I can just imagine the conversations inside the NSA - about how this is a bloodless way to destabilise their enemies and bring down those who might hurt America. It's certainly kinder than blowing people up with drones, and probably produces less blowback. After all, you're using people's own hypocrisy against them.
But this isn't necessarily a weapon restricted to foreign soil or only bad people. The fact is that a lot of famous people have different public personas to their private selves. Who's to say elections can't be rigged this way, or election winners blackmailed?
I think this is increasingly an issue about how we regulate the watchers. In a media-centred age, being the gatekeeper of privacy is a position of immense power.
There's also another, parallel question, of course: should society continue blaming people for having hypocritical private lives? Maybe after a lot of NSA-led outings, Facebook photo exposures, sackings for what people write on bulletin boards, etc, we'll one day allow people to be complex and multifaceted.
I think it will certainly be used against citizens for non-security purposes. They're already restricted by the Constitution from doing what they're doing, they're already violating their charter to only spy on foreigners and mass collecting domestic everything. Of course they're going to turn this against non-threatening citizens; they're probably doing it now.
> should society continue blaming people for having hypocritical private lives?
No, we all have something to hide, from someone's point of view. I'm an atheist, which probably wouldn't have played well in John Ashcroft's Justice Department. He did, after all, order a curtain to cover the statue of Lady Justice and its somewhat traditional single bared breast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Department_o...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 12.5 ms ] threadBut this isn't necessarily a weapon restricted to foreign soil or only bad people. The fact is that a lot of famous people have different public personas to their private selves. Who's to say elections can't be rigged this way, or election winners blackmailed?
I think this is increasingly an issue about how we regulate the watchers. In a media-centred age, being the gatekeeper of privacy is a position of immense power.
There's also another, parallel question, of course: should society continue blaming people for having hypocritical private lives? Maybe after a lot of NSA-led outings, Facebook photo exposures, sackings for what people write on bulletin boards, etc, we'll one day allow people to be complex and multifaceted.
> should society continue blaming people for having hypocritical private lives?
No, we all have something to hide, from someone's point of view. I'm an atheist, which probably wouldn't have played well in John Ashcroft's Justice Department. He did, after all, order a curtain to cover the statue of Lady Justice and its somewhat traditional single bared breast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Department_o...