The fear of an imminent surveillance state just rings so hollow to me. It used to appeal to me as an existential threat, but then real world experience made me realize how implausible this is, not due to technological limitations but political will.
We already have surveillance states. Walk into any chain drug store in the country and you'll be met with cameras tracking your every movement, deodorant under lock and key and a security guard at the door. You walk in and the overseers know who you are and track your every move.
However, people walk in to drug stores every day and walk out with stuff. They're often unmasked and repeat offenders. The drug store chain gladly hands over all identifying information to police as well as their patterns. Yet nothing happens.
People comment on forums exactly how and where scams take place. YouTubers bait car and package thieves within hours. Whenever a horrific crime occurs, 9 times out of 10 the perpetrator has had dozens of arrests.
> The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance.
So the police doesn't go after known criminals who have been arrested for the umpteenth time, but I'm made to believe they're about to come after me any day now for my innocuous offense, they just need one more Palantir camera.
Be real, there's just no political will to enable a police state.
So now on to technology. Technology should make our lives better. Police should use it to capture and stop the 1% of the population that's making life much more difficult for the rest of us. And they should lock them up for a considerable amount of time, not as rehabilitation or punishment, just to make the lives of ~99% of us better off. Maybe not 3 strikes, but can we settle on 10? 20? Anything would help.
So these theoretical arguments about a surveillance state where some hypothetical political dissident is getting doxed and raided just strikes me as fantasy.
> Police should use it to capture and stop the 1% of the population that's making life much more difficult for the rest of us. And they should lock them up for a considerable amount of time, not as rehabilitation or punishment, just to make the lives of ~99% of us better off. Maybe not 3 strikes, but can we settle on 10? 20? Anything would help.
criminals are not out there making life difficult for you. you are far more likely to die in a car crash than a repeat offender that you don't know. this complaint is a subjective truth blithered from behind a keyboard.
> So these theoretical arguments about a surveillance state where some hypothetical political dissident is getting doxed and raided just strikes me as fantasy.
we know this is what they do, and we know this is what palantir does in other countries to help governments oppress civilians. that is the product. that is why it is worrying to see it used here.
Sure I'm unlikely to be murdered by some rando. But I have gotten my packages and bike stolen. I've been accosted on public transportation. Been threatened by homeless junkies. I've had to cross the street to keep my kids from seeing some unspeakable sight.
And then there's the minor inconveniences, too many to worth mentioning. These are the things that affect my life.
I could care less about someone whose daily routine involved "patrolling for ICE". I don't see myself trying to purposely obstruct law enforcement so maybe I can't empathize. I just don't see "professional agitateur" in my future so I focus on things that affect me.
This is more to the point, I think. You have a number of different minor inconveniences that you think are worth locking humans up for life for, and also you don't care about people who are not you even if they are not doing anything wrong. That doesn't make for a set of long-term legislative principles that would make a society work because they would be structurally sociopathic.
Correct, I don't think we should allow people to steal and terrorize the public. It's not a minor inconvenience and every sensible society in history would remove these people from the population.
I imagine you live in a nice gated community where you don't have to deal with these people. Must be nice.
Wishing to remove people from the population for stealing packages is the sociopathy I'm talking about. Valuing personal property over human life is how you get so many people in positions where they end up stealing to begin with, so it is short sighted as well. The people who end up stealing, for the most part, are not well-off.
I live in an apartment building where packages regularly get stolen or torn apart, am regularly accosted in the street and frequently see people who are homeless, not that it matters. Those things absolutely are a minor inconvenience and beyond those few minutes I don't think much about it. It doesn't really impede me from going about my day, and I certainly don't fantasize about imprisoning and "removing these people from the population".
The kind of thinking that produces those words, though. That does frighten me.
Among persons admitted to state prison in 2014 across 34 states, 77% had five or more prior arrests in their criminal history, including the arrest that resulted in their prison sentence.
About half of persons admitted in 2014 were released by the end of 2015. Among these released persons, over half (59%) were arrested at least once within 2 years, including 16% for a violent offense. Forty-two percent were arrested for a public order offense within 2 years of release, making it the most common arrest offense for the 2014 admission cohort.
The number of prisoners that have had 15 or more prior arrests is over 26%
I think by colloquialism you mean extreme exaggeration. Maybe check word definitions before using them if you don’t know. The last sentence would have been omitted had you not thrown the “familiar with language” shade.
A Surveillance state is not the same as police state. We already live in a surveillance state, but we are protected by three things:
1. The cost of arrest. Actually sending someone to pick the person up and put them in handcuffs, process and change them.
2. The cost of prosecution. Having lawyers build a case, schedule a judge and courtroom.
3. The cost of enforcement. Putting someone in prison or threatening to put them in prison if they don't pay back what is stolen. Tracking if they paid it back. If they get probation it is cheaper but a probation officer is required.
These are expensive and use limited resources. Policing and governments prioritize these resources for more serious crimes like murder. Constitutional rights, including due process dramatically increase these costs. Mass surveillance made investigation and determining who did what for minor crimes done in public much much cheaper, so we just hit the next cost bottleneck.
The solution to the enforcement bottleneck is automated enforcement. This will likely be rolled out over the next ten to twenty years. If you steal from a store, you get banned from the entire story chain. This means living life very difficult, so you pay a fine. It is likely that stores will make lots of mistakes and flag innocent people, but most people will pay the fine because it is more convenient.
The situation is entirely different in a police state with no constitutional protections. The government can simply lock you out of everything you need to live because you did buy enough Dear Leader portraits this quarter. You can't use your car, can't call a ride share, can't catch a bus, can't buy food, can't get electricity to heat your house to keep your family comfortable. Instead of a fine, you need to walk to closest detention center, confess your guilt, lock yourself in and do manual labor and reeducation until the state allows you to leave. This system requires no guards.
Keep in mind that the US president can now do anything he declares related to his office with immunity, and can pardon whoever else violates the law or the constitution
Perhaps the shoplifters are less iportant to the surveillance state than the people protesting government abuse and getting chased around the country to their workplaces and vacation hotels?
Street crime is tangible, visceral, and visible. When someone physically accosts you or physically invades your space, you feel it.
Incestuous "robber baron" state-capitalism that privatizes gains and socializes losses, or outright white-collar crime, are not so tangible. You don't see it or feel it. It doesn't feel as invasive.
It's worse though, with the only exception being violent crime against your body. It does more actual damage over a longer term.
1) We DO actually need to detect crime if we are going to fight it. Sticking our heads in the dirt and strapping a sign to our rear end saying "no surveillance" may feel good, but it does nothing for the victims of crime.
2) The anti-Palantir cries are funded in part by state actors whose operations are constrained by technology that detects and predicts their actions.
The quantity of anti-Palantir, anti-America and anti-American ally threads on HN has grown substantially. YCombinator and HN owe something to this country for setting conditions for their success. How about returning the favor though diligence in moderating HN?
It's not about the minor offenses of uninteresting people, but what happens because a change in political orientation makes you suddenly interesting. Even more so when AI automates this: Dear computer, we just got some ruling to remove citizenship of people that were not born in the country if they commit event the stupidest offenses: Go look them up.
It makes no sense for the authoritarian to anger everyone at once, but if you just convince people that complaining is bad for them, or expressing negative affect against the government, they can ge much done with little, and it doesn't take that much surveillance. We are already seeing governments that pursue their enemies to the fullest extent of the law for things that are, at best, dubious. Automation just makes this easier to do.
We already have surveillance states. Walk into any chain drug store in the country and you'll be met with cameras tracking your every movement, deodorant under lock and key and a security guard at the door. You walk in and the overseers know who you are and track your every move.
However, people walk in to drug stores every day and walk out with stuff. They're often unmasked and repeat offenders. The drug store chain gladly hands over all identifying information to police as well as their patterns. Yet nothing happens.
People comment on forums exactly how and where scams take place. YouTubers bait car and package thieves within hours. Whenever a horrific crime occurs, 9 times out of 10 the perpetrator has had dozens of arrests.
> The “enemy within” continually expands until it encompasses the entire population of a nation regardless of their status and beliefs, justifying evermore paranoid and totalizing surveillance.
So the police doesn't go after known criminals who have been arrested for the umpteenth time, but I'm made to believe they're about to come after me any day now for my innocuous offense, they just need one more Palantir camera.
Be real, there's just no political will to enable a police state.
So now on to technology. Technology should make our lives better. Police should use it to capture and stop the 1% of the population that's making life much more difficult for the rest of us. And they should lock them up for a considerable amount of time, not as rehabilitation or punishment, just to make the lives of ~99% of us better off. Maybe not 3 strikes, but can we settle on 10? 20? Anything would help.
So these theoretical arguments about a surveillance state where some hypothetical political dissident is getting doxed and raided just strikes me as fantasy.