Pandora’s iPhone, by Stuart Carlson, 2016. Still spot-on in 2026:
A backdoor for the good guys simply does not exist. Once you build it, hackers walk through, authoritarian governments walk through, and the rest follows.
The UK is pressuring for chat control right now. EU Chat Control initiatives keep popping up. We need to keep saying NO to this!
“Authoritarian governments” as if the US is isn’t exactly fucking that
Authoritarian? The US currently even outscored North Corea.
Outscored where? Based on what?
On repressive policy
I’m not saying I don’t believe the US has repressive policies, but I am questioning any source that claims to have detailed enough info about NK internal policy to accurately rank them compared to other countries
The thing is, being repressive becomes more and more expensive past a certain point. It’s not cheap being the prison capital of the world or building a surveillance state. The US is one of the only countries that can even afford to do as much repression as it does.
That’s why we use our prison population for slave labor, helps to offset the cost!
Maybe to some extent, but prison slavery only provides about $9 billion in services and produces over $2 billion in goods annually.
For comparison, the total cost of the U.S. prison system is approximately $445 billion annually.
Absolutely correct! Tbf I did say it helps to offset the cost, not that it’s anywhere near profitable
Sure, but that’s why we are the only country in the world to charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day for the privilege of being in prison, on top of the price gouging for basic services.
According to?..
I think it’s more like a “protest the regime and have a 50+% chance of getting executed for it” thing
Something which the good people at Radio Free Asia have assured me is totally real and definitely happens
And the odds of getting killed at a protest here are what, only 30%? Bullshit. It’s a propaganda thing, the US has always been a violent repressive menace to world peace.
The odds of getting killed at a protest aren’t 30%. If that were true we would have hundreds of thousands dead each year.
Allow me to facetiously talk about the US the way people from this country typically talk about the DPRK:
How do we know they don’t kill hundreds of thousands of protestors a year? The repressive
governmentregime hides any information that makes it look bad, such as job reports, climate reports, and war casualties. They’ve got concentration camps all over and people dissappear all the time. There’s just no way we can trust their numbers.Based on what? Statistics provided by the same government we’re talking about?
It’s a ridiculous claim. If it were 30%, even just off anecdotal data from social media, people you know at work, friends, you would hear about tons of people dying. I’ve been to numerous protests, I would have personally seen dozens to thousands of people dead.
And the 50% claim I’m responding to is no less ridiculous or baseless, the difference in how people respond to them is pure chauvinism
You said, “And the odds of getting killed at a protest here are what, only 30%? Bullshit. It’s a propaganda thing, the US has always been a violent repressive menace to world peace.”
The U.S. has done many reprehensible things. But I’m talking about your specific claim that the odds of getting killed at a protest in the U.S. are 30%, which is false.
Learn to read dumbass
Can argue with ml
Public forum discussions aren’t just about persuading the person you’re interacting with directly, they’re about persuading every single person who reads that interaction for as long as it exists. The only reason not to try is because you suspect you’ll come out of it looking worse to observers, not just losing the argument with one person but inadvertently reinforcing their position to third parties and popularizing their views over your own.
I pray you understand I’m trying to create a picture that’s comprehensible for the average. ml user here
What you think/claim you’re doing doesn’t matter at all, this is presenting the US federal government as less of a threat to our privacy than some other “repressive regime” somewhere else in the world and that’s 100% bullshit
Ah yes those people worried about getting executed for opposing their government face the same threat as someone in the US worried for their privacy
One struggle
People in the US are summarily executed by law enforcement without consequence, pretty well documented actually
Are they legally executing people protesting the government at a comparable rate to, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia?
Definitely higher than Iran, possibly lower than Saudi Arabia lol
Black Panthers, BLM organizers, anti ICE protestors
And how many of those are they executing /day?
“Oh yeah well it’s not happening every day” dude it’s fine that there are groups of people in the US who fear execution by their government who you forgot about. Nobody remembers everyone all the time, but it’s weird to get argumentative and start moving goalposts about it.