Comment by abustamam
1 month ago
Even if they ban you for a reason, you're screwed. Granted, the ban may have been warranted, but you're essentially put into a societal prison with no due process or recourse.
1 month ago
Even if they ban you for a reason, you're screwed. Granted, the ban may have been warranted, but you're essentially put into a societal prison with no due process or recourse.
That is a great analogy. There are countries where a police can throw you into a lifetime jail with zero option for justice unless you are a famous person from a well known western country.
Those countries are North Korea, Iran, Russia, Google and Apple.
Well the US can do it with CBP/ICE, but not for life. I was placed in a jail without being arrested or being accused of a crime and they were very clear at all times I was not even arrested, nor did a federal criminal history search show any record of arrest. No access to lawyer either.
US Citizen. Contacted lawyers, all informed me they'd given up trying to sue for these things because it's hopeless.
You should contact IJ. They recently took up a case like this.
https://ij.org/press-release/us-citizen-and-army-veteran-sub...
1 reply →
Assuming what you're saying is true, this is the kind of thing 2A was written for. I don't mean for you personally, but for society it's really the last line of defense against a rogue government. But, even if your story is totally made up it's completely believable. Scary times.
9 replies →
how long were you in jail? How did you get out?
13 replies →
Founding fathers rolling in their graves.
First of all - add Israel. If you're a Gazan than this goes without saying, but even if you're a citizen, then - the General Security Service can and does people into custody without a warrant; often does not publicly disclose or admit said custody; and has "secret" detention facilities to hold such people (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_1391)
I also wonder about the US: What about the secret imprisonment mechanisms it set up after the 2001 attacks on the twin towers (9/11)? Were those ever dis-established?
The US has done just that to Abrego Garcia, and is now giving him the choice between confessing to a crime that he hasn't been convicted of (and likely didn't commit) and deportation to a country he has never been in.
Abrego Garcia has attorneys working his case through the US justice system. That is a key factor that the other entities lack.
1 reply →
Very true. They are effectively a new type of non-territorial state with absolutely no separation of powers or rule of law or principle of proportionality.
What makes this difficult though is that they are under constant attack from highly organised and automated criminal operations that create and exploit accounts en masse.
Any solution to the tyrannical state of affairs we are subjected to (even more so as developers) needs to balance better protections for real people (including as you say for people who have committed some transgressions) with fighting organised crime.
It's also used by the actual territorial state to project power through corporations, by influencing them to project their policies. I'm reminded of the story of the guy that had his google account shut down for "CSAM" because they took explicit medical pictures of their child at the directions of physicians, that were only privately shared solely for the purpose of aiding diagnosis. Apparently google works with the government to create these systems to scan your cloud images in the background.
Yes, I think governments love centralisation of control in very few hands. It gives them far greater powers than they would otherwise have, both technically and legally.
"Harmful" content has significant overlap with freedom of speech, so governments find it hard to ban directly. But when there's a big corporation facilitating access to that content, then it becomes a clear case of "evil capitalist profiting from harmful content - corporations need to take responsibility!".
When a government doesn't like end-to-end encrypted photos and cloud drives, all they have to do is issue a secret order telling Apple to disable it.
And when people find workarounds for intrusive and insecure age verification methods, what's better than a total sideloading ban to regain control?
2 replies →
Yes, I am feeling like technology is being used as a authoritarian trap.
Always has been... pertinent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
IBM in Nazi Germany was no different from other German owned companies in being conscripted to do what the Third Reich ordered them to; the headquarters in the US obviously had no control over them during WW2.
Plus it's ridiculous to apply collective guilt in any form by blaming later IBM management, given that anyone involved with 1940s German IBM is long dead by now.
1 reply →
Let's hope people remember this and don't cheer the precedent when it's set against "undesirable" like it was with Alex Jones.
It always starts like that.
Can you explain a bit more? As far as I was aware, Alex Jones was found guilty by a court of law.
I didn't really follow his case or anything about him though. Did he get banned from Google/Apple for no reason?
He was a high profile case of social media coordinated banning. Not just one platform but many and it wasn't about court orders at the time but simply the vague "policy" which we know gets applied selectively.
The particularly interesting thing was that the sentiment of unpersoning someone online and "one service banning you" being a good reason for others to do so, was used by politicians later on to suggest more proactive unpersoning of different government critics which, they obviously called conspiracy theorists. Obviously different politicians call for the ban of people from opposing political parties, so it's not something about a specific party or political compass quadrant, as much as people want it to be.
This was sometime after Trump's election, when the "all out war" on the US political landscape was happening.
You could probably find numerous less extreme and easier to defend cases, where people get banned from one or many linked services, with no recourse but the Jones one was one of or maybe the first high profile one across several sites.
It's very easy to think that these powers will only be used at someone we dislike or find politically abhorrent but it will always point back to us, the moment we are the nuisance, no matter if it's because we are against the new freedom (TM) war or "save the children" civil encroachment.
5 replies →
"Alex Jones"
Lol.