[rigonkulous]

People are shocked by laws which abrogate and abuse their human rights, because people do not realize that their human rights depend on constant, vigilant awareness of what the government is doing with the super-powers granted them by the general population.

Whenever events such as this occur - and this admission from Google is but one in a long line of shit-pearls - folks get uppity about it, because fundamentally we should all be paying better attention in the first place, and nothing upsets peoples' sensibilities more to find out that their rights are being abrogated, than the understanding that, its happening because we are allowing human rights to be abrogated at massive scale as a course of state policy.

What we do to our enemies, we do to ourselves. Where once, Americans - and American culture, and American companies - were absolutely repulsed by the notion of stasi-like, draconian data-reporting policies - they are now, instead, motivated by the extreme power such activities can provide.

Sure, it sucks that the government now has a way of identifying its internal enemies - but the fact is, the corporations have had that power, every minute of the day, for decades, also.

This is a problem because the government is just the tip of the shit-iceberg, and not many of us have stomach for what it takes to fix the problem.

[t-3]

> people do not realize that their human rights depend on constant, vigilant awareness of what the government is doing with the super-powers granted them by the general population.

Literally every grade school history and civics class I took pounded this idea ad infinitum. I think people by-and-large just don't care because they're probably not being visibly effected even if they feel uncomfortable when it's talked about.

[neuralRiot]

> > people do not realize that their human rights depend on constant, vigilant awareness of what the government is doing with the super-powers granted them by the general population.

People happily waive their rights and their privacy in exchange for “the new trendy app” or trick, “alexa order a large pizza” was life really that hard before? We turned from physically lazy to mentally lazy and AI is just accelerating the pace. People have become “comfortably numb” to the lost of privacy, I don’t know if it’s by design but surely is a nice side effect for some.

[rigonkulous]

Lets not discuss literacy rates in the US' public education system.

"The United States is ranked 125 in the world behind Oman and just a little better than the Syrian Arab Republic."

This is by design.

[beaglesss]

The highest, unelectable, courts allow and encourage this behavior. The police are unelected standing army that carry it out.

It's a difficult problem that maybe by the most generous interpretation can be voted out, but not really. Only way I see an end is emigration or the US not existing in anything resembling what we see today.

[hodgesrm]

> People are shocked by laws which abrogate and abuse their human rights...

You'll want to avoid signing any NDAs then. They virtually all have a clause like the following which says that parties may divulge information in response to a court order.

> The Receiving Party may make disclosures required by law or court order provided the Receiving Party uses diligent reasonable efforts to limit disclosure and to obtain confidential treatment or a protective order and has allowed the Disclosing Party to participate in the proceeding.

I just picked this out of the latest NDA sitting in my email queue. This one is better than most in that it actually attempts to stand up for the rights of the party divulging secrets. Every single NDA I've ever signed had similar language.

[rigonkulous]

>.. and has allowed the Disclosing Party to participate in the proceeding.

The solution to the problem is to not keep secrets.

Which is better for all of humanity, anyway.