Minnesota is now using contact tracing to track protestors?
bgr.com
bgr.com
Its source for the inflammatory phrase "contact tracing" is a Twitter search link that mostly points back to this very same article. That's a pretty lame trick. What's the actual source here? What exactly does the phrase mean?
The clear implication is that covid-related contact tracing techniques or apps or data have been repurposed to track protestors. If that's true, we should certainly discuss it, with a real source as the basis. If it's false, this is the worst case of flamebait/clickbait that I've seen in a long time.
All: please don't believe what internet titles say, even when they feed into what you were already expecting might happen. It's possible that your expectations are being fulfilled. It's more likely that our attention (not to mention our adrenalin) is being exploited. On HN, at least, let's try to let that first rush of a reflexive response subside, and wait a few seconds for the slower, reflective circuits to engage (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you watch your own reactions, you'll notice what a huge difference that makes.
Edit: ok, here is the source: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1266758240018276352. It looks like he made an unfortunate analogy between tracing violent protesters and tracing covid-19 cases—unfortunate because it could be blown up into yet another internet story with no there there. Unless he gets to it later in the video (I only watched half), there's no suggestion of any data or technology being shared across these two categories.
I don't want to overreact out of being pissed off that this site wasted all our time, but can anyone give a good reason not to ban bgr.com on HN? It used to be banned. I'm not seeing a lot of valuable threads at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., nor stories that wouldn't have gotten discussed through some other submission.
Apparently the only nugget of info in this article about "contact tracing":
> According to Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harringon, officials there have been using what they describe, without going into much detail, as contact-tracing in order to build out a picture of protestor affiliations — a process that officials in the state say has led them to conclude that much of the protest activity there is being fueled by people from outside coming in.
They couldn't even spell his name right, by the way.
I'd say "please don't believe Internet content, especially when it feeds into what you were already expecting...".
I try to avoid (though frequently fail) falling foul of the "reflective/reflex" trend. I did poke through BGR's "about" pages, and the story struck me as far more smoke than fire, though possibly worth discussion. No longer.
For a time (generously, Lippmann's "Public Opinion" through "going viral"), a key principle of journalism was that it was based, somewhere, on facts. I disagree somewhat with HN's policy of deprecating source names much of the time, as reputation (or its lack) really should count for something.
But site bans, especially for egregious abuse or indifference to facts and reality, especially in the relentless pursuit of attention and virality for their own sake, and yes, wasting all our time, I can get behind.
Back into the ban bin with BGR.com, from me.
Several people disagreed, either commenting that they already have this capability, or that they have no reason to use it.
And here we are today. The right to assemble falling victim to a tragedy of the commons, justifying greater erosion of our rights.
That's all fine and well to speculate, but where is the evidence that it's true?
This article has zero information on what they are doing. This could just be routine investigative work, it could involve private contractors scouring social media, it could be the FBI + NSA + Fusion Centers collating phone data. Who knows. This author definitely doesn't.
AG Barr claimed the "outside agitators" are "far leftist" groups like "AntiFa" (and lots of conservative social media is conspiracy theory talking of Soros-funded groups hiring and bussing in crisis actors. Lots of public social media posts speculating that White Nationalist groups are executing an anti-government agenda to spark a race war (a la The Turner Diaries). Simply not enough signal yet in the "fog of war" and this article doesn't reveal anything useful.
It's even scarier to think that reconnaissance satellites are now actually really good and can probably trace you even in the dead-of-night. So, even if you left your phone at home to avoid location-tracking, just the act of venturing outside your house creates a tracking-trail as exposed by satellite imagery. Theoretically, law enforcement could use this data as of today to persecute the looters. Again, satisfying in a way, but also scary to think about.
How libertarian do we really want to be? I think the goal should be to opt for whatever leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. There's a spectrum, on one hand you have free libertarianism, and on the other, you have authoritarinism and strict social control. It's interesting to watch how states on different sides of the spectrum operate; namely, the contrast between liberties for citizens in the US and China. Which one is better?
In the US we operate under the premise that we should ensure our liberties are upheld at all costs; yet, this comes at a severe cost. China's authoritarian approach allows them to withstand epidemics in ways that we couldn't even dream to; and, overall, their centralized approach will allow them to surpass the US in terms of economic output. They also enjoy much lower levels of crime as measured by many different data points. In many ways I think the non-libertarian approach to life there will eventually lead most people to living better lives overall. Not saying that their approach is correct; but it's just interesting to think about.