[HN Gopher] The Banality of Surveillance
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The Banality of Surveillance
Author : commonreader
Score : 28 points
Date : 2022-09-29 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bostonreview.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (bostonreview.net)
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Despotism is lucrative for those on the right end of the
| information asymmetry.
|
| Fundamentally, the phenomena occurs in cycles in areas where
| communities lack mutual respect, income inequality is high, and
| regulatory capture of information is monetized/weaponized.
|
| The networks simply made it cheaper to squeeze the vulnerable,
| and extend the cycle by a few decades.
|
| While unsustainable sociologically or economically, every
| individual must make a conscious decision at some point... to
| serve a king... or walk to a better life someplace less foolish.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Despotism is lucrative for those on the right end of the
| information asymmetry.
|
| Everything is lucrative for those on the right end of
| information asymmetry. It's really the fundamental theory of
| capitalism.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Which monopoly character told you that? ;)
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The US might well not be a "real" democracy by some measure but
| it's not a despotism by any means - a variety of powerful
| forces are contending against each other.
|
| I mean, the US has surveillance, had surveillance in the 1960s
| when income inequality was relatively low and it had
| surveillance in the 1920s, when income inequality was more
| similar to today.
|
| This stuff isn't a recipe for some _future_ dictatorship, it 's
| part and parcel of the way power works right now and has worked
| for a while.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| As a foreigner doing business in the US, one needs to
| understand there is zero protection under the laws for non-
| citizens. If you have something someone wants, than you must
| expect professional thieves will show up before any division
| head.
|
| One can't take it personally, as the price of admission is
| high for that show.
|
| I find it amusing that you thought I was alluding to the USA,
| as the work was based on another historical democratic
| republic.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > to diffuse a bomb
|
| If even the Boston Review's subeditors don't know the difference
| between "diffuse" and "defuse"... well, English is going to
| change a lot in the next couple of decades. It will get a lot
| more ambiguous.
| gumby wrote:
| Technically, wouldn't detonation of a bomb "diffuse" it?
|
| I hope that's not what they meant, though!
| reidjs wrote:
| In the context I think it's clear what they mean.
| pessimizer wrote:
| In contacts, it's probably pretty clear what I mean here,
| too. A lot of incorrect things become interpretable when
| viewed in contacts.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Your loosing you're mined.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Does it matter with regards to the above comments? In this
| context, right now, it's clear. As we start losing track of
| the precise meaning of words, we'll get an increasing
| population size that doesn't even know the alternative
| exists. It's inevitable to then start using them in contexts
| where both spellings/meanings are valid and using the wrong
| one results in confusion.
| pkage wrote:
| I'm not sure pearl-clutching about losing the meaning of
| words is appropriate, it seems like a small mistake from
| the editing team slipped through.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| They're phonetically identical in most dialects so no
| meaning was confused here, it's a simple transcription
| error.
|
| The way you say "spelling/meaning" implies you think
| they're the same thing but they just absolutely are not, as
| much as that pains pedants sometimes.
|
| If you think otherwise you're mistaken about very basic and
| long-confirmed foundations of linguistics, like whether
| meaning derives from the spoken form or the writing system.
| BalinKing wrote:
| That's just how languages evolve; there's nothing
| particularly dangerous about it. (Besides, I really doubt
| there are many scenarios where "diffuse" and "defuse" could
| reasonably be confused.)
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Devolves. If meaning is abstracted by multiple words
| spelt different ways and context specific understanding
| is required, then there will be a greater cognitive load
| to reach 'understanding' and the language will move away
| from it's goal of conveying meaning.
|
| This is a long tail, but it's not like we've only just
| started down it.
|
| I actually find misspelling and bad phraseology to judge
| how seriously I should take a person's opinion, though
| factored in amongst other things (if it's obvious that
| English is their second language, or if their field of
| expertise may be one that eschews language skills, for
| example).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| There is no language that isn't effective at conveying
| meaning, because doing that is fundamental to what
| language _is_.
|
| People have been complaining and worrying about this
| since, literally, the beginning of recorded history. Our
| language is much "devolved" specifically in the ways many
| of them were worried about, and yet we are still having
| this conversation in it. You might not like how it tastes
| in your mouth but it'll still work fine for the needs we
| have of it, as all languages always have.
| smolder wrote:
| People say this evolution thing about language frequently
| but not all changes are positive for a languages utility,
| clearly. It can get better and it can get worse. When
| words start meaning their opposite and then consequently
| nothing, like with "literally", that's evolving away from
| usefulness.
| jjulius wrote:
| Stuff happens, people make mistakes, innocuous stuff like that
| slips through sometimes. I really don't know that I'd take this
| long-term view of the English language based on a single typo
| in the Boston Review, but then again I'm also not sure if that
| comment is missing a "/s".
| IntFee588 wrote:
| > During World War II military scientists invented the
| transistor, a semiconductor device that paved the way for
| miniature recording devices smaller than sugar cubes and thinner
| than postage stamps to flood espionage markets.
|
| This goes against common knowledge (that the FET was first
| invented by Lilienfeld in the 1920s, and that the germanium
| transistor was invented by Bardeen and Brattain at Bell Labs in
| the 1940s). Points to anyone that can produce evidence to support
| this claim that it was invented during WWII.
|
| Friendly reminder that nothing sent over public internet
| infrastructure without additional security measures is truly
| private. Also, pardon Snowden.
| verisimi wrote:
| > The protagonists of state-sanctioned surveillance are
| cybersecurity experts hacking into smart phones' operating
| systems from a suburban office park, Microsoft engineers refining
| a biometric camera's algorithm from their home office, and plain-
| clothes soldiers parsing through geolocation data for someone
| else to carry out a drone strike.
|
| I think it's more banal than that - Google, M$, Facebook etc
| probably allow direct access to whatever agencies, no tinkering
| required. Let's not forget Google was funded by inqtel, and
| Facebook started the same day Darpa's Lifelog ended.
| paganel wrote:
| WhatsApp's acquisition by FB (which seemed over-priced at the
| time, mind you) involved a boutique investment bank called
| Allen & Company, which acted as an advisor for FB [1]. That
| bank had as a managing director back in 2008 a certain George
| Tenet [2], a former director of the CIA. From that same wiki
| section, and related to the topic at hand:
|
| > Tenet is also on the boards of directors of L-1 Identity
| Solutions, a biometric identification software manufacturer.
|
| [1]
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303636404579397...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tenet#Later_life
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It seems very likely that surveillance involves both talking to
| Facebook and hacking on one's own these days. If a local police
| department (or an obscure agency or a contractor) can
| successfully hack someone's phone, such action has the
| advantage that neither the Feds nor Facebook or whoever has to
| know about it.
|
| It's reasonable to say that surveillance channels are power and
| by that token, everyone wants a channel that's as much under
| their sole control as possible. And no one wants another
| Snowden, even if Snowden probably didn't change things
| fundamentally, he gave the NSA a big black eye and I'd suspect
| image is important to these agencies as well.
| fsflover wrote:
| Not sure why it's downvoted. They are all a part of PRISM,
| according to Snowden revelation. And they collect too much
| data.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| The stored communications act prohibits companies from sharing
| email and similar messages without a warrant, and prohibits
| sharing information from remote computing services without a
| subpoena. This is not to say that it never happens that
| information is shared illegally, but the US is one of very few
| countries where illegally collected evidence is inadmissible,
| and so is "fruit of the poisonous tree", any other evidence
| collected based on this illegal evidence.
| uoaei wrote:
| It is possible there are secret dicta that supercede
| legislation, and anyway, laws are only as good as their
| enforcement, so there are many ways for the government to act
| as if that law doesn't exist and face zero pushback or
| repercussions.
|
| It is not in your best interest to assume good faith on the
| part of potentially bad actors.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| You are being downvoted, but I will give an example that is not
| controversial, is ( or at least should be ) openly known and
| currently in operation. In Canada, which does have much
| stronger privacy protections than US, RMCP can get information
| directly from Fintrac under the umbrella of partnership.
|
| While there is no direct evidence that Google et al, allows for
| the type of access you describe, I find it less and less
| unlikely these days.
| naithan wrote:
| Yeah, I rely on a Chromebook for most of what I do, and I
| sometimes wonder if US spy agencies have backdoor access to
| Google servers or even their mobile operating systems.
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