect on any extra-normal behavior.
If it was implicit that context leading up to and afterwards were required to interpret the outlier, one would see it's probably not an outlier after all, but that requires a lot of people's time and potentially your involvement.
Even if that context could be supplied with tons of surveillance and people/AI, I'd wager people would rather not be hauled in front of the internet police to explain every non-obvious, out-of-the-ordinary thing they directly or indirectly associated with.
Ask them if they'd also be fine with hackers potentially leaking
all their account data to the public.
There are enough real-life examples, like the Equifax debacle or
that "dating" site where multiple people committed suicide when
their online identities got leaked.
The only way to guarantee personal data cannot be abused by
anyone, authority or not, is when those data don't exist at all.
We know that governments are too incompetent to follow best
practices in security, we know that this kind of power gets
abused with barely any limits because there's no
accountability(e.g. when a prominent German singer did a concert
police officers made 83 lookups of her data in the police
database just in that single night. Nothing ever came out of
it even though the police had to admit those numbers aren't
possible without abuse).
I suspect that to a great degree, people who say they have nothing to hid do have something to hide, but are trying to bluster their way out of closer scrutiny. The Ashley Madison thing is an excellent example, if anyone would commit suicide over having details of that nature leaked they certainly wouldn't admit to having anything of the sort on their conscience when discussing the matter with friends or family.
It's a bit of a tricky situation because as has been noted upthread, the best practical way to maintain privacy is to simulate the ambient data noise. So in a sense, loudly proclaiming one has nothing to hide is the best strategy for keeping one's own privacy secure, but at the expense of everyone else's.
I don't get into these conversations much, but if I do perhaps I should try out the response: "I don't have anything to hide either, but I know a lot of my fellow citizens value their privacy. So I'm willing to advocate for it even though I know it will lead to more scrutiny on myself. Anyone who's afraid of that extra scrutiny is suspect! What are you really hiding!?"
The best retort is "You don't get to decide that - your persecutor does and you have no way of knowing what their twisted ideology will find 'wrong' with your past actions."
To which again, the answer is "I trust the authority and I trust the system". I've heard this too many times, ultimately the conversation ends with "but I trust the police and I trust the courts, so I really don't care"
if they do get in a hairy situation they will always explain themselves since after all they have nothing to hide
Every middle class person thinks that but what they don't understand is that cops spend their entire lives being lied to, every day, nearly everyone they speak to who isn't a fellow cop is lying to them. So that you are lying is their default position. They're going to go with whatever it says on their screen or whatever another cop told them, 100% of the time.
Well the example I like to give is that pre WW2 many countries gathered completely normal census data, but of course during WW2 Nazis used it to find out exactly where Jews lived. So the data was collected with perfectly good intentions and it was then used to kill people.
To which of course all I hear is
"Well yes, but that's not going to happen to the UK, so I don't think it's important"
On the one hand antisemitism is definitely a massive, deep issue in the Labour party. On the other hand there's no way Jews could be systematically targeted in the future.
You don't have a symmetrical relationship with the government. Do you ask the IRS every year "can you please send me 25% of all the money you collected this year? If not, why ask me to give up mine?"
I'm in favour of strong privacy protections, but this argument isn't one I find convincing.
Why can I not be pissed off at my government abusing my data? We should also be pissed off at the insanely wasteful spending that the federal government does as well.
You can resent paying tax, and argue that you should pay less tax or that your tax money should be spent more effectively. But arguing that the government has no right to extract taxation is...fringe, let's say.
In the same way, arguing that the government has absolutely no right to information you would prefer to keep private is not compelling. Better to demand limitations on what data can collect and what it can do with that data.
The problem is that too many people have a world view wherein government can do no wrong or never does enough wrong to matter. That world view (or massive amounts of cognitive dissonance) is a necessary prerequisite for being willing to tolerate this kind of government invasion or privacy.
Making these people uncomfortable with giving the government all that info will just move them from the naive camp to the cognitive dissonance camp. Other than actually experiencing significant government abuse I don't think anything will change these people's minds. Political ideology is like a religion these days.
Or, if they're of the type that are actually ok with that, then "please install this webcam next to your toilet" usually works. Followed by "what do you have to hide? Surely you're not committing CRIMES in there, are you??"
What people often forget is that often it's not Big Brother you need to be wary of but Little Brother.
That is, low level bureaucrats that work for you local council, your local police force or at your local hospital or telecoms company. People who might actually know you or that you might meet socially. A friend of a friend maybe.
These are the people being given access to all your private secrets...
The issue is there is a non-trivial portion of even industry insiders who buy into the "nothing to hide" rhetoric. I can't count the number of team outings I've had these conversations and get stonewalled on "Well, just be a Luddite then." I figured it's some sort of Upton Sinclairism, but most of them weren't even relying on it for a paycheck, and saw someone complaining about (for example) someone being nervous about the use of voice assistants like Google Home, Siri, Cortana, or Alexa around them, and wishing to have those devices turned off burdensome, or unreasonable even if broached politely.
Do not seem to have that issue with people historically targeted by governments though.
A bit off topic, but recently, when I downloaded software under export restriction from Siemens (for industry automation) I saw in the license text, it is not just allowed for military applications but also not allowed to use it for police applications. I think more and more companys think they just don't want to be involved in bad press, because not all, but a lot of police things have a such bad image now.
This article has a lot of words without saying very much.
The tl;dr:
Mounties purchased some sort of intelligence gathering software, and kept it secret for "national security" (i thought that was CSE or CSIS's job?)
Mounties have some sort of darknet search engine. Article implies the term "darknet" is being used liberally, possibly to include spying on protestors, but is very unclear on the details.
Mounties have some sort of vuln in facebook that allows them to see your fb friends even if set to private (this is probably the most significant revelation in the article imo)
Mounties use proxy software when working undercover (no kidding, never would have guessed that one)
Mounties have software to do sentiment analysis on intercepted or publicly available messages
It is implied that the mounties have a caviler attitude towards privacy violations.
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The article is a little light on details and high on unstated implications. I'm not exactly happy about all this but this is hardly a bombshell of privacy violation. Maybe there is bad things there, but the article just doesn't have the technical detail to judge.
Theres important things missing from this summary - such as hiding that they have these capabilities, lying about parts of it, going against privacy expectations set by other parts of their government.
That's a very blatant double standard - privacy for them, but not for us.
Their culture as indicated by their actions (plus wording in training materials) is that they don't care about the rights of the people which the people believe they have, and are willing to lie to abuse the public's privacy.
Its familiar, maybe from the plot of a bad action movie where the spy agency has gone rogue?
> That's a very blatant double standard - privacy for them, but not for us.
Other than the fb hack, these all seem to be consumer available technologies (albeit probably better versions). I've used proxies before. I've used search engines before.
Hardly the most rouge thing the rcmp has ever done.
>Took the names for Project Wide Awake and other internet surveillance programs from the X-Men comic book series, in which illegal government programs hunt human “mutants.”
This sort of "geeky but psychopathic" type of humor seems to be not uncommon in surveillance agencies. I suppose it makes sense that amoral intelligent people would be drawn towards intelligence agencies, as I suppose sadists were probably drawn towards organizations like the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi. There's something I find galling about it - not only is one's privacy violated, but what's more is that the violators go about their business with corporate bureaucratic banality and "joking around the office" sort of humor.
> It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.
> But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.
> It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.
Liberal democracy is incompatible with a police state but it will get worse before it gets better.
There needs to be a digital version of "privilege against self-incrimination" [1] [2] but it seams like the governments won't legislate this without a push from the public.
The laws of our society are so complex that at each moment we are breaking at least a few. This also means we could be arrested at any point, by a corrupt official trying to earn extra money for letting us go.
Imagine living your whole life under the regime of airport border control section where anything you say / do can be misinterpreted by a border guard who had a bad day and needs to arrest someone.
Yet another reason why I do not want to live in the great white north.
Although, in time depending on how politics slants in the US there actually may be positive tax advantages for upper middle class earners ($150k-290k).
People think of the kinds of income that makes the same money as doctors, lawyers, etc as upper middle, and the kind of people who can afford 10k sqft mansions, private jets and lambos as upper class, even if the numbers shake out to something else.
Not really any new information. This came out during the New Zealand shootings where the RCMP were showing up at Canadian's houses talking to them about 'supporting trump' or 'having viewed the shooting video'. Admittedly our police were less problematic compared to the police in the NZ.
The more interesting thing if you google 'Brenda Lucki' in the news. TONS of groups are calling for her dismissal. They call her racist, but don't worry our blackface prime minister supports her.
Keep in mind the RCMP is not responsible for policing major cities. They are mostly the canadian equivalent of the FBI and also are the provincial police in some (not all) provinces. They also are the local police in small towns.
I've seen mounted policemen in canada, but never a mounted mountie (outside of ceremonial things)
A few weeks back, an HN reader asked "Can you name some of the authors who were publishing panopticon concerns [in the 1980s or earlier], or the media they were publishing in?"
As there didn't seem to be a useful compilation, I created one. This seems useful in answering persistent questions, tropes, and dismissals concerning privacy and surveillance.
- Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) Notably reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog’s Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (1988).
I'd really like to extend it. My recent realisation of the interconnections between information monopoly, censorship, prooagandaa, surveillance, and information has prompted further and related research. The interconnections are providing some interesting findings.
Tim Wu and Bruce Scneier, both in 2013.
A series of monographs on early copyright and censorship, notably Cyndia Susan Clegg:
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
They are really good at cracking down violently on indigenous resistance to land appropriation and resource extraction, so they are performing their function, and these spying powers serve that function well.
No doubt. The same incompetence line (they're incompetent, so don't worry) has been used against numerous large agencies in the US, including the CIA. The CIA has been endlessly mocked, in every manner possible, across every possible medium (movies to books), for being incompetent. Does anyone question the CIA's ability to fuck shit up (coup city doesn't have to be a pleasant place to live)? To cause nightmare outcomes around the world? To get the US into wars based on fake intel?
I equate that thinking as identical to "I have nothing to hide, so I'm not worried." It's one part evasion, deflection out of fear (head burying); and it's one part failure to understand how those agencies - systems - really work, and why they exist at all. Not only does the occasional (or frequent) incompetence not matter when you're untouchable like such agencies usually are, it can be super useful ('the CIA could have never been responsible for causing that, they're far too incompetent').
The thing that always got me about the RCMP is how board their role is. Depending on where you are in the country, they're the local police, the equivalent to state troopers, the FBI, are the prime minister's security, and more. It's ridiculous!
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that being one organisation; the UK is pretty similar:
- local police forces (backed by national groups for serious organised crime, terror, financial, etc.);
- that have within them CID (Criminal Investigation Department, plain-clothes detectives) [0] with a shared (as in uniform and non-uniform branches from a common point, AIUI) org chart, which is about the closest we have to the FBI in the US;
- and the PM's visible security comes from the 'Protection Command' (also royals, diplomats, other ministers) [1] which is just a part of the Met, London's 'local police force'.
I don't think that means there's some automatic abuse of power, or whatever it is (?) that you're concerned about, just from it all being 'the police'.
It's not that ridiculous. Canada has no county-level organizations, and for various historic reasons, the provinces are not really in the business of policing.
So, cities either need to run their own police forces, or contract out to the RCMP.
The government of Surrey, BC and its self-aggrandizing mayor should by no means be an example of good governance. This is a case of a broken clock being right twice a day.
Whilst I find Dang's goals admirable, this isn't a discussion in the abstract about surveillance technology but instead a discussion about the misuse of said technology by an institution has historically committed genocide and continues to serve a similar role today. It can be quite difficult to not introduce emotion into such discussions. Most well informed people do find the conduct of the RCMP upsetting and if we which to speak about it at all we must accept that people will be angry.
Thinking back on one of my own comments here a couple of days ago, I suppose the same thing could be said about Donald Trump.
My knee-jerk reaction was to point to the guidelines, but I guess it's one of those things I need to take a step back from and let people be rightfully angry.
If the question was: give up your privacy to help stop covid killing people, it would be more accepted on Hacker News.
I'm half surprised that our governments have not pulled this trick and half relieved that the world isn't going down the toilet as much as others would like to tell us it is!
That bluff was already long called with the phone contact tracing protocols specifically designed to get privacy. They gave it a cold shoulder and attempted to roll their own slowly and terribly until it was far too late which should tell us everything about their concern for our lives and overall trustworthiness with data. That their response was to start railing on "Big Tech" as the well of all sorrows and responsible for kidnapping the Lindenburg Baby tells us that not only are they not trustworthy but we shouldn't even piss on them if they were on fire.
Agreed. It's a testament that the big tech cos have some interest in privacy and also that what some call The Big State is actually very horribly inefficient and disfunctional.
Hence the relief; the dysfunction of these govts is a guard against dystopia!
Provide a handbook to all law enforcement members explaining these rules. Give them access to whistleblower hotlines. Make an agency whose job it is to look into such complaints and file charges. The problems would vanish in a very short time.
But naturally, such a change would have to come from the top- and the government does not want to give up this power it has over its citizens.