Circa three hours ago, I made a post discussing how complicity through inaction threatens digital privacy. In the post, I made connections to the inactions of people during the 1930’s Germany. The post was removed for being posted in the wrong community:
Meanwhile, these are the rules:
I am not trying to pick a fight with the mods. I am trying to point out that there is no privacy without political discourse and action. That’s all I wanted to inspire discussion on.
Peace.
absolutely agree 100%
control of your own privacy is political, and censorship only holds back genuine debate.
I’ll back you on this.
A few years ago, most of my privacy effort was focused on removing myself from increasing restrictions online. Even this last year, there’s been a concerted, worldwide push towards censorship and removing anonymity online.
That is dangerous, and left unchecked, leads to a future where anonymity is illegal.
Now, the majority of my effort focuses on privacy advocacy and showing up to city hall meetings to pester council members about this stuff. If we don’t do this, they will continue to erode our rights, because there is no pushback to it.
Privacy is political, and removing relevant discussion helps nobody.
Thank you very much for backing me, for your efforts and for putting all that so eloquently! I completely agree! Which isn’t to say that we don’t need forums where we share and teach each other the practical implementation of digital privacy, but this fight needs to be fought on both fronts.
Again, just to have it said out loud, I’m not trying to go behind the mods’ back or talk badly about them! I appreciate them taking on moderation of this extremely important community on their free time, and that, too, shouldn’t be diminished.
what is the community for these types of posts thou?
No idea. Perhaps they felt it should’ve been posted to a community with “politics” in its title? I don’t know.
I’m not sure what the original post was about, but it’s very true that privacy is an extemely political thing. I wonder if the open source & security communities are preparing themselves for a future where western monopolies on hardware manufacturing and datacenters slip away and they become more hostile to these things. Western nonprofits funded mostly by corporations, and academia, these are totally bound by legality and could disappear with a few penstrokes. Autopen sorry
Well put! In my original post, I tried to draw from Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil , in which she discusses how the totalitarian Nazi state at the time came to be out of the inactions of people, among other things. I also tried to further exemplify it with the poem First They Came, and finally I tried to connect the dots with how the same process is ongoing as we speak but in regards to digital privacy.
Oh yeah my issue is with the ideology of anti-authoritarianism that all these privacy people adhere to, thanks for clarifying what you meant. Anti-authoritarianism is an ideology that crosses many academic fields, as a result of the CIA (well, the OSS started it) bankrolling loads of orgs, as well as deciding the publishing & reach of their work. Very fine process of elimination. Leftism was exploding across the humanities and history departments, they needed their own brands (so many) to swallow it all whole worldwide. They needed to explain why they were fighting the people who drove Hitler to his grave (why, Stalin is secretly superhitler, please disregard Wall St’s involvement with the Nazis and Allen Dulles’ high treason against FDR, trying to make a deal with them before the soviets swooped in).
Privacy orgs often treat US governments as at risk of devolving into authoritarianism and dictatorship, contrasted with a mix of states the west is besieging with those it has bent and shaped into internal catastrophes, like Egypt in that recent Mullvad advertisement, India which has its whole ID system (AADHAR) managed by Google and Mossad (what’s the difference at this point). But the states they treat as at risk of being corrupted are the ones running the global surveillance apparatus. They have the luxury of allowing these software solutions. They control the hardware manufacturers, they have compromised your firmware. This stuff is not opaque to them, unlike the less technologically advanced states it targets (including the satrapies it calls allies).
Would you agree, even if not with the former points (I’m sure, as this is coming from entirely different premises than yours), that historical education among STEM workers and programming hobbyists is very lax? That they trust western journalistic institutions? Leaving them wide open to this capture strategy?
Putting this last so you get the framework before the trivia gotcha type thing: Arendt was in a relationship with a Nazi and these academics deliberately whitewashed his history. When Heidegger was a rector at Freiburg he would begin his lectures with “Heil Hitler!”. Not a great authority on authoritarianism (depending on your definition, just to do the stupid wordplay)
Will try to expand on these points later, maybe someone else can help. I have to go grab a lot of this reference material as I’m typing.
Let me get back to you after I have had a good half of Earth’s rotation. 🌍
No pressure, I am a turn-based human being
