The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List | Hacker News Reader

The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List

drive.google.com

Could also be labeled "Meta-Surveillance: How to make a list of everyone interested in Surveillance" given that it's hosted as a google drive document instead of _any other sane format in the world_.

It's a PDF.

Hosted on Google drive for some reason. It'd be interesting to see what inferences Google makes about people accessing files on g-drive.

Yeah, if you're logged in to Google and access this file, it will now appear in your list of recent Drive files.

I know what PDFs look like, they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner. It's a Google page wrapped around a PDF.

>they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner

I don't understand how can someone who doesn't even bother to logout out of his google account or use something like firefox containers care about privacy. The document has to be hosted somewhere no matter what and google drive isn't any worse than random web page which uses google analytics.

Privacy and convenience don't have to be trade-offs.

If you set up containers to quarantine all Google stuff in one container this is still going to open in that container.

Doesn't Google Drive show the identity of someone reading the document to other people reading it, or at least the owner? That's worse than just collecting analytics internally at Google.

No. If you aren't authenticated, it shows your presence in a shared document as "anonymous [metastable animal designator]"

I should have made it clear I was assuming that people were authenticated to their Google account. I think most people who use GMail never log out, and might not check the URL and realize they were navigating to a Google doc.

Then you entirely missed the point of the comment you replied to: that if you willingly impose google surveillance on yourself you really don't have any space to complain about being reminded of it.

I think you're missing my point that even if you willingly impose Google surveillance on yourself, Google Drive is still worse than Google Analytics because your personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers, not just Google.

> personally identifiable activity is visible to the author and/or other readers

View activity is not surfaced to users. View activity is tracked, and in a _GSuite domain_ (such as your job) an admin can audit that activity. For a standard Google account, a user cannot know whether another user has viewed that document, let alone which user. Is there a way you're seeing this that I'm missing? If so I'd like to know about it so I can raise it as an issue.

If you're thinking about docs/sheets/slides presence, unless you've been shared directly on the document the owner (and other users) only see "Anonymous <Animal>".

If the document is shared to you comment/edit access, that comment/edit activity _will_ show up in the document's activity stream, but at that point the owner of the document already knows you have access by virtue of sharing it to you.

I realize you probably don't have much incentive to believe me, but as an engineer on Drive I can say that we take privacy incredibly seriously.

Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared Google Drive documents since then.

If it's not the case that the owner of the doc can audit activity, I stand corrected.

EDITED TO ADD: I suppose the root of my confusion is that it's pretty hard to distinguish the behavior of Google Drive from Google Docs; and once the lack of privacy has been observed anywhere (e.g. using Docs the workplace), it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me" list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

> Thanks for the response. I'm mostly familiar with Google Docs in the workplace, where it was apparent who was reading what document at a particular moment from a list of users at the upper-right.

Right, which is the notion behind the Activity Dashboard in Docs too (GSuite only). If you left a doc open and watched who popped up, you can effectively know who views a document, so it was exposed as a panel instead. You can disable your own activity showing up for document editors (which applies retroactively) from that same pane. (https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png)

Obviously, in GSuite especially, view activity is recorded and your GSuite admin can audit that activity, but that's kind of an obvious need for a business.

> Separately, on my personal account, at some point I viewed a publicly shared document from a well-known person, and that ended up in my "shared documents" (or "documents shared with you"?) for ages. I wasn't sure if that sharing was evident in both directions. I've avoided clicking on shared Google Drive documents since then.

If you open a link-shared document, it add it to your Shared With Me list (and Recent list), but none of that is visible to the sharer. If you're worried about even "Anonymous Fox" showing up, go to the /preview url, e.g. https://docs.google.com/document/d/<docid>/preview. This still adds it to Shared With Me/logs events on your account (it'll show up in your Quick Access results), but none of it is visible to the sharer and they won't even see your icon.

> it's hard not to assume it's also happening with PDF's shared via Google Drive, simply because you can't know what the other person is seeing.

This is a struggle, I agree. I work on it and sometimes I struggle to remember what applies on GSuite vs. consumer. It's a complicated product and therefore doesn't have one straightforward answer, especially in light of the myriad of policies that GSuite admins can enable/disable. For instance, whether we even record your search queries in Drive (for showing as recent searches in Drive) is controlled by a policy your admin can set.

> It's especially hard when there is an asymmetry (e.g. in a non-GSuite environment, I can see some publicly shared document in my "shared with me" list, but I guess the sharer can't see me).

Right. Consumer: shows up in SWM, GSuite: shows up in SWM & you show up in Activity Dashboard to editors (unless you turn it off as shown in https://i.imgur.com/AOGmj40.png -- it may default to off in your organization anyways).

Also if you sit near the Android people, let them know I'm going to be irritated if I find that my parents have been tricked into activating location tracking on their phones again! It seems like I have to shut off all the various Google privacy settings every time I visit them. They don't want to be tracked.

Why do they have phones with GPS circuits in them it they don't want to be tracked?

There's nothing about GPS that says it should provide continuous information to others about one's location.

Presumably to be able to know where they themselves are, a gps circuit is only a passive receiver and a bit of compute.

Hit right-click > open in private window rather than left-click. I'm with the other poster, if you haven't de-googlified your digital life and you don't even bother opening this in private / firefox container, then I don't know what you expect.

If your Google account is in the corner it’s because you’re surfing the web while logged into Google.

or those who shared it simply wanted to distribute this to anyone who participated in the event (this reading list seems to be a follow-up deliverable):

https://lawweb.colorado.edu/events/details.jsp?id=8376

and

https://twitter.com/alvarombedoya/status/1168933978029678592...

fwiw, there is no need to authenticate with google to download the pdf (tor works fine too if anyone is too paranoid).

There is no need true, but if clicked and was logged into google, they now know. True I should have use an incognito but the point is there.

Your ISP knows what IP you use, and Google has your ISP's phone number.

The signal value of “being exposed to a link about surveillance and clicking it” is pretty darn low. Unless you’re in North Korea I wouldn’t worry about it.

? It's a cheap way to host a file

>given that it's hosted as a google drive document

While an amusing irony, the reality is that -- without special measures -- 99% of content either is hosted on or routed through infrastructure owned by companies with less than stellar history regarding privacy..

Heh, I missed the first ' and parsed the title as

    (The Color of Surveillance): ([Monitoring of] [Poor and Working Peoples Reading List])

instead of

    '([The Color of Surveillance]: [Monitoring of Poor and Working People])' [Reading List]

but I suppose the latter is partially about the former anyways.

Same here. Initially thought this was about libraries monitoring what poor people read.

Yes, that was confusing. I've repunctuated above.

Mirror in case Drive crashes: https://sdan.cc/archive/CoS4%20Reading%20List.pdf

here's another mirror _in case drive crashes_

https://gist.github.com/philshem/71507d4e8ecfabad252fbdf4d9f...

Lists don't make good HN submissions, because the discussion ends up being about the lowest common denominator of the items on the list, making it generic instead of specific. Generic discussions are less interesting because there are fewer unpredictable things to say. When threads turn generic, they become repetitions of previous discussions, and usually turn nasty, almost as if that's what the mind turns to for amusement in the absence of new things to chew on.

It's better to pick the most interesting item on a list and submit that. Curiosity thrives on the diffs between a new thing and other related things.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

It's a shame, because some of those links are really interesting.

If they only included a little bit of a narrative, they could easily make those links take on new meaning. Maybe even mixing examples of old with new (like the surveillance and terrible abuses toward labor leaders in the 19th century)

I think the list is a good starting point for something a little more cohesive.

Kind of amusing that this PDF is hosted on Google's servers, given that Google is running the largest surveillance operation in history.

That would be the NSA, which I guess is the same thing.

Raw pastebin of the PDF contents here (Google Docs/PDF lol) so even those of us with JS off can view it.

https://pastebin.com/raw/baHYyHyX

The title is quite confusing. Maybe a moderator could improve it... The content is good.

Wait, poor working people read?

Every time I hear that term it's typically university students (and their professors or related groups, in this case Georgetown Law) co-opting that label and projecting their ideology on an idealized group of people whom they don't have much in common with (besides some vague anger at society and elites) - yet are convinced they know what's best for them... often pushing mass centralized systems as the solution.

Systems that these same people will just happen to control and then later the 'vanguard' never actually gives up said power to the working poor. This story has repeated itself in history a bunch of times and it continues to.

In the hands of the Chinese government being on such a list could get you sent to a reeducation camp. The US isn't there yet, but "yet" does too much work here. If you ever wonder why pro-gun folk are so adamantly against gun registration, remember the yet. If 1A won't hold, 2A through 10A likely won't either.

Because I'm sure in the context of a revolution, the American gun owners would be super hard to identify.

How closely does the NRA guard its donor list, or Guns & Ammo its subscription roster?

You might find the extreme gun fanatics this way, but for every one of those there are dozens that just have a regular weapon in the closet for emergencies and don't advertise it whatsoever. (At least in some jurisdictions, may vary based on your location)

In an actual revolution scenario, they're pretty easy to find too. They'd be the people with guns.

I don't think I've actually ever really understood this aspect of American paranoia.

See Venezuala. First came registration, then confiscation, then conflict. The government would round up as many guns as possible before war broke out in the streets.

It's an interesting hypothesis that more guns in the hands of civilians would have resulted in less bloody conflict (as opposed to military escalation in light of armed resistance), but I don't know how one proves it. What's the control group?

I don't think the claim has ever been that it would result in less bloody conflict. On the contrary, likely more bloody.

I think the claim is simply that it can potentially change the outcome.

And before anyone disagrees, how many soldiers died in Iraq & Afghanistan at the hands of insurgencies?

Plenty, until the US pivoted to drone-launched missiles.

Have fun launching missiles at American cities and insurgents embedded in civilian targets. Even shooting missiles at the desert kill enough innocent bystanders to radicalize the enemy, now imagine doing that in Miami and Houston.

I have imagined it, and it's horrifying. But not guaranteed to radicalize people outside the immediate effected area against the ones pulling the trigger.

Philadelphia bombed a city block to flush out an entrenched armed group in the '80s, and life went on (for everyone who didn't have their home burned down). Don't underestimate the American capacity to believe something was done because it was necessary. It's the only country to have ever deployed nuclear weapons. Twice.

The MOVE incident was gross incompetence that spiraled out of control. If you have one of those every month, in every city, on purpose, the country is going to completely break down.

Heuristics. What are the 2 longest-standing governments in the world? US and SUI

What are the 2 most-armed civil societies in the world? US and SUI

Then you have the other end of the spectrum: is regulation of private gun ownership predict government turning on its citizens? No.

Is regulation of private gun ownership a prerequisite for authoritarian govts to turn on citizens? Yes

It is not paranoia when a US presidential candidate states he wants full blown confiscation.

If anything, it is mistrust.

I'm curious as to why gun advocates trust the candidate who says they want to confiscate guns less than the president engaging in authoritarian and corrupt behavior.

The whole point of the right to bear arms is that they're meant to be used against the government when they overstep their bounds. But what happens when the people who bear said arms agrees with how the government is breaking the law?

Hell, they sell those lists. Though just because you are on those lists, does not make you the typical “gun nut”; FWIW I fall in that gun nut category.

The “I lost them in a boating accident” won’t work when they zip tie you to a chair and start cutting off body parts.

I don't consider them "gun nuts." People support the NRA or read Guns & Ammo for their own reasons; it's a free country. So free that someone who has a mind to shoot a dozen strangers can do so with relative ease, but a free country.

Granularity matters. Anyone can find my phone number in the book, but when the government tracks and analyzes exactly who I'm calling it becomes an invasion of privacy and an existential threat to free society.

What prey, would you do with the list of 5.5 million gun owners? Basically, 4% of US adults.

Take their guns. Though I gather that might still be difficult, since so many Americans profess their intention to lay down their lives to protect their gun(ownership right)s.

I'm sure you can understand why most observers are puzzled by this, since guns are ostensibly purchased as tools used to prevent one's own death.

There's less than a million police in the US.

More than half of them are desk/bureaucracy bound. It's probably more like 3/4 of them, not to mention many of them will favor the gun owners, but let's be generous to the opposing argument and suppose all active street duty cops were in on it.

So you are saying each police officer is going to arrest and remove weapons from 10 people scattered across millions of square miles. They will also need to ostensibly put those 5.5 million 'bad Americans' somewhere. We don't even have jails for that many people. You'd need literally a few million guards just to keep them. And that's just NRA members. There's many more gun owners than there are NRA members.

Have you been in the US? Do you understand how insanely unrealistic this is?

Lists are great when the people you want to hurt are small in number and weak in force. Neither applies here.

A tyrant dictator could send the army, but again, way outnumbered. Not to mention how big the USA is, how rugged the terrain can be, and how well acquainted the locals are. Even just rounding people up is super hard when people WANT to cooperate (look at our response to natural disasters)

The tyrant dictator can take over with tanks, no doubt. But then they would face a long, protracted guerrilla war with all freedom loving Americans. If Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, the founding of the USA, etc have taught us anything, is that you can conquer, but holding a territory is a whole other ball game. And holding is where it's at.

I imagine we'd do it like Australia did, where the cop/population and population/land ratios are presumably even worse.

I'm not very well acquainted with what happened in Australia.

Since you are bringing them up, you must be.

So tell me gun ownership statistics for Australia and participation in gun ownership organizations. I'd be interested to hear what happened there and learn.

I mean I know they pretty much disarmed, and I've seen the positive statistics paraded by anti-gun supporters, but I've yet to hear about the details of what % of the population was armed, what % the population supported disarming, ratio between gun owners and cops, etc. That would say a lot about the feasibility comparison.

Since you are implying the feasibility of disarmament was worse in Australia, I'd love to learn about the exact details that allowed you to come to your educated conclusion that it's worse in Australia. I'm always happy to learn about things I didn't know about.

Unless that is you are just assuming. Like when you said 'take their guns' without even considering feasibility and then you ignored posts that confront you with contradictory evidence to your assumptions. There's a certain type of attitude that will base their conclusions on made up information (aka assumed... I can't say you are presuming as you don't seem to have the data needed to make this about probability), without bothering to check or even ignoring contradictory realities as perceived and recorded by human consensus. It's not very pretty.

>I'm always happy to learn about things I didn't know about.

If this is true, you'll be happy to do your own research. The Australian experience with an assault weapon ban, gun buybacks, and a firearms registry is well-known to anyone remotely serious about gun ownership discourse, and the fact that you aren't familiar with it casts into doubt the ostensible good faith with which you've approached me with this short essay of glib intellectual overextension.

The italicized "ass" in "assuming" is cute, and also 100% against HN's code of conduct, by the way.

Gun buyback program.

And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to organize.

I would argue that in the modern world strong encryption and other safeguards against surveillance much more worthy of of 2A protection than firearms..

Totally agree on the encryption, but why not both? They don’t need a quantum computer to get your 1024 bit key; a pipe wrench will work fine. I need a gun in the latter case.

Guns do work. You may end up dead, but you’ll take some with you.

Well, I hope -- by among other things, a careful use of encryption -- to avoid facing the pipe wrench :D

Dying for a course can be a choice, but I would like it to bring some meaningful benefit to society. Just taking some lackeys with you doesn't seem all that useful to me.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Guns themselves are pretty useless except as ways to make a few people rich. The "revolution" against the powerful nation state are the tools of propaganda and discord. Enemies can manipulate our political system and the powerful forces of self-interest and partisanship fog the battlefield.

The aura of power associated with guns is literal bread and circus that keeps people angry and ignorant. There's a fantasy that some sort of popular revolt is a viable thing. It's not, and that's been demonstrated time and time again.

This sort of thing is a big part of the limits of US power today... there's nobody to blow up. We're equipped to fight the ultimate WW2, but that arsenal cannot be directly focused on a nuclear power. The United States has the most powerful and capable military that has ever existed, but like any tool, it isn't so effective in solving problems outside of it's scope.

Why would you assume that the military would just go along with the killings of average Americans? I think there is tons of evidence to suggest that this wouldn't happen. Not only were there problems in Vietnam when people were ordered to kill innocents (you know... people that don't even look like, speak like, or share the same culture as Americans) but we've had a history of military commanders reminding presidents that they are sworn to the constitution. Their oath starts

> I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic

There's a large subset of people who, for whatever reason, are particularly attuned to ideas and fears around societal collapse, authoritarian takeovers, and other threats to their personal liberties.

That's not to say these fears are completely unfounded -- they've been realized before many times throughout history. But when faced with questions such as, "Would the US military turn on the people?" they're likely to assess the risk far higher than the average person would. They're also far more likely to be libertarians.

I just don't understand why people think the US military would act in unison. I'm sure there would be factions that would go along in this (crazy and unlikely) scenario. But I'm fairly convinced the larger faction would protect the people.

We had a hard time getting soldiers to kill civilians in Vietnam. We had a hard time shooting others in WWII. How can you convince me that the majority of these soldiers are going to shoot their friends and family? That scenario itself seems ludicrous.

"I just don't understand why people think the US military would act in unison. I'm sure there would be factions that would go along in this (crazy and unlikely) scenario. But I'm fairly convinced the larger faction would protect the people."

I'm not sure why the US military would be an exception in the history of hundreds or thousands of years of militaries being used against domestic civilian populations. Politicians are very good at getting militaries to heel. That's why militaries exist in the first place.

"We had a hard time getting soldiers to kill civilians in Vietnam. We had a hard time shooting others in WWII. How can you convince me that the majority of these soldiers are going to shoot their friends and family? That scenario itself seems ludicrous."

Some soldiers may have had a hard time killing Vietnamese civilians, yet despite that nearly 200,000 died. In WW2 tens of millions died. As for shooting friends and family, see the viciousness and bloodiness of the American Civil War.

During times of unrest, stuff happens. Are they average citizens, thugs, rebels or the enemy? Depends on your POV.

Fortunately, the US has strong institutions and balance of powers that make civil unrest, etc a rare event. When there is, actions depend on the situation.

Note that I'm not an advocate of arming one's self against the government in any way. I'm pointing out that the fantasyland of some citizen militia fighting any modern nation-state is absurd.

Examples of things where unrest or rebellion were put down by force:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner%27s_slave_rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars

"Why would you assume that the military would just go along with the killings of average Americans?"

Remember Kent State?

In the hypothetical scenario where there is armed insurgency against the US government and US military, I don't doubt that the US military would do what it had to do to suppress such an insurgency. Yes, there could be some dissent in the military against doing that, but short of an all-out civil war, they would obey.

"I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to organize."

I think this is a salient point and I appreciate you making it.

"And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?"

I am tempted to point your attention to the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu[1] where, poor, badly organized militia members armed with what, I think, could be characterized as "pea shooters"[2] held off the full force of the US Military in a warzone.

However I don't think that's a productive discussion because it easily gets bogged down by tactical details and it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison, etc. (although I encourage you to read about it).

Instead, I would simply say that I expect repressive, authoritarian behavior by states to expand to fit whatever vacuum is available and the presence of an armed populace places a ceiling on how far that reach will go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)

[2] Shitty AKs and old, Russian RPGs.

That wasn't planned as a battle force and it certainly wasn't the "full force of the US military". And what was so shitty about their AKs?

The 1993 Battle of Mogadishu isn't the best example, as you alluded to. I'm trying to think of some other representative military actions. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising can be argued to be both evidence in favor of and against your point. It also featured an urban battle between well-trained military forces and civilians with limited supplies, and it's a bit better of an example because it features a much larger military force with the express goal of pacifying the city. The civilian resistance does eventually end up defeated, but only after the Germans essentially destroyed the city and acted without any regard for civilian casualties. You could argue that the Warsaw Uprising shows how much damage a civilian population with limited weapons could inflict. But I would point out that it shows what happens when the nation state doesn't care about collateral damage and needs to crush a resistance (which is why examples featuring the US as the nation state like the Battle of Mogadishu aren't the best).

> And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

We should ask the Vietnamese and Afghans.

Who's even serving on the side of the "corrupt nation state" in this scenario? Good luck ordering American soldiers to fire on Americans over 2A of all things. The whole thing is a fever dream.

...except when the authoritarian regime successfully paints dissenters as enemies of the state.

Do you not think the military itself would faction? Because I'm not convinced it would act in a single way. Generals have defied presidential orders.

We’ve seen it across the world over and over again. Rebellions/Government overthrows that are successful are few and far between. Who do you think puts down the ones that failed? The military.

The Afghan point stands, though it's a common misconception that the North Vietnamese were very poorly armed. The Viet Cong were an insurgency group, but North Vietnam had a traditional army which was relatively well equipped for the era. Including rocket artillery (BM-21), supersonic jet fighters (Mig-21s), surface to air missiles (SA-2), and main battle tanks (Type 59, among others). I definitely wouldn't put their weaponry in the same category as "pea shooters"

You are correct. Small arms have never stopped the US in the past. Afghan war they all had nukes. Same with Vietnam. Small arms are not enough. The large geographic challengers of the US military holding the entire US won’t help the civilians either. It is best to disarm now.

People have this idea that gun owners would stand in an empty field shooting at tanks with their handguns, and whoever won in that field battle would win the control of the country, which is quite silly. First, if enough gunmen rose up, the US would be ruined, and the tyranny with it. Sure, they can bomb any rebelling city, but those rebelling cities are their cashcows. Enough of those destroyed and the tyranny is less profitable than freedom; too many of those destroyed and the country as a whole is ruined. Even if the factories are not ruined, big population losses would be equally bad.

Or they can do terrorism. Assassinations, sabotage of infraestructure. Tyrants live somewhere, and they send their children to school. Collaborators(which probably would be civil servants, police and the army) also need to sleep somewhere and have children and family. They could just be shot while going home, or killed by IEDs while patrolling. Infraestructure is much easier to destroy than to repair. Killing the power grid or destroying a bridge hurts the rebellion as much or more than it does the dictatorship, but I don't think they would care much.

Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop overreaching.

I agree that it is quite foolish that these people support things which actually work against them, but do not understimate what hundreds of thousands of angry gunmen could do. Even if they didn't win, they would ruin the US. And making tyranny less profitable than liberty is a good protection against it.

Basically, terrorism for freedom? I have hard time to find situation where it actually worked that way in the past.

If it would be that easy, ISIS would do it long time ago.

> I have hard time to find situation where it actually worked that way in the past.

US?

When? Civil war involved armies and so did war for independence. Natives lost.

That was armed insurrection, not terrorism.

The difference is more than just "the winners write the history books". The methodology was different. The patriots/rebels/insurgents weren't setting off truck bombs in city centers in the hope of making people not oppose them, and not just because they didn't have truck bombs. They weren't trying to assassinate the governor. It was fundamentally a war, not terrorism.

The minute companies of Massachusetts did constitute a well-armed militia, I would argue in the sense intended by the 2nd Amendment. They were not just gun owners, they were men trained and drilled, often with the leadership of locals who had served in two previous wars.

The US wrested control of territory from a massively over-extended empire across the Atlantic.

American Civil War 2 would be totally different.

It's more about power projection, a last resort protection level that significantly increases the bar for total subjugation, than it is a tangible strategy towards bettering the world.

Besides a lot of military and police support legal gun ownership as well and I highly doubt all of them would be choosing the totalitarian side if it came down to it so it's not entirely just civilians with pop guns vs a well-armed military.

Huh, what makes you think army or cops would not support totalitarian side? Typically, in turn toward more totalitarian, army and cops are first target for recruitment.

Targeted for recruitment = all will support the cause?

More like terrorism as a crude form of mutually assured destruction. It doesn't have to work, there just needs to be a credible threat of a really unpleasant amount of damage.

ISIS does not fight for freedom. It's a doomsday suicide cult.

ISIS was incredibly successful at beating an organized (although not great quality) military with small arms and improvised weapons. A lot of the military equipment they got was stolen. They really may have been able to take over Iraq if a number of foreign powers did not intervene against them.

I am certainly not an advocate of terrorism. But I think recent events show that it doesn't take a lot of arms for a motivated group to overcome a well armed unmotivated group. It makes me wonder what Hong Kong would be like now if 1 in 10 people owned a rifle or hand gun. Probably in the long run the situation would be much worse, but also maybe less hopeless.

They have done that with army and army like structures, not just with terrorist tactic. ISIS in USA is limited to terrorist tactic and did not achieved all that much.

The argument I reacted to was about terrorist tactic being used to create deterrent against tyranny. Like, it talked about killing children on their way to school.

Because answer to terrorism would be more freedom or something.

tldr: Guerrilla fighters have a long history of being successful.

Also to add, the US military is sworn to protect the constitution and not members of the political elite. So were this extremely unlikely scenario of revolution to arise, you would definitely see a division of factions even within the military (some pro gov, others pro people). I believe there has been sufficient evidence to believe this. American soldiers would have a hard time killing other Americans.

The sitting president of the US has declared that war crimes are ok as long as they serve him personally.

Because no US general has ever defied the president...

Huh? This is completely different. He's prepping his supporters to rise up in armed revolt once he is truly cornered.

I know this risks an admonishment by dang, but this needs to be said.

Wait, you think Trump is trying to start an armed revolt on the basis of him getting impeached? His favorability isn't that high... He has below a 42% approval rating. 1% of that actually rising up seems pretty unlikely. Do people not watching Fox news live in this kind of fear?

Yes I am. I'm not alone in that assessment.

The soundness of such a tactic is moot when one considers the subject(s) at hand.

I would argue that all of these things can, and have been done using improvised weapons. Organising any of these things without some form of secure communication seems utterly impossible.

Contrary to popular believe, many totalitarian government do not shy away from arming their citizenry. History is rife with paramilitary death squads. What we do see in virtually all totalitarian governments is efforts to control the means of communication. I think this should tell us something.

>Organising any of these things without some form of secure communication seems utterly impossible.

The secure communication isn't the problem; it's having the commitment, discipline and the organizational operational security to use it.

>Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop overreaching.

I find this to be quite ironic since we now have a country run by a lawless president, who was elected with the help of a foreign, adversary and who gave a massive tax cut to billionaires and has done nothing tangible for those gun owners who voted for him.

A federal judge had to include in her ruling that presidents are not kings, which makes you think just what country are we living in when this has to be stated: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/mcgahn-testify-subpo...

Sure, it's not unusual for people to vote against their own interest; but what the people you described haven't realized is they are on the same side as the tyrant.

It's slightly delusional to think a few thousand gunmen in a country of over 300 million and an economy of nearly 20 trillion dollars could do what's required to "ruin the US".

Also, keep in mind the typical urban police force has battlefield weapons the old “protect and serve” police departments of the '60s and the '70s couldn't have imagined.

> And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

Kill and intimidate people. This a serious question?

Yeah, in an all out war it's not likely to work. But an all out war against your armed citizenry also isn't likely to happen.

Politicians are still people. They too, can fear being at the wrong end of a barrel.

Which no, isn't some kind of veiled threat. But more an important point that politicians, just like everyone, also tend to want to live & sleep peacefully at night. It's not in their self-interests to make such a move.

What's far more likely to happen is what's already happening/happened. The erosion of various rights, and the militarization of the police force.

>And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

How do you say "make controlling you economically untenable" in Pashto or "bomb your way to the negotiating table" in Irish?

It's not about winning, it's about making tyranny expensive and unattractive. Insurgency is basically a bloody tax on doing something that a large enough subset of the populace finds sufficiently objectionable. The more armed the populace the higher the tax rate.

My grandfather was part of the Danish resistance.

Him and his 'pea shooters' caused nasty losses to the Natzies, and ended up saving quite a few people.

The 'pea shooters' of Russian peasants (together with acquaintance of the local terrain) took down Napoleon.

A few guys with 'pea shooters' in America even founded a country!

Denmark was occupied most of war. Russia had an actual state army fighting Napoleon, it was not random peasants. You are simplifying American history too.

I know they were occupied. Read my post. I'm proud of my grandfather and the Natzies he killed and the people he saved as part of the resistance (I have stories passed down of prisoners being saved, people whose grandchildren are alive today and wouldn't be otherwise).

You might want to make it seem like it was inconsequential by highlighting the fact that they were occupied. But I have to say, it seems a little keyboard warrior to minimize Danish resistance.

Russia had an actual army, but local guerrilla resistance played an important part. I've read about the bravery of the Russian resistance with awe.

For the US, yes we received support from France. I'm pretty well acquainted. But if you are going to say that George Washington and his men had nothing to do with our struggle for freedom, that's on you.

Using words like 'peashooters' makes the anti-gun lobby seem out of touch, just like people who would say Obama is Muslim/Communist. There's a certain nasty arrogance of showing huge disrespect towards those who have achieve more than you ever will.

The parent where thread started claims that the small time resistance with small guns is what will stop the governmental tyranny and army. Which is not what stops the governmental tyranny, no matter how brave those people are.

The argument is about whether it can protect the freedom, not whether resistance (or refusal to cooperate) with whatever tools available deserve celebration.

The bravery alone does not stop armies and did not stopped the armies. Power, actual power did it in all those cases. (And for that matter, bad guys were brave too, sacrificed a lot too, just for the bad cause.)

When one goal post is meet, you move the goal posts, sneaky and dishonest. I was answering a comment that specifically said:

> And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

I think my comment quite clearly answered this question.

> bravery alone does not stop armies and did not stopped the armies. Power

Like the POWER AND BRAVERY of the ARMED local militias in the US which HELPED drive out the world's most powerful army. I'm sure glad they didn't get disarmed. Notice though, I said help. I'll admit my wording in regards to Russia was poor.

All or nothing arguments that remove the nuance (like saying 'it does' or 'it doesn't') are generally employed by people who aren't well positioned to understanding the complexities of reality. Any intelligent review includes more nuanced words. And any review that completely dismisses the power of armed local populations resisting oppression is simply going to be detached from reality and history. The use of the derogatory term 'pea shooter' is the perfect example of this dismissive, arrogant and ignorant take on history.

The Nazis my grandfather killed by putting lead through their skull certainly didn't think those were 'pea shooters', it takes a certain type of keyboard warrior to see a gun that way. Even a little .22 purse gun is no trivial matter.

> The argument is about whether it can protect the freedom

The people my grandfather saved I'm pretty would agreed that they 'obtained freedom/had their freedom protected thanks in great measure to the small arms' my grandfather had. Which kinda covers both the original goal posts and the new ones you created.

It would be a tough fight for sure, and let's hope it never comes to that, but look at what insurgents in Vietnam/Irak were able to do against the us military with scarce resources.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

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