Chat control
(midwest.social)
PrivacyPandora'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!
This illustration is completely wrong.
The man representing hackers isn't in a fur suit.
Love the weird scale of threat depicted here.
-smol bean megacorporation
-regular bean fbi man
-Big Hacker, the big hacker lobbyist
-giant evil FOREIGNER with their evil UNIFORM and MEDALS
-ect, other guys, artist kind of blew his load drawing all those evil medals
Like the scale implies I should be most worried about the biggest guy, but I live in America. The feds are the biggest threat to me. You can tell this wasn't drawn by a leftist because...well, almost everything, but mostly because of how normal they seem to think the FBI is, and how small a deal being spied on by them apparently is compared to being spied on by someone that doesn't have the capacity to send a death squad to my apartment at any moment.
That's only because the FBI guy and the Oppressive Regime guy have become the same guy
Astronaut behind astronaut, Always have been
Yeah the choice of scale is very weird, why are hackers larger than the FBI? Also doesn't really seem mutually exclusive
Because whoever made this (natively) trusts their government
Should be "scammers" not "hackers".
Oh shit not the ETC
As far as threats go, I would swap FBI and Hackers.
that’s a good image to convey the message to people propagandized by the us, but yes, "fbi" and "repressive regimes" are one and the same here
your domestic government poses much more of a threat to your privacy than some foreign "repressive regime" far away
I took it as “repressive regime” to mean the administration itself, (not some foreign government), as in more normal times the fbi was a separate entity. And would even investigate the president for crimes. But given the current consolidation of power and that checks and balances have been compromised, I suppose the distinction is moot now.
The FBI and others have had the open back door to iPhones for years.
The world is so vast and complicated, you just cant comprehend what good things your representatives are trying to do for you with your simple, tired, working class, simple brain.
Its hard work running a government, not that you would ever know because youre not in the big club. That's why good things are hard to accomplish.
Your government loves you so much its worked its butt off towards this common goal with other nation states across the world simultaneously. Why arent you grateful?
Now go on back to your increasingly more expensive apartment, you got to get a lot to do before you get to your shift at your 3rd part time job. Oh and the retirement age went up again. Youre welcome.
"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.
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 ~~government~~ regime 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?
Can argue with ml
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
Black Panthers, BLM organizers, anti ICE protestors
And how many of those are they executing /day?
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?
Is really sad when a company is forced to install a backdoor like that, kill all their revenue, how they will sell all your data if the buyer can get it for free? Poor companies.
Apple seems too small and innocent in this image
my little trillion-dollar corporation can't be this cute!
The door should say: Made in China, designed in the USA.
Yes, like the MAGA hats
My conspiracy mind sometimes thinks that Apple has said backdoor and has given the keys, but plays a pretend game with the govt as if they didn't
What’s the ETC or behind it? What else could be worse?
And why isn’t the FBI part of the repressive regimes man?
It's a respectable and necessary "intelligence agency" when we do it, nefarious and unjust spying when they do it. Same old propaganda.
the cia? oligarch pedophiles?
why isn’t the FBI part of the repressive regimes man?
Or the hackers
I guess the difference is that FBI makes Apple install the backdoors, while the rest of the bigger guys just reap the spoils afterwards.
Build the alternative and use it.
You're either the dictator of your computer or you're not. A government 'forcing' companies to hand over logs describing what happened on their commercial platform means you have not even begun the fight. It's a complete farce.
It's a distraction from the fact all these companies are rolling in capital by manipulating their users--oh, but I want to be manipulated by daddy Apple or daddy Discord, just not daddy national-government. What?
It's a fucking larp. How many of you will agitate against this, but you will still use your fucking Discord/Apple/Google/Meta whatever?
Oh, the government is going to hunt you down for using different software that is non-compliant with legislation? What? In what fantasy land? Wake me up when there's boots on the ground invading people's homes by authorities to check what software I'm running on my computer. It's never going to happen.
EDIT: Sorry, the more I look at this cartoon the more this pisses me off. It's painting Apple as an innocent. It's fucking not. Come on, dear artist, labour more to paint mega-corp dictatorships as benign, aloof, white, middle-class targets. Get fuckt.
me and a lot of us on lemmy do whenever possible.
the problem comes from the societal changes that spawn off of that shit when most normies are using it and/or don't care.
like how i can be super careful i don't upload my picture, but then the first normie takes it and my face is suddenly on a database. or public surveillance camers etc.
or how facebook mindrot culture is now mainstream even if we don't use it.
You are absolutely correct, which is why this and even your comment is a distraction. Regardless of how much we dislike the sophisticated surveillance regime you can't deny material reality: it exists.
The correct thing to do is to materially destroy it. It's current existence is the threat, not a theoretical oh, it might do something to me. The actual fact it could do something to you now is the issue. In fact it is doing something to you right now. Every user of these commercial entities labours freely for these trillion-dollar companies.
E.g.: A Google android phone provides data to Google which they use in their commercial mapping-software, which they sell. "Oh, but I get free-access to Google maps; if my mobile-computer spies on me to improve Google maps then it's beneficial to be spied on." Such reasoning is trotted out ceaselessly, but it ignores the commercial nature of Google: other companies (& governments) are required to pay a license to use it. You're a rube labouring for free. You are an employee of Google, only you don't realise it; neither does the law. You materially impoverish yourself whilst enriching a capitalist corporation. The data you're giving away has value. Even if you want to deny that value consider the following: you pay for the hardware, the data connection and the electricity that enables the extraction of that data. Socialise the losses privatise the profits. Free access to Google maps isn't charitable. It's a requirement to extract labour from you that improves Google maps. You might as well praise your employer for providing shelter whilst at work. How charitable of them. Gee golly, I sure am pleased my employer lets my use a building whilst I labour for the owners. Gee golly, they're so charitable that they're not demanding a rent. (Satire).
I will reiterate: it exists now. Ask yourself what can you do now to weaken what it is you're fighting. This cartoon distracts from the fact that Apple is a private surveillance-corporation. Don't use Apple controlled computers. That is the correct line.
Yes, your data will be inadvertently collected by rubes, but this cartoon says nothing about that fact. This cartoon is just a distraction. It shouldn't be applauded by those who want privacy. It should be critiqued for what it is: a distraction.
Really great comment! I do not agree with the edit, tho. Apple's dude is the one with they on his and, on an Apple device. Doesn't look like Apple is depicted as an innocent agent here, to me
The problem is, that nearly no OS is perfect. Even grapheneOS and copperheadOS. If a three letter agency wants to get access to the systems running a privacy OS, they will somehow get it. Who should block the door to the devs home? They raid them, acquire the signing keys with their methods and deploy a backdoor in the next OTA update.
It is always about thread level and alternative options. If they get Apple, you move to Android, then to graphene, then to sailfishOS and whatever comes next. If you care about it. But the thing is…. Who cares? Privacy and security enthusiast, for sure. Freedom of the press people? Hopefully But these people don’t always know about that shit, and those are to protect.
Etc. could have been fraudsters and/or scammers.
This is fucking slop lmao
A famous Carlos cartoon from long before the adoption of AI?
Doubtful.
I never said it was AI slop but that's an etymologically interesting thing you've got going on there, if I was a scientist I'd look into it
picture would be better if there were fingers taking wallets and passpy
it wouldn't because they don't need to.
All the big tech companies regularly meet with the US regime and do anything they ask.
