Johann   tag: mass surveillance

This is both insightful and hilarious:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/zuckerberg-senate-testimony-w518920

Bill Nelson from Florida leads aggressively: "Let me just cut to the chase – if you and other social media companies don’t get your act together, we won’t have privacy anymore." He goes on to talk about how we’re all glued to screens and tablets from morning to night, and chastises Zuckerberg for repeatedly misusing data.

It’s not that Nelson is wrong, but the randomness of this is so strange. Facebook and other social media platforms have been using the same data-mining techniques for ages, and of course have been partners with the government at times in its use of such techniques – including partnerships with the NSA in its PRISM program. But suddenly Facebook is getting hammered by both parties in the most aggressive manner. Zuckerberg is a uniquely unsympathetic person in a lot of ways, but the rapacious and completely illegal government surveillance programs to this day tolerated by this same U.S. Senate undercut the effect of the outrage they’re all going to demonstrate today.

Thune blasts Zuck’s "14-year history" of apologies for bad decisions and asks why we should listen to this new one. Zuck looks back blankly, appears to be counting Thune’s eyebrows.

Installing exactly the technology Hitler would have had wet dreams about under the pretense of ^(the) convenience ^{(of getting fleeced)} and security ^{(from unscheduled murder, not from large scale mass murder by authorities)} is something you can delude yourself about, but that doesn't absolve you from your responsibility in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of his time, as it required fewer staff [..] According to Bentham's design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labour walking on wheels to spin looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.

Neat, huh? And then there is this mind-boggling twist:

Bentham remained bitter about the rejection of the Panopticon scheme throughout his later life, convinced that it had been thwarted by the King and an aristocratic elite. It was largely because of his sense of injustice that he developed his ideas of 'sinister interest' – that is, of the vested interests of the powerful conspiring against a wider public interest – which underpinned many of his broader arguments for reform.