The French government has recently arrested and detained Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram. The alleged offence is that the messaging app is not policing and governing what it’s users do. So a national government has kidnapped and demands that the CEO give up access to the app. Currently Telegram is used to get information out of Gaza, with many on the ground reporting from the Palestinian side. It is also where most of the accurate reporting from both Russian and Ukrainian sources can be found from that ongoing war as individuals are sharing information and personal ordeals. It has been the pipeline of the common person on the ground from various conflict zones the world over.
As Dave DeCamp reports on Antiwar.com, Durov had been previously approached by the Russian government who wanted access to his platform. The US also had attempted to pressure Telegram to give up information on its users and supply them with the data that it may have. Fortunately Durov’s Telegram and apps like Signal remain free of such intrusions and the prying self interest of national governments, for now.
In the old days of the internet, this would have been widely viewed as a good thing, various perspectives and access to information from those witnessing events. PRIVACY. To have ones data and privacy respected. To not be spied on. To not have ones data sold, shared, intercepted, monitored and potentially edited or censored. PRIVACY. In 2024, the internet is no longer a frontier but rather a place of corporate and government jurisdictions where YOU are the product and are to be governed. It’s a permissive world.
“Won’t somebody think of the children!”
The world is harsh, horrible and nature wants to eat or poison you. Attempting to make everything G rated is idiotic. Hoping to destroy every liberty under the pretence that some may be offended or in an attempt to deny nefarious actors the ability to do evil things is an impulse of hubris. In fact it is offensive to be so offended that freedom itself must be curtailed and prohibited. And for those claiming to care about children, let’s not forget that governments are currently intentionally starving and murdering scores of children. Most “smart” and “renewable” technology is made abundant in the opulent welfare states of the West because children in the poor nations recycle and mine the rare Earth so that you can constantly upgrade your toys. It’s where pollution is exported to the poorest.
Ross Ulbrycht, the inventor of the website Silkroad, remains in prison. It was alleged that assassins and drug dealers used his platform. Those interested should look into his case and the corrupt and unjust process the US government agents used to get him convicted. He invented a media platform so that others could use it freely. Freedom is illegal. The real crime was that individuals may have made money without the taxman knowing,government people not like.
“Won’t somebody think of the children!”
Everything on the internet needs to be child friendly, in case a childrenperson walks into the room or needs to be so policed in case someone is doing a bad thing to a child. Under this fear all platforms can be brow beaten and bullied into complying with child killing governments. Because the monopoly on child abuse is sacred. Therefore privacy violated and censorship mandated across the board. Soon everything online will be Mr Beast and we know how much his origanisation loves children.
Any intimate message you may have sent to a lover, perhaps you have a personal conversation with a family member or need to spitball ideas among work colleagues. The devious eyes, ears and minds of government agents are magically omnipotent enough to be privy to such communications. Like human gods, the State has deemed itself and those who make it function the ultimate deity, it must know all. Remember when the lie of liberal democracy was that the government worked for the people, so much so that the people constantly lose their rights at the expense of the governments paranoia so that it can continue to serve the people. Whoever or whatever “the people” is, I am yet to know. Perhaps some day it may be AI that polices the net will serve a government master as easily as the ideological or monetarily motivated currently do. Then the AI may better know how to serve the people.
The argument is always that surveillance will be used to find terrorists and child sex traffickers. The great monsters that most can appreciate as being a threat. When the Israeli government and the company NSO developed Pegasus spyware, it was used by those governments that purchased it to predominately go after human rights activists and journalists. The pretence is always that child rapists and terrorists are the target, instead it’s those who dare to report on government corruption, abuse and murder. Those who would report on the rape and murder of children are likely to suffer from such surveillance rather than those doing the raping and murdering.
Whatever the platform or lack of platform, terrorists and child predators will lurk. Making every person suffer a regime of spying under the promise that these parties will be stopped is a lie of arrogant assumptions or blatant deception. Given that governments often dump child exploitation material into cyberspace, running their own websites in an attempt to entrap and “catch” pedos. The FBI itself became the worlds largest child porn distributor. I doubt that any of the victims in the released material gave their permission. But because a government did it, it’s not a bad thing?
The fascinating thing about government is that it’s apparently magical moral, when it blows up houses full of families, it’s righteous in doing so. It can distribute child porn, and it’s agents may view such content that an ordinary person would be jailed for doing. Remember that government lady who had thousands of dick pics that she had collected at work from her job of prying into peoples personal accounts or the cops who distribute USB’s of naked girls, taken from their phones when arrested? It’s alright cos gods.
Social media already has to succumb to the whims of various national governments allowing them to perve inside of your DM’s. To peruse your conversations and do with it as they please. When the depictions of East German secret police vans driving down streets with listening devices was viewed as vile. When dystopian fictions envisioned a world of no privacy, the State a supreme overlord of everything in your life, it was understood to be evil, to be wrong. Now, it’s 2024 and seemingly welcomed, desired or maybe just accepted. Vote One for more government!
“I have nothing to hide,”mumbles the indifferent. Those who trust and believe in the status quo. The ability to pause, delay and edit messages also exist, so soon it won’t matter what you do or do not do. It will be up to those who invent and interrupt the evidence to decide. Perhaps some day nothing we witness through the screen can be trusted, or should be trusted. Either way, most will remain indifferent or care little. Those who work in government will shrug so long as they are paid and get that pension. The powerful monopoly has the monopoly on your privacy. Not just the local national government that taxes you and regulates your day to day, but those in foreign lands to. It’s a globalised spy ring.
The funny thing about those of us who think coercion is wrong, any form of it. Including when the magical government does it. One is ridiculed as being Utopian. Naive. Maybe that is true. The flipside, is that in not opposing such a thing, we inevitably end up in a dystopia. The union between well meaning intentions and the cynically apathetic who serve any master for pay make it possible. My solace is in knowing that dystopia’s are more like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil rather than anything Huxley or Orwell conjured up. You see, despite all of the putrid intrusions and murderous mercenaries, they are incompetent. While it will kill and imprison many, beneath all that paperwork and debt and hubris its a big fuckup. A clumsy, bloated, corrupt pile of shit that threatens, bribes, murders and steals. It functions because it bribes, for every true believer are scores who would do near anything for money. A jobs a job. It’s made up of people and if they are not ashamed of themselves for what they make possible, then the rest of us should be ashamed of them what they do. Few will own what they are complicit in and anyone who dare speak out, won’t even have a shadow to whisper in.
But please, won’t somebody think of the children.
