Comment by flycaliguy
Comment by flycaliguy 9 hours ago
I think Snowden was bang on when in 2013 he warned us of a last chance to fight for some basic digital privacy rights. I think there was a cultural window there which has now closed.
Comment by flycaliguy 9 hours ago
I think Snowden was bang on when in 2013 he warned us of a last chance to fight for some basic digital privacy rights. I think there was a cultural window there which has now closed.
> and people are ok with that
I've seen no evidence of this. People mostly either don't understand it for feel powerless against it.
There's also a vast amount of people that were just too young to be aware of Snowden's revelations. These people are now primarily on TikTok what not, and I doubt there's much in those feeds to bring them to light while directly feeding the beast of data hoarding.
And I'd bet over 99% of those people have never once considered that said camera could even be capable of saving any data without them operating it.
Snowden couldn't convince people that the privacy he was talking about meant a limit on government power. Not sensitive data. And honestly, nobody cares about anyone taking a shit.
You can advocate for limiting govt. power ("LGP") without leaking any NSA docs. I don't think a single story about "LGP" changed due to the leaks. Everyone knows the government can do a lot of violence on you. So it's very hard.
If you're a high drama personality, yeah you can conflate all these nuanced issues. You can make privacy mean whatever you want.
This is my experience as well. I talked to a LOT of people after the Snowden debacle (techies and otherwise) and the general attitude was "so what? they aren't using the information for anything bad!" or "I have nothing to hide!" (in this thread, for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594775)
I think people don't really understand what an enormous sleeping dragon the entire thing is.
But won't you think of the children!
(EU is trying to implement chat control again...)
We need more real-world analogies... "see, this is like having a microphone recording everything you say in this bar"... "see, this is like someone ID-ing you infront of every store and recording what store you've visited, and then following you inside to see what products you look at. See, this is like someone looking at your clothes and then pasting on higer price tags on products. ..."
>and people are ok with that.
All the propagandists said he was a Russian asset, as if even if that were true, it somehow negated the fact that we were now living under a surveillance state.
>Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger.
This is a great way of putting it.
> it somehow negated the fact that we were now living under a surveillance state.
There's long been surveillance programs and also numerous laws outlining the responsibilities of telecom provides to enable wire tapping.
There's really nothing new from Snowden besides the names of a bunch of people to go kill cause they're spies.
FISA [1] isn't a private law either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
Note: 2006 (Klien) predates 2013 (Snowden)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
>There's really nothing new from Snowden besides the names of a bunch of people to go kill cause they're spies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...
> There's long been surveillance programs and also numerous laws outlining the responsibilities of telecom provides to enable wire tapping.
Laws which the telecoms were knowingly and willfully breaking for years.
You do remember that Congress gave them retroactive immunity? [0][1] You do know that this was only granted because people COULD sue (and were suing) them because of the information made public by Snowden and others?
[0] <https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/retroactive-tele...>
[1] See Title II of the this bill <https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/house-bill/6304>
Over ten years ago I wrote about the root of the problem: https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
And here is a libertarian solution: https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
Snowden pointed and everyone looked at his finger. It was a huge shame, but a cultural sign that the US is descending into a surveillance hell hole and people are ok with that. As someone who was (and still is) vehemently against PRISM and NSLs and all that, it was hard to come to terms with. I'm going to keep building things that circumvent the "empire" and hope people start caring eventually.