Privacy…
I was just browsing around my feeds recently and came across two pieces that kinda got me thinking. The first was this BBC article on how the US and UK are increasingly looking for ways to keep their citizenry under constant surveillance. It talks a little bit about some things that are being worked on, from automatically tracking people in video automatically by their height and gait all they way to monitoring people in their houses using radio signals - more frighteningly they suggest they can monitor their intent as well using those same signals. But what caught my eye was this one here:
Interestingly, we, the public, don’t seem to mind. Opinion polls, both in the US and Britain, say that about 75% of us want more, not less, surveillance.
In this world where the government and media are selling us constant fear, fear of others and fear of ourselves, we seem to be all too happy to give up our privacy and freedoms in the name of self protection. Britain seems to be well ahead of the curve with all their crazy cctv work all over the place, but NYC and the states seem to be looking to catch up.
Coupled with that, the people who are looking to protect our privacy are increasingly being persecuted as criminals. The Tor Project which is a really valuable privacy tool is coming under fire. In Germany a Tor node operator was recently arrested - although released after it was understood what Tor is and how it works. I suspect that one be the last time that Tor faces off against the law - and I’m that over time these issues will become more serious.
I don’t really have any grand point to make, just a couple articles that got me thinking. But it’s a disturbing trend where we are being subtly made to be ok with giving up our privacy which will ultimately make it easier to attack those who refuse to give up those privacies. That can’t be good.
