> Surveillance sliding into dictatorship is one of the most common ways that democracies fall.
What? Give me one example where surveillance was the _reason_ and main tool for ascending dictator.
What? Give me one example where surveillance was the _reason_ and main tool for ascending dictator.
Given as my family lived and suffered from this kind of dictatorship throughout three consecutive generations, I hope I can explain why I don't think that this is surveillance.
You see, when you write to NKVD to say that your neighbor said a joke about Stalin, they don't actually check if what you've said is true. They don't honestly care. The accuracy of your report is completely irrelevant to the system, and even further — if these reports were actually checked, the system wouldn't be as effective, because this would mean that the system actually had rules.
Instead, this report system was based on complete paranoia and random violence. Random violence, not based on any actual rules, but only pretending to be, is much more effective in putting people in a state of learned helplessness and upholding the regime — while (in the example of 30s Soviet Union) killing almost the whole elite several times over.
This has nothing to do with surveillance.
Maybe not the main tool for Hitler to reach his position as Fürer but it was certainly one of the main tools to keep him in power.
I understand and agree with what you were probably trying to say ;)
Yes, every regime is trying to get information about who's trying to destroy it. But (1) it's not a tool to get to power as much as a tool to hold to power, and (2) it's not inherently evil: if you have some regime that you actually like and don't want to see violently overthrown, you would support such measures, implemented in a reasonable way (!), too.
(I don't have a firm opinion on what modern surveillance will do politically over time, just answering your specific question.)
Update: take for example google/twitter/facebook and how they have a lot of control over what we do online. Because they have that info they can influence our lives. Facebook's mood experiment is a recent example. Also if a picture of an election candidate is shared a lot, that candidate gets more votes by causation. Google/twitter/facebook don't have a political agenda behind their abilities and people are concerned about their influence. It makes more sense to be concerned about politically controlled agencies.
Please, stop analyzing things as being "good" or "bad". By any reasonable person's standards, the whole today's world is just awful. It's not usable. Use "worse" and "better" instead: when we compare things to one another, only then can we get somewhere.
Furthermore, the fact that billions of people are voluntarily using social media, all stored on private company's cloud servers, along with ML, massive computing increases gives those who'd use surveillance for power grabs exponentially more power than the Stasi, KGB, Hoover's FBI, etc. could have ever dreamed of.
But that's what the quote from the post is claiming.
> Furthermore, the fact that billions of people are voluntarily using social media, all stored on private company's cloud servers, along with ML, massive computing increases gives those who'd use surveillance for power grabs exponentially more power than the Stasi, KGB, Hoover's FBI, etc. could have ever dreamed of.
No, Hoover wouldn't. When you compare Hoover's era to today, compare how easier it is to track paper letters and phone calls than email and skype, and more importantly, how much more of emails and skype calls do we have now than then. The only thing that have gotten easier is to bulk process them, yes. But if you actually want to tap communications of certain individuals for some legitimate reasons (and I think we all can agree that in the most corrupt and awful country, there are some situations where these legitimate reasons exist), you would need much more man-hours and effort to do that.