Iran installs cameras in public places to identify, penalise unveiled women
reuters.com
reuters.com
The problem here is Iran, cameras have nothing to do with it.
Surveillance cameras have everything to do with consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands. Therefore fewer voices of dissent on the levers of power.
Iran is going through a demographic shift. The protests and strikes are evidence of a desire for change. With tools like this even small acts of defiance become higher risk.
So you're telling me if we banned cameras in Iran, women would no longer be oppressed?
I'm saying without cameras people will have more freedom to resist, in big and small ways. And with enough resistance they may enact meaningful change.
Cameras are tightening the noose on the opposition to those in power.
That does not logically follow; another technology would just as soon take the place of surveillance cameras (phone tracking, social stigma, stricter laws and punishment). It is the intent of the oppressor and the courage of a culture to resist it that matters most.
sad thing is this is only the start, wait till you see what pervalant surveillance powered with AI/GPT-X brings.
We are not, and literally no one is advocating for this. This is entirely on Iran, and maybe the Chinese company selling them cameras if it exists
Oppression would still be present. The issue is the impact and influence protestors could have had simply wouldn't be possible as any dissent will be met with a knock at the door the moment it is uttered.
> Surveillance cameras have everything to do with consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands. Therefore fewer voices of dissent on the levers of power.
> Iran is going through a demographic shift. The protests and strikes are evidence of a desire for change. With tools like this even small acts of defiance become higher risk.
People with guns kill more people than people without guns.
Oppressive governments with cameras oppress more people than oppressive governments without cameras.
I think you and I agree that it's a matter of degree.
But in that case, why is this link interesting? And if it's not interesting, why is it in HN? I consider that "government that's well known to be very oppressive decided to take another step to increase oppression" isn't interesting.
If nothing else it spurs discussion about the ethics of our field. Perhaps it will give some pause before pushing the state of the art forward, or working for shady operators.
The irony of this statement is government is historically responsible for the most deaths as they are best armed. When technology like firearms are decentralized and more people have access to them, fewer overall deaths occur and more individual freedom ensues.
Same concept for cameras, when they are pointed at police and agents of the state by citizens.
The way I see it you're making a stronger claim and thus have a higher burden of proof. And yet, you offered none.
He said "in my country such and such happened". And you're saying "here's an example of such and such happening".
EDIT: But now that we're at it,
> The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people by soldiers of the United States Army.
300 people seems like nothing compared to the number of people that dies every year due to (civilian) gun violence. You're just thinking binary, you're not thinking with numbers. Also your best example is from 1890. Roughly the same amount of people that died in school shootings in the first three months of this year. Your commitment to ideology is hilarious.
Germany was also never widely armed prior to Hitler. This is an urban myth.
Only a handful of societies have ever had widespread civilian armament. Certainly not enough to make any kind of causal inference about the general effects of firearms on revolutionary or counter-revolutionary activity.
And Wounded Knee? This was a continuation of a policy of Manifest Destiny and genocide that saw hundreds of massacres and battles. The many armed battles that took place would suggest that being armed wasn't a significant deterrent to US cavalry.
Ask the various native peoples, who at various times outgunned the then pitiful US Army, how well that worked out. Read the survivor accounts about how well the Easter Rising did in Ireland. Political movements defeat state power, period.
Ditto with the Boers and the British. The Brits weren’t faring well against mobile artillery and people not marching around with redcoats and brass. The Brits “won” when they put the families in concentration camps and half starved them.
Guns are powerful, but power doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun.
A: Tactical teams with automatic weapons, sometimes snipers or air support now serve warrants and raid moderate risk suspects.
We don’t have a tyrannical government. The US unrest scenario is different than China as the citizenry is neutral or pro-government, but you have a vocal minority. We have reactionary political parties that use armed LARPer militias to intimidate voters and influence policy.
What evidence proves this is true?
(Edit: more curiously, has there actually been an example of a democractically-elected government committing genocide?)
It worked well for Afghanistan, also Vietnam.
I would like for us to start thinking about how we want that to play out now, rather than later.
I hope you'll join us for that conversation.
We have been hearing this argument for too long from those who are anti Iran.
This kind of thing is terrifying and not worth hand waving away.
Why "but"? Those are usually the same groups of people.
Intuitively, it is more likely that people who are not fan of US policies would be fan of Iranian govt's policies (you know because Iranian govt and US govt don't see eye to eye and all that..).
Oh sorry I misinterpreted this phrase. I read it as if it said "become red with anger when you criticize their govt's treatment of women". My bad.
In what world but an American worldview is that even remotely intuitive? That statement is plain wrong.
US-Iran relations post-WW2 and why some Iranians see the US as a causal factor for the current repressive regime is a fascinating topic! If you want to explore, here are a few starting points:
1. More of an anti-Shah stance: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=100...
2. More of a pro-Shah, US-centric stance: https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/1979-iran-and-america/
US actions set the conditions (a foreign puppet ruler) for a people's overthrow which itself was usurped by the worst form of theocrats (your "Iranian Regime") who maintain power by murder (public hangings in squares, etc) .. and act which, again, US Courts have no time limitation on the consideration of.
That's not what I meant. What I meant was no one will excuse what Ted Bundy did because his parents had a divorce or were mean to him when he was a kid. While we acknowledge that stuff that happened decades ago still might have an effect today, we tend to attribute people with self agency. I think we should do the same with the current Iranian regime or all countries for that matter.
Also, these theories will never be verifiable. I don't see what's so interesting in exploring them then. This might be because of what the U.S did, or it might be because of what Iraq did (one million people died in the Iran-Iraq war), or simply it might be bad ideas in the minds of religious fanatics - or a million other things or a combination of them. What do we do with it then?
Some Iranians love their government! This is true in every country. On the whole, though, this is a gross mischaracterization.
Iran has been having enormous countrywide protests and strikes for the last several years. The scale of these cannot be understated. Protests in every city and town, and many small villages, across the entire country, for months and months on end.
Over 20,000 Iranians have been arrested in the most recent wave of protests, and somewhere between 500 and 5,000 have been killed since September 2022. The government steals people's corpses and buries them in secret so that the true death toll is hidden.
Iran has the largest standing military in the Middle East. About a third of the military is the IRGC, who is sworn protect not the people or national sovereignty, but rather to the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic, and is frequently deployed domestically. They have been instrumental in crushing protests, going as far as shelling their own villages with artillery to quell dissent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahsa_Amini_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Iranian_food_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_Iranian_prot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Iranian_gene...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011–2012_Iranian_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elec...
Regardless, that huge military you refer to in Iran is composed of... Iranians. They're not foreign oppressors. If the Iranian people don't want these village-shelling assholes ruling over them, they need to stand up and do something about it. These soldiers live somewhere, and have families somewhere. No regime can stay in power without military support.
Anyway, back to my point: Iran's current problems aren't America's fault. Iranians are doing this to themselves, just like Afghanistan's people are oppressing themselves.
Really, I can't understand why this worldview comes from.
The previous one (not exactly democratic, but not "let's kill everybody that dresses wrong" either) was created by a lot of popular pressure, replacing another set of religious nutjobs that were put there by the CIA.
Now, answer me, did the sanctions destroy the current government yet? Or maybe they are only there for 15 years and they just need a century or two to make any effect?
The CIA definitely did not put the religious nut jobs in power in Iran. Unless you want to blame them for the revolution in the first place.
I also feel for iranian women. One can't but wonder what life would look like if Iran dumped the derelict religious practices and just went with a more common sense approach to religion and equality.
Considering how many Indian Americans convert to a different religion for the sole purpose of escaping the social implications their caste ties them to, this is a good starting point.
Feminists are to authority like atheists are to religion.
In other words I’ve had direct experience with feminists who supported religious clothing in a misguided attempt to support other cultures.
I’m of course not saying that there aren’t people who freely choose to wear such things. But it’s rarely without at least some pressure. We should be careful about what we force people to do but also be aware that not everyones outward choices are free.
To use a phrase that seems to have lost favor: link, or it didn’t happen.
Our experiences are a result of who we associate with. The Muslim women who fought to wear the scarf did so out of having dedication and focus in their lives to studies and discipline (they were med students, engineers, architects).
For whatever reason, fragile people get real offended by what other people wear.
Update (context): I am not talking about the people in west who want to (not)wear hijab. I understand the premise of that choice. But this word (choice) is used daily in government propaganda. Maybe its analogous to talking about the choice of working in a cotton field to a slave. It’s a whole different environment/context. Hence my negative reaction to this word. It’s a matter of feeling which I just expressed. Nothing against someone who has a real choice, without religious stigma.
It's the same argument: don't make me do something I don't want to do.
It can be very isolating and sometimes dangerous to be the outsider in an area with uniform religious and cultural beliefs.
What are your thoughts on western governments that attempt to ban the hijab? I can't remember if France succeeded.
I believe banning a piece of clothing is not reasonable, like banning jeans or headscarves. On the other hand there is a lot of stigma around hijab if you choose not to wear it among some muslim families so much so that it’s not a real choice anymore and it’s not a simple piece of cloth. So I think it’s not bad to have some legal ways to protect you against your over zealous family/community but this kind of lawmaking is very prone to other issues too. Furthermore, banning and enforcing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin which is ultimately the root of the problem. It’s very complicated. I wish I had a straightforward answer.
In the end it is about a social contract, the details of which may change with the course of time.
Locality and social norms definitely play into this conversation, here in Seattle at least there is a culture that supports nudism, whether it's the summer solstice bike ride, certain beaches that are popular for swimming in your birthday suit, etc.
I've seen art students making life drawings in a city square, for example.
If wearing too little is illegal in most places, why wouldn't it be possible to wear too much, in theory?
You might be cool with that, but I’m not.
Some forms of dress and undress have laws. Others don’t have laws but are still bound by social contracts. The person you are replying to is clearing trying to compare these and pointing out responsibility may come down to the wearer in both cases and wondering out loud that society may punish any extreme state of dress.
At which point did he say you should pass new legislation or that he agreed with it?
I tend to elicit the feeling you are mentioning often, without intending to. I have seen old women move away from me while we were waiting to cross the street. I have been stopped by police because “I was acting suspicious” (I was walking to the gym, after work).
It’s not a nice feeling, scaring people just by being around.
Because of this, I never wear the hood of my hoodie. In general I have to wear as unthreatening clothes as I can. And I avoid dark streets, because someone can see me as a threat and fear makes people do irrational things.
We would all benefit from less fear.
I am not “athletic” though :)
A similar thing would be the ban of wearing nazi symbols.
It's a head covering; it covers your head, which can provide comfort depending on the environmental conditions.
Depending on the specific garment and context, it may provide some privacy/anonyminity.
Comparing it to nazi symbols doesn't seem right; in part because it's not purely symbolic, but also because it's only oppression when you're forced to wear it, not when you choose to. No one is calling for the star of david to be banned because Jews were forced to wear them; if someone wants to wear it, they can.
Perhaps we should examine your beliefs for indoctrination? To use your indoctrination as an excuse to remove your bodily autonomy.
The topic is much more complicated than "fragility" as you are dismissively trying to portray it. We wear clothes in civilised societies for a reason, and different types of clothes have different types of societal effects.
Your freedom ends where the the freedom of the next person's begins.
Also, the Nazis are just really exceptionally bloody-handed. In terms of intentionally, directly killing people, they killed like 16 million people. In terms of intentionally, indirectly killing people, their deliberate use of famine killed eight or nine million civilians in the soviet union alone. Then you add all the people that died due to massacres, or were killed as collateral damage, and you can understand why 30 million people died in the USSR, the vast majority of whom were civilians. It generally gets much worse in areas the Nazis had a longer duration of control: in Poland, they killed about one in five people.
It's generally pretty hard to kill that many people before the 20th century, because the means of killing are too innefective, and the number of potential victims is too small. For what it's worth, Genghis Khan is probably the most bloody-handed pre-modern figure, so if we're going to blame religion for his behaviour, it's probably shamanism that has the highest death toll.
Making it simply a choice of clothing is reductionism and you know it.
Do you consider the widespread laws in the West that require women to cover their chests in public similarly oppressive?
Trying to support other cultures (admirable) by encouraging oppressive practices (troubling). Not seeming to understand that very much of the women’s clothing is worn out of fear ranging from family shaming to extreme violence.
The far and even moderate left is becoming increasingly bigoted classifying people into bins and setting behavior standards. You’re not just a person you’re a complex set of race, gender, and creed and you have to stay in that lane or you’re immoral. It’s all very odd.
In my experience, there's nothing exceptional about American liberalism in contrast with most of the Western world, while American conservatism has an unhealthy obsession with authoritarian solutions to problems that aren't problems: transgender people, women who don't want to be pregnant, people who want to marry those of the same sex, and books about any of the above that children might read.
- Women should not be forced to wear particular items of clothing
- Women should not be forced to not wear particular items of clothing
What's difficult to understand?
Those hijabs is a clumsy measure to contain the power of sexuality. They recognize its power and the danger of getting it unleashed, but they aren't wise enough to know how to transform it into creativity at the society level, so they just chained it.
The ISW covers it every now and then with their daily Iran conflict updates: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-ap...
> Student poisonings have resumed in Iran after approximately three weeks without reported incidents, indicating that the regime has failed to take the necessary security measures to permanently prevent these attacks. CTP recorded ten student poisoning cases on April 5, four cases on April 4, and one case on April 3.[1] The April 3 chemical poisoning attack on Iranian school girls in Naghadeh, West Azerbaijan Province marked the first of such attacks since March 13, as CTP previously reported.[2] The pause in student poisonings between March 13 and April 3 roughly corresponds to the Iranian New Year holiday between March 20 and April 2, suggesting that the recent respite from student poisonings was not due to the regime’s ability to effectively crack down on the perpetrators of these attacks, but because schools were not in session. The resumption of student poisoning attacks also indicates that the network targeting Iranian school girls still exists and retains the ability to operate in Iran.
> There are numerous similarities between the most recent student poisonings and the poisonings that occurred between December 2022 and March 2023. Students poisoned in recent days have reported symptoms—such as smelling a strange smell before becoming ill, dizziness, and headaches—which match the symptoms experienced by students poisoned in March.[3] Students from schools where poisoning attacks have occurred in recent days have additionally reported that school principals confiscated their cellphones to prevent the dissemination of news about the attacks.[4] School officials reportedly behaved in a similarly abnormal and unsympathetic manner during the peak of student poisonings in early March, as CTP previously reported.[5] Regime officials have largely disregarded the resumption of student poisoning attacks. Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi stated on April 5 that he “could not confirm” the poisoning of students in Tabriz, East Azerbaijan Province. Vahidi added that “further investigations should take place,” but did not exhibit any sense of urgency regarding the recent attacks.[6] The regime’s lack of response suggests that it is incapable of preventing such attacks, does not want to acknowledge the existence of a network capable of instilling fear into the Iranian people, and still tolerates the poisoning of Iranian schoolgirls.
However the Iranian regime helped move the Overton window within Iran in a direction that led to school girls getting poisoned for going to school.
You see "CSAM".
Do you know what it means, without looking it up?
CSAM is alas a fairly well understood term of art in security and cryptography circles, for those with the good fortune to not know have such familiarity, it means child abuse.
And like Iranian laws of public decency, CSAM has it's "oh my god think of the children!" central case that is a reprehensible crime. Nobody disagrees with this. Of course, there's a few cracks already: a number of state governments are trying to classify comic book depictions of LGBTQ, even textual ones, as CSAM. You can even vaguely see the argument, the idea being that this encourages children to engage in such acts.
The problem is that CSAM laws are perfect for this use case. They're absolutely perfect for repression! After all, we can never have a frank discussion of what CSAM is, based on the actual material, for obvious reasons. We can never have the citizenry openly discuss what material gets added to the list, and what does not get added to the list, so we are 100% dependent on politically not-quite-elected people with agendas deciding what's on the list.
Furthermore, one can quickly expose the motives behind CSAM scanning. Is it to help children ... or not? Look at what it's being used for, what these laws effectively do. Obviously it's being used to find children, who are of course in most cases the victim of very minor abuse, or of mistakes, and then placed in the care of CPS. Now you can quickly differentiate motives:
1) if the intention is to help those children, we would make damn sure those children, from that point forward, are treated better than they were at home
2) if the intention is repression, societal control, ... they totally would not care about the treatment of the children found
We all know how CPS treats children. It most definitely does not protect children in their care against sexual abuse, for example. Something like half those children does not go to school at all. They have no real future (yes, thankfully there are exceptions). There is a Netflix series "Young and locked up" that is, among others, about what happens to children who protest their treatment by CPS by running away. Go and look.
Or look at "Short Term 12" where a victim of child abuse is depicted. The victim, nearly adult tries to get out from "protection", constantly explaining how her life at home (presumably/allegedly WITH abuse) was so much better than her environment in CPS, and eventually returns to "home", where she was abused and destroys and rages. It is left in the middle if she wants revenge for abuse ... or is taking revenge for getting her into CPS. In an interview the director points out that this vagueness about her motives, whether they're against abuse or against CPS, is not an accident.
One kid, because he's about to "graduate" from CPS (dumped homeless on the street), tries to commit suicide, because of what he knows his future is. In commentary, it is made very clear that the kid is correct about his future.
And of course, there's many stories in the press that this effectively encourages child abuse. After all, CPS in the US is a horrible punishment FOR CHILDREN, worse than jail in some cases. Which of course means it's net effect is to strongly encourage children to simply accept abuse if they've ever seen CPS in action. And, of course, CPS is completely losing the fight against everything they're supposedly fighting, from sexual abuse to suicide, which of course is completely coincidental. Children FEAR state help against sexual abuse much more than they fear the abuse in the US (not that the situation in, say, France, is any different). And frankly, it's hard to argue this fear is anything but justified.
So, frankly, you cannot trust government with CSAM scanning, and there's no reason to. It's the perfect instrument of repression, we would not even know if it was used for that, and if you look at the full picture of CSAM scanning, including enforcement, the argument that it's there to protect children is ridiculous.
I’ll guess the software is from a Chinese company..
In fact, I would bet that most of this kind of information gathering/large scale spying is running on computers powered by Linux.
So everyone who has ever contributed to Linux must also be aware of the consequences of their work, there’s no avoiding it.
But I’m sure that for those directly involved the money is excellent and the feeling of doing something “cool” must be through the roof, uncle Ted and Ellul be damned.
Build it and they will come.
Shame the approach René Carmille took is no longer popular. I guess it’s easy for us to wash our hands of what our software is used for - it’s bad guys who use it, and maybe it’s bad guys that sell it to bad guys, all I do is close some jiras
Someone should hack those cameras to add fake veils when one is not detected
Is it really for spying unveiled women?
Or is it for public safety? considering the recent poisoning of young female students [1] + the killing of scientists by the mossad [2]
The fact that reuters jumps to conclusions makes me believe there is something fishy going in with Iran and its neighbor Israel
Why isn't the press investigating? Maybe that's the question everyone should ask themselves instead of going the easy road, whenever it's too easy, there might be something more complex behind the scenes..
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64797957
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...