deeply uncomfortable with rights organizations making pragmatic appeals against internet surveillance. would way rather see them saying something like "human decency recognizes the absolute right of people to have private conversations without government eavesdropping."

@Moon I think there was a typo in your post, or i misunderstood…

Isnt this:

human decency recognizes the absolute right of people to have private conversations without government eavesdropping.

An example of this

rights organizations making pragmatic appeals against internet surveillance

@freemo a pragmatic appeal means arguing "we shouldn't do it because it won't work" or "it would be too costly to implement"
I think such arguments come up from assumption that a lot of people don't really give a shit about human rights, privacy, decency, etc but do care about their wallets and their job.

If you stand up and say "internet surveillance is violation of human rights" people will say that you're just another lefty whiner triggered by some meaningless shit. But if you provide a pragmatic argument about implementing surveillance would be too expensive and have too much side effects, they may listen.
@lonelyowl @freemo they are all BS left-wing oriented pragmatic arguments like "women won't be able to keep abortion plans secret from the government" which is a stupid argument on multiple levels if you actually think about it

@Moon

Wait, what exactly do people use "women won't be able to keep abortion plans secret from the government" to aruge?

@lonelyowl

@freemo @Moon @lonelyowl It's an artifact of Roe v Wade, which was justified by an implied right to privacy from the government for pregnant women seeking an abortion (and no other scenario). It kind of seeped into every argument about abortion and warped into an emotional appeal because people didn't really understand the legal gymnastics involved in the case.
@freemo @Zettour @lonelyowl incidentally I am willing to admit I may be totally wrong about this and whatever argument will get rid of the surveillance is the "best" argument, not the one that I think is the most pure or whatever.
I also have a thought that legal prohibition of some surveillance practices in big tech is just a bad approach to the problem because they later will come up with something else anyway.

Maybe it would be better to concentrate on advocacy and developing free analogs. Apparently it's not such a bad idea, at least a lot of non-tech normies are quite happy to use mastodon.

We do need to criticize facebook, google or whatever for surveillance, but that's a secondary objective
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