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Comment by mcguire | Hacker News Reader

"Bredoux added: “It takes a bit of time to realise it, but it’s extremely unpleasant to think that one is being spied on, that photos of your husband and children, your friends – who are all collateral victims – are being looked at; that there is no space in which you can escape. It’s very disturbing.”"

Welcome to the future! It's pretty much the same as the past, only more effective.

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This is why we need competent people at EU level and national governments. The current leadership is very much in favor of such surveillance. In Germany, it is even large parts of the press, which is pretty damning given their profession.

A depressing thought experiment a professor once posited many years ago....Hitler comes to power in the internet era and now has state of the art tools to find people of certain traits, vs manpower and spies to discover them. Ability to go through your entire lives digital footprint. Every picture. Every video you've created, or viewed on a website. Every location you've visited, how long you were there, and who was around you. Everything you've ever searched. Everything you've ever purchased. Every contact you have. Content of email, text, phone calls, etc. All keyword searchable with beautiful charts and graphs showing how you relate to everyone you've ever come into contact with.

It's pretty much what we have in China now.

There are programmes doing this in the West as well.

To the positive spin for China, they tend to target only their fellow citizens and have some internal coherency and moral. NSO is an Israeli national problem that sells the spying capabilities to the highest bidding crook dictator around the world.

> To the positive spin for China, they tend to target only their fellow citizens and have some internal coherency and moral.

This is a terribly disturbing comment to me, who cares that they "tend to only target their citizens?"

If I had to choose, I'd go with China, at least they believe in something.

NSO looms like modern version of mercenaries, selling 'raid and pillage as a service'. It's like spanish conquistadors, kill and steal anything law does not protect.

> positive spin for China

> moral

Which moral?

We have all that, just without Hitler in power. At least in the US anyway, the government has access, should it become necessary, to a comprehensive catalog of your activities and communications. It's just that they should get a warrant before accessing it, which I'm not naive enough to believe that they do in all cases.

The ship already sailed on the whole "ubiquitous gaze" thing.

> I've heard quite a lot of people that talk about post-privacy, and they talk about it in terms of feeling like, you know, it's too late, we're done for, there's just no possibility for privacy left anymore and we just have to get used to it. And this is a pretty fascinating thing, because it seems to me that you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape. And why is that? The reason is that it's bullshit.

> We can't have a post-privacy world until we're post-privilege. So when we cave in our autonomy, then we can sort of say, "well, okay, we don't need privacy anymore, in fact we don't have privacy anymore, and I'm okay with that." Realistically though people are not comfortable with that. Because, if you only look at it from a position of privilege, like, say, white man on a stage, then yeah, maybe post-privacy works out okay for those people. But if you have ever not been, or if you are currently not, a white man with a passport from one of the five good nations in the world, it might not really work out well for you, and in fact it might be designed specifically such that it will continue to not work out well for you, because the structures themselves produce these inequalities.

> So when you hear someone talk about post-privacy, I think it's really important to engage them about their own privilege in the system and what it is they are actually arguing for.

-- Jacob Appelbaum, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3h46EbqhPo&t=7m46s

I know Lenaïg since I’ve been working at Mediapart a few years ago. I feel sorry for her. We were very careful on all security aspects, and it’s sad to see it’s never enough.

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