Hacker News Reader

"A new leader will be elected, they'll flip the switch, say that because of the crisis, because of the dangers that we face in the world - some new and unpredicted threat - we need more authority, we need more power. And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It will be turnkey tyranny." - Edward Snowden (June 2013)

Right on, except you misspelled "Joseph Goebbels."

If your off to study journalism you might fit this that I just published today handy. It's important to remember that surveillance in both the media and activism scene in the UK has also meant significant physical surveillance. Meaning both surveillance of movement and also infiltration. We are writing a series of things about this (secure meetings with sources, covering protests, dealing with arrests etc) based on the content in Umbrella App.

"How journalists and activists can identify and counter physical surveillance"

https://medium.com/@roryireland/how-journalists-and-activist...

Strange the Umbrella App link gives me a 403 https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/ Can't find it within the FD app.

Yeah your the third person today to say that to us. We checked it was working outside with direct download link at https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/umbrella.apk. As far as we can tell there is an issue with F-Droid build but our devs are looking at it at the moment to see can we solve from our side.

Actually, as a temporary fix its working if you go to F-Droid and then add our repo

"https://secfirst.org/fdroid/repo/umbrella.apk"

Thank you :)

Learn political organizing skills, which address these issues: How to build awareness, appeal to people, organize them, etc.

As many veterans of past civil rights battles have said: Don't get mad, organize!

I think we should also focus on making our current technology impervious to this type of tracking. If the flaw exists in the system that exposes our personal information then we should work to plug the hole. I think organizing is important too but I guarantee someone is going to try this type of power grab again in the future.

We can make our tech impervious to tracking time and time again. Follow best practices, etc. It absolutely does help.

The shortfall comes in with backdooring and just getting access. There's nothing stopping a government that strongarms laws like this into law, from strongarming a company into giving access to data.

Mesh networks? Everything P2P.

Gnunet on the right track: https://gnunet.org/

Technology can be made impervious to spies but organisations based on humans cannot.

I've just started out freelancing, this is the kick in the pants I need to fill my downtime.

Fill your downtime with work to fill your pipeline.

Unless you plan on selling freelancing services related to anti-surveillance work (Security, building an audience in the area) really filling your time with anything but sales is going to hurt in a years time

If what you do during your downtime is directly related to your work then it can hardly be called downtime, now can it?

I assumed with the reference to starting freelancing (s)he referred to "time I normally would have spent at work but now cannot bill (i.e. 9-5 M-F) as opposed to "time that never used to be work (i.e. Sleeping, weekends etc)"

Otherwise the freelancing comment would have been superfluous

But you read it how you like.

I've noticed that Britons, generally speaking, put a lot of trust in authority. They'll shrug it off or rationalize it when their government introduces another perverted law - the NHS works, so it can't be that bad, surely. Britain lacks a sizeable and vocal government-distrusting counterculture like they exist in Germany or the US. How you go about introducing that artificially, I don't know. The frog is being boiled too slowly.

Ah, yes. The US, where you don't have so much surveillance... but cops can just take your money because they feel like it. British police also follow the Peelian principles, so they do fewer things like send SWAT teams to batter down people's doors and point guns at innocents.

I'm not really seeing how US government application of authority is better than the UK's on the basis of a vocal citizenry.

That is interesting. Living in Sweden, and having lived in the UK for 15 years, I feel the Brits trust their government much less than the Swedes do. In the UK there is strong resistance against a national ID card, as an example. Whereas in Sweden you can hardly live without one.

I got the feeling that the Brits didn't trust their government with that info and control it implies. In Sweden we have the opposite: ID cards are seen as an asset and surveillance cameras are severely restricted by the government, for privacy reasons.

Resistance to the national ID card idea mostly came down to two things 1) cost to government, and 2) cost to citizens.

There's also the fact that ~87% of the population already hold a passport, and some of those that don't likely have a drivers license.

The funny thing is that the cost to the individual is negligible and the cost to government (and business) is low compared to the benefits. Less fraud, efficient identification processes etc.

I think we're fairly moderate people in general, so it's not so much excessive trust as just some kind of tacit understanding that things won't go to extremes because we're British (and also a tendency to avoid extreme reactions). I guess sometimes that's dangerous because there's a faslse sense of security, but perhaps there's other benefits to that.

Interestingly, privacy matters less to "wage-slaves" than to entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs value their reputations more, having to gain approval from strangers more often. Meeting with a customer/VC/bank/mayor/state committee/supplier for the first time? good chance they'll google you.

In a typical corporate desk job, they do some basic checking (arrest record) at hire, then leave you alone.

I'm sorry this doesn't help directly, but it I share it to help interpret the apathy of your typical human. Perhaps if they considered the future when they might be subject to judgment by a group they don't know.

Offtopic but why not call entrepreneurs "revenue slaves" or "investor slaves" if we are going to be fair.

I've always found the pro-privacy argument "well let me see your email than" to be weak. But when someone responds to this "here, no problem" this indicates exactly what the problem is: Apathy.

A lack of privacy induces apathy. This is exactly what your friend responded from and acted upon. The better argument to start with, and one that counters apathy, is: I do not value privacy because I have many things to hide but rather because I have many things I value.

> But it's the same everywhere, introduce an encroaching bill, have uproar from those with the heads screwed on (the minority). Let it grow a little stale in the publics eye and keep reintroducing with slight alterations it until it passes into law.

So, is this the mere-exposure effect in practice? Or is there another psychological effect at play here?

I think it's that the government[0] can repeatedly propose the bill and wear down the public's will to fight it. They[0] don't appear to lose any/much standing from continuous proposals and people become apathetic towards continued fighting.

[0]whoever that may mean

Does something like this make a strong case for UK having a formal constitution to check the power of Parliament to make laws like this?

Not really. The UK is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and the law can be challenged under that. See for instance here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/20/human_rights_court_r...

This summarizes all what I could not forge into words.

Glad I could help, more than anything this was me getting the sense of helplessness of my chest!

Then you'd better do something because pretty soon you won't have the option to leave for a more enlightened jurisdiction.

Like the U.S? No point soon...

I think 'anigbrowl meant the Brexit thing...

No, the grandparent was correct...sadly. No hyperbole intended.

Yikes. All the more reason to embrace technologies like the Decentralized Web.

The solution to government surveillance is not laws - we've already seen that laws don't stop secret shadow government entities - the only defense is technology.