This is a story on how technology is used to in a systematic human rights abuse and a massive systemic government sanctioned privacy breach is being facilitated by a major tech company.
While the headline is focused Microsoft the bigger story is the wanton violation of human rights, privacy and using this data in risk scores which I’m certain gets used in automated kill chains by Israel.
So it isn't tech focused, because that use of tech is a politically controversial and ethically questionable?
Yeah, no that is not how this works. We in tech also need to be able to talk about about how the systems we build impact the world. And if we only talk about the positive sides, we are not getting the full picture.
Storing phone calls en mass and using ai to target people based on what they say, is tech imho. This is like what Snowden revealed about PRISM, only stored on Microsoft’s servers and it’s used to kill people.
> Why is this flagged, and why can’t I vouch for it?
You know why it's flagged. Israel wants to continue doing its highly automated genocide silently without people questioning it an their cloud providers.
It's scary how this is actually being called out as a problem of capitalism ... when anyone can look up history and see communists were actually doing this in 1946. Not just phones, they were doing it on the street, going as far as sending out people to listen in on conversations everywhere. Makes sense, I guess: there were barely any phones to tap when communists started doing this.
In case you don't know mass phone tapping didn't start in the US until decades (plural) later.
Not that I have experienced socialists/communists reacting positively to being proven wrong much before. Even when proven wrong by their own historical record (yes, they PROUDLY published they were doing this in 1946, after all, that's what Marx instructed them to do). Yes, the need for mass surveillance of the masses is actually in Marx and Engels's work.
In fact it was a part of Marx's work in much the same way as you are arguing it here: he was falsely accusing capitalist and bourgeoisie of mass surveillance, even while he was trying to do it himself. But yeah, Marx is Marx. His whole work, a pamphlet discussing massacring the bourgeoisie ... when, of course, both he himself and his family (up and down, his parents, he himself, his wife, his children) were very much part of the "hated" bourgeoisie. But, of course, in his mind he was excluded. He himself was very much not the evil he was trying to fight, and that every description he published said otherwise ... Very on-brand for communists, that.
I would really much want to see which Marx (with Engels or not) writings advocate for mass surveillance.
I would also like to see a reference of when did he call for a bourgeoisie massacre.
Then I suggest you actually read the manifest. Oh, I should probably declare you technically correct. He does not call for a massacre, just a violent revolution. These are technically not exactly the same. They turned out the same in practice though.
Violence has been used for good ends such as deposing monarchies and ending slavery. Marx argues that capitalists are akin to the new kings. Witnessing billionaires funding the destruction of democracy, I wouldn’t say he’s wrong.
And you refer to Soviet Russia as if that’s supposed to represent socialism and communism. In fact there are many different kinds of socialists and communists, many who support democracy and oppose authoritarian governments. In fact many such people opposed the Bolsheviks and were killed by them. It’s simply not true that being socialist or communist entails supporting totalitarian government.
> His whole work, a pamphlet discussing massacring the bourgeoisie
It's not cool to make stuff up just to win an argument. It makes you lose the argument.
> In fact it was a part of Marx's work in much the same way as you are arguing it here: he was falsely accusing capitalist and bourgeoisie of mass surveillance, even while he was trying to do it himself. But yeah, Marx is Marx.
Yeah, Marx was trying to establish a vast spy network of ravens and pigeons, spanning the whole continent on Wakanda. /s
Both mine and your statements are equally true.
> Yes, the need for mass surveillance of the masses is actually in Marx and Engels's work.
Yeah, in the unpublished archives that only you have access to. /s
Capitalism is just a reflection of people being self-interested which you can't prevent without being authoritarian which will inevitably leads also to surveillance.
> Capitalism is just a reflection of people being self-interested
I don't think that's the case. I think most people are not self-interested, or at least not in the selfish sense. I think most people are more than willing to sacrifice _some_ direct personal gain for better community gains.
The problem is that capitalism only allows selfish self-interest to flourish, so it incentivises even the more community-oriented people to always put themselves first, a lot of the time even in detriment to their immediate vicinity.
Capitalism is a form of authoritarianism in that it really only serves a few, and everyone else is just constantly fighting for survival.
> being authoritarian which will inevitably leads also to surveillance
Poverty reduction has largely been the result of China’s mixed economy not unbridled capitalism. Guided markets have played a role there - but that’s because they were guided. We don’t have to accept the authoritarianism or any of other effect of markets, simply because markets have played a role in some of the positive outcomes of the past. In fact for the last 50 years in the global north, roughly the same timeframe, productivity has continued to grow but most of that growth has accrued to the wealthiest and relatively little of that benefit has been seen by the median worker.
What's the fiduciary duty here for Microsoft C-suite when it is supplying infrastructure and services that assist in underpinning war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide?
There are a number of big name tech companies associated with similar through their collaborations with the Nazi's, IBM etc. Did that have any effect on those companies that might inform what could happen to Microsoft and others?
Was already flagged. I vouched it and it became unflagged. Now it's flagged again...
(I don't think every story about this conflict should be on HN by the way, as a "major on-going topic". But IMHO this particular story seemed like a good one as it intersects with tech and is something actually new, at least to some degree).
There's a "vouch" button on flagged comments and some flagged stories, which will unflag a story. I'm not entirely sure under which conditions it's available on flagged stories (it's almost always there for flagged comments). I think it probably gets disabled after it got flagged → vouched → flagged, or something? You need at least 500 (or more?) reputation points regardless.
In the documentary (in the form of cinéma vérité) The Act of Killing (1), the director learnt about "anti-communist" massacres in 1965 Indonesia, which was sanctioned by a regime whose successors were still in power in the modern times. He compared the atmosphere of the country as if he came to Germany 40 years after WW2, but with the Nazis having won it. He talks to some of the killers, and he found them not even regretful, but boastful - throughout the documentary, he learns that if they admitted they were wrong, they'd be having to admit to themselves that they murdered a lot of innocent people, so they'd rather construct a fantasy world where they're the good guys.
There's even a musical segment of the documentary (he convinced the people to reimagine their doings in the style of 50's Hollywood movies they loved) where actors playing the victims thank the killers for saving them from godlessness and sending them to heaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ta9To14yw
I wonder how many of the genocide-defenders and genocide-enablers (not to mention genocide-executioners) will have similar PTSD...
This story should not be flagged.