The real issue, I would argue, is that of governments becoming repressive and using force or threats against those who assert their right to free speech and civil disobedience. The first issue does not imply the second and I found that they were often confounded in comments, making it sound like they both go hand in hand.

I don't believe that to be the case. I'd like to think we can have a healthy democracy while living with increasing surveillance.

Let's keep pushing back on governments when they actually infringe on free speech. Like when they start firing people or limiting their rights based on political affiliation or beliefs.

Do we still have curfews or vaccine passports? No, people pushed back. Does the government know who got the shot and who didn't and what their stance is around it? I imagine they do.

* lists gmail address in footer

We should never confuse the two - people seem to think that a right to privacy means a right to secrecy. It does not and never can. People have behaved badly enough with so called online anonymity.

We will have our entire lives stripped bare and laid out on a digital plate - this will enable an incredible outpouring of new lessons, psychological, criminal, mental health and happiness - if we treat it right. If we give individuals control over who can use their information, if we ensure PII is treated like a lawyer treats their clients confessions, that epidemiology can get what advertisers never can, we shall find that it’s not “no-one can ever know” but “health researchers can know, but I would rather my employer does not and I hope my friends understand”

We spend 20 years training children as to what is and is not acceptable in polite society - and it’s going to take a generation to figure this new set of etiquette out - but I am betting the juice is worth the squeeze

Edit: in short, it’s not the data that’s collected, it’s who uses it and how. Focus on that.

In your sex offender example, the sex offender would still be allowed to maintain their secrecy, but they would forgo their right to observe the thoughts or actions of those members who are completely open.

so for example it is not necessary to track the route you take with your car, or who is inside, in order to find out if you are speeding. speed can be measured anonymously, and only when you break the speed limit, the camera saves the recording, scans the license place and identifies the owner/driver of the car. there is no need to collect any data on cars that are not speeding.

i dont want anyone to belive it, i want it to be so fantastic it is invalidated.

such as glue on pizza.

thanx for the concern, i get what you are saying.

and that's the issue. now what is easier to enforce? banning of targeted ads? or banning of collection of data?

laws can not protect us from everything. because if they did we'd loose all of our freedom. laws need to focus on protecting us from things from which we can't protect ourselves. that is already difficult enough to decide.

Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s.

When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff.

This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary.

The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it.

In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back?

To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals.

If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish).

Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger.

As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires.

Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures.

What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.

We got the cameras rolled back even further; we now, by municipal policy, don't trust the Illinois LEADS stolen vehicle hotlist, so cameras can no longer be used to stop "stolen" cars (too many of the stops we were doing were mis-listed), only cars with stolen license plates (for which there is no innocent explanation). We're also the only muni in Illinois that won't automatically share camera data with out-of-state LEOs.

The rule of law is meant as a safeguard for non-violent conflict resolution. It requires 4 components. Accessibility and independent judiciary are two of the most important.

It currently costs an average person's yearly (unspent for necessity/food) salary to bring a case before a superior court to conclusion excluding some niches. That's roughly $50,000, and that was in 2020 dollars. Wages have been suppressed to create a cost wall that excludes those who don't make enough money. There are also other aspects such as forced arbitration, and front of line blocking (i.e. being unable to show standing until an agreement is nullified for discovery, when information that would show standing would be available once done).

You are mistaken. This isn't how democracy works. It is historically the early stages of totalitarianism, and those type of governments resort to menticide which is well documented (but largely not taught outside certain niches).

Robert Lifton, and John Meerloo both are experts and wrote books if you care to actually do your own research.

I regularly reach out to my representatives in writing. Nothing ever comes of it. None of the issues I bring up are ever brought into discussion. Fake job postings, and interferance in labor relations have been a recent subject that only receives boilerplate responses. No action has been taken, its been 5 years since I started doing this which is an appropriate measure of sampling time to show trends and inform on larger systems, though 10 years is better.

I vote every time I have a chance. The problem with voting systems is first, the money vote (tweedism) just to get on a ballot. It's a filter and acts to make the system captive to those with concentrated wealth, by limiting those who can successfully run.

Second, the concentration of representative power in few representatives leads to dynamics where many are not represented simply because there are too many competing interests within that group (as opposed to an upper limit per representative like it used to be @80,000).

Seniority by committee limits power to only those who get re-elected regularly (further concentrating power).

Third, the voting as a plurality which is also exclusionary. You can skew any system holding at least 66 percent of the vote.

It is also an all or nothing vote (not ranked choice), where inherently when a representative can't win the majority, none of the people who voted for them technically have much representation among other competing and more favorable members of that group who voted for that person.

Finally,

> Please don't do this. Its one step below analogising petty complaints to Auschwitz.

These are not petty complaints. They are fundamental and foundational to the functional operation of any feedback system. Its based solidly in actual history, not hyperbole. Its not funny... at all. Archer is meant to be absurd and funny; its not a fair characterization or comparison.

There are many experts that are claiming the same thing because rational observable indicators are all showing that this is a growing existential problem. Rome fell largely because of corruption alongside external invasion. There are important lesson's which could be learned but are largely being ignored.

The dynamics are the same with most Empires (where a country seeks hegemony), and the majority of people have not been adequately educated to be able to even hold to rational conversation, instead putting forth beliefs in luei of observable facts being confident in their blindness.

That too is a problem because our enemies take advantage of that blindness.

If you've read any history about the Stasi, you'd know the systems they used to disunite the population, most of those system's have been used by government's today. They also enrolled others in a constant fear of betrayal by those close, and that's very similar to all the embedded devices (where a digital automata/soldier is embedded in each household spying on them).

These things are serious, and deserve rational respect and following rational rules to have any discussion.

On multiple occasions the text I drafted was passed into state and twice federal law, in red states and blue. I’ve also guided staffers, when they were dealing with a new field which I was familiar with, on how to sort the nutters from the informed but powerless. (They’re good at identifying those who can organise a constituency, informed or not.)

I was trying to figure out how you can be more effective. Not fight you.

> observations, and references stand on their own and are testable, when following rational methods

By classic rhetorical methods, you left unchallenged my inequivalence claim in respect of the use of violence by the Stasi and our present governments. Herego, I win by default. (Obviously not how conversation works. But at least more precedents than “rational norms,” which is not standard rhetoric.)

Also, “it is not exaggerated, and by definition cannot be hyperbole” is argument by tautology. Hyperbole means exaggerated. You say it isn’t hyperbole because it isn’t exaggerated. You say it isn’t exaggerated because…well, that’s never argued.

You called out argument ad absurdum, too, though I’m not sure you know what that means—neither of us used it, correctly or not, except in misinformation.

> Since you did not follow rational norms nor provide specific examples one can only assume you are referring to the entirety of my initial post as being exaggerated

…did you use this tone in your letters? “Rational norms” are not conventional English.

On a stylistic level, you used the word “rational” in almost every sentence. That’s fine. But it puts your writing into a specific corner of the internet better known for flat Earthers than reasoned policy.

Good luck. I’m signing off this thread.

If someone knows the normal hours you are at home, they can enter your home without much risk. They can plant evidence, Interfere in your life in ways that you can't easily fix, or even create situations where you get harmed or die from an accident. Information gathering is a necessary pre-requisite for a successful attack, and by itself it is an act of hostile intent.

The argument doesn't come down to dystopian future. It comes down to the fact that people in corrupt systems lie, and those lies can torture the victim without any recourse.

Information is abused regularly.

Once you see it, you can memorize it and transmit it without a paper trail. You can even have a plausible reason for needing to access that information in the first place.

It is ephemeral and its security relies on trust of an untrustable entity that trends towards corruption as a structural flaw.

All centralized hierarchies as a structure involving people either perform action based on a distribution of labor that is incentivized (away from a loss function), or they do so through corruption (in its absence).

In either case, there is incentive and there is no other means to overcome the natural friction towards inaction.

You can't really predict what factor is gonna get you targeted. You also can't predict the particular manner in which data that's being collected about you will be used to harm you. Sometimes it's about secrets you'd want to keep private, but often it's about correlations drawn that may even be wrong. Like if public sentiment or government scrutiny were to turn against tech in a huge way, maybe even just a post history on hackernews existing for you, regardless of what's in it, correlates you to some kind of cybercrime they're pursuing with a dragnet, and this gets your credit pinged when you try to buy a house, and someone freezes your bank account because something's going on here and we should just lock it down to be safe until we figure this out. Who knows? The erosion of privacy is a powderkeg that makes everyone more vulnerable to these sorts of things, but the effects aren't felt by everyone all at once, but chaotically based on circumstances beyond your control, sometimes even truly random ones. I can't predict the actual threat model that will become relevant to you because the attack surface is enormous already and the problem is about how it's ever-growing

It's hard to convince people that "you are more likely to be targeted and there is more that can be done if you are but it may never happen to you in particular and there's basically no way to know" is something they should care about. Intuitive risk assessment that our brains are good at can't fucking fathom the world we actually currently live in. Nonetheless, that is the form risk takes, and you should care about factors that expose you to it, even probabilistically

Regardless, the way in which surveillance harms them, as well as other minorities, whether political, racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious, isn't that their "secret" is revealed, it's that they are monitored and can be targeted. Their status can be used to aggregate and group them, but other information can be used to harm or target them. My point in bringing up minorities that suddenly become more prominent targets isn't that they need to hide their minority status and thus are uniquely harmed by surveillance. My point is that surveillance is a weapon, and you only feel the harms of it when it is used on you, not when it's being built

Again, the issue isn't that particular information is especially dangerous. It's that information is power, and there are lots of very concentrated and unaccountable powerbases being built through mass-surveillance, which can be deployed to harm people in all manner of different ways for all manner of different reasons. People feel violated when their privacy is invaded because it is an incursion of power that violates their autonomy, and power is quite versatile in the harms it can do

Organizations are secretive by default, countless intersecting ones have influence over our lives, communication and information are pervasive but can also be fully encrypted. It is effectively impossible that there is no conspiracy anywhere that's relevant to your life, and there is no perfect way to get accurate information about all such conspiracies

I really don't have much means to epistemically assess the threat model you've presented here except to say that it seems obviously technologically feasible, especially given that many overlapping approaches here don't need to all work for the stated aims

But perhaps more importantly, elucidating this motivates me to be more skeptical of my internal reasoning for feeling malaise, depression, and aimlessness, and as a belligerent person, even an irrational belief that this is being induced (even stochastically rather than in a targeted way) is likely going to be an enduringly effective way to resist it. Something about having an intention to defy an adversary rather than some less agentic explanation seems to benefit the underlying problem regardless of whether it's true

But sometimes they are zero-sum. The right of women and girls to have female-only spaces, for example. If a subset of males are given the right to use such spaces, they cease to be female-only spaces. By doing so, this right is taken away from women and girls.

As another example, we can see this principle very starkly in women's and girls' sports competitions. There can only be one winner. If that winner is male, or is a team that includes males, this takes this prize away from female athletes. There are also a limited number of competition spots in most sports. Any of those taken by males denies a female athlete the opportunity to compete. This is a zero-sum game.

Regarding prisons, the expectation is that penal authorities work towards the goal of no sexual violence in prisons. Policies that demonstrably make this worse are of course going to be protested. In this case, removing the most important safeguarding measure for inmate housing: segregation by sex. The motivation is actually the safety of women prisoners. It's not an isolated case either, this was the first of many.

I think women have a right to safety. They have a right to privacy. They have a right to being given the same opportunities as anyone else. A girl has a right to compete in sports. She doesn't have a right to win at sports or even a guaranteed spot on the team. Those rights are not zero-sum. The rights of a cis girl are not violated when she competes against a trans girl.

> Do you think it would be safe for a trans woman who has surgically transitioned to be housed in a male prison?

Depends on how well the prison is safeguarding its vulnerable male prisoners. I expect your implication here is that he should be moved to a female prison. That's usually why this question is asked in this sort of discussion. However this would obviously be nonsense, as he is male and therefore his safety is the responsibility of those running the male prison. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the female prison estate.

> I dedicated almost that whole previous post trying to get you to define what a right to "fairness" really means, but you ignored all those questions.

No, sorry but you asked a load of questions irrelevant to the topic. Just to expand on my earlier response: female-only sporting competitions exist for the most part because male performance is such a huge categorical advantage that sex segregation is needed for the competitive advantages amongst women and girls to play out. Allowing a subset of males to compete in women's sport just because they demand to is fundamentally unfair, because of this categorical advantage.