alt Hacker NewsYou know, I thought stories of law enforcement and the military targeting people using commercially collected data, effectively skirting the sanity boundaries we applied to surveillance, would raise a little bit of awareness in the US. It didn’t. Then when the political scene got really into deliberately targeting political opposition, I thought that might raise more eyebrows about all of this data being out there, but it didn’t. Same with ICE and border patrol. I think the risk and mechanisms will remain too abstract for people to grasp until they’re one of the unlucky people staring down the barrel of a gun because they, or someone they were associated with, had the wrong opinions.
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It’s not that they don’t care - the current administration is targeting people that they specifically don’t like.
And Trump has a cult of personality where many Republican politicians are literally afraid for their lives if they stand against him because they get death threats.
Romney said other Republican politicians won’t stand against Trump because they can’t afford security like he can. Majorie Green Taylor said her family has started getting death threats and the Indiana legislators who were first opposed to redistricting are now holding a vote because they also got death threats
This has echos of “First They Came” [0]. The current status quo begs a question that must have been asked in the time it was written: at what point does it have become morally acceptable for citizens to rise up and overthrow a violent government?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came?wprov=sfti1#