Hacker News Reader

Comment by passwordoops | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, but I assume if he's in the UK, you take it for granted that all communications are monitored and big brother is everywhere. Ergo naming and shaming here runs the risk of the ire of those protecting said mogul...

This is how democracy dies in the darkness

View on HN

To be fair I was being somewhat obtuse. It's fairly obvious he's talking about Rupert Murdoch, but my point was to highlight that believing that big brother is watching us, means they don't even have to be watching us.

OP could easily get away with spewing every detail right here without getting caught, but the constant fear of surveillance stops her. _This too_ is how democracy dies in the darkness.

Two reasons I shy away from naming names:

1) There is no such thing as anonymity from state actors on the internet. Apart from anything else, semantic analysis can accurately indicate the identity of the writer of content - never mind the full take interception that has been a fact of life in the U.K. for over a decade now.

2) I really don’t want to bring the hellfire that rained on said friend down upon him once more, or upon myself. They crushed him like a damned insect. If I were to name him, you’d just say “oh, the pedophile. You can ignore anything he says, he’s a pedophile”. He is not, is anything but, and the “evidence” of his transgression that was presented doesn’t exist - the court transcripts from the incident in question show an entirely different picture from what the papers and prime minister threw at him. This made me acutely understand that the truth is entirely irrelevant, when you are up against the powers that manufacture reality.

Damn. Now I have more than just academic curiosity.

> OP could easily get away with spewing every detail right here without getting caught,

The UK govenrment monitors UK citizens internet people have already been prossecuted simply for having knowledge of this court case which in the UK is illegal. The fear of surveillance doesn't stop her the reality of the government survaling people and then acting on it does.

I remember throughout my years that London had a (negatively) impressive amount of cameras (https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/top-10-countries-by...)

I don't know how it started, but their own "war on terror" must have helped to hit that top spot.

Monitoring internet is just the same. "Eyes everywhere". The technology changed (people walking on the street vs people browsing the internet), but the practice remains.

And to show where the focus is (and it's not to serve and protect) the amount of corruption in the UK police (even rapists & murderers) are only caught after years and years, and only after the victims go through hell and high water to get justice. (that last paragraph is a bit provocative - but true)

The US actually had more per capita (world rankings are US, China, UK, Germany), though they may be more _visible_ in the UK (particularly after the GDPR, there are differences in rules on covert surveillance). As I understand it, they're nearly all privately owned in both the US and UK, and their installation is driven more by insurance company requirements than anything else.

Remember that the overwhelming majority of these cameras in London are privately owned and operated by shopkeepers and homeowners, it's not a massive state-operated surveillance network. They usually have extremely poor image quality and are hooked up to fixed local tape/hard drive recording rather than networked.

With that said, there are still a lot of state-operated cameras. Mostly to make money from traffic infraction fines, curiously that's one area where governments don't ever seem to cut police funding :-)

As a hint as to surveillance in the UK, a poster which appeared on the London Underground some years ago. This is/was not ironic.

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/collections-online/po...

Now the hard popup asking about cookies on that page is very ironic!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com