That's because they've been brainwashed into blindly accepting mass surveillance being supposedly necessary, due to terrorism, crime, etc.
Problem with the reasoning is that surveillance doesn't really stop terrorism and crime.
Indeed, if I were a criminal worth my salt, I'd slither into positions where I am effectively exempt from surveillance, or could control how surveillance is used against me.
Exactly. And look at the freedoms we've given up, billions of dollars we've spent (maybe more - we'll never know how much the NSA/CIA put into their data-collecting infrastructure), hours wasted (you used to be able to arrive at the airport 20 minutes before your flight left, and still board on time), etc.
IIRC - it "only" cost the 9/11 terrorists about $1M to pull it off. Terrorism is quite effective. It's almost like an amplified reflection DDoS attack - cheap to pull off and expensive to defend against.
> "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Ben Franklin
OT historical trivia time. When Franklin wrote that, the "essential liberty" he was talking about was the government's liberty to tax, and by "purchase" literally meant to buy with money.
The Pennsylvania Assembly was trying to raise money to defend the frontier during the French and Indian war. This would include taxing the lands of the Penn family (which ruled Pennsylvania). The Governor, appointed by the Penn family, kept vetoing this, each time finding some new excuse that made little sense to Franklin and the Assembly.
Franklin's quote was in a letter he wrote to the Governor concerning this situation, rejecting the notion that the Assembly should have to give up its taxation power over the Penn family in order to get a bill approved to purchase arms to supply those on the frontier.
He later did write something similar but about personal liberty rather than government liberty. I can't quote it, though, because I stupidly saved a link to a Reddit comment that cited it rather than the direct citation, and the Reddit comment has been deleted.
In oz, we have a nationwide metadata retention system managed by ISP's to help 22 police agencies to catch terrorists.
Here is a list of the hundred odd local councils, union watchdogs, agriculture depts etc. [0] who actually access the metadata.
But the thing that most worries me about surveillance is that almost no one is exempt. The oz government has in the past have the AFP raid the offices of journalists and opposition party members. What do you think they would do with meta data access. Politicians, more than anyone else should be afraid of surveillance.
While I am sympathetic to your line of reasoning, I would like to point out that most people are massively underestimating what computers (and by extension computer aided surveillance) can do.
For example, people are still regularly amazed when I show off Google Translate’s augmented reality mode, whose technology is nearly 8 years old now.
Other tech demos I have seen include:
• Wall penetrating radar using ambient WiFi to do pose detection
• Remote sensing of pulse and breathing from RGB video
• Audio recovery from normal speed (sans audio channel) RGB video footage by taking advantage of the rolling shutter
• Lip reading to the level that specific speakers can be isolated or removed from the audio stream of a clip
I think it’s a bit dismissive to say they’ve been brainwashed. With some of the career choices I’ve made, I’ve given up huge amounts of my expectation to privacy. I thought about these things and came to my own conclusion for my personal life, and I don’t think brainwashing ever came into it.
I have a big problem with how deeply flawed the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is (it’s almost a direct Kafka reference ffs), but people are allowed to have their own opinion on privacy and surveillance.
This may have been implicit in your comment, but it's not just dismissive: it's actively counterproductive if your goal is increasing awareness of the real harms of indiscriminate surveillance.
In today's polarized political environment where terms like bot/shill/NPC are thrown around willy-nilly, implying that someone lacks agency over their views is a fantastic way of getting them to shut down and refuse to engage with you as anything but a tribal enemy.
That's a particular shame because opposition to indiscriminate surveillance has the potential to transcend partisan feuding, as exemplified by Schneier's careful selection of examples that have appeal across the spectrum. Sanctimonious sniping by tech elites at them darn brainwashed masses is one way to ensure that an anti-surveillance coalition of 2a defenders and immigration reformists remains a fantasy.
Note that I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting terrorism/crime, but tone of messaging is everything.
They made up their mind to be okay with it a long time before that comment.
> I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting terrorism/crime
No, it itself is bad for reasons that make other crimes and terrorism bad. It's a crime worse than terrorism, we're just too primitve to have it on the books yet. And plenty of entitites using surveillance also commit terrorism and other crimes, and are in bed with all sorts of people who do all sorts of things, as long as its useful. It's a great "tool" to fight activism of all sorts, and it's used for that.
Actually, I would say it's not even a tool, it's a weapon. I hope future historians will get a chuckle out of this, to me it's like people arguing about how useful a minigun is for hunting deer. As Hannah Arendt said, intellectuals are great with coming up with all sorts of high-fallutin, complicated explanations, they're the best at not seeing the obvious, not the quickest to understand. It really just boils down to this: when they came for X, Y and Z, it was more comfortable to rationalize that than to realize that they're going through the alphabet, backwards, and that all of us could have been born as anyone, and that even when they came for Z, they really came for you.
But you see, if people don't care about others, I also don't care about them. If X Y Z are not enough for someone, I'm not going to bend over backwards to explain to them them how they will also get affected at some point, how it already changed them, how ultimately, nobody gains from it, not even the very tippity-top, and so on.
If a kid kicks a dog, yes, you probably shouldn't descend on it with fury and preach to it for hours on end how horrible a person they are. But you also probably shouldn't just say "it's great you have this much energy, but check out this pillow". No, they hurt another being, they wouldn't want to be hurt that way themselves, it's not okay and they shouldn't do it again -- if there is no way to tell them that without them getting upset, let them get upset. Some things are simply too serious to be too soapy and sloppy about.
At this point, the sheer amount of crimes people have NOT cried bloody murder about, the rationalizations they already invested in, are enough to make people upset regardless of how nice you are. Nevermind personal choices, we are too many generations into too much bullshit for anyone to come away from a good, hard look unscathed. If they want to hold people who haven't even been born hostage with their petty selves, their fragile egos, their life choices that can't have been for nought, then they need to be overcome, not catered to.
The quality of seeds is not determined by how a rocky surface interacts with it, but what happens when there's fertile soil and some rain. Sometimes when the seeds are actually fine, but there's still a holdup, the soil might simply not be fertile, it might be rock. Maybe it needs more time and rain, but either way you don't wait around until something grows or doesn't. Instead you do rounds, and only after you've done at least one round can you even begin to justify focusing on the patches where nothing has grown. But instead, those patches actually demand a veto right, seeking to stop the whole thing even though the fault is with them.
If you get hung up on "brainwashed" you're simply not going by the strongest most possible interpretation, and take offense at a word people people use in casual conversation without a problem for decades. And that's not even getting into serious thinkers, or any of that.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
-- Hannah Arendt
Someone who not sometimes trembles to their core because of that, who never loses sleep because of the realization that right now, millions of people are in physical and/or psychological agony, which is carefully curated and hidden from sight -- how could I be moved in the least by them trembling over being called anything but innocent yet wise?
Let's say 5% of the people had no problem with being this "unflattering" because that's a near invisibly tiny thing compared to what others endure and what's at stake. Those, without interference from the rest, would probably achieve more than 30% who have the top priority to never be offended and never be sad.
How many women were suffragettes, how many weren't? This very notion that it all needs to be made inoffensive and smooth enough, until everybody can agree on it, itself may impede progress way more than people who are more blunt about it than you.
"nothing to hide" is itself an attempt to hide something. For example, it implies that when a neighbour gets disappeared, I'm not going to film the agents doing it, or raise a fuss in any way. In practice, it usually implies obedience to a range of criminals and abusers, and the the pledge to not pose a seriously meant threat to them.
I say "in practice" to exclude native tribes and such; most of us don't enjoy the option of being neutral. That's not a matter of opinion, it's just a matter of unpacking everything there is to unpack.
If this offends some people too much to partake in the discussion of our responsibilities, and what we best should be ashamed of, if we want future generations to even have the option to not be born complicit and deceived (they might not even rationalize it as benign like is done today, for them it could be all there is), I would prefer to discuss with those who have a thicker skin, rather than discuss something that is more palatable but has nothing to do with reality.
The situation determines what is required of people. The whims and abilities of people don't determine what the situations is. Any offense people might feel for being called complicit or foolish, I see and raise by the offense done to countless of people who had their rights denied in all sorts of ways or even were murdered.
