3mo ago

Mass surveillance is not normal

My threat model is against mass surveillance. This is one of the hardest threat models to defend against and to justify, because (at least here in the US), mass surveillance has become normalized. I've heard people directly tell me that "privacy is weird." I'm not here to shoot down the Nothing to hide argument literally labelled on Wikipedia as "a logical fallacy," instead, I want to take my own approach to show just how unnatural mass surveillance is.

Picture this: Your best friend tells you that he heard rumors that someone put cameras in your house and was actively spying on you. That is super creepy, but you brush it off and say that nobody would do that, because who would care that much about you? However, when you get home, you look around and find multiple dozen hidden cameras everywhere. Think about how you're feeling right now, knowing that you're being watched. Even though you know that you're being watched, but have no idea who has been watching you, what they have seen, or how long they've been watching you, it's disillusioning and creepy to find out that what your friend said was true.

Then, you do some digging online and find out that everyone in your neighborhood is also being watched. Oh, it's fine then, right? Suddenly it's much better that you're not alone. No! More surveillance is not a good thing. People fall into the false belief that as long as it's not targeted surveillance or a personal attack that it's suddenly fine, that you will just blend in with the noise. Your data is valuable, and spying in any capacity is NOT normal. Remember: The situation never changed, you are still being watched, you just found out that not only you, but everyone around you is also being spied on.

You still have no idea who is watching you, and it's even worse to find out that it might not just be one person, that anyone can buy this data for cheap. Data like this can be used to stalk you, drain your bank account, read intimate personal texts, rig elections, manipulate you into buying things you never intended to buy, and so much more. This is the state of mass surveillance and it needs to stop. It's not a conspiracy, the dystopia is today.

Mass surveillance is not normal. Privacy also isn't normal: it's a right, instead.

50 comments

Snowden is and always will be a hero.
Sorry we let you down dude.
- And, chelsea manning. I'd love to see more whistleblowers in the world. That's the kind of mass sousveillance we need!
- He let us down too. Sidling up with Putin doesn't put him in the hero position.
  
  uh wasnt his passport revoked mid flight and the plane landed in russia against his will?
  hes been basically trapped there
  
  Yes and no. Everywhere "Western" has an extradition treaty with the USA so there's no point fleeing to any of those. Russia isn't a great choice but if he values his freedom it's probably the least worst option.

Lol there is a ring camera on every door and an Alexa in every home. Mass surveillance is so normal they got "normies" to pay for it monthly.
- There is a house that put a Ring camera on their fence... facing nothing but the public sidewalk and the properties of other people. Thankfully, they live on a common path for schoolers to walk home, who happily harass them by ringing it 100 times a day.
  
  Spray paint until it stops getting replaced
- Disappointing that the top comment is this dismissive take (whether or not it's factually true).
  If the best response we can muster is cynicism, we'll get what we deserve.
  
  Sorry buddy, but we definitely deserve it. This is not Sparta.

It has significant mental health and social effects, too. We need to start seeing these behaviors by governments and corporations the same way that we see similar actions by abusive people. Stalking and monitoring someone isn't wrong only because a regular individual is the one doing it, it's wrong because it's fundamentally wrong. Such behaviors are designed to intimidate and control someone. It is absolutely unjustifiable on every level.
- Just last week, my partner and I were on a long hike. No one was around us so to loosen our muscles we started dancing like goofballs on the trail only to look up and find a drone hovering in the shadows recording us. I was embarrassed, but my partner is a very private person and was really upset. Surveillance is seriously getting out of hand. If things continue in this direction then I wouldn't be surprised if people find a way to use powerful Lazer pointers to burn out cameras.
  
  time to work on your slingshot skills
  
  Where do you live that has surveillance drones on hiking trails?
- Bootlickers got nothing to hide so that's all that matters
  
  I think people who say this are having a very human panic response to something that none of us should ever have to deal with and that none of us can personally control.

In all honesty, I believe it falls on each of us to educate as much people as possible in the actual dangers of mass surveillance and what are the potential options to minimize it's impact.
For example, I've been advocating for privacy within my family, friends and other acquaintances for years now. Only recently have I managed to get my wife to start caring (some fearmongering was required) and have gotten a friend from church already on track to eliminating Google, Crapple, mainstream social networks and even self hosting. Some people at work have been reaching out to ask me how they can start moving away from the big tech overreach, and now even my kids have gotten their friends on Simplex, which have made some of their parents move to it as well.
Again, it's taken me over 7 years to manage this little, but it's something. If all of us keep doing this, avoiding getting to the point of annoying others (though I've annoyed quite a few persons with this, but whatever) more and more people will start moving in that direction.
Just getting some people to change from chrome to brave, which is one of the easiest things to do without making them change their streamlines, or move to Signal from SMS and WhatsApp, is already making headway.
If we get tired and stop preaching security, the surveillance wins. At least that's how I see it.

Define normal...
If you go by the definition of being the most common thing, the current surveillance capitalist dystopia is literally the new normal.
What you mean is that you feel it shouldn't be normal. And you're right. But sadly, it is now undeniably the norm.

I find this argument compelling:
"We have a physiological need for privacy. Mammals in particular respond poorly to surveillance. We consider it a threat because animals in the wild are tracked by predators, and it makes us feel like prey."
Taken from this TEDx talk: https://youtu.be/jVeqAemtC6w Quoted bit starts at 5:45

It's normal but people don't like it. Just ask the people you know if they are ok with all the mass surveillance, they don't like it. But it's just too difficult for them to do anything about it. They don't like this "small beginner steps" approach to privacy. They want complete privacy without effort or nothing at all and they don't want to pay for it. It's laughable and sad but that's my experience talking about privacy with people. But the point here i guess is that mass surveillance has been forced on us all. They create a new wonderful technology with lots of use case but then they also add in some mass surveillance on it as well as a bonus.

I personally love mass surveillance. What other use could tax dollars have anyway
- God forbid every American woman gets a few months paid time maternity leave to heal and bond with her child.
  
  But if the child is well bonded, how will he grow up to be an insecure, dependable consumer?

In humans, there's good things and there's bad things. But most of it is actually in-between.
If you take out everything bad, that satisfies you for the moment. And then you go on, looking for further progress. You take out the almost-bad, the somewhat-bad. In the end, it leaves only the good. But that is not enough for a human to live on.
Constant surveillance leads to burnout and extremely high stress-levels.

Typical 1984 behaviour and wrong thinking

i talked to people that had a difficulty grasping the concept of "if you delete a post, it might still be stored on the server"
the obscure and closed tech we have makes it hard for laymen to get a true grasp on whats truly happening.

You might also be interested in the Panopticon.
- Fun fact: In poland, there is the Panoptykon Foundation, which analyzes introduced laws in terms of privacy and human rights. Many laws have already been withdrawn thanks to them.
  It's just a shame that the government doesn't do it on its own, but we need a special foundation to do it....

we've traded privacy for access to ease, and i don't think we're going to able to put the genie back in the bottle

Welcome to the Future where everyone can see you at all times and you will not able to do much with it. (unless you live in an underground cave like Batman)

I'm not sure if you have looked around much but mass surveillance is pretty normal these days.
Terrible isn't it. I just want to be left alone.
- I just hate that we don't have a choice.

There's a reason I tell people that if I ever met God or Santa Claus, of beat their ass for assuming my end of the deal without me.

People have been conditioned to believe that determination of an act's morality is somehow changed when when carried out on a large enough scale, or when performed by certain entities.

Your heart is in the right place, but relying on what Wikipedia calls a fallacy and on implicit "natural rights" both undermine your argument severely. Your fourth paragraph is far and away the most valuable one.

Mass surveillance is absolutely natural. What do you think it was like for the last 10+ thousand years in villages and towns around the world. Everyone knew everyone, reputations and word of mouth was the currency of the millennia. Privacy as we know it has only exist for a very short period of time. The only reason we even got the privacy we had for a bit was because it was too much data and there were too many people for any one village to know everyone. Computers solved that. I don’t like the idea of cameras everywhere but as someone who’s been robbed repeatedly and watched others go through the same and with the utter failure that is our current legal system and our over reliance or for some twisted belief that human perception is somehow the end all be all of evidence or to determine the truth I welcome more public recording if it means I dont have to rely on some cop or other official to back or refute my testimony. I want a safe society not one where some random jackass can lose rheir mind and just blow off hundreds or more lives in a whim. There’s too many people now for the “it’s just a few people” argument. When you’re dealing with billions of individuals even a .00001% of fuckers is still a lot of fuckers. Come up with a way to stop them before hand without recording everyone and I’m down. Till then I’ll trust a video recording over a personal testimony any day of the week.
Oh look why got posted like a day after
https://lemm.ee/post/43071932
Everyone seems to acknowledge it there.
- All those negative things are happening in a society that implemented mass surveillance so clearly it doesn’t help. Recording a crime doesn’t prevent it and if there’s no incentive or funding to make sure justice is served afterwards the recording is useless. I think you’re mistaken in who this surveillance is for: it doesn’t exist to improve your life but to empower corporations and state against you.
- A camera is not gonna stop some cunt with a weapon. Your argument is shit.

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