Fwd: GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance and give us a way to fight back

[Garreau, Alexandre]

On 2014-08-22 at 01:16, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
> On 8/21/2014 3:35 PM, Johannes Zarl wrote:
>> "Compiling a collection of publicly available information" is an
>> almost perfect description of the term "surveillance". E.g. a
>> surveillance camera does exactly that: it collects publicly available
>> information.
>
> So does the phone book, Wikipedia, and IMDB.  We don't call them
> surveillance.

The difference in the relation we have with information is who does it
concern: when it concerns everybody (like Science, information about
politics, events, Philosophy, Art, etc. what generally is what Wikipedia
contains, aka “encyclopedic informations”), it should be shared among
everyone, and not doing so is taking part in some kind of oppression
(like stopping people from sharing a software); when it concerns only
some people (like private information, one-to-one communication, etc.)
it should be keep secret amoung the few people it concerns, otherwise it
is also taking part in some kind of oppression (like surveilling,
spying, controlling). That’s why we ask for more transparency from the
powerfull and more privacy to the weak.

When someone watch the tweets of some friends of some person discussing
with some others, while not knowing and not being interested of it, even
if it doesn’t concerns her, just to spy the person, it *is*
surveillance. Though Twitter haven’t sophisticated privacy features like
circles or groups, so it’s possible even if it’s not always a good
thing. The same applies to IP.

In this case, it does concern only the person owning the house what
color is it, what is the model of door, of lock, of key and how to open
it. So even if it’s “publicly available information” (like in Twitter,
Facebook, or any potentially privacy-harmful social network) it
shouldn’t be collected without hurting someone’s freedom, so here the
usefulness of the GNU patch for it :)