Does no one else find it deeply distressing that all our tech has been so completely co-opted by outside agents? How can we live this lie that we are free while every day we see how we are controlled and watched?
It's not the tools that worry me. Those will advance with technology and just like non governmental tech, it will progress no matter if we like it or not.
Oversight, rule of law, and etc is where it is at to determine the end result.
Call me old fashioned but the idea that my democratic country has intelligence agencies making tools like this (or this one...) is not worrisome at face value to me. I would expect them to do so.
I think this is a false equivalency. It was the case that you could be targeted, but this would be one case and a lot of resources were bound by this one case. Now, the process can be automated in such a way that everyone can be targeted simultaneously without much overhead.
The main problem is not that you could be targeted (like you said, that was always the case), but that everyone could be a target.
Now think ahead to maybe democratic institutions failing or just failing enough that someone can use that infrastructure to subvert democracy and capture up dirt on all their opponents, cementing their power.
Nitpick: consistent with moral, ethics and/or human rights
Most of the stuff that [A-Z]{3} does is lawful (if only legitimized post-facto) but not nearly half as often does it fulfill the other criteria.
Either we work out a democratic way to self-govern these technologies, or oligarchs and plutocrats end up controlling them.
crypto is widely used and easy to get access to. at this point, there is very little that can be done to put this genie back in the bottle. there are open chat networks that can provide e2ee with forward secrecy even if some compromised devices are present (XMPP/OMEMO). many clients support routing your chats over tor so nobody can tell which server you are using.
not only can you go completely dark with off-the-shelf android apps and a non-google ROM, you can do it for free.
Seems like they have bigger fish to fry. I would loathe to think this being employed on boring run-of-the-mill Windows users who like to Skype grandma and play Solitaire & Tetris, use Internet Explorer as their main browser etc
Our parents and teachers prepared us for a world mostly like the one that existed in 1980, but some of the icky parts like bookkeeping were ameliorated by the 6502.
We went online a little bit, but mostly to goof around, trade some software and maybe sometimes discuss and flame, but it was always a tiny part of life, about the footprint on our time as the card game UNO. An interesting diversion, but certainly not a daily activity, much less a dependency.
Of course, older now, we realize there was much more brewing behind the scenes: Corporations had been leveraging Freud's psychological principles to make us rabid consumers. Cold War paranoia created an arms race. American military hegemony had been cruising to a head.
We plugged on, amused we had internet in college, but still found time to play music, party, ride bikes, etc. Suddenly around 2000, networking fused the military and commercial nature of American life into the portable mega-mall of cookies.
But with all this communications technology, why only use it when sitting at our Pentium II's? Let's get everyone carrying cell phones -> surveillance capitalism.
It's starting to all come together for me as I re-watch The Century of Self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
What to do? Opinions vary. Many people will argue whether we can legislate our way out of it. I like to believe we can empower ourselves and not drink the Kool-Aid as heavily by making choices to stay offline, not use Amazon, support local businesses. I live my life that way.
However, we are not rational. I will convince very few people through my (sporadically, ha!) clear-thinking. Plastic, celebrity merchandise will emerge from the factories, from the chemical plants, from Hollywood, from Saudi Arabia, from the fractured wells below our plains.
So, yes, yes and yes, I still recall the joy of plotting large, clunky GR mode pixels on the apple in off-kilter pink and green colors to make a flower. I miss hearing trackers simulate analog through careful timing of the PC speaker. I still dream of families rolling up their expenses in Excel.
I wanted all of this tech to be used for cute, cozy, cheerful families and towns. To see it weaponized around me, to fear not exactly my own government, but hacking groups hired by Ireland-based corporations, foreign insurance agencies and hospitals trying to steal my identity each time I simply look up rock videos from the 1990s is sad and distressing. It's humanity out of control.
It's very astute that you mention "living a lie." We are coming face to face with it through numerous channels. According to Freud, we have humungous darkness in our unconscious. With persistent media and industrial exploitation of these impulses, it's getting harder to ignore.
I believe religions in the past attempted on some level with varying tactics and degrees of success to confront this. However, the demands on our everyday reality have shifted. We can see through most religions's tactics and where we can not, our purview is heavily obscured by cultural noise, such as anecdata, fake news, etc.
I maintain the best thing to do now is empower ourselves through understanding the history of the last 100-200 years and what the ideals of freedom and privacy mean as we "transistorize" the world around us. This empowerment demands a certain kind of clarity which can be difficulty to find, but if anyone wants to talk about it, get in touch.
In the meantime, I highly recommend anyone interested watch The Century of Self: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
I expected our AI overlords to be robots and talking computers.
I didn't expect AI to be a set of algorithms used to subtly manipulate peoples' thinking in such a way they don't even notice. Orwell would have had a field day with surveillance capitalism.