Pandora’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!

          • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
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            6 hours ago

            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

            • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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              6 hours ago

              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.

                • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                  6 hours ago

                  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.

                  • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
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                    5 hours ago

                    Absolutely correct! Tbf I did say it helps to offset the cost, not that it’s anywhere near profitable

                  • freagle@lemmy.ml
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                    5 hours ago

                    Sure, but that’s why we are the only country in the world to charge prisoners hundreds of dollars a day for the privilege of being in prison, on top of the price gouging for basic services.

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        7 minutes ago

        Something which the good people at Radio Free Asia have assured me is totally real and definitely happens

      • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
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        9 hours ago

        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.

        • LesserAbe@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          The odds of getting killed at a protest aren’t 30%. If that were true we would have hundreds of thousands dead each year.

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            10 minutes ago

            Allow me to facetiously talk about the US the way people from this country typically talk about the DPRK:

            How do you 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.

          • Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml
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            9 hours ago

            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

            • couldhavebeenyou@lemmy.zip
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              8 hours ago

              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