Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

In the U.S., the National Hotline number 988, as a story from The Markup explores.

(Finally, another new source focused on technology news from the social impact angle and less on the technical angle, such as The Register or Bleeping Computer.)

You see, marginal groups, such as LGBT+ groups, understand the need for privacy. I'm pretty sure you don't need to watch the ending of The Imitation Game that showed how Alan Turing was convicted for homosexual acts (which eventually lead to his death) to have an example of LGBT+ people having their private lives upended.

(Also, happy Pride Month — I didn't mean to when I first started this, but I might as well.)

Anyways, this shows how services done for the common good or as a public good will always be open to sociological attack vectors from surveillance technology.

You don't have to search that far back into Surveillance Report news stories to see that this has been happening to public schools.

Even private/charter schools are not immune from surveillance tech, both directly and indirectly from the increasing pace of technology — don't think that just because these schools are more exclusionary via tuition fees and/or entrance exams that you have the privilege of not being surveilled on. Technologist writer Cory Doctorow has written a great piece on “The Shitty Technology Adoption Curve”, where this technology is (mostly involuntarily) applied on marginalized groups before spreading to everyone else in society. For example, surveillance cameras are used in high crime areas, such as Chicago, but now all socialized people think you're crazy for not protecting your Amazon packages with a Ring doorbell.)

So, about Chicago: a report from 2010 cited Chicago having the most surveillance cameras on public streets (which was a fact famously used in one of the teasers/trailers for the 2014 video game Watch Dogs (and part of the reason why the first game was set in Chicago).

(Sorry, that video's now age-restricted in 2023, as this wasn't the case, as far back in 2017-2018, IIRC; though yt-dlp seems to not care about age-restricted, videos especially videos that are given this false positive by YouTube's New Age algorithm filtering now.)

Don't believe me? This is Chicago has a high level of gun violence as a major city in the U.S., so much that that the scene where one of the protagonists in the 2018 film Widows gets dropped off at a Chicago hospital after getting shot — and no police will ever come to ask you how you got shot. The gun violence is that bad in Chicago. Some viewers might hurl an initial and naïve Cinema Sins pot shot at this film for that scene, but that scene is actually based on IRL research on Chicago; and actually you would be in the wrong for not knowing the background info behind this film deeply enough.

Random bit

Why the heck is there a “Surveillance Resource Center” page from the CDC?