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There's the chilling effect, people not wanting to protest or organize against government overreach for fear of being put on a watch list. This allows the state to enact more draconian laws with less push back from the general public.

It's like a vicious circle that feeds itself, the more surveillance the government permits, the less the public are able to complain or fight back against it. Thus leading to even worse surveillance.

You are talking about the panopticon, where, in the perfect jail, anyone can be looked at but they themselves have no awareness of that fact. This changes behaviour. The implementation of technology we have is the panopticon across the whole of society. This is not accidental, it is part of the governance control system.

What a coincidence, I was thinking of the same concept pictorially reading the comment you replied to, but I did not remember its name.

Panopticon it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Generally, there is plenty of reasons to be worried:

  - Firmware-wise (e.g., Intel Management Engine, Coreboot, Libreboot, system on a chip)
  - Hardware-wise (i.e., Von Neumann architecture - Code + Data)
  - Operating System-wise
    (e.g., 0-click exploits, remote code execution to manipulate the CPU's instruction pointer,
     stack overflow, Pegasus)
  - Facility-wise (e.g., electromagnetic waves, cell towers, Faraday cloth)
  - You (making mistakes)

What you can ultimately do is: rely on randomness (e.g., rolling casino-grade dice), Diceware, one-time pad, no computers of any kind. Further, hope that time traveling backwards remains impossible. Otherwise officers will travel back in time and can see what you wrote (e.g., unencrypted message) back then.

If you need some electronics go with analogue electronic devices. Or, make your own computer systems from scratch with transistors etc.:

jdh, I built my own computer. by hand., https://youtu.be/vaGZapAGvwM?si=lGQuskkFxZ7FHe1h

what a crazy, interesting project and video.

We can talk about the datasets, but the elephant in the room - to me - is that the world is deeply deeply intermediated.

Our lived experiences are filled with countless powers preying upon us humans. They want to stay middlemen, they want to keep us using their convenient systems, they want their hand in every pot, and they use networks to vend their position to as many other would industrialists as they can.

That's them, what about us? We humans have lost direct and authentic connection to the world around us. We lack orientation & cannot make sense & decide & understand (and that alone may be a ghastly threat to democracy). We don't have visible economies around us anymore.

There's such a deeply Dark Forest scenario playing out, as companies invisibly consume & process society. It's so asymmetric, so hard to even grasp how thoroughly & tightly the corporate surveillance winds itself around us. Are the datasets generated terrifying? Sure, yeah. But the result is not the only horror here. The potential power of what is gathered is only one form of damage that the de-huamnizing/intermediating of humanity strikes against us with.

Well, they're sometimes outright overt. Here's Spanish defense ministry trying to extort 100.000$ from an 18 year old kid because he made a tasteless joke in a message to his friend> https://www.businessinsider.com/passenger-faces-120k-fines-a...

> The BBC reported that before departing, he told a friend on Snapchat: "On my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)."

> Security services saw the message and flagged it to Spanish authorities, who sent two F-18 jets to follow the airliner until it landed, per the BBC.

> He faces a public-disorder charge, which could result in him being ordered to pay over $120,000 if he's found guilty.

> About $103,000 of that is from the Spanish Defense Ministry for the cost of scrambling the fighter jets.

Definitely alarming than encrypted Snapchats are clearly not private, but the response as a whole still seems fairly reasonable, no? He did kinda threaten to blow up a commercial airliner.

I think the BBC article about his acquittal has a lot more points relevant to the discussion about privacy:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68099669

No, charging 100k to a teenager over a shitty joke over private encrypted communication channel is absolutely not reasonable. Spanish military can eat the cost of their false positive response. Why would you think an innocent individual paying for trigger happiness of authorities would ever be reasonable?

> No, charging 100k to a teenager over a shitty joke over private encrypted communication channel is absolutely not reasonable.

Where are you putting the stress in this sentence?

If your issue is with the encrypted private channel being spied upon, then I completely agree, and so did the court system.

But outside of that, if he had said this via SMS, this would be the standard response. It may be a shitty joke, but jokes don't make you magically immune to consequences. You can't yell "fire" in a clouded theater, and you can't say "on my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)" while boarding a commercial airliner. Well, you can, you just should expect to be sued.

Also, it appears that a lot of the danger is political. Both Trump and Biden were presumably being spied on by the incumbent administration (Trump because of the Russia thing, Biden because of the Ukraine thing). It seems likely that Trump is being spied on again, and there is no reason to believe this pattern is going to stop.

The hazing process for electing a president is already cruel enough that nobody sane runs. Add in the risk of the incumbent administration finding a way to leak all your dirty laundry from as far back as the records go and it will be really weird. Probably corrupt, ugly and with bad results for everyone outside the intelligence apparatus.

In some sense that isn't new, there are questionmarks over the US spooks dating back to J. Edgar Hoover. But the damage that sort of actor can do is greater the more data they have to make decisions with.

I'd argue there's an even more fundamental reason for the hazing process, as you call it, which is that the voting system itself incentivizes negative campaigning as just as if not more effective than positive. In other words, a dollar spent trashing the "other side" is destructive yet effective. This destroys healthy competition and encourages mutually destructive behavior.

software is naturally authoritarian.

Is is though?

Maybe that's just a reflection of the organizations that have created said software.

yes, because it allows centralized control and that control is absolute.

Whether an organization decides to lock things down or not is a different discussion, but software itself is absolutely authoritarian in nature.

And the scary part is that it's absolute. If you have employees who shouldn't be doing a thing you make it company policy, but with software you flat out enforce it.

Software has its absolutes - and those are often good things. Security, ability for backup, redundancy, scalability. We value these things.

Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users.

And over time we may have started with systems that are centralized because our abilities were young at the time, but distributed systems are very popular and often the goal. One example is version control systems: all the systems prior to Git/Mercurial and those after.

With social networks, the network effects are dominant, but I am hopeful that distributed systems will eventually dominate.

> Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users.

That they can be applied at all makes software authoritarian in nature.

software enables something we've never truly had, which is automated, effective force at a distance.