Canada's bill C-22 mandates mass metadata surveillance of Canadians
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...
Canada's bill C-22 mandates mass metadata surveillance of Canadians
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...
I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this.
If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be.
One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools.
Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.
Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry
To what end would you say the surveillance is for?
So you surveil your citizens and precog their opinions... to do what? Make them have state-sponsored opinions? Don't we already have that without the surveillance?
It's trivial to predict how a human will behave without any surveillance at all. Facebook abandoned their Beacon system not because of the backlash, but because they realized all they really needed to predict user behavior was the user's credit card statements, which they could easily buy.
At some point the constitution is the backstop, and unless we amend it, it should hold true.