Want to push a bill through the House of Commons to curb GCHQ's powers? Think again Mr. Politician. Someone might just leak your sexual deviances to the newspaper.
Leaning on a politician is an obvious tactic, but it's somewhat heavy-handed. If the politician were to fight back, there could be expensive blowback. Worse, it's a single (or nearly single) point of failure. The bill could pass regardless of the actions of that one politician. A talented blackmailer should only want to directly lean on someone as a last resort.
There is much better tactic: find the people who may organize other people against your interests. If you take out the potential future leaders, journalists, and educators - aka, the people that will organize the writing of that bill - then you prevent the problem before it starts. When the FBI was busting up the hippies, this was known as COINTELPRO. It's laughable to think the program ended with the Church Committee - like "total information awareness", the program was simply split up into various existing programs.
A politician could be idealistic and fight back against blackmail. With social network information, a counter intelligence program can avoid this risk by leaning on the target's friends or family instead.
Last-second blackmail isn't really the best way to defeat a political movement. Compromising the central figures in organizing the movement -- not necessarily "taking them out", but potentially just reducing their involvement or creating some alienation -- when the movement is still young is the way to really stop it.
Before you choose to share information, you're going to find out who will actually use it effectively which implies research. Then once you share the information, you're going to pay attention to what they write with it. In both cases, since you're not doing the actual leak then, you're unlikely to take any countermeasures, let alone effective ones.
For example, odds are Snowden researched Greenwald before he released anything to him. He probably read a ton of his pieces, looked at his wikipedia, and dug into his professional, etc profiles. And then after the leak, he probably continued to check Greenwald's regularly keeping an eye out for the new pieces. Even if we didn't know who Snowden was, a program like this would uncloak* him relatively quickly.
* Or at least narrow down the suspects.
The "digital exhaust" we leave behind is extremely revealing. I usually use COTRAVELER as my example of how just a few data points (without any PII) can reveal a LOT about your social interactions, but browser history is another powerful data source.
I believe this is why Dan Geer, in his incredible talk last year[1], suggested that "privacy" should now be defined as "the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself". To avoid exactly the type of analysis, you need the capability to misrepresent yourself, and you need to regularly be in the habit of use use that capability.
Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion
on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Some of it can
be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in
cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself
not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping
affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation
means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy
through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between
you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no
reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when
there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not
one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but
having as many as you can.
1: You're banging them
2: You want to bang them
3: It's your kid and they're underage.
Considering what his government gets up to, it's completely clear he has no conscience at all.
I don't expect it'll ever change, as by the time someone's made it to high office, then the agencies will have collected enough material to keep them quiet and on side.
If your kid isn't underage, then presumably they are capable of making rational decisions about with whom and to what they consent. And at that point it's none of your damn business.
I like your choice of the word "bug." That's why I come to HN.
The question is whether democracy needs bureaucracy, and if so, how much.
Obviously, democracy requires certain decisions to be made according to certain processes, which take time.
So you can't do away with all bureaucracy.
The documents aren't going to push themselves. :)
This is a classic case of the just world fallacy.
Historically, representative democracy with one man one vote exists because that was the result of the last compromise between the underclasses and elites trying to keep them from getting out of hand.
It isn't any more theoretically reasonable than the compromise before that (no women voting), or the one before that (no blacks) or the one before that (nobody votes who doesn't own property) or the one before that (nobody votes).
Who is experiencing the bias here, the founders of the representative democracy or me for pointing to the political theory? I assume you're talking about some system that isn't the US government, because otherwise your recollection of history is way off.
"Theoretically", we had kings because of the divine right of kings. Theoretically the American expansion was justified by manifest destiny. Theoretically women were not allowed to vote because "90% did not want it" or because it would "place the government under petticoat rule".
Theoretically, today, we have representatives in government because the people aren't smart enough to represent themselves.
Every system of power and domination creates a justification for its own existence and it's nearly always bullshit.
You might want to reserve the use of the word "fallacy" for cases where an argument's logic does not follow. Ironically, use the word otherwise often betrays one's own cognitive biases.
As far as my endorsement, I don't think I could state my position any more clearly than I already have: "...maybe we should reconsider the wisdom in granting some small portion of our freedom to every other voter. 42% of Americans believe in ghosts..."
You have yet to make an argument that "representatives are theoretically there to guard against majority tyranny." If you had, it wouldn't be a just world fallacy.
Correct, I have no interest in arguing that position. Any highschool graduate should immediately recognize "majority tyranny" and the political theory that it is connected to. If I had argued the virtue of representative democracy, it might have been biased by the just world fallacy, but I haven't - so it wasn't.
Also, Switzerland does not vote on every law with a referendum.
But all through history, human beings had some notion of a private space. The catholic confession booth is the only counter example i can think of, and even there it was just between you and you priest which was trained specifically for that role, and you had some control of what you did expose there.
And at least some psychologists ,when asked about this issue, believe that a right for privacy is critical for the psychological well being of people, not something we can give away without consequences.
This CBC series, The Origins of the Modern Public, would dispute that idea (specifically - and I don't know if this is what you are talking about - the positive sense of privacy). Luckily, a nice HNer ripped the mp3s. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984068
Here's the specific episode (8) on privacy
http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Ideas/Full+Episodes/2010/ID/1...
Regarding age of consent, what if a mature 15yr old seduces a naive and vulnerable 21yr old and causes lasting emotional harm? How is that "none of my business" but the reverse isn't?
What if a 16 year old from England travels to America and has sex with a 20 year old? Is that OK (UK law) or not (US law)?
What you call a revolution sounds more like the way it already is for many people, and is full of arbitrary and changeable definitions that unfairly discriminate against harmless activity while also allowing harmful activity.
No. Some sexual acts are still seemed shameful by society.
Within the services, this is colloquially called the 'sluts & nuts' file.