Comment by dw_arthur
1 day ago
A surveillance state was always inevitable once wireless networking, GPS, and cameras were ubiquitous. If you say this isn't true, show me anywhere in the world with these technologies that is not headed down this path.
its inevitable if you do nothing to organize politically against it.
This makes for nice political slogans but Hank Asher had the entire state of Florida DMV records in the early 90s and we did nothing. Then we did nothing after 9/11 and the patriot act. We did nothing between 9/11 and Snowden. We did nothing after Snowden. We have literally done nothing in 35 years but now is the time to start? Snowden is probably in political office in a society that had the will to do something about this.
At a deeper level, I think people would need to care more about the outcomes and higher order effects of political decisions and not just the emotional weight of political slogans. The fundamental problem is that is not the society we live in.
Many other reasons to do it too.
>"if you do nothing to organize politically against it"
how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?
they do whatever they want and we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.
> how does one politically organize against a billion dollar industry which is friends with, and donates to, the ruling class?
You're mixing the places of horse and cart here - the ruling class is ruling because it's organized. Organization comes first, the presence of other organizations, be them ruling or not, has little bearing on the process.
> we just post about it online and click 'like' or post emojis.
That's what you do without organization. It still helps though, getting to the truth isn't easy these days.
It was really tiny, inexpensive cameras and wireless networks. Cameras are everywhere now. They're so cheap they're almost free, and it doesn't require an expert to install them.
It’s inevitable that some country would do it, but not inevitable that any given nation would do so, except maybe the CCP.
Europe is, compared to the US, doing a lot more for protection of private data. That includes strict guardrails on what data can be collected and how it is used.
Secret courts still exist but the phenomenon of random Flock employees spying on children in locker rooms at gyms is so much harder to get away with in a system with a modicum of decency.
Chat control was actually shot down, and that was the UK not Europe (anymore).
Laws are different in different places. The world is not composed of America and other-Americas.
Saying something was shot down isnt that strong of an argument. The US government has proposed and shot down surveillance laws hundreds of times, until one finally passes.
Ok, sure. You want more words to say the same thing, here you are.
It got vociferous support from the highest levels of government even though the deception ("protect kids!") was so blatant and transparent, and it wasn't until a legion of privacy and in particular tech-literate advocates raised concerns in mass media together with an awareness campaign about the dangers of unchecked surveillance structures that it was finally... shot down.
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Chat Control was proposed and rejected in the European Union
You're right, mixed up the names, in UK they called it Online Safety Act.
Uh France? It annoys me when people say this stuff is "inevitable." No, many countries have forcibly "reshaped" their government (French revolution, American revolution, etc etc) and nobody has any basis for saying it won't happen again, perhaps many more times.
French Revolution is largely regarded as a tragedy. It led first to the Terror, and after that a series of new monarchies over the following century.
Revolutions in most countries have generally replaced one faction of the ruling class with a competing faction of the ruling class, with little actual change for the people.
> It annoys me when people say this stuff is "inevitable."
"Resistance is futile" is an old slogan of them Borgs.
A scene from the Chinese 1980s period drama "Like a Flowing River 2":
Lei Dongbao, party secretary of a small village, is courting the owner of a restaurant in a nearby city. He persuades her to let him care for her young son over the weekend.
As he's heading back to his village on his motorcycle with the boy seated behind him, he drives by some women resting in the shade by the side of the road. One of them remarks to another, "Why does the secretary have a child?"
By the time he arrives at his office, all of his subordinates - and one of their wives - have turned out to meet him and say hello to the child.
https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2019/9/...
> Citizens, on the other hand, don’t like red light cameras because they don’t want to be fined. They complain that the cameras are an invasion of their privacy. I don’t buy that because I grew up in a small town, and as such I understand that privacy is a myth.