Elektrine lite

← Feed

@masek@infosec.exchange

2026-10-03 11:28 UTC

@Leszek_Karlik@circumstances.run This is a very personal opinion: I think this confuses the immediate effect with the systemic effect. Yes, in an authoritarian regime, false positives may initially be a feature rather than a bug. Arbitrary punishment creates fear, and fear can help suppress opposition. The regime may therefore tolerate a level of false positives that would be politically unacceptable in a democracy. But false positives do not stop having consequences just because the regime doesn't care about human rights. They create an enormous business opportunity for corruption. If being flagged by the system can cost you your job, your freedom or your life, then making sure that you are not flagged suddenly has considerable economic value. Officials can sell protection, investigations can disappear, rivals can be denounced, evidence can be manufactured, and surveillance itself becomes another instrument in internal power struggles. At the same time, every false positive consumes resources: investigators, police, intelligence officers, prisons, bureaucrats and ultimately money. A sufficiently noisy system can drown its own security apparatus in useless information just as easily as a democratic one. The difference is that an authoritarian regime can hide these costs for much longer. But it cannot make them disappear. Fear may strengthen authoritarian control in the short term. Corruption, resource consumption and the gradual destruction of reliable information corrode the state in the long term.

Replies (1)

  • @forthy42@mastodon.net2o.de 2026-10-03 14:47

    @masek@infosec.exchange @Leszek_Karlik@circumstances.run The difference between a tyranny and trying to find terrorists is that the tyranny has many, many more true positives. Example: Mao started his land reform with 杀一儆百, kill one, warn 100, and in effect, about 10% of the landlords were killed. Roughly 5-10% of the rural population were landlords, so not just a few. Finding the landlords was easy, the other villagers knew them, and they were tasked with punishing them. In effect, this act of violence didn't backfire. Most villagers had an axe to grind with their landlords, and benefited from redistributed land. Especially, since many landlords gave away their land only on paper, and demanded the same lease afterwards, using their old network of thugs, so they had to be killed (including the thugs). Similar acts of redistributions happened when Jews were ousted by the Nazis. Not to everyone, but it created an incentive to find Jews, Communists, and whatnot. All of those weren't so rare that false positives were rare enough. How many innocent did Freisler kill? From a Nazi point of view, despite the fact that his court didn't meet any standards, not many.

    Open ##5300182