A Sense of Doubt blog post #3923 - AGAINST AUTHORITY by John Twelve Hawks - book review and advocacy for resistance

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3923 - AGAINST AUTHORITY by John Twelve Hawks - book review and advocacy for resistance

I have been sitting on this post for a long time because I had planned to do more with it, to do everything. I am trying to change how I function in regards to these long planned posts and not overdo it. After all, any readers who venture here are unlikely to digest an entire post if it's gigantic.

This book came out in 2014, but eleven years later it is still very relevant. In fact, with the arrival of tech like Palantir and the proliferation of AI, this book is more relevant than ever. I hate that they gave that company a name from Tolkien. Bastards.

This book is free on Kindle. It's short. And worth multiple readings.

For instance, Hawks makes the point in the chapter "Being Watched by a Machine" that surveillance is not a new thing. In medieval villages, people knew what was going on with everyone. The priests especially were the overseers and institutional heads of these systems. Now we have machines that are by and large invisible to us watching and recording EVERYTHING and these digital shadow selves (all of our accumulated data) can conceivably live on forever. And companies and governments LIE about it. Like how Amazon swore that the Echo devices do not record everything we say, and yet in some murder cases, they had recordings. Or the U.S. Intelligence department swore they were not spying on citizens and then Edward Snowden blew that whistle.

As John Twelve Hawks writes learned people, professors, have been issuing warnings about technology and surveillance for a long time, such as in 1985 by Spiros Simitis in a lecture titled “Reviewing Privacy in an Information Society” and his warning of how computers would change everything dramatically.

September 11th, 2001 changed everything as people willingly gave up their privacy in the name of safety from terrorists.

Did you know that the government can obtain someone's library records without a subpoena, without the person's knowledge, and the librarian is "gagged" by law not to disclose that they gave the government the information? Section 215 of the Patriot Act. It also gave law enforcement the power to enter someone's home without their permission or knowledge.

John Twelve Hawks moved to London in 2002, as the city was quickly becoming the MOST camera-filled city on the planet earth, and London Transport created this very 1984-like poster:

In 2002, John Poindexter created the TIA -- Total Information Awareness system -- to spy on everyone and collect all the data for all time. There was blowback from the public and both sides of the aisle in Congress, and so the system was renamed the Terrorist Information Awareness system, but the technology did not disappear and the collecting continued, as Snowden revealed in 2013.

That's just some of the things covered in Against Authority.

Check it out!!

Thanks for tuning in.

https://www.johntwelvehawks.com/


AGAINST AUTHORITY - By John Twelve Hawks

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2511.14 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3788 days ago & DAD = 442 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.