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Daniel Pocok blogs about the misguided picture that most people have over social media. These web sites turn out to be an effective means to monitor and control the population. One key point he makes is that the public ignores the ease with which social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, facilitate the effective kettling and surveillance of activists, campaigners, and other groups. He writes:
Facebook helps kettle activists in their arm chair. The police state can gather far more data about them, while their impact is even more muted than if they ventured out of their home.
And further down he asks,
Is somebody who takes pictures of you and insists on sharing them with hundreds of people, tagging your face for the benefit of biometric profiling systems, really a friend?
The addictive nature of these so-called services combined with the network effect make it really hard for people to escape, but the negative aspects really suggest that they should make the effort.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @09:21AM
Of course it requires a certain amount of attention by the general public to underst...
OOOHHH...shiny ponies!!!!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday July 03 2017, @09:31AM (2 children)
People seem to be so nuts to share so much about themselves on social media.
I believe the time is coming up fast they will wish they had been a little more discreet in their exposure online.
I have been seeing reports of the next "wannacry" type of ransomware... except this one isn't after your files... its after YOU!
Doxxing Ransomware! [barkly.com]
Look at this and tell me that if some business sends some javascript or microsoft business document to you, you open it, and get what the linked article refers to.
How much of this crap do we have to take before the public at large starts taking their privacy seriously?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @11:05AM (1 child)
I'd suspect those criminals using that kind of ransomware will find themselves in a much deeper boiling pot before too long compared to the assholes that trick you into running some code then claim their services are a beneficial service. I don't think you can easily say you're doing anything other than blackmail when you're threatening to dox a person and if they infect and dox the wrong person then you'd be surprised how much money can be put into finding the original culprits. (Especially when it ends up being taxpayer dollars)
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 03 2017, @04:33PM
As a demonstration of their prowess and to encourage more payouts, the crooks should publicly release the dox of the big politicians for free.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:02AM
Seriously, it's taken him how long to come to this stunning realisation?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 03 2017, @12:44PM (5 children)
He's making a very generous assumption that said activists would have gotten out of their arm chairs otherwise. I think that is not just in error, but a purely imaginary concern. Anyone that obsessed over Facebook wasn't ever going to get out much. This otherwise reads like a typical more-sophisticated-than-thou screed for which it clearly has a lot of benefit. We don't have enough people telling us that they are smarter. \sarc
As to surveillance, most groups just aren't going to be hard for the surveillance apparatus to investigate, with or without Facebook. Surveillance isn't control. Sure, Big Brother needs surveillance in order to control you, but they need a lot more than that. In contrast, my view is that the ease of organizing groups via these sites more than counters the slightly easier surveillance environment.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Monday July 03 2017, @02:47PM (1 child)
For those of us not familiar with random British slang :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 03 2017, @08:59PM
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kettling only points to a recent US source.
As a Brit - you can have it, I have several words for corralling and otherwise containing, I don't need any more.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @05:25PM (1 child)
Well, that can be annoying, since being more intelligent than the vast majority of people is not very impressive at all given that it's an extremely low bar. When morons blindly allow themselves to be used by massive surveillance engines like Facebook and don't care about the implications this has, it's difficult to think of them as anything more than garbage.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 03 2017, @08:13PM
The problem is that the garbage acts unintentionally like an extension for the surveillance apparatus. So they do need to be contained and shunned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @06:48PM
http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Wort_Souring [milkthefunk.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @02:43PM (4 children)
We've learned that the famous mass action of fifty years ago was fairly effective (though not as much as many of its cheerleaders would have had us believe).
These days mass action that isn't naked violence doesn't seem to do much. It's a photo op for a sympathetic politician who, half the time, achieves nothing much.
The Occupy movement mostly succeeded in convincing themselves that they were totally changing the world, while convincing the rest of the world that they were sad nuts who couldn't organise a dog fight if they had a bitch in heat to get things started.
The Tea Party movement showed up - but then got very politically active off the streets, and had substantial influence.
BLM has largely succeeded at polarising opinion based on their public activities. Actual legislation on holding police more responsible for their actions is presently missing.
The WTO protest group haven't really managed to change the world.
And so on ... kettling people in their airmchairs is not a major change in their effectiveness.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 03 2017, @04:37PM (1 child)
BLM are a bunch of violent shitheads and like Antifa are one of those groups that came out of nowhere, part of Grand Usurper-for-life Baraq Hussein Soetoro's plan to implement a globalist Operation Gladio within the United States. Although there is some degree of control, as with our "moderate rebels" overseas, these people are driven by violence first and ideology is secondary. Fortunately, Trump won, so these groups can no longer stay legitimate by intimidation and labeling everything "racist." Now they're relegated into the shadows and dismissed as jokes.
BLM and Antifa don't have neither leaders or organizers -- they have handlers.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Monday July 03 2017, @05:16PM
I can't help it, but every time I see BLM, I think of the Bureau of Land Management first. Land-use controversies come to mind, with Federal overreach as a theme. Mostly, it's armed standoffs with ranchers, even though there aren't many.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @10:49PM (1 child)
Have you been to a university lately? Or Wikipedia? Or Reddit? Or looked at the HR practices of Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Github, Mozilla, etc? All of that lunatic nonsense that we laughed at when Ketchup brought it out at OWS is mandatory. You have to swear to it or they will kick you out. Tenure does not protect you.
That would be "totally changing the world" and not for the better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @03:25AM
That would be a lot more impressive if it were demonstrably that public mass action movement that both demanded and extracted those concessions.
Instead, that particular goal has been on the public's radar since the days when Hillary Clinton first made "political correctness" a phrase in the public eye, and has been an incremental push ratcheted up by various academic consciousness-raisers since at least the '70s. It was well under way by the time that Occupy occupied anything.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday July 03 2017, @06:19PM
My daughter suggested that I could get more people reading my books, and she was right. My site statistics have risen quite a bit in the last couple of years. It's a great tool for me, but dangerous for most people.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 03 2017, @08:16PM
With more rapidly rising dV/dt there will be less computer phones to work for the surveillance state.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 03 2017, @08:21PM
It's a bit of a long read but well worth it:
My point in writing this snarky little narrative is that it's a bad move to use Twitter, Facebook or the rest to organize. It is one of the worst possible things that any political/social/economic/etc. movement can do, because it means that they're handing extremely useful, real-time, geolocated, correlated, actionable intelligence over to a third party which has, no doubt, long since by subverted not just by agencies of the US government, but by as many other governments as can manage it.
And quite likely by non-governmental entities. If you think about it for a moment, you'll realize that anybody with sufficient power (i.e. money) could do exactly the same things as the mythical dictator of Elbonia. If you think about it for another moment, you should be able to come up with a list of entities that have both the money and the desire to do so.
And this is the point at which you, if you're an activist using those sites, should be sweating. Because it should be dawning on you about now that you have been doing your adversary's intelligence work for them. For free. All they have to do is harvest the results...which is not a particularly challenging problem for any intelligence agency worthy
of that title.
So...if you don't think the Chinese or the Saudis or the Elbonians have a data feed, then you're being highly optimistic. Of *course* they do, it's a completely obvious, highly cost-effective move. As soon as *any* of these so-called "social networks" gets popular enough to matter, it WILL be targeted and while not every country can afford it, and not every country, corporation, or organization will succeed, enough will try and enough will manage it. And if not? They'll try again tomorrow.
And the next day.
So when I see a note from some well-meaning, highly-motivated organization that says "...and follow us on Facebook" I just shake my head slowly. They've not only turned themselves into sharecroppers, but they're doing their best to get their own supporters surveilled, tracked, and much worse.