Post #3004858

Hello, we are sUS Binghamton. SUS is short for Southern tier United for responsible Surveillance. We are a local activist organization in Binghamton, New York that opposes mass surveillance by Big Tech and governments, and is in favor of surveillance technologies being used responsibly in consensual ways, we are not trying to completely ban security cameras, we are reasonable. Our website is at https://susbinghamton.org and is still a work in progress. We have meetings weekly in Binghamton. Our contact information is on our website. We are very much in favor of alternatives to Big Tech monopolies, things like Mastodon and the Fediverse, decentralized tech ecosystems outside the control of Silicon Valley. We want users to have more control of their own data, more privacy and security. We want to promote open source and having people able to control their own hardware and software and not have it controlled by other people. We want technological sovereignty like people talk about in the European Union, but in the United States too, being free from Silicon Valley and our own federal government using intrusive technology to spy on everyone. We want AI development to happen in a more responsible, ethical, sustainable way, with less environmental impact, less using people for training data and spying on them, less stealing of people’s creative works, less excessive electrical usage, less hallucinations and errors, less consolidation by monopolistic companies, less connections to the military-industrial complex, more accuracy, more open-source, more uses that actually benefit people, more ability to run it privately on your own consumer grade hardware without having to use cloud computing or data centers. We want games to have less predatory microtransactions. We want the Internet to have less ads and paywalls and sponsored content and AI slop and enshittification. We want a return to having your own content online that you control. We want less dependency on technology and more of an ability for people to live in harmony with nature. But we are pro-technological advancement, not against technology, we just think the wrong people are currently in charge of a lot of technology, in the surveillance capitalism system written about by Shoshanna Zuboff. We want to democratize technology and have more equal access to it, have it be a force for good instead of harm, we want to minimize harms, minimize violations of privacy and security, help people improve their privacy and security, and advocate for better public policies that benefit ordinary people. We want less things like Flock surveillance cameras and more things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Less targeted ads and phones tracking people, more secure devices like phones switched to GrapheneOS. Less bots, more plants and animals. We are in favor of nature and humanity as opposed to having machines or billionaire tech oligarchs take over. We don’t want to ban all surveillance, parents using baby monitors is a wonderful thing, just don’t use it for harmful things, not for mass surveillance of the public, not for surveillance of every Internet user or everyone who steps foot outside and is recorded on camera. We are in favor of freedom. We are nonpartisan. We are open to everyone. It is a sUS for the rest of us. We are super sus impostors among us. We are activists. We are educators. We want to change policy starting with local governments in our area, and educate and inform the public and help people make informed decisions regarding technology. We are happy to be on the infosec.exchange Mastodon instance and look forward to learning more from others here and contributing to this online community, as well as using this as a way to get our message out without using Silicon Valley corporate Big Tech platforms that spy on everyone. Most people agree with a majority of our agenda. It is a popular agenda that is common sense. When we fight, we win. A better world is possible. This is something the vast majority of people can support regardless of political affiliation, and we want to build bridges and coalitions. Currently we are focused on fighting Flock cameras and other ALPRs, Automatic License Plate Readers. We will try to get them banned in our area and expand our operations to other areas, like switching people from Windows to Linux, especially people whose computers are still stuck on older versions of Windows like Windows 10 and earlier that no longer get security updates. Everyone should have good security on their devices. You should not have to buy a new computer like Microsoft tells you to do. You should not have Google and Meta and Palantir and Flock and the NSA all tracking you. You should not be used for training data by OpenAI and Anthropic and all the other AI companies without agreeing to it. These companies should not be involved in human rights abuses or killing people. None of this should be controversial. The public agrees with us overwhelmingly on almost all of this. We just need to mobilize people and then we will win. We are sUS, don’t mess with us. OK, that was not meant to be threatening, we are friendly, we are on the side of the vast majority of people, we are just opposed to people in power doing bad things and abusing their power. So hello there everyone! Join us in our revolution as we overthrow the ruling power structures of the world... err... umm... I mean, we have very modest goals, we are just reformists. OK forget we said anything about a revolution. That was just a wardrobe malfunction. Yeah, that’s believable. It was just a gaffe, a Freudian slip. A joke! By none other than J.R. “Bob” Dobbs! No but seriously, these Big Tech oligarchs have become the most powerful people in the world and we need to reign in their power quite a bit and give it back to ordinary people, have things be more democratic, and that would actually be a revolutionary change at this point because things have gotten so techno-authoritarian by now that techno-authoritarianism is the status quo and advocating that people have basic freedoms is actually a revolutionary statement now, even though it shouldn’t be, it is just common sense. So we are starting at the local level and trying to get local people in our area to take back control of our own local area from what Yanis Varoufakis would call technofeudalism. The enshittification Cory Doctorow talks about. The surveillance capitalism Shoshanna Zuboff talks about. The AI bubble everyone is talking about, similar to earlier hype bubbles like NFTs except more dangerous because AI is a real thing and NFTs were pointless. This stuff is all connected and we are here to fight back against all the nonsense coming from the Big Tech authoritarians who want to control everyone else. Surveillance is just a means of control. Responsible surveillance means, only using this technology in responsible ways where the benefit outweighs the harm, where there is consent, where it is ethical. Although different people have different ideas of ethics so we use the word responsible because that has more to do with how if you are irresponsible, you are liable to be causing harm to others through carelessness or bad decisions or decisions that do not even take their well-being into account at all. Regardless of what political labels people identify as, this is common sense stuff almost everyone ought to be able to agree on, if presented with the facts and allowed to make educated decisions. We are for responsible surveillance because we are not just against things, we want to build a better world and be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If people hold those in power accountable by capturing their misdeeds on camera, for example, that is an example of responsible surveillance. It can actually be a force for good in the world, if we put a stop to the irresponsible surveillance causing so much harm, things like algorithmic price discrimination and social media experiments in giving people negative emotions and eating disorders, AI systems that tell people to harm themselves, if we stop these harms, we can make things so much better.