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Comment by firtoz | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: Some time ago I decided to assume that everything I do outside of my house, and some of what I do inside of my house, is public knowledge which can be retrieved reasonably quickly. And if I'm to be targeted directly or indirectly (from appearance, faith, race, or some kind of behaviour or anything else) then I can defend against that.

I mean, to prevent or punish when an authority decides to abuse their power of observation (e.g. a stalker decides to follow someone via webcams and harass them), or to try our best to prevent or avoid the conditions that lead a nation state etc to target some groups (or individuals).

Also, if some authority decides to [do harmful thing] all people of x religion, it doesn't matter that much if they do it by AI webcams or "report your neighbour to the police" word of mouth.

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Based on the experiences I've heard and read about, you're clearly trivializing the "defend myself" part and don't understand how problematic this is for the people actually affected by the discrimination or targeting you're talking about. It's not as easy as "oh, this is racism, you're in the wrong". These are institutions with comparatively unlimited resources with an interest in defending their behavior and how they treat the people they target. Lives are destroyed over this kind of thing.

So we should try to fix that, for us and everyone else. I know it's hard, but some things are hard. Preventing cameras etc is harder I think, because they can use "think of the children", except maybe in some parts of Europe it seems.

I think you have the right idea but both things can be right.

I think it's possible to simultaneously vote against "your worst enemies getting control of the state" and to agitate against the kind of widespread surveillance you wouldn't want your worst enemies to be in control of.

I do hear (what I think is) your argument that legislating against ubiquitous surveillance is counter to the inevitable tide of cameras and AI getting crazy cheap, a future where everything is a sensor and processing costs drop to zero. But I think (maybe naively) it's possible we can also have social norms and boundaries around how these things get used.

Sure, that's fair enough, I just think that they are winning so best prepare our expectations for it. We can still fight, too.

"think of the children" is partially a meme here in germany, there's a song about it, but it focuses mainly on how people wanna seem better by "thinking of the children" and less about using that as argument to negate human rights.

You’ve clearly never pissed off someone with more money and connections than you.

My point is that if they would want to attack me or my community or things like that, especially illegally, or, in ways that would not really be approved by the public, then it would be easier to build up arguments or defences against those than to prevent cameras etc.

To make a comparison: it is also 'theoretically' easier to teach people not to shoot eachother, rather than to restrict their access to a technology which makes killing very simple. I think keeping the 'activation barrier' to bad actor induced, AI-aided stalking high is a good thing, even if it is only a temporary solution.

I think it could easily be harder to defend against an attacker who has the complete ability to surveil and track you at all times.

What about when they want to attack you for things that would be approved by the public? Imagine a black person in the Jim Crow south doing civil rights organizing having to live in a society with these cameras.

Let's say the public is against you (both in opinion and legally) and you need to organise your people to try to change their mind.

What I'm saying is that it's wise to assume that if you have enemies, they will know a lot about what you are doing and that if you do something in public or maybe even private, they may know what you are doing much more than they could in the past.

Is it right, should they do it? Of course not. But are they doing it? It's safer to assume, yes, they are.

Or walked past a random personality disordered obsessive who "fancies you" and decides to use their low-level digital privilege handed out to them as a petty council official or minor law enforcement role.

In fact, in some versions of experimental panoptic "utopias" [0], everybody gets to watch the feeds which are simply made public. Half your neighbourhood are in their homes watching the other half walking about scratching their arses and picking their noses.

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=12

The point is to come to acceptance with the possibility that yeah, someone is watching me or you or our loved ones probably most of the time. If you are a celebrity you have no privacy anyway, and if you are a regular person you are too boring to watch, so, either way, not too much of a problem.

If the people in power have the personality disorders or tendencies to abuse their power then they hopefully won't be in office, because maybe someone else who watched them takes note of that, but sure, sometimes it happens. If they do abuse their power and get caught, then they should no longer have that power, eventually.

But this capability gives so much power to someone with authority to abuse it to remain in power…

That is correct, and it's wrong, but as a regular citizen, it's safer to assume that this is the world we live in now, and prepare accordingly, than to assume otherwise and get caught by surprise.

I cannot imagine what preparations can be made but since you have given it a thought, I'm very eager to hear. Maybe we can all benefit, who knows.

> I cannot imagine what preparations

I can, And it's very ugly and scary.

Go read the psychological literature on what happens when groups (of animals as well as humans) are put under sustained overt surveillance (not covert surveillance - they need to "feel" watched). Clue: it activates the "predators about" part of the limbic brain. Such a population is essentially a powder-keg in a pre-revolutionary state. For humans, on the surface it's all sweetness and smiles because social regulation (Freudian superego) keeps the lid on... for a while.

That part of the brain cannot be "trained out of it" so it cannot be "normalised". One cannot "make surveillance acceptable" because we have an innate aversion to it.

This is why in Bentham's design of the Panopticon the key feature of it is that nobody knows for sure they're being watched. Remove that limitation and surveillance is massively counterproductive and dangerous to everyone.

It's such a shame people don't read more about history, anthropology and human psychology before making parochial; statements about "the world we now live in" or what they think "people should accept". Before doing that it helps to research what _people_ really are, rather than go on personal gut instinct,

The British are still able to have their tea without losing their shit.

The psychological literature you are reading are written by people who are greatly motivated to produce such impactful conclusions. Life in reality is not that dramatic.

Aha, the old "Scientists are motivated to disagree with my worldview". Good luck dealing with your "reality".

Not all scientists. However we need to admit that quite a lot of them can be biased. Psychology has a serious reproducibility problem.

So... I follow Buddhism. The best thing is to be at peace with yourself, and accept that no matter what happens, everything is okay. Including death, loss of all material things, loss of sanity, imprisonment, and so on. This goes for yourself and also for your family. Then you become invincible. All of those things become only inconveniences. Sure, it'd not be nice to have them, so you can do something about them, especially your family or loved ones may feel sad more than you, because they may not think like you even if you may come to this kind of thinking.

I know that some people cannot do this and they think it's stupid or impossible, which is fair enough, it's too different from their upbringing and societal conditioning and so on. So let's say you still have chances to be devastated by a few of those things.

Now, let's continue with the assumption that "people in power" have the capacity to watch everyone, including each other. KGB of Chernobyl series style.

You can try to find out, as much as reasonable, what's the actual likelihood of your being affected by a particular thing you may worry about. And, decide, how much that would inconvenience you. Then, you try your reasonable best to reduce the chances of that happening, and also the impacts of it. If it's almost guaranteed to happen, for a moment, pretend that it already has happened. Let the emotions sink in, try to think beyond the emotions. What do you think would be the effects, to you and the people you care about? Can you do anything to reduce those effects? And so on.

It's impractical to do this for "everything that can happen", of course, so you can start with identifying your greatest worries and applying the process for them until your worries about those are reduced enough. And when other worries start surfacing more, apply the same process for them, too.

> or to try our best to prevent or avoid the conditions that lead a nation state etc to target some groups (or individuals)

So lets give govt (and a private company) all the power they want because we should just work hard so they don't abuse it?

No, that's a slippery slope. I mean, privacy is a lost battle, at least, outside your home, or on the internet.

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