I keep wondering if there’s some kind of positive correlation between prestige of an institution and level of immaturity and fragility going on.
Look, I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever, but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building) in a publicly accessible space on a private university unusual or alarming?
I thought every university had this, but I guess I’m now learning that my university wasn’t prestigious enough to be exempted from reality.
My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
Keep in mind that pretty much 100% of schools this size have assaults take place every single year on school grounds, in a country where school shootings happen on a literal weekly basis.
> Look, I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever
Kinda sounds like you are, though.
> but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building)
The article notes 6-7 cameras per floor of one particular building. I'm not sure of the size of each floor of that particular building, so 6-7 cameras per floor may cover very little space, or it may cover a lot. That also says nothing about the coverage in other buildings. Larger buildings probably got more cameras.
Either way, often these sorts of things are set up in phases, with higher concentrations of cameras added later, after the system proves itself as useful.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
There's a big difference between your bog-standard security camera that just records footage to a hard drive somewhere, and these cameras, that send live feeds to an AI company, where the video is presumably automatically indexed to allow administrators to effortlessly track people's movements. The AI company may (now or in the future) offer real-time alerts of "suspicious activity", which as we all should know by now probably will have a very high false-positive rate. (But cops will treat alerts as gospel without doing any critical thinking.)
There were a lot of things in the article I didn’t take at face value due to the obviously non-neutral point of view of the faculty.
For example, why would I assume that MIT is going to violate Massachusetts law and record audio? The cameras possessing microphone hardware is irrelevant if the software doesn’t turn on audio recording.
As you alluded to, 6-7 cameras per floor might be a lot or might not be. I would think it’s not that many: you’re probably getting two to cover stairwells, one for the elevator, one or two to cover a corridor. As soon as a corridor has a bend or runs a certain distance you’re getting another camera. We’re basically at 4 cameras minimum for the smallest multi-story building possible.
> No. The security cameras do not record audio. Massachusetts law prohibits recording audio without the knowledge of those being recorded. Additionally, we do not use facial recognition technology with our security cameras.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
Security cameras are incredibly typical. Having cameras that record _audio_ are not, and having cameras whose audio and video recordings are handed over to an AI company is _absolutely_ not typical.
Many cameras include microphones that the user has no intention of enabling. These are like that, since they're in a state where no-consent audio recording is illegal.
No audio recordings are made or handed over to anyone. Handing video over to a service provider to do things like weapons detection is not uncommon and not inherently a privacy problem. It's done in hospitals today.
Based on the article I really didn’t feel like I could assume that they were really recording audio. I had a hard time believing that MIT was violating state law.
Yeah as a non-American I can understand why it might be that way, but I think you should understand that globally this is not normal and is indicative of deep problems
If you're taking cameras in high schools because of school shootings as your baseline of normality, you probably need to calibrate a little differently
> in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building) in a publicly accessible space on a private university unusual or alarming?
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
I don't think such a handful of cameras means the same thing today as it meant in e.g. the 00s. Lots of things have changed, the government, the politics, the culture, the technical possibilities.
> Lots of things have changed, the government, the politics
This reads like you're saying "When [Good Party] were in charge, they would have always done the right thing, but now [Bad Party] is in charge so we need to handicap the government (perhaps only temporarily, until we get in charge again).
More compelling would be "Doesn't matter if it's a Bernie Sanders Socialists supermajority or a Trump MAGA government, the government shouldn't be allowed to have such-and-such power."
No, I mean that before, the video would've led to a closet where maybe someone was occasionally paying attention, the footage just recorded in a loop, new overwriting old, and it would only be accessed upon request when an incident happen. The matter would be handled internally; people would use their heads.
Now, surveillance can be automated and centralized. Who knows where that footage is being taken. It's not longer necessarily the school handling its matters internally. They can just offload that and accept the judgment of an algorithm. Maybe you're holding a Doritos bag and that results in police swarming you and almost killing you for fear that it was a gun.
> Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon
Re: government and politics, maybe you fear your government is heading towards authoritarianism, something that would've never crossed your mind in the 00s, and that makes more conscious of surveillance. You've also become more conscious about Facebook and Palantir, etc, and how mass surveillance is a thing that's quite different from regular surveillance (handful of buildings, handled manually and autonomously).
It's not about what party. I don't think another Republican candidate would've had the same effect.
Your high school has responcibilities over minors and the video never gets seen except when an incident is reported. Do you think office spaces or libraries need face tracking and ai cataloging surveillance too?
To me that is no different than having someone follow me and everyone else around and writing a report on all my daily activities and submitting it to arbitrary self-appointed authority.
No because its not the purpose. The purpose is to reduce risk by having accountability assignment to things like demonstrations that hurts the funding of the institution.
There was a bunch of anti-Israel stuff for example, which goes against the alignment of the university donors. In order to be able to assign accountability and prevent reoccurrence of such events, its useful to know who did these things so you can take necessary measures.
A bunch of cameras cost much much less than what stopped funding would cost the university, so it's the rational choice.
Of course it won't. It never has. The people making these decisions and profiting from them will be long gone, even if it ends up hurting the university (which it won't)
Have you seen the current US administration? The country isn’t even remotely close to have that discussion, you’re lucky the failed insurrectionist, rapist hasn’t yet made public universities illegal via an executive order (yes that would be absurd, they don’t care)
You do have to put some effort into understanding crime and prosecution figures though.
Was it actually flock that saw the cratering of car breakins in 2024 - or was it the increase in successful prosecutions following the passing of SB 905 which closed the "locked door loophole" ?
How would a camera stop a break in? All that does it catch it on camera. So many celebrities and rich people all have top of the line security systems connected to rapid response patrols already stationed in the neighborhood to get there faster than police. They still get robbed, and they get to watch a video after of people dressed in all black rifle through their possessions and get out in 3 minutes driving away in a stolen car.
> have set into motion a plan to cancel our subscriptions to 700+ academic journals integral to our research and teaching.
ehh, this part is a weak take. All universities should cancel their journal subscriptions because journal publishers are parasites. Lots of other things are done by universities in collaboration with each other, without allowing some random for-profit company to collect rents. Publications should be one of them.
Thank you. His memory is importantly to me and helped frame how I see freedom and civil authority. I still make mistakes on this tiny hand held platform.
I was also thinking of Aaron. I was just getting into the tech world and found HN around the time that happened. It definitely helped shaped my opinions for many years to come.
There is an effectively unlimited supply of people willing to take sums of money to work on anti-human endeavors, so long as they and theirs are not the humans involved.
This is wildly off-topic but what does patriotism even mean anymore? What would you say was the last time someone in a position of power sacrificed themselves for the good of the country? vs. sacrificing the country for the good of themselves, which I can assure you was within the last 48 hours?
Excellent examples, but it unfortunately proves the point: 2018 was the last time you can say someone even somewhat arguably sacrificed themselves for the good of the country. 8 years later we "patriots" pay 7% for mortgages and $7 for diesel as Don Jr. and Hunter enrich themselves on crypto scams and sicko laptop media tours.
A fascinating read, and very timely, thank you for sharing. If ever there was an argument against “too many people would have to keep quiet” this is it. Sickening.
Not that i disagree, but at the time these people were called traitors to their nation by people who claim to be patriots. I guess it all depends whose interests your patriotism defends, which is why patriotism as a concept/value is not really useful.
The patriots who want leakers in prison think it means securing the existence and power of their country no matter what, even if their own citizens suffer. The other side wants to protect their people from any harm, including the government and police if they act wrong.
Some people care about America and others about Americans.
And Hitler said he was just defending his country from the evil invaders. Bad people always have excuses and if they're good at being bad, they have excuses that work well.
That is traditionally thought of as the line between Patriotism and Nationalism. One often used example is that a patriot wants what is good for the country, while a nationalist wants what makes the country look good. Patriots will do things that make their country look bad if it improves the country or helps the people within it, nationalists will avoid doing that and rather wave the flag and try to hide the problem.
However I wouldn't call anything on the American political right patriotic and even their Nationalism appears hollow, as many of their political measures actively hurt the standing and appearance of the Nation. If anything they are just marks of a political grift.
Patriotism is the attachment one feels toward one’s homeland.
Personally, the place where I grew up: the geography, people, and culture are permanently etched into my identity. So, yes in a sense it is brainwashing - but driven by biology.
Unfortunately, the rulers always want to deconstruct individuals and groups into fungible mechanical parts that can be used by the machine that continues their reign and authority.
Yes, I can separate myself from my past, but it sure doesn’t feel good. Why do we continue to sacrifice the life satisfaction of the small and weak to only give greater satisfaction to the powerful? Have so many become a product of this corrupted system, that their homelands no longer matter to them?
It is very well studied that the entire concept of “nation”, “homeland” and thus patriotism in the modern way began to develop only at the late 19th century with the adoption of mass media and railways.
Hundreds of thousand of years before this people were loyal to their family (not always) and their community (village, city, craftsmanship, etc.).
If you ever travel to 18th century and ask any ordinary European are they proud to be, say, French or British, they will not get you.
I think we're using different definitions of patriotism. I looked it up, and it said "homeland" not "nation". I think what the parent meant was nationalism. Either way, I don't care about the 'nation' all that much (although constitutional free speech rights are very important - arguably a primary factor of what's holding the world together at this point). But, I definitely care about where I grew up, my homeland.
Of course. The system rewards you so much if you do, and punishes you if you don't (anti-human is where all the money is). May as well point out that there's an unlimited supply of male grasshoppers willing to get their heads bitten off to have sex.
But I imagine there should be only a limited supply of people with both the desire and resources to pay large sums of money to get people to work on anti-human endeavors.
Every time we fit out an office building we cover it 100% in cameras, both internally and externally.
Fact is, stuff happens. For example: we once had a crazed person run inside and start yelling profanities at people for no reason. Then, he denied it and reported us to the police for assaulting him. He got his girlfriend to act as a fake witness.
Having the cameras was a no brainer for legally protecting my staff, we could just pull the footage and show that no one touched him.
Similar protections for when male and female staff are working together alone. They are both protected from false accusations, one from harming the other, and the other from potentially false reports/blackmail that they attempted to do something.
We’ve caught interns stealing petty cash from people’s wallets (before cameras - caught in the act)
Is it sad? Yes. But it’s the world we live in and cameras are cheap. No such smaller incidents since the cameras went up. People behave better when they’re being watched, or at least they think we’re being watched. Nobody has actually watched the footage for months and it rolls over in about a week.
They must really love their security cameras to have decided to start decorating them. The bedazzled cameras are lovely to see. My inner 90's child can't wait to apply sparkly plastic rhinestone to their naked exteriors. What's next? Some fake braids and perhaps a troll doll or two?
Also have to commend whoever is in charge of acronyms for this project. I thought I was the most excessive acronym user, but now having read this article, I'm not!
I respect that the bling protest. I’d respect the writing to another level if they touch on some of the very public incidents that have happened in/around and associated with MIT, where this level of cost/security was even considered in the first place. This would open more dialog around better approaches as well.
I can't help but notice that the cameras emerged on campus around the same time that our generation gained an israel-concious politic and israel-gaza protests started.
Edit: I realize this sounds very conspiratorial and hand-wavey but this is my just my personal anecdote from University of Florida, that the cameras showed up with the protests. There is probably more to university poltics than I am aware of, but my impression is that there is signifigant corruption and adminstrative bloat. A major aspect of college protests was funding wrt Israel. Not that all of my experiences with college have been negative, but I leave with the impression there is something strange in the university system at large.
Definitively must be related to that. My guess is they are worried they might get into trouble if they don't control activism (any expression not in line with the govt.).
Idk about college campuses, cause plenty of them had cameras already, but Israel-Gaza war was precisely the reason Google cracked down so hard on employee expression around 2024.
As context for this article presumably written for an audience of faculty, a few bits of historical MIT culture:
1. MIT prided itself on having minimal rules. Historically, they think rules are barriers to MIT people doing smart things.
2. MIT valued an open campus. Typical example was that at any time of night students could walk into an empty classroom to work on a problem or something.
3. There is a joke that it stands for "Military-Industrial Technology". There have been very close ties to US govt., more than most than most universities. Whatever goes on at a small set of partifcular universities will be seen by some to affect national security. This is in addition to, like other US research universities, suddenly feeling at the mercy of whatever US administration is controlling the purse strings.
4. Overall strong libertarian bent, of the student body and much of the faculty. This affects how you make non-engineering/science/financial/prestige arguments to this audience. (Excepted are administrative staff, more typically having the background of solid liberal arts educations.)
5. (This one is my own observation) MIT student body overall were less aware of societal and world issues, compared to students overall at the university I was at before. If you see demonstrations on certain issues, that might be originating with international students arriving on campus with concerns felt widely in their home countries, rather than the stereotypical general idealism of young college students.
(Aside: I'm surprised by the style of the article, if the audience is broad MIT faculty. The authors seem to be mostly from humanities pockets, so I wonder whether they bounced a draft off some engineering or science professors. Also, although the article might be implying that inhibiting protests is a motivation (not just an incidental effect) of the surveillance, I didn't see the article acknowledge the horrific recent mass-shooting on campus, which would be an obvious motivation. I'm personally highly skeptical of mass surveillance, and I think there are some profound questions for society, so I'd like to see engagement of the broader faculty.)
Are you talking about the professor who got killed at their home in Brookline (horrific, for sure, but not on campus and not really “mass”)? Or do you just mean the one at Brown?
Yes, I was thinking of the whole tragedy together, not wanting to dwell on it, and misspoke. Thank you for catching that.
I assume that the whole incident is also on the minds of those responsible for trying to prevent it from happening again, on any campus. So I'd think the point still stands, about, once you're talking about motivations for campus surveillance, that's one of them.
Editing would be a good idea, but it was already over an hour old before someone pointed out the confusing phrasing, and HN won't let me edit it. Do you agree that the clarifying comments right below it will suffice?
If one got a cheap laser and attached a medium quality rifle scope to it such that you could target the lens from a quarter mile away (or more), what power would you need to permanently blind these? What would be the correct tactics to make sure that you can't be caught doing so (with practice, each shot should take less than 15 seconds to set up and execute, so mostly it's about not being caught on another camera)?
Universities in many countries have traditionally been the place of political change and even revolution.
Always the prime target of intelligence agencies.
From Palestinian flags to ultra conservative incels it's a hotbed of dissent even in tame countries.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadLook, I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever, but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building) in a publicly accessible space on a private university unusual or alarming?
I thought every university had this, but I guess I’m now learning that my university wasn’t prestigious enough to be exempted from reality.
My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
Keep in mind that pretty much 100% of schools this size have assaults take place every single year on school grounds, in a country where school shootings happen on a literal weekly basis.
Kinda sounds like you are, though.
> but in what universe is a handful of cameras (less than 10 per building)
The article notes 6-7 cameras per floor of one particular building. I'm not sure of the size of each floor of that particular building, so 6-7 cameras per floor may cover very little space, or it may cover a lot. That also says nothing about the coverage in other buildings. Larger buildings probably got more cameras.
Either way, often these sorts of things are set up in phases, with higher concentrations of cameras added later, after the system proves itself as useful.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
There's a big difference between your bog-standard security camera that just records footage to a hard drive somewhere, and these cameras, that send live feeds to an AI company, where the video is presumably automatically indexed to allow administrators to effortlessly track people's movements. The AI company may (now or in the future) offer real-time alerts of "suspicious activity", which as we all should know by now probably will have a very high false-positive rate. (But cops will treat alerts as gospel without doing any critical thinking.)
For example, why would I assume that MIT is going to violate Massachusetts law and record audio? The cameras possessing microphone hardware is irrelevant if the software doesn’t turn on audio recording.
As you alluded to, 6-7 cameras per floor might be a lot or might not be. I would think it’s not that many: you’re probably getting two to cover stairwells, one for the elevator, one or two to cover a corridor. As soon as a corridor has a bend or runs a certain distance you’re getting another camera. We’re basically at 4 cameras minimum for the smallest multi-story building possible.
If the capability is there, it will be used, specially since the whole decision process appears to have been rather opaque.
could you read lips with AI?
... but why do you then go on making all pro-surveillance state arguments ?
These are arguments that are put forward in favor of mass-surveillance.
That is in direct contradiction to the claim "I’m not trying to be pro-surveillance state or whatever".
So I was wondering how that contradiction comes about and asked about it.
What would you suggest the charitable reading should be ?
Security cameras are incredibly typical. Having cameras that record _audio_ are not, and having cameras whose audio and video recordings are handed over to an AI company is _absolutely_ not typical.
No audio recordings are made or handed over to anyone. Handing video over to a service provider to do things like weapons detection is not uncommon and not inherently a privacy problem. It's done in hospitals today.
Security cameras on the inside of a high school strikes me as deeply NOT NORMAL
Admittedly it's been many decades since I was at high school. I think some of your metaphorical frogs might be getting boiled here.
1999 - https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Columbine_Shooting_Secur...
2022 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting 2023 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
I could go on ... but most of the school shootings in the us seem pretty well documented on cctv
If you're taking cameras in high schools because of school shootings as your baseline of normality, you probably need to calibrate a little differently
What? Absolutely not! At least not in the countries in which I went to school.
> My high school also had cameras. Isn’t that rather typical?
I don't think such a handful of cameras means the same thing today as it meant in e.g. the 00s. Lots of things have changed, the government, the politics, the culture, the technical possibilities.
This reads like you're saying "When [Good Party] were in charge, they would have always done the right thing, but now [Bad Party] is in charge so we need to handicap the government (perhaps only temporarily, until we get in charge again).
More compelling would be "Doesn't matter if it's a Bernie Sanders Socialists supermajority or a Trump MAGA government, the government shouldn't be allowed to have such-and-such power."
Now, surveillance can be automated and centralized. Who knows where that footage is being taken. It's not longer necessarily the school handling its matters internally. They can just offload that and accept the judgment of an algorithm. Maybe you're holding a Doritos bag and that results in police swarming you and almost killing you for fear that it was a gun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45684934
> Armed police swarm student after AI mistakes bag of Doritos for a weapon
Re: government and politics, maybe you fear your government is heading towards authoritarianism, something that would've never crossed your mind in the 00s, and that makes more conscious of surveillance. You've also become more conscious about Facebook and Palantir, etc, and how mass surveillance is a thing that's quite different from regular surveillance (handful of buildings, handled manually and autonomously).
It's not about what party. I don't think another Republican candidate would've had the same effect.
To me that is no different than having someone follow me and everyone else around and writing a report on all my daily activities and submitting it to arbitrary self-appointed authority.
No that’s completely insane?!
No that’s a completely insane thing to have normalized?!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/
There was a bunch of anti-Israel stuff for example, which goes against the alignment of the university donors. In order to be able to assign accountability and prevent reoccurrence of such events, its useful to know who did these things so you can take necessary measures.
A bunch of cameras cost much much less than what stopped funding would cost the university, so it's the rational choice.
Time will tell. Long term, I think it’ll hurt them.
Security, but at what cost?!
Why do we allow non public universities to exist again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicknames_of_San_Francisco
Was it actually flock that saw the cratering of car breakins in 2024 - or was it the increase in successful prosecutions following the passing of SB 905 which closed the "locked door loophole" ?
ehh, this part is a weak take. All universities should cancel their journal subscriptions because journal publishers are parasites. Lots of other things are done by universities in collaboration with each other, without allowing some random for-profit company to collect rents. Publications should be one of them.
Just a reminder: Carmen Ortiz judicially murdered Aaron Schwartz in order to unsuccessfully launch a political career.
This is wildly off-topic but what does patriotism even mean anymore? What would you say was the last time someone in a position of power sacrificed themselves for the good of the country? vs. sacrificing the country for the good of themselves, which I can assure you was within the last 48 hours?
Some people care about America and others about Americans.
https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/story-trump-insult...
Patriotism, like religion, is used to draw artificial separation between "us" and "them" and initiate violence against "them".
However I wouldn't call anything on the American political right patriotic and even their Nationalism appears hollow, as many of their political measures actively hurt the standing and appearance of the Nation. If anything they are just marks of a political grift.
Personally, the place where I grew up: the geography, people, and culture are permanently etched into my identity. So, yes in a sense it is brainwashing - but driven by biology.
Unfortunately, the rulers always want to deconstruct individuals and groups into fungible mechanical parts that can be used by the machine that continues their reign and authority.
Yes, I can separate myself from my past, but it sure doesn’t feel good. Why do we continue to sacrifice the life satisfaction of the small and weak to only give greater satisfaction to the powerful? Have so many become a product of this corrupted system, that their homelands no longer matter to them?
Hundreds of thousand of years before this people were loyal to their family (not always) and their community (village, city, craftsmanship, etc.).
If you ever travel to 18th century and ask any ordinary European are they proud to be, say, French or British, they will not get you.
Fact is, stuff happens. For example: we once had a crazed person run inside and start yelling profanities at people for no reason. Then, he denied it and reported us to the police for assaulting him. He got his girlfriend to act as a fake witness.
Having the cameras was a no brainer for legally protecting my staff, we could just pull the footage and show that no one touched him.
Similar protections for when male and female staff are working together alone. They are both protected from false accusations, one from harming the other, and the other from potentially false reports/blackmail that they attempted to do something.
We’ve caught interns stealing petty cash from people’s wallets (before cameras - caught in the act)
Is it sad? Yes. But it’s the world we live in and cameras are cheap. No such smaller incidents since the cameras went up. People behave better when they’re being watched, or at least they think we’re being watched. Nobody has actually watched the footage for months and it rolls over in about a week.
Better according to who? Better for what goals?
Also have to commend whoever is in charge of acronyms for this project. I thought I was the most excessive acronym user, but now having read this article, I'm not!
This correction is not an endorsement.
Edit: I realize this sounds very conspiratorial and hand-wavey but this is my just my personal anecdote from University of Florida, that the cameras showed up with the protests. There is probably more to university poltics than I am aware of, but my impression is that there is signifigant corruption and adminstrative bloat. A major aspect of college protests was funding wrt Israel. Not that all of my experiences with college have been negative, but I leave with the impression there is something strange in the university system at large.
I don't think I've seen this descriptive adjective before, but it is brilliant.
MIT may need to establish an endowed chair position for its department of Sauronical Engineering.
1. MIT prided itself on having minimal rules. Historically, they think rules are barriers to MIT people doing smart things.
2. MIT valued an open campus. Typical example was that at any time of night students could walk into an empty classroom to work on a problem or something.
3. There is a joke that it stands for "Military-Industrial Technology". There have been very close ties to US govt., more than most than most universities. Whatever goes on at a small set of partifcular universities will be seen by some to affect national security. This is in addition to, like other US research universities, suddenly feeling at the mercy of whatever US administration is controlling the purse strings.
4. Overall strong libertarian bent, of the student body and much of the faculty. This affects how you make non-engineering/science/financial/prestige arguments to this audience. (Excepted are administrative staff, more typically having the background of solid liberal arts educations.)
5. (This one is my own observation) MIT student body overall were less aware of societal and world issues, compared to students overall at the university I was at before. If you see demonstrations on certain issues, that might be originating with international students arriving on campus with concerns felt widely in their home countries, rather than the stereotypical general idealism of young college students.
(Aside: I'm surprised by the style of the article, if the audience is broad MIT faculty. The authors seem to be mostly from humanities pockets, so I wonder whether they bounced a draft off some engineering or science professors. Also, although the article might be implying that inhibiting protests is a motivation (not just an incidental effect) of the surveillance, I didn't see the article acknowledge the horrific recent mass-shooting on campus, which would be an obvious motivation. I'm personally highly skeptical of mass surveillance, and I think there are some profound questions for society, so I'd like to see engagement of the broader faculty.)
Are you talking about the professor who got killed at their home in Brookline (horrific, for sure, but not on campus and not really “mass”)? Or do you just mean the one at Brown?
I assume that the whole incident is also on the minds of those responsible for trying to prevent it from happening again, on any campus. So I'd think the point still stands, about, once you're talking about motivations for campus surveillance, that's one of them.
From Palestinian flags to ultra conservative incels it's a hotbed of dissent even in tame countries.
Not sure what the serial-number looking acronym is about.
The acronym is real. Google it. I know it's absurd and stupid, but that's the point.