[sudo-discuss] Freedom of name: the Big Stinking Skunk that everyone seems to miss:

[Patrick Schmidt]

Speaking about corporate cellphones where you cant take out the
battery and dont know who
controls the mic:

Would be awesome if the Hacker Community finally comes up with Open
Hardware Mobile Phones and awesome Open Hardware Cameras.





2013/3/16, Anon195714 <anon195714 at sbcglobal.net>:
>
>
> Yo's-
>
> There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
> including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:
>
> The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
> enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.
>
> The biggest threat is the corporate sector.  And many of us are
> willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
> condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
> less than fully informed consent.
>
> What government can do to you with the data they collect:  Prosecute you
> for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo.  Some day, though at present it's
> merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
> the street.
>
> What the private sector can do to you:  Get you fired from your job,
> deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
> health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit.
>
> Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you?  Which set of
> consequences causes more fear today?  Which set of consequences
> realistically makes you look over your shoulder?
>
> On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
> to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
> losing their health coverage, etc.?  Do you know anyone who has a kid?
> Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
> their job and the roof over their head.
>
> Round-ups of dissidents make news.  Political prosecutions make news.
> Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
> hacking, make news.
>
> Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
> "objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
> picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.
>
> As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
> and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
> dissident, they make you a "loser."  And when you rant about getting
> fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
> you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."
>
> There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
> offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize.
> There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
> compliance as "convenience."  As a science fiction character of mine
> said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
> the person?"
>
> But there's something even more insidious about this.
>
> It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
> submission.  A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
> (because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
> vast majority does what is expected of them.  A culture where today
> people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy," a
> culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete."
>
> The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
> job, and end up homeless.  The biggest risk is that the culture as a
> whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
> dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
> latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
> economic alligators.
>
> Big Data is the feed-in to that system.
>
> Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now?
> Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
> their website for their write-ups about 'em.  Look up "super cookies"
> and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it.
>
> Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
> files & folders on your machine that store these things.  Open the
> folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
> your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
> browsing history, etc.  What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
> instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
> impossible to kill off entirely.
>
> Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this.  You can write a
> custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them.  They
> are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
> to their owners, no matter what you do.  They are arguably a criminal
> violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
> measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
> (I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
> so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is).  "Privacy policies"
> that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
> enforceable.  And yet....
>
> Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
> with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
> you knew how far it goes.
>
> The ostensible goal is to sell advertising.  But I have a question:
> what's the actual return on investment for that?  How many goods &
> services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
> "personalized" messages?  How often have you bought something because
> you got a targeted ad?  I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
> amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
> flashlights shoved up our collective colon.
>
> The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
> business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain competitive"
> and all that nonsense.  One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
> and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves.
>
> So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
> themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
> with something less than informed consent:
>
> Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones.  And very soon, Verizon and
> other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
> "watch you cuddle."
>
> Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
> using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
> for publicity purposes.
>
> But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
> telephone numbers.
>
> Google is the paradigm case of Big Data.  Even NSA is envious of Google,
> and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
> facility in Utah.
>
> When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
> kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
> for intercepting overseas traffic.  The difference is that you don't get
> to vote for their boss every four years.
>
> When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
> and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
> number, they are effectively saying to their friends:  "If you want to
> write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
> surveillance."  If you value the friendship, you submit.  Or you say
> nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
> person."  Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
> century of communications technology.
>
> What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
> become technologies of control that rival _1984_.  As Winston Smith said
> to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
> "You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off.  We
> have that privilege."  Try taking the battery out of an iPhone.  Try
> taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
> "iWatch."  They watch.  You can't turn it off.  Interesting, that.  So
> when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
> iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting.
>
> Facebook is a surveillance machine.  Google is a surveillance machine.
> Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
> intelligence collection platform.  I know someone who developed intel
> collection & analysis software for use on Twitter.  I'll tell that story
> in person.  "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
> platform.  And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
> with you.  Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
> controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
> everywhere you go?
>
> There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
> etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers.  Cool People didn't go
> anywhere near AOL.
>
> AOL's big sin was censorship.  They tried to "moderate" their little
> corner of cyberspace.  In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
> to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
> another dumb "aggregator" page.
>
> But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship.
>
> When people are being watched, they behave differently.  They submit,
> they conform, they comply.
>
> And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance.
>
> -G.
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