comment: >
  
  
  The strange thing about dictators, they don't usually want to be open about doing whatever the fuck they want.
  
  Yup. Just look at parts of the Chinese constitution.
  
  Article 35 
  Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
  
  I think we all know how true that is in reality, but they still try to pretend.
context: It'd be a weird irony if the leader of the hacker group got asylum in the US for revealing this. >
  
  His name? Eduard Snegov >
  
  That's hilarious if you know a bit of Russian. Sneg means snow >
  
  Thanks for helping us non russian speakers to get into the joke. >
  
  It was funny without knowing Russian. Now that I know a little more, it's even funnier.  Like a joke onion. >
  
  Snowgres have layers. >
  
  Not everyone like snogres. Proletariat like suffering. Suffering have layers. >
  
  You know what everybody likes? Parfaits. >
  
  You ever meet anybody who said "Hey, I don't like no parfaits", parfaits are delicious! >
  
  “Parfaits may be the most delicious food on the WHOLE DAMN PLANET.” >
  
  The State Duma passes what ever needs to pass, so I doubt its "Illegal" >
  
  It's actually kind of amazing - they can make the law say whatever they want, but they don't even bother and still do illegal stuff left and right >
  
  That's pretty normal for such regimes.
  There is stuff which they can do openly, because it's supported or at least tolerated by many. Then there is stuff where they need some amount of plausible deniability, so their supporters can feign ignorance.  And finally things which has to be kept secret because it's just so obviously indefensible.
  To some extent this even applies to functioning democracies, but our grey areas and scope for actions "beyond the line" tend to be much narrower. The US have expended these with their secret court system past 9/11 (technically the systems existed since the 70s, but their use was much expanded in the War on Terror), but it's still much narrower than in a country like Russia. >
  
  It also makes it much easier to get rid of people you don't like anymore. 
  If everyone is guilty of something you can just throw them in prison if they don't behave like you want. >
  
  The true problem with a surveillance state, it makes it very easy to harass people. One minute apple and Google are leaving backdoors in their OS so the NSA can make sure you don't nuke NYC, the next minute some company in Israel is selling stingrays to police departments and selling software for them to image your phone. Maybe the CIA is sort of professional, only interested in bad guys, but then even if that is somehow possible, your local police officer who didn't finish high school uses one of the 15 billion laws and a loophole to get a warrant to harass people they don't like.
  To me, I hate mass surveillance of course, but I could almost stomach it if, it was exclusively within the domain of the military, with no jurisdiction over citizens, except for maybe a phone call when someone is hurting a child or kidnapped someone or something, not used for political reasons, which is almost impossible to imagine governments doing, as it's very easy to interpret things however you want and call someone a prototerrorist, and stalk and harass people until you catch them doing a crime.
  This is a very hard one, because in modern times you sort of need a secret service to kind of keep tabs on organized crime, foreign influence and stuff. Sometimes you need people to just be able to assassinate leaders of organized crime without it being public, so they don't have to endanger themselves. Yet somehow you have to keep politics out of this. You have to make sure someone has an actual legitimate reason to lay eyes on someone's personal information. I don't trust FISA courts, I don't trust the court system at all tbh, but definitely not secret courts. This is kind of one of the benefits of having a military that's seperate from the police. The military is easier to isolate from politics, and since they don't have power to act as law enforcement, they can kind of do the antiterrorism role better as long as they don't leak information, outside of protecting children or something, to the police. 
  In the future AI may be able to do it better, and have less fuck ups and leaks, and actually respect people's rights properly. Have a defanged police force that is concerned with protecting the community, and having a powerful military to protect the country as a whole, while still actually respecting people's rights and privacy, not storing data, etc. >
  
  Something adjacent to this domain was posted on HN just yesterday; it’s a pretty interesting read called ‘Disney without Data’. >
  
  Sorry, what’s HN? >
  
  Hacker News, ran by the YCombinator startup accelerator (they helped Reddit evolve into what it is today).   
  In format, it’s like Reddit but different in that the site isn’t gamified to increase engagement because it’s just an extension of the companies goals at launching startups and getting tech workers together to assist to that end. It’s not just aimed at tech workers - but there is a lot of content in that domain. The articles and discussion are usually more in-depth as well. Definitely recommend checking it out. >
  
  Do you have a link to it please? >
  
  A worldwide surveillance disclosure slapfight might actually do us some good. >
  
  It's all in the open already. Snowden proved people just don't seem to care. >
  
  The apathetic "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care?" mentality out in full force. >
  
  Isn't apathetic more like "I can't do anything anyway, why should I care" ? >
  
  It's both, apathy is the not caring part. >
  
  Teacher: I can't tell if you're ignorant or just apathetic.
  Student: I don't know, and I don't care. >
  
  "Giving up your right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is like giving up your freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." >
  
  It's Russia. They have no rights at all and are just serfs serving Tsar Vladimir and his genocidal war machine. >
  
  Technically they do have rights. Just when you have 1 man in charge with no opposition, he tells the judges what decisions to make regardless or has the people he does not like sent straight to jail or made to disappear.
  The strange thing about dictators, they don't usually want to be open about doing whatever the fuck they want. They need to feel respected as well as feared, and in their minds this means making laws that should help the people (and then disregarding the laws because they don't help you).