The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List

https://drive.google.com/file/d/106LQoUzt-41OMt4ssyizwIMNUjn893f4/view

by DyslexicAtheist • 7 years ago

176 118 7 years ago

drive.google.com

sdan• 7 years ago

Mirror in case Drive crashes: https://sdan.cc/archive/CoS4%20Reading%20List.pdf

philshem• 7 years ago

here's another mirror _in case drive crashes_

https://gist.github.com/philshem/71507d4e8ecfabad252fbdf4d9f...

vorpalhex• 7 years ago

Could also be labeled "Meta-Surveillance: How to make a list of everyone interested in Surveillance" given that it's hosted as a google drive document instead of _any other sane format in the world_.

testuser66• 7 years ago

It's a PDF.

ForHackernews• 7 years ago

Hosted on Google drive for some reason. It'd be interesting to see what inferences Google makes about people accessing files on g-drive.

cousin_it• 7 years ago

I know what PDFs look like, they don't have my Google account in the upper right corner. It's a Google page wrapped around a PDF.

DyslexicAtheist• 7 years ago

or those who shared it simply wanted to distribute this to anyone who participated in the event (this reading list seems to be a follow-up deliverable):

https://lawweb.colorado.edu/events/details.jsp?id=8376

and

https://twitter.com/alvarombedoya/status/1168933978029678592...

fwiw, there is no need to authenticate with google to download the pdf (tor works fine too if anyone is too paranoid).

dalore• 7 years ago

There is no need true, but if clicked and was logged into google, they now know. True I should have use an incognito but the point is there.

rhizome• 7 years ago

Your ISP knows what IP you use, and Google has your ISP's phone number.

paggle• 7 years ago

The signal value of “being exposed to a link about surveillance and clicking it” is pretty darn low. Unless you’re in North Korea I wouldn’t worry about it.

hackerbrother• 7 years ago

? It's a cheap way to host a file

jascii5• 7 years ago

given that it's hosted as a google drive document

While an amusing irony, the reality is that -- without special measures -- 99% of content either is hosted on or routed through infrastructure owned by companies with less than stellar history regarding privacy..

brenden2• 7 years ago

Kind of amusing that this PDF is hosted on Google's servers, given that Google is running the largest surveillance operation in history.

user764743• 7 years ago

That would be the NSA, which I guess is the same thing.

gpm• 7 years ago

Heh, I missed the first ' and parsed the title as

    (The Color of Surveillance): ([Monitoring of] [Poor and Working Peoples Reading List])

instead of

    '([The Color of Surveillance]: [Monitoring of Poor and Working People])' [Reading List]

but I suppose the latter is partially about the former anyways.

cgranier• 7 years ago

Same here. Initially thought this was about libraries monitoring what poor people read.

dang3• 7 years ago

Yes, that was confusing. I've repunctuated above.

hirundo• 7 years ago

In the hands of the Chinese government being on such a list could get you sent to a reeducation camp. The US isn't there yet, but "yet" does too much work here. If you ever wonder why pro-gun folk are so adamantly against gun registration, remember the yet. If 1A won't hold, 2A through 10A likely won't either.

shadowgovt10• 7 years ago

Because I'm sure in the context of a revolution, the American gun owners would be super hard to identify.

How closely does the NRA guard its donor list, or Guns & Ammo its subscription roster?

satokema_work• 7 years ago

You might find the extreme gun fanatics this way, but for every one of those there are dozens that just have a regular weapon in the closet for emergencies and don't advertise it whatsoever. (At least in some jurisdictions, may vary based on your location)

madengr2• 7 years ago

Hell, they sell those lists. Though just because you are on those lists, does not make you the typical “gun nut”; FWIW I fall in that gun nut category.

The “I lost them in a boating accident” won’t work when they zip tie you to a chair and start cutting off body parts.

homonculus13• 7 years ago

Granularity matters. Anyone can find my phone number in the book, but when the government tracks and analyzes exactly who I'm calling it becomes an invasion of privacy and an existential threat to free society.

4ntonius8lock7• 7 years ago

What prey, would you do with the list of 5.5 million gun owners? Basically, 4% of US adults.

jascii5• 7 years ago

And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to organize.

I would argue that in the modern world strong encryption and other safeguards against surveillance much more worthy of of 2A protection than firearms..

madengr2• 7 years ago

Totally agree on the encryption, but why not both? They don’t need a quantum computer to get your 1024 bit key; a pipe wrench will work fine. I need a gun in the latter case.

Guns do work. You may end up dead, but you’ll take some with you.

Spooky232• 7 years ago

The pen is mightier than the sword.

Guns themselves are pretty useless except as ways to make a few people rich. The "revolution" against the powerful nation state are the tools of propaganda and discord. Enemies can manipulate our political system and the powerful forces of self-interest and partisanship fog the battlefield.

The aura of power associated with guns is literal bread and circus that keeps people angry and ignorant. There's a fantasy that some sort of popular revolt is a viable thing. It's not, and that's been demonstrated time and time again.

This sort of thing is a big part of the limits of US power today... there's nobody to blow up. We're equipped to fight the ultimate WW2, but that arsenal cannot be directly focused on a nuclear power. The United States has the most powerful and capable military that has ever existed, but like any tool, it isn't so effective in solving problems outside of it's scope.

rsync• 7 years ago

"I find it interesting to observe that most 2A defenders are totally willing to support bills funding their potential adversaries and limiting your ability to organize."

I think this is a salient point and I appreciate you making it.

"And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?"

I am tempted to point your attention to the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu[1] where, poor, badly organized militia members armed with what, I think, could be characterized as "pea shooters"[2] held off the full force of the US Military in a warzone.

However I don't think that's a productive discussion because it easily gets bogged down by tactical details and it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison, etc. (although I encourage you to read about it).

Instead, I would simply say that I expect repressive, authoritarian behavior by states to expand to fit whatever vacuum is available and the presence of an armed populace places a ceiling on how far that reach will go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mogadishu_(1993)

[2] Shitty AKs and old, Russian RPGs.

tenpies• 7 years ago

And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

We should ask the Vietnamese and Afghans.

virmundi• 7 years ago

You are correct. Small arms have never stopped the US in the past. Afghan war they all had nukes. Same with Vietnam. Small arms are not enough. The large geographic challengers of the US military holding the entire US won’t help the civilians either. It is best to disarm now.

blockmarker• 7 years ago

People have this idea that gun owners would stand in an empty field shooting at tanks with their handguns, and whoever won in that field battle would win the control of the country, which is quite silly. First, if enough gunmen rose up, the US would be ruined, and the tyranny with it. Sure, they can bomb any rebelling city, but those rebelling cities are their cashcows. Enough of those destroyed and the tyranny is less profitable than freedom; too many of those destroyed and the country as a whole is ruined. Even if the factories are not ruined, big population losses would be equally bad.

Or they can do terrorism. Assassinations, sabotage of infraestructure. Tyrants live somewhere, and they send their children to school. Collaborators(which probably would be civil servants, police and the army) also need to sleep somewhere and have children and family. They could just be shot while going home, or killed by IEDs while patrolling. Infraestructure is much easier to destroy than to repair. Killing the power grid or destroying a bridge hurts the rebellion as much or more than it does the dictatorship, but I don't think they would care much.

Having guns is also a great detterent to creeping tyranny(well, at least when the guns owners care enough to do something). If every overreach was met with hundreds of thousands of angry people with guns on Washington, they would stop overreaching.

I agree that it is quite foolish that these people support things which actually work against them, but do not understimate what hundreds of thousands of angry gunmen could do. Even if they didn't win, they would ruin the US. And making tyranny less profitable than liberty is a good protection against it.

NotATroll• 7 years ago

And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

Kill and intimidate people. This a serious question?

Yeah, in an all out war it's not likely to work. But an all out war against your armed citizenry also isn't likely to happen.

Politicians are still people. They too, can fear being at the wrong end of a barrel.

Which no, isn't some kind of veiled threat. But more an important point that politicians, just like everyone, also tend to want to live & sleep peacefully at night. It's not in their self-interests to make such a move.

What's far more likely to happen is what's already happening/happened. The erosion of various rights, and the militarization of the police force.

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

How do you say "make controlling you economically untenable" in Pashto or "bomb your way to the negotiating table" in Irish?

It's not about winning, it's about making tyranny expensive and unattractive. Insurgency is basically a bloody tax on doing something that a large enough subset of the populace finds sufficiently objectionable. The more armed the populace the higher the tax rate.

4ntonius8lock7• 7 years ago

My grandfather was part of the Danish resistance.

Him and his 'pea shooters' caused nasty losses to the Natzies, and ended up saving quite a few people.

The 'pea shooters' of Russian peasants (together with acquaintance of the local terrain) took down Napoleon.

A few guys with 'pea shooters' in America even founded a country!

gerbilly• 7 years ago

It would be a tough fight for sure, and let's hope it never comes to that, but look at what insurgents in Vietnam/Irak were able to do against the us military with scarce resources.

dang3• 7 years ago

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21648271 and marked it off-topic.

gwenter• 7 years ago

The title is quite confusing. Maybe a moderator could improve it... The content is good.

grsrvs2vu29• 7 years ago

Raw pastebin of the PDF contents here (Google Docs/PDF lol) so even those of us with JS off can view it.

https://pastebin.com/raw/baHYyHyX

puggo• 7 years ago

Wait, poor working people read?

dmix3• 7 years ago

Every time I hear that term it's typically university students (and their professors or related groups, in this case Georgetown Law) co-opting that label and projecting their ideology on an idealized group of people whom they don't have much in common with (besides some vague anger at society and elites) - yet are convinced they know what's best for them... often pushing mass centralized systems as the solution.

Systems that these same people will just happen to control and then later the 'vanguard' never actually gives up said power to the working poor. This story has repeated itself in history a bunch of times and it continues to.

dang3• 7 years ago

Lists don't make good HN submissions, because the discussion ends up being about the lowest common denominator of the items on the list, making it generic instead of specific. Generic discussions are less interesting because there are fewer unpredictable things to say. When threads turn generic, they become repetitions of previous discussions, and usually turn nasty, almost as if that's what the mind turns to for amusement in the absence of new things to chew on.

It's better to pick the most interesting item on a list and submit that. Curiosity thrives on the diffs between a new thing and other related things.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

4ntonius8lock7• 7 years ago

It's a shame, because some of those links are really interesting.

If they only included a little bit of a narrative, they could easily make those links take on new meaning. Maybe even mixing examples of old with new (like the surveillance and terrible abuses toward labor leaders in the 19th century)

I think the list is a good starting point for something a little more cohesive.

The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List

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