If someone had said that, by 2018, we'd have effortless, instantaneous communication to almost any place on Earth, but that governments and corporations would be able to spy on all of it, would people have taken the deal??
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If someone had said that, by 2018, we'd have effortless, instantaneous communication to almost any place on Earth, but that governments and corporations would be able to spy on all of it, would people have taken the deal??
Honestly, fuck the NSA and the CIA too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AATJ0CtobU4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrrAwGzQO_U
People have “taken the deal”.
Not that they were offered any choice in the matter. Nor has anyone exerted any effort to change the situation.
I find it interesting that all it would take to restore privacy to communications would be to pass some laws.
The founding fathers of the United States were familiar with most of the abuses of power of governments from having experience with the governments of Europe, and worked hard to ensure that future citizens would escape these abuses.
However, they knew that they could not anticipate all the forces of abuse in the future and so made provisions for people to organize for the purpose of overthrowing the government.
They did this by making it a crime to monitor the communications between private citizens. At the time, this communication took place through letters sent between individuals, and it is still a federal crime to open a first class letter.
I think it is a tragedy that this sentiment wasn’t extended to all communications between private citizens. However, there are always nosy assholes who loudly proclaim that the only way they can keep you safe is to monitor your every move.
We’ve come a long way from 1778.
I just hate it because it puts expectations on me to have adapted to its accepted usage by nearly everyone. It's not the government I hate, it's the culture of having everything be as fast and meaningless as possible.
I've considered cutting myself off completely, but it would worry my family so I don't. That and I have yet to find a job where I can just choose to avoid communication until I'm actually physically there.
Edward Snowden did something about it and now he is holed up in Russia with little to no chance of returning to the US in the future. Sadly, little came out of it so far other than proving what a lot of people already suspected anyways. In the end of the day, it takes protests like the ones happening in France right now to force the government to make positive changes.
I agree, @Raver. More people should do something about this. At a minimum, vote. If you don’t vote, your representatives don’t care what you think.
True, but it's a shame that both politicial parties support what the NSA is doing as evidenced by both the Bush and Obama administration.
Even something like drone strikes on innocent civilians as collateral damage has been on going from Bush to Obama and now Trump.
It is like some policies are not changeable despite who sits in the oval office for whatever reason unfortunately.
Same, it's a very callous ends justify the means approach. Basically, that killing a family of innocents is worth it to kill one terrorist.
Basically proof that changing parties is not going to change the basic and important structure of how the country is run. Wars will still be fought killing innocents and civilians will be spied on. This is one of the reasons why I'm disillusioned about politics and who wins if the most major aspects of the country are not changed with both parties and only minor aspects are squabbled over.
In general I am becoming more skeptical of large institutions of power, very much including the government of my own homeland (USA). I'm pretty jaded when it comes to the US government's moral record. Sure, comparatively, it's not nearly as bad as the records of some other countries, but something being not as bad as something else is not the same as it being good. Additionally, the foreign policy actions by the US over the past few decades have fit a distasteful mold with little signal of changing - invade, invade, invade, meddle in foreign affairs, scheme to control commodities, ally with questionable governments just for financial incentives.
This has continued to go on - alliances with the governments of Saudi Arabia, Israel, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, massive numbers of drone strikes, just to name a few issues.
A notable example of the shadier institutions of the US at work in the past is the 1953 coup in Iran, where the relatively liberal and reform-oriented prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq was exiled in a coup that was orchestrated by the US CIA and Britain's equivalent. They threw him out and elevated the powers of the Shah (king) to ensure that they had more control over the oil in Iran. Of course this sowed some resentment and eventually backfired in 1979 when the current Islamic Republic popped up, but it's just one example of the entities of the US sticking their fingers in the business of other countries with little regard for the structures that have been conceived of by the people of the country.
This should go without saying, but these problems are not transferable onto ordinary civilians. Power is just a corrupting influence, and giving a person with generally the same vices as everyone else who has ever lived is bound to end up corrupted to some degree, perhaps proportionally to the amount they've had power. I think there are more good ordinary people than bad, but there are more bad powerful state entities than good.
I'm also not trying to shit-talk the US - it's got a solid set of governing principles in the Constitution, and its democracy is certainly preferable to many less-democratic countries. But it could certainly be a better example of this abroad.
George Orwell was no longer around in 1978, but Ray Bradbury would have been. He would have put his foot down, and put it down hard.