Comment by tobbyb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobbyb | Hacker News Reader

There are many who not only remain unconcerned but often seek to diminish or dismiss concern as hyperbole or exaggerated, often by pointing to the current status quo.

No one is interested in you the individual, but they are certainly interested in building the capability to track all individuals and preempt anything that threatens any entrenched status quo.

We are not currently a police state but we are certainly building the capability and the cultural language to justify it. The moral high ground and the entire framework of values that powered it have shown to be near meaningless by the alarming ease with which they have been discarded in favour of the language of security and paranoia. Everyone is safe in a cage. It will be naive to believe in the context of how modern states operate that a cluster of extreme right wing medievalists in the ME are bringing on this state of affairs, the bulk and most powerful of whom are paradoxically our best friends in the region.

Surveillance states are not a on/off thing, you don't suddenly wake one day to a surveillance state. These capabilities take time to build, but once the infrastructure is in place it will inevitably get used.

In this case we can see all the pieces being put in place methodically with language that makes George Orwell look astonishingly prescient. And its the self absorption of this generation who have inherited and enjoyed a relatively 'free' and equal state with 'hope for improvement' but are going to willfully pass on something more ominous.

Im in the pessimistic group. What can an average person do?

- blow a whistle and be on the run like snowden?

- put their name on a petition which also acts as a watch list?

- publicly protest and hoping to be covered by mainstream media which basically means quitting their job abd taking a < 10% risk of success

- start a viral shame campaign which both google abd facebook have attempted multiple times only to have cisa pass and this sort pf thing to become the "status quot"

Really, what is there to do but watch the future unfold into dystopia? Really, tell me? In reality we are tools turning the coorperate machine. Individuals freedom is not more important the economic evolution. Online communities are unaminously against evil but in reality, they are made up of fattened happy pigs that do very little but talk to one another and hope to get their oen lives a little more perfect.

Governments have been corrupt for more than a mellenia. Recent attempts at being humane should be taken with a grain of salt

> start a viral shame campaign which both google abd facebook have attempted multiple times

The business model of both Google and Facebook is based on intensive user (and non-user) surveillance. They don't and never will "campaign against" a dystopian surveillance state because they very much are that dystopia. As Eric Schmidt from Google says: “We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.”

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Eric-Schmidt-We-Know-Wher...

Nonetheless, the created a facade. Unless someone like pewdiepie decides its a good idea to rile up 12 year olds, Mass majority of adults are more willing to listen to coorperations than to internet personalities or nobodies screaming conspiracy

> What can an average person do?

Don't incorporate in the UK.

International business is for the rich. Local businesses dont have a choice. not sure how this spplies

On an individual level that would be leave the UK - brain drain.

The simple answer is stop being concerned with your own lifestyle and do what's right, consequences be damned. Edward Snowden at least had the guts to throw his entire life away to bring attention to something he thought was morally wrong.

The lack of that sort of courage is why the world is going to hell. Today's attitudes of prioritising personal 'comfort' over what's right is why this sort of crap is being allowed to happen.

The best solution for a company in this situation (especially a large one) is to blow the whistle to the media and watch the fallout. Oh sure, you might not come out alright, but the media and internet reaction would certainly be fierce, and the reputation of any government involved would go to hell extremely quickly.

More the reputation goes, the harder it is to stay 'legitimate' and keep in power. Same thing goes for companies trying to shut down smaller ones and individuals through threats.

Given the extreme zeal for liberty and freedom espoused by the tech crowd in the early 90's its more than sad, no a complete tragedy that there is just one Snowden today and hundreds of thousands of others who 'toil' away silently actively building this.

Here was your turn to do your bit, something meaningful and what we get instead is a complete co-option into the system. No activism, no protest, very few whistle blowers, especially since you of all other groups would be alert to the possibilities, where is the movement? There has been real sacrifice and sustained, persistent struggle to get here, values have a cost to the individual, if one balks if there is a cost then its just empty words and mass delusion.

And thus there is no shame, no movement, no activism, no code of conduct, no moral pressure to dissociate with these kind of activities or to call out all these people in any technology fora, even today when its out in the open.

And it's just not their failing. Modern populations seem to be completely unequal to any kind of meaningful activism and change. There is such a debilitating focus on individualism, and the completely irrelevance of wider community and other interests that the only real thing left is self interest and self interest has no 'values' or value, beyond expediency and survival.

People who call out such get banned in places like HN.

An open discussion of government corruption and oppression is essentially impossible here.

Its very easy to ask others to sacrifice themselves fir your own good. Different to be willing to do it yourself. While I agree hive mind values should be considered above the individual, Its far easier said than done.

But from what i understand, the nsa chooses to train individuals in part based on psychological aspects. I wish i could find where i read that

Honestly, the only thing you can do is vote for the non standard parties, and get your friends to do the same. We need to remove the current incumbents.

If your friends questions you why they should do this, then ask them this:

> Can I see a list of the porn you like to watch?

No, really mate! The British government believes that it should know that you have a penchant for large heavily endowed older ladies servicing three men at a time. The British government isn't being very specific about who can actually access that lust list of yours either. And funnily enough you can't get a list of the Home Secretary, Theresa May's internet history, because "people might use it against her". Someone already tried an FOI request and got denied!

Once I start quietly loading ISIS websites in hidden iframes on my blog, you'll all be on the list of people who'll be getting a knock knock dawn raid.

Radical transparency, David Brin style. Our runaway technology has made the panopticon inevitable. The best we can manage is to make sure we watch them as much as they watch us. That's what wikileaks was trying to do, on a small scale. (Anyone up for an open-source, freely-accessible ANPR network?)

While this is a cool idea, it wouldn't balance because the Government knows which license plate is kept by which person, and your putative ANPR network doesn't.

You can do what you can to improve and encourage the adoption of technology that makes dragnet voyeurism impossible, and individual surveillance expensive enough to be reserved for bona fide investigations.

As much as feasible, avoid buying into technology that prioritizes shiny bells and whistles over privacy and security.

And perhaps try to practice and spread greater tolerance for personal lifestyle differences, hopefully to reduce the amount of persecution in the event that nothing can prevent the surveillance state from emerging.

Keep these 2 points in mind: (1) unlike previous police states, this one is machine mediated and pervasive. There will be no place to hide and it is hard to see how it will be dismantled once in place. (2) our children are growing up in a culture that no longer reflects the traditional values held sacred in the West.

What traditional values would those be? Could you clarify, because your second point depepnds largely on the generation within which you were born.

I think OP means the values of classical liberalism, i.e. freedom from oppression of the state, and everything that goes with. When you empower the state to the degree that it will be empowered once they can keep tabs on everyone at all times, we will have oppression.

For the last thousands years, we, our mothers, and our fathers have been struggling for freedom of thought we have sustained many horrible losses and some immense victories and we are now at a very serious time.

From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century we began to be concerned primarily with access to printed material.

The right to read, and the right to publish were the central subject of our struggle for freedom of thought for most of the last half millennium.

The basic concern was for the right to read in private and to think and speak and act on the basis of a free and uncensored will.

[...]

By the end of the 19th century, that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance of Christianity itself and European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind it spoke of "liberté égalité fraternité" but actually it meant freedom to think differently.

The "Ancien Régime" begun to struggle against thinking and we moved into the next phase of the struggle for freedom of thought which presumed the possibility of unorthodox thinking and revolutionary acting.

And for 200 years we struggled with the consequences of those changes.

That was then and this is now.

Now we begin a new phase in the history of the human race. We are building a single nervous system which will embrace every human mind.

https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-...

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