There is a nonzero price to enforce norms and laws.
For instance, let's imagine a technology emerges that can render any wall in a building transparent and penetrable for a short time, without affecting the structural integrity of the building. How much easier would it make the job of the law enforcement! How many crimes would it help prevent or at least detect! Of course it will be a securely guarded technology, so that it won't fall to hands of random strangers, malicious hackers, or burglars; only the law enforcement agencies would use it, and only for legitimate purposes! Honest.
Would you endorse such a technology in your town? Mandate it for your neighborhood? Why? Are you comfortable with the idea that a number of crimes will go undetected or not prevented because this feature is not implemented? Not rhetorical questions all.
There is a complicated legal and political process because there are a lot of things which are criminal that really shouldn't be. Historically, the law has been used to come down hard on people who:
* Say bad things about the king.
* Said good things about the king.
* Are homosexual and attempting to live their life.
* Are black and attempting to live their life.
* Are foreign, regardless of activity.
* Are female and attempting to own property.
* Are local but not the right type of local.
* The actual person is OK but they're trying to help the Jews.
* Own the wrong book.
* Worship the wrong god.
And in hindsight it is generally agreed that those laws were poorly thought out. Giving the police tools to enforce 100% compliance with the law is by no means a sane thing to do. And if that is the plan it would behove us to make sure the law is good first. Which it obviously isn't there are gaping holes in every legal system.
Maybe you should read the news on the other side of the fence. In the UK, LGBT training is a compulsory class for children. Many Muslim families are pulling their children out of school because they're not being given the choice to withdraw their children from classes where opinions about sexuality are being presented as fact in contrary to the principles they want to raise their child with.
> In the UK, LGBT training is a compulsory class for children.
This is way overhyped. It's barely more than “gay people exist, don't bully them” most places. One lesson in PSHE class – maybe two or three, if you get lucky and your teachers decide to teach you about binary trans people too, or if sexuality is mentioned in the Equality Act lesson (which mostly focuses on disability and maternity leave).
> opinions about sexuality are being presented as fact
By this logic, we should ban other children from talking about their religions in schools; they're likely to say things like “Jesus is God” or “God isn't real”. It's unlikely a religious child would get particularly confused with a teacher exposing them to different views on morality, given how much they're already exposed to that.
Many? You sure about that? Also, "opinions about sexuality are being presented as fact in contrary to the principles they want to raise their child with". How do you think things like that help? We want a tolerant and inclusive society, thank-you. I know gay Muslims in the UK. Can you imagine what life is like for them?
What does "LGBT training" mean? What I gather is that what they are teaching kids is, in essence, "be kind to each other". Do these families that are protesting not have the same biases against gay people that the person I originally responded to has?
I’ve seen some media in the last few years that definitely qualifies as LGBT propaganda and would therefore be banned under Russian (and other countries’) laws.
The most recent I can think of is that creepy Blues Clues episode… why do prepubescent children need to know about Pride and any sexuality at all?
The reasonable middle to me is to introduce LGBT issues in sex-ed when kids are going through puberty and treat it with decorum. You can punish homo/transphobia when it occurs, not try to program it out of literal toddlers with a creepy song about families marching.
I never learned about marriage in school, I learned about it from my parents since it is a global social norm.
I would teach them about false equivalence in school however.
Anyway the issue isn’t with kids learning about LGBT, it’s HOW they learn about it. I wouldn’t promote nightclubbing or pickup artistry to my kids. I do also have issues with how aspects of mainstream ‘straight culture’ are pushed to kids as well.
For example, drag is an inherently adult form of entertainment now being pushed to kids. Grown men throwing money at drag kids makes my stomach turn. Two moms or dads taking their kid to play in the park does not.
I run a shipping company. You want to send a package. It is illegal for me to handle and ship certain things (e.g., nuclear bombs). Further, I don’t want to handle any of those things. Furthermore, if I find those things (e.g., when a package breaks open), I am legally required to alert the authorities.
What assurance can you provide to the me (the shipping company) that there is nothing illegal in your box? Suppose I ask you to attest but then I find out later that a bunch of people have been lying on their attestation forms which means I have been unknowingly, undesirably made party to illegal activities? Every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package and looking. Suppose my shipping company’s clever engineers invent a detector I can give to you that doesn’t require me to look inside the package but can tell me with some certainty that there are no illegal things in the package. What statistical properties would the detector need to have to satisfy you that this was better than forcing every package open?
This isn’t an analogy, it’s just reality, right up to the sentence “every other company solves this by simply opening everyone’s package”. Every shipping company doesn’t open every package today, and in the real world there are no magical package opening robots, though there are some specialized detectors. So we already know from experiment that imperfect detection is better than forcing every package open.
It is an analogy to what Apple is doing. Analogically you are sending something to Apple to handle for you (either store or ship) and they have legal obligations and business requirements. Every other company manages those by ‘opening your package’ is analogous to server-side image scanning like PhotoDNA.
PhotoDNA is analogous to the detectors. The analog of “opening every package” would be human review of every picture.
We already have real world evidence for “what statistical properties the detector would need to have” to be better than opening every package, because the real delivery companies are literally doing this today. There’s nothing hypothetical about the question.
Perhaps the analogy could have been clearer and the hypothetical more broad. I was trying to press on the difference between the shipper doing a very specific test vs some functionally similar but unknown test being done by the shipping company (the server-side test is unknown, it could be hashes, non-hash based image comparison, or manual review). I wasn’t asking about something like the sensitivity or specificity of those tests, rather, why we would be fine with one and not the other when the difference is not whether but when, where, and what test is applied.
That’s a pretty good analogy, but it’s what you do with the detectors answer that’s the problem. If you just say: “The detect says no, we won’t accept your package”. Then there’s no problem.
Apple could do the same, simply letting the user know that this/these images cannot be uploaded to iCloud, and then do nothing else.
The problem is that the results of these scans are pretty useless. They don’t prove anything. While Apple knows that law enforcement and politicians will believe it’s 100% correct, because they don’t even understand that DNA can be wrong, and demand customer names from Apple.
I love cyberpunk because its predictions are all coming true, so I feel that I've got a fair warning.
This is stuff directly from Deus Ex (1999). Repercussions for posting wrong memes are also mentioned in Deus Ex, and are also coming true. (The epidemic situation is not that dire as depicted there, though. At least not yet.)
>Of course it will be a securely guarded technology, so that it won't fall to hands of random strangers, malicious hackers, or burglars; only the law enforcement agencies would use it, and only for legitimate purposes! Honest.
Here lies the problem. You can't guarantee that. Law enforcement itself has criminals. In some countries law enforcement is even one of the largest collection of criminals.
And then something like Trump happens. Do you really want to give such powers to people like Trump and it's followers, not to mention more malicious ones?
There is no way that this technology is only used for good.
And what comes on top, it doesn't stop crime, just it's modus operandi.
If they can't use their computer to handle certain data, they use hacked ones and hide it there. You know the trick how drug smugglers use the suitcases of tourists to smuggle their drugs?
Of course I would campaign for it to be accessible. It would be a complete revolution in archeology, architecture, engineering, maintenance, rescue and firefighting and geology should it also work on rocks.
Not sure I see the relation to Apple laying Fully Automated AI ThinkPol groundwork though.
Let's assume that it only works with thin walls, so it has limited archaeology use. Firefighting is a very fair point.
Would you, reader, trust the firefighters to not abuse such a power by mistake? Would you trust the chance of it being abused for the chance of being rescued during a serious fire? Not an easy question.
You can put checks and balances in place. Firefighters have vehicles with ladders, but they don't drive up to houses and break-and-enter. If it can be made obvious when they're using it, and there's independent oversight, I think the trade-off is definitely worth it.
I think the context is suitable: the arguments for increasing efforts of law enforcement, because "think of the children", accompanied with promises that only the good guys will have the new technical means, and the law enforcement won't even make honest mistakes using it, to say nothing of ever abusing it.
> And it is always pretended that the bad guys can only exist on the client side and not on the supervisor side.
This is very much the crux of it.
Back during the immediate post-9/11 era there was a huge push to restrict all kinds of civil liberties (and the birth of today's surveillance state) in the name of preventing the next terror attack, which could be "a mushroom cloud" in the words of George W. Bush.
There's a problem with this reasoning.
Osama bin Laden wasn't some random dude who got radicalized. He was a member of one of the wealthiest families in the world. He was born rich, grew up rich, attended Harvard, and had a family that rubbed shoulders with heads of state and were directly connected to the Saudi royal family.
Osama bin Laden was a member of what I've heard described as the "superclass," those who are beyond just being "merely rich" in that they possess not only vast wealth but internationally diversified wealth and powerful political connections.
He was of the social class that is behind the glass of a surveillance state, and if he wanted to avoid any possibility of surveillance himself he and other members of his class could easily afford expensive security consultants and specialized devices. They could also afford armies of attorneys to get them off any lists and out of any trouble.
If someone detonates an atomic bomb in Washington DC, it will not be some random middle class youth who got radicalized on a 'chan board or a Facebook group. It will not be some random protestor or dissident. It will be someone like Osama bin Laden. It will be someone with the money, expertise, connections, and background to find, recruit, and pay the personnel required to obtain or build a nuclear device. It will be someone with the connections to organize the logistics to smuggle it into the country and put it in position.
It will be a member of the global elite.
People with bin Laden's level of wealth and privilege are the dangerous ones. The lens of scrutiny should be aimed at them. One member of the middle class radicalized with toxic ideology might shoot up a school, but one elite radicalized with the same ideology could blow up a city or engineer a super-plague.
The risk to the existing order comes from outsiders with leadership abilities.
Osama bin Laden's $30MM (per Wikipedia) inheritance from his estranged family no doubt greased some skids, but mission-driven people with charisma come from all socioeconomic backgrounds, and some of them succeed. (FWIW he did not attend Harvard, and AFAIR never set foot in the US.)
The general pattern is that the wealthy are, on average, supportive of the existing order. They are the winners of the current game. Of course there are always rebellious children who are motivated by religion or power or fame etc, but most of them are feckless due to their upbringing. And ultimately, there are so few of them.
Leadership abilities can be found across all economic strata. Most are happy to leverage their talents into moderate economic advantage, but some are driven by "larger" causes.
I would say that the intersection of leadership abilities, belief in a "larger" cause, belief in victimization, and a willingness to harm innocent people (or to blame them for their inaction against your oppressor) ... is what leads to the risk of violence against the existing order.
Looks like you’re right about Harvard. I’ve heard that claim for years but it seems to be a confusion with another member of the (large) family and controversy about Saudi money at Harvard.
My point is that people with money and power are far more able to execute large scale crimes, and not just terrorism. Meanwhile surveillance is experienced more and more as you move down the socioeconomic pyramid.
Apple is catching flak for this but overall their devices respect privacy more than most cheaper devices. They also cost a lot more. Your average cheapo phone or laptop comes absolutely stuffed to the gills with spyware and runs older OSes with bad security. The poorer you are, the more spyware riddled and insecure your devices probably are.
Bin Laden did take a course at Oxford and palled around with Britain's best and brightest of the young. So there is some connection with the West's elite universities.
Bin Laden certainly has been to Oxford, but I’ve not heard of any connexion with the university.¹ I wouldn’t say that those attending language schools and similar tend to interact much with students of the university. With the exception of a few cramming programmes for admissions, the ‘best and brightest’ (I assume by this you mean those sufficiently academically able to get into Oxbridge as matriculated students—I daresay the average Imperial mathmo is brighter than the average Cambridge land economist) tend not to take courses in Oxford outside the university, since they mostly use the name ‘Oxford’ to entice gullible tourists who don’t realise that these places have nothing to do with the university.
You are forgetting that if the alt-right movement is not itself a product of GamerGate, it got an enormous JATO boost from GamerGate. One of the darkest eras in recent American history -- the Trump administration -- happened in large part because some basement nerds were pissed that a woman wrote a God-damned video game.
Do not discount the effects of chan boards and Facebook groups so foolishly.
I lived through that idiocy and you're not wrong, but I really don't think all those trolls and Pajama Nazis would be particularly dangerous without elite backing.
Some of it may have been organic at first, but things don't stay organic for long these days. The instant there's even a whiff of a popular movement that can be exploited the propagandists are on it... especially if it's a movement that can be exploited so as to win an election or make money. The thing that made that stuff dangerous was elites and their water-carriers like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Milo Yiannopolis, Rupert Murdoch, etc. empowering and steering all those useful idiots.
The Pajama Nazis have a camp of doppelgängers that I've come to call Basement Bolsheviks, but they haven't had much impact since that camp of idiots doesn't seem useful to anyone with money and power (yet?).
And it is always pretended that the bad guys can only exist on the client side and not on the supervisor side.