I’m pretty sterile with my internet habits. I only dox willingly. Most of the surveillance state propaganda is true to an extent(think something like Ed Snowden). But I’m gonna go out on a limb and make the case it’s mostly the invisible panopticon that disguises itself for real surveillance.
As long as the Indian State does not manipulate hardware itself(like China and America), there can never truly be an Indian surveillance state.
And for that you’d need to manipulate a whole manufacturing industry. And for that you’d need a manufacturing industry in critical electronics and hardware to begin with(not yet seen in India).
Of course not. Anyways, there are two ways of thinking about govts. and corporations. One is where you think the top brass of the Govt. and big tech is filled with 150iq Ubermensch individuals who secretly run a global cabal for monopolizing power and resources. These people think Bill Gates engineered Covid, Trump is the God-Emperor and so on. Then there are those who think the Govt. is filled with a bunch of primitive and extremely tribalistic folk whose only motivation is some arcane idea of power and a shit ton of money.
I’m skeptical about both and take the middle road. I think there is a bit of both in all of big Tech and big State.
The Govt. simply can’t afford to keep an eye on every individual. No amount of data centers and IT guys is changing that picture. BUT. They do know something about almost every other person as far as basic info goes. Usually in the form of your PAN and Aadhar. The only way you’re in harms way is if you become a person of interest in the eyes of the State. Then you get to see the ruthlessly pragmatic side of the State.
Some say in the 21st century you are being given an invisible offer of security vs health. Do you trust the big brother for your safety or will you be a hill billy farmer who is self-sufficient?
Just don’t use propriety software. And even if you do, do it like everybody else. No suspicious activity. Just a regular ass joe. There are not enough servers in the world to parse through this amount of noise. There’s simply too much noise-to-signal ratio to be handled by humans alone. So they use ML and shit like that. And an ML program will be trained to highlight predetermined stuff. Stuff you can bypass by just being a regular joe on the internet.
I’ve heard some linguistic nerds discussing how some Chinese internet users in niche groups manipulate regular words in Chinese and change their meanings to something other than the colloquial one to bypass Chinese censorship laws and surveillance.
China being the most aggressive surveillance state in modern times that is. Most say the hardest surveilled city in the world is London with so many cameras. But A) what the fuck have they achieved? Stabbing is literally a meme. B) The UK state isn’t aggressive enough when compared to their Chinese counterparts.