UK surveillance “worse than 1984” says new UN privacy chief
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
If you where a Secret Agency, and you knew the top 100 news/forums for opinionated technical people, would you not set a division of monkeys to try and confuse people? They win if some people even "doubt" or "question"... we must all be 100% sure of what is happening, 24h a day, ready to feel threatened and abused by cameras, abusive permissions, tracking devices, dragnets. We must feel the disgust 24h a day.
The objections are too canned/simple/easy to shoot down, and they rely on emotion rather than facts.
The tech crowd's acquiescence to the surveillance state is absolutely necessary for it to function as designed.
Well said!
Since we have the toolset to understand what is happening, we must be the main source of outrage. When we come online and do our stuff, we represent our families, our friends, or coworkers. Everyone around us that do not have the same tools to understand/interpret the abuses and the propaganda.
We like to think that everyone should understand what is going on, but this is impossible in a short/medium or even long term. People use the Internet like they use the building they live, or the house. They haven't built it and they don't understand, and don't need to understand how it was built or its internals. They are the users. They presume the architects/engineers involved where responsible, good people, that did a good job and wanted for them, future residents, to have a nice home.
If you are an engineer building a Shopping Center, and you get to know how the company you work for is abusive towards its employees or how they are overpricing resources in a public contract or manipulating prices, or doing a dirty job using an unsafe structure or bad materials, it is you who should act. You can't expect someone else or everyone to act, to understand what you understand because you are in a position to understand. If you do not act, if you do not take a position, if you do not represent the ones that are unaware, you become the same as them.
The only way we can make out of this bizarre situation is if everyone of us takes his role in society, whatever society, with his/her heart. Do it with love towards your neighbour. There is no other way. In tech, we are often quite cold because we deal with machines, but we are still flesh and bone behind screens, and our love should be directed to protecting the users.
Loving your neighbor is good; but income for my family will probably take precedence most of the time.
How about something along the lines of the Guild of Engineers and Scientists? A broader base of smart people would be helpful, but I'm not sure if it'd dilute the effectiveness of speaking out.
A Guild/Collective for Tech Engineers, Scientists
• Transparent decision making + expenditures (opt in/out services)
• Challenges and certifications for members
• Recruiter / job match type serviceDo you know what a full content packet capture is? It’s when you’re able to grab every piece of data transmitted over a network using a tool called tcpdump. You can use another tool to reassemble those collected data packets into complete applications, movie or music files, even video chats and phone calls. Safari Books defines full content data as, “the most flexible form of network-based information. It is a rich form of evidence offering detail and opportunities seldom found elsewhere. Once full content data has been acquired, analysts can derive session, alert, and statistical data if necessary.”
As a joke, an instructor once told me that when they went onsite to do security investigations, they would do a full content dump; if someone was downloading videos at the time, my instructor would say, “Thanks for the movie, guys!” This is what the Utah Data Center is doing. All packets are collected using a tool like tcpdump, and then the Center reassembles them and categorizes the content into data cubes (e.g., movies, video calls, emails) that are easily findable with open source search engines such as Lucene and Solr. Is this taking security seriously? You bet!
When you ask a security professional what they recommend is the most reasonable approach to protecting sensitive health records, they will say, “Its all about Penetration Tests, Risk Assessments, and IDS.” Mass Traffic Collection is currently one example that’s being taken very seriously as an approach to security. If a hosting provider like Akamai — which, runs 30% of the world’s web traffic — is able to reassemble your packets, and even archive them, is that what you want security to be? Probably not, but when a security professional says “let’s take security seriously”, to them it means just watch all the things. That may sound a bit paranoid but check out this pretty spooky Hacking Team Commercial[1] where they specifically say, “Is passive monitoring enough? You want to look through your target’s eyes.”
I remember in 2006, after my IDS training, I was all for collecting every single packet (no matter what) because I was taught as a security professional, that was the only way I could do my job: watch everything, since we need to know everything about anything. If you watch everything, that’s inherently security, and the world is protected. That was my modus operandi for many years. This is why taking privacy and security seriously really means taking compliance seriously. Compliance lassos in “watch everything” while also providing validation and proof of security. If we’re doing good hygiene (e.g. Key rotation, Log review, Code review, Change control, etc. ) in our forts, there’s no reason to collect and watch everything. If compliance fails as an approach to security, IDS could expand to a massive data collection agent running on every company in the world.
The recipe to collect everything already exists but that means only security is being taken seriously. I hope we start to take compliance seriously because I think that is the intersection for good privacy and good security.
The truth is that although there may be spies here that's are also people who have opinions that are genuinely contrary to yours. You are calling those people "idiots", "dumb", and "NSA agents". This may discourage those people and particularly other people from commenting. I want to hear whatever people think based on their experience. I don't want group think. If we get enough comments like yours and they are upvoted strongly then plenty of people will just shut up because they can see that it will cost them.
You could have made your points as just as strongly without any of this.
In light of HN practice of banning accounts that accuse people of shilling her post was actually quite brave. See any controversial discussion -- posts will disappear and accounts will be hell banned. In other words those that do the calling out have been and are genuinely punished. She did well to not to call individual accounts out and to keep things civil.
You never read the novel, I take it?
Or else how do you compare the UK to the Stalinist USSR?
So maybe my point of view is biased when I say that, to me, it looks "beyond Orwellian" now that we have all the cameras, all the satelites, all the propaganda, and, most of all, my dearest Internet, the thing I should be proud to deliver to the next generations of human beings, completely dominated by abusive, illegal, unrespectful, inhuman secret agencies that protect only the ones behind the capital in their war of interest. I'm just a human unit, I feel very, very opressed knowing what I know.
I do not walk the street in peace. I do not roam freely, even though most people still do. What I understand puts me in a place of distrust. And that, to me, is quite worse than any fiction.
The observation that a community may be infiltrated by spooks reminds me of spot the fed: https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-15/dc-15-stf.html.
It's "maybe worse", "maybe comparable" right now, but the machinery is very strong already. And you know the thing with power, right?
I mean, tempora is pretty bad, rank and file stronger than the collection obtained by NSA, metadata is stored, content is stored, there are examples of "owning" certificate authorities and even examples of downgrading SSL/TLS to not include perfect forward secret ciphers.
And this is done for any content that passes UK borders. :|
Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners.
Sure my emails are probably buffered for a little while. But as long as I don't ride a jet into the Sears tower nobody will actually read them.
The people asked themselves: if a tree fell in the woods and nobody heard it, did it make a sound. And our answer is no it didn't.
The fact is the biggest intrusion in our lives is Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Google literally exists to spy on you. It's a many many billion dollar industry.
The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does.
I don't mean to detract from your mains points about why people aren't in an uproar over these things. But, there is a big difference between what "Google" can do to you, and what a government institution such as the NSA can.
In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database.
That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.
You are already tied to stupid things you said online. They have categorized this information and will sit on it for an indefinite amount of time. There are groups such as JTRIG who will use the stupid things you have said to turn you against people you may be aligned with, if they think it is necessary.
Should you ever run for public office or become an inconvenience, you are already in their pocket. It's already "full fascist", you just haven't toed the line of their rules yet.
The NSA programs chill speech of the majority, anyway. You always hear people faux-fretting about "being on a list" for what they say. It's a joke when they say it, but it's not a joke in reality. People are reacting to being constantly surveilled, and it's putting a cramp on a lot of discussions.
It's not rational for me to care about surveillance of the socialists, because I'm not a socialist. It's not rational for me to care about surveillance of unions, because I'm not in a union. It's not rational for me to care about surveillance of fringe elements, because I'm not in a fringe element.
But now they're surveilling me, and there's no one left to be irrational for me.
Just look at how the NSA gets its information right now. Most of it is just delivered by companies who keep the information themselves.
You want to find a list of gays in America. Grindr has a database for you, Google too.
From the leaks we know that they both do the same thing, which is to use their computer resources to sift through all emails they get their hands on, build profiles of people and connect them with each other. Neither could afford to have humans reading all the data coming at them.
The difference is that Google uses their conclusions to show you the most profitable ads, while the NSA keeps their conclusions to themselves until the day of your potential arrest.
Whether people consider the creation of such a profile to be spying is up to them, but my personal suspicion is that people would strongly object if they understood what was being done with their data.
The problem with google though, is that anything Google knows about me can be sought by the NSA with just one of those FISA warrants.
Google and Facebook are essentially NSA Reserve Branch.
The NSA also isn't charged with making criminal cases. There is a conspiracy theory about "parallel construction" but too much crime is totally unsolved for the NSA to be secretly feeding law enforcement data on a large scale.
I also wouldn't be so sure that Google or Facebook won't fuck with your life. Plenty of American companies have done extraordinarily evil things before. Then again so has the government.
Your implication seems to be that this is supposed to make the practice more acceptable. Well, I'm not from the US or even a Five Eyes-country. I speak from the perspective of the billions of people who don't have these rights under the NSA and similar-minded agencies.
Let's quote Wikipedia:
"In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating criminal cases against Americans that are actually based on NSA warrantless surveillance. The use of illegally obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the Fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine.
Two senior DEA officials explained that the reason parallel construction is used is to protect sources (such as undercover agents or informants) or methods in an investigation. One DEA official had told Reuters: "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day. It's decades old, a bedrock concept.""
That's a formal government advisory to its agents that they should cover up the way that they actually encountered evidence. And that is total bullshit because it completely invalidates your right to a fair trial, among other rights. This isn't the NSA, solving crimes, it's the government law enforcement agencies querying the NSA database in order to solve cases they've already opened.
And you're basing this belief on what, exactly? The NSA party-line? I think a lot of evidence shows that they've been scarfing up damn near everything, FISA be damned, by using bogus interpretations of various laws. Are you really confident that the NSA aren't hoovering up your email, web traffic, phone calls, etc?
Just curious, as I see nothing to support such a belief.
Consider if you get into politics in some way?
Maybe you get a evening visitor telling you to either drop your ambitions, vote a certain way once in office, or in some other way dictate terms for not releasing something to the press.
Something that while not directly criminal, will be negative enough socially to make a mess of your life.
Google on the other hand? They spend millions upon millions of dollars trying to influence policy in Washington.
Who do you think is actually more likely to use blackmail here?
The same NSA that lied to it's oversight committees about it's actions? Or do you live under a different NSA than the rest of us?
They tried to hide by redefining the meaning of all sorts of simple terms ("collection" comes to mind) and narrow political answers like "not under this program".
There hasn't been any actual overview by either party... the actions of the NSA are aggressively hidden from them, and they prosecute whistleblowers.
Non-partisan my ass. The NSA is it's own party. And from what we've seen over the past 3 years or so, they are - effectively - under NO oversight whatsoever. They lie to Congress with impunity, get rubber-stamp "warrants" from the FISA courts, and then do whatever the hell they want anyway.
Also when it comes to lobbying involving a lot of money and for draconian measures you should take a look at Hollywood and the entertainment industry. They've been using lobbyists for decades to pursue even more draconian agendas.
However I've not seen any suggestion that this is happening, nor is dragnet surveillance in any way a pre-requisite for this sort of thing.
It isn't the lack of means that stops democracies becoming dictatorships.
As far as democracy vs dictatorship goes, consider that there is a third (and probably many other) alternatives: inverted democracy: all the totalitarianism of a dictatorship paired with passive "participation" to rubber stamp the majority of the regime, which is not subject to any form of democratic oversight. I think we're headed there rapidly, if not already there.
Remember the study that showed that public opinion is less important than moneyed interests? That's part of it, too.
Complete and utter nonsense. Have you not heard about SQL's "JOIN" feature? Did you miss the numerous advances in machine learning?
> nobody will actually read them
If you haven't figured out by now that it's not a human that reads them, you're being wilfully blind.
Even if you are limiting it to humans, all it would take is you pissing off the right person. With your entire life in front of them, how many different types of revenge do you think they can find?
They buffer pretty much everything for a while so they can backtrack a couple days but that information isn't being filtered through a search algorithm.
Your email isn't in their database.
Assuming they play by the rules (they don't, but anyway...) all they'd have to do to get your emails anyway is ask GCHQ for them. GCHQ isn't American, so they didn't break any laws by grabbing the content and metadata for all your communications. GCHQ passes the data to the NSA, and boom, they have your data. Legally, with no FISA warrant.
The FISA court is a rubber stamp, anyway-- look at their approval rate.
If you're running an agency in the US that can't spy on Americans, you can make a deal with a similarly bound agency in the UK - they get your UK data, you get their US data, and you have all the US data you want even if you didn't collect it.
What most people haven't thought of is that the government doesn't NEED to do that to everyone to massively impact society.
I lived in Cuba for a while. Almost everyone was left alone to speak as they pleased. But the government had data on what was said, who associated with who, etc. It was collected by neighborhood watch groups.
They knew when someone actually became a threat and had the means to make their life difficult.
Oppressive systems only need to oppress those who would make waves.
So the knowledge of the surveillance then kept people in line to the extent they feared the amount of retaliation brought.
If the UK government was to re-educate everyone who voted libdem then we would all know the extent to which the surveillance would be used - and then adjust our behaviours.
So it seems surveillance is always "in potentia", and oppression is enabled by it.
I'm not sure where I am going with this other than, don't feel disgust, just violently revolt the minute they over step "the" mark.
It wouldn't be every libdem supporter btw. It would be 300-3000 key actors, or less. That's all you really need to target. Most people stay in line without prompting. I mean that in a statistical, not a critical way.
First, your claim that we "aren't being actually spied on" is utterly false, given that the NSA has a multitude of programs which explicitly harvest and analyze the "metadata" (telemetry content) and also body content of all American electronic communications. They lied about this, then were refuted-- check the Snowden files online at the Intercept website. They have a dossier on every last one of us.
This brings me to your next point, that they can't spy on all of us. It's all automated, idiot. They have enough hardware to do it, and they've spent years making sure it's all done without any hands on from their analysts. This is also in the Snowden files. They don't need to "totally reconstruct your life", they already have it right there, with every shred documented electronically. Sure, they probably haven't integrated all the times you popped up on a CCTV or dashcam, but they have the data from your phone, which is even better.
Your emails are stored indefinitely and are in a searchable database, tagged by keyword, topic, you name it. Nobody will actively read them, but it doesn't even matter since the computer system has read them already. They know you aren't up to anything because they automatically checked as soon as the email left your outbox.
Your discussion of the tree in the forest is irrelevant; people react differently to events when they know that they are being watched, which is now the case on a societal level. I will say this again because it is critical for the next section: people react differently when they know that they are being monitored.
There is actual impact to people because of this aspect of human behavior. Investigative journalism is moribund because sources are afraid to come forward, meaning that the public has one less (of very few) way of understanding what the government (and corporations) is doing in their name.
Then there's the problem of the intelligence agencies spying on the political organizations that are supposed to oversee them. They capture all of the political communications too, after all. Remember when Dianne Feinstein publically claimed that the CIA was surveilling her and threatening her as a result of the torture report that was being put together? Think about all of the times that you never even heard about that because the blackmail was successful.
Speech has been chilled, with people afraid of saying what they really think for fear of ending up "on a list". Anyone who runs for office is sure to be already on the list, and frankly, if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group.
To speak a bit more about JTRIG, I want to emphasize that JTRIG is an active platform out of GCHQ that is currently operating whose mission is to disrupt, degrade, and encourage obedience among nonviolent, legal groups. They likely target public dissenters and protesters. This is not acceptable, and it isn't something that an actual democracy would partake in, but hey, we found it in the NSA's slide decks.
Moving on, I agree that Big Brother 2.0 takes a lot of data from the big tech companies-- the difference being that it's optional to participate. You can opt out, and shut out their tracking or spying, if you want. Can't do that with the NSA.
In conclusion, the actual impact is invisible to the public, but certainly present. The impact takes the form of things not said, blackmail in private, and disruption via proxies.
Some propaganda ministry trying to honeypot the Taliban, Iran, and Argentina is totally unrelated.
>if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group.
There is absolutely no indication that anything of sort goes on. There are no shortage of left wingers making all sorts of noise in the UK and US.
The NSA and GCHQ aren't allowed to blackmail politicians. If they wanted to break bad, even if you destroyed them today, they could reform in like 20 minutes by just storming Google's headquarters.
If you don't think that the government will follow the law and the will of the people, why do you want to make a law preventing them have any capability. Either they follow the law or not.
I must admit I laughed at this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Environment_for_Anal...
To clarify the problem: if Tempora grabs 100% of content and metadata from the pipe then hands it to the NSA while keeping a copy for itself, it's the same as the NSA harvesting the data itself.
This means that the NSA's hubbub about "we only collect metadata assuming you use our definitions for all terms" which has been previously proven false, is again conclusively proven false.
The point is he's asking for a Geneva convention for the Internet, and I think that would be a good thing to have, even if some abuses will exist, at least we'll have a framework other than the current "whatever the spy agencies can come up with in terms of surveillance is a-okay".
You're right that we need a framework, like a Geneva convention for the Internet. However, I'm afraid that the willfulness and the balance of powers isn't the same as for the Geneva convention itself.
So, that's the thing, in some ways it's worse. It has more detail, it's voluntary and less intrusive. The one thing which is quite different is it's not a system to control people, by control I mean controlling as in Orwell's vision.
And, for the most part, with few sheepish objections, people are willing to trade in their privacy in exchange for services rendered. People in practice value free resources and services over privacy, else we would have seen a system of micropaymets or economic alternative take root but it has not.
At some point people may change their minds and may want to hold on to their privacy and begin paying for services, maybe, but for most people that is not the case at this time.
It's something akin to the slow boil effect.
So to start, there's this. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2011/23/schedule/1 It actually replaced the even worse 2005 act. This is not voluntary, is very intrusive and is exactly a system to control people.
But then the actual surveillance, where on earth do you get that it's voluntary. Unless you're suggesting that simply having an Internet connection, a phone or travelling in a town is volunteering to be be surveilled.
Also, a camera on every street corner and spy agencies spying on you isn't what "voluntary" means.
I never understood why people hate CCTV cameras - they are in public places. Places where anyone can film you at any time. Public places are not private. Online surveillance has better arguments against it but 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it). It is not as bad as this hyperbole makes it out to be.
But if articles like this is what it will take to finally get mesh network projects off the ground then I'm happy to be outraged.
Private photography by individuals that can't realistically pool their recordings is something entirely different.
Thought experiment: what if we could?
E.g. here's a form for Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council [1] but anyone holding personally identifiable information in the UK are required to handle subject access requests (and there are similar mechanism required in all EU countries to comply with the relevant EU directive)
[1] http://www.stockport.gov.uk/2013/2976/66897/subjectaccessreq...
Or where someone else went...
That's more or less the situation with CCTV cameras though. Its not like there's some national control room where people sit and watch every camera in the country 24/7. Most CCTV cameras are being recorded to a hard disk or video in the premises their located, and for authorities to access it they'd have to turn up in person and ask to see the videos (assuming the storage hasn't been reused yet).
> what people don't realise is that in fact a very significant proportion of the private CCTV cameras in the UK have their management outsourced to a few large private sector companies.
Neither of you have offered evidence to back up the statements, and both are plausible. Does anyone have evidence pointing to which statement is more representative of reality?
If the only reason we're comfortable with the police having a particular power is that they don't have the resources to use it in a way we don't like, then maybe we should reconsider letting them have that power?
The real thing we object to is dragnet surveillance, and we should think about how we limit police power accordingly. It might be the case that there's no effective way to prevent abuse of cameras in this way, and the only thing we can do is remove them. But if we reach that conclusion, it should be argued from principles, not kneejerk objection to cameras.
These are not minor differences; participation means equal opportunity and "fair play", and it can't be stored for future use and retroactively used against people for future perceived transgressions. There is a limit to the traditional surveillance that a society would bear, while the latter is nearly invisible. It is a powerful tool to be able to track your political enemies at any point in the past.
Except when they're pointing at your private property.
And even when you're in public it's still unpleasant for them to be slurping this information, especially if they misuse it.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/15/michael-mcintyr...
My understanding in the UK is that (apart from some "special buildings") if I'm on public land (eg a road) I can film anything visible from that spot, even if it is your private property.
Edit: Have just realised that we're talking about CCTV cameras rather than me romping around taking photos with my camera.
With regard to CCTV, I believe it has to be properly signposted with contact details, but I'd have to go read up again before I could properly comment.
http://findlaw.co.uk/law/z_articles-for-carousel/500284.html
The libel laws on the other hand are quite strong, so filming someone privately in their own home and publishing it could land you in trouble with those.
When combined with facial recognition and the unsavoury characters at GCHC/Langley/Fort Meade, it means you can be tracked all over the country, and the complete history of everywhere you ever go can be archived.
Nasty.
But many are connected, such as those on the road network.
Bottom line, we citizens should be able to tell the state, in theory our servant and not our master, to do or not do whatever we want. That does not seem to be the case with surveillance, to the extant that we don't even really know what they're doing, modulo Snowden and the like.
The convenience store can't correlate its data with the university's camera data, decide you're a person of interest and ramp up surveillance of your phone and internet use. And they can't arrest you for questioning or jail you, particularly if you point out to people that the correlation between the two cameras and the telecom companies has merely been done.
It's different.
I think I just described how tracking advertising works today, except for the cameras.
How soon before businesses' cameras are money makers in advertising networks? Maybe we'll all have them in our cars. Maybe Google glass or whatever fills in that void.
Glance at a Slim Jim and see ads for bulk purchases from Amazon for the next few days. "Get the Variety Pak! Beef. Pork. Llama. A surprise Mystery Meat in every Pak!"
That's not really permission - proper permission requires informed consent. We're back to the data protection principles here.
There's also a big difference between a CCTV system which stores to a set of local VHS tapes which are generally overwritten after a short while, and a CCTV system which is online and capable of face recognition and tracking.
The extent to which the CCTV system can be used against 'innocent' people is unclear and there aren't any clear abuses to point to. The Metropolitan Police "FIT" camera teams that go around filming protestors are another matter.
That said, it is excessive in the UK.
As for the article, it is, of course, some sort of propaganda. I guess they're just acclimating us to being aware that we're monitored all the time, everywhere.
That way we're easier to lead down the slippery slope all the way to where ever we're headed. But it's not good.
People need to wake up and start seeing that governments are obviously not working towards our interests. It's amazing how the masses still don't see it.
Do we want surveillance? No. Are we going to be surveilled anyway? Yes, of course. It's not about what we want - it's about what our rulers want.
They don't want us to have privacy because (duh) knowledge is power, and they want even more power. Maligning opting out is covered safely by the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" cliche (which is never challenged in the public channels) and allegations of surveillance are still shut down by the "conspiracy theory" smear.
They're ready for widespread rebellion and attacks on government installations. Many of the people-tracking systems that they have in place were tested against guerrilla IED networks in Iraq, and they've armed every government agency to the teeth-- even the US Department of Education has a SWAT team [0].
[0]: http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2011/06/beware-t...
Given how we've been sold devices for convenience that it turns out are being used against us for many years, I would say that it's just as likely that this is happening on all levels.
With what we're gradually finding out since the Snowden Revelations, one can naturally assume: Any mass market product which appears to make life easier for a large enough percentage of the market whilst potentially compromising privacy/security is almost certain to be used in such a manner - that goes for consumer products as well as commercial.
Then consider that a team of 1.000 people monitors you and you alone, everywhere you go, everything you do.
Then imagine what that says about you. About where you work, where you shop, what you buy, which friends you keep, who you bring home etc.
Then think about whether you're cool with this 1.000 man team recording this in a database, to be potentially used by the government. Consider your familiarity with historical and current governments who have abused this for purposes ranging from ethnic cleansing to political oppression.
And then consider that in the world of computers, that 1000 man team costs a few dollars of computing power at some point. Facial recognition combined with a whole range of data (from your cellphone being registered, to your financial accounts making transactions being registered, to your car being registered, obviously your home and workplace, and social media networks detailing your network, and your communications being monitored).
The combination of this all is incredibly dangerous. Should we worry and fear? Well it depends on one question, which is 'do you think your government will ever shift so incredibly to actually abuse this'. If the answer is yes, then there's no escape and our lives in relation to tech as we know it today is incredibly dangerous. If the answer is no, and you also don't fear individual gov users illegally abusing their privileges, nor hackers abusing the gov systems, then you're good.
But again that question has nothing to do with whether we should hate CCTV or not. The question is do you think it'll be abused. If the answer is yes, then CCTV is incredibly dangerous.
Now about the question of the chance for abuse... Well I'm totally not paranoid, indeed I generally feel quite optimistic about these things. I live in the Netherlands and I don't think we'll make such a shift towards abuse on a large scale. At the same time I live in a city that commemorates the 'terrorist' attacks on the civil registry during WWII by the resistance movement, because jews were being processed for genocide with these records which detailed where ethnicities lived in Amsterdam, and the resistance sought to destroy the registry to prevent it. They succeeded but unfortunately they held a copy in another city. And that's relatively recent history, in my parents' lifetimes, in one of the otherwise freest societies on earth.
It's largely because of this reason that many countries don't have a civil registry. For example here in the Netherlands we don't hold a census because you can simply pull the information from a database, it's like Facebook doing a census on the age of their users, it'd be silly. For the same reasons one may wonder whether CCTV cameras which can help track people in similar ways, combined with other information, makes sense.
That doesn't mean I don't think the cameras' benefits outweigh the risks, but for me to say they're completely harmless would be myopic, too.
The 'it's public space' I think is a weak argument against mass surveillance. Humans can't live without participating in public spaces, you can't remain in private space and live a full life, so we must ensure high levels of privacy in public spaces, too. Just because a space is open to the public doesn't mean your privacy is.
You've made several great points, but I would invert your question. What value does systematic CCTV offer? If we have no strong evidence then perhaps we should dismantle the network.
That is what I dislike about CCTV cameras. Without them, there would substantial parts even of London where you could walk around and feel alone and be reasonably sure you're not being observed. It is an odd feeling, e.g. walking down a relatively secluded part of the riverside with nobody around with a date and suddenly being face to face with a camera pointed right at you.
> 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission (possibly given by people who are not fully aware they are giving it
If people are not fully aware they are giving it, it may still legally be permission (though in that case the laws need to change), but it certainly isn't morally permission. There's also a vast difference between surveillance by private entities locked in silos and subject to the Data Protection Act, and secret government surveillance.
Even up in the Eiffel Tower there are times of day where you can get moments "to yourself" out of the view of tourist cameras, and on the ground around it you can be pretty much alone at times - even the hordes of tourists do not manage to reduce the level of relative privacy as much as the CCTV.
Yes, but I think it's strange to consider that as a necessary requirement. First of all, can you even formulate this requirement precisely? Because "in any public space, there should be up to 10 seconds a day where a person would find himself not observed by anybody" sounds a little bit ridiculous.
Can you demonstrate that a lack of privacy is a requirement?
No, that's not the claim. The claim is that there was never a guarantee or right of privacy in public.
Being in public has never before meant that everything you did in public was stored in a format that will eventually be mined which private and public companies can get access to.
If you don't see the problem with this, wait til the mining software can detect homosexuals and is deployed in a country where you can be killed for being such.
"But I have nothing to hide." Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Even if you are good and the government is good right now, that still doesn't make you safe in the future. And it is quite clear there are already bad actors in the government. Perhaps you are the one about to expose another child abuse scandal... do you want the guy you are about to expose to have access to everything you've ever done in public, because I'm sure they can find a few minor crimes that they can then twist to silence you. Even if you are Jesus incarnate and have behaved perfectly while in public, they can still just edit it some misbehavior to silence you.
I understand the rationale behind that.
But as long as we can't put in an easy to check, precise limit to the "amount" of "data" that we allow collected, we'll never be able to effectively enforce that limit.
Perhaps there are "strange" compromises, though -- what if a business owner had to seek permission to view the footage of their permanent camera if it were in a public place?
[1] http://www.toureiffel.paris/en/faq.html "Are you allowed to publish photos of the Eiffel Tower?"
[2] Dubious extra source: https://torrentfreak.com/night-time-eiffel-tower-photos-are-...
[3] http://artlawjournal.com/night-photos-eiffel-tower-violate-c... suggests the same, although the claim is untested and probably has a personal-use exception anyway.
Until relatively recently there was no expectation of being filmed anywhere, ever.
This idea that we're fair game for recording anywhere outside our own homes is a recent one. I just don't agree that being out in public means I'm fair game to be recorded and monitored constantly.
>> 90% of Internet surveillance is by permission
No, it's not. Implicit permission and default browser behaviour do not constitute permission.
Why should anything you do in public ever be private?
People can film you in public places, but they can't follow you around all day filming constantly from multiple angles. That would be harassment and invasion of privacy. This is however, the real situation in large parts of the UK.
It's now impossible in most of London to meet with political activists or journalists without being surveilled.
I feel that CCTV is just a lazy approach to a deeper problem when it comes to crime. If you want to prevent it then figure out the root cause. If you want to curtail it then hire more competent police officers. They both work and they're both easier to hold accountable (imo).
(I'll concede I felt happier with armed guards outside every building in Quito, but the threat they were supposed to be combating was also a tad more obvious)
> Ironically, most of the better bits, and indeed the overarching plot thread of HPMOR are largely down to the huge gaps in various characters' rational thought. If Harry had made the obvious "let's not trust the sinister guy that's obviously manipulative and definitely more experienced at it than me" leap right at the beginning it might have been a much shorter series.
Oh God, yes! After 2500 pages finishing, uff, I have to say it was not uninteresting, but is way overdone how singular awesome that Harry there is. I also disliked that he "solves" death. I get that transhumanists/futurists are pretty scared by it, but the story ending with everyone in the magical world getting virtually immortal and forever young? Apart from the wish fulfillment by the author, how would that even work with population growth?
I am also a bit wary now about fanfiction in general, because after so much time invested reading such a long story, it does change your imagination/interpretation of the original story.
No it isn't. Please read up on GCHQ and their pals NSA and what they do, e.g. 'dragnets' and other mass surveillance which absolutely isn't 'by permission' but is happening at a massive scale.
Also, you can claim you're one of the most paranoid people you know, but your whole post sounds like a post written by one of the 'I have nothing to hide so nothing to fear' group. If you'd be even a little bit paranoid, you wouldn't be ok with whatever surveillance, CCTV cameras etc.
If you'd be even a little bit racist, you wouldn't be OK with miscegenation. Only someone starting from the premise that miscegenation is bad would conclude that this statement means that everyone should be at least a little bit racist.
If the police found out about a meeting to discuss police corruption, the police could look up the CCTV camera data, combine with face recognition, etc, and find out who was at the meeting.
There is a long history of harassment of activists and whistleblowers.
There is a long history of arresting bank robbers.
East Germany and the Stasi are a pretty good example of what happens when mass surveillance goes wrong. That wasn't very long ago.
Frankly, there were easier ways of identifying activists and whistleblowers to harass even before the internet.
I might think differently if I was a high profile person as then there's the possibility the government could be watching your moves to use as blackmail or for nefarious purposes. But as an every day citizen I believe it's much more likely that I'm going to get mugged in an alleyway than have big brother mess with my life. I'd rather have that increased safety from everyday criminals than worry about the government.
On the internet I believe the opposite, because there is such a low chance of intelligence services catching anyone trying to harm me. I feel like gathering peoples public unencrypted information will do almost nothing to stop online criminals.
1) Public places /used/ to be private! In practice, anyway, because CCTV wasn't ubiquitous, and constant recording by every passerby wasn't the norm. It's a public space, but 24/7 recording by a dozen private parties at a time is NOT the norm historically.
2) If most of our surveillance online is "by consent" but no one reads the EULA or signs anything, is it really consent? Just because people are ignorant to the problems, or do not feel immediate impact of online surveillance, doesn't make it right or consensual.
Public space is not owned by the watchers (in most jurisdictions). Even if it was, ownership does not translate well to physical space. There are lots of things you're not allowed to do with a place you "own", including building there.
Regarding permissions for surveillance, it's far from clear how such a contract works and what you even can be said to agree to. In some places, both parties in the conversation need to agree to recording a telephone conversation for example, and the same principle should hold true for email.
That's the real thing Orwell missed -- not that surveillance would increase, but that the surveilled would so enthusiastically cooperate in their own surveillance.
That is why Brave New World is far more chilling.
www.amazon.com/We-Yevgeny-Zamyatin/dp/0140185852
It's the number one law of inescapable advertising. The more people are willing to pay to avoid advertisement, the more lucrative advertising to them is.
He was right about the military industrial complex, about being at constant war with somebody for a manufactured purpose, about shifting alliances and villainization of the new enemies. He was especially right about a government using ubiquitous information about its populace to control it, and the crime of speaking out against the government.
And you are wrong about the every room thing: it's not just TV's in every room but everywhere.Your cellphone follows you along with its mic, gps, camera, wifi, BT, NFC, UTDOA, GPS, and CGI. If you leave that behind, then face trackers, license plate readers, UAVs, RFID tags, ezpass, TPMs, etc etc follow you everywhere you go.
He especially did not see the compute power of correlating thousands of inputs on each individual.
You lost me here. In 1984, the populace was afraid to speak out against the government, even in private to close acquaintances. I don't believe this is the case at all in our society -- both individuals and the media seem very willing and able to criticize the government freely.
It may not be just cowardice. The scary part is that the public-at-large just does not care.
Using your speech is also verboten if you have insider information that you think the public needs to know, as we see from Drake, Binney, Snowden, Manning, and others.
Weak criticism from outsiders is allowed; substantial criticism from people who know what they are talking about isn't given airtime or is criminalized even if they get popular traction. Here, it's more that speaking out doesn't accomplish anything for most people anything rather than speaking out being forbidden.
Edit - things are not looking great for journalists either.
1. I have no cellphone. 2. I have no "face trackers, license plate readers" in my rooms.
1 + 2 "And you are wrong about the every room thing" no I'm not.
Not to mention that the phones aren't always listening, always recording, and always reporting my location any way. I they were, my battery would last 3 hours tops.
But sometimes they are![0]
[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdro...
Hell, failing that, it's been demonstrated publicly that anybody can simply purchase access to SS7 and query this sort of information to locate you, in real time, from the other side of the globe, without your knowledge. If you post your cell phone number online, many people can find you right now.
As for it not always recording, true, but you have no idea when and if it is enabled. The SIM and baseband processor are black boxes capable of running unfettered by iOS and Android. Your app preferences are simply irrelevant, and you cannot easily see or inspect the traffic going over the cellular network.
Oh, and you likely can't remove your battery.
Cell phones are an Orwellian wet dream. If you're ever doing anything you never want anyone to ever know about, whether it's illegal or just deeply private, do not take your cell phone with you.
You have to love the beauty of such a scheme.
I don't think we're quite so far from Nineteen Eighty-Four as you think.
As a regular visitor to the English countryside, where are these rural cameras ?
Seriously, most CCTV cameras are attached to buildings. If there are people genuinely expecting privacy standing outside because they can't see anyone inside the building observing them, then I have an invisibility cloak to sell them.
The genie is out of the bottle. Welcome to the big data revolution.
They don't care about providing evidence to the police, because their customers might stop going if they're going to be ratted out on, they only care about protecting their own shop.
It's one of the reasons there's very little crime in the UK.
Possibly pointing a finger at the Euro states that still have mandatory ID cards and allow local government to run their own secret police as well as the main federal ones - might be more useful.
The fact that you can criticize the government without being sent to minilove for crimethink is proof enough that things aren't "worse than 1984".
Edit: playing devil's advocate, you could almost argue that the surveillance system in the UK is at least a lot better than that of Airstrip One/the GDR - while the level of surveillance is perhaps about the same, the Thought Police/Stasi used it to feed their obsession with picking up harmless political dissenters, while at the very least GHCQ seems to (thankfully) be focussed on (somewhat) more genuine existential threats.
No chances for Big Brother to snoop on what kind of information you're seeking or what kinds of comments you'll make when you think you are anonymous. No physical tracking device on people at all times. No network construction of who each individual talks to and when; no harvesting of metadata.
1984 had a bunch of CCTVs without enough people to monitor all of them, no recording capacity, and an extreme political indoctrination regime to help make up the difference by having informants. Ingsoc is a child's view of dystopia, now-- we have far surpassed it.
Even most lynchings by a Twitter mob aren't actual executions where someone is really killed (although sometimes someone might be pushed to suicide by the psychological pressure; that is still a far cry from an actual political purge with murder.)
These cameras are all infinitely more utile than in 1984 once they are linked to facial recognition and gait recognition technology. In 1984, you could be an unnoticed face in a crowd if you weren't under investigation-- not so in our reality. You step outside, and the fact that you did so is tied to your identity and dossier and noted for later.
Like I said before, Ingsoc of 1984 was a primitive surveillance society which still relied on humans to manually collect data on each other's conversations and movement patterns. It just doesn't scale as cleanly as an automatic computer system does. There wasn't any ability to create dossiers on 100% of people passively, nor was there any ability to sort people based off of various patterns, nor was there any ability to build sentiment maps, etc.
As far as exploitation goes, I'm not going to say that our society is blatantly coercive using surveillance in the way that Ingsoc was. Wild abuses of the surveillance apparatus is utterly undeniable, however. Consider that whistleblower Russ Tice has said that Obama was being surveilled before his presidential term. Consider the terms "LOVEINT/SEXINT" and the JTRIG group. These are serious, democracy-eradicating abuses whose purpose is blackmail, not finding terrorists. I will also say that the current trend of politicians trying to outlaw cryptography and the sentiment there there should be nothing beyond the government's reach is taking us even further into totalitarian territory.
Then there's the whole "we never voted or asked for this and now it won't go away" thing. As far as I can tell, the government doesn't have the consent of the governed to pursue these programs.
But only because we choose to. We don't have to.
And even if you forgo your own personal spy device, all of the other mobile, stationary, and airborne devices will make up for the hole, mostly. Choice doesn't really come into it.
This was just basic communication hygiene routine, one of the many, you had to do in USSR to stay alive and well. People doing it didn't even think it was wrong, it was as natural as washing your hands after taking a dump.
You guys thinking that the West outdid 1984 just because there are DPI switches around are making me cringe.
The pieces are all in place and there doesn't seem to be a way to stop it. We are already seeing abuses of the power that ubiquitous surveillance gives the government. Subversion of checks and balances by the oligarchy has been underway for decades.
Similarly, as long as society remains healthy at large, not pushing itself to the brink where emergent properties of dictatorship take over, I believe we are safe. In contrast, for a rotten society you don't even need advanced technology to make everyone's life miserable, as been proven many times over in modern history.
Wealth is massively concentrated, and has a larger sway in things than democratic routes. The government has been on a 30 year warpath in the Middle East, with no sign of stopping. Torture has been forgiven; gulags for the tortured are accepted and permanent. A huge percentile of the US population is in prison or on parole-- far larger than other countries. Aside from this, the government used a terror attack as an excuse to start removing civil liberties in a slow march.
The problems of modern Western societies, while numerous and deep, are nowhere near dystopian levels yet. I lived the initial part of my life in USSR, arguably in the period when it gave up doing communism full strength. Still, 1984 ring true in very special way. Not just the basic concepts of oppression, surveillance and lies, that you can argue in any society with a government. By reading it you instantly recognize the behavioral traits of your friends, your parents, teachers and yourself in a shockingly precise and fitting manner.
The 1984 is not a stretch of imagination, not a metaphor or a fitting analogy where you supposed to "draw parallels". It's a description of a totalitarian society modeled on totalitarian societies of the time and people subjugated by them. It's an anti-totalitarian, anti-communist text that always caused problems to the Western political left by its uncomfortable, uncanny plausibility. Hence the endless efforts to re-interpret it as we have here.
Even China and the UK haven't done that yet, nor are they close to it.
It's a very serious problem, and absurd, over-the-top exaggeration doesn't help.
Like when people say, "Working at McDonald's is slavery!" No, it isn't. Actual slavery is a whole different level of badness. Obviously.
And along those same lines, odious though it is, government spies hacking your webcam to see your dick pics is not as bad as the government installing mandatory government cameras inside the homes of all citizens. Obviously.
So I don't think Cannataci is helping with this kind of hyperbolic statement. It could reasonably be argued that government surveillance in the UK and the US today is worse than it was in East Germany and the USSR -- and that's very alarming. The notion it's as bad as the fictional dystopia of 1984 is absurd and unhelpful.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2014/12/16...
http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-toward-forty/2013/11/elf-o...
"Smart" TVs, and most of the "Internet of Things" stuff is all about monitoring us. XBox's Kinect is in the mix too.
And they're just brazenly telling us through the mainstream media. Again, they're acclimating us to being aware that we're surveilled all the time.