The IT Skeptic - Comments for "Big Brother vs. Big Uncle; the opposing sides of the loss of privacy to security systems"

ya mun

skeptic — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:54:15 +0000

ya mun

I didn't realise it isn't an international term

A spliff by any other name...

kengon — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:46:44 +0000

Would that be Kiwi for "joint" ;-P

be grateful we have Amnesty and Greenpeace and Mike Moore

skeptic — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:09:27 +0000

Big Brother isn't here. There are a few elements of it carried on by the CIA and others which i will blog about real soon, but right now it is heavily constrianed: most world governments can't get away with BB, not as Orwell defined him. The troops on the frontline object. Look at the leaks over US torture in Iraq etc... People still have enough courage and freedom to blow the whistle. Much as I wouldn't want to socialise with them, the world should be grateful we have Amnesty and Greenpeace and ACLU and Mike Moore and ...

A personal truth

buraddo — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:32:38 +0000

One if the things I consider a truth ("and there are very few I consider in this category") is that everybody is a mushroom living in the growing ecosystem of society. The inability for information and knowledge to be transmitted in an unbiased fashion means that we are immersed in a reality which is completely artificial. Very rarely do we get to see truth communicated, and then it is only things that are so sensational, that no "spin" is required (eg. Asian Tsunami).

If you want to personalize this concept of personal reality, then consider the change in perspective you get when you start doing your bosses job, or move from customer land to vendor land. You have a completely new reality, a different view on the same set of inputs. To believe that masses can truely regulate governments is a myth. You can have no concept of what occurs in this other reality. Our involvement just givse them a different set of conditions to work under. This is hghlighted in a comical was in "Yes Prime Minister" ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/yesminister/index.shtml ) on the BBC. For go or bad, that is society and the best one we have..

Big brother is here, its just a matter of penetration of implementation. A organization or group monitoring a target community and influencing decisions to the detriment of freewill exists today in many places (eg. prisons being one clean example, school another, the media being a slightly more complicated one)..

Go too much further down this track and you might have to rename the both to "Conspiracy Theory" :)

Brad Vaughan
blogs.sun.com/buraddo

people need to stand up and object

skeptic — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:58:00 +0000

I'm in Amsterdam right now and it looks a nicely functional society to me, despite the fact that the guy at the next table is smoking a spliff so perhaps society's aversion to leglisation might be more of a probelm of closed minds. likewise surveillance. people get the government they deserve. people need to stand up and object. if surveillance is being used inapprorpiately then lots of technical people know. it is up to us to whistle blow, and the USA has quite a good track record of this. a free press is also essential.

losing privacy won't create big brother any more than any technology will. big brother arises when the society is too abject,apathetic or corrupt to stop it, regardless of the tools available.

The benevolent dictator paradox

buraddo — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:14:58 +0000

Power corrupts and absolute power.... You know the drill

You are getting into heady territory when you start discussing Plato's The Republic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_absolutism

The core problem is the type of policies we are talking about grants powers which cannot be easily governed. You therefore have the benevolent dictator paradox which is a great concept, but one that people do not generally believe to be true of government (unless perhaps you are from Sweden or similarly enlightened society).

"A" truth is, the legacy barriers of security afforded us by a lack of connected'ness have all but disappeared. Because the capability exists, the "blackmarket" usage has already started. Do you believe if you legalized drugs, that the problem would be more manageable. Is smoking or drinking less of a social problem than drugs, or is it just media who forms this opinion in our minds. If you believe in legalization, then adopting relaxed privacy would have the same impact.

I will say that I have little passion about privacy. Being from the wide open spaces of Oz, I sometimes think all I need is an excuse to head to the bush and disconnect from the world. Privacy meltdown might be just the ticket.

Brad Vaughan
http://blogs.sun.com/buraddo