Pandora’s iPhone, by Stuart Carlson, 2016. Still spot-on in 2026:
A backdoor for the good guys simply does not exist. Once you build it, hackers walk through, authoritarian governments walk through, and the rest follows.
The UK is pressuring for chat control right now. EU Chat Control initiatives keep popping up. We need to keep saying NO to this!
Apple only needs to push a dodgy software update to the phone… No need for a backdoor. All phones are registered with Apple so they know who to push to
This illustration is completely wrong.
The man representing hackers isn’t in a fur suit.
Love the weird scale of threat depicted here.
-smol bean megacorporation
-regular bean fbi man
-Big Hacker, the big hacker lobbyist
-giant evil FOREIGNER with their evil UNIFORM and MEDALS
-ect, other guys, artist kind of blew his load drawing all those evil medals
Like the scale implies I should be most worried about the biggest guy, but I live in America. The feds are the biggest threat to me. You can tell this wasn’t drawn by a leftist because…well, almost everything, but mostly because of how normal they seem to think the FBI is, and how small a deal being spied on by them apparently is compared to being spied on by someone that doesn’t have the capacity to send a death squad to my apartment at any moment.
Almost as though the cartoonist just drew a load of their stock characters and then added labels instead of putting thought into it.
Yeah the choice of scale is very weird, why are hackers larger than the FBI? Also doesn’t really seem mutually exclusive
That’s only because the FBI guy and the Oppressive Regime guy have become the same guy
Probably more of a “Corporate wants you to find the difference…” than the astronaut one.
that’s a good image to convey the message to people propagandized by the us, but yes, “fbi” and “repressive regimes” are one and the same here
your domestic government poses much more of a threat to your privacy than some foreign “repressive regime” far away
I took it as “repressive regime” to mean the administration itself, (not some foreign government), as in more normal times the fbi was a separate entity. And would even investigate the president for crimes. But given the current consolidation of power and that checks and balances have been compromised, I suppose the distinction is moot now.
I’m not saying I don’t believe the US has repressive policies, but I am questioning any source that claims to have detailed enough info about NK internal policy to accurately rank them compared to other countries
The thing is, being repressive becomes more and more expensive past a certain point. It’s not cheap being the prison capital of the world or building a surveillance state. The US is one of the only countries that can even afford to do as much repression as it does.
That’s why we use our prison population for slave labor, helps to offset the cost!
Maybe to some extent, but prison slavery only provides about $9 billion in services and produces over $2 billion in goods annually.
For comparison, the total cost of the U.S. prison system is approximately $445 billion annually.
I think it’s more like a “protest the regime and have a 50+% chance of getting executed for it” thing
Something which the good people at Radio Free Asia is totally real and definitely happens
And the odds of getting killed at a protest here are what, only 30%? Bullshit. It’s a propaganda thing, the US has always been a violent repressive menace to world peace.
The odds of getting killed at a protest aren’t 30%. If that were true we would have hundreds of thousands dead each year.
Allow me to facetiously talk about the US the way people from this country typically talk about the DPRK:
How do we know they don’t kill hundreds of thousands of protestors a year? The repressive government regime hides any information that makes it look bad, such as job reports, climate reports, and war casualties. They’ve got concentration camps all over and people dissappear all the time. There’s just no way we can trust their numbers.
Based on what? Statistics provided by the same government we’re talking about?
I pray you understand I’m trying to create a picture that’s comprehensible for the average. ml user here
What you think/claim you’re doing doesn’t matter at all, this is presenting the US federal government as less of a threat to our privacy than some other “repressive regime” somewhere else in the world and that’s 100% bullshit
Ah yes those people worried about getting executed for opposing their government face the same threat as someone in the US worried for their privacy
One struggle
People in the US are summarily executed by law enforcement without consequence, pretty well documented actually
Are they legally executing people protesting the government at a comparable rate to, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia?
