Remember when people used to say, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” on the topic of whether there should be backdoors for law enforcement?
Some people get it after that. Otherwise, I would see them makes some entertaining mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they still did not see the problem with electronic surveillance.
To be perfectly fair to her, it is harder to become a police officer in the UK (3years of education), otherwise I would have applied at the local police station, some places in the USA have only 6 weeks of training.
Send her a link to this article. Highlight this part:
> "A former Louisville Metro Police Department officer used law enforcement technology as part of a scheme that involved hacking the Snapchat accounts of young women and using sexually explicit photos and videos they had taken to extort them, federal prosecutors said in court documents filed on Tuesday."
Some people live in an absolute fairytale.
I imagine that if the covid droplets in the air are visible, we would have a much easier time convincing people to wear masks in the beginning of the pandemic.
There are probably millions of Americans who would, without hesitation, hand their unlocked phone to their pastor or a police officer. Your "hand me your unlocked phone" exercise won't really work.
For a uniquely interesting spin on this, you might look at the case of Doug Jensen. After participating in the January 6th events, he willingly went for an interview with the FBI and then gave them his phone and his passwords so they could look.
To me, that seems emblematic of a person who has never in their life been in a outgroup.
The lack of awareness it would take to do that is astounding, but worth paying attention to; there are plenty of folks in the US who have never actually been on the receiving end of state power.
As such they have no way of discerning what that power looks like, much less an appreciation for the real effects of it's use on themselves.
Since the 1970s in the us most people were not impacted by health challenges where they had to do anything, maybe with the exception of aids. I never had to think about getting a vaccination or a health issue that might affect me, I always got my shots for school, never thought about it.
I think the covid vaccination was the first time a lot of adults had to think about a vaccination and there was a lot of pressure to get it (I'm in that category, I never gave vaccination a second thought, got a flu shot every year for example). People in my family who were engineers, always been vaccinated, even in the 50s knew some people with polio got influenced by the anti-vaxer world on facebook and started talking about the dark conspiracy and secret payoffs of us govt health workers. That was very sad to see.
This isn't true, because I've lived here my whole life and experienced zero vaccine requirements since being so young I can't remember. Many that I or my parents chose to get, but those were by choice.
This may be state-dependent.
Though this is all somewhat irrelevant; the government didn’t mandate vaccines in most contexts. Coercion, yes, but not proper mandates. I’m thinking more of having my favorite businesses shut down, arbitrary restrictions that don’t make sense, government bodies ignoring clear law, etc. And I’m in a free state, compared to most others!
For instance, you family and friends over. They use your wifi to access illegal content.
The police now want to see everything about you that you ever did. they don’t need to ask. And being white and wealthy will only help you so far.
Everyone is guilty of something. Make enough laws and we will all be guilty of prison time crimes!
Just because I'm not building a bomb in my basement doesn't mean I want all my dirty laundry trotted out in front of the world.
- Technological solution. Implement end to end encryption, and encrypt data at rest. Use techniques to prevent third parties from gaining access to decryption keys.
- Human solution. Strengthen, and critically, enforce laws that protect the privacy of individuals. Severely punish and hold to account misuse of data & PII.
It’s not dumb luck that the first and second amendments of the US constitution both provide protections against an unjust government. I’m not a gun fan by any means, I just see the similarity between the soft and hard approaches to addressing an issue.
We should come together as a group to write a new amendment that protects one's digital life to propose to congress via a lobby group.
The authors of the Constitution absolutely understood how critical privacy was with respect to personal information. "Papers" is the keyword here, the OG Americans were 100% harassed by the British Gov.
4th Amendment:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Why? Because people assume that it is highly unlikely that they will be the target of such a search, assume that a warrant would be needed, and in the bigger scheme of things, a backdoor is worth having in case someone who has committed a crime or is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime can be pursued.
So there's a principles / practicality tradeoff that I think people are making.
Further, telling people that the government might spy on you with the purpose of locking you up or fining you comes across as overly paranoid. Again, not saying this hasn't happened in the past or in other regimes, but this just isn't a sizable number of people's experience (in the US or Canada for example).
Rather than directly handing someone an unlocked phone, I like to think of it more like the residents of high-rise buildings who leave their curtains open no matter WHAT they're doing in the apartment. They figure the chances that someone is looking in THEIR window is miniscule even though the technology to do so is cheap and easy to obtain. The thing is, I bet a LOT of high rise residents, especially on higher floors, do leave curtains open all the time.
You see, every year there's one or two toddlers in her class that realize that either they can hit back, or take revenge by stealing those plastic cards in her purse she finds so important. And the other gets the idea they might get some support from their parents if they steal her emergency Jack Daniels bottle and take it to their parents.
With privacy HOW WILL THE POLICE FIND REASONS TO THROW THOSE CHILDREN INTO RE-EDUCATION CENTERS? Without constant surveillance of yet more aspects of those children's lives (OUTSIDE of school or anything perfect, I mean government related, of course). I mean unless every hairdresser tells Youth Services that these are bad parents.
With privacy how will youth services find reasons to throw children of parents who've committed heinous crimes into youth services? Heinous crimes such as abortions or same sex marriages or even ... gone to a protest for those unmentionable rights, or legalizing Satan-juice and Belzebub-smoke? Those parents could even be Jesus-killers, sorry, Jews is the PC term isn't it? Or terro...Muslims. We can't use that as a reason, but obviously children can't be trusted to those parents, so we'll trust them to youth services, you know, where half the girls grow up to be prostitutes, and most boys have more drugrunning arrests than points on their final exams. I mean the ones that actually do their final exams at all. Ahhhhh ... God bless good old American government style child upbringing!
Think of the children! Think of Gladys! Think of the heinous crimes some children might be confronted with! DO YOU WANT BABY JESUS TO DIE?
In other words privacy is bad if and only if the government is near-perfect. If the government is no better (and in fact significantly worse) than the society it serves ... then privacy protects you.
Meanwhile your nudes are getting stolen by cops.
Anti-privacy people come in a lot of shades.
Some of them like to think of themselves as "good people" who never need to be protected from the law because they believe they always follow the law, therefore, the law is always on their side.
Some of them are holdouts of a bygone age where people championed an open internet coupled with an open society and open government.
There's probably more categories than that, but those are the two I encounter most often on this website. Unfortubately, if you read into what they're sayinf, they hold moral positions on the issue so it's next to impossible to have discourse with them.
I'm pro-privacy: I think we have a fundamental (natural) right to privacy, and I support legislation that practically strengthens that right. But that doesn't mean that I agree with you on everything, and it's unreasonable to expect that.
Safe harbor was probably not the right word; I'm talking about people you can't even have basic privacy conversations with because their worldview is just so baseline different. It's next to impossible to have conversations about privacy with a person who believes you should be able to view all sensitive information about a person because of their belief that a transparent society is analogous to bleach. The people who believe they and their friends are the last bastion of good people on Earth and that they have nothing to hide cannot be reasoned with either.
These are people who won't even say, "privacy is important".
One day, one of these people suddenly quits, moves to Dubai, and buys a Bugatti.
The backdoor is now a front door.
If they know what they are looking for, have a warrant. It is that simple to me.
/s
No one who studied history ever said this.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid...
It's not a valid point and has nothing to do with ethics. If you're a gay person, there's nothing unethical about that. But if you happen to live in the Middle East, there's a good chance that your government wants to murder you because of that. Keeping it private is not unethical and doesn't point to you doing anything bad. And it's now impossible to live most of your life without some of it leaking out onto the web, even if you aren't the one actively putting it there yourself. Companies collecting data, people posting stuff about you, etc. If you live any part of your life, it's likely it will end up on the internet without you doing anything.
1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468308/google-ceo--if...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin#Sexual_harassment_a...
If the photos were of a pet dog playing the park instead, nobody would be concerned except maybe around realizing that the tech could also be used to expose wrongful material in the same way.
Is that why? We all shower and change clothes on a regular basis(I assume), there's nothing wrong with it. Yet, I'm sure most of us do that in private perhaps only in front of a romantic partner. Something doesn't have to be taboo to be personal or private.
Au contraire. Step outside to let the world see you doing those things and see how well you fare. You are going to realize quickly just how wrong those things are. Humans aren't rational. Just because we all do it doesn't mean it isn't deemed wrong.
Of course, as with any wrongful act, you can get away with it as long as you aren't caught.
If you want to flip things around, there is absolutely nothing that you can do that is wrong if nobody else not party to the act knows about it. Fundamentally, wrongness can only be judged when third parties are aware of an act.
The acts of which we speak are wrong, but you can get away with it so long as you aren't caught.
Speaking English doesn't confer magic powers. The same people who made up the the communist/nazi secret police are in every government, the only question is if they are in the ascendant. The stakes are very high, and we've seen in the 20th century that the situation can turn sharply and without warning that most people will accept to the point where some violent idiot is running the show.
In some senses, a constant string of leaked nudes out of police departments is the best case. At least that will keep people asking how to preserve privacy. I'd rather have this Wilson bloke looking at people rather than the return of Lavrentiy Beria. Mr. Wilson is on the heroic end of the spectrum compared to what will happen with these spy networks, which are most effective when wielded politically.
Do you wear clothes around your family?
(Mostly because this sort of story is quite rare. It should happen zero times, but plenty of people are very happy with the status-quo tradeoff. I mean, we're talking about folks that the public trusts to carry lethal weapons openly, in spite of the damage they do with them; access to espionage tools are way down the security-and-safety-concern ladder from the Glock Gen 5s on the officers' hips).
I'm not implying this should just be a "cost of doing business," but I am implying that most of the citizenry has implicitly accepted it as such, so we can't expect democracy to fix this issue.
It's real, real hard to get the polity at the national level to care about a 0.2%-of-the-population issue. I don't think we can expect a democratic solution to this issue.
I kinda doubt this guy would have got caught if he wasn't blackmailing the women.