China Shows How Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship
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What if 55% of the people want to control and limit what the other 45% do and say? It's never as easy as 'government should just do this' because a government needs to have power to fulfill its mandate. Any concentration of power can, and will be abused and there will be cycles of this occurring as the society around it grows more and less apathetic to abuse of power.
We are not modernizing and improving laws to reflect changing times. Can give plenty of examples for that. Instead we are clinging to what forefathers thought was best at the time. We are in the best time to implement true democracy. Are the red and blue candidates your only choice? Is it so hard to implement a better way to field candidates based on merits/goods that you do for society rather than dirty politics? Too much change too soon will often not be well received. So things needs to be improved one by one. But I don't see that happening. All I see is government desperate to violate on the rights of people.
Hell, if you could build grandiose scale systems to snoop on people, it not that hard to build something that betters the living condition of people. Currently the government doesn't care. Too much energy(time, money, lives) are spent on waging meaningless wars. Now if that much energy were to be focused on advancement of society..
No, it's a problem with the state. The state is not the society.
We are in the best time to implement true democracy.
No, we are not. No one knows what it even is.
Are the red and blue candidates your only choice?
That's a majoritarian consideration. Eliminating that for the U.S. is only one of many issues.
Is it so hard to implement a better way to field candidates based on merits/goods
Yes, it is extraordinarily hard. As a practical matter, any system based on electing representatives makes it impossible to ex ante anticipate the decision making that the representative will actually undertake in office. There is no guarantee that the elected agent will abide by the expectations that they have conveyed to the principal. Further, decision making in a system of collective action has profoundly different semantic considerations and rules from that of a contractual exchange.
(This topic has been well-studied under constitutional economics, voting theory, rational choice and political science. For starting points, see The Logic of Collective Action and The Calculus of Consent followed by Patterns of Democracy. For radical reappraisals, see Organization Theory (Kevin A. Carson) and Democracy: The God That Failed).
If the candidates were those who have done many good for the society, then there is high probability that any of them will do comparatively well for the society than candidates chosen not based on their merits.
> true democracy -No one knows what it even is
are we even doing any debate on how to improve the situation? that would be a start.
> 55% in control doesn't want the other 45% to have those
those(healthcare and education atleast) are needs of everyone. I don't see why anyone would disagree with making those mandatory and free/accessible for everyone. If that is implemented, coming generations would be well civilized and well behaved as it eliminates many societal problems.
If that is implemented, coming generations would be well civilized and well behaved as it eliminates many societal problems.
Oh boy. Not even wrong.
See: Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, Compulsory Miseducation by Paul Goodman, anything written by John Taylor Gatto, John Holt and A.S. Neill.
It's also trivially disprovable by mere observation.
By education, I meant some better form of learning. Those books describe an actual problem that needs to be fixed. If the education system would teach people to think critically, analyze and identify the good and bad with something, then that is the ideal education. Once a person can think clear, it will almost always show in his actions.
I had a teacher, who taught us to think about the why's? We really struggled initially. But then it made me curious about many things, which I followed by reading up on it. Reading about many different things, be that stories, news, science, technology, culture gave me a view that is accommodating of other humans and their point of view. I am very fond of that teacher. Without her, I wouldn't be what I am today. I cannot tell the same about any other teacher in my life. Now that was education I received from her.
You don't even need "hate". You only need 55% of the people to own houses, and the other 45% not to. The 55% will vote in the government that makes it easiest for immigrants to come in and push up those house prices, including rents. Just look at Australia/NZ and Canada wrt immigrants from particularly Asia: 55% of the people will sell citizenships to the detriment of the other 45%. Since 2008, the US has started doing the same, not out of people having "hate" but out of making money from their houses.
You may have many issues, but you need to start fixing something. Better if what you start with is key to fix the rest. Unfortunately it's also the key for the people in power to stay in it, so it's the most difficult issue to fix.
Better options include consensus, multi-stakeholder representation (like needing overall approval from many different groups within society for a decision), and score voting (See http://electology.org/ for more on practical voting systems).
this.. i give you a thousand points
I'm going to guess you've never been on a committee and needed something important done but very few people understand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_trivialit...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the...
I'm of two minds on this one. Gamification works in lots of arenas (from pizza coupons to annual reviews). Why not social/public morals?
It's nuts - and this is what people should revolt against.
Fight club was a documentary :-)
https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en
> obfsproxy is a tool that attempts to circumvent censorship, by transforming the Tor traffic between the client and the bridge. This way, censors, who usually monitor traffic between the client and the bridge, will see innocent-looking transformed traffic instead of the actual Tor traffic.
For better or worse, the economic and political restrictions China enacted allowed for local companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (makers of WeChat) to utterly dominate the Chinese market. Those same companies are now pretty much the only competitors that can match the American giants I mentioned before. In this area, this was a big win for China - both for companies and customers (money made stays in the country).
Well, that's the problem and the solution, as you hinted. At worst, the US giant Google is equivalent to what China has done. At best, it's better, because the US government didn't have to meddle quite so much to force such growth to occur.
So I don't really see how Baidu is some terrific example of IT flourishing. If anything, Google, Facebook, and the companies that will follow their inevitable fall are noteworthy.
And if you don't like Google, you have alternatives for every one of its services. Same with Facebook. Really viable alternatives, too.
The typical Silicon Valley start-up has more money than some of the most successful, long standing companies in other countries. Skilled people from other countries will move to the US, because they can get sometimes up to 10 times their usual pay for the same job (and maybe still get less than local US engineers). On the other hand other countries get mostly US losers as expats who can't make it at home and basically live off being born with white skin and having a US passport.
So now that all your smart engineers are gone and you know you don't have enough money to get them back, what are you going to do to compete with the US company? Blocking off your market is one of the few successful strategies (and actually accepted amongst educated people).
China did it and some regard they have quite a good chance to end up on top of the US one day. I'm thinking just about all the new mobile technologies that get much faster adoption in a people that is more willing to experiment with new stuff and basically grew up with mobile internet.
The US government does its share of meddling; just not in tech (since Obama overrode the Apple import ban in HTC v Apple). What do you think "promoting American interests" is a euphemism for?
Farming/agriculture is a good example: farming subsidies and skewed trade are just as forceful as the Chinese protectionism.
All the EFF ends up doing is sounding like a propaganda wing of the state department.
There is a reason Obama has to meet with the Tech Industry to talk about the spread of ISIS and other forms of lunacy on the networks. There is a real need for control rods. And our tools are useless. That's the reality.
However they end up sounding, the reality won't change that covert surveillance is not good for a country and its citizens.
> There is a reason Obama has to meet with the Tech Industry to talk about the spread of ISIS and other forms of lunacy
I'm tired of repeating this, but show me one incident, just one where government surveillance has helped stop a terrorist attack and I'll be all in for your surveillance. The reality is that the terrorists of Paris attacks used plain-text SMS to communicate, which shows how ineffective our intelligence systems are.
All that is going to happen with covert surveillance is just more harassment of innocent citizens. What's the guarantee that the agent doing the surveillance is honest and sincere and won't take undue advantage of the data gathered from surveillance?
That said there is an obvious use for it in helping stop attacks and pretending there isn't is weird to me.
> show me one incident, just one where government surveillance has helped stop a terrorist attack and I'll be all in for your surveillance
Whether or not these exist they're likely to be classified, it's possible attacks have been stopped - the classification of information makes it hard to know.
Though mass collection can help, if you have intel of suspicious people you could look through the entire history of their communication - see what they've been saying and to whom. When you newly learn that a person is a part of ISIS (for example) you can look through their entire communication stream retroactively. Since the attackers are not always that sophisticated (they used SMS in Paris like you said) you can potentially learn a lot of information by doing this (their network, maybe plans).
They're posting videos of themselves on youtube showing off weapons and locations - I suspect there's a lot of information available in their communication that's useful for stopping attacks. It's a tool you would obviously want if you had to do the job.
That said I think the secrecy is dangerous because it prevents the public from being able to determine what level we'd accept (and legal recourse against abuse). It also is more likely to encourage abuse and since James Clapper lied to congress about it we can't trust the organizations that have tasked themselves to do it.
The problem is the same can be applied to {{political_opinion}} such as $has_been_to_rally(tea_party) or $is_member(nra) or $has_donated_to(aclu). Then, tptb can glean through all the past records of anyone who is starting to gain momentum (and trust me we all have broken laws one way or another if we look finely enough).
My argument against a surveillance state is not based on whether it can stop acts of violence but rather my question is "at what cost?"
The 'it's not effective anyway' argument always struck me as wrong.
I don't agree. Surveillance\Censorship is necessary and it has to get better over time. In the era of social networks and virality, bad stuff spreads at a speed and scale no one has seen before. If the Twitter CEO is saying "We suck at dealing with abuse" it isn't a stretch to believe the Intelligence agencies and defense establishment sucks at preventing worse stuff like the Boston Bombings or ISIS recruitment.
Hoover's FBI sending death threats to MLK is not so long ago.
My point is that it doesn't matter what the reasons are for censorship or surveillance, if you actually want to implement your repressive solution successfully, you will end up walking down an increasingly authoritarian path. Every country has some clear reason for introducing their own "control rods", whether it's Islamic separatists in Xinjiang or immigrants or the communist menace or economic instability. The reasons are always different, but the consequences are often the same.
There is also the problem with media. Giving religious terrorists the attention they crave is the last thing we should do. That only gives them a sense of satisfaction.