I've never had this feeling more poignantly than one day, where I was deep in a wilderness zone of the Cascades, several miles from even the nearest logging road.
I was minding my own business, pack in, pack out, with not a soul in sight. And out popped a park ranger, the first person I had seen in days, asking me if I had a permit to exist in the wilderness.
No, no I did not. Sorry for the terrible intrusion of existing. Then he went up to write an order that I had 2 days to get off the public land, with it being a 2 day hike out. Before handing it, he wanted an address I had none. Apparently this somehow broke his brain. The dude would literally not let me go until I came up with an address, even though I legitimately had none.
OfficialTurkey · 9d ago
My understanding is that permits, especially quota permits in locations like the Cascades, are to protect the wilderness from too many people. In that case it sounds to me like the ranger was being a good steward of the land. In your case you may have been pack in, pack out (though there's still waste to think about), but in general that's not true and I don't see a non-blanket approach here.
jandrewrogers · 9d ago
Most of the Cascades have no quota permits, you just need a basic pass that anyone can buy. The quota permits are for exceedingly popular areas like the Enchantments mountain range, and even then usually only for overnight camping.
I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger. Most of it is National Forest; more restrictions than BLM land but you are generally allowed to camp as long as you follow the local rules.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger
I mean, yes. You followed the rules. If you wandered somewhere that does require a permit, you'd have been at risk of being stopped.
I live around national parks. A single obnoxious tourist can disrupt the life cycle of dozens of protected species by running feral through their mating and nursery grounds. (It's also not obvious that you're re-routing e.g. a herd of pronghorn from the safe valley whose floor you're on into the territory of a new pack of wolves.)
jjulius · 9d ago
It's entirely dependent upon where, specifically, in the Cascades OP was. There are numerous wilderness-designated zones that don't have limits on number of people in an area and access is free, save for the requirement that you fill out a permit at/near the trailhead or wilderness boundary.
tasuki · 9d ago
> protect the wilderness from too many people
The person you're replying to mentioned the park ranger was the first person they had seen in days.
peterhadlaw · 9d ago
The world is meant to be explored and people have dominion over the Earth and animals-not the other way around. Whatever happened to liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
SR2Z · 9d ago
"People" may have dominion over the Earth, but that does not mean that you as an individual can turn a national park into a garbage dump without someone throwing you in jail.
OP might have been backpacking responsibly, but the permit system exists for good reasons and we bear the heavy burden of protecting the wilds from ourselves.
zzo38computer · 9d ago
People should not have dominion over the Earth and animals, but neither would be other way around. Humans are also one of the kind of animals (and there are more stuff than animals of the Earth, such as trees and other plants too).
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> Humans are also one of the kind of animals
We are. But we're also the most powerful. That power comes with responsibility, one of which isn't trampling through sensitive areas.
itishappy · 9d ago
The Earth and it's animals didn't ask for a permit. Human dominion isn't being challenged. This is a people problem.
LiquidSky · 9d ago
>people have dominion over the Earth and animals
Then you should be happy: it's not the Earth and animals creating the permitting system.
concerndc1tizen · 8d ago
> The world is meant to
No, it's not. It literally has no meaning.
> not the other way around
Yeah, until an alien species shows up that has more powerful weapons and decides your meat is delicious, and considers you a herdable animal. They might install you in a coup so you can play videogames all day and drink beer as your only source of nutrients, to give your meat that kobebeef marble.
> Whatever happened to liberty
The Americans decided that it wasn't worthwhile anymore.
> and the pursuit of happiness
It became profitable to keep you from being happy.
dkarl · 9d ago
There are a variety of public lands with a variety of management methods. It's important for some to be more restrictive and others less restrictive.
GuinansEyebrows · 9d ago
The tragedy of the commons.
Also, you have a scary view of humans' place within the world.
all2 · 9d ago
Responsibility is a scary thing. It means we have the opportunity to do well or to do poorly. And if we do poorly, we bear the consequences.
GuinansEyebrows · 9d ago
that sounds nice and neat to say, but it doesn't really bear weight when you insert that into the world we actually live in. who is "we" in this? i'm not DuPont dumping chemicals in a river. i'm not mining for rare earth minerals. i'm not nestle trying to privatize water. so i'm not that "we".
peterhadlaw · 9d ago
The point is, whatever it is, it's not the person I responded to. Unless that was Mr. DuPont himself dumping chemicals in nature and the commenter left that out strategically.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> Unless that was Mr. DuPont himself dumping chemicals in nature and the commenter left that out strategically
NPS is stretched on resources. They don't set up permits because it's fun, but because something needs to be conserved.
What? "Dominion"? What are you on about? What is the moral and rational basis of this supposed authority?
anigbrowl · 9d ago
It's a religious concept (from the book of Genesis). Some people forget that their religious affiliations/foundational beliefs are not universal.
blooalien · 9d ago
> "Some people forget that their religious affiliations/foundational beliefs are not universal."
They also forget this one little story their "savior" (the son of god, the one true king; if you believe all that ancient religious gobbledygook) supposedly told (written in the very same book); "The parable of the trusted steward." "Dominion" does not equal neglect and destruction.
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
It's from the bible. He's citing God as the authority.
peterhadlaw · 9d ago
The stance is anti-authority.
taurath · 9d ago
Then the question becomes "why is that ranger, at the expense of the public, there, and what is the purpose of them issuing the order, and do we agree with that purpose?".
Its helpful to understand the intended purpose of something before calling for its removal.
all2 · 9d ago
I confused. How is this anti-authority?
peterhadlaw · 9d ago
To find someone minding their own business in the middle of nature/nowhere and then harass them out of said place is oppressive. I'm opposed to said authority. Just leave people alone. Yes I understand the tragedy of the commons and whatever, I don't think a dude chilling and minding his own business/liberty is _that_.
So I'm arguing to leave people more alone, which is more anti-authority.
ty6853 · 9d ago
It's a cultural rift. I also built a house with no code inspections, no building plans, and no trade licensing. Which seems to scare the shit out of a large segment of commenters on HN, meanwhile living in a place where that is actually allowed has enabled me to have neighbors who think alike, since these kind of neighborhoods scare the ever living shit out of the collectivist authoritarian types.
It's really hard for me to put into words the cultural rift, but it's almost like aliens colliding, the only solution I have found is to live in a different world and try to tread carefully away from theirs. By identifying a few topics like "is it wrong to exist in remote undeveloped public forest without a permit" I can immediately identify the sort of people I have irreconcilable differences with.
taurath · 9d ago
We can believe in and experience different societies while ultimately participating in the meta society. In this way, it’s less a rift.
ty6853 · 8d ago
Sure, ultimately i learned meta society is a scam, being lectured about environmental responsibility by the same people that use their precious rule of law for vast destruction of wilderness area wildlife migration by building massive hundred+ mile border walls that let nothing bigger than a few inches through.
It was never a serious position, and all the raging about i.e. above poster paranoid about pronghorn movement while apparently being oblivious people were likely legally hunting the damn things in the wilderness areas they're thinking of, since the law apparently allows killing them but not a .00001% chance you spook one inadvertently into moving into a wolfs mouth. I cannot even begin to get on the level of someone like that,they may as well be aliens to me the rift is so severe.
peterhadlaw · 9d ago
That's awesome and hits it exactly on the head. Notice how not one comment addresses the liberty comment I made. The meme "touch grass" could never be more relevant here. I'm sure the backpacker learned a lot about the world and humans in that exchange with the ranger.
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
I think it was Locke who talked about the "Social Contract". The idea being that society robbed man of the opportunity to live as a "feral" by inventing property rights and restricting their right to roam; therefore society owes each member a subsistence at least equivalent to the one nature would have provided.
I'm not sure I agree with Locke, but I at least feel that the parks are meant to exist as a partial means of living up to that contract and should be less strictly patrolled than this one was on that day.
dimal · 9d ago
That’s an interesting argument. I looked it up. Looks like it’s from Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice.[0] It’s essentially an argument for universal basic income. Crazy, radical stuff, and it’s hosted on a government website!
It's been a very long time since I studied it, but... The founders of the US (including Paine) took most/much of their inspiration from the works of Locke who popularized a lot of the ideas about inalienable/natural rights coming from God and governing requiring the consent of the governed.
I'm fairly certain that Locke adapted ideas from some some older source, but Locke's work is considered foundational to the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and some of his phrasings found their way into both documents.
Definitely worth reading more about it if you're into that sort of thing. Especially in the current political climate where everything that doesn't fit the agenda is fast being swept beneath the rug of history.
candiddevmike · 9d ago
:shrug: there is no right to roam in the US, you need to pay to use various state/federal parks. The money goes towards the upkeep of the park. The park ranger was doing his job and you made it difficult for him, I don't know what else to tell you.
jandrewrogers · 9d ago
Vast tracts of land in the US are explicitly open for people to wander around or camp-out wherever they want. On BLM land (much of the western US), you can stay at any particular site you choose for up to two weeks before you have to move on.
National Parks are completely over-run with millions of people from all over the world, it would utterly destroy the environment to not limit the number of people that access it and how they access it. They have to keep ratcheting up the restrictions because of extreme levels of demand that cannot be reasonably met.
National Forests and wilderness areas are somewhere in the middle. You can buy a general pass to use them but there are local restrictions on what you can do and some popular areas require additional limited-availability permits for backcountry camping and similar to manage the number of people occupying the land at any one time.
In this case, it seems like the ranger is being a bit of a dick. I’ve never been hassled in the National Forest backcountry of the Cascades in regions that require no special permit, just a cheap general pass that I buy every year that technically permits that usage. I did once get a ticket from a rural sheriff for not parking far enough off the shoulder on a forestry road when I went camping.
jjulius · 9d ago
This comment makes assumptions and gives OP crap for said assumptions. As someone who also frequently backpacks in the same region, it's just not true. OP specified "wilderness zone" and there are numerous wilderness areas where the only requirement is to fill out a permit yourself near/at the trailhead. Otherwise, access is entirely free. It's hard to know how much of a violation OP made without knowing exactly where in the Cascades they were.
No comments yet
j-bos · 9d ago
You might enjoy the book "the man who gave up money". He faced a similar experience, better brain breaking.
ninalanyon · 7d ago
Why the hell should you need a permit? Sounds like you met a real jobsworth.
I'm so glad I live in a country with a legally defined right to roam, Norway [1]. There is a two day limit but that only means you can only camp for two nights in any one place not that you can be told to leave. There are provisions for the kommune (local authority) to forbid access to areas that have been damaged by over-use though.
Have you heard of "right to roam" laws in the UK? They make sense to me and maybe the US could use them for all public lands.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> maybe the US could use them for all public lands
We have this for some public lands. It doesn't work for all of them. Our National Parks would fail at their conservation mission if everyone were allowed to break trail, for instance. (You'll also see rampant poaching if refusing to provide ID or an address for a citation turns into a get-out-of-jail-free card.)
azemetre · 9d ago
I wouldn't consider right to roam the same as right to hunt.
gwbas1c · 9d ago
I think that's a symptom of there being too many people. Sometimes I feel guilty for reproducing.
alphazard · 9d ago
You could frame the entire project of building a political system as just solving this problem without extra side effects.
If you want the right to be left alone, you have to concentrate power, so that people who don't leave other people alone can be effectively punished. That concentrated power attracts the kind of people who don't like leaving other people alone. To these power-seekers, people left alone are an opportunity cost, they could be forced to work towards some goal set by the power-seekers.
NoTeslaThrow · 9d ago
I mean you could, but we're inherently dependent on each other. I'm not sure I see the value of building a society around personal liberty. It wouldn't make much of a society, would it?
alphazard · 9d ago
Sounds like you don't want to leave people alone.
NoTeslaThrow · 9d ago
I'm quite the introvert. I just am flummoxed why you would build around something so much less substantial than equitable distribution of resources, which necessarily implies our bothering each other to enforce.
If you want to be left alone above all else, you can always turn into ted kaczynski.
But reaping the benefits of society comes with costs. one of them is accepting annoying neighbors and other social contracts that might not specifically cater to your desires.
kelseyfrog · 9d ago
If privacy is the ground for creativity and agency, then let it be the soil in which mystery grows, not the airtight vault that suffocates every conversation about you. When you extend that absence to forbid mention or thought, you’ve weaponized oblivion into censorship. The right to be left alone is the creation of thought‑crime by fiat.
bendigedig · 9d ago
But what about what the article hints to w.r.t. the right to never be recorded?
To be recorded is to leave an immutable trail of the self which prejudices how you (and others) view yourself. To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror.
Look at your distorted historical reflection and tell me that it does not prejudice the choices that you make and so alter the person that you choose to be next.
kelseyfrog · 9d ago
> To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror.
To be observed is to be put into a taxonomy - a cracked funhouse mirror that never reflects the real you. Typifications aren’t a bug in the system; they’re the mind main feature. If the glare of categorization freaks you out, therapy is cheap and plentiful. And let’s be clear: the Noumenal - the unfiltered Real - is forever barred from our awareness. Everything we think and feel must pass through the sieve of perception. If that bothers you, congratulations. Welcome to being human. The only escape is non-being.
bendigedig · 8d ago
Cool story. I think most accept that we are unlikely to achieve thr absolute state you have described above, but we can reduce the scale of the bureaucratic categorisation and the associated distorted trail we leave; there is no question that the volume of such data has dramatically increased over the past century and is undoubetdly accelerating.
kelseyfrog · 8d ago
Synthesizing a right because a person feels a way isn't valid.
bendigedig · 8d ago
All of our rights have been created because of how people feel. How else would we decide what we collectively value? Logic is only logical if it is grounded in how we as humans feel.
alganet · 8d ago
Are you declaring that you would volunteer for being permanently surveiled?
kelseyfrog · 8d ago
Bro, these internet debate tricks are not effective. Why not use a different strategy? I simply reject your premise.
alganet · 8d ago
Not an internet trick, it's an old empathy tale.
Would you want that done to you? Simple question. Not rethorical.
It's not my premise. Do you accept your own premise? That you can't have that right.
kelseyfrog · 8d ago
It's a category error. Wanting it or not wanting it isn't even on my mind. I simply don't care. It doesn't bother me.
alganet · 8d ago
So you would, in fact, volunteer. You are leaning into it. It doesn't bother, right? Why not declare that you volunteer?
Do you want me to leave you alone? Or can I keep investigating the real you?
kelseyfrog · 8d ago
Bro, Take a breath. You aren't going to gotcha me. It's a bad look.
alganet · 8d ago
It's a hypothetical.
I already collected your volunteership for The Seer. It will watch you, not me.
Don't worry. If you abandon technology, people around you still use it, and The Seer will be there, lightly probing you.
kelseyfrog · 8d ago
Thank you for the theatrical antagonism. It's fun, but unfortunately it's not a serious counterargument.
alganet · 8d ago
I made a simple question. You evaded it (wanting to be left alone).
We are not in an argument. We are in a social interaction that leads you to slowly lean towards agreeing with me. There is no escape.
There is no answer you can give. If you agree that people should have the right to be left alone, then you were wrong. If you don't agree, then you volunteer. If you agree but don't volunteer, you are tyrannical (you want rights for you but not for others). If you just leave, that signals you want to be left alone.
We are not in an argument.
kelseyfrog · 8d ago
This is less a conversation and more a one-man play where you read both parts. Bravo, but no.
Why don't you get curious instead? It's one of the site guidelines after all. Community trust and goodwill is the most precious thing we have here. Why throw it away?
alganet · 8d ago
I am fighting for your rights and giving you a chance to not be eternally surveiled.
That is the most profound expression of community trust someone can hope to achieve.
All you need to do is say that were wrong, or that you volunteer. It's an act, theatrical or not, of empathy.
Instead, you prefer to pretend that you are right. That no one is going to surveil anyway, and there is no point conceding to a random member of the community. It would be a personal shame for your image after all. You would lose what you perceive to be as an argument, on the internet. You can't do that, right? Your ego is more important than defending personal rights.
dayvigo · 9d ago
Are witness protection programs a form of "censorship?"
We all agree the answer is no, I would hope. It follows that you are not affording this topic a proper level of nuance.
kelseyfrog · 9d ago
Look, this isn't something where a counter-example disproves the thing. The formation of rights is not a logical proof.
dogleash · 9d ago
I too subscribe to the idea it's the collection of data that invades privacy not (just) usage. It used to be more widespread. But as software people there are traitor in our ranks. People who decided to become conman to justify abusing others and perpetuate lies that it's all benign. All in the name of maximixing data exfiltration so they could get in on the scam. Plenty of money to be made, after all. And such big servers to play with too.
verisimi · 9d ago
Which software isn't selling out privacy?
PS even something like signal (presuming things are as private as we are told) encourages phone usage, which is very leaky.
I'm struggling to think of benign software - I guess linux etc could be considered as that.
zzo38computer · 9d ago
Many people (although not most of them, it seems), including myself, are designed to not sell out privacy (and also to avoid some of the other problems that are common in modern software).
throw-qqqqq · 9d ago
> Which software isn't selling out privacy?
None of the software I’ve authored or contributed to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
genewitch · 8d ago
I don't even keep web logs 90% of the time. Logrotate puts the zips in /tmp
I barely make users enter an email.
What I do won't scale but I can sleep at night.
glitchc · 9d ago
This can't happen unless we find a way to demonetize private information. And since digital information is trivial to duplicate/copy, that's a tough hill to climb.
m463 · 9d ago
I'm reminded of domain squatting - where just searching for a domain name caused the registrar to reserve it and they could sell it back to you.
Is this the endgame? Any action, anything spoken or viewed is monetized for rent seeking intermediaries? information is power -> information is money.
drdaeman · 9d ago
I believe the power disparity is the fundamental issue, not the monetization. In most situation an individual has no abilities to negotiate anything, and given that we're social animals and conformance plays an important role voting with one's data/wallet is always going to be skewed toward sellers for anything socially significant (widespread).
I can imagine honest and ethical ways where I would want to provide some of my private information to someone and ask them to process it for me - basically, recommendations as a service is a perfectly valid (and very valuable) business. What I don't want is for them to keep my information and use it for any other purposes that don't benefit me. Which suggests that I always want a way to negotiate the terms.
Given that there were some estimates than individual private data is worth mere pennies, my only explanation why such negotiations and data non-retention agreements are gated behind some enterprise plans (with "call us" pricing) is because it's either worth more than I think it does, or that it's perceived as such.
If it's the perception/bias issue, researches into value of private information may help. A legal requirement to offer an ability to have the same terms to everyone interested (aka upfront pricing and requiring data privacy related features to be individually available outside of any plans/bundles) might be the way to prompt such research (no guarantees about the results and that normal people won't be just priced out, though), but it may also have a lot of unexpected consequences.
Ultimately, I suspect this hill is probably as hard to climb as solving economic inequality (and is probably related to it).
glitchc · 9d ago
The power disparity is an emergent property of monetization, not the other way around. Once it is possible to make money from it, someone figures out a way, and that large pool of money accrues power.
thomastjeffery · 9d ago
I think the foundational problem is the privatization of information.
Information is not an object. It's not a countable good. Yet copyright demands we frame it as such.
Why? To structure our society around competition. I would much rather give collaboration a try. Unfortunately, the demand of intellectual property reframes collaboration as "derivative work", and forces us to make explicit contracts with specific people before creating it.
---- edit:
To elaborate this in the context of the article,
The very idea that we need to protect a person's right to monopolize information is ignorant of the underlying right to oblivion. Intellectual property frames the very act of existing as a person as the creation of information. That alone infringes on the right to oblivion.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 9d ago
I would go back even one step further... marketing itself must be curtailed or eliminated. If you could manage that, private data would only be of use to supervillains hellbent on world domination.
0x0203 · 9d ago
Getting rid of the motivation for collecting so much private info would go a long way. Advertising is not the only motivator, but currently the biggest one, and putting more restrictions on how advertising is done would be a step in the right direction.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> demonetize private information
What does this mean?
neogodless · 9d ago
While it's a bit of a contradiction, it's about private information that some money-seeking entity holds and utilizes to make money.
In other words, the goal is to remove the financial incentive to collect and store information about individuals that should be private.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> the goal is to remove the financial incentive to collect and store information about individuals that should be private
The NSA has no profit incentive. Neither do e.g. ICE or the nutters tracking womens' menstrual cycles.
anigbrowl · 9d ago
I think they do; such institutions just seek to profit in something other than currency, to wit power.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> such institutions just seek to profit in something other than currency
Sure. It's a bit silly to extend the term "demonetize" to encompass more than money.
drdaeman · 9d ago
I suspect it all boils down to attention, which, in turn, can be converted into money, votes, actions (or lack thereof) or other stuff.
"Disincentivize" is probably a better term.
nonrandomstring · 9d ago
In Britain young people say "Leave me in peace". Peace is the state of
being left alone, not just an absence of violence. Only later, adults
develop separate notion of "privacy", a diluted and weaker version of
natural 'peace'?
jvidalv · 9d ago
Same in Spanish or Catalan.
We say “dejame en paz”.
And is not a young thing, is how it is said around here.
em-bee · 9d ago
german too: lass mich in frieden
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
Freedom of speech can not exist without private speech. Yet, my privacy rights always imply a lessening of someone else's right to knowledge.
There will never be a perfect balance between these competing needs, and the line will be pushed back and forth as long as there are humans to debate the issue.
ziddoap · 9d ago
>Yet, my privacy rights always imply a lessening of someone else's right to knowledge.
Is there a "right to knowledge"?
I'm aware of rights to speech, thought, movement, conscious, religion, expression, assembly, association, etc. But I've never heard anyone claim, or read any charter/constitution/etc. that has a "right to knowledge" clause.
Is there a country which has enshrined a "right to knowledge"? Does it have any limits (alluding to what you mentioned, how does the right to knowledge interact with other rights)?
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
The thoughts in your head, and the information you gather belongs to you and you get to make decisions about how it's used. If it helps think of it as intellectual property, or perhaps an extension of bodily autonomy in less corporate terms.
It's so fundamental a right that most places only enshrine more complicated versions of it as law. Most societies now even extend that right to offer control over the knowledge you store electronically or write down and the way other people get to use "your" knowledge.
When we seek to impose privacy limitations on the data that others can gather we're curtailing those rights to some extent. We're telling them there are specific things they can't know and that does limit their freedom in a very fundamental way.
internet_rand0 · 9d ago
> a "right to knowledge"?
it's the right to observe somebody else without their consent: it's quiet scientific observation that tries not to disturb the observed which is impossible in the quantum level but very realistic in the day to day classic (non-quantum) level
tl;dr: the right to create knowledge i.e. do science
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
I think you're being sarcastic, but you've missed the point.
The point, restated, is this: When we pass laws that say "There are factually true things that you are not allowed to know under penalty of law" we had better be damn sure the tradeoff is worth it. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won't. The exact line will always be ill-defined.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> Freedom of speech can not exist without private speech
It can in several variants. Freedom of expression probably can't without private speech.
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
I'm not sure I follow. In all it's variants the ability to trace unpopular speech back to the speaker puts their life in danger and robs them of their freedom under threat of violence. Am I missing something?
The United States, for example, wouldn't exist if Thomas Payne hadn't been able to publish his pamphlets anonymously.
JumpCrisscross · 9d ago
> the ability to trace unpopular speech back to the speaker puts their life in danger and robs them of their freedom under threat of violence. Am I missing something
Yes. Freedom of speech doesn't require privacy in most constructions as it typically concerns, first and foremost, publicly-made political speech. This finds its way into U.S. law through the expansion of the First Amendment's protections by its press and religion clauses [1].
> Freedom of speech doesn't require privacy in most constructions as it typically concerns, first and foremost, publicly-made political speech.
Suppose you're Thomas Paine and you want to advocate for the independence of America from Britain, and that Britain doesn't allow the government to punish anyone for what they say, but does prohibit anyone from publishing their writings anonymously.
Then everyone knows exactly who Thomas Paine is, and even if there is no law against writing those things, there is now a constable poking into his business looking for some other pretext to arrest him, several legislators drafting bills that would negatively impact his livelihood and which will quietly be withdrawn if he would simply stop publishing such things, and a variety of private enterprises who now refuse to have anything to do with him in any capacity because they have business before the crown and fear any public association with their critic.
How is it free speech if you're still getting punished for it?
stevenAthompson · 9d ago
You're almost certainly correct from a technical legal perspective (although I loathe the way legal experts extract "extra" meaning form the spaces between the words of the constitution). I was speaking from a more practical dictionary definition of the terms.
From my perspective, you simply can't speak freely if the government (or your neighbors) might murder you for saying things they disagree with.
Even before the invention of public-private-partnership driven hyper-surveillance (aka social media), there were just three places known to western man where one is truly alone: In front of his steering wheel, inside of the voting booth and in the crapper.
smsm42 · 9d ago
Take the steering wheel out. Most modern cars are already networked and are capable of tracking your every movement and recording anything that happens inside and in the vicinity of the car. Not all of them do that, and not all of them preserve and forward this information, as of yet, but this is clearly a thing that will happen. Insurance companies already propose discounts for people that allow them to track their "driving habits", how long before it flips and you'd end up forced to let them record everything or be forced into the "dangerous and reckless driver" bucket where the insurance would be plain unaffordable? And that's not mentioning car manufacturers, which will record everything - for QA and performance monitoring purposes, of course - and then somehow this data end up on the market? I think if you need privacy, driving is no longer an option, better go for a walk in the forest.
woodpanel · 9d ago
That’s correct. It even applies to the other segments I mentioned: Smart Toilets aren’t even necessary, as most people won’t sit on an analog one without their smartphone in their palms.
And yeah, about the voting booth: many of those who now demand a right to be left alone just a couple of years ago vehemently defended the practice of proprietary voting machines.
ahofmann · 9d ago
Even if this were true (and I don't think it is), it misses the point. Two decades ago, it was perfectly normal for people to be untraceable or unavailable in most ways when they were away from home. Today, it is normal for some people to send their location to loved ones in real time. And we all carry one or more devices that record tons of data about us and our surroundings every second.
woodpanel · 9d ago
I think you’re missing the point I made: that applying a „right to be left alone“ was already scarce pre-digitalization.
keybored · 9d ago
Are we really societies based on liberal negative liberty? It seems that we are free-for-all when it comes to interference based on marketing. I don’t have it that bad even. Much worse for those who have to drive by/commute by obnoxious billboards every day.
> Pressly’s book is less about privacy and more about what it protects, a condition he calls “oblivion.”
What an excellent way to frame the discussion!
ideashower · 9d ago
What are some places you feel alone, these days? I imagine it's a highly personal question.
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smsm42 · 9d ago
It feels kinda ironic to find this kind of article in The Nation. I mean if it were Reason, sure. But The Nation is a leftist publication, endorsing Sanders. Of all regimes that I could find myself in, I'd expect to be the least amount of left alone in the socialist paradise they are ultimately rooting for. Nothing is left alone in a true socialist country, The Will of The People is in everything and everything is subject to it. That's kinda the point of collectivism - everything is everybody's common business.
Transparency is vital for regulation and control (see e.g. Seeing like a State) and the more opaque humans are, the harder is to control them, plan their actions, reason about their future behavior. How can you make a five-year plan for the whole country if you don't even know anything about anybody? Opacity is not going to work here. You would need a ton of very, very detailed information.
That's why China is introducing more and more measures to defy privacy - this is the only way their model can hope to work, it it impossible in the opaque-person world where no information about the person can be created. The article argues that privacy is not property, but the concept of privacy can not but lead to the concept of property - if you can have private thoughts, can you have private expressions? If you can have private expressions, can you have their material embodiment? If you can have the material embodiment, can you exercise control over it and limit the control of others over it? Oops, you just created private property.
justin66 · 9d ago
Perhaps these particular leftists want what they say they want, rather than what you've been led to believe they want.
smsm42 · 9d ago
> want what they say they want
Which is what? Pretty much all leftist state models require strong state, which leaves very little space to privacy. Somebody who holds both leftist or collectivist political beliefs and hopes for privacy is contradicting oneself. If they were anarchists or libertarians, that'd be a different business, but it's surprising to find libertarians in The Nation.
justin66 · 8d ago
> Somebody who holds both leftist or collectivist political beliefs and hopes for privacy is contradicting oneself.
I believe that's the core obviously wrong idea we're not going to agree about.
concerndc1tizen · 8d ago
It's important to remember that the communist states were in a cold war with the US, and were being sabotaged from within, so they had to aggressively monitor for internal threats.
We don't know what the world would look like if the US hadn't destroyed communism, and hadn't actively supported tyrannical leaders.
But in an ironic twist, the US will now be destroyed by the same dark forces they created.
keybored · 5d ago
We do know what happened to socialist projects that weren’t authoritarian. They got crushed by the US and other capitalist states.[1]
That all socialist projects that were successful for some time were authoritarian is, well, those were the ones who could survive in that world (in this current world). I think there’s a word for that. :)
[1] Capitalist nations violently interfering in other nations is not called authoritarian.
BLKNSLVR · 9d ago
I think you're joining together a bunch of dots from different pictures.
None of these things necessarily imply any of the others.
concerndc1tizen · 8d ago
That's not true. I've seen it firsthand. They built infrastructure that was free for public use.
It is significantly better than privatized tourism, because private tourism is frequently taken over by organized crime who destroy the nature to build hotels. Public service tourism usually doesn't care about profit, but rather about reducing public spending, so it is generally more efficient, has a smaller foot print, is shared, educative, and respectful.
I'm not an expert so I can't give you references, but ask your neighborly LLM:
> The USSR promoted the idea of "democratic tourism" — affordable and accessible to everyone. Unlike Western commercial tourism, Soviet tourism aimed to educate and unite people. The Tourist Union (Туристско-спортивный союз) and other state organizations built networks of tourist bases, campgrounds, hiking routes, and equipment rental centers.
keybored · 8d ago
The Nation is writing about the existing reality. I feel I would need a subscription to Reason: Monthly Review to understand what you are imagining.
I was minding my own business, pack in, pack out, with not a soul in sight. And out popped a park ranger, the first person I had seen in days, asking me if I had a permit to exist in the wilderness.
No, no I did not. Sorry for the terrible intrusion of existing. Then he went up to write an order that I had 2 days to get off the public land, with it being a 2 day hike out. Before handing it, he wanted an address I had none. Apparently this somehow broke his brain. The dude would literally not let me go until I came up with an address, even though I legitimately had none.
I’ve backpacked into several parts of the Cascades without a special permit, because none were required, and never been hassled by a ranger. Most of it is National Forest; more restrictions than BLM land but you are generally allowed to camp as long as you follow the local rules.
I mean, yes. You followed the rules. If you wandered somewhere that does require a permit, you'd have been at risk of being stopped.
I live around national parks. A single obnoxious tourist can disrupt the life cycle of dozens of protected species by running feral through their mating and nursery grounds. (It's also not obvious that you're re-routing e.g. a herd of pronghorn from the safe valley whose floor you're on into the territory of a new pack of wolves.)
The person you're replying to mentioned the park ranger was the first person they had seen in days.
OP might have been backpacking responsibly, but the permit system exists for good reasons and we bear the heavy burden of protecting the wilds from ourselves.
We are. But we're also the most powerful. That power comes with responsibility, one of which isn't trampling through sensitive areas.
Then you should be happy: it's not the Earth and animals creating the permitting system.
No, it's not. It literally has no meaning.
> not the other way around
Yeah, until an alien species shows up that has more powerful weapons and decides your meat is delicious, and considers you a herdable animal. They might install you in a coup so you can play videogames all day and drink beer as your only source of nutrients, to give your meat that kobebeef marble.
> Whatever happened to liberty
The Americans decided that it wasn't worthwhile anymore.
> and the pursuit of happiness
It became profitable to keep you from being happy.
Also, you have a scary view of humans' place within the world.
NPS is stretched on resources. They don't set up permits because it's fun, but because something needs to be conserved.
They also forget this one little story their "savior" (the son of god, the one true king; if you believe all that ancient religious gobbledygook) supposedly told (written in the very same book); "The parable of the trusted steward." "Dominion" does not equal neglect and destruction.
Its helpful to understand the intended purpose of something before calling for its removal.
So I'm arguing to leave people more alone, which is more anti-authority.
It's really hard for me to put into words the cultural rift, but it's almost like aliens colliding, the only solution I have found is to live in a different world and try to tread carefully away from theirs. By identifying a few topics like "is it wrong to exist in remote undeveloped public forest without a permit" I can immediately identify the sort of people I have irreconcilable differences with.
It was never a serious position, and all the raging about i.e. above poster paranoid about pronghorn movement while apparently being oblivious people were likely legally hunting the damn things in the wilderness areas they're thinking of, since the law apparently allows killing them but not a .00001% chance you spook one inadvertently into moving into a wolfs mouth. I cannot even begin to get on the level of someone like that,they may as well be aliens to me the rift is so severe.
I'm not sure I agree with Locke, but I at least feel that the parks are meant to exist as a partial means of living up to that contract and should be less strictly patrolled than this one was on that day.
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html
I'm fairly certain that Locke adapted ideas from some some older source, but Locke's work is considered foundational to the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and some of his phrasings found their way into both documents.
Definitely worth reading more about it if you're into that sort of thing. Especially in the current political climate where everything that doesn't fit the agenda is fast being swept beneath the rug of history.
National Parks are completely over-run with millions of people from all over the world, it would utterly destroy the environment to not limit the number of people that access it and how they access it. They have to keep ratcheting up the restrictions because of extreme levels of demand that cannot be reasonably met.
National Forests and wilderness areas are somewhere in the middle. You can buy a general pass to use them but there are local restrictions on what you can do and some popular areas require additional limited-availability permits for backcountry camping and similar to manage the number of people occupying the land at any one time.
In this case, it seems like the ranger is being a bit of a dick. I’ve never been hassled in the National Forest backcountry of the Cascades in regions that require no special permit, just a cheap general pass that I buy every year that technically permits that usage. I did once get a ticket from a rural sheriff for not parking far enough off the shoulder on a forestry road when I went camping.
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I'm so glad I live in a country with a legally defined right to roam, Norway [1]. There is a two day limit but that only means you can only camp for two nights in any one place not that you can be told to leave. There are provisions for the kommune (local authority) to forbid access to areas that have been damaged by over-use though.
[1] https://www.miljodirektoratet.no/publikasjoner/2020/juni-202...
We have this for some public lands. It doesn't work for all of them. Our National Parks would fail at their conservation mission if everyone were allowed to break trail, for instance. (You'll also see rampant poaching if refusing to provide ID or an address for a citation turns into a get-out-of-jail-free card.)
If you want the right to be left alone, you have to concentrate power, so that people who don't leave other people alone can be effectively punished. That concentrated power attracts the kind of people who don't like leaving other people alone. To these power-seekers, people left alone are an opportunity cost, they could be forced to work towards some goal set by the power-seekers.
If you want to be left alone above all else, you can always turn into ted kaczynski.
But reaping the benefits of society comes with costs. one of them is accepting annoying neighbors and other social contracts that might not specifically cater to your desires.
To be recorded is to leave an immutable trail of the self which prejudices how you (and others) view yourself. To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror.
Look at your distorted historical reflection and tell me that it does not prejudice the choices that you make and so alter the person that you choose to be next.
To be observed is to be put into a taxonomy - a cracked funhouse mirror that never reflects the real you. Typifications aren’t a bug in the system; they’re the mind main feature. If the glare of categorization freaks you out, therapy is cheap and plentiful. And let’s be clear: the Noumenal - the unfiltered Real - is forever barred from our awareness. Everything we think and feel must pass through the sieve of perception. If that bothers you, congratulations. Welcome to being human. The only escape is non-being.
Would you want that done to you? Simple question. Not rethorical.
It's not my premise. Do you accept your own premise? That you can't have that right.
Do you want me to leave you alone? Or can I keep investigating the real you?
I already collected your volunteership for The Seer. It will watch you, not me.
Don't worry. If you abandon technology, people around you still use it, and The Seer will be there, lightly probing you.
We are not in an argument. We are in a social interaction that leads you to slowly lean towards agreeing with me. There is no escape.
There is no answer you can give. If you agree that people should have the right to be left alone, then you were wrong. If you don't agree, then you volunteer. If you agree but don't volunteer, you are tyrannical (you want rights for you but not for others). If you just leave, that signals you want to be left alone.
We are not in an argument.
Why don't you get curious instead? It's one of the site guidelines after all. Community trust and goodwill is the most precious thing we have here. Why throw it away?
That is the most profound expression of community trust someone can hope to achieve.
All you need to do is say that were wrong, or that you volunteer. It's an act, theatrical or not, of empathy.
Instead, you prefer to pretend that you are right. That no one is going to surveil anyway, and there is no point conceding to a random member of the community. It would be a personal shame for your image after all. You would lose what you perceive to be as an argument, on the internet. You can't do that, right? Your ego is more important than defending personal rights.
We all agree the answer is no, I would hope. It follows that you are not affording this topic a proper level of nuance.
PS even something like signal (presuming things are as private as we are told) encourages phone usage, which is very leaky.
I'm struggling to think of benign software - I guess linux etc could be considered as that.
None of the software I’ve authored or contributed to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I barely make users enter an email.
What I do won't scale but I can sleep at night.
Is this the endgame? Any action, anything spoken or viewed is monetized for rent seeking intermediaries? information is power -> information is money.
I can imagine honest and ethical ways where I would want to provide some of my private information to someone and ask them to process it for me - basically, recommendations as a service is a perfectly valid (and very valuable) business. What I don't want is for them to keep my information and use it for any other purposes that don't benefit me. Which suggests that I always want a way to negotiate the terms.
Given that there were some estimates than individual private data is worth mere pennies, my only explanation why such negotiations and data non-retention agreements are gated behind some enterprise plans (with "call us" pricing) is because it's either worth more than I think it does, or that it's perceived as such.
If it's the perception/bias issue, researches into value of private information may help. A legal requirement to offer an ability to have the same terms to everyone interested (aka upfront pricing and requiring data privacy related features to be individually available outside of any plans/bundles) might be the way to prompt such research (no guarantees about the results and that normal people won't be just priced out, though), but it may also have a lot of unexpected consequences.
Ultimately, I suspect this hill is probably as hard to climb as solving economic inequality (and is probably related to it).
Information is not an object. It's not a countable good. Yet copyright demands we frame it as such.
Why? To structure our society around competition. I would much rather give collaboration a try. Unfortunately, the demand of intellectual property reframes collaboration as "derivative work", and forces us to make explicit contracts with specific people before creating it.
---- edit:
To elaborate this in the context of the article,
The very idea that we need to protect a person's right to monopolize information is ignorant of the underlying right to oblivion. Intellectual property frames the very act of existing as a person as the creation of information. That alone infringes on the right to oblivion.
What does this mean?
In other words, the goal is to remove the financial incentive to collect and store information about individuals that should be private.
The NSA has no profit incentive. Neither do e.g. ICE or the nutters tracking womens' menstrual cycles.
Sure. It's a bit silly to extend the term "demonetize" to encompass more than money.
"Disincentivize" is probably a better term.
We say “dejame en paz”.
And is not a young thing, is how it is said around here.
There will never be a perfect balance between these competing needs, and the line will be pushed back and forth as long as there are humans to debate the issue.
Is there a "right to knowledge"?
I'm aware of rights to speech, thought, movement, conscious, religion, expression, assembly, association, etc. But I've never heard anyone claim, or read any charter/constitution/etc. that has a "right to knowledge" clause.
Is there a country which has enshrined a "right to knowledge"? Does it have any limits (alluding to what you mentioned, how does the right to knowledge interact with other rights)?
It's so fundamental a right that most places only enshrine more complicated versions of it as law. Most societies now even extend that right to offer control over the knowledge you store electronically or write down and the way other people get to use "your" knowledge.
When we seek to impose privacy limitations on the data that others can gather we're curtailing those rights to some extent. We're telling them there are specific things they can't know and that does limit their freedom in a very fundamental way.
it's the right to observe somebody else without their consent: it's quiet scientific observation that tries not to disturb the observed which is impossible in the quantum level but very realistic in the day to day classic (non-quantum) level
tl;dr: the right to create knowledge i.e. do science
The point, restated, is this: When we pass laws that say "There are factually true things that you are not allowed to know under penalty of law" we had better be damn sure the tradeoff is worth it. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won't. The exact line will always be ill-defined.
It can in several variants. Freedom of expression probably can't without private speech.
The United States, for example, wouldn't exist if Thomas Payne hadn't been able to publish his pamphlets anonymously.
Yes. Freedom of speech doesn't require privacy in most constructions as it typically concerns, first and foremost, publicly-made political speech. This finds its way into U.S. law through the expansion of the First Amendment's protections by its press and religion clauses [1].
[1] https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-01/06-diffe...
Suppose you're Thomas Paine and you want to advocate for the independence of America from Britain, and that Britain doesn't allow the government to punish anyone for what they say, but does prohibit anyone from publishing their writings anonymously.
Then everyone knows exactly who Thomas Paine is, and even if there is no law against writing those things, there is now a constable poking into his business looking for some other pretext to arrest him, several legislators drafting bills that would negatively impact his livelihood and which will quietly be withdrawn if he would simply stop publishing such things, and a variety of private enterprises who now refuse to have anything to do with him in any capacity because they have business before the crown and fear any public association with their critic.
How is it free speech if you're still getting punished for it?
From my perspective, you simply can't speak freely if the government (or your neighbors) might murder you for saying things they disagree with.
And yeah, about the voting booth: many of those who now demand a right to be left alone just a couple of years ago vehemently defended the practice of proprietary voting machines.
What an excellent way to frame the discussion!
No comments yet
Transparency is vital for regulation and control (see e.g. Seeing like a State) and the more opaque humans are, the harder is to control them, plan their actions, reason about their future behavior. How can you make a five-year plan for the whole country if you don't even know anything about anybody? Opacity is not going to work here. You would need a ton of very, very detailed information.
That's why China is introducing more and more measures to defy privacy - this is the only way their model can hope to work, it it impossible in the opaque-person world where no information about the person can be created. The article argues that privacy is not property, but the concept of privacy can not but lead to the concept of property - if you can have private thoughts, can you have private expressions? If you can have private expressions, can you have their material embodiment? If you can have the material embodiment, can you exercise control over it and limit the control of others over it? Oops, you just created private property.
Which is what? Pretty much all leftist state models require strong state, which leaves very little space to privacy. Somebody who holds both leftist or collectivist political beliefs and hopes for privacy is contradicting oneself. If they were anarchists or libertarians, that'd be a different business, but it's surprising to find libertarians in The Nation.
I believe that's the core obviously wrong idea we're not going to agree about.
We don't know what the world would look like if the US hadn't destroyed communism, and hadn't actively supported tyrannical leaders.
But in an ironic twist, the US will now be destroyed by the same dark forces they created.
That all socialist projects that were successful for some time were authoritarian is, well, those were the ones who could survive in that world (in this current world). I think there’s a word for that. :)
[1] Capitalist nations violently interfering in other nations is not called authoritarian.
None of these things necessarily imply any of the others.
It is significantly better than privatized tourism, because private tourism is frequently taken over by organized crime who destroy the nature to build hotels. Public service tourism usually doesn't care about profit, but rather about reducing public spending, so it is generally more efficient, has a smaller foot print, is shared, educative, and respectful.
I'm not an expert so I can't give you references, but ask your neighborly LLM:
> The USSR promoted the idea of "democratic tourism" — affordable and accessible to everyone. Unlike Western commercial tourism, Soviet tourism aimed to educate and unite people. The Tourist Union (Туристско-спортивный союз) and other state organizations built networks of tourist bases, campgrounds, hiking routes, and equipment rental centers.