Russia: Citizens must turn off home surveillance because Ukrainians are coming
theregister.com
theregister.com
The main thing surveillance cameras create is distrust between neighbors, and to enable businesses to better ignore the community they are in.
I see your first point, but don't get the second. What do you intend?
Putting one up inside your store, okay, sure whatever. I mean when they put them outside pointing at sidewalks and pedestrians. Monitoring the sidewalk says that you care more about your security than your neighbor's privacy, and intrinsically that you think your neighbors may be a security threat, which is objectively offensive if you're the neighbor.
You don't do that if you see yourself as a part of the neighborhood.
We can talk about theft and security being important concerns, sure, but when I see security cameras going up pointed at neighbors and pedestrians it's yet to be *because of an actual breakin*. It's just bonkers how they get installed without anyone asking "why here, specifically?"
It seems like a response based on paranoia when the less antisocial thing to do is recognize that your business is, by the nature of physical space, part of the community. If every employee, including the founders and C-suite, commute from elsewhere and never talk to anyone living near their office, of course they're going to be paranoid of neighbors.
I point cameras at their houses, at their doors & driveways from my property. Why? Because they can't install a camera on my house, but I can. Nobody has a problem. There's no distrust. There's cameras pointed right back at my home, too. We watch each other, because having more than one camera point of view creates a better security for all of us. I also have them watching at my door, specifically so I can see who is at the door, when mail gets delivered, or when packages get dropped off.
None of us have the delusion that we're all spying on each other. We're watching out for each other.
If a neighbor wanted to install a camera pointed in the direction of my house and I could tell they were asking as a formality, I'd be nice about it. I'd be even nicer if we discussed my concerns before the final choice and they did not respect my wishes. It is their property and I'm not one to make a fuss, especially if there is no legal recourse.
However, in my head, I'd be furious and take it as a clear sign that they lack trust in the community and that they misunderstand what privacy means.
Being a good neighbor often means not rocking the boat, especially if you want to maintain healthy relationships. That isn't an endorsement of being passive, but an understanding that there are often bigger fish to fry. Banking their good will for a rainy day when I need coalitional support for something
My point was that cameras destroy trust.
You don't demonstrate trust in your child by putting a webcam in their bedroom and scanning their internet traffic. Maybe that's necessary for security in your mind, but it's not *trust*.
Good god!
If a neighbour insisted on filming me and my family every time we left our front door, I'd either think they had a mental illness (paranoia) or were a bloody perv and in need of percussive attitude readjustment.
I'm sorry, you need to define "propaganda" and "neighbor" if you want me to take this seriously, especially as you're claiming that I am so invested in it. I care about my neighbors and want to preserve their and my privacy.
I don't think it is worth the downsides of being subjected to pervasive surveillance in the public square in exchange for the (false) promise of being necessary for security. Is your position seriously that this is propaganda that means I don't care about my neighbors?
To be honest it sounds like the actual propaganda I've been hearing since 9/11, and I don't think it makes neighborhoods healthier or safer. Just look at the actual article, do you think criminals haven't been hacking these cameras to determine when your neighbor leaves home?
You can have different values if you want, I'm not ashamed of mine on this one. I will absolutely not put up cameras pointing at the public, my neighbors deserve better than that.
Russians lost at least one officer to an assassin finding his profile on an running app and lying in wait.
It makes this war even more tragic, because Ukraine and Russia are so intertwined socially and culturally, and there was no reason for Russia to escalate the war.
That said, Roskomnadzor can't fully lock down ingress and egress without drastically impacting the Russian economy and pissing off your average Russian who watches YouTube, games on Steam, and messages using Telegram.
Just today I heard they had big outages. Haven’t seen much news about it but perhaps, as this article mentions speculation, it was an internal shutdown rather than external actors? https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/08/21/russia-blames-tele...
Based on the outrage from the Telegram, VK (Russia's FB), and YouTube outage in 2024 caused by a similar test [0] the impact is quite high.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-reports-temporary-...
As in, connect terminal to some household fiber modem, then get whitelisted by DOD & SpaceX?
I wouldn't be surprised SpaceX already secretly does this tho hence the weird news how they allegedly supplying Starlink to Russian forces.
It's like Putin watched the US experience in Iraq and said "I can do something much dumber than that..."
As stupid as this sounds, no other explanation for Putin's behavior makes any more sense. Come up with a better one? I'm all ears... but there's a lot you'll need to explain.
As opposed to the external narratives -- about NATO expansion, denazification, and the supposed need to "protect" the Russian-speaking population, and all that garbage (that unfortunately a certain contingent on HN seems all too eager and happy to believe, pretty much exactly at face value).
At the start of the invasion, anyway. By now things have changed dramatically of course, and his true position is probably a lot closer to your description.
No it is not. Every Soviet or Russian leader since 1917 died peacefully in his bed, and a handful of those (Gorby and Yeltsin certainly) lost power well before they died.
Beria was executed.
Stalin did apparently expire in his own bed a few days after collapsing on his floor. But given that he was suspiciously denied treatment for 18+ hours, the circumstances cannot quite be called "peaceful".
Khrushschev died of a heart attack at Moscow Central Clinic Hospital.
Andropov and Chernenko spent their last months mostly at that same hospital. Andropov "dropped off" there, and Chernenko likely did as well.
Yeltsin spent his last 12 days at an unspecified hospital.
And yet somehow you "know" that they all died peacefully and in their own beds.
Putin's own circumstances will likely be significantly more precarious than the post-Stalin/Beria batch. The reason the latter were able to enjoy relatively peaceful exits (if not in their own bed at home) rests in the fact that the Soviet system at least had a working semblance of respect for the law; and everyone knew that the transition process was firmly in the hands of the Politburo and the KGB. The country's position in the world at large was quite stable, and it faced no external threats.
Meanwhile under Putin, rule of law as such been entirely hollowed out; his supporting factions are more diverse suspicious of one another; and thanks to his actions, the country now faces significant external threats, which he doesn't seem to be doing a good or even adequate of managing.
Pretty much anything could happen in his last days, under these circumstances.
And Beria was never leader of Russia or the Soviet Union: he was head of the spy service, a position held since 2008 by Alexander Bortnikov. You've heard about Beria, but probably haven't heard about Bortnikov because Bortnikov has been much much less violent and hasn't made a habit of raping Russian women in plain view on the streets of Moscow like Beria did.
And I disagree with your assertion that the Putin regime is more autocratic than the other Russian / Soviet regimes since the death of Stalin. Opposition leader Navalny for example held that Crimea should be part of Russia; ditto Yeltsin. (And Russia's holdings in Donetsk, Zaphorizia and Kherson oblasts can be seen as necessary to make it viable to hold Crimea over the long term: the so-called land bridge.) If Putin dies suddenly, Russian politics probably goes on mostly the way it has been going: i.e., very slowly becoming more liberal and more committed to the rule of law, with some setbacks. (I do not deny that Yeltsin was more liberal than Putin.)
Arguably the US's finest diplomat was George Kennan, who predicted before Putin became leader of Russia that NATO's policy of expanding eastward would eventually cause Moscow to react with military force, which Kennan correctly predicted would be misinterpreted by the West as a re-awakening of Russian imperialist ambitions. Kissenger was also against NATO expansion as were many other Western diplomats and international-relations experts.
He says he wants to restore the glory of the Russian empire ( https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/europe/russia-putin-empire-re... ).
He can't do that -- him and what army? LOL -- but it's naive to ignore his literal words, or to dismiss them as a 'misinterpretation.'
And the fear he has of NATO is the fear of a burglar in the face of the neighborhood watch.
You're wildly shifting topics here, otherwise.
He still needs to play, in some way, to a domestic audience.
The fall of the USSR was objectively bad for a large part of the Russian population. Their economy and quality-of-life metrics have never really returned to pre-1991 levels. Their geopolitical relevance has been degraded, and Western institutions have nibbled away at their sphere of influence. They've lost millions of square kilometres of territorial holdings that date to Imperial times.
He needs to perform some action to prove he's delivering something, and a stilted "you bait us long enough and we'll bite back" response might well fit, especially if they're already on a "the West is encroaching on our motherland" narrative.
I still believe that if the Ukraine had made some token concession-- for example, offering a binding secession referrendum in the Donbass, that would have given Putin the bacon he needed to bring home without an actual war.
The de-facto capture of Crimea wasn't enough, but the Donbass would've been. Got it.
As a nuclear-armed loser, he's a threat to global stability. Since he evidently can't be removed or ignored, he must be indulged, which is why he has gone out of his way to project weakness at every level since the start of the invasion. Losing the Black Sea fleet to a country with no navy, complaining about NATO encroachment while taking actions guaranteed to increase it, making a big show out of (temporarily) forgiving a usurper, releasing weird-as-hell photos in which he cowers at the end of a table the size of a bowling lane, along with videos in which he's quivering with a nervous tic that mysteriously doesn't seem to be getting worse... the examples are as numerous as they are nonsensical, and as irrational as they are irrefutable.
Either I'm terrible at making my point, or many people vehemently disagree while being unable to offer a better explanation.
The war also highlighted some weaknesses and a general unpreparedness of the western allies.
The cost in human lives was high but I’m not convinced you can really call it a strategical defeat at this point sadly.
They managed to: -get Sweden and Finland to finally join Nato
-completely demolish their entire military export potential
-lose half their warchest because they kept it in foreign banks
-lose all kinds of prestige the „mighty“ russian military had
-severely diminish the arms stocks they had left over from the soviet union
-lose the flagship of one of their fleets to a nation without a navy
-publically had one of their mercenary companies march on their capital in revolt
In exchange the land might gain from this is going to be completely devastated from the war.
Compare all of this to the 2014 fiasco where they ended up with crimea in exchange for some minor-ish sanctions,
Which buyer have they lost? I fail to see any. Most of their customers distrust the US and Turkey didn’t denounce their contracts as far as I know.
> -lose all kinds of prestige the „mighty“ russian military had
Did they? That’s unclear to me. Wagner is in more countries than ever.
> -severely diminish the arms stocks they had left over from the Soviet Union
Their defence industry output is the highest it has ever been and wasn’t stopped by the various embargo they are under.
> -publically had one of their mercenary companies march on their capital in revolt
Before Putin very publicly showing that he is still the sole master of the country. With Russian propaganda on the ground, it wasn’t ever a minor setback for them.
Plus, give it six months more and they might have humiliated the west by actually mostly winning the war with Ukraine which everyone say they would never win.
I know the western media needs to parrot that Russian is the complete loser here to keep support high but the reality doesn’t seem that clear to me.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying it’s an overwhelming victory from Russia. I’m saying that if you look at it like if Russia had overwhelming lost, you will completely misanalyse both the situation today and its implication for the future.
I'd agree even two weeks ago, but then Kursk happened. So far, Russia's response to that has been weak. While it will be hard for Ukraine to use that as a foothold to advance deeper into Russia due to geography (mountains and rivers, I'm told), it will also be challenging for Russia to take back the territory. It's also not a big enough threat to "endanger the existence of the Russian state", so they probably won't be using tactical nukes there. With that, "winning" is going to be very hard - it looks much more like a tie now. What are your thoughts on that?
Plus the situation regarding troops on the ground didn’t change. Ukraine didn’t rotate enough and is reluctant to conscript more. Soldiers are tired and morale is low.
Kursk is there to try to extend the front and have Russia pull troops out of the north. It’s mostly guerilla warfare on a weakly protected area. They don’t have the man power nor the logistic means required to prevent Russia from retaking the region but doing so means that Russia will stop pushing further into Ukraine for some time. It was sorely needed but it’s a stopgap measure not a complete revirement unless something else happens.
It has changed the timeline however. I expect Russia to stall until the US election to see if it’s better to enter negotiations now or keep fighting.
You are misunderstanding how China views itself and its current position. They don’t really bargain this way anymore and especially not when it comes to country bordering them and they consider in their sphere of influence.
Most analysts seem to think that China is not very happy about what Russia is doing. It means they will probably put pressure on Russia for an end to the war. I expect them to try to be leading and hosting the negotiation to show that they are a diplomatic power nowadays.
I don’t expect them to negotiate an end of their support with the US however. They still share a common goal with Russia after all. They both want to limit the US influence in their direct neighbourhood.
I like to think of them as North Korea's client state.
Well, there goes half of Russia's national cultural exports.