- Former Director of National Intelligence (Michael Hayden): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV2HDM86XgI&t=1h18s
First, you have those who stormed the Capitol and were identified by the NYT based on their phones location [1]. You also have the Substack that used location data to publicly out a priest as gay [2].
You then have the companies selling location data of people who visit abortion clinics [3]. They obtain this location from SDKs that they deploy via apps you may already be using. And if you want to get more dystopian remember that Texas allows citizens to sue anyone for "aiding or abetting a post-heartbeat abortion" [4], meaning that driving your friend Rebeca to a clinic can land you in a lawsuit for at least $10k by people who do this as their day job.
Even if you're not sued, remember that companies have been reliably predicting whether you're pregnant for at least 10 years [5] and using it to influence your behavior in their favor. This one may be the one with the "least bad" consequences but, paradoxically, the one that better drives home the point since nothing here is criminal.
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-...
[3] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortio...
[4] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/texas-abortion-law-bounty-hunte...
> Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
What's he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
He has subscriptions to those magazines
He never waves when he goes by
He's hiding something from the rest of us
He's all to himself
I think I know why
"
Rowan O’Connell, 23, was hit with a fine by magistrates today over the sick outbust following the death of Mzee, 18.
The teenager, described by his mother as a “gentle giant”, died after becoming unwell while detained by police officers at Liverpool ONE in July.
O’Connell took to social media website Reddit, where he made baseless allegations, labelling Mzee a “good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey”.
He added: “As I say, who gives a f**.”
"
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-mo...
So, Not quite what you said.
> or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution
That's not mild, and you either know it or should know it.
> I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK.
No link eh? What a surprise.
---
edit: this isn't about the rights/wrongs of what was said in this case but your (deliberately?) incomplete description of them. I actually share your concern about freedom of speech but twisting facts doesn't build your case well.
Several Dutch officials enacted wholesale destruction of those records as the occupation became obviously imminent, which saved many, though the Jewish population of the Netherlands fell from 154,887 in 1941 to 14,346 in 1947.
The point being it's not necessarily your own government you need be worried about.
In another variant on this, surveillance records kept by the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, a/k/a the Stasi) and Soviet KGB were acquired by successor governments (unified German and post-Soviet states including Ukraine). See: <https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/unearthing-soviet-sec...>
(I'm trying without success to find a reference to the destruction of Dutch census records, though I'm pretty certain this did actually happen.)
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/police-arrest-autistic...
I'm pretty sure I saw this spelled out years ago in a groups.google.com post, but the amnesiac search engines of today are not yielding it up to me.
I did find these articles:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide/
https://medium.com/@hansdezwart/during-world-war-ii-we-did-h...
And one of them references http://web.archive.org/web/20150812120743/https://stadsarchi... (archive link, site is no longer up).
Because nobody is trying to hurt you. [0]
That you know of.
Yet.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=iran+1970s&qs=MM&form=Q...
That changed literally overnight in 1979.
In the US, we had McCarthyism.
Estimating the number of victims of McCarthy is difficult. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[81] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarth...
Some weeks back, I started to watch a movie about McCarthyism and didn't make it very far in. It's not really a history we talk that much about, perhaps because it's too disturbing.
Americans like to think that sort of thing happens elsewhere, in "bad" places like Russia, not here. But it did happen here and not that long ago and it could happen again -- here or anywhere.
Milgram's famous experiments were intended to show that what happened in Nazi Germany was due to some weird character quirk or defect of Germans and couldn't happen elsewhere. His experiment proved the opposite. It proved that a high percentage of people will just do as they are told, up to and including potentially killing someone for no real reason.
Milgram suspected before the experiment that the obedience exhibited by Nazis reflected a distinct German character, and planned to use the American participants as a control group before using German participants, expected to behave closer to the Nazis. However, the unexpected results stopped him from conducting the same experiment on German participants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
In order to take an ethical stand at some risk to themselves, people generally need to both feel very clear what is right and wrong in a particular situation and have compelling reason to stick their neck out.
People who foment evil generally do all they can to instill doubt of various sorts and deny people full disclosure, which tends to be shockingly easy. Even if the information is available, it can take a great deal of time and effort for a person to adequately educate themselves about a particular thing and this can take too long to act in a decisive and timely fashion to avert an ugly slippery slope.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_bombing_of_the_Amsterdam_...
Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
> If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state
Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture.
So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate.
I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.
[1] Cybersecurity Myths and Misconceptions: Avoiding the Hazards and Pitfalls that Derail Us:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/cybersecurity-myths-and...
Quite eye-opening. All too often a police officer will attempt to run them off at the behest of a government bureaucrat. Overall, these videos reveal that the people who form our government tend to streamline the operation of government for their own convenience and comfort at the expense of the rights and convenience of ordinary citizens.
Even the people who have sworn an oath to uphold the rights enshrined in the Constitution all too often do not really understand what those rights are. Or don't care. Or think their job is about something else - keeping citizens in line or something.
One must always exercise one's rights or lose them. "I have nothing to hide" is hiding. As The Civil Rights Lawyer says: Freedom is scary. Deal with it.
https://www.youtube.com/@HONORYOUROATH
https://www.youtube.com/@LongIslandAudit
https://www.youtube.com/c/TOOAPREE
https://www.youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer
* Honor Your Oath does not actually panhandle until he is told he cannot panhandle. Then he asks the officer for money.
There's a few commended civilian heroes whose contribution was that they burned or otherwise destroyed records like these, like Willem Arondeus who bombed the Amsterdam public records office (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Arondeus)
Is it still a police state if you are breaking three laws every day?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/...
"The Investigatory Powers Tribunal, however, ruled on 30 January 2023 that MI5 broke key legal safeguards by unlawfully retaining and using individuals’ private data gathered via covert bulk surveillance." - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/365529894/MI5-unlawfully....
"MI5 spy who fantasised about ‘eating children’s flesh’ escaped prosecution despite machete attack" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/05/19/mi5-spy-fantasis...
"Americans pay GCHQ £100m to spy for them, leaked NSA papers from Edward Snowden claim" - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/americans-pa...
"Police ‘warrior culture’ makes US-style police brutality a UK problem too" - https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2023/police-warrior-cultur...
It's a lovely idea, but Peelian principles are currently only paid lip-service. People are trying to drag it back to something approaching that, but it's not the current actual situation, particularly in London. (Kettling, etc.)
> are operationally independent of HM government,
> the police literally are not the government,
> do not spy for the government,
Again, in the sense of "political party currently in control of Parliament", yes. But they're literally the enforcers of the law -- and their meaning of the law. People not in Parliamentary systems have a broader, and far more useful meaning of "government" -- those governing, determining what is going to be punished and what won't. If you're actually stuck on term "government" in the partisan meaning, please give me some other term to refer to the coherent actions of the state. The bureaucracy and enforcement arms actually do govern, regardless of whether they're doing so at the behest of particular partisan guidance (though sure, that's worse in terms of being able to politically course correct). An arrest and detention whilst CPS sorts out taking to the next level is actually a punishment. Hence the quote "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."
> do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.
Hah. Hah. Hah. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa... .
- Klasu Schwab in 2016, source: https://youtu.be/IJcey1PPiIM?t=414
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/us/kentucky-tennessee-tra...
From https://19thnews.org/2023/07/anti-lgbtq-laws-blocked-federal...
> "Across the country, we’re seeing a clear and unanimous rejection of these laws as unconstitutional, openly discriminatory and a danger to the very youth they claim to protect,"
We learned the lesson.
> 2023 marks the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation in the U.S. In just one month, the U.S. doubled the number of anti-trans bills being considered across the country from the previous year. We've seen familiar themes: attacks on gender-affirming care, education, athletics, birth certificates, religious discrimination, and other categories documented in our 2022 anti-trans legislation overview.
----
What makes this argument particularly ridiculous is -- ask every single one of these groups and advocacy fighters what they think of privacy and every single one of them will give you the same answer: it's an essential right that matters for protecting minorities. Has the ACLU stopped fighting for privacy because we've apparently defeated transphobia?
Your evidence that privacy no longer matters is an organization that spends an enormous amount of time advocating for privacy rights for exactly the reasons I mentioned above. If you're going to quote an ACLU article on the direction of transphobia, consider what they are actually saying about privacy, both in regards to transgender issues and to issues like abortion:
> As a school administrator, you have a legal obligation to maintain the privacy and safety of your students, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning
- https://www.aclu.org/documents/open-letter-schools-about-lgb...
> The lack of strong digital privacy protections has profound implications in the face of expanded criminalization of reproductive health care. In light of these breathtaking and authoritarian attacks on bodily autonomy, we must fight with new urgency to ensure that people maintain control over their personal information. If we fail, the repressive surveillance techniques and powers that police and prosecutors have for decades used to wage the racist wars on drugs and terrorism will be marshaled to track, catalogue, and criminalize pregnant people and those seeking basic information about reproductive health issues, putting tens of millions of people at risk of police harassment and worse.
- https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/impending-threa...
----
When you say that privacy no longer matters because we've beaten transgender discrimination, first consider checking if there are any transgender advocacy groups that agree with you. The people that you're arguing are on top of this and that will prevent us from ever doing anything horrible ever again -- they all think that privacy matters. It might be a good idea to research why they think that?
We don't really need to imagine a hypothetical around that because we can look at the history of antisemitism after WW1 and see the parallels directly. Nazi growth was largely dismissed by political opponents of the Nazi party (https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-the-holocaust/articles/antisemit...)
> In the audio clip above, Eli Fachler remembers that many Germans he knew saw antisemitism as a sign of ignorance or lack of culture. In fact, many Germans did not take Hitler seriously and saw the Nazis as a fringe movement that would be short-lived – even when the Nazi Party won 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections, a result which made it the largest party in the German Parliament. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933, many politicians still thought that they would be able to control him and form a functioning government.
"It would be impossible for these people to seize power, we have legal challenges in front of that happening" was the overwhelming sentiment before the Nazi party seized power. There are striking similarities between early responses to the Nazi party and the attitudes of people today towards modern fascist movements in America. Consider that many Jews in early Germany during Hitler's rise to power did not think that mass discrimination against them was feasible or likely.
----
But at the same time, holy heck I'm sorry I even mentioned the holocaust if that's the only thing you're now able to think about. For the 3rd time at this point:
> Society has improved slowly, via heavy investment from anonymous activists and advocates who put themselves in harms way to improve it. Every single one of those activist movements relied on privacy. Quite frankly, there really aren't many examples of social movements that have improved society that haven't heavily used privacy and anonymity to aid them. Certainly at the very least this displays a startling lack of knowledge about the history of race and gender in America.
> If that's not enough, consider that there might be a reason why we literally have laws preventing the requirement of disclosure of sex/race in hiring today? Consider the countless studies about how anonymity benefits the ability of oppressed groups (particularly women) to participate in public spaces online, consider that the Supreme Court has very directly said that anonymity and privacy are an essential component of 1st Amendment rights. You also still really haven't grappled with the fact that multiple states today are pushing to get access to medical records and social media messages both to prosecute people and label minority groups. These are not issues that are affecting only one or two people.
Is your position somehow that none of these current events count because they haven't reached the basic threshold of 6 million deaths where privacy suddenly starts mattering? There is enough harm being done to enough people in modern America today to justify caring about this stuff.
> and the idea that "if only trans people could have more privacy this wouldn't be an issue" is so nonsensical it borders on delusion.
Nobody has said that, neither I nor the many anti-hate groups and advocacy groups whose privacy opinions you are ignoring.
Not a single one of the things I mentioned above only affects only a single person. The current harms in America today are sizable enough and severe enough to justify privacy. None of this is niche. If you think that current discrimination is something that only affects one or two people, you are burying your head in the sand.
Anti-discrimination privacy rulings did not get affirmed by the Supreme Court because it was a niche issue. The numerous anti-hate groups today (who all collectively agree with my point of view that modern privacy matters) are not focusing on niche issues. The essential privacy protections that allow for modern advocacy that you seem to take as a given are not niche issues and they affect huge swaths of the population.
Your math is wrong.
> And to be clear, the only person dismissing the holocaust here is you, by equating it to something completely different.
Gosh, you should let the ADL know that they're dismissing the holocaust: https://www.adl.org/resources/news/politics-privacy