The Philosopher of Surveillance
firstlook.org
firstlook.org
1 - What about no surveillance until there is a reasonable suspicion confirmed by an impartial Judge (see 4th Amendment to the Constitution for details)?
2 - Ok, he feels safer with Big Brother looking after him ... but apparently that justifies in his mind that everyone should be watched since he prefers it for himself. Is that narcissism or just sloppy thinking?
3 - One of the many dangers of this sort of surveillance is the bizarre notion that we are the data collected. There is NO level of surveillance that equates to the actual knowledge of the self (sorry Google, NSA, etc.). Think about it for yourself - is there any data set large enough that it would capture without misunderstanding who you are? Now remember that the rest of the 7 billion people on this planet have just as rich lives (inner and outer) as you.
On that last point, keep in mind the so called "targeted" ads that Google uses. Or the movie/book suggestions from sites that use them. Now imagine such bizarre misunderstandings leading our NSA big brothers to act. Not a pretty picture.
Larger and more haystacks aren't the solution. Realizing that humans aren't stacks of data is.
It's been done plenty of times in science fiction, but now we're getting to the point where we can actually transmit some information directly from mind to mind. I think there's room for voluntary connectivity without being invasive. There should always be a way to have total privacy whenever it's desired, and that should be true for the near future without question.
But there's a chance that at some point, people won't even want it anymore. If it happens voluntarily as people become more comfortable with each other, I'm not sure if it will even be bad. Forced is no good of course, and using surveillance to impose oligarchical control is terrible, but if we move gradually, I don't think anyone can really predict how it might turn out.
One could argue that many readily available datasets "capture" any given person with a higher degree of accuracy than that person "captures" himself. People are subject to all sorts of subconscious biases that influence their own self-perception. Cold, hard data about the self is often more accurate than one's own understanding of oneself.
This is profoundly sick.
From his first SIGINT Philosopher column: > I guess if we were a corporation, we could make our mission statement (or "corporate philosophy") this: "building informed decision makers -- so that targets do not suffer our nation's wrath unless they really deserve it -- by exercising deity-like monitoring of the target." Now that's philosophy.
Does anyone else find it deeply suspicious that Wall Street (and investment bankers in general) remain mum about this? We're talking about a group which is one of the most powerful in the world, has tremendous influence over government, and has the most to lose by invasive NSA surveillance.
THE INTERCEPT HAS A POLICY of not publishing the names of non-public intelligence officials unless there is a compelling reason, as with our naming of Alfreda Bikowsky, who oversaw key aspects of the CIA’s torture program. Withholding Socrates’ identity presents certain problems in the age of Google, however. If I quote from his blog, or give its name, or provide other search-enhancing morsels, like the name or location of his graduate writing program or where he was born, I might provide the sort of data that could instantly reveal his name with a few keystrokes.
So I am more or less trying to do what the NSA and a large number of agencies and corporations do with the personal data they possess — stripping away names and other identifying information to “anonymize” the data before sharing it. The beauty of anonymizing data, according to the (very many) entities that do it, is that nobody can be identified — citizens and consumers do not have to worry that their privacy is violated when petabytes of data are collected about what they do, where they go, what they read, where they eat and what they buy, because their names are not attached to it. The conceit is that our data does not betray us.