It's like a vicious circle that feeds itself, the more surveillance the government permits, the less the public are able to complain or fight back against it. Thus leading to even worse surveillance.
Panopticon it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Generally, there is plenty of reasons to be worried:
- Firmware-wise (e.g., Intel Management Engine, Coreboot, Libreboot, system on a chip)
- Hardware-wise (i.e., Von Neumann architecture - Code + Data)
- Operating System-wise
(e.g., 0-click exploits, remote code execution to manipulate the CPU's instruction pointer,
stack overflow, Pegasus)
- Facility-wise (e.g., electromagnetic waves, cell towers, Faraday cloth)
- You (making mistakes)
If you need some electronics go with analogue electronic devices. Or, make your own computer systems from scratch with transistors etc.:
jdh, I built my own computer. by hand., https://youtu.be/vaGZapAGvwM?si=lGQuskkFxZ7FHe1h
Our lived experiences are filled with countless powers preying upon us humans. They want to stay middlemen, they want to keep us using their convenient systems, they want their hand in every pot, and they use networks to vend their position to as many other would industrialists as they can.
That's them, what about us? We humans have lost direct and authentic connection to the world around us. We lack orientation & cannot make sense & decide & understand (and that alone may be a ghastly threat to democracy). We don't have visible economies around us anymore.
There's such a deeply Dark Forest scenario playing out, as companies invisibly consume & process society. It's so asymmetric, so hard to even grasp how thoroughly & tightly the corporate surveillance winds itself around us. Are the datasets generated terrifying? Sure, yeah. But the result is not the only horror here. The potential power of what is gathered is only one form of damage that the de-huamnizing/intermediating of humanity strikes against us with.
> Security services saw the message and flagged it to Spanish authorities, who sent two F-18 jets to follow the airliner until it landed, per the BBC.
> He faces a public-disorder charge, which could result in him being ordered to pay over $120,000 if he's found guilty.
> About $103,000 of that is from the Spanish Defense Ministry for the cost of scrambling the fighter jets.
Definitely alarming than encrypted Snapchats are clearly not private, but the response as a whole still seems fairly reasonable, no? He did kinda threaten to blow up a commercial airliner.
I think the BBC article about his acquittal has a lot more points relevant to the discussion about privacy:
Where are you putting the stress in this sentence?
If your issue is with the encrypted private channel being spied upon, then I completely agree, and so did the court system.
But outside of that, if he had said this via SMS, this would be the standard response. It may be a shitty joke, but jokes don't make you magically immune to consequences. You can't yell "fire" in a clouded theater, and you can't say "on my way to blow up the plane (I'm a member of the Taliban)" while boarding a commercial airliner. Well, you can, you just should expect to be sued.
The hazing process for electing a president is already cruel enough that nobody sane runs. Add in the risk of the incumbent administration finding a way to leak all your dirty laundry from as far back as the records go and it will be really weird. Probably corrupt, ugly and with bad results for everyone outside the intelligence apparatus.
In some sense that isn't new, there are questionmarks over the US spooks dating back to J. Edgar Hoover. But the damage that sort of actor can do is greater the more data they have to make decisions with.
Maybe that's just a reflection of the organizations that have created said software.
Whether an organization decides to lock things down or not is a different discussion, but software itself is absolutely authoritarian in nature.
And the scary part is that it's absolute. If you have employees who shouldn't be doing a thing you make it company policy, but with software you flat out enforce it.
Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users.
And over time we may have started with systems that are centralized because our abilities were young at the time, but distributed systems are very popular and often the goal. One example is version control systems: all the systems prior to Git/Mercurial and those after.
With social networks, the network effects are dominant, but I am hopeful that distributed systems will eventually dominate.
That they can be applied at all makes software authoritarian in nature.
software enables something we've never truly had, which is automated, effective force at a distance.
Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today.
The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder. Firecrackers are sold without license, small amount of gunpowder. Dynamite and other explosives with larger amounts of gunpowder are heavily restricted because of the damage that can be done. Today, there are laws against re-packaging explosives to protect people.
I believe the damage that these datasets are doing to society are covert and second-order effects that are hard to track. Most datasets like what the NSA are doing are kept secret precisely because they don't want transparency. If there was transparency, the damage would become obvious that regulations would swiftly come.