Unpopular opinion: Its a sign of the world becoming more liberal and free. These kinds of weapons don’t directly kill hundreds of thousands of people. It’s propaganda wars. Let’s hope all future wars are fought only on the internet.
I think you are more right than most people here want to admit. Sure, surveillance is bad, and so is censorship, and we should fight it, and not let short-term moral panics like drug wars and terrorism forfeit our fundamental rights.
But let's realize how impossibly hard information is to contain and control. With maybe the exception of China, let's imagine sitting in the Iranian or Saudi secret service. You might have vast funds at your disposal, but you also have a rapidly increasing sophistication in your populations technological awereness. Every day, New VPN technologies spring up and things like sudden critical mass of mesh networking threatens to turn everything upside down. You whack new exist points, but you also know, fundamentally, hundreds of thousands of you people have unrestricted access, and you best weapon is a frustrating shutdown, whenever things truly get out of hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
Worth a watch on this subject.
Propaganda has been a necessary precursor for most recent civil wars, genocides, and regime changes. It's the most important ingredient in acts that can be labeled terrorism.
Organized violence can't really happen without spreading information, and the internet has democratized the ability to spread information.
I don't know whether it's net-good or net-bad, but I consider it to be unknowable what the net effect of all this propaganda is until it either leads to something or it doesn't.
I've thought about it a lot, and I don't know how anyone can ever topple the CCP when they control information so tightly. You could never create a large enough revolution with no organizing power.
The really scary thing is that control of information also means you can hide the murder of millions of people. We'll never know how many people the Nazis, the Ottomans, or the CCP kill, and our estimates might be off by millions.
Quoting Albert Speer [1]:
> Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime "made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought."
and to quote Goebbels himself [2], i.e. the Nazis' propaganda minister:
> It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio...It is no exaggeration to say that the German revolution, at least in the form it took, would have been impossible without the airplane and the radio…[Radio] reached the entire nation, regardless of class, standing, or religion. That was primarily the result of the tight centralization, the strong reporting, and the up-to-date nature of the German radio.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels#Workings_of_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propaganda#Nazi_Germany
Certainly not liberal or free and should still be opposed of course.
I think you 're confusing "alive" with "free". Merely surviving in a world of surveillance is not a life worth living.