They are really quite unlike us. And our sets of norms is, shall we say, somewhat different to theirs.
A lot of what they look for is consistency in accounts of previous behaviors between you and any references / interviews they undertake, trying to assess if you're currently honest.
Another big thing they are trying to decide is if you are blackmailable.
(throwaway because I have the sort of clearance you are not supposed to advertise that you have)
(clearly decades ago, and he's less than reliable, but fun nonetheless!)
It's a problem if you do drugs and are hiding it from someone (say, family). Then you can be blackmailed.
Facebook and Google need the user to use their services and they say (despite the message being in legalese) what they're going to track. There is consent involved in these organisations, it's a voluntary transaction.
The government can (and did) just intrude on everything without consent or penalties.
From a moral point of view, I would be open to work for BigTech, but I wouldn't work for a state actor.
And, also, both Google and Facebook eagerly cooperate with state actors in censorship and other aspects - likely surveillance too. So there's not much difference in that aspect whether you work for the government directly or for somebody who takes marching orders from the government while being formally independent.
A more accessible idea which is quite different but allows some truth to shine in similarly is to consider how many of us are utterly dependent on advertising in our careers but we all adblock personally.
I remember "Spot the Fed" at DEF CON where I thought it was reflecting this deep and kind of intractable antagonism between the hackers and the government. It turned out that the government was regularly recruiting people there and at other hacker conferences, fairly successfully, and still does. (First I thought that all computer nerds would be at least somewhat anti-military or anti-surveillance, and then I thought that at least those who actively associate themselves with computer culture and counterculture would be, and now I don't really think either of those.)
The social distance between people working for spy agencies and people who vocally criticize and oppose the spy agencies is tiny. I worked at EFF and I've known socially, or kind-of-socially, four people I can immediately think of who worked directly for NSA at some point in their careers, and those are, of course, just the ones who chose to mention it. I've also seen someone unsuccessfully try to recruit someone for NSA face-to-face right in front of me, and had a boss whose next job was alongside an NSA alum.
I also think that NSA alums are more likely to mention it because they're less likely to have worked under false pretenses in other countries (compared to, say, CIA alums).
I had a relative who was a super-huge computer nerd (the biggest computer nerd in my whole family, possibly more than myself, and taught me a lot of my early Unix knowledge) who had previously held a clearance and worked in aerospace engineering (I think on radars or something). He didn't work for a spy agency, but did work on military projects. And nobody could hold a candle to his Unix expertise.
It's pretty striking how diverse in our beliefs we all are (not just about surveillance and espionage, but kind of on every issue and question). Maybe we don't notice it because of social pressures to act like we agree more than we do. Being fascinated with surveillance and secrecy is a common trait in our circles, but it seems that might translate into trying to fight it, or into trying to do it.
That sort of makes sense to me? The average member of the public doesn't generally think about what spy agencies do. If you assume that recruitment is based more on topical proximity than positive/negative opinion, that's what you'd expect to see.
Some of us don't agree with the intelligence gathering behaviors of our governments, but they certainly might not view it as an issue.
Of course. And education.
If most people are weak enough to become matrix-like slaves to the machine, so be it. I don't believe in free will and I don't think we need to preserve human life in a certain way (e.g. the way our ancestors lived).
Sure, a lot of people will fail this test, or maybe they prefer to live their life like that. I don't care, that's on them, that's their choice - or, better, the way DNA and the environment shaped this human shell.
If instead you wiretap my device, you're attacking my privacy and I don't have a way to defend myself. You are committing violence.
Please forgive my ramblings. I may have been reading Daniel Dennett too much, most likely with too little understanding.
It is specious to look at entropic consequences, when you should look at the existent will being exercised to predict those consequences.
You can't predict unless you have the will to perform a prediction. Having such a will to act, is free will.
As another example - You are able to freely exercise your will to comment or not to comment.
I’m fairly certain fish can predict the course of future events, to a fairly high degree of accuracy, in relation to seasonal changes in water temp, food density, etc… e.g. spawning salmon
It is not clear at all your claim is true in the general case, which is the point. Humans differ from fish not in kind, but only in degree, a few hundred million years of evolutionary divergence as the biologists would have it. Unless of course special factors such as a ‘soul’ are assigned to humans and so on.
That is a general claim that you wrote that I have shown is not correct unless you have an interpretation of the word ‘will’ that is so broad as to render your other statements somewhat meaningless.
In fact you are the one creating the strawman since you dodged addressing the question. I have made no separate claims about my personal free will, or lack thereof.
It is now obvious you have no point other than wanting to debate words and are being intentionally obtuse. This is not a high school debate class, and I will no longer engage in your foolishness, since you have stated that you are not actually commenting on the subject of the conversation.
I’m not exactly sure why you think I would care so much about your opinions to be ‘the arbiter of truth’ for any topic. You’ve made claims that are clearly erroneous and I’ve been pointing them out to the passing reader, so they are not waylaid. I won’t comment on the correct interpretation of ‘free will’ since I myself don’t know, and decline to pretend to know.