‘A Partial Freedom’: What Latvia Found in the KGB Archives (2019)

There's been some archives that were hidden for decades (for example Kazimierz Kujda or Lech Wałęsa), there's been manipulation of which exact offices require check with the archives, there were blackmails and misleading lists of "communist agents" published by politicians and journalists (lista Macierewicza, lista Wildsteina).

Fun fact - mother of Kaczyński (who currently rules Poland and is famous for McCarthy-like policies and calling everybody a communist) - is in IPN lists.

If they treated her like political enemies they should already declare her a public enemy/traitor/spy/etc. And just like they declare any political enemy with communists in family tree "regime's children" - that should be enough to remove Kaczyński from politics by his own logic.

But they didn't (and probably correctly - lots of people were on these lists without actually being a spy, it could just mean you were considered or interesting to communist security for a variety of reasons - like being related to opposition activists, being a homosexual, a priest, having family abroad, whatever).

In the end I think we should just have had full transparency since day 1, because smart people realize being in the documents doesn't prove anything without interrelated evidence, and stupid people believe it's all a huge conspiracy anyway, no matter how many proofs you show them.

> "To be sure, people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only about $146,000 in annual household income."

For the aunt/uncle comment: No, I don't believe "the government"/"the corporations"/"the illuminati" are actively listening to every[1] conversation. However, is there any technical reason why they couldn't?[2]

Ad networks[3] already know many web pages I visit; why would my own devices (or devices between me and my ISP's gateway) not know them all?

As I doubt there are any technical solutions to this problem, I hope we[4] eventually come up with some social ones.

[1] In the early 1960's, watch lists were only a few thousand words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage

[2] Having had friends whose research became unpublishable due to having been classified midstream, I have a bad habit of looking for dual-use. A friend of mine was excited to work on https://eos.com due to the (for the time) cutting edge transfer, storage, and retrieval issues. I couldn't help but think that there were no doubt other agencies besides his funder, who had similar problems, albeit slightly different data sets.

Dual-use technology is an existence proof that many systems can be used for good or for ill, depending solely upon intent (or the signs of certain parameters).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23768824

[3] cf p.88 "5.A.1.j. does not apply to systems or equipment, specially designed for any of the following: a. Marketing purpose; ..."

https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2019/12/WA-DOC-19-PUB-...

[4] "What you mean we, kemo sabe?"

Governments indeed have more data or at least the ability to access more data about us than they ever have before and can do so remotely in many cases, unlike the reams of paper and slogging they'd have had to go through several decades ago. That the vast majority of this data about any random civilian is never looked at by human eyes is secondary.

The bottom line is that so much of it is being stored somewhere on corporate, or government, or corporate but accessible to government servers, and if you ever came to the attention of the government of the country you live in, it would be extremely naive to think that these vast troves of accumulated information about your entire digital life up to that point could not be accessed with little effort.

It is no longer necessary to recruit their friends, family or neighbors for watching so much of most people do. These people themselves post the details of their daily lives, or if not, their own intimate circle does, or chats about them through digital mediums that are only dubiously secure from prying eyes. (To name just one example, can you concretely say that the content of your entire Gmail inbox is rigorously impervious to government intrusion?)