Re:Pardon Snowden
by forgottenpass on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:54AM
(#12497494)
The main difference is you're not getting fired or ostracized or jailed for run of the mill political views or dissidence.
There are two different aspects.
The difference you're focusing on seems to be setting what positions are acceptable, and what gets done to people who hold them them.
The similarity I was focusing on was that they're being tracked at all. And in the cases that they're not not immediately actionable, I don't draw much distinction between a bureaucrat with actuarial tables and machine learning.
> The main difference is you're not getting fired or ostracized or jailed for run of the mill political views or dissidence.
Jailed, no. Fired and ostracized? Certainly, except for narrow definitions of "views" and "dissidence" (largely calibrated by region and type of employment).
You're conflating government action with civil actions. Civilians do all kinds of things governments are constrained from doing --I can be ostracized by colleagues for being irreligious or contemptuous of management or being pro choice, or conversely pro life or being too PC or not being PC, etc.
I'm unaware of dragnets and massive house to house searches in order to discover and punish people who went out for a brief protest against against a corrupt government office.
Look at today's Turkey for what it would be if this were true in western democracies (of which Turkey withdrew itself recently).