Circa three hours ago, I made a post discussing how complicity through inaction threatens digital privacy. In the post, I made connections to the inactions of people during the 1930’s Germany. The post was removed for being posted in the wrong community:

z1fs9sYGFAHVzV2.png

Meanwhile, these are the rules:

TMRptTbFH6TWTTN.png

I am not trying to pick a fight with the mods. I am trying to point out that there is no privacy without political discourse and action. That’s all I wanted to inspire discussion on.

Peace.

  • f3nyx@lemmy.ml
    10·
    3 days ago

    I’ll back you on this.

    A few years ago, most of my privacy effort was focused on removing myself from increasing restrictions online. Even this last year, there’s been a concerted, worldwide push towards censorship and removing anonymity online.

    That is dangerous, and left unchecked, leads to a future where anonymity is illegal.

    Now, the majority of my effort focuses on privacy advocacy and showing up to city hall meetings to pester council members about this stuff. If we don’t do this, they will continue to erode our rights, because there is no pushback to it.

    Privacy is political, and removing relevant discussion helps nobody.

    • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Thank you very much for backing me, for your efforts and for putting all that so eloquently! I completely agree! Which isn’t to say that we don’t need forums where we share and teach each other the practical implementation of digital privacy, but this fight needs to be fought on both fronts.

      Again, just to have it said out loud, I’m not trying to go behind the mods’ back or talk badly about them! I appreciate them taking on moderation of this extremely important community on their free time, and that, too, shouldn’t be diminished.

  • vapor_body@lemmy.mlEnglish
    18·
    4 days ago

    I’m not sure what the original post was about, but it’s very true that privacy is an extemely political thing. I wonder if the open source & security communities are preparing themselves for a future where western monopolies on hardware manufacturing and datacenters slip away and they become more hostile to these things. Western nonprofits funded mostly by corporations, and academia, these are totally bound by legality and could disappear with a few penstrokes. Autopen sorry

    • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      Well put! In my original post, I tried to draw from Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil , in which she discusses how the totalitarian Nazi state at the time came to be out of the inactions of people, among other things. I also tried to further exemplify it with the poem First They Came, and finally I tried to connect the dots with how the same process is ongoing as we speak but in regards to digital privacy.

      • vapor_body@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        4 days ago

        Oh yeah my issue is with the ideology of anti-authoritarianism that all these privacy people adhere to, thanks for clarifying what you meant. Anti-authoritarianism is an ideology that crosses many academic fields, as a result of the CIA (well, the OSS started it) bankrolling loads of orgs, as well as deciding the publishing & reach of their work. Very fine process of elimination. Leftism was exploding across the humanities and history departments, they needed their own brands (so many) to swallow it all whole worldwide. They needed to explain why they were fighting the people who drove Hitler to his grave (why, Stalin is secretly superhitler, please disregard Wall St’s involvement with the Nazis and Allen Dulles’ high treason against FDR, trying to make a deal with them before the soviets swooped in).

        Privacy orgs often treat US governments as at risk of devolving into authoritarianism and dictatorship, contrasted with a mix of states the west is besieging with those it has bent and shaped into internal catastrophes, like Egypt in that recent Mullvad advertisement, India which has its whole ID system (AADHAR) managed by Google and Mossad (what’s the difference at this point). But the states they treat as at risk of being corrupted are the ones running the global surveillance apparatus. They have the luxury of allowing these software solutions. They control the hardware manufacturers, they have compromised your firmware. This stuff is not opaque to them, unlike the less technologically advanced states it targets (including the satrapies it calls allies).

        Would you agree, even if not with the former points (I’m sure, as this is coming from entirely different premises than yours), that historical education among STEM workers and programming hobbyists is very lax? That they trust western journalistic institutions? Leaving them wide open to this capture strategy?

        Putting this last so you get the framework before the trivia gotcha type thing: Arendt was in a relationship with a Nazi and these academics deliberately whitewashed his history. When Heidegger was a rector at Freiburg he would begin his lectures with “Heil Hitler!”. Not a great authority on authoritarianism (depending on your definition, just to do the stupid wordplay)

        Will try to expand on these points later, maybe someone else can help. I have to go grab a lot of this reference material as I’m typing.

        • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Unfortunately (?), I am not a STEM worker myself and as for programming, I just began learning C about six months ago, barely qualifying even as a hobby programmer. Which is to say, I have no insight into how well-versed or not these people are on history. With that said, I do believe that society as a whole - and feel free to call me a doomsayer - is about to face a third world war, because we haven’t yet broken the cycle that is tragedy ---> unlearn tragedy ---> tragedy. Society as a whole - not programmers and STEM workers - is forgetting history. As to why, I can only guess. Perhaps we have been made too busy to stay educated, informed and critical. We are stunted and we have been bereft of our tools and motivation to take action. When I say “we”, I mean people of the West, because in those parts of the world where Western imperialism has driven entire populations to poverty, there is a fighting spirit that we have all but forgotten… This is getting out of hand and very farfetched. Sorry!

          I did not know that about Arendt’s partner! Ever since we read the Banality of Evil as part of a German class, I have viewed her - or at least that particular work of hers - as source of inspiration, since, being born to a Jewish family, she also suffered at the hands of the Nazi for researching antisemitism. I do not view her theories as apologetic, but rather as very important messages to future generations: that every single person is capable of doing everything the Nazi did against the Jewish people under the “right” circumstances. That totalitarianism normalizes “evil” - please don’t get me started on the definition of that - and that with the right indoctrination, even sending a person to a concentration camp can become a banal task.

          Smack me for forcfully tying this together, but that banality is yet another threat to digital privacy, just as inaction (as per my previous post, which I realized now you never saw… shoot…) is. Marx says somewhere - heavily paraphrased - that the ideology of the ruling class trickles down to become the ideology of the people through various institutions and I hate to see just that, just now: the process of normalization of the invasion of privacy that is going on in the world.