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Are we heading for a brave new world?

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It’s going on smoothly and sneakily for well over a decade without us noticing it but marginally: more and more Big Brothers began snooping deeper and deeper over the web into our communications, our preferences, our thoughts, our curiosities, our opinions and our private lives.
And most people seem to accept it without batting an eye: “I’ve nothing to hide, so why should I care about privacy?”

Yet this very popular attitude seems to overlook the fact that there are precious few human actions or beliefs accepted as sinless by all governments, sects and milieus, thus nearly everything one thinks or does is prone to be blamed, condemned and – if need be – punished by someone else.

Unless, of course, the individual differences get slowly smoothed down under the guidance of a single surviving Big Brother until we end up all alike and the whole world becomes a huge beehive where individuals are mere cells of a monstrous collective being on whose intelligence and personality I’d rather not elaborate.

Is the dream of so many dictators from the past really coming true?

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“Nothing to hide” has NEVER protected ANYONE.

In reply to Are we heading for a brave new world?

Talk to anyone who has ever moved from a tyrannical nation to a free one, and they will tell you that having nothing to hide offered no protection. The police would search, and they would “find” something whether it was there or not. In the digital age, it is even easier to, for example, drop child porn files on someone’s computer, change the timestamp and then “find” the offending item “later” after a search to “protect” the people.

It’s been done before on a much more low-tech level where a tyrannical nation’s secret police would search someone, or better yet, take someone in for “questioning” which would last for a few weeks. After his or her family was worried to death during this time, and also shunned by others, lest they get the same treatment, he might be released.

It isn’t about whether they can find something, it is about intimidation.

But who has really nothing to hide?

In reply to “Nothing to hide” has NEVER protected ANYONE.

Quite right: if there’s no evidence the Authorities can easily fabricate some – or, coming to that, just state that it’s there and who’d you rather believe, Your Honour, a respected police officer or that suspicious-looking handcuffed thug sitting there?
However this applies only to special cases, as we all begin having little (or even not-so-little) guilty secrets early in our childhood – unless of course we are the altar-boy type who do and don’t everything exactly as Mom says.
Which is precisely my fear: that the current trend ends up flattening the whole humankind down to nearly nothing, a world of merry goody-goodies where thinking out of the box is not only forbidden but also downright inconceivable.

Make everything illegal, then only prosecute “trouble makers”

In reply to But who has really nothing to hide?

That’s another tactic I’ve witnessed personally. “Selective prosecution”.
There are literally MILLIONS of laws on the books, most of which go unenforced, but if someone working for government at ANY LEVEL gets irked, you will quickly find how many you are violating without even knowing it. Suddenly, you’ll be receiving letters stating the codes you have been found violating, if you’re lucky. If not, you’ll get a visit from mr friendly police officer.

Suffering from GUILT???

In reply to Are we heading for a brave new world?

Nothing to hide?? I have plenty but it resides in my castle. It never leaves. I conduct my life outside the castle as a law abiding citizen, thus, have nothing to hide. Remember, you are in public. Inside my abode, rule and laws must be followed to enter. Yes, tyrants and others find ways to subvert the law and conduct illegal search and seizures but the corruption goes unnoticed. I have to laugh very loud at the people who scream about invasion of privacy when police mount cameras on street poles (in public). What kind of privacy does one expect in public?? NONE. Enough said.

Castles, glasshouses and simpletons

In reply to Suffering from GUILT???

Mjd, you’re not alone: we all independent thinkers have castles for our private lives and thoughts – those who didn’t are now dead or rotting in a dungeon.

Still I don’t feel quite at ease with Authorities (both the self-proclaimed ones and those that didn’t even take the trouble to do so) looking for newer and subtler ways to infiltrate our castles and then break in for evidence, and who cares about the law, we ARE the law.

Even less at ease I feel with that 90% (and counting) of collective thinkers that carry on their lives in comfortable glass-walled houses and keep entrusting their own things and thoughts to Assbook or Go-Ogle or Picosoft blissfully convinced that they are dealing with fair altruistic gentlemanly organizations.
And no, we cannot afford to just ignore them and withdraw in our ivory towers, at least not as long as the heads count weighs so much more than the heads contents – which, if I’m not mistaken, is dangerously close to our current definition of democracy.

It is not unreasonable to expect that your every move NOT be monitored

In reply to Suffering from GUILT???

or that the only place you can expect privacy is in your own home, with all the shades pulled down, and the walls sound-proofed and heavily lined so that infra-red cameras can not pick up your heat registry.

Are you sure?

In reply to It is not unreasonable to expect that your every move NOT be monitored

I’m afraid you’re an optimist, Locrian: just as an example, last year where I live remote sensors were installed in every home on each radiator, allegedly to save the cost of human readout and “to avoid invading people’s privacy unnecessarily”, and still to be able to charge the energy according to the consumption.
Call me paranoid and you’ll be probably right, but since then I don’t feel completely at ease even in my workroom, despite the carefully grounded Faraday’s cage I mounted around my desktop (chicken wire is cheap and unobtrusive).

In your other post above, the one about making everything illegal (apparently there’s no way to reply directly there, don’t ask me why), you’re bloody damn right, that’s exactly what ‘they’ have being doing for at least a decade, slowly and surreptitiously.
When in 1948 George Orwell wrote his dreary “1984” he wouldn’t ever expect that some day someone would call him an optimist, but I’m strongly tempted to do so right now.

Not so much an optimist as trying to flex my rights

In reply to It is not unreasonable to expect that your every move NOT be monitored

The limit of government intrusion is the tolerance level of the people

[L_L wrote “The limit of government intrusion…

In reply to It is not unreasonable to expect that your every move NOT be monitored

… is the tolerance level of the people”]

Yes it is; once that limit is exceeded guillotines start sprouting here and there and then the government backtracks, provided that there’s anything left of it.
The sad thing is that when most people are too busy exchanging hellos, selfies and inanities on facebook to mind what it’s being done to them, you risk to find governmental webcams legally installed in every restroom without any other official reason but “security”. A jolly prospect, isn’t it?

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