[advael]

I think most people who say "I have nothing to hide" are just mimicking a slogan they no doubt heard someone they respect or at least think talks well say

Another common refrain, especially since Snowden, is just glib defeatism ("they already have all my info anyway") which is also a poor way to think about policy (and to make personal choices, but I won't argue those with most people)

I really think the main reason people are complacent is more often that the spying is abstract to them. They wouldn't like it if someone were pointing a big camera through their window, but data being aggregated through their phone and smart home gadgets and computer and CCTVs in public places and leaks on distant websites doesn't register in their actual attention, so it doesn't emotionally feel like a big deal to them

[dylan604]

>so it doesn't emotionally feel like a big deal to them

I wonder how people would feel if there was a single site that aggregated all of the data that has been harvested about them. Potentially showing where/how the data was collected and setting aside protecting that data from prying eyes would be problematic. In the world of today where evidence is just fake news, how [in]effective would something like this be in changing minds?

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Viewing the off-site data Facebook has collected was enlightening. There were events from when I paid for food and other goods at brick-and-mortar stores.

[trod123]

I disagree that people are complacent. What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi.

The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently.

When you have people as a group lie for profit, and they corrupt your representatives and there is no one to hold them to account. They don't give you the choice, and you can't hold them accountable first because you find out about it later, but you still have no choice and you reach out to the people whose job it is to solely represent you in government and they do nothing, and the courts are inaccessible so you have no means.

At that point, despite declarations, there really isn't a rule of law then, it along with most of what people think of as their rights were taken by collusion gradually and quietly.

When that type of problem occurs, every citizen has a choice based upon the individual risk. Totalitarian governments kill people, or lock them up from kafka kangaroo courts (before they kill them) to give a semblance of legitimacy when that legitimacy has already passed. You show me the person, I'll show you the crime; is a famous saying.

When feedback systems fail, and can no longer respond, things will get worse until people will do something, and that will be destructive. The only choice they are given is when.

Totalitarian governments make no distinction between peaceful protests, they may not go after you initially, but collecting all the information upfront of everyone that does to black bag you later; or keep you under their thumb through enhanced coercion (given the systems) and harassment from every direction is not unheard of.

The moment you start surveilling peaceful protests is a known indicator that you are in fact in a totalitarian government.

Its not the people who are the problem. Its the fact that feedback mechanisms have been corrupted and are now broken.

Privacy is a necessary and requisite element for any insurgency in its beginnings, so by eliminating it no corrective action can take place and abuses will continually get worse.

You've had agency stripped from you without your consent and told all your life you live in a world that doesn't exist while misleading you at every step.

These situations historically always cascade, which is why we almost certainly will have a violent civil war in the near future. Its destructive, but that is the inevitable outcome when feedback systems are interfered with to the point where they can no longer function to keep people within reasonable bounds.

[JumpCrisscross]

> primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently

Are you a regulator voter? Do you have a dialogue with your electeds’ offices? If not, try starting there. Express, as unemotionally as you can, why you believe this is something you believe in. If possible, get your views seconded in writing.

If you’re in America or Europe, there are plenty of non-violent remedies at the ready. The problem is privacy is uniquely afflicted with the uselessly cynical, to the point that it’s considered electoral junk at the national level.

> What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi

Please don’t do this. It’s one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz. (Archer can do it. You can’t.)

[trod123]

> Are you a regular voter

I regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion. Fake job postings, and interferance in labor relations have been a recent subject that only receives boilerplate responses. No action has been taken, its been 5 years since I started doing this which is an appropriate measure of sampling time to show trends and inform on larger systems, though 10 years is better.

I vote every time I have a chance. The problem with voting systems is first, the money vote (tweedism) just to get on a ballot. It's a filter and acts to make the system captive to those with concentrated wealth, by limiting those who can successfully run.

Second, the concentration of representative power in few representatives leads to dynamics where many are not represented simply because there are too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000).

Seniority by committee limits power to only those who get re-elected regularly (further concentrating power).

Third, the voting as a plurality which is also exclusionary. You can skew any system holding at least 66 percent of the vote.

It is also an all or nothing vote (not ranked choice), where inherently when a representative can't win the majority, none of the people who voted for them technically have much representation among other competing and more favorable members of that group who voted for that person.

Finally,

> Please don't do this. Its one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz.

These are not petty complaints. They are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole. Its not funny... at all. Archer is meant to be absurd and funny; its not a fair characterization or comparison.

There are many experts that are claiming the same thing because rational observable indicators are all showing that this is a growing existential problem. Rome fell largely because of corruption alongside external invasion. There are important lesson's which could be learned but are largely being ignored.

The dynamics are the same with most Empires (where a country seeks hegemony), and the majority of people have not been adequately educated to be able to even hold to rational conversation, instead putting forth beliefs in luei of observable facts being confident in their blindness.

That too is a problem because our enemies take advantage of that blindness.

If you've read any history about the Stasi, you'd know the systems they used to disunite the population, most of those system's have been used by government's today. They also enrolled others in a constant fear of betrayal by those close, and that's very similar to all the embedded devices (where a digital automata/soldier is embedded in each household spying on them).

These things are serious, and deserve rational respect and following rational rules to have any discussion.

[JumpCrisscross]

> regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion

Where are you? Can you share a sample of the text you reach out with? Have you ever organised a group of people to sign on to what you’re advocating?

> too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000)

You have no state representatives with smaller parcels?

> are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole

It’s hyperbole: the Stasi used violence as a political tool. Normalising them with rhetoric such as yours legitimises all of the mechanisms you describe escalating to including violence in their portfolio.

[advael]

> the Stasi used violence as a political tool

This point is extremely silly. In the modern US, violence is an essentially omnipresent political tool, both at home on every level and abroad. In many cities across the country we just saw police violently crack down on protestors in universities protesting the US support of Israel's present massacre in Gaza, but this also happened at the protests against police killings and bigotry throughout 2020, or at Ferguson before that, or before that against students protesting the Vietnam war, or before that against civil rights protestors, and those are just the really famous cases in living memory. Relatively recently, an activist in Georgia protesting the demolition of a big chunk of forest for the planned enormous training facility for the already armed to the teeth police of that area was essentially gunned down by a whole firing squad of said police, extrajudicially, and you likely didn't even hear about it.

On a federal level, the FBI has been constantly deployed to attack political dissidents with national fame in more targeted ways, and the DHS and DEA were both essentially invented to do this with more impunity under very broad mandates surrounding very nebulous crimes. You could argue that ICE often functions this way too. The NSA's PRISM program is a surveillance apparatus the Stasi couldn't have dreamed of, and that's just what got leaked, and it was at this point like a decade of both capabilities growth and political unrest ago

Political violence is so normalized that when people are scandalized by our use of it abroad (usually via the CIA), it is when they use the tool of political violence for the benefit of American businesses rather than some perceived "pure" political motive, because it smacks of corruption of one of most important functions of US foreign policy, "necessary" political violence against the sovereignty of perceived potential threats

I agree that it is hyperbole to compare the modern US and its various forms of police to East Germany and its Stasi. The Stasi employed a much smaller scale of political violence than the modern US has, and had nowhere near the capacity nor appetite for widespread surveillance, which nonetheless is further dwarfed by that of its corporations, although of course these are often intertwined

[trod123]

> Where are you.

Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability. Recipients included assembly members, house, and senate. To date, only boilerplate responses, no action, and only an increase in spam related to requests for donation for support during re-election.

> It's hyperbole.

It is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole.This is false.

The observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods. Social contract theory is well established, so is much of the referenced history.

Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated, which is an 'all' claim which are the most trivial to contradict as an overgeneralization and thus be shown to be false.

The claim that communicating facts about past events somehow legitimizes and justifies unrelated acts of violence, and causes it, is fundamentally unsound.

Violence absent survival (existential threats) as a general rule can never be justified, or legitimized.

Any good person knows this, and wouldn't try to justify because false justification is an act of self-violation, and this is how you become an evil person (who has willfully blinded themselves).

There was a time when evil people were killed because they had to be stopped otherwise they would bring destruction on everyone, these times were existential threats. WW2 against the Nazi's was one such time. They threatened the world, and your argument against communication for organization and response is an obvious contradiction during those times.

The structured reasoning you use is a foundational example of flawed thinking (fallacy) and an example of tautology, ad absurdum (by contradiction).

The consequence of an action or event, being the causing action of the event may be narrowly valid in some cases, but never sound (and it must be true in all cases to be sound), this is why it is generally considered fallacy, and by contradiction discounts agency and environmental factors, and overgeneralizes by claiming supposition-al elements are the same when they are not. You can't use circular self-reference when seeking sound argument.

As a result, you have made false claims, while choosing to ignore rational norms (given the ambiguity and dissembling). This is twisted.

Needless to say, there can be no rational discourse if you do not follow rational norms. I've shown that several of your statements are false claims, this informs on your innate credibility for future claims.

Without credibility, you don't have any basis for standing and by necessity, your future rhetoric must be considered false and discarded until you can prove rationally that it is not.

The nice thing about following rational rules and norms is it does not require credibility; only unbased rhetoric has that requirement.

Lies, deceits, and falsehoods are easily discarded under rational methods. Dissembling, discrediting, nullification all cease being useful when you have lost credibility and have no standing.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Doesn't really matter. It was drafted and professional, included known problems such as fake jobs and lack of accountability

On multiple occasions the text I drafted was passed into state and twice federal law, in red states and blue. I’ve also guided staffers, when they were dealing with a new field which I was familiar with, on how to sort the nutters from the informed but powerless. (They’re good at identifying those who can organise a constituency, informed or not.)

I was trying to figure out how you can be more effective. Not fight you.

> observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods

By classic rhetorical methods, you left unchallenged my inequivalence claim in respect of the use of violence by the Stasi and our present governments. Herego, I win by default. (Obviously not how conversation works. But at least more precedents than “rational norms,” which is not standard rhetoric.)

Also, “it is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole” is argument by tautology. Hyperbole means exaggerated. You say it isn’t hyperbole because it isn’t exaggerated. You say it isn’t exaggerated because…well, that’s never argued.

You called out argument ad absurdum, too, though I’m not sure you know what that means—neither of us used it, correctly or not, except in misinformation.

> Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated

…did you use this tone in your letters? “Rational norms” are not conventional English.

On a stylistic level, you used the word “rational” in almost every sentence. That’s fine. But it puts your writing into a specific corner of the internet better known for flat Earthers than reasoned policy.

Good luck. I’m signing off this thread.

[ffgjgf1]

> The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently

I think that’s a rather absurd claim. The real problem is that most people couldn’t care less, they neither understand the issues and/or are in the “don’t have anything to hide” camp. Unfortunate I guess that’s just how democracy works..

[trod123]

It is not absurd, it is frightening, because when you look closely at the details of how the systems currently function it shows they are not functioning.

The rule of law is meant as a safeguard for non-violent conflict resolution. It requires 4 components. Accessibility and independent judiciary are two of the most important.

It currently costs an average person's yearly (unspent for necessity/food) salary to bring a case before a superior court to conclusion excluding some niches. That's roughly $50,000, and that was in 2020 dollars. Wages have been suppressed to create a cost wall that excludes those who don't make enough money. There are also other aspects such as forced arbitration, and front of line blocking (i.e. being unable to show standing until an agreement is nullified for discovery, when information that would show standing would be available once done).

You are mistaken. This isn't how democracy works. It is historically the early stages of totalitarianism, and those type of governments resort to menticide which is well documented (but largely not taught outside certain niches).

Robert Lifton, and John Meerloo both are experts and wrote books if you care to actually do your own research.

[ffgjgf1]

I was mainly thinking about Europe (with all the controversy about new regulations), you certainly do have a valid point, though.

[advael]

There's a lot to fear from revolutionary uprising, and I think people are very risk-averse, so this becomes a coordination problem even when there's perhaps widespread discontent

I agree with your conclusion that most rich countries are totalitarian in character, and it feels so fundamentally absurd that a lot of how we got here was merely developing the capability and not doing enough to prevent it

However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. One of the most powerful uses of these panopticons is the pre-emption and disruption of coordinated resistance efforts. Is an effective uprising even feasible if not supported by some faction of the extant powerbrokers? Hard to say to be honest. A lot of these capabilities are unprecedented, if not in nature then certainly in responsiveness and scope

[trod123]

> However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable.

Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s.

When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff.

This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary.

The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it.

In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back?

To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals.

If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish).

Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger.

As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires.

Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures.

What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.

[fsflover]

> > The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently

Support https://eff.org, https://edri.org etc.

[mistermann]

And the last decade has been a master class in solidifying faith if not worship of the very thing that facilitates it all: "democracy", our most sacred institution.

It's so easy, it's like taking candy from babies.

[w0m]

> spying is abstract to them.

Not just spying, but for many/most - the harm is also. Most people struggle on the day-to-day; getting worked up that a random boogieman is compiling a profile on them to serve ads leads to a big pile of 'so?'.

When Windows Recall was announced as an example; I started asking (non tech, mostly boomer) people their take on it. I almost universally got a 'neat!' response. The security implications simply didn't register or matter, even when I explained them. I felt like I should be wearing a tin foil hat.

[slg]

Because who you are keeping something private from is often more important than what you are keeping private. For example, there are plenty of things I would be fine sharing with the anonymous internet that I wouldn't share with my coworkers. My coworkers knowing something embarrassing about me has obvious harm. There is no real harm in strangers knowing something embarrassing about me. And companies and governments are both largely strangers.

I think the fundamental problem with the pro-privacy side of the debate is an inability to communicate why privacy matters in way that makes sense to people who think like this. The argument always seems to come down to some dystopian future in which this information is abused, but hypotheticals like that are just never very motivating when people have so many more pressing issues that are causing clear and immediate harm rather than some hypothetical future harm.

[trod123]

You are mistaken. There is real harm in strangers knowing sensitive information about you. You seem to have a blindspot for how coercion works. There's harassment, struggle sessions, and blackmail as well as many other things.

If someone knows the normal hours you are at home, they can enter your home without much risk. They can plant evidence, Interfere in your life in ways that you can't easily fix, or even create situations where you get harmed or die from an accident. Information gathering is a necessary pre-requisite for a successful attack, and by itself it is an act of hostile intent.

The argument doesn't come down to dystopian future. It comes down to the fact that people in corrupt systems lie, and those lies can torture the victim without any recourse.

Information is abused regularly.

Once you see it, you can memorize it and transmit it without a paper trail. You can even have a plausible reason for needing to access that information in the first place.

It is ephemeral and its security relies on trust of an untrustable entity that trends towards corruption as a structural flaw.

All centralized hierarchies as a structure involving people either perform action based on a distribution of labor that is incentivized (away from a loss function), or they do so through corruption (in its absence).

In either case, there is incentive and there is no other means to overcome the natural friction towards inaction.

[w0m]

I think you made his point fairly clearly.

>hypothetical future harm

Does a non-techy boomer worry that Microsoft is going to use their cookie-research browsing data to harass/coerce/blackmail them?

You're describing what a hypothetical future-booggieman can do; not what to be feared now that the nontechy is reading about on the news.

[trod123]

> You're describing what a hypothetical future-booggieman can do...

Unfortunately no, being deadly serious here I'm describing what can be done today fairly trivially (to any target), and done in a way without alerting the victim that its even happening. They simply seem to have bad luck with a monkey on their back that they can't see everywhere they go in society. They are deprived of opportunities without their knowledge, be it gender relations, labor relations, citizen-government relations etc; its applies equally at all levels.

There are multiple ways than just what follows to do this:

Shall we go down the rabbit hole?

Starting off with a compromise and transparent SSL proxy termination through failures at the network edge (firmware level, between Router or Cable Modem and ISP/Internet).

Note the point the guy makes that Cable Modem standards require 56bit encryption to remain working, and there being no authentication for sensitive requests (i.e. query then update that firmware for one of something like 8 models of microcontroller architecture).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hk2DsCWGXs

From here, middle man most traffic (it says encrypted to the victim, its not encrypted), Deny service selectively (delayed update of antivirus, certificate revocation, etc), deny service selectively of inbound email and/or remove specific emails (breaking communication with a non-response you never receive), close opened resolution processes posing as the user, or the vendor CSR using generated correspondence or voice AI based in unofficial versions of GPT. The more induced frustration the better (higher cost).

Analyse traffic behavior for time spent on entertainment as potential targets. Isolate communications, prune social networks gradually.

Delay interrupt driven communications to the point of uselessness (friends ignore you, relationships wither and die, they see it as you not being interested/flaky, you see it as them not being interested; no way to validate and a lack of belief that it follows you across services; they firmly believe you are either crazy or are ghosting them and withdraw because you don't respond to communications they send you which you don't know about, and communications on their side are not impaired with other people).

ISPs may extend their cellular coverage through edge-based repeaters/mesh network allowing interception. Prevent or delay SMS/Voice Communications of all forms targeted and intermittently. (i.e. medical communications to coordinate scheduling/testing for cancer/mortal diseases early? etc...) Failures are systemic failures of the company not an adversary... or so they perceive. "It is just everyone is so incompetent, it can't be malice", someone would have ensured this is unthinkable.

If they love something (what your identity is based on), like chess, pose as the chess server and always match and win against them using an engine to demoralize. They would see perfect play 7/10 times, assume its representative of the state of thing, and despite having the expectation that they are playing against people they are constantly being the victim of deceit. This Distorts Reflected Appraisal changing their worldview subtly, the more wide in subject/situation, the worse the distortion gets; it destructively interferes with Self Concept and their Identity hollowing them out inducing hypnotic states commonly known and seen in torture from WW2/Mao but without that physical threat (its just an omnipresent threat). The mind in these states is malleable and remembers details more easily, this is where ads come in. Induce hate, disunity, derision, disgust in every one and thing they love; segment the victim into a cohort.

Make what they love shit, pose as the user for any number of harmful effects (i.e. request mail forwarding to some other address now the victim gets no mail and it goes to lost mail once the forwarded address says not here), report the property as vacant, intercept e-file make it so it appears to be submitted (when it doesn't); what happens when you don't file taxes or pay taxes?, or replace with incorrect taxes posing as the user (fraud, whose responsible?).

Google Information Services can have a fake business listing registered at an address. The victims own devices generate a busy time graph as they do for any business which is public. This is when they are home.

A Roku/Smart TV may be remotely triggered to enable the voice control mic to turn on regularly and place shows that destructively interfere with your view in their queues. They would see this as the company.

All this happens outside the users ability to perceive or largely control. It forms the basis for a struggle session (mental coercion/torture) they cannot escape from it.

With isolation and distorted view of the world you can ramp this up continually until they break psychologically, no physical presence needed. Slow, steady, and increasing the anaconda coils. If you don't minutely adjust within some arbitrary viewpoint the anaconda eats you.

If you've made fun of those insane Trump Supporters that are still with him despite everything he has done, this is a perfect example of the long-lasting permanency of mental coercion with persistence that naturally comes with demagogues, but is also being engineered using the same elsewhere for purpose.

The victims of this menticide either disassociate no longer contributing anything to anyone or reacting to anything, commit suicide, or become psychotic taking it out on other people violently until they are stopped. No physical presence needed because every single IOT/tech system has been shimmed towards benefiting a malicious adversary without a trace (since detailed network logs aren't kept longer than a certain period due to storage costs).

Need I continue?

Psychologically unstable people can be easily manipulated by timely showing solutions or ways out that temporarily resolve difficulties (pay for play to be that solution) in the middle of such torture.

Ever talk about purple dog collars with friends for awhile repeating the word and then see purple dog collars in all those ads on all your devices for up to 2-3 days later?

How do you think they know to show you those ads? The devices largely don't have the hardware specifications to do that computation at the edge so its collected, aggregated into a profile centrally, and used against you in sophisticated brainwashing/torturous ways that are simply claimed to be harmless marketing/adtech (you have to prove otherwise).

Incidentally, this is the why and how false confessions to crimes people didn't do are made, its been known since the 1950s.

Tech makes the links ephemeral with a false but generalized presumption that they are working in all cases unless you can prove otherwise which has no paper trail because it vanished immediately after it happened.

If you'd like to research these mechanisms for Thought Reform and indoctrination from sound expert material further (its dark), I'd suggest Robert Lifton "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism", and John Meerloo "Rape of the Mind" for the foundational material. Its not absurd like most people are conditioned to believe from the irrational association of this depicted subject in media.

Communists use this as a divide a conquer strategy for regime change (most governments do too).

Monopolists use this to pressure consumers to buy things they wouldn't normally buy. This is how they capitalize on the inducements of anxiety and other emotional states they paid for via their marketing budget.

Governments use the shimmed parts to spy. Everyone benefits but the individual.

It is why the world today feels like torture to many rational people; it actually is torture and you just didn't realize it because you were not educated properly, and it was snuck in when you were not looking. It is also de-facto protected by the first amendment because of lack of standing and any interference by government to correct is a violation of the constitution.

It has been known by experts that free-will isn't guaranteed and has largely been broken for quite some time absent few exceptional individuals. These things warp people into stilted lesser versions of themselves that are incapable of further growth (by purposeful design).

Yes most of these things are very much against the law, but those laws are not self-enforcing and you have no proof, and opsec is simple when so many things are shimmed and ephemeral. Outside extreme measures coupled with extreme expertise it is impossible to detect, and equally challenging to hold those engaging in such evil to account.

Even most IT professionals lack an appropriate background knowledge to properly analyse firmware or log signal data between non-standard interfaces (i.e. coax beyond the demarcation point of responsibility, where law may punish any observer) which would be needed to overturn that irrational presumption that everything is working (uphill battle in any centralized/corrupt structure).

If you are thinking, this is crazy-making nightmare fuel...

It is, and it has valid and sound basis, and few outside the deepest niches and technical circles know (not belief).

It is an uphill battle just communicating the danger, in opposition to indoctrination caused by the many hidden systems designed for malign corruption and influence.

Edit: If you want to rip some of that indoctrination conditioning to shreds, I'd suggest Bazzel's book: Open Source Intelligence 10th Edition.

[advael]

I think we do ourselves a disservice by making "conspiracy theory" the common parlance for what is quite often just being swayed by a popular kind of diversion propaganda (the fact-thin doppelgangers of real controversies or investigations of the various complicated systems of surveillance and control that surround us) when in fact the issue is inadequate capacity for assessing the plausibility of a particular theory, the sources it comes from, identifying and resisting motivated reasoning and especially the hijacking thereof by others, or doing the cost-benefit analysis for both accepting a theory and courses of action conditioned on it

Organizations are secretive by default, countless intersecting ones have influence over our lives, communication and information are pervasive but can also be fully encrypted. It is effectively impossible that there is no conspiracy anywhere that's relevant to your life, and there is no perfect way to get accurate information about all such conspiracies

I really don't have much means to epistemically assess the threat model you've presented here except to say that it seems obviously technologically feasible, especially given that many overlapping approaches here don't need to all work for the stated aims

But perhaps more importantly, elucidating this motivates me to be more skeptical of my internal reasoning for feeling malaise, depression, and aimlessness, and as a belligerent person, even an irrational belief that this is being induced (even stochastically rather than in a targeted way) is likely going to be an enduringly effective way to resist it. Something about having an intention to defy an adversary rather than some less agentic explanation seems to benefit the underlying problem regardless of whether it's true

[advael]

The problem with making this case is that the threats are kind of stochastic. Usually what happens to an individual is that either a mistake occurs or some unpredictable factor changes to suddenly get them targeted. I had a relative who was blindsided by identity theft, fending off creditors for bills that were in her name because she was in some breach (I think maybe the sony one? Often not even easy to say how it happened). This is a consequence of erosion of privacy. American Muslims didn't have any more inkling that 9/11 would happen than anyone else, but suddenly received a ton of suspicion from both crazy wingnuts and actual government agencies despite often having "nothing to hide". Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.

You can't really predict what factor is gonna get you targeted. You also can't predict the particular manner in which data that's being collected about you will be used to harm you. Sometimes it's about secrets you'd want to keep private, but often it's about correlations drawn that may even be wrong. Like if public sentiment or government scrutiny were to turn against tech in a huge way, maybe even just a post history on hackernews existing for you, regardless of what's in it, correlates you to some kind of cybercrime they're pursuing with a dragnet, and this gets your credit pinged when you try to buy a house, and someone freezes your bank account because something's going on here and we should just lock it down to be safe until we figure this out. Who knows? The erosion of privacy is a powderkeg that makes everyone more vulnerable to these sorts of things, but the effects aren't felt by everyone all at once, but chaotically based on circumstances beyond your control, sometimes even truly random ones. I can't predict the actual threat model that will become relevant to you because the attack surface is enormous already and the problem is about how it's ever-growing

It's hard to convince people that "you are more likely to be targeted and there is more that can be done if you are but it may never happen to you in particular and there's basically no way to know" is something they should care about. Intuitive risk assessment that our brains are good at can't fucking fathom the world we actually currently live in. Nonetheless, that is the form risk takes, and you should care about factors that expose you to it, even probabilistically

[slg]

You inadvertently hit on another problem with this debate. The three historical examples you chose were identity theft, Muslims post 9/11, and trans people. The root of all those people’s problems isn’t privacy, it is some other broken part of society. So why focus on the symptom instead of that root issue?

Muslim and trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status. Their effort would be more efficiently used advocating for acceptance than advocating for privacy.

Same goes for identity theft. That isn’t caused by bad privacy regulations, it is caused by bad financial regulations that put too much of the burden of fraud on the individual and not the company who fell for the fraud.

In any debate about privacy, it never seems like privacy should be the number one concern for the people involved. Like if you are worried about your credit report being hit for your HN comments, maybe spend some effort trying to change that credit system rather than trying to hide your HN account.

[seethedeaduu]

> trans people don’t want to hide their status, they want people to accept their status

They want both (stealth/passing and acceptance)

[slg]

Fair point, but in the context of an oppressive society the variance from the perceived norm is what presents the problem. That makes the hypothetical "hidden" status I was discussing their gender and not their non-binary status.

[advael]

I mean I think as with many broad groups of people, different individuals likely want each of those things, as well as many wanting both or neither. My comment referred specifically to a subset that wants to assimilate, as they were more likely blindsided than activists who fight for acceptance, but we're nitpicking here

Regardless, the way in which surveillance harms them, as well as other minorities, whether political, racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious, isn't that their "secret" is revealed, it's that they are monitored and can be targeted. Their status can be used to aggregate and group them, but other information can be used to harm or target them. My point in bringing up minorities that suddenly become more prominent targets isn't that they need to hide their minority status and thus are uniquely harmed by surveillance. My point is that surveillance is a weapon, and you only feel the harms of it when it is used on you, not when it's being built

Again, the issue isn't that particular information is especially dangerous. It's that information is power, and there are lots of very concentrated and unaccountable powerbases being built through mass-surveillance, which can be deployed to harm people in all manner of different ways for all manner of different reasons. People feel violated when their privacy is invaded because it is an incursion of power that violates their autonomy, and power is quite versatile in the harms it can do

[granibran]

> Trans people who wanted to assimilate and blend in have by and large been blindsided by the massive increase in scrutiny they've gotten from random people and increasingly lawmakers in the last few years in much of the western world, because some machinations of internet culture made the right wing start thinking about them a lot all of a sudden in the last decade.

The reason they're getting more scrutiny is because of the negative impact of pro-trans ideological policies on women's rights.

I can't speak for the US, but in the UK the turning point was a combination of two things: firstly, the right-wing Conservative government announcing that they were going to remove all barriers for anyone to change their "legal sex", with no medical diagnosis required at all. Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.

This caused an uprising of women, initially groups of left-wing feminists who most rapidly organised, to push back against this "gender self-id" policy proposal and against men in women's prisons. And then against the whole principle of males identifying themselves as female and being given special privileges because of this.

Only later on did right-wing groups take an interest in this as a division against the mainstream political left who were still very much in favour of these policies. Though we've just got a new centre-left Labour government and it seems likely now, based on what they said during the election campaign, that they're going to prioritise protecting single-sex spaces for women over the desires of males who demand to access them.

And this is because they've realised that they can't just unilaterally diminish women's rights and expect the electorate to follow along. The increased scrutiny worked.

[slg]

Civil rights are not a zero-sum game. One group of people gaining rights doesn't take away the rights from another group, but that is commonly used as an argument to manipulate people into opposing the expansion of rights without confronting what that opposition really means. We saw it with integration in the US often presented as an infringement on the rights of white people. We saw it with gay marriage when people argued that it was somehow an affront to traditional heterosexual marriage. And now we are seeing it with people claiming that trans people are infringing on women's rights.

>Secondly, press coverage, from news outlets across the political spectrum, of a male rapist incarcerated in a women's prison, who sexually assaulted several female prisoners there.

This is a good example of what that manipulation looks like in action. I agree that prisoners should have a right to safety despite their crimes. But what should the priority be for someone with this position? It certainly wouldn't be putting more attention on a single case of assault over some 999 other examples of a prisoner getting assaulted[1]. The focus on the one case involving a trans person shows that the motivation isn't actually prisoner safety.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/13/revealed-alm...

[granibran]

Sometimes they aren't zero-sum. For example, trans-identifying people being protected from employment discrimination. This takes nothing away from anyone else, but makes this group's lives easier.

But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example. If a subset of males are given the right to use such spaces, they cease to be female-only spaces. By doing so, this right is taken away from women and girls.

As another example, we can see this principle very starkly in women's and girls' sports competitions. There can only be one winner. If that winner is male, or is a team that includes males, this takes this prize away from female athletes. There are also a limited number of competition spots in most sports. Any of those taken by males denies a female athlete the opportunity to compete. This is a zero-sum game.

Regarding prisons, the expectation is that penal authorities work towards the goal of no sexual violence in prisons. Policies that demonstrably make this worse are of course going to be protested. In this case, removing the most important safeguarding measure for inmate housing: segregation by sex. The motivation is actually the safety of women prisoners. It's not an isolated case either, this was the first of many.

[trod123]

That is because the boomer generation was raised in a time where technology publicly wasn't turned on them in undisclosed ways. They were in control, and the laws had more teeth than they do now. Their cohort was incentivized to help themselves as well. Look at social security.

In my experience, their idea of the way the world works seems to have crystallized for them about the times of the 1970s.

They have significant blind spots which they likely won't ever recover from, they were blined and in many respects behave like children in a indoctrinated way.

They certainly didn't have to deal with arbitrary high costs because someone spied on them secretly and used that information as a false justification for increasing their auto rates since non-regenerative breaking is hard breaking and is therefore reckless driving (Lexis Nexus reports).

Heaven forbid that traffic conditions go from 65 to 15 in less than 200 feet. No, the fact tha you avoided getting into an accident is the same as reckless driving.

All parents want their kids to be better than them, some parents through circumstances largely in their control set the bar so low that it is a horrible feeling when their grown children exceed them at most levels.

Being more educated, rational, and mature at almost every level, then they were at a similar age, where there growth remained perpetually stalled in their 20s is a very damning situation. Especially since they blew their inheritance like a playboy at a party and will be leaving you almost nothing but debts except in rare circumstances.

Indoctrination and Menticide is real. Its subtle, and it blinds perception of issues.

John Meerloo, and Robert Lifton cover it well.

[mdp2021]

> for many/most - the harm is also [abstract]

Tell them that persecutions have historically been more effective in places where institutionalized profiling was in place.

[advael]

Most animals are bad at learning stochastic or even unreliable patterns, even when doing important things like threat assessment