Cameras used for omnipresent government surveillance absolutely do have something to do with aiding the targeting of political dissidents. That said, I agree it is not surprising to anyone here. I hope more people get clued in.
This reminds me of the "guns don't kill people" argument.
Surveillance cameras have everything to do with consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands. Therefore fewer voices of dissent on the levers of power.
Iran is going through a demographic shift. The protests and strikes are evidence of a desire for change. With tools like this even small acts of defiance become higher risk.
> This reminds me of the "guns don't kill people" argument.
> Surveillance cameras have everything to do with consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands. Therefore fewer voices of dissent on the levers of power.
> Iran is going through a demographic shift. The protests and strikes are evidence of a desire for change. With tools like this even small acts of defiance become higher risk.
People with guns kill more people than people without guns.
Oppressive governments with cameras oppress more people than oppressive governments without cameras.
I think you and I agree that it's a matter of degree.
But in that case, why is this link interesting? And if it's not interesting, why is it in HN? I consider that "government that's well known to be very oppressive decided to take another step to increase oppression" isn't interesting.
> People with guns kill more people than people without guns.
The irony of this statement is government is historically responsible for the most deaths as they are best armed. When technology like firearms are decentralized and more people have access to them, fewer overall deaths occur and more individual freedom ensues.
Same concept for cameras, when they are pointed at police and agents of the state by citizens.
It all depends very much from social context. In my country stricter gun control has absolutely saved lives, simply because it has effectively prevented random mentally ill people from committing school shootings. It didn't make our government or police forces any more oppressive.
I'm not interested in discussing personal anecdotes, only factual history which is replete with examples of state-sponsored genocide and tyranny when the population is disarmed.
Seems to me your claims are also personal anecdotes. You claim something, the other guy claims something else. The real difference is that you're claiming that the answer is universal, whereas the other guy is saying it depends.
The way I see it you're making a stronger claim and thus have a higher burden of proof. And yet, you offered none.
That looks like a personal anecdote to me, exactly like what the other guy said.
He said "in my country such and such happened". And you're saying "here's an example of such and such happening".
EDIT: But now that we're at it,
> The Wounded Knee Massacre, also known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, was a massacre of nearly three hundred Lakota people by soldiers of the United States Army.
300 people seems like nothing compared to the number of people that dies every year due to (civilian) gun violence. You're just thinking binary, you're not thinking with numbers. Also your best example is from 1890. Roughly the same amount of people that died in school shootings in the first three months of this year. Your commitment to ideology is hilarious.
You asked for a citation, you were provided one. If you think 300 unarmed civilians being murdered by the government because of their race is "nothing" then there is nothing left to discuss. I am honestly worried about what you might think of Mao's China or Hitler's Germany and their respective civilian disarmament; I bet very few lives were lost to "civilian gun violence" under their rule, too.
China never had a citizenry widely armed with firearms.
Germany was also never widely armed prior to Hitler. This is an urban myth.
Only a handful of societies have ever had widespread civilian armament. Certainly not enough to make any kind of causal inference about the general effects of firearms on revolutionary or counter-revolutionary activity.
And Wounded Knee? This was a continuation of a policy of Manifest Destiny and genocide that saw hundreds of massacres and battles. The many armed battles that took place would suggest that being armed wasn't a significant deterrent to US cavalry.
PRC had massive public firearms ownership stemming from people's war, villages were settling beef with home made artillery into the 90s until gov crackdown.
There’s nothing factual about that fantastical history. Possessing a firearm doesn’t prevent state violence, if anything it justifies further escalation. An armed rabble doesn’t have a chance against trained soldiers, and a citizen militia doesn’t have a chance against artillery.
Ask the various native peoples, who at various times outgunned the then pitiful US Army, how well that worked out. Read the survivor accounts about how well the Easter Rising did in Ireland. Political movements defeat state power, period.
It does prevent state violence the same way nukes prevent world wars. State violence rarely looks like soldiers vs citizens, because soldiers would rebel if they were given such an order. What tyrannical states do is they employ a third party, gangsters or cartels, that are given a carte-blanche to terrorize citizens. See what happened in Hong Kong: CCP hired Triads, those attacked citizens, while the riot police standed behind and arrested _citizens_ who dared to push back. The same cannot happen in the US because the gangsters would be outnumbered 1000:1, and the order to engage soldiers against citizens would split the army into competing factions. Edit: when I say gangsters I don't mean those who rob banks, I mean radicalized mobs who are far more dangerous because their motive is not money, but ideological control.
What happened in the United States when cheap guns began flooding the streets?
A: Tactical teams with automatic weapons, sometimes snipers or air support now serve warrants and raid moderate risk suspects.
We don’t have a tyrannical government. The US unrest scenario is different than China as the citizenry is neutral or pro-government, but you have a vocal minority. We have reactionary political parties that use armed LARPer militias to intimidate voters and influence policy.
I'm far more worried about BLM-style riots. Iirc, in Seattle they even managed to cordone off parts of the city, called them "autonomous zones" and declared themselves kingpins of the square, while the gov forces were ordered to not engage. The local citizens who lived there had to get over it. Only when BLM kingpins killed someone the gov forces had to engage.
Try reading stuff not written for a gun audience. Lots of scenarios in American history exist where tribes were well equipped with repeating rifles while the Army was stuck with Civil War surplus or breechloaders. The 1870s army was a ramshackle affair underfunded and poorly maintained.
Ditto with the Boers and the British. The Brits weren’t faring well against mobile artillery and people not marching around with redcoats and brass. The Brits “won” when they put the families in concentration camps and half starved them.
Guns are powerful, but power doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun.
I'm trying to read it by asking you to cite something, but you have so far been unable to. "Lots of scenarios" is vague and you should be able to come up with at least a few specific examples to support your argument.
The US is arguably the only country in the world where a significant % of citizens possess firearms. If US army decided to commit genocide against even some subset of those citizens, do you really think said firearms would help much?
(Edit: more curiously, has there actually been an example of a democractically-elected government committing genocide?)
Do you really believe either was an example of attempted genocide?
I don't think anyone believes the US lost in Vietnam because local citizens had access to firearms.
I think that tech surveillance, and news about ratcheting oppressive governments do, is interesting -- especially where they overlap
If nothing else it spurs discussion about the ethics of our field. Perhaps it will give some pause before pushing the state of the art forward, or working for shady operators.
CCTV cameras is a benign form of survelliance. In the future everyone will have to wear an AR ring on their heads, similar to what was shown in Watchmen, that ring, paired with attached eyeglasses will be an always online connection to the Internet, necessary for any participation in society, and the only input will be the "inner dialogue" speech that this ring device will detect in the speech-related regions of the brain.
No, that's reductive, though women would be less frequently oppressed.
I'm saying without cameras people will have more freedom to resist, in big and small ways. And with enough resistance they may enact meaningful change.
Cameras are tightening the noose on the opposition to those in power.
But Isn't that true for most technology? it tends to amplify power & if there is already concentration of power than tech will make it worse. I mean even in US tech has created a lot more inequality (though growing the pie but still).
sad thing is this is only the start, wait till you see what pervalant surveillance powered with AI/GPT-X brings.
That does not logically follow; another technology would just as soon take the place of surveillance cameras (phone tracking, social stigma, stricter laws and punishment). It is the intent of the oppressor and the courage of a culture to resist it that matters most.
Oppression would still be present. The issue is the impact and influence protestors could have had simply wouldn't be possible as any dissent will be met with a knock at the door the moment it is uttered.
"Man's own perverted ego" is a constant across all off human history. Asymmetrically powerful technology is not. What are you even doing if you are only going to look at just the former thing?
It should be still common sense to limit access to guns, so that people who are likely to harm themselves or others can't just go and buy one easily. Works very well in most of Europe.
If we're talking about fatalities then stats for gun deaths don't reinforce the argument that they are an unalloyed good, or that reducing their prevalence is impossible.
You seem to be arguing a point that was made by no one present in the conversation.
That aside, if you want to talk statistics, your biggest threat comes from the guns in the hands of your own country's police or military authorities. Sort of like the cameras under discussion.
I've personally known 2 women from Iran who are not fans of the US foreign policy, but become red with anger and visibly shaking when talking about their govt's treatment of women.
> I've personally known 2 women from Iran who are not fans of the US foreign policy, but become red with anger and visibly shaking when talking about their govt's treatment of women.
Why "but"? Those are usually the same groups of people.
Don't get it; 'but' seems to be very legitimate use.
Intuitively, it is more likely that people who are not fan of US policies would be fan of Iranian govt's policies (you know because Iranian govt and US govt don't see eye to eye and all that..).
Causality in global geopolitics is complicated, multifactorial, and generally very difficult to pin down. The original comment was talking about the perceptions of Iranians, and my comments speaks to the perceptions I have seen.
US-Iran relations post-WW2 and why some Iranians see the US as a causal factor for the current repressive regime is a fascinating topic! If you want to explore, here are a few starting points:
At what point do we allow people (in this case the Iranian regime) to have free will / self agency?
And also - we usually don't allow ourselves to go 50 years back to explain someone's behavior. At least in court - that kind of testimony wouldn't have much value.
US Courts (and others) will lock up or send to death row some on evidence that they killed someone 50 years ago (and more) .. murder has no statute of limitations.
US actions set the conditions (a foreign puppet ruler) for a people's overthrow which itself was usurped by the worst form of theocrats (your "Iranian Regime") who maintain power by murder (public hangings in squares, etc) .. and act which, again, US Courts have no time limitation on the consideration of.
> US Courts (and others) will lock up or send to death row some on evidence that they killed someone 50 years ago (and more) .. murder has no statute of limitations.
That's not what I meant. What I meant was no one will excuse what Ted Bundy did because his parents had a divorce or were mean to him when he was a kid.
While we acknowledge that stuff that happened decades ago still might have an effect today, we tend to attribute people with self agency.
I think we should do the same with the current Iranian regime or all countries for that matter.
Also, these theories will never be verifiable. I don't see what's so interesting in exploring them then. This might be because of what the U.S did, or it might be because of what Iraq did (one million people died in the Iran-Iraq war), or simply it might be bad ideas in the minds of religious fanatics - or a million other things or a combination of them. What do we do with it then?
The current Iranian regime maintains power because Iranians support it. No regime rules without a sufficient fraction of the populace supporting it. The US actions were many decades ago. Blaming the US for current affairs in Iran is like blaming the British for problems in the US today.
> The current Iranian regime maintains power because Iranians support it.
Some Iranians love their government! This is true in every country. On the whole, though, this is a gross mischaracterization.
Iran has been having enormous countrywide protests and strikes for the last several years. The scale of these cannot be understated. Protests in every city and town, and many small villages, across the entire country, for months and months on end.
Over 20,000 Iranians have been arrested in the most recent wave of protests, and somewhere between 500 and 5,000 have been killed since September 2022. The government steals people's corpses and buries them in secret so that the true death toll is hidden.
Iran has the largest standing military in the Middle East. About a third of the military is the IRGC, who is sworn protect not the people or national sovereignty, but rather to the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic, and is frequently deployed domestically. They have been instrumental in crushing protests, going as far as shelling their own villages with artillery to quell dissent.
While obviously, many Iranians are very unhappy with their government, that doesn't equal an outright majority. In fact, many (most?) revolutions aren't even fought by a majority; usually it's a small minority that takes over by defeating another small minority, while the rest are complacent.
Regardless, that huge military you refer to in Iran is composed of... Iranians. They're not foreign oppressors. If the Iranian people don't want these village-shelling assholes ruling over them, they need to stand up and do something about it. These soldiers live somewhere, and have families somewhere. No regime can stay in power without military support.
Anyway, back to my point: Iran's current problems aren't America's fault. Iranians are doing this to themselves, just like Afghanistan's people are oppressing themselves.
I get impressed every time I see those people that don't see that the most effective thing supporting the current Iran government is the US foreign policy.
Really, I can't understand why this worldview comes from.
Would the current Iran government collapse if the US removed all the sanctions and let Iran be?
Historically a 180 reversal on sanctions on countries while the regimes were in place has never really been fully tested or known to work.
The current government was elected as soon as GWB started threatening invade Iran. (And followed with a much expected unnoficial coup.)
The previous one (not exactly democratic, but not "let's kill everybody that dresses wrong" either) was created by a lot of popular pressure, replacing another set of religious nutjobs that were put there by the CIA.
Now, answer me, did the sanctions destroy the current government yet? Or maybe they are only there for 15 years and they just need a century or two to make any effect?
This is the true mass surveillance dystopia. When cameras get weaponized to enforce arbitrary dressing rules. Looking at how common cameras have gotten in public places like CCTVs in UK I can't shake the feeling that civilians are just one bad election away from getting hammered by the establishment.
I also feel for iranian women. One can't but wonder what life would look like if Iran dumped the derelict religious practices and just went with a more common sense approach to religion and equality.
Meanwhile, feminists in the western world fight to wear a hijab, burkha, abaya, etc. and don’t see them as signs of oppression. I wish i understood the logic. Wish we could all stand up against this together.
Is it really a choice when you are talking about religion? I am from Iran. In the school they teach (scare) children that if you don’t wear hijab, you will be hanged from your hair and burned on a stick till eternity in hell after you die. By the way that subject is not elective. You have to pass it. What kind of choice is this?
Update (context): I am not talking about the people in west who want to (not)wear hijab. I understand the premise of that choice. But this word (choice) is used daily in government propaganda. Maybe its analogous to talking about the choice of working in a cotton field to a slave. It’s a whole different environment/context. Hence my negative reaction to this word. It’s a matter of feeling which I just expressed. Nothing against someone who has a real choice, without religious stigma.
Yes. Compare the commercial secular Christmas to the mainstream Christian versions to the biblical literalists version. People in different parts of the world treat their religion and culture with different levels of severity and it's possible for an item associated with an oppressive interpretation in one part of the world to be a cultural pride item in another.
Obviously that's the reason why people in (say) France are arguing to be allowed to wear it and people in Iran are arguing to be allowed to not wear it.
It's the same argument: don't make me do something I don't want to do.
Many years ago I had a colleague who was a pretty good engineer from Morocco, also a very nice guy. He left his country and was almost disowned by his own family for being an atheist, a condition which over there I imagine is quite rare and dangerous even nowadays, although we have a good set of examples of discrimination in the west too.
He probably had to leave his country to live a reasonable lifestyle. Some countries like Malaysia will not let you leave Islam if your ethnic Malay, and due to your race you are presumed to be Islamic by law.
It can be very isolating and sometimes dangerous to be the outsider in an area with uniform religious and cultural beliefs.
I think it’s a complex topic that involves religion, society and culture. In this case it’s important to know if they are singling out hijab or also other religious symbols? For instance France banned full face covers and burkas which are not even mandated by the religion if I am not mistaken.
I believe banning a piece of clothing is not reasonable, like banning jeans or headscarves. On the other hand there is a lot of stigma around hijab if you choose not to wear it among some muslim families so much so that it’s not a real choice anymore and it’s not a simple piece of cloth. So I think it’s not bad to have some legal ways to protect you against your over zealous family/community but this kind of lawmaking is very prone to other issues too. Furthermore, banning and enforcing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin which is ultimately the root of the problem. It’s very complicated. I wish I had a straightforward answer.
I don't get offended but I've noticed that when people wear the hood of their hoodies in public transit, I sometimes feel a bit uneasy about not being able to see their faces. So I'm thinking there is a non-religious aspect to the discussion.
I tend to elicit the feeling you are mentioning often, without intending to. I have seen old women move away from me while we were waiting to cross the street. I have been stopped by police because “I was acting suspicious” (I was walking to the gym, after work).
It’s not a nice feeling, scaring people just by being around.
Because of this, I never wear the hood of my hoodie. In general I have to wear as unthreatening clothes as I can. And I avoid dark streets, because someone can see me as a threat and fear makes people do irrational things.
I once read in a book about sales about a tall, well-built athletic guy who was in outside sales. His problem: whenever he walked into a prospect's office, he could detect fear just from his imposing presence. He solved this problem by arranging to stumble as he crossed the threshold, which effectively allayed the latent fear.
Locality and social norms definitely play into this conversation, here in Seattle at least there is a culture that supports nudism, whether it's the summer solstice bike ride, certain beaches that are popular for swimming in your birthday suit, etc.
That’s a really bad faith argument. What’s up with people attempting to summarise someone else’s thought in the worst possible way and putting words in their mouths?
Some forms of dress and undress have laws. Others don’t have laws but are still bound by social contracts. The person you are replying to is clearing trying to compare these and pointing out responsibility may come down to the wearer in both cases and wondering out loud that society may punish any extreme state of dress.
At which point did he say you should pass new legislation or that he agreed with it?
If I'm wearing a hoodie I take off the hood when I go indoors. It's just basic courtesy, something I've noticed a lot of people nowadays have trouble with.
Cowardice can be a factor, but even when it is, it stems from the fear of losing control over others’ behaviour. That control is in this case veiled with religion.
Do the people which get offended by nazi uniforms are fragile as well ?
The topic is much more complicated than "fragility" as you are dismissively trying to portray it. We wear clothes in civilised societies for a reason, and different types of clothes have different types of societal effects.
Your freedom ends where the the freedom of the next person's begins.
There's a bit of a difference between a religion, and a regime that, in its ten years of power, managed to kill tens of millions and start the largest and bloodiest war of all time.
Well, because populations have grown so much in the last two hundred years, to the extent that a sizable chunk of all lives ever lived are after 1800 or so, I don't think that a long history in pre-modern times would move the needle that much.
Also, the Nazis are just really exceptionally bloody-handed. In terms of intentionally, directly killing people, they killed like 16 million people. In terms of intentionally, indirectly killing people, their deliberate use of famine killed eight or nine million civilians in the soviet union alone. Then you add all the people that died due to massacres, or were killed as collateral damage, and you can understand why 30 million people died in the USSR, the vast majority of whom were civilians. It generally gets much worse in areas the Nazis had a longer duration of control: in Poland, they killed about one in five people.
It's generally pretty hard to kill that many people before the 20th century, because the means of killing are too innefective, and the number of potential victims is too small. For what it's worth, Genghis Khan is probably the most bloody-handed pre-modern figure, so if we're going to blame religion for his behaviour, it's probably shamanism that has the highest death toll.
If I see a person nazi regalia I might feel uncomfortable and I’ll certainly judge them for their choice of clothing, but never would I advocate for making nazi regalia illegal.
It is not functioning as a garment, it is a device used to enforce modesty and mark someone as second class citizen. It is more similar to a straight jacket or a yellow star than a hat. What complicates it is some people of faith want to wear it and are persecuted for that.
Making it simply a choice of clothing is reductionism and you know it.
The problem is these has been equated to symbols of oppression. Tbf, they serve no practical purpose and are deeply tied to religious practices that have caused lots of problems where they are from.
A similar thing would be the ban of wearing nazi symbols.
It's a head covering; it covers your head, which can provide comfort depending on the environmental conditions.
Depending on the specific garment and context, it may provide some privacy/anonyminity.
Comparing it to nazi symbols doesn't seem right; in part because it's not purely symbolic, but also because it's only oppression when you're forced to wear it, not when you choose to. No one is calling for the star of david to be banned because Jews were forced to wear them; if someone wants to wear it, they can.
It’s more complicated because the reason someone may want to wear it is based on indoctrination. If you have a modern sect that indoctrinated its members to serve (labor, etc) the leadership and they do it voluntarily and in addition may balk at not doing it, posing their position as “a choice” is missing the context.
How is this any different from belief in general? Most people's beliefs are a product of their culture. We are all indoctrinated, whether it's religion, nationalism, or tuna casserole.
The ones handed down by institutions designed to indoctrinate you is different from culture in general which goes through natural filtering and change. Indoctrination usually follows some dogma with "interpreters" who tell you what it means.
"Power to choose" in the eyes of law and general society, as advocated by feminists, is not much use if women's family, relatives and other close community strongly disapprove and don't respect that law.
The law should not force anything. Western feminists should focus on improving women's rights in migrant communities, rather than calling people who point out real problems racist. Then more women actually do have the choice to wear what they want.
One of our elected feminists, Kshama Sawant did focus on migrant families issues, and passed landmark legislation banning discrimination based on caste.
Considering how many Indian Americans convert to a different religion for the sole purpose of escaping the social implications their caste ties them to, this is a good starting point.
Many of such movements were created by people with noble intentions, but over time they have been replaced by selfish actors who use the movement's past reputation as a shell. Today they are wolves in sheep's clothes.
Those hijabs is a clumsy measure to contain the power of sexuality. They recognize its power and the danger of getting it unleashed, but they aren't wise enough to know how to transform it into creativity at the society level, so they just chained it.
It is the opposite. Feminists are fundamentally anti religion and anti establishment. If govt is railing against what women can do, feminists are the first to fight. If religion is dictating what women can/should do, feminists will be the first to fight.
Feminists are to authority like atheists are to religion.
I had a conversation with a young progressive atheist woman about first hand accounts with women of Muslim backgrounds wearing the mandated clothing out of fear. She had a hard time accepting that what people said and how they acted publicly wasn’t the whole story. I used to smoke weed with some people that included some Muslim girls who would talk openly about what they were afraid of and the family pressures. If you don’t actually know people well you don’t get the whole story.
In other words I’ve had direct experience with feminists who supported religious clothing in a misguided attempt to support other cultures.
I’m of course not saying that there aren’t people who freely choose to wear such things. But it’s rarely without at least some pressure. We should be careful about what we force people to do but also be aware that not everyones outward choices are free.
I have known Muslim women who have had to fight their own family members to wear the clothing, and had to fight the fundamentalist stereotypes associated with women who veil. And then I have also come across Muslim women who were pressured to wear out of tradition. Rarely have I come across any women rebels. But that’s also because I am selective of the company I keep, like I don’t go anywhere near drugs.
Our experiences are a result of who we associate with. The Muslim women who fought to wear the scarf did so out of having dedication and focus in their lives to studies and discipline (they were med students, engineers, architects).
These anecdotes are completely useless. It is far too common to see some conservative somewhere trot out anecdotes such as this, claiming some stupidity being said by someone they don’t like. Frankly I do not believe you, no matter how taboo it is the say so.
To use a phrase that seems to have lost favor: link, or it didn’t happen.
I’m not conservative and I’m not recording sensitive private conversations for the amusement of internet strangers. I’m relating my first hand experience using my real name, you can choose to believe whatever you want.
This has been my experience, especially given the predominance of governments that are to some degree controlled by fundamentalist sects. It goes against the unspoken orthodoxy of what feminism is, though, so I do not expect your opinion to be a popular one here. I would say that there is a lot of overlap between atheism and feminism though.
A lot of “liberal” people are starting to get progressively more strange ideas and it’s troubling. Jumping from not wanting to prosecute minor drug crimes (reasonable) to not wanting to prosecute murder (troubling).
Trying to support other cultures (admirable) by encouraging oppressive practices (troubling). Not seeming to understand that very much of the women’s clothing is worn out of fear ranging from family shaming to extreme violence.
The far and even moderate left is becoming increasingly bigoted classifying people into bins and setting behavior standards. You’re not just a person you’re a complex set of race, gender, and creed and you have to stay in that lane or you’re immoral. It’s all very odd.
I feel like you're doing the classifying here. There is no single "left" position on this issue, because "the left" is not an entity. You got very close to self-awareness in your last paragraph, but projected onto it a twisted view of liberalism as an authoritarian morality police, which makes me question where you source your information.
To be clear, I’m explicitly calling out the average liberal as increasingly advocating for authoritarian solutions on many societal issues. Not the fringe, not a few, but the majority of the political left in the US. Do other people not see this?
You're going to have a hard time convincing others without naming those solutions and the mainstream liberal figures who support them.
In my experience, there's nothing exceptional about American liberalism in contrast with most of the Western world, while American conservatism has an unhealthy obsession with authoritarian solutions to problems that aren't problems: transgender people, women who don't want to be pregnant, people who want to marry those of the same sex, and books about any of the above that children might read.
School girls poisoned in many cities in concert using similar method and government officials claimed it’s nothing but hysteria and the “supreme” leader finally condemns it after a lot of bad press outside of Iran. They install cameras to find one unveiled woman but have trouble to identify who is poisoning school girls nationwide. His condemnation is there to be sold to BBC. Nobody in Iran believes him.
I didn't want to claim I believed him, just that this was the last thing I heard. So it seemed the poisonings actually stopped. But as spywaregorilla pointed out, there are very recent reports of new poisonings: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-ap...
ehhh, it's not super clear but the government response has been so lackluster it seems highly likely that they are responsible for it as a way to suppress protest movements which has a strong momentum among high school girls.
> Student poisonings have resumed in Iran after approximately three weeks without reported incidents, indicating that the regime has failed to take the necessary security measures to permanently prevent these attacks. CTP recorded ten student poisoning cases on April 5, four cases on April 4, and one case on April 3.[1] The April 3 chemical poisoning attack on Iranian school girls in Naghadeh, West Azerbaijan Province marked the first of such attacks since March 13, as CTP previously reported.[2] The pause in student poisonings between March 13 and April 3 roughly corresponds to the Iranian New Year holiday between March 20 and April 2, suggesting that the recent respite from student poisonings was not due to the regime’s ability to effectively crack down on the perpetrators of these attacks, but because schools were not in session. The resumption of student poisoning attacks also indicates that the network targeting Iranian school girls still exists and retains the ability to operate in Iran.
> There are numerous similarities between the most recent student poisonings and the poisonings that occurred between December 2022 and March 2023. Students poisoned in recent days have reported symptoms—such as smelling a strange smell before becoming ill, dizziness, and headaches—which match the symptoms experienced by students poisoned in March.[3] Students from schools where poisoning attacks have occurred in recent days have additionally reported that school principals confiscated their cellphones to prevent the dissemination of news about the attacks.[4] School officials reportedly behaved in a similarly abnormal and unsympathetic manner during the peak of student poisonings in early March, as CTP previously reported.[5] Regime officials have largely disregarded the resumption of student poisoning attacks. Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi stated on April 5 that he “could not confirm” the poisoning of students in Tabriz, East Azerbaijan Province. Vahidi added that “further investigations should take place,” but did not exhibit any sense of urgency regarding the recent attacks.[6] The regime’s lack of response suggests that it is incapable of preventing such attacks, does not want to acknowledge the existence of a network capable of instilling fear into the Iranian people, and still tolerates the poisoning of Iranian schoolgirls.
It's insane how Islamic Republic wants to speed up its downfall and start another popular uprising with things like this. The walls of Iranian cities are still full of "Woman Life Freedom" and "Death to Khamenei" slogans.
Just to point out: The "on device" and "private" CSAM detection christian politicians push would trivially be able to be used for this as well. Before anyone says "but CSAM is illegal", in Iran the violating the "hajib law" is definitionally illegal.
That's a fair point, alas I can't edit my original comment anymore.
CSAM is alas a fairly well understood term of art in security and cryptography circles, for those with the good fortune to not know have such familiarity, it means child abuse.
The thing people don't understand is that in most oppressive governments, MOST of what the government does is quite acceptable, positive even. The Iranian government definitely also protects women. Even repression is not all bad, or even mostly bad.
And like Iranian laws of public decency, CSAM has it's "oh my god think of the children!" central case that is a reprehensible crime. Nobody disagrees with this. Of course, there's a few cracks already: a number of state governments are trying to classify comic book depictions of LGBTQ, even textual ones, as CSAM. You can even vaguely see the argument, the idea being that this encourages children to engage in such acts.
The problem is that CSAM laws are perfect for this use case. They're absolutely perfect for repression! After all, we can never have a frank discussion of what CSAM is, based on the actual material, for obvious reasons. We can never have the citizenry openly discuss what material gets added to the list, and what does not get added to the list, so we are 100% dependent on politically not-quite-elected people with agendas deciding what's on the list.
Furthermore, one can quickly expose the motives behind CSAM scanning. Is it to help children ... or not? Look at what it's being used for, what these laws effectively do. Obviously it's being used to find children, who are of course in most cases the victim of very minor abuse, or of mistakes, and then placed in the care of CPS. Now you can quickly differentiate motives:
1) if the intention is to help those children, we would make damn sure those children, from that point forward, are treated better than they were at home
2) if the intention is repression, societal control, ... they totally would not care about the treatment of the children found
We all know how CPS treats children. It most definitely does not protect children in their care against sexual abuse, for example. Something like half those children does not go to school at all. They have no real future (yes, thankfully there are exceptions). There is a Netflix series "Young and locked up" that is, among others, about what happens to children who protest their treatment by CPS by running away. Go and look.
Or look at "Short Term 12" where a victim of child abuse is depicted. The victim, nearly adult tries to get out from "protection", constantly explaining how her life at home (presumably/allegedly WITH abuse) was so much better than her environment in CPS, and eventually returns to "home", where she was abused and destroys and rages. It is left in the middle if she wants revenge for abuse ... or is taking revenge for getting her into CPS. In an interview the director points out that this vagueness about her motives, whether they're against abuse or against CPS, is not an accident.
One kid, because he's about to "graduate" from CPS (dumped homeless on the street), tries to commit suicide, because of what he knows his future is. In commentary, it is made very clear that the kid is correct about his future.
And of course, there's many stories in the press that this effectively encourages child abuse. After all, CPS in the US is a horrible punishment FOR CHILDREN, worse than jail in some cases. Which of course means it's net effect is to strongly encourage children to simply accept abuse if they've ever seen CPS in action. And, of course, CPS is completely losing the fight against everything they're supposedly fighting, from sexual abuse to suicide, which of course is completely coincidental. Children FEAR state help against sexual abuse much more than they fear the abuse in the US (not that the situation in, say, France, is any different). And frankly, it's hard to argue this fear is anything but justified.
So, frankly, you cannot trust government with CSAM scanning, and there's no reason to. It's the perfect instrument of repression, we would not even know if it was used for that, and if you look at the full picture of CSAM scanning, including enforcement, the argument that it's there to protect children is ridiculous.
At this point anyone who works in the “AI” image recognition space, no matter the company, must be aware that these are some of the consequences of his/her work, there’s no avoiding it.
Anything that makes humans more legible to machines is a threat to human liberty. Biometric surveillance and digital identity initiatives must be resisted or we will inevitably find ourselves hopelessly ensnared by a totalitarian clique. Machines can't be convinced to join the revolution.
Good way for avoiding responsibility, as good as any other, I guess.
But I’m sure that for those directly involved the money is excellent and the feeling of doing something “cool” must be through the roof, uncle Ted and Ellul be damned.
I doubt it. Clearview is already being targeted by regulators in the US and Canada, and trading with Iran is basically giving those regulators a 50-caliber bullet to knock them down.
I’ll guess the software is from a Chinese company..
SV tech employees that wrote the software on their $400k quite happy as their stocks improve too.
Shame the approach René Carmille took is no longer popular. I guess it’s easy for us to wash our hands of what our software is used for - it’s bad guys who use it, and maybe it’s bad guys that sell it to bad guys, all I do is close some jiras
Literally a story anbout the state using technology our community develops to anttack women, and of course it’s the “Karen” is blamed. Misogyny in a nutshell.
Which race? Arabic culture was spread over with the sword upon Islamic expansion.
The same with Christianism in Western Europe. If you think about it, both cultures are totally alien to Europe and Iran. The Christianism itself had to steal lots of Greek philosophy so it could fit in the Roman Empire and the further Middle Ages.
With the Enlightenment we got the Graeco-Roman aesthetic and philosphical values back.
Is not a matter of race. Since the Roman empire, all of the Western Europe it's pretty mixed with Atlantic and Mediterranean features all over the place. It's a matter of culture.
Turkey with Ataturk got it pretty fast. Either evolve, or die as an irrelevant country with backward values.
I used the word "objectively" to close the door to moral relativism. However, I can defend the use of the word more thoroughly.
I base my morality on the well-being of conscious creatures.
What constitutes well-being is open to debate, but whatever it is, it will be facts about the state of the brain/physiology of conscious creatures in the physical universe. If you admit the physical universe is objective basis for measurement, actions that decrease a creatures well-being can be thought of as objectively wrong.
> Which results in the "rightness" and "wrongness" of those actions being open to debate, and therefore subjective.
Poor choice of words by me...what I meant to say is that the full scope of human well-being is not yet known. Whatever it ultimately _is_ isn't open to debate, as whatever constitutes well-being will be facts about how the human organism can either flourish or fail to flourish.
If you can admit that a universe where every conscious being suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it possibly can is bad, then the morality conversation can get off the ground. If the word "bad" is going to mean anything, it applies there.
Those who want compulsory veiling and it's associated punishments are _wrong_ to want it. I contend that this is true independent of culture.
I wish they'd share exactly the reason of these cameras
Is it really for spying unveiled women?
Or is it for public safety? considering the recent poisoning of young female students [1] + the killing of scientists by the mossad [2]
The fact that reuters jumps to conclusions makes me believe there is something fishy going in with Iran and its neighbor Israel
Why isn't the press investigating? Maybe that's the question everyone should ask themselves instead of going the easy road, whenever it's too easy, there might be something more complex behind the scenes..
The problem here is Iran, cameras have nothing to do with it.