[Discussion] Surveillance and the Police State

General observations on surveillance and accrual of police powers.

For what it's worth, a man in China got a traffic ticket for scratching his face - an AI surveillance system thought he looked like he was talking on a cell phone while driving and automatically took a photo and sent a ticket. If they're doing that, it's not unreasonable to assume they have plenty of capability for more.

(hopefully I am not repeating something already reported here)

Baltimore Cops Carried Toy Guns to Plant on People They Shot, Trial Reveals

Detective Maurice Ward, who's already pleaded guilty to corruption charges, testified that he and his partners were told to carry the replicas and BB guns "in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them." The directive allegedly came from the team's sergeant, Wayne Jenkins, the Washington Post reports. Though Ward didn't say whether or not the tactic was ever used, Detective Marcus Taylor—another cop swept up in the scandal—was carrying a fake gun almost identical to his service weapon when he was arrested last year, according to the Sun.

IMAGE(https://media.giphy.com/media/QLyhWVTvAHbAbAdWcp/giphy.gif)

I'm very disappointed that this thread is only 5 pages deep. You guys still haven't woken up to what's going on yet?

I'll check back in another few years...

#1 - There are bigger fish to fry

#2 - Malor has taken a long break from P&C

So two of the major drivers of these threads (Malor and myself) just aren’t into it.

Well, with the El Paso terrorist attack, online surveillance of potential threats is a relevant issue. And if it was unseasonably hot in Texas at the time, I'm sure we could merge this thread with the gun control, Trump administration, and climate change threads together to make it easier on everyone.

93_confirmed wrote:

I'm very disappointed that this thread is only 5 pages deep. You guys still haven't woken up to what's going on yet?

I'll check back in another few years...

?

JLENS-type ballons in the Midwest? Almost certain infiltration and corruption of our highest levels of government by enemy nation state actors? "Smart" devices covertly surveilling owners? The Area 51 fun run?

The ship has sailed. Massive surveillance hasn't hurt enough rich white people for anything to change. Maybe if we made white collar crime illegal again. But, for that to happen rich white people would have to change things, so...nope.

Turns out people will cheerfully sign away all their personal information, right down to daily habits, for a modicum of convenience. When people will let google listen to their conversations at home it’s not really shocking to me that they don’t give a sh*t about government surveillance. Not sure how to shove that genie back into the bottle.

Zona wrote:

Turns out people will cheerfully sign away all their personal information, right down to daily habits, for a modicum of convenience. When people will let google listen to their conversations at home it’s not really shocking to me that they don’t give a sh*t about government surveillance. Not sure how to shove that genie back into the bottle.

The government is going to listen in whenever it wants anyway, barring a violent revolution we're over half a century too late to stop that from happening. They would sit down the block and listen with a parabolic mic if they had too, but with the preponderance of voice recognition gadgets and how bad computers are at deciphering idioms and metaphor they'll have to sit through 10,000 hours of farting and old episodes of Stargate SGU whenever they want to listen in. Drown them in useless information, make them work for it.

If a state-level actor targets you they'll basically learn whatever they want.

Most people should be more concerned about getting caught up in a general dragnet and datamined, or targeted by a harassment mob that sends death threats, or just randomly getting shot by the police, no surveillance necessary.

So...is this a police state, yet? Or are we still being alarmist? Asking for the Portlanders being picked up by secret police and being disappeared.

I remember arguing in a former police state thread here sometime in the late Bush or early Obama years that the US isn’t a police state, but in the intervening years I’ve grown into the realization that we are and always have been. This is just the police state flexing.

In my view, we became a police state when Bush Sr. insisted that the Constitution didn't apply in the War on Drugs. We've been tipping further and further in that direction ever since.

It's a spectrum, not an on/off state; we started out only a little police-stateish, but have been moving hard in that direction.

Isn't it interesting how troops have started disappearing people off the streets just a few months before the next election?

What’s happening in Portland is police state stuff. And it’s being prepped to go nationwide.

This is either where we win or lose to fascism.

Hasn't the country been a police state since even before its founding for Black people?

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Hasn't the country been a police state since even before its founding for Black people?

Yes. The egregious mistake people like me made back in the heyday of the police state threads was not considering the fact that what we were afraid of happening to all of society, was already the lived experience for certain people in America.

It was from an extreme place of privilege that I worried about slippery slopes and the like when entire races (and sexual orientations) of people had a decidedly different experience with the law and the state than I did.

I still don't like lumping in civil rights and systemic racism in with the police state in a way that appears to imply that our struggle with fascism right now is anything in comparison to the struggle for equal rights.

Solving systemic racism can help prevent fascism. Eliminating fascism can help prevent racism. They are not the same the problem, and solving one does not solve the other.

I think you could reasonably make the argument that living in slavery state and then under apartheid was just as bad as fascism to the people who experienced it. It’s certainly a different thing from fascism, but it doesn’t minimize it at all.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Hasn't the country been a police state since even before its founding for Black people?

DSGamer said it better, but my first, flippant thought was "yeah, but they're not even pretending that white people have rights anymore, nevermind respecting them when it matters in the least bit."

In January of 2019, Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School, published a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It describes what surveillance capitalism is and how we got here. I haven't read the book, but it looks fascinating.

https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/t...

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

The general thesis is that the collected data and AI techniques of these surveillance companies allows them to manipulate society for their own ends.

Cory Doctorow wrote a pretty long and entertaining piece as a sort of rebuttal called How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. He agrees with her on many things but vehemently disagrees that these tech companies can really act as a sort of 'mind-control ray.' Their claims about how good their advertising manipulation is are grossly overblown, but they are extremely dangerous for many other reasons. We got here because antitrust law repeals from the Reagan Era have allowed monopolies to arise which regulate themselves and prevent competition. It's a really good, but long read.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-de...

While I agree with Doctorow that the advertising claims of these companies are way overblown and there is no peer reviewed science to back them up on their major claims, the ability to sway a population by 2 or 3 % could still be used to do real harm in elections, or extremist recruitment. And the ability to affect elections with targeted ads has been shown to be small, but real.

An interesting Lawfare podcast with former employees of GCHQ discussing the agency, its history, what it does today, and its laws.

https://pca.st/episode/5d6a9422-1cd5...

Edit: wrong thread