Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The problem is that even if most people don't subscribe to the "nothing to hide" argument in general, they do not care about themselves being the target of surveillance.
Having unsuccessfully tried to make family and acquaintances more aware of privacy issue, I can confidently say that the "nothing to hide" argument is nothing next to the "I don't care" attitude. It's not just being the target of a wrongful accusation, arguments about unintended public shaming, identity theft, negative economic consequences (higher insurance premium or mortgage rates if your bank has more information about you), none of it will work.
I think there is some sort of a Tverskyan study to be done here about expected value and perceived risk. Overall for most people the equation is always: (probability of data being mishandled) * damage < time and effort required to maintain my privacy.
The ultimate trajectory of liberal democracy is towards anarchism. But humans are anything but evolutionarily suited for that. We are biologically built to function in a hierarchy, even if the top of that hierarchy is tyrannical. This will take a long while to change. And enough efforts to educate are not being made. Not even close.
PS. Also wanted to add that the "maintain my privacy" part is still far too technical for anyone except diehard nerds, and even they confess it takes great effort and thought. The entire system has been taken over at all levels of the stack by commercial and political powers. The average Joe doesn't stand a chance unless he wants to go entirely off-grid.
Proof of it being biological? Look at other primates. They form groups of way less than few hundreds and still maintain (strict) hierarchy.
I for example believe that hierarchies are a cultural artifact of civilization, not a biologically inherent human value. The inherent human value is deference to authority, which is useful to maintain existing order and generational memory (and is the basis for what we typically call "conservative"). In tribes of 300 people or so, the hierarchies are easily challenged. In a civilization of 1000s of people, with incomplete information, this is much more difficult.
(That being said, I think there are individuals who do not share typical human values, and try to subvert those for their personal benefit. So these individuals might subvert the value of deference to authority to create a hierarchy from which then they personally benefit. Just like existence of somebody, who might always take and never give back, doesn't invalidate reciprocity as a typical human value.)
And in fact we increasingly live in a world where everybody is a member of multiple independent social hierarchies, and these apply situationally (and it's not even clear they are always needed). This really strains the claim that humans inherently favor hierarchies (which there should be only one), rather than just simply defer to authorities (which might be multiple or even chosen by each individual independently).
I think it is a useful value (and so it evolved in humans), because it forms the basis of parent-child relationship and the transfer of culture. So as young, we reluctantly defer to authority of our parents and other elders, and as we grow older, we begin to believe in the existence of authority as necessary to prevent the cultural collapses due to social experimentation gone wrong (which might result as pursuit of other human values). The fear of such cultural collapse (and the need to prevent them, through authority) is the focal point of conservative values.
Of course, in modern society, this gets pretty muddled, because the rate of change in societies has accelerated and actual authorities (in power) are often younger and change too quickly to really facilitate the transfer of life experience between generations. From this grows various forms of resentment, which is further shaped by ideological propaganda. My point is, I believe that the demand for more authoritarianism comes from people who believe that culture (they grew in) is in peril and want to slow or stop the rate of its change.
It might also be a reason why people believe in God - as Dan Dennett pointed out, it's more like that people believe that belief in God is itself a good thing, rather than necessarily believing in God as an existing being. This is, again, a manifestation of the belief that some authority is required.
Do you spend much time around children?
Dunbar's Number squared seems like the ideal population size. Enough people that some level of privacy/anonymity is possible but not so many that rule by a sociopathic elite can emerge.
It's more like towards feudalism, and that's what the surveillance helps achieve. That's why surveillance is dangerous.
Yet every democracy seems to tend toward dictatorships according to history.
But I agree the idea behind liberalism is individuals, which anarchy makes sense.
Given I have 3 to 5 government layers, Federal, State, city, HOA, and international law, I'd certainly prefer to get rid of a few of these layers due to corruption.
How could a democracy end if not dictatorship? I suppose sinking beneath the waves is an alternative, but that is pretty rare.
If you want to have some fun reading up on Wikipedia's list of Empires [0], take some time to appreciate that the Republic of Venice being the longest-lived Western European empire. And I'm no expert in Venetian history (especially being as they have so much of it), but it seems to have had some solid democratic elements for around 700 years.
Democracies have a messy, difficult to categorise staying power. I hear stories about Kings and Emperors, but nobody talks about the enduring-like-weeds powers that don't have neatly defined figureheads but are hotbeds of prosperity. Look at Switzerland working through the World Wars for example. Really a minor miracle at that time in that place.
And world's largest empire (the British) spawned numerous highly successful democracies.
What Venice had was pretty good compared to dictatorship.
Don't look around for long.
United States of America — a truly improbable, impossible country. With so much of s**t going on through its history, any other normal country would've crashed, and burned 20 times over.
Interesting you would say that, by all accounts the current trajectory of bourgeois liberal democracy is towards towards concentration of power and neo-feudalism.
I am going to make a weird, but IMHO apt, comparison to Type 1 Diabetes. T1D is an attritional disease caused by the pancreas's inability to produce enough/any insulin and the list of complications is long and deadly. As someone who has lived with the disease for decades what makes the disease particularly insidious is immediate effort versus delayed impact. The disease affects everything...every single part of every single day. Eating, sleeping, exercising, traveling, finances...everything. And to be on top of everything is extremely effortful. However the impact of not taking enough insulin, of not checking blood sugars frequently enough, or living with high blood sugars, is delayed. Today's transgressions may not be punished for decades. It is no shock to read about poor therapy adherence when the effort is immediate (and constant) and the effect is delayed (and therefore hypothetical). I see the same issue - immediate and constant effort coupled with long term hypothetical effect - with protecting one's privacy. Obviously one should do the right thing. But many won't.
To use myself as an example: I've had a gmail account since it was invite-only. Was on facebook as soon as it was available to high schoolers. So over 15 years now for both (although I'm basically off facebook at this point because it sucks now, I maintain a skeleton account to use the Marketplace). I've had an android phone for 6 years, used a "free" discount brokerage for years, etc, file my taxes with Turbotax, and use any number of services (including credit cards themselves) that likely sell my data in some form.
Any hard privacy-based damages have yet to materialize beyond a couple of stolen credit card numbers that were easily dealt with.
Now what's the "therapy" for all this?
1. Thoroughly examine the terms and conditions of any service/software I sign up for and actively avoid those who state they'll sell my data, and re-review said terms and conditions every time they're updated, canceling services when/if the terms turn malicious.
That point alone could be a career unto itself.
2. Run an adblocker which will inevitably break some sites and have to be periodically turned off
3. Run a Pi-Hole on a local router
4. Run anti-browser-fingerprinting extensions
5. Use a VPN to obfuscate location data
6. Switch from Android to Apple (and even Apple isn't perfect)
7. Avoid all social media
8. ...
There's an endless list of technical partial solutions that may or may not add up to any real difference, but will definitely consume hundreds or thousands of hours of time in set-up and maintenance and reserach, thousands of dollars in fees over the long haul if using paid services. Plus the daily grind of dealing with non-homogeneous and often 2nd-rate alternative tools because there isn't much money in privacy. All to prepare for a threat that may never materialize and hasn't materialized at all in the over 15 years people have been warning me about the issue.
I drink beer, wine and cider on the weekends. Yes I'm well aware that marginally increases my odds of getting cancer/other nastiness over decades. I don't care, I judge the increased risk negligible compared to the worth of enjoyment/socializing. Privacy falls into that same category for now. I tried using GnuCash to track my finances over privacy concerns. It won't connect to my bank for some reason, spent hours troubleshooting the issue, researching obscure bank communication protocols to no end. Maybe I could have figured it out, but Mint.com works with everything down to my power and gas utilities, was completely set up in less than 30 minutes.
I'd like Privacy, but I think people sneer at the word "convenience" more than they should. Convenience means I get time back, the one resource we all definitely have a finite amount of. And maybe there will be some great privacy crisis some day, in the same sense that there may be nuclear war. I'm not building a fallout shelter any time soon, I've got better things to do.
Related is the fact that people making waves about privacy now have actually made a difference, and even if we're not in a "100% privacy" world, maybe it's good enough.
Reminds me of Y2K. Consumers at the time heard it was a big deal, and then nothing happened. But industry fixed a ton of things that were broken before Y2K so that nothing major did happen.
I'll add, with regard to T1D, that I am fortunate enough to have an endocrinologist who is effectively an expert tasked with staying up to date with the science and facilitating the best outcomes for me, the patient. I am not sure if there is a parallel when it comes to privacy. Sure, there are orgs out there that will take your money and provide you with solutions that claim to guard privacy but it's difficult to confirm their intent and capability. My endo works in a regulated environment with statutes to guard against kickbacks and other bad behavior and has little incentive for malevolence.
With privacy, how do I know my 'privacy score'? It's way more difficulty to do any 'health checkup', compare to how you were 6 months before and plan around known risks for the future
Yes and I would take this even further -- Google, Facebook, and our phones, have become such an integral part of our daily (hourly) lives that to ask the average person to give up even a portion of these things or to change their habits is akin to social ostracization or educational handicapping.
“Maintain” and “sustained” are the key words there. The effort is constant and must be. You only have to get it wrong once, those wanting to slurp up all the data they can about you and pass it on can keep trying and trying and tying, and the effort is much less expensive to them (portioned out over the number of subjects they are tracking or attempting to track) than the counter-effort is to the individual.
If someone is aware and choose something, it's absolutely fine. The problem is the hidden agendas in all shapes and forms.
Didn't know about 'Tverskyan study', thanks for referring
On a more sinister level, even though a malicious state seems very distant (Nordics here), given how many such there are in the world, it is definitely not impossible. We must avoid being frog-boiled to accept surveillance. Even if I don't have anything to hide, we must present "herd anonymity" to shield those who really need it when shit hits the fan. This is the much more abstract part of my privacy philosophy.
That is the main reason. To keep privacy is too costly on purpose. In Europe, thanks to the GDPR you can get quite good privacy. But companies give you a 1-click option to be tracked, And then company that build products usually 1-click or 2-click to not be tracked. But ad-based companies will ask you 3,4 or sometimes even dozens of clicks to not be tracked. That extra effort is on purpose and should be regulated. When you get a pop-up "Do you want to be tracked (Yes/no)" most people chooses no.
The GDPR explicitly forbids that. If you're going to do that you may as well not ask to begin with because you'll be in breach either way.
The problem is that GDPR enforcement is delegated to incompetent idiots and very little of it is being enforced, so these breaches go unpunished. At this point it raises the question of whether the regulators actually benefit from it not being enforced.
In the case here it is state actors doing the surveillance. The biggest con was that people are concerned about privacy vs private companies when the focus should be on state actors. The ability to get people worked up about privacy and data sharing in a messenger app when at the same time governments are trying to remove anonymity in the web is nothing but astonishing.
You can express as much "confidence" as you like in saying that but as it stands, this is nothing more than another personal anecdote.
If you were sure about your anecdotally-based conclusion, then what would be the purpose of a Tverskyan study.
People are not being given a meaningful choice. No one is "choosing" to sacrafice privacy in exchange for using the internet.
Rather, others are choosing to violate previously established notions of privacy in order to make money. Why. 1. Because whatever these others have in the way of computer skills they lack in moral character 2. Because they can; it's technically easier with the internet and generally there are no legal protections against it.
What happened when Apple asked iPhone users if they want to be tracked by Facebook. What did users choose.
s/sacrafice/sacrifice/I feel pretty helpless to help them understand the risks. Or they just don’t calculate the risk vs hussle the same way I would??
So from looking at that risk it seems quite clear that no, it's not worth the hassle, because the hassle is real but the benefits are not. It may be different for other risks, of course - e.g. if OP was worried about a specific abusive ex stalking one of their family, that would be a very different story.
They do care, but they don't have a choice. Investing the time and effort it takes to avoid constant surveillance is far more costly than being under constant surveillance.
If asked, they would all prefer a functional government, rather than the ones we have now that not only refuse to regulate, but take advantage of lax laws for private date collection to get around slightly tighter laws for government data collection.
It's like believing put options in stock market should be worth $0 because you will never need to exercise them.
And not that this isn't terrible but just throw it on the pile. Did they sell the Saudis access to Khashoggi's wife's phone? Maybe but we definitely sold them a fleet of fighter jets too. Trump campaigned on it and got huge applause from crowds. So I wouldn't expect a lot of outrage over this.
It's about security advice more broadly rather than specifically privacy, but you might find the paper “So Log, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users” by Cormac Herley interesting: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
I.e. in Germany, I have seen wave after wave of surveillance passed. People try to fight back each time. Often the supreme court cancels the unconstitutional laws.
But they always try again. And it only takes a football euro cup or Worldcup, or Olympic games or a natural catastrophy to provide the distraction for the public to pass another law.
Our governments want to surveil us, and they will do it whether we like it or not.
People only stand up and fight if the damage if the fight is smaller than the damage of what they are fighting against. We live comfortable, so we will take a lot of this type of immoral behaviour of our leaders. The figth will only start after enough innocent surveillance victims are harmed in the real world (i.e. their data is leaked or worse) and enough people have felt negative consequences of this surveillance.
https://european-pirateparty.eu/pirates-commissions-ai-propo...
Sadly I doubt even this will happen. I lived in China and watched the CCP built their digital surveillance state. Like others say most people don't care because they have comfortable lives and/or are concerned with other issues they find more pressing. And so what if the government looks at my holiday pictures, they think. What they don't realize is that it may not make a noticeable difference to them personally at first. But slowly the effects ripple through society. Independent journalism becomes risky, political activism gets pushed into the underground. It affects the people keeping our societies sound and healthy first. Once they're gone, it only gets worse and worse, because there's no one to keep the government in check anymore. By the time the ordinary citizen wakes up and realizes they're living in a dystopian nightmare it's way too late. In China there is 0 resistance anymore. Among the last ones were the Uyghur seperatists and you may know how that ended.
Now is the time to fight back! Do not wait until the damage is irreparable. And in an ever more globalized world, we the people also need to unite globally and support each other.
Holiday pics, sure. Dick pics? Joe public doesn't like that one!
On another note, have Chinese citizens ever been "free" since the one party system?
I think authoritarianism is often as much about norms as it is about actual legal structures - and while the legal structures in China have changed just a little, the norms of government behaviour have shifted an enormous amount in the last ten years.
That sounds like a reasonable take. I like it. I wonder how many Chinese are actually OK with the system as it is and how many aren't.
As for how many people support the system it's impossible to say right now because people can't speak their mind anymore since Xi took power, it's gotten dangerous. Before when the internet was still relatively uncensored the majority of the comments regarding the government was negative. If it hadn't been they'd not have needed such a massive censorship apparatus in the first place, don't you think? Internet users were mainly younger people though. From my experience in real life I'd say it might have been about 50/50 support vs opposition. Not that it's in any way representative.
I'm not saying techies should just stay passive though. Special cases - journalists, activists, politically involved - need to be protected right now, and when the problem will be generally understood we need to have solutions ready for the average person: information, software, proposed legislation, etc.
There is a point where it goes too far, but not all surveillance is bad.
It is why mass surveillance exist in the first place, to foster collective conformity.
Unfortunately we are prone to accept authoritarianism these days. The more economical and ecological uncertainties there are the more we desire order and stability, no matter the cost. For many having to look the other way is a small price to pay.
I don't see many people suppressing non-conformist opinions anywhere. Rather, I see people defiantly shouting their non-conformist opinions from the rooftops at every opportunity. Spend an hour on Twitter or Facebook and tell me anyone is suppressing any of their radical hot takes on anything.
Polling suggests that the number of people self-censoring has increased. It's especially common among college educated conservatives, who are in tune with what they're supposed to think and also aware that their thoughts do not line up with that, and so decide to keep quiet on political questions, probably because they have more to lose career-wise.
And what is it that people are afraid to say? That they only believe in two genders, or innate gender roles? That the US should return to the gold standard? That they don't trust the consensus on COVID vaccinations? Most people's "radical" beliefs aren't that radical, and the truly radical beliefs (white supremacy, anti-semitism, violent revolutionary ideology, pro-pedophilia) have always been suppressed by society, so the existence of the surveillance state changes nothing in those cases.
>It's especially common among college educated conservatives, who are in tune with what they're supposed to think and also aware that their thoughts do not line up with that, and so decide to keep quiet on political questions, probably because they have more to lose career-wise.
I'm not aware of any mainstream Conservative beliefs that are suppressed in general discourse, or that would lead someone to lose their job. I don't think many people have ever been fired for believing in limited government or the free market. Conservatives have an entire political party and half a country that supports and welcomes their beliefs, and plenty of businesses that would hire them because of those beliefs.
> I'm not aware of any mainstream Conservative beliefs that are suppressed in general discourse
Not in "general discourse" (if by that you mean anonymous social media), but if you work for a tech company, many mainstream conservative beliefs are not to be discussed in public. Consider the James Damore memo, which he got fired for and which most conservatives would agree with. Or imagine being a Trump supporter in a tech company, and wanting to put a Trump poster on your wall/cubicle compared to a Biden/Hillary poster. You might not get fired, but there's enough stories of social ostracism that people probably won't want to do that. Or consider having the opinion that gender = sex and therefore pronouns should correspond to sex, which is what most conservatives think, and something that they'd get fired over. Self-censorship is a rational thing to do in such a climate.
A left-leaning person would probably self-censor in a heavily conservative industry (e.g. oil & gas), too. I don't really have a reference point in such industries about how stifling the climate would be for them, but I don't think this is a phenomenon that's unique to one side of the spectrum. It's mostly a consequence of heightened polarization.
[1] https://2cnzc91figkyqqeq8390pgd1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
Not exactly a wonder that autocratic regimes are among the worst offenders of state surveillance. The recurrent purpose of surveillance is to control behavior.
Intellectual privacy is an important part of intellectual diversity and individuality. Basically it allows culture and values to be generated from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. The fear of being watched causes people to act and think differently from the way they might otherwise. Surveillance fails to respect the line between public and private actors as well.
The consistent "haha only serious" taunt I hear on the left is directed towards "Twitter activists" – leftists whose only contribution is to tweet, and who aren't politically active outside of their social media bubble.
I'd almost wonder if taking a hands-off approach to social media benefits the surveillance state: undirected radical energy flows into social media and away from organizations that could try to focus it towards change. Those organizations remain small, which means the people who are actually likely to radicalize are easier to watch. Social media as a "pressure relief valve", I guess.
Someone may point out that sometimes that pressure relief valve gets stuck and we experience stochastic terrorism, which is very true. But I contend that benefits the state as well.
Like: let's pick two hot-button political issues in the US. Say, abortion rights and gun control. You can definitely find online spaces that are pro-choice and spaces which are pro-life. You can find spaces which are pro 2nd amendment and pro gun-control. You're going to be much harder pressed to find spaces which are pro-2nd AND pro-choice, or pro-gun-control AND pro-life.
So yes— there are absolutely places where I could express my beliefs that cross political lines. But I couldn't do it as myself. Or at least, I'm not willing to.
I'm talking about things like how the ethic of responsibility and academic freedom is in decline. For example when it comes to mass surveillance computer scientists and cryptographers are culpable.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1162
"A creeping surveillance that grows organically in the public and private sectors, that becomes increasingly comprehensive, entwined, and predictive, that becomes an instrument for assasination, political control, and the maintenance of power - well, this vision doesn't merely seem possible, it seems to be happening before our eyes."
Just because the street corner is still populated by the crazies shouting about the end times, doesn't meant ordinary people aren't suppressing their own opinions around the water cooler.
Let's get some polls going on which politician / billionaire we should "reveal" first... then throw all their private info, backroom deals, what they had for lunch the other day that doesn't match up with their publicly stated diet preference, how many unregistered immigrants they have to take care of their mansions, all the stuff... throw it out in public.
Let's do this to anyone and everyone who's voted for more surveillance powers. Or has sponsored or helped develop them. Like NSO Group employees - especially the CEO.
And maybe if they start to see a problem, and some costs, maybe there will be some change.
They were designed to be surveillance devices! Remember when you could replace your phone battery? They corrected that 'design flaw'. Smart phones, smart meters, smart cities, 5g... this is the infrastructure of the technocracy.
Smart = spy.
When papers like the guardian present articles like these as if they care, they are in fact doing a different job. They are actually acclimatising us to the future so that we are not shaken into action, but wring our hands for a bit and move on.
To those talking about journalists needing to protect freedom, what world are you on? Have you heard of 'project mockingbird'? Have you not yet realised that journalism is just a part of the governance structure, along with education, and of course the government?
Our phones were certainly not designed to be surveillance devices, that's just a side effect of having one central device that includes pretty much all of your life's data. As convenient as it is to have everything that matters to you on one device, it simply makes spying that much easier.
I'm not going to go into the smart home debate. I personally don't think that most smart devices are actually spying on you, though a lot of them are security nightmares and could be easily configured to do so by a malicious third party.
I don't share your sentiment towards the guardian at all. I think it's important they are writing articles like this -- thereby doing more to put an end to it than most. You not using a cell phone and telling your friends not to either is likely not having as much an impact on the public as such an article does.
That last sentence of yours pretty much makes any debate pointless, however.
Sure, elementary education glosses over the state's transgressions and the like, but it doesn't seem exactly appropriate to go into detail about how native americans were raped and murdered by colonizers to a 9 year old.
Education teaches people to think critically, which is incredibly important to liberal society and, if anything, would encourage people to _not_ be obedient workers.
Journalists are not independent enough to create a market of actors with different ideas and point of views. If they are, they're probably internet blogs or youtubers and are labeled conspiracy theorists by mainstream journalists.
In the mainstream media you have a few narratives (typically one per party but there may be variations) who are sponsored by either the government or massive businesses.
There are certainly noteworthy exceptions (think about Greenwald - Snowden) but those are few and far.
Someone asked why Israel is considered a "beacon of democracy" in the region. That opens the conversation to why liberal democracies elevate it over the region's autocracies. The tolerance it shares with other liberal documents is germane.
Unfortunately it only takes a few brain cycles for even the simplest of persons to realise that upholding apartheid because #girlpower is a sad stretch and a half.
It's relevant because the goal is to delegitimize criticism of apartheid and it's export of oppression to its neighbours.
There is no other point of relevance to my original comment and, in all honesty, it amounts to blatant propogandising. I'll just leave it at that.
It's equally reductive to ignore those progressive elements on account of certain elements of repression.
It doesn't make them less murderous. And it doesn't de-legitimize criticism. But reality doesn't offer perfect choices. Every government is flawed; most have redeeming values. We must balance the former against the latter. Armchair enthusiasts can imagine perfect options, but reality isn't that forgiving to decision makers.
Israel's unregulated spyware, bordering on terrorism, is an international issue. Its apartheid state is an international issue. But the freedoms it affords a large number of its citizens stands in sharp contrast to its neighbors. That, too, is of international interest. Acknowledging that is not a diversion and does not de-legitimize the criticism--it contextualists it.
The only way the contextualisation is relevent to the original comment is if there's some value in appending this racist myth that "if those Arabs had their say then women would be on leashes and gays would be made into smoothies on-sight". Ironically, the contextualisation is the status quo. The contextualisation is a direct result of, among other things, Israel and it's complicit export of cyber oppression weapons.
And before someone claims that this is separate from the state, just consider that the export license would not be granted for a sale which would be detrimental to Israel's interests as a state. The base deduction is that it's in the interest of the state to keep its neighbours citizens in-check and for Israel to be known worldwide to be an exporter of these exact tools.
I think you're conflating Israel the state with this Israeli company. AFAIK it has no ties to the state, and should no more be conflated with it than we should conflate McAfee or Facebook with the USA.
That doesn't mean everything the company does is to support the objectives of the state, or approved by the state, but it does mean they're not unaffiliated either.
You can't conflate that with the company being an extension of the state though, as the GP did.
They're separate entities with separate objectives. A reasonable comparison would be to Lockheed Martin or Raytheon in the US.
Lockheed Martin is not going to sell to China right ? So saying say for example sales of weapops to Saudi Arabia used to kill civilians in Yemen is not supported by U.S. does not hold water. US also absolutely is responsible for any weapons being sold to countries with questionable government and human rights practices
In both cases they are complict and responsibile for failing to regulate adequately. Israel is additionally responsible as they are also shielding the company from being sued.
https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surv...
I remember being questioned on terrorism charges outside St. Pauls Cathedral, alongside my friends by about 20 police with 4 vans. They told us that we need to leave London (lived outside of it) and they will watch us to ensure that we leave, if we do not then there will be further problems for us.
2. Presuming you aren't a terrorist or doing something so almost terroristish you were violating a public order statute - why wouldn't you just refuse?
But essentially we were out for a road trip and a friend of mine happens to be a videographer. We were around St. Paul's later at night with 2 cars a few guys and a couple of ladies. My friend was filming the Cathedral and a patrol drove passed and turnaround. They asked to see what was on video, they saw it, a couple of friends turned into deer in headlights with their responses and that's when they called backup.
I tried to keep the producer which they gave me with all the details etc but haven't been able to find it. Odd experience. I couldn't be any lesson 'terrorist' looking if I tried.
A fact that often scurries across my mind when I read about some crime caught in 4k (especially home security cams) for which the police are unable to find the culprits. Are all those cameras actually on?
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/region_rankings_current.jsp?reg...
In some countries, governments have a detailed statistics based on a number of reported crimes per capita. Those surveys are particular good in comparing crime between two cities in that country, but are not so good in cross country comparison for the following reasons:
By its own admission this isn't a good metric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_London doesn't really reflect a significant influence. It is falling slightly, just analogous to almost any other European city or capital.
I think a lot of the time it comes down to resources. For a high profile murder they're prepared to put in the effort. For more minor offences, it's not worth it (to the police, not the same as to the victim)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/09/sarah-everar...
Don't get me wrong, UK has a strange fixation with CCTV. But I wonder how these figures would look if you excluded privately owned cameras
Edit: more information here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Uni...
Until people stop accepting busting drug dealers by tapping their phones, they're going to keep getting journalists and other random people having their phones tapped too. The hard line we need to take is that there is no legitimate use of this capability
Also forbidding it will not stop suveillance when it brings benefit to some.
In any hands, I should think. Some things just shouldn’t exist.
Sleep tight.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime
Mass surveillance gives huge leverage to a handful of people under the pretext of safety and security.
China is just a small taste of how population control will look like in the future.
I could do without email, just wait until I'm at a desktop/latop. I could do without chat, again just wait until I'm at a desktop/laptop or use SMS. I could probably do without a browser as well, although this would probably be the most inconvenient loss.
Other than that, I use my mobile phone as a phone, a camera and an alarm clock. If I want small, high quality digital camera I could buy one (or use a phone without a sim card and Wifi turned off 90% of the time). A feature phone would cover the phoning, SMS and alarm use cases.
I'm really not sure what I'd be missing out on that was critical to my life. I'm about to have a three week summer holiday and I am sorely tempted to buy a sub-€100 feature phone just to try this idea. As I also don't want to take a laptop on holiday, I might need to take the smart phone with me to check things once a day. At least it would then only be in one specific location for a very short time.
I mean do you start caring about privacy when your local script kiddy can warrentlessly tap you? In my experience people tend only to care about things that directly affect them.
Part of the lack of caring I think comes from the thought that why would "they" care about spying on me, it seems so distant and unlikely to happen. However when your personal rivals can do it and you could do it back to them, well the risk starts to feel more immediate.
Sure there will be laws against it, but that doesn't stop some people, the main way to tackle it will be either reducing attack vectors or making any surveillance more visible, which will hopefully have a more global effect.
Perhaps more people will start talking about surveillance because it suddenly got yet again easier be a thing? Though perhaps I'm being naive =)...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27878333
I don't know why anybody believes the lie that surveillance won't harm innocent people.
Trying to get people to care about stuff by convincing them it might someday directly impact them personally seems like a fool's errand to me. Even wars and genocides don't directly impact the vast majority of people, often even in the countries where they're happening. We instead need to figure out how to get people to care about bad things happening to other people. The case needs to be made to fight for freedom and against surveillance even if you're completely certain it will never impact you.
For those of you who are struggling with this I would like to try to help you understand why those attitudes are more common and therefore results in inaction so that you can be more effective in getting people to take a position, rather than ignore the problem. As an example, I'm going to be citing something anecdotal which is nevertheless true, in order to establish the necessary psychology you have to combat.
The vast majority of people that live outside the inner city don't worry about someone breaking into thier homes. Breakins do happen, but for most people you only occasionally hear about them as happening to a friend of a friend. Occasionally a large string of burglaries will make the news, but generally the thief was caught by the time the news can begin reporting on it. This is the same way myths and legends are spread, and people don't view such things as happening to themselves, but to vague other people they've never met. They don't know the statistics and if they do they are still unlikely to change behavior or pay for a security service beyond having a yard sign. They do this because the perspective they have toward the problem is that of being unaffected. Possibly losing a TV or random jewelry is only worrying if you believe it could happen to you, and impactful enough that the pain of it happening exceeds to pain of doing something to protect themselves. If birgarlies are common enough where you live you might believe it could happen to you, but if you think of the loss in terms of money the cost of a security service over ten years is likely to exceed tge cost of what they might steal. However, if they think about potential loss in terms of something personally importanr to them they become more likely to hiring a security service. The chance that you might have to buy a new TV is less compelling than the possible loss of the wedding ring your grandmother gave you or the possibility that a rare photograph of your great grandfather might be destroyed by a meth addict carelessly throwing it against the wall while they search your room for jewelry.
Data leaks like this establish that thier data can and probably will be stolen, but it doesn't establish how it can emotionally impact them. Most people are not journalists are significantly critical of the government and will continue to take for granted that journalist are sometimes targeted because as far as they can tell it isn't impacting thier lives. You have to put it in perspective of something they care about, like the government might collect and look at thier nudes, or collect and leak thier banking details such as account passwords. That's not even taking into account that surveillance can cause things like dropped calls, and some government agencies attempt to block consumer protections solely so they can continue to spy on you.
Imagine just for a moment that the FBI and CIA find it convenient that phone companies haven't fixed the phone number spoofing and scam auto dialing problem because it means they send a spam call to any number at any time and appear as something other than a goverent phone number. This can allow them to force your cell phone to ping the nearest towers so they can triangulate your position even if you have GPS turned off. This works even if you reject the call, but it won't work if you're using Google Voice and you block the spammer's number because Google won't forward the call to your phone. The FBI or CIA doesn't even have to bother with setting up a fake spam auto dialing scam because the spammer's already call every active phone number multiple times a day. You might not care that the government is collecting your data, but those spammer's are really fucking annoying, so even if you don't care about the surveillance itself, you should probably care about how annoying some of thier methods for achieving surveillance can be.
Now, does the FBI or CIA care about whether phone companies implement the necessary anti-spoofing protections? I have no idea, but we know enough about recent surveillance history to say that they have used invassive and outright annoying methods. They've infected people's phones with Spyware that runs in the background all the time, killing battery life. They've installed key loggers on all kinds of devices that can screw up the responsiveness of keyboard inputs. They've used malware that can change setting in your browser like search history, which could expose the porn search terms you've looked for (don't pretend that possibility doesn't scare a lot of you when you have to look something up in front of friends, we all know it does). They've demanded private companies create or leave in backdoors into people's devices and accounts that have later been abused by hackers to steal nudes and other embarrassing information (or found vulnerabilities and not reported them so they could abuse them and they were later discovered and abused by hackers).
My point to all of this book of a response is that you need to figure out what the person you're talking to cares about so that you can establish not only that unwanted surveillance can happen to them, but that it will impact thier life in ways they care about. Shit that annoys regularly or has the potential to cause severly awkward or embarrassing situations tend to work better than a quantifiable loss of money or even time.