we lost the Cold War
Jun. 21st, 2013 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eWhat was the Cold War about? It was about keeping back the scary threat of an all-controlling government obsessed with spying on its citizens -- the USSR. Well, the USSR was "vanquished" (actually Gorbachev conceded that the Cold War was a bad idea and ended the standoff), but the war was lost because in being distracted the USA (and other "democracies") have become infested with secret spy agencies.
I've heard people say, "What of it? I don't do bad things. Only villains have something to fear from this, and it is only surveillance." But they couldn't be more wrong.
Firstly, you have to wonder what the Jews, the homosexuals, the blacks, the crippled, the intellectually handicapped did wrong in Nazi Germany, or the Irish Catholics in Ireland, or the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Muslims in Serbia, or the blacks in South Africa, or the blacks in USA, or non-English-speaking non-whites in Australia. It is a rule of human nature that people with excessive power become drunk with it and inevitably use that power against others who are comparatively powerless. The creativity and mental contortions displayed in rationalising the murder and cruelty that grow out of it is always mind-boggling to those not actually caught up in it.
Secondly, the analysis of this mountain of data from eavsdropping can't be processed by humans -- there is just too damn much of it. So computers are being turned to the job, however this is the kind of thing that computers are notoriously bad at. They fail miserably, but unfortunately people trust them because they are "infallible computers". There are cases where innocent people's communications have been erroneously linked to genuine bad guys through computers picking up on coincidence and seeing it as pattern. This is to be expected; as I said, computers are terrible at this kind of thing. The worry is that police and spooks enthusiastically persecute the victim as if they were a real bad guy, never seeming to question whether the computer could have made a mistake.
But perhaps the most deeply troubling aspect of this is the drone war. If you think this is something used only to assassinate bad guys on foreign soil you are very, very mistaken. The Pakistani drone attacks are a trial-run. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that 3 years from now at least 30,000 drones (likely more than that) will be in American skies surveying US citizens "in the name of safety", according to Janet Napolitano (Secretary of Homeland Security). Talk about karma coming back to bite you!
Do you seriously think they will relinquish their deadly force capability? What do you think will happen when a big corporation wanting to run toxic pipelines through people's backyards is peacefully protested? At the moment TransCanada trains police to treat protesters at their pipelines as terrorists. Leaving aside the disturbingly fascist notion of a police force directly doing a corporation's bidding, does anybody think such "terrorists" will receive gentle treatment when a simple drone attack can "solve" such inconvenient protests? And what will people do about such drone attacks? Protest?
If the USA's powerful elite are happy to run drones on home soil, how long before they do so in friendly nations like Australia? UK? Canada? The rest of the world?
Considering how incredibly corrupt humans always become when they get absolute power, this really can't end well.
I've heard people say, "What of it? I don't do bad things. Only villains have something to fear from this, and it is only surveillance." But they couldn't be more wrong.
Firstly, you have to wonder what the Jews, the homosexuals, the blacks, the crippled, the intellectually handicapped did wrong in Nazi Germany, or the Irish Catholics in Ireland, or the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Muslims in Serbia, or the blacks in South Africa, or the blacks in USA, or non-English-speaking non-whites in Australia. It is a rule of human nature that people with excessive power become drunk with it and inevitably use that power against others who are comparatively powerless. The creativity and mental contortions displayed in rationalising the murder and cruelty that grow out of it is always mind-boggling to those not actually caught up in it.
Secondly, the analysis of this mountain of data from eavsdropping can't be processed by humans -- there is just too damn much of it. So computers are being turned to the job, however this is the kind of thing that computers are notoriously bad at. They fail miserably, but unfortunately people trust them because they are "infallible computers". There are cases where innocent people's communications have been erroneously linked to genuine bad guys through computers picking up on coincidence and seeing it as pattern. This is to be expected; as I said, computers are terrible at this kind of thing. The worry is that police and spooks enthusiastically persecute the victim as if they were a real bad guy, never seeming to question whether the computer could have made a mistake.
But perhaps the most deeply troubling aspect of this is the drone war. If you think this is something used only to assassinate bad guys on foreign soil you are very, very mistaken. The Pakistani drone attacks are a trial-run. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that 3 years from now at least 30,000 drones (likely more than that) will be in American skies surveying US citizens "in the name of safety", according to Janet Napolitano (Secretary of Homeland Security). Talk about karma coming back to bite you!
Do you seriously think they will relinquish their deadly force capability? What do you think will happen when a big corporation wanting to run toxic pipelines through people's backyards is peacefully protested? At the moment TransCanada trains police to treat protesters at their pipelines as terrorists. Leaving aside the disturbingly fascist notion of a police force directly doing a corporation's bidding, does anybody think such "terrorists" will receive gentle treatment when a simple drone attack can "solve" such inconvenient protests? And what will people do about such drone attacks? Protest?
If the USA's powerful elite are happy to run drones on home soil, how long before they do so in friendly nations like Australia? UK? Canada? The rest of the world?
Considering how incredibly corrupt humans always become when they get absolute power, this really can't end well.