“You Have Zero Privacy” Says Internal Royal Canadian Mounted Police Presentation
thetyee.ca
thetyee.ca
Provide a handbook to all law enforcement members explaining these rules. Give them access to whistleblower hotlines. Make an agency whose job it is to look into such complaints and file charges. The problems would vanish in a very short time.
But naturally, such a change would have to come from the top- and the government does not want to give up this power it has over its citizens.
The police wants these tools to satisfy their ego and complexes as much as the govt wants power over citizens.
Maybe we could give them a special title, such as 'judge' or 'your honor'.
I tried to be a privacy purist: a smartphone without internet on a prepaid card running opensource software (likely with a backdoored baseband chip, but). Internet through rotating VPNs only on incognito browsers with anti-fingerprinting plugins, no sms'es, personal email on a self-hosted server with at-rest encryption...
All while gaining absolutely nothing out of it, but inconveniences like filling out captchas and needing to go extra steps to open up wikipedia. That behaviour itself was a failure in opsec - I am sure that it put me on a watchlist somewhere.
I'm a "normie" now, trying to emulate the "noise" that is around me. I believe that's much more a viable approach than being a hardcore privacy-ist(?)
No. The majority don't care because it hasn't happened to them or someone they love.
Once it does you can believe they'll start caring pretty quick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berwyn_Heights,_Maryland_mayor...
So he spearheaded an accountability bill that mandated the state police to publish a yearly report on how often SWAT is deployed, for what reasons, how often lethal force ends up being used etc (it should be noted that police unions fought this tooth and nail, even though it didn't actually hold them accountable for any of it - only exposed how SWAT is actually used most of the time).
http://goccp.maryland.gov/reports-publications/law-enforceme...
But there's a catch. You might notice from the link above that the reports end in 2014. That's because the law had a 5-year sunset clause, and nobody bothered to renew it.
So, even when a fairly influential politician from a privileged background gets involved for personal reasons, that's not still enough long-term.
Being placed on list is still a fight.
Give politicians free reign to everyone’s browser history/social media account, well Suddenly a lot of people are on a bad list.
Pretty suspect line of reasoning when you apply it to literally any other scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Unclassified_Inform...
If politicians want encrypted comms they'll probably have a //SECRET Blackberry or iPhone.
I’m going to burn for that one :)
I'd argue that this is the core issue: everyone is on a list now. Where did the presumption of innocence go?
No, the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you", they can use reasonable force if you decide to ignore or refuse instructions when they have a warrant which has been obtained via the courts. The warrant will only be granted after presenting substantive evidence that the person they are wishing to arrest has committed serious crime i.e. possession / distribution of indecent images of children, drugs, money laundering etc which required rapid entry to secure evidence. They don't get to enter your property for minor offences or on a whim.
the police can not legally "kick the shit out of you"
I'm honestly baffled by it. I get that people can be ignorant of how police act in the real world because they have no experience with it and watch cop shows on TV, but once you learn what the actual behaviour is ...
Given the discussion topic, maybe you should cite an incident that the RCMP was involved in, or at least one that occurred in Canada?
I could cite police violence in Hong Kong, but I think that would be off-topic too.
“Reasonable force” for values of “reasonable” that are defined by a group of people that doesn’t include me, no thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-defense_(United_States)
In England it's got what I think is clearer definition:
"Force is reasonable if a reasonable person would think it necessary to use force and would have used the same level of force as the defendant."
As far as I'm aware these definitions apply to police officers.
This only applies to civil liability; criminal prosecution of unreasonable use of force is not affected by QI, though there are other problems with that.
There seems to be a broad based perception these days that the Police don't obey the rules regarding use of force and they are not proscuted when they break them.
This might mean that the original statement: "the police can legally ... kick the shit out of you" is technically innacurate but it is functionally accurate. The Police do not appear to large swathes of the general public to be at risk of prosecution for beating the shit out of suspects (which basically means anyone they want to).
They do, the problem is qualified immunity rules out most civil liability in practice, and relying on criminal prosecution has problems because of the relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement.
Ok. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kelly-Thomas-Police-Beati...
Demonization is a consequence of bad behavior combined with radical unaccountability.
Irrelevant. It's evidence that refutes your earlier claim that police can not legally "kick the shit out of you". They can. Dismissing them as "bad actors" doesn't change that fact.
I really, really dislike this meme. Try to put yourself into the shoes of a non-tech person, remembering that "non-tech" is in no way a synonym for "stupid" or "lazy". They may be a doctor, lawyer or professor, a construction worker, service industry person or driver. Maybe they make a reasonable amount of money, or maybe they're on minimum wage working multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Now please QUANTIFY what "care" means. I'll give it a shot: 1 hour a week. I think that a non-tech person is going to need to average putting in at least that much time, consistently over a year or two, to make major advances on defending their privacy in a Digital Wild West environment. We on HN tend to have not merely significant digital system knowledge, but also significant meta knowledge. We don't just know answers, we know questions and where to look for answers and how to try to find them, the kinds of keywords to use, the kinds of other people to ask and where to find them. This is of course true in any area, but it's easy to take for granted how much of a difference that makes. Someone starting from scratch is going to spend a lot of time even learning that things like firewalls or personal VPNs or the like exist at all, let alone what ones to use and how. They probably won't already have their own technical infrastructure either, like owning a a personal domain with email, and understand the various factors involved with that. Which in turn makes it harder to use unique addresses per site (hence services like Apple Sign In stepping in, which itself has concerns). It's deep, deep waters.
But at $15/hr, even just an hour a week is $780 a year. That's real money. Maybe they'd be better off just spending more of that directly. But on what? I think the answer for some is "Apple devices" which they've heard are somewhat more updated and private, which could be some fraction of the premium for those that care. Or maybe it'd be better to put some into political donations and activism. But how exactly to do that effectively is itself an area of expertise that will take time. Etc etc.
A sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly overwhelming force isn't the same as "not caring at all", nor ignorance that improvement is even possible. Contrary to your assertion, we've repeatedly seen the public being quite uncomfortable with mass surveillance. Large percentages polled don't like the idea of personalized advertising. Laws trying to enhance it have passed repeatedly, despite overwhelming concentrated interest opposition. The laws sometimes get watered down or are misaimed, but that's not surprising for technical things pushed by the public. But the desire is certainly there for a majority, even if many have given up, or are merely quietly getting more angry about it.
So please be careful about blithely ascribing motivations to swaths of hundreds of millions to billions of people from our perch of expertise. Life is more complicated than that, and furthermore it's self-defeating. We, people who care a lot about this and have some idea of what to do about it, need large numbers of regular people who care but don't know what to do. Writing them off instead is stupid. Of course, that means we also need to care about satisfying their needs on the reverse too.
For example, in our local swim team, I pushed back on using Facebook live-stream for broadcasting a time trial (parent audience was not permitted due to COVID) and instead we distributed heat videos with a password protected server. It seems other teams went with the convenient approach, and now they are banned from recording (since a few parents, correctly, complained). Since then we have gotten permission to continue what we were doing, because we put privacy first. But even so, this begs the deeper question... why is privacy not the default? It's about monetization (cost) and convenience.
I would say that I do not feel like me if I don't have time that is unobserved by others (and I'm not using this as a euphemism for masturbation). Even though the things I do then are typically inane. My browser history is fairly inane, and yet I would not publish it.
I had kind of noticed this before, but didn't really have to put it into words until trying to explain my daughter's need for privacy to my wife. She is a very empathetic person, but it took several conversations for her to start to get the idea that "I want to do something without someone looking over my shoulder" is different from "I want to hide what I'm doing from someone" (though absolutely the latter can be used as a smokescreen for the former, particularly by teenagers).
If all you're speaking from is personal anecdote from a tiny biased subsample of people, then don't speak about "the majority of the people". Because objectively, millions care given the chance. Measures like the GDPR were popular. Or in the US the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which in fact just this past election got an attempted[1] enhancing provision passed by popular referendum (2020 Proposition 24) with 56% of the vote, or about ~9.1 million people.
Of course people care about convenience and security as well. So again it's very important to make it clear that those don't have to be zero-sum games with privacy, and for technical people to not merely blindly oppose flawed efforts to improve that but put up better solutions. I think we've repeatedly made big mistakes there over the past 20 years, failing to get out in front of efforts like Apple's iOS and then ending up with no way to create standards with the good but not the bad. But that doesn't mean, all else being equal, that people don't care, or in major cases won't make some sacrifices for it. One of the real nasty strategies of anti-privacy forces in fact has been trying to twist it into zero-sum, claiming that privacy can't be convenient or secure.
----
1: Proposition 24 is itself also illustrative of how popular support doesn't always translate into perfectly written legislation, I know the EFF had reservations about it saying it was a mix of steps forward and backward. But again, the desire is clearly there.
One even told me that he wished Google knew him better so some functionalities worked better for him.
The non tech people don't even let me talk to them about privacy. I lost half my Whatsapp contacts that didn't want to install Signal.
> But at $15/hr, even just an hour a week is $780 a year. That's real money.
Please stop with this meme that every second of one's life is equal to some amount of money.
For example I'm learning Flutter on my spare time right now. It doesn't cost me a dime because otherwise I would watch YouTube videos or some other unproductive activities.
If you push it too far soon you're going to calculate how much sleep "costs" you!
So, try:
The majority of people do not rationally save for emergencies, let alone retirement.
> A sense of helplessness in the face of seemingly overwhelming force isn't the same as "not caring at all"
I look at this as:
(1) Roughly the same proportion of people at any given time will be [failing to save, feeding the surveillance beast].
(2) Change the environment, and you change their behavior on the margin. (Opt-out 401K increases overall savings rates; safe defaults frequently don't get changed.)
(3) Change the incentives, and you change behavior permanently. (Ownership stakes encourage savings; close channels that leak personal information.)
> I really, really dislike this meme.
I dislike it too, but for a different reason.
This story is a conspiracy theory. Literally.
At least one difference I notice in this case is that neither the article itself, nor the comments in this thread (at the time of writing this) contain either of the terms "conspiracy theory" or "QAnon" - but attach either of those, and you'll find all sorts of people who will suddenly develop a very passionate sense of caring/interest of a different kind: in discrediting, downvoting, and silencing anyone who in any way supports or perpetuates this type of a story.
Conspiracy theories: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
QAnon: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
In this case, I suspect the main difference is that the "public relations" departments of the Canadian Government and CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) are bush league compared to that of the US. In the US, this story would probably have been preemptively "taken care of" in the media before it even broke, or in 24 hours via a full court press if it did happen to accidentally fall through the cracks, and people would fall in line as they always do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour#Biological_swa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_behaviour#People
Let's wait and see how the Canucks respond, assuming this gets any traction in mainstream newspapers (I'm guessing it does not).
Who in the US is "taking care of" stories? If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...and how this can act upon people's interest levels and thinking styles.
> I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
I feel like this sort of rhetoric is a fine example of the very phenomenon that I described ("...but attach either of those, and you'll find...).
> Who in the US is "taking care of" stories?
Not sure who it is exactly. And unless they for some reason decide to voluntarily confess, I suspect we will never know for sure.
Are you under the impression that the United States government never uses propaganda? Maybe you guys have the state on a much shorter leash than the Canadians.
> If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
Regardless, to answer your question, here is an example:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/q-fades-qanon-s-domin...
This article implicitly(!) asserts that the Dominion story is an invention of QAnon. How it works (from a neuroscientific, "belief formation" perspective) is, these stories are printed in the news, and then people who read them believe what is in the story.
Whether it is actually true or not has very little bearing. Not only do most people (who voice an opinion) not care what is actually true, they will go to great lengths to discredit anyone who mentions the very notion of 'What is Actually True'. This is not just an opinion - the phenomenon can be observed.
To me, this behavior is absolutely fascinating. Why most people have such a strong aversion to the topic is also interesting.
Back to the article...
> "While the theory has already been debunked — including by Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with national security related to the internet and technology..."
Notice the language used in such articles, words like debunked.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/debunk - to show that something is less important, less good, or less true than it has been made to appear
If you have an eye for detail, you may notice that this is a very popular word with journalists these days. You may also notice that "debunk" has a fair amount of uncertainty and wiggle room in its explicit definition (if not so much in how it is interpreted by people who read it). This sort of wiggle room can come in handy if one is ever called to testify in court.
I won't bother doing a full analysis of the article, I have not once encountered a single non-conspiracy-theorist who is able to discuss this topic with the same attention to accuracy as they would if we were discussing a technical topic like programming - I am merely drawing people's attention to the phenomenon. I have no illusions whatsoever that I am going to change a single person's mind (and believe me, I've tried), in the slightest.
You are free to believe whatever you would like, as is everyone else. And Mother Nature will reward us accordingly, in the long run.
But I will say this:
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain
> I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
Isn't this a Russell's teapot sort of situation?
The general topic of the thread is ~government agencies "being bad", with several people complaining that ~"people don't care" about privacy.
I submitted for consideration the notion that governments engage in "conspiracy theories", and covering them up. Evidence can be provided for this - there is plenty on record.
A point of contention then arose:
>> How is this story related to QAnon or a conspiracy theory? I feel like this is a true example of "begging the question", you just sort of assumed that part was true.
>> Who in the US is "taking care of" stories? If you're going to make bold claims like this, include some details.
And then:
> I wonder: does your mind desire evidence when it encounters the inverse of my ideas?
So what would be an inverse of my idea. By my reckoning, a valid example would be where someone asserts that a story should be ignored because it is attributed to QAnon, or even better, when someone disputes that claim, and then the channel goes silent.
I don't mind "losing an argument" on a technicality, the elephants in the room being discussed (or, explicit mentions of them "not being seen") is more than enough for me. To me, this is kind of the logical equivalent of asking conspiracy theorists where the evidence is that substantiates their characterization of the state of reality. One would think, at some point at least one person might realize and acknowledge that indeed, there are some things that occur (or do not occur) in reality that we do not know all the details of...that some portions of reality are unknown. One would think.
I don't think anyone disputes that governments have conspired and kept it secret before. The "teapot" in this case is QAnon or any specific conspiracy theory, not that any government has ever had any conspiracy. Prove or argue for a specific conspiracy and don't hide behind that "people have kept stuff secret before".
> To me, this is kind of the logical equivalent of asking conspiracy theorists where the evidence is that substantiates their characterization of the state of reality.
Isn't that exactly what we should do? If someone (the conspiracy theorists) has a theory they should also put forward evidence for that, right?
Am I "hiding" behind that?
Alleged conspiracies happen, or they do not happen. I make no specific, strong assertion either way. Many others cannot say the same though.
> Isn't that exactly what we should do? If someone (the conspiracy theorists) has a theory they should also put forward evidence for that, right?
Most definitely.
How do you feel about those who assert things like:
- "<X> did not happen - that idea (<X>) is just a conspiracy theory" (implicitly) [and therefore it can be accurately dismissed as false]
- "<X> did not happen, (implicitly)[we know this to be true because] there is no evidence" (which ignores the largely unappreciated facts that human beings are not omniscient, and all that occurs in physical reality is not known)
Personally, I see such assertions being problematic in a number of ways, mainly: in excess quantities, describing reality in this fashion can highly distort the public's perception of reality.
People make generalizations about truth because they are not omniscient. Social cues combined with critical thinking allow me to believe that over a billion people live in India even though I have never been there. Something is broadly considered a conspiracy theory when there is broad evidence for it being false and circumstantial evidence for it being true.
You are absolutely hiding behind generality by not defending any specific conspiracy theory. Assertions of the forms you mention do not on their own distort the public's perception of reality.
The Earth IS round. The Holocaust DID happen. These statements do not distort the public's perception of reality. Quit hiding behind rhetorical tricks and give an example statement that does distort the public's perception of reality.
That's a rather imperfect characterization, but at least you realize that it "seems" this way, not that it --is-- this way.
An improvement would be something like: "[Generalizations about the truth that are presented as the accurate, comprehensive truth] is bad, because it distorts the public's perceptions of reality. One can often know(!) whether these generalizations are manufactured truth. An example of one such way is when knowing a truth would require omniscience (ie: "there is no evidence)".
However, what one cannot know(!), for sure, is whether this manufacturing is performed consciously. That the "just so" stories are so consistent in their timing, and details (or lack of details), suggests that this process may often not be purely organic. That many confirmations of conscious and coordinated behavior have been discovered (but mostly in the past, funny that) lends further support to the idea that it does actually occur, at least sometimes (a funny sentence if you think about it).
> People make generalizations about truth because they are not omniscient. Social cues combined with critical thinking allow me to believe that over a billion people live in India even though I have never been there.
This is true, but not comprehensive - but many people perceive it as comprehensive.
> Something is broadly considered a conspiracy theory when there is broad evidence for it being false and circumstantial evidence for it being true.
This is what people are told (about how they themselves and others behave), but it's not the actual reality of how people behave. If this was actual reality, it would require that the masses ("broadly") actually think ("considered") about the ideas [1] contained within each conspiracy theory.
For the most part, people do not do this, and this can be seen in the comically inaccurate way they discuss the ideas, on the very rare occasion that they do. They discuss (and believe, as fact) the distorted and simplified "just so" version that the media tells them, not the actual one that exists within the conspiracy theory ecosystem [2]. I suspect you likely have a fairly strong belief [3] about whether what I say here is true or not - whether you have any curiosity about what the actual truth is, is likely a different story - this applies to a large percentage of conspiracy theorists as well.
> You are absolutely hiding behind generality by not defending any specific conspiracy theory.
No, this is how your mind is conceptualizing it. I am not "hiding" behind anything, I am simply discussing the general nature of conspiracy theories. Is this a violation of some natural law?
> Assertions of the forms you mention do not on their own distort the public's perception of reality.
Actually, this is your perception of it. Think about it: By what means do you know the thoughts of the public, which is composed of hundreds of millions of people? Of course you have no way of knowing what people think! Yet, it sure doesn't seem like you don't, does it! It seems rather crystal clear that you know this, does it not? But if you trace the lineage of that knowledge in your mind, what do you find? Go ahead, try it!
> The Earth IS round. The Holocaust DID happen. These statements do not distort the public's perception of reality.
Here you have resorted to a strawman rhetorical technique, and a rather obvious one at that. I doubt this convinces even you.
> Quit hiding behind rhetorical tricks and give an example statement that does distort the public's perception of reality.
Here you go: https://www.google.com/search?q=election+no+evidence+fraud
How does one make sense of all of this complexity and uncertainty? What should a person believe? Shall we believe what the newspaper man, and telly man, or conspiracy theory man, tell us is true (even though it's very often obvious that they literally do not have the technical means of knowing(!) what they say is true, is actually true?
One novel approach, taking The Clear Pill, is offered by Curtis Yarvin (Mencious Moldbug):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__0jqfKj6_U
Now I'm not suggesting you adopt this approach, I'm just pointing it out as an option [4], and as a demonstration of how things are not as they seem (to the mind).
Most people can conceptualize and accept the flawed nature of human cognition when discussing it in the abstract, but this skill seems to vanish when the point of focus turns to concrete reality. Then, perception is perceived as 100% accurate. I imagine there is an evolutionary explanation for this strange inconsistency, but I suspect that explanation may not be comprehensive.
--------
[1] the actual ideas, as opposed to the distorted allegations advertised in the media
[2] which is very often an inconsistent mess full of contradictions - but not always
[3] many people incorrectly consider these beliefs "knowledge", or even/usually "facts"
[4] there are many available options to choose from, and you've already "chosen" one (or had one chosen for you - see: culture), whether you realize it or not
I see your point, that by attaching certain labels (like a logical fallacy), many people write off information without independently judging its veracity (whether the fallacy actually occured)
Yet in your case, you still fail to support your key claim:
> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...
Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.
I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me. I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense. There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.
I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth. I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist. Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills. Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.
>> I was describing how these types of stories can be discredited, by simply attaching a label to them...
> Obviously some people will never read past the label, whether it is "Qanon" or "socialism", but plenty of people do read past the label, and independently try to discover what is true.
You seem to be framing the conversation as if I have made the assertion that 100% of people fall for these techniques. I made no such claim.
> I don't think Dominion conspiracy is false because some low quality nbcnews article said it started on qanon - where it "started" does not really matter to me.
Now you are addressing the example I provided, rather than the general phenomenon I am describing.
> I think it's false because it's obviously politically motivated and doesn't make any fucking sense.
There is some Truth to the story, or there is No Truth to the story. Our respective personal opinions or understandings have no bearing on the actual state of reality.
> There would be noticable statistical differences between the results of Dominion and other voting machines.
Perhaps there would, perhaps there would not.
Perhaps this would be noticed, perhaps this would be not. Can you point me to anything that demonstrates that an extremely thorough statistical analysis has been performed?
> I reject the premise you seem to be trying to push, that only conspiracy theorists care about truth.
I am not pushing the premise that "only conspiracy theorists care about truth". You are framing and characterizing my comments as if I am stating that.
> I care about truth and am not a conspiracy theorist.
How much any one person perceives themself to "care" (a slippery concept) about something does not always match "the actuality" of the situation. This is kind of what sayings like "Watch What People Do, Not What They Say" are getting at. To make it even more complicated, the level of caring can often vary significantly with the smallest of modifications to certain variables in the model.
To be clear, I do not mean to accuse you specifically of any particular imperfection - if I have done so, then that was done in error. I have no way of knowing your true beliefs or intentions. I am speaking of a general phenomenon that can be observed - and furthermore, I am in no way asserting that it applies universally in all situations.
> Some conspiracy theories turning out to be broadly true (e.g. nsa metadata surveillance and mkultra) has no bearing on the truth of other conspiracy theories.
This is absolutely correct, and I have said nothing to indicate otherwise.
> Conspiracy theorists are a result of modern magic like airplanes and fiat currency being poorly explained in school and bad critical thinking skills.
This is an estimation. It is not possible to know with any kind of precision what the complex chain of causation is behind any individual conspiracy theorist, or conspiracy theorists in general.
> Most conspiracy theorists believe in multiple directly conflicting theories because it maximizes the chance of being correct at some point.
This is also an estimation. You do not have any way of knowing the actual, comprehensive beliefs of even one individual conspiracy theorist, let alone what "most" of them believe. Ironically, this neurological phenomenon (the mistaking of heuristic predictions about reality, for reality itself) is to a large degree the type of thinking that many conspiracy theory beliefs are based upon.
I happen to believe that both sides are very wrong on this general topic, and most other popular "culture-war" category disputes. I would like for the counter-productive and harmful "he said, she said" meme wars (of which this topic is but one) that are going on in the world between the various tribes to stop. I would like us to move more towards a public discourse based on calm, measured, truly evidence-based reasoning, and trinary logic (True/False/Unknown), rather than our current binary (True/False) approach (which forces people to guess).
[0] https://www.hcinnovationgroup.com/home/blog/13018078/privacy...
But before recently, I would've preferred Firefox over Chrome for example, since it's more private.
These days it's the other way around.
Its obvious now that "vaccine passports" and "contact tracing" are going to become defacto required. Therefore, the level of data they will be collecting will be so granular that 'blending in' won't really matter. A simple SQL query 5 years in the future will establish your every movement and health history for any given point.
>50% of average people are going to go along with this (or outright support it) and anyone who speaks against it will be called "anti-science" and selfish.
It's literally mind-boggling we are at this stage, but we must open our eyes and accept it.
Once you actually tell them the reality of things, they really don't like it. Like why can the FBI force my therapist to give them their notes under the Patriot act? Most don't know it, most will not like it either.
Another part of this is the power is unexercised and/or covert. Because if it was overt, it would create huge public backlash. They know this and it's why they use things like parallel construction.
“There’s little privacy anymore” is a reality not a joke. Citizens chose to engage in social media and to buy technologies which expose their private lives.
The RCMP bought some script kiddie toys to explore Facebook and the dark web... because they have things like child exploitation units meant to look in places like that. Not news.
If anything it’s funny that the RCMP is so much worse at hiding this stuff from the public than the FBI.
I feel no threat to my privacy based on what’s written here... at all.
Why can't an innocent individual have private communications with other innocent individuals if so desired?
Most private stuff is banal and not worth a government budget to look at.
The level of assumed self-sacrifice for the collective is getting high enough to breed rebellion.
Privacy can be about hiding things, but it's also about space and boundaries. I want to have some control over who gets to know me, and how intimately.
So much of the "I have nothing to hide" retort misses the fact that it isn't about big secrets, but rather a collection of little secrets (if you want to call them that - they are just facts that are sensitive).
Less about are you planning to violently overthrow the United States Government. More about what genre of porn do you like to entertain yourself with.
These little things can be used against you. We all have them.
When I do give out my CC data I do this voluntarily and make an active decision each time to do so. I'm NOT giving it out to random people, some of which might be fraudsters
Everyone I know who hates this stuff says so on the edge of normal conversations, couched in a wait-and-see vibe. Google Home gifts go unopened and tech devices are excluded from certain areas.
The dialogue has become a scary game.
Now the public generally seems to have a sense of what's happened to privacy, but has given up do to the upkeep required to avoid our ubiquitous surveillance machine.
The people in my circle who still think there's hope won't buy smart devices, but won't go further, because to do so would lock them out of large chunks of modern society, or require them to maintain a level of technical skill and perform certain kinds of upkeep which would disadvantage them in the long run.
The world's complex, many of us are living at the margins of insolvency. The bandwidth required to fight the panopticon is too damn high, and unless done very well, only produces a moral victory ('I'm fighting the system as best I can').
>Most private stuff is banal and not worth a government budget to look at.
Private conversations are potentially a threat to government as an organization. People might convince one another to vote for less taxes and more accountability <clutches pearls>.
As the cost of keeping tabs on this kind of stuff gets lower the government does it more. It's no different than BigCos tracking your mouse on their eCommerse site "because its, cheap, we can and it might be useful".
That argument could be made about damn near anything & used to justify banning near anything.
At some point common sense needs to prevail
I think this is a fundamental problem with how we've structured modern organizations in a way that removes all personal accountability and responsibility. Everyone is accountable to the organization. Nobody has "be reasonable" as part of their job duties or performance evaluation. It's not wholly their fault but I blame the MBA-ization of everything for a lot of this.
“Could I please get all of your phone records, browsing history, Internet account credentials, details of your friends and family, and anything else that you wouldn’t want me to have but legal for me to have so long as you provide it to me willingly? If the answer is no, then why ask me to give up my privacy when you refuse to give up yours?”
Their answer to that might be a better starting point?
If they don't have any, then at least they would be consistent =)... You can also then discuss what kind of a society comes from that position and whether that's a good one to live in?
Alternatively another question is, "do you and your colleagues want to be stewards of this data you collect?"
What's an appropriate / reasonable punishment for failing to be good stewards? Jail time? Fines? Personal or organisational? Paying money into charities designed to act as public oversight?
Starting off combative feels nice, but just gets people's hackles up in my experience =)...
I feel like some people flippantly respond "none" to this, which they can afford because they are not expecting to really be compelled to give away their personal information on the spot. The response suggested by the OP would give them an opportunity to prove their position immediately.
The public / audience of the debate need to be constantly reminded that these rules apply to them as well and they need to ask themselves, what am I comfortable with living under? Do I trust this administration? The current law enforcement? Forever? What could they do to me or my family if we suddenly become persona non grata?
To be honest even under this system people can reason that this is just giving the police etc powers, so even then their "privacy" isn't really at risk.
They aren't necessarily thinking that:
- data can be leaked
- data could be sold
- you can get malicious officers
- the data can be used for other purposes
- etc
These are the other parts of the conversation that need to also be thought about because otherwise this is just another security blanket.
There were cases where lack of privacy for public figures family members have caused issues[0][1]. I don't want to focus on that specific story, it's just an example.
This might be a case where people are happy about that information being public? Or maybe they have a more nuanced take? For example, report that it happened, but don't print their name / picture? (for example both articles below did name, but only nytimes seems to have also done picture)
Where you draw the lines on this stuff can be really important.
- [0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
- [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/nyregion/chiara-de-blasio...
Your follow-up questions are great too.
This sort of dialog / FAQ for “what do you have to hide” needs to be available somewhere online with a catchy URI e.g. https://privacymatters.org (I don’t know if this is real just an example).
But that's why in my opinion, a question about what society people are looking to live in is important. We can start to draw out what people are and aren't comfortable with.
Personally I think that in addition to websites, more media needs to be available for the public to discuss this topic more and get a feel for it.
EG: Mr Robot raised some questions about whether the hacking and casual discovery of personal information they were showing was realistic.
Perhaps "Man in the High Castle", I've not seen it, so not sure if it covers the notion of the nation state turning hostile and then leveraging collected information to attack specific citizens, but something along those lines.
Also things like the munk debates to foster discussion.
In my experience media does a much better job of getting people to empathise with different circumstances which would get them really thinking what these things might mean for them.
This opened my eyes most people have an irrational fear and think that these capabilities won‘t be abused. At the same time our state abused their surveillance capabilities during the cold war and gathered data on almost a million people. But people seem to have forgotten already.
I‘m talking about Switzerland if you are wondering what which of authoritarian regime I‘m talking about.
Such a BS attitude. For one, it's self serving and selfish. It serves only to comfort the parent and has no consideration for the life their child will be handed when they become adults. Heck, even children and teenagers will suffer from freedom sapped by people who offload their agency to the government time and time again in exchange for an insulated "life". How can you make mistakes and learn if everything is under the eyeball of an authority who has the freedom to do as they please as long as it's in the name of public safety.
Life entirely without risk and danger, at all costs, is not a life at all, and that's what you want to hand your daughters and sons?
When you blindly let this legislation through because the first page of the draft reassures you it will get "assholes" off the streets you also tend to become entirely passive about the rest of the legislation. All sorts of side effects and detriments to society can be ushered in if you don't question big changes like this.
People with the mentality of "at all costs we must be safe" are doing damage that is irreparable. We must accept that life is implicitly hazardous at times.
I recognize my objection is futile, it's impossible to argue any case in the face of "think of the children". Genes want to survive and project themselves into the future, it's hard wired into us. The more technology and organization we have the more we are going to use it to abstract ourselves the human monument rather than mere organisms. We really can't help ourselves.
This is possibly one of the most defining and interesting times to be alive. We get to witness the beginning of a madness, what happens when life is able to achieve its goal only to find out it's a meaningless dead end.
Wow, that got dark quickly.
The world is a scary place. The problem is that it doesn’t become less so by giving up your privacy, it becomes more so.
The world bought the idea that privacy and security are at odds, and that by giving up one, you gain the other. It’s the biggest lie of our generation.
I hope I don’t live to see the chickens coming home to roost. It’s happening in China and Russia, and what happened to Assange is a preview of what will eventually happen in the USA.
The "problem" is, that there is not one universal "freedom". Freedom is many concepts packaged into one single word.
Coming from Germany, I still remember the division by the Iron Curtain. Having lived on the western side few miles from the border and having talked to a lot of former GDR people (my father fled with his parents before the wall was build when he was still a little kid) during the years I came to understand two totally different forms of "freedom" at play in the different regimes:
A lot of people in the east got away with critizizing their bosses and sometimes even becoming physical. Up to a certain point they even got away with being somewhat critical to the system and the problems within the system.
In the west people got away with critizising the state quite well, while it became problematic to critique your bosses at your workplace. I know a lot of people in my father's generation who got fired for pointing out flaws in their workplace.
We were able to travel to a lot of places (once we were well off enough to afford it). While my parents still struggled to pay for me being able to attend sport clubs.
My while my SO's parents (she was born few years before the wall fell in the eastern part of Germany) were only ever able to travel to the east German coast, other eastern countries like Slowakia or what is now the Czech Republik, Romania or Bulgaria, Russia or Cuba (and they were by far less well off than my western German parents).
I don't imply one system was better, one was worse. Well yes I do - the GDR was worse. But what I wanted to show is, that there are different kind of "freedoms" and that is just one example. Every form of freddom comes with inherent trade-offs.
Because of preferences, personal values and said trade-offs other people tend to prefere different kinds of freedoms (while maybe not grasping that their choices impact others - like a tragedy of the commons thing). They seem to have a different hierarchy of what is important to them - and decide based on that. Be it in Germany, the US or as OP pointed out in Switzerland.
I was in China for a friend's wedding and his fiance's family was adding another floor to their house. I asked what kind of permission they needed. They said they didn't need anything. They just went ahead and did it.
Contrast that to the US and, depending on the place, you could spend months arranging to get the proper paperwork and inspections to be able to do something like that.
So while the Chinese person may not have the freedom to strongly criticize their government, in this case they did have more freedom to make an individual improvement to the quality of their immediate life.
I think it's a huge issue when someone brings up "freedom". What does that even mean? In a society you're never truly free. There's always some form of constraint. You could go live as a hermit and be free but then you're constrained by the physical limitations of the environment.
While walking to work (pre-covid) I'd see homeless people and wonder "Are they freer than me?" They can wake up and do whatever they want for the day. I'm the one that has to stick to a fairly regular schedule.
Someone smarter than me once wrote “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
If you can point out that someone in authority is wrong, without fear of death or persecution, then you have freedom and from that germ everything else can be reformed eventually.
Dictators know this and it's why they don't let people laugh at them even when they clearly look stupid.
I can’t agree with this. Life is hard but isn’t scary. I’m far more concerned about losing my home to a natural disaster than terrorism. Fear is the media’s new currency.
There’s nothing to be scared of, except maybe a dystopian future where you can be jailed or killed for your beliefs.
I just don’t scare easily. Many do.
Changing the focus from "hiding", which insinuates underhandedness or immorality, to "sharing" - often allows the conversation to extend to "What would you be comfortable sharing with (the government | the police | your neighbors) etc.
In my experience, this angle helps people grasp more quickly that they'd be uncomfortable sharing many things with most people.
PRISM – NSA surveillance program did not prevent a single terrorist attack (tutanota.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777115
Fighting "assholes" is not even the goal of the surveillance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes
That's part of the the problem. Hundreds of years of (relative to everyone else) peace and stable not too abusive government makes people complacent.
You won't hear many people from places that had repressive governments within their or their parents' lifetimes saying "but if it catches one terrorist."
He's OK with random strangers surveilling his children then? Because no child molesters have ever been employed by the public sector, of course. And no government has ever leaked data onto the dark web. Honestly, there should be a parenting license people need to pass with exams.
I would probably make enemies very quickly as I would be sorely tempted to respond "So you want your children to live in a police state? God you are a terrible father."
You can then explain that the data does get misused, but they always just say that it won't happen to them or if they do get in a hairy situation they will always explain themselves since after all they have nothing to hide.
---
The thing people don't realize about the 'nothing to hide' mantra is that it only makes sense if someone looks at your whole life. If you really did have someone examining everything you ever did, watching a playback of your entire life, through your eyes - and this was the only form that anyone would get your data in, by watching everything - then yeah, you probably wouldn't need to hide anything. That person would see everything you do, and understand you pretty well by the end of it. All the things you did, even the seemingly weird things, would make sense in context. They'd sympathize with you.
But that isn't what happens. What does happen is huge amounts of data are recorded, but only little pieces are looked at at a time. And suddenly you do have something to hide, because the people looking at the data on you won't have the full story, and will therefore jump to conclusions based on what they have - and because you won't know when and where this is happening, and what specifically they're looking at, you won't be able to set them straight. Suddenly your every action has to look innocent on its own, you can't do anything that is justifiable given prior events or knowledge. Your wife has been treating you like shit for months, and finally you snap and yell at her? If they only see the end of it then you look like the bad guy. You're researching bombs because you're interested in the historical development of technology, including explosive technology? Tough shit, you don't get to explain that, to them it will just look like you're a big bad terrorist wanting to blow up the government.
You might say that they will have all your information so they can fact-check. This is wrong, they have neither the incentive or the time to trawl through your whole life working out your motivations for everything. It's easiest to just jump to conclusions. And employers will look at this and make judgments on you - without you having any idea what they're seeing and what they're concluding from it.
In public, people carefully monitor their behavior so they appear normal to anyone who only sees them for a second. They're only willing to show their weirder sides to people who know them, who won't make big judgments on them based on minor quirks. With total surveillance, everyone will be in public, all the time.
---
I wonder how much a version of the fundamental attribution error is responsible for "nothing to hide" kind of thinking.
Also adding to the FAE angle, we have to consider what a potentially "bad" action looks like not just outside of context, but in aggregate, because in these systems you're probably looking for outliers, unusual sentiment, not just key terms.
This has a chilling effect on any extra-normal behavior.
If it was implicit that context leading up to and afterwards were required to interpret the outlier, one would see it's probably not an outlier after all, but that requires a lot of people's time and potentially your involvement.
Even if that context could be supplied with tons of surveillance and people/AI, I'd wager people would rather not be hauled in front of the internet police to explain every non-obvious, out-of-the-ordinary thing they directly or indirectly associated with.
There are enough real-life examples, like the Equifax debacle or that "dating" site where multiple people committed suicide when their online identities got leaked.
The only way to guarantee personal data cannot be abused by anyone, authority or not, is when those data don't exist at all. We know that governments are too incompetent to follow best practices in security, we know that this kind of power gets abused with barely any limits because there's no accountability(e.g. when a prominent German singer did a concert police officers made 83 lookups of her data in the police database just in that single night. Nothing ever came out of it even though the police had to admit those numbers aren't possible without abuse).
It's a bit of a tricky situation because as has been noted upthread, the best practical way to maintain privacy is to simulate the ambient data noise. So in a sense, loudly proclaiming one has nothing to hide is the best strategy for keeping one's own privacy secure, but at the expense of everyone else's.
I don't get into these conversations much, but if I do perhaps I should try out the response: "I don't have anything to hide either, but I know a lot of my fellow citizens value their privacy. So I'm willing to advocate for it even though I know it will lead to more scrutiny on myself. Anyone who's afraid of that extra scrutiny is suspect! What are you really hiding!?"
Every middle class person thinks that but what they don't understand is that cops spend their entire lives being lied to, every day, nearly everyone they speak to who isn't a fellow cop is lying to them. So that you are lying is their default position. They're going to go with whatever it says on their screen or whatever another cop told them, 100% of the time.
See model-citizen Uyghurs becoming targeted by the Chinese government just for being Uyghurs.
To which of course all I hear is
"Well yes, but that's not going to happen to the UK, so I don't think it's important"
I'm in favour of strong privacy protections, but this argument isn't one I find convincing.
Everyone has something that can be used against them. If not legally, at least as leverage, blackmail or just to impersonate or humiliate.
Enough to destroy someone's reputation, livelihood, family, life.
In the same way, arguing that the government has absolutely no right to information you would prefer to keep private is not compelling. Better to demand limitations on what data can collect and what it can do with that data.
They always get offended at the idea of me calling them at their personal number.
Making these people uncomfortable with giving the government all that info will just move them from the naive camp to the cognitive dissonance camp. Other than actually experiencing significant government abuse I don't think anything will change these people's minds. Political ideology is like a religion these days.
That is, low level bureaucrats that work for you local council, your local police force or at your local hospital or telecoms company. People who might actually know you or that you might meet socially. A friend of a friend maybe.
These are the people being given access to all your private secrets...
I am in favor of privacy but I'm not under the delusion that it is something I have ever really had.
The tl;dr:
Mounties purchased some sort of intelligence gathering software, and kept it secret for "national security" (i thought that was CSE or CSIS's job?)
Mounties have some sort of darknet search engine. Article implies the term "darknet" is being used liberally, possibly to include spying on protestors, but is very unclear on the details.
Mounties have some sort of vuln in facebook that allows them to see your fb friends even if set to private (this is probably the most significant revelation in the article imo)
Mounties use proxy software when working undercover (no kidding, never would have guessed that one)
Mounties have software to do sentiment analysis on intercepted or publicly available messages
It is implied that the mounties have a caviler attitude towards privacy violations.
--------
The article is a little light on details and high on unstated implications. I'm not exactly happy about all this but this is hardly a bombshell of privacy violation. Maybe there is bad things there, but the article just doesn't have the technical detail to judge.
That's a very blatant double standard - privacy for them, but not for us.
Their culture as indicated by their actions (plus wording in training materials) is that they don't care about the rights of the people which the people believe they have, and are willing to lie to abuse the public's privacy.
Its familiar, maybe from the plot of a bad action movie where the spy agency has gone rogue?
Other than the fb hack, these all seem to be consumer available technologies (albeit probably better versions). I've used proxies before. I've used search engines before.
Hardly the most rouge thing the rcmp has ever done.
This sort of "geeky but psychopathic" type of humor seems to be not uncommon in surveillance agencies. I suppose it makes sense that amoral intelligent people would be drawn towards intelligence agencies, as I suppose sadists were probably drawn towards organizations like the Gestapo, KGB, and Stasi. There's something I find galling about it - not only is one's privacy violated, but what's more is that the violators go about their business with corporate bureaucratic banality and "joking around the office" sort of humor.
> But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.
> It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.
-- Adam Curtis
Relevant article: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-fake-nerd-boys-of...
There needs to be a digital version of "privilege against self-incrimination" [1] [2] but it seams like the governments won't legislate this without a push from the public.
The laws of our society are so complex that at each moment we are breaking at least a few. This also means we could be arrested at any point, by a corrupt official trying to earn extra money for letting us go.
Imagine living your whole life under the regime of airport border control section where anything you say / do can be misinterpreted by a border guard who had a bad day and needs to arrest someone.
Although, in time depending on how politics slants in the US there actually may be positive tax advantages for upper middle class earners ($150k-290k).
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-votes-2019-middle-cl...
You can handwave around the 150k end, but he 300k end is laughable.
The more interesting thing if you google 'Brenda Lucki' in the news. TONS of groups are calling for her dismissal. They call her racist, but don't worry our blackface prime minister supports her.
I would assume that their surveillance goes much. much further than this, considering they're basically watching and learning from the U.S.A.
What are they mounting then?
I've seen mounted policemen in canada, but never a mounted mountie (outside of ceremonial things)
AFAIK, they use Dodge Charger Enforcers.
They do have mounted units and RCMP horse carrier trailers.
As there didn't seem to be a useful compilation, I created one. This seems useful in answering persistent questions, tropes, and dismissals concerning privacy and surveillance.
A formatted version lives at: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/bf4f5f10f6120138799c002590d8e...
(Additions welcomed.)
On authors who were publishing information technology panopticon concerns in the 1980s, or earlier
Paul Baran / RAND
- “On the Engineer’s Responsibility in Protecting Privacy”
- “On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number”
- “The Coming Computer Utility – Laissez-Faire, Licensing, or Regulation?”
- “Remarks on the Question of Privacy Raised by the Automation of Mental Health Records”
- “Some Caveats on the Contribution of Technology to Law Enforcement”
Largely written/published 1967–1969.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html
Willis Ware / RAND
Too numerous to list fully, 1960s --1990s. Highlights:
- “Security and Privacy in Computer Systems” (1967)
- “Computers in Society’s Future” (1971)
- “Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens” (1973
- “Privacy and Security Issues in Information Systems” (1976)
- “Information Systems, Security, and Privacy” (1983)
- “The new faces of privacy” (1993)
https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/w/ware_willis_h.html
Misc
- Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) Notably reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog’s Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (1988).
https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-the-age-of-the-smart-machi... https://archive.org/details/inageofsmartmach00zubo/page/n7/m...
- “Danger to Civil Rights?”, 80 Microcomputing (1982)
https://archive.org/stream/80_Microcomputing_Issue_26_1982-0... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14329877)
- “Computer-Based National Information Systems: Technology and Public Policy”, NTIS (September 1981)
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ota/Ota_5/DATA/1981/8109.PDF
- “23 to Study Computer ‘Threat’” (1970)
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/03/12/archives/23-to-study-comp...
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Privacy and Information Technology” bibliography is largely 1990–present, but contains some earlier references.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/it-privacy/#Bib
Similarly “Privacy”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy/
Credit Reporting / Legislation
US Privacy Act of 1974
https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974
Invasion of Privacy Act 1971 - Queensland Government, Australia
https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/pdf/inforce/current/...
Arthur R. Miller, The assault on privacy: computers, data banks, and dossiers
https://archive.org/details/assaultonprivacy00mill/page/n7/m...
“The Computer, the Consumer and Privacy” (1984)
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/04/weekinreview/the-computer...
Richard Boeth / Newsweek
The specific item I’d had in mind:
Richard Boeth, “Is Privacy Dead”, Newsweek, July 27, 1970
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/11/is-privacy-...
Direct PDF: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/712228/1970-newsw...
Based on an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24851736
Tim Wu and Bruce Scneier, both in 2013.
A series of monographs on early copyright and censorship, notably Cyndia Susan Clegg:
Press Censorship in Elizabethan England https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/press-censorship-in-eli...
Press censorship in Jacobean England https://www.worldcat.org/title/press-censorship-in-jacobean-...
Press censorship in Caroline England https://www.worldcat.org/title/press-censorship-in-caroline-...
‘Corona’
I'm half surprised that our governments have not pulled this trick and half relieved that the world isn't going down the toilet as much as others would like to tell us it is!
Hence the relief; the dysfunction of these govts is a guard against dystopia!