Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best

The internet, as it was before the one-way ratchet started to close, feels more and more like a lightning in a bottle that nobody in power wants repeating ever again. Everything in the past couple years has been going towards the centralization into a small number of services, walled wastelands that require you forfeit any kind of anonymity to even browse, tightly coupled to the countries they operate in, and especially for tech corpos, practically an extension of surveillance agencies through PRISMesque programs.

Soon enough (and already the case, if you're one of the unlucky ones) you won't even be able to browse it without explicitly allowing Google to track you on every single website you try to access through your Google-approved, constantly monitored handheld device, linked directly to your identity.

Commercial VPNs are not a solution, they're merely kicking the can down the road, and shrinking the number of people that will complain once they will, finally, come for them too, first by requiring strict accountability to providers and age verification, then outright banning any that do not comply.

Spoiler alert : Singapore won the race years ago. Cameras everywhere, and mostly : the singaporian civilian population is educated to surveil peers so that they don't commit incivilities. Here is an article about it : https://gcctvms.com/smart-city-surveillance-singapore-camera...

reddit started asking KYC yesterday.

You (and me) can bitch all you want, but reddit has well prepared for us whining and being sad will change nothing.

Mark my words: KYC will be required on HN in about two years. Not because dang will want it, but because that's the direction the world is going to.

Governments are casting a wide a net but it all seems aimed at a foreign influence and espionage Cold War going on. The thought of using this for crime in most countries is tertiary and the real reasons for implementing these systems are so embarrassing to their respective governments that they will rarely mention what's actually going. In Canada there has been two recently large omissions, one is the Chinese government influencing Canadian elections and the other was Indian spies killing Indian immigrants on Canadian soil. Maybe this will all result in mission creep, but the upside will be getting to pay for things with your face.

VPNs are great and all but many that are well advertised here in North America are a huge source of attacks, abuse, etc. so it’s pretty desirable just to block them. They sometimes have agreements with residential ISPs to get around the bans.

I've very sympathetic to this message, but "not even the Pentagon’s employees can expect to have their privacy respected" doesn't make sense. When you sign up, you sign up to hand everything over, including your private life.

Britain will win for sure.

The interesting question is whether non-Western countries will develop their own internet governance models that are neither US-dominated nor China-firewall style. The .ng ccTLD (Nigeria) is a real, functional namespace that offers an alternative to .com. The internet was supposed to be distributed. Maybe the future is genuinely distributed governance, not a single blocs approach.

If you're not fabricating your own silicon, you are OWNED.

This is very unwelcome.

The country that really refined mass surveillance in the digital age, China, has seen tons of investment from people who want to see big returns and for the workers to be kept in line (by force if necessary) and many countries want that sort of "prosperity" for themselves, which means sucking up to the investor class, which includes people like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison.

If you do business with totalitarian states, there's a good chance you become one.

sure, I'll just right on your service, with the ability to see and sell everything I do...

We're #1!

That’s why I said it before, only delusionals think we live in democracy, there’s no democracy, no freedom, no transparency, none of the values you hear daily are actually in use, it’s just a facade to trick people and maybe to make them relax their measures to maintain their own privacy compared to non democratic ones. In fact, it’s better to be straightforward and be oppressive where people might fed up and revolt at some point rather than those sneaky tactics, coupled by making people lives very expensive to live where “privacy” becomes an auxiliary commodity, plus giving the public some distraction like concerts and other carrots after all that whipping.

It’s very accurate to assume that ALL US based tech companies are part of mass surveillance, no matter what promises you hear, companies can be forced to cooperate without the public knowledge. Same with European ones, as the article stated, they are not that far, so don’t assume much even when you see the cliche “based in Switzerland!! Trust us give us your money”. The only safe way is to host your own, maintain your own, encrypt at rest and while transferring on your own, trust no one and nothing, and it’s a good start.

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It is from a VPN Company, so YMMV. But I do agree there is surveillance happening, but the amount of data is way too much to fully examine. Makes one wonder if this is one of the reasons the US Gov. (and others) are so into AI.

Mass surveillance is bad, until I'm in charge of it. -- Parents demanding "age verification" laws

- does anyone have actual proof that surveillance does not effectively curb terrorism or something along those lines?

- i keep seeing the same arguments everywhere "ThEy WaNt To CoNtRoL Us" etc

- how do you propose catching terrorists then?