[r2vcap]

It feels like many democratic leaders are starting to think the CCP model—mass surveillance of citizens—is the right direction, with growing demands for chat control, facial verification, age verification, and more. Fxxk any politician who thinks they are above the citizens in a democracy.

[eucyclos]

I've been in mainland China for the past year and I wish western politicians would get it through their skulls that most of the ccp model's upsides come from CCTVs in public areas and a police force that prioritizes stopping street crime.

[ranyume]

Do they de-prioritize or ignore other crimes that are not visible in the streets? This is an honest question, I want to know if actually focusing only on the streets makes people feel safe even if other types of crimes are rampant.

EDIT: I guess I could add examples of what "other crimes" could be. Fraud, corruption, sexual abuse, all victimless crimes, hitmen?

[eucyclos]

Victimless crimes definitely. For example, street vendors without permits are asked to leave, but not fined. Car accidents are investigated but there seems to be no 'ticket quotas' like in the west, etc.

I don't know much about the other categories you mentioned but I do know that president Xi is associated with a 'tough on corruption' stance that's widely seen as a major positive of his administration.

[throwawaysleep]

Eh, if you see the reaction to Flock Safety, people object to that one as well.

[someguyiguess]

The problem is that those cameras aren't being put in areas where crime occurs in order to keep citizens safe. They are being put on busy streets to prevent people's ability to travel without being tracked.

[eucyclos]

Not familiar with that conversation, but is the concern that it will be used to raise ticket revenue from victimless crimes without doing much to prevent the other kind?

[frig57]

The concern is losing all your freedom and privacy for no good reason

[eucyclos]

I don't think any constitution has ever guaranteed a right to privacy in public spaces. I can't imagine how that would ever work even if we were willing to make serious tradeoffs for it.

[kvuj]

From what I've seen, it's simply an aversion to mass scale surveillance, even in public setting. The worry being how easy it could slide into a tool used by the state for nefarious purposes (punish political dissidents, etc).

[lesuorac]

Is there actually evidence of flock being used to stop street crime? I've never heard anything about Flock (or Shotspooter) stopping street crime.

Where I am, the local speed cameras have annual documents about the street their on detailing pre-camera vehicle speeds and fatal (pedestrian) accidents and the decreases in both of them since the usage.

Afaik, the concern isn't that it "could slide" its that flock _is used_ by say Texas to monitor out of state abortions. That isn't solving street crime and certainly didn't benefit the local residents.

[augment_me]

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this.

If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be.

One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools.

Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.

Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry

[armchairhacker]

As always, the devil is in the details. How will "mass surveillance" be implemented? How will bad opinions be suppressed? How will misguided officials be blocked?

Even the vague outline you've provided has issues. You can't prevent someone from having an opinion. You can't figure out who is "influenced" vs merely "exposed" (and visible intrusion shifts people towards the former).

You should actually consider the downsides and failure modes of implemented mass surveillance, not "it prevents malicious foreign influence better than my other proposals", because it may be worse than said influence (which does not necessarily translate into control; keep in mind that Georgescu only won the primary and would've lost the runoff had it not been annulled). The world under free information is the devil you know.

I always hold that the problem with mass censorship and state overreach is, they are too powerful and people are too selfish and stupid. There's no good solution, but my prediction is that any drastic attempt to prevent foreign interference will backfire and fail at that (liberal leaders can't use authoritarian tools as effectively as authoritarians). Even Democracy, "the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried", is a better countermeasure; all you need, to prevent anti-democratic foreign capture and ultimate failure, is to preserve it.

[augment_me]

I think the definition of what is "anti-democratic" is as hard as the initial 3 questions you pose. If you push second-order ideas, for example by using refugees as indirect fuel for anti-democratic sentiment, is that anti-democratic? The Romanian election propaganda in itself was not anti-democratic, the coordination from a foreign state was. This means that the future of this kind of interference could be a more diffuse approach, or an approach where this is done from within Europe.

Any countermeasure you propose will just lead to moving one level of abstraction, or finding another point of entry.

I do think it's a better idea than mass surveillance, but I believe that the states will see it as harder. It can be that mass surveillance is implemented, and then the states do not know what to do with the data and nothing is achieved.

[hn111]

Regarding banning platforms I’d say just ban the attention driven business model online by forbidding all social media platforms from serving ads entirely.

[thfuran]

Ban all third party advertisement. Or taking payment for it at any rate.

[mvkel]

To what end would you say the surveillance is for?

So you surveil your citizens and precog their opinions... to do what? Make them have state-sponsored opinions? Don't we already have that without the surveillance?

It's trivial to predict how a human will behave without any surveillance at all. Facebook abandoned their Beacon system not because of the backlash, but because they realized all they really needed to predict user behavior was the user's credit card statements, which they could easily buy.

At some point the constitution is the backstop, and unless we amend it, it should hold true.

[augment_me]

I don't think that the EU member states have the same data access as companies in the US like Facebook do, and therein lies the problem. There is no good way to gather and connect data like Meta or Palantir can, you can't just sell things to the maximum bidder here. I think that's where the necessity comes from.

[xtiansimon]

> "control of the population"

Who is doing the controlling in this take? "The Government"? Calling for more government control when some say--at least in the US--too much government is the heart of our current political strife. Unless this argument is for corporate surveillance?

As for elections in the age of social media, why not just pass Blackout laws around the date of the election? One week not sufficient? Make it two.

But instead the answer is mass surveillance? To do what? Arrest & detain people, and let the judicial system incarcerate them for months or years while the process plays out?

[augment_me]

I am not for mass surveillance, I am saying it's the cheapest option to achieve the goal without disturbing the individual and causing social unrest. If you have a blackout, you will have businesses stopped, people will complain, people will use VPNs anyways, massive economic costs. Mass surveillance will just allow you to monitor, flag and perhaps later exclude people without affecting the rest.

[thfuran]

>when some say

Some say very nearly anything you could imagine and many things you couldn’t.

[pydry]

>If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers

When Georgia tried to implement a law to inhibit this type of foreign meddling from all superpowers it was widely branded a "pro russia law", presumably because the west had invested more in astroturfing Georgia.

Which is no different to what the US and Europe was already doing in Romania on an ENORMOUS scale before Russia ran its Tiktok campaign. Russia's campaign evidently resonated with the populace far more than what the NED were doing.

Democracy is a bit like freedom of speech - either you support it even when it makes decisions you dont like (e.g. in opposition to western imperialism) or you hate it. There isnt a middle ground.

If you support the Romanian secret services' decision to cancel the election over a tiktok campaign which was more convincing than better funded NED campaigns which they permit, you probably just hate democracy.

If you think "pro russia law" is an accurate designation of what Georgia was trying to implement - again, you just hate democracy.

[worldsayshi]

Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive.

But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work:

> start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them

A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.

[augment_me]

It's a good suggestion, but the thing is that the average person does not care and does not want to use your tools. You can make an app that gives you correct news, where you can vote for local political issues, etc. Most people don't give a shit, you as a state are competing against the attention economy(evolving into an affection economy given LLM use).

You are competing against companies that are using biologically wired mechanisms, like short-burst 3-second information overload together with marketing signaling(consumer neuroscience) to make you do choices and then confabulate the choice to yourself as your own.

Any tool would have to either be made in a landscape where ALL of the attention/affection-economy tools are banned, OR use the same mechanisms.

[worldsayshi]

I agree but I also think that authenticity is one quality that such a tool could offer that other things in the attention economy cannot.

Addictive things are addictive. But people are also capable, given the right circumstances, to go and "touch grass". People are capable of making choices that are good for them. Especially if we make those choices easy enough.

I often scroll too much but I also go into nature and meet irl humans. And it's not close to an insurmountable choice.

[Meneth]

> A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.

Which tools, specifically? I know none.

[worldsayshi]

I mean that we are in dire need of such tools!

I also am not aware of any existing tools.

[frig57]

Your last paragraph spunds misguided

[_heimdall]

Said leaders are only really democratic based on the literal name of the party they signed with when running for office. There's nothing democratic about these types of programs and I have to assume that a plainly explained referendum spelling this out on a ballot would fail miserably.

[canadiantim]

Canadian leaders are currently very consciously choosing to partner with China as opposed to the U.S.

I get diversification, that’s a good call, but adopting policies that actively harm Canada to the benefit of China is where we’re at and it’s so far beyond the pale. Just take a look at Canada, who for as long as I have known, have tried to maintain its industrial base in Ontario, eg the cross-border supply chain for automobiles, but then this "new" government comes in and is like y’know what we really need right now? To compound the effects of tariffs, piss off our biggest trading partner, risk NAFTA (CUSMA) and our entire cross-border supply chains with the US all so we can get some cheap electric cars from China, which won't even be manufactured here (atleast not with Canadian jobs); meanwhile we just spent close to $100 billion in subsidies explicitly to try and kickstart electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada. May have been more productive to turn that $100 billion into pennies and throw them down a wishing well...

[HerbManic]

This is a systemic problem of modern information technology. With social media for instance, either you let the technology run rampant and the worst case scenareo plays out. That is misinformation, tribalism, bidy dysmorphia and the pletora of other issues. The worst case pesamistic mode of what the technology can do, that is self termination. The alternative is that you have to have the watchmen over watch everything and you have the full dystopia model.

While there is a middle road, it is almost never taken as it is the hardest path. The real trick is to not invent the torment nexus but you cannot know this as the n'th order effects are decades beyond the initial creation. But that is so incredibly difficult to anticipate.

Think about it, the transistor was invented in 1947, 70 years later it turned into the surviellance panopticon. Very few could have seen that coming.

I dont have answers just explanations here.

[throwawaysleep]

Look at what social media considers to be safe countries.

You are absolutely bombarded with messaging about how Dubai and Chinese cities are the safest places in the world. I have friends who live in each who consider North America and Europe crime ridden shitholes because theft is possible to get away with.

If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades, there is nowhere else to go but mass surveillance to make sure that even the smallest of visible crimes are stamped out.

[indiangenz]

The streets of Dubai and pretty much any where in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam etc are orders of magnitude safer than UK, US, France, and other western European countries. Crime appears to be tolerated and reporting crimes doesn't do much, and statistics are managed in western Europe. If you get an opportunity to travel to China, do see for yourself how safe the cities feel, and how advanced (and safe) the public transport systems are.

[gib444]

There is also plenty of social media and politicians telling you that because of some statistic that the knife wielding gang you yourself saw in the shopping centre in east London in fact does not exist

[modo_mario]

>If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades

After having to push for a crime to be actually registered and for others to even report small crimes because police has been so useless in Brussels I lost complete faith in this.

It also doesn't track with prisons overflowing more and more and damn near half of prisoners not having the nationality. It's safer now! But more and more people have experiences so keep your wallet in your front pocket. Watch out as a woman after dark. Avoid certain areas that your grandma described as posh and the trainstation you went to every day in your youth has stabbings now.

It feels like one of a bunch of fronts where we get some kind of hypernormalisation.

[b112]

Getting a warrant for each person is not "mass surveillance". Why do you think a warrant is not required? It is.