Why NSA Surveillance Scares Me
bentilly.blogspot.com
bentilly.blogspot.com
I believe one of the existential threats to our country is becoming a dictatorship. I'm always shocked when I share this point of view with people around me and their reaction is basically, "that's so unlikely it's not worth worrying about". There are many examples of this throughout history, e.g. the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, those that the author cites, etc. We should not be so arrogant to think that we are somehow exceptional and immune to this.
My personal belief is that there are certain constants in the dynamics of human nature, and one of them is seek power. Broad, unchecked domestic surveillance is a dangerous tool to give to a potential dictator. We should not set up a framework where a power-seeking individual can circumvent our democracy through coercion.
Here is an example. Let's suppose that we're observing the USA at a random point in its history. Then there is a 10% chance that we're looking at it within the last 10% of its history. The USA turns 240 this year, so that means that there is a 10% chance of it collapsing in the next 24 years.
That figure is much, much higher than the 1% odds I used of collapse in the next 30 years. It is also likely to be more realistic. "Stable governments" survive in periods measured in centuries, not millennia. However that number is so high that it would have left me more easily dismissed as a paranoid nut, so I avoided it.
History demonstrates that humans tend to over-estimate the stability of whatever exists now. And are surprised when the present turns out not to be permanent. You should try to compensate for such perceptual biases when you find them in yourself. And should try not to trip such biases in others.
If you sold life insurance using those kinds of numbers, you'd have some woes.
If you can't use probability meaningfully, it's better not to use it at all; it obfuscates.
J. Richard Gott famously invented this method to estimate the lifespan of the berlin wall, and predicted a 75% chance that it wouldn't be there by 1993.
Also relevant is this article, Risk-Free Bonds Aren't: http://lesswrong.com/lw/hy/riskfree_bonds_arent/
>A list of major governments in 1900 would probably put the Ottoman Empire or Austria-Hungary well ahead of the relatively young United States. Citing the good track record of the US alone, and not all governments of equal apparent stability at the start of the same time period, is purest survivorship bias.
>But even if you don't share those particular assumptions, do you expect the United States to still be around in 300 years? If not, do you know exactly when it will go bust? Then why isn't the risk of losing your capital on a 30-year Treasury bond at least, say, 10%?
The odds of a 100-year-old person dying before reaching age 110 are more than 10%, and the odds of a 10-year-old person dying before reaching age 11 are less than 10%. This is due to age-dependent-factors such as shortened telomeres and accumulated structural damage.
It is possible that countries similarly have age-dependent factors which affect the odds of survival, either positively or negatively.
I am not a statistician; I could be completely wrong. Apparently this is a whole debate: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Doomsday_argument
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument for the most famous use of this line of argument. (It concludes that the human species is likely not long for this universe.)
We can take this to extremes. At the 1 minute mark we have a 99% change of being in the latter 99% of their life (and thus a 99% chance of dying 99 minutes later). It's amazing how many of them beat these odds.
Also see my comment above.
1. Is that a reasonable assumption to make? (In a surprisingly wide variety of cases, yes. But not always.)
2. How do we update the conclusion of the argument given a variety of other information that we have available to us? For example we have a great deal of information about the US system of government, current political state, potential threats, and so on.
We're much closer to the British model - we consider the law actually independent of the government proper. The government depends on law, but there's a quite specific set of interfaces for government to change law. This model is not only surviving but thriving, around the world.
I don't know how any modern state, post-WWII, survives without a security apparatus. Perhaps it not be the one we have now, but there will be one, should a government failure happen. It takes very little for the government security apparatus to encourage ratting out dissidents as was done in the Soviet Bloc, effectively drafting every citizen as part of the security apparatus. So the present size of such a thing, pre-collapse may not have anything to do with what it looks like post-collapse.
But so far, the basic framework has survived ( knock wood ). There are disturbing parallels with the period leading up to the failure of the Whig Party in American history. But there were self-destruct mechanisms built into things then that aren't apparent now - I can't imagine receiving news of a whopper the size of the Dred Scott Decision today. But perhaps my imagination fails.
The slow attrition of our civil rights and the strengthening of the surveillance state is not unlike the process of smoking cigarettes. In the beginning it seems like fun. Everyone is doing it. People warn you that it's dangerous, but you don't feel bad, and in fact you feel kind of cool.
Some years down the line and you start to develop a bit of a nasty hacky cough. You brush it off, but in the back of your head you think it might be connected to your smoking habit.
Then one day you feel a lump. You don't feel well, and after a bit of procrastination, you go and see the doctor. You find out you have cancer, and it's terminal.
All of a sudden you're dead. How did that happen? You feel like an idiot. You knew smoking was going to kill you, but you did it anyway.
Slow attrition is the worst for the human psyche. We just can't get out heads around it.
I really like the term that I heard for this: "Turnkey Dictatorship".
The international agreements for trade, defense, and surveillance cooperation are intersecting with the interests of their respective oligarchies and corporations.
Just ten years ago, who would have thought we'd be extraditing and jailing someone for copyright infringement? How about governments subverting civilian infosec and sharing the exploits? It makes going to war for plain old oil rights and defense profiteering seem quaint.
Our country will never become a dictatorship, and our country is already a dictatorship. To be more precise it is an oligarchy or what was that word... plutocracy? Anyone has a link to that paper?
It is basically ruled by the very few powerful interests.
There are multiple methods of how it is done:
One of the most effective is regulatory capture -- look at heads of FCC, FDA, USDA, Military and corresponding industries: communications, pharma, military industrial complex companies. There is a giant revolving door between them.
Senators and legislature in general (state and federal) can be easily bought as well.
Judicial can be subverted as well. This happens easier on the state level were judges are elected. I found "Hot Coffee" movie pretty interesting and accessible in understanding how the process works: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1445203/
Election campaigns are basically a big theater where future political favors are sold for campaign funds.
And finally the PR involved in polarizing the population and manipulating their opinions. On paper the country will never be a dictatorship so this just means spending extra on manipulating public opinion. Bush did a good job mobilizing Evangelical voters. Obama capitalized on liberal votes and sold a story of hope, change, plus added the racial card in there as well. It really was a very well run campaign, not unlike what Coke or Pepsi would have. This is not just a random internet person talking, AdAge -- one of the main marketing interest groups gave Obama an award in 2008 http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market... for the best marketing campaign. Other usual winners are Coke, Nike, Apple.
The other thing that helps out is that various segments of the population, which would benefit from having a unified voice and position, are divided. It happens naturally in society, but it is of course helped a bit by media: Fox News vs liberal news etc. The division lines are multiple: conservative vs liberal; racial: Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, immigrants; regional: North, South, East vs West; by religion: non-religious, vs Christians vs whatever. It is a bit like the sports fans, the hate the other fans, but in fact they are closer to the other fans in terms of interests, income status, and general life outlook, than they are they with the players they are rooting for, who could be all driving sports cars, and hang out in exclusive expensive downtown bars together.
So minus some PR juggling and the need for some extra rhetoric about "Freedom, democracy, and exceptionalism, mixed with a bit of God and manifest destiny" you are not too far off treating the country like a well run dictatorship.
I'm totally with you on our country becoming more of an oligarchy. I think we're talking shades of grey here. Today, things aren't good. The trend also isn't in our favor. To paraphrase Robert Reich, money and power go hand in hand, more money buys more power and more power alters the rules of the game in favor of those in power. Sadly, elected officials aren't bought and the moneyed interests have undue influence over the legislative process. This is one of the most important issues of today and I wish more people realized this. The only popular presidential candidate who is talking about this issue is Bernie Sanders.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
1) Oligarchies are not dictatorships.
2) The US was founded as an oligarchy and has been a relatively stable one. This being the case, the OP's point still stands.
Good enough for a general heuristic. On paper we are Constitutional Republic and not a Democracy either. But it depends on the level of conversation. Most people on the street would not know Constitutional Republic vs a Democracy even if it hit them on the nose.
> 2) The US was founded as an oligarchy and has been a relatively stable one. This being the case, the OP's point still stands.
Note: I didn't say a dictatorship would be unstable or everyone would have a bad time. There are and have been lot of dictatorships people support(ed) and didn't rebel against in order to turn them into democracies.
The bottom line is people don't have the representative power they think they have. And other, most concentrated power centers make decisions for them. Whether it is one person or 20 large companies doesn't matter much. I can't quite be one person so on paper it will never be dictatorship, just like on paper very few countries identify as "The United Dictatorship of <blah>". Even North Korea, is a "Democratic Republic" on paper. That doesn't mean it is one in reality.
The sheer volume of people who think the two parties are the same and/or their voting is pointless would disagree with you.
> Whether it is one person or 20 large companies doesn't matter much. I can't quite be one person so on paper it will never be dictatorship
A large number of opposing poles on a spectrum are involved, it isn't just "20 companies". This competition allows it to function in a reasonable stable manner that appears similar to a Republic as everyone with the power to change the status quo is represented roughly equal to their ability to do so.
The simple truth is revolution requires it to be backed by people with resources.
I love your bit about PR - that's beyond true. But it's the sort of thing that, once you see it, it doesn't really scare you any more. It's all very silly in the end.
The rest? People don't have strong mechanisms for identity any more. They don't live on the same land all their lives, they may or may not have strong affiliation with an extended family, so more ephemeral things creep in. I have friends who rant about the Left or the Right, and when you get 'em calmed down, at their core they're usually pretty centrist, but they depend on political entertainment product too much. And political entertainment product is rapidly going self-referential - this week's FOX story is a volley-hit back from last week's CNN story, ad nauseum. It's just cheap air time with delusions of grandeur.
There is a real chance of Donald Trump or similar taking power in the white house. "Mature" or not, every democracy is a despot away from crumbling.
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.
This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.
https://archive.org/details/EbenMoglen-WhyFreedomOfThoughtRe...
Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.
There are people alive today, in the startup founders age bracket, who lived under Soviet-style communism and escaped it.
Get a grip.
That's what always happened and will be happening as long as there's more than one nation state. Moreover, the difference today is that we've created multinational corporations, which are basically like nation states, except they're not tied to the land and they can't raise an army openly.
With regard to the author's general point: we should indeed be very concerned with the potential for widespread surveillance to abet the violation of civil liberties or even a totalitarian takeover.
But I could have made a different argument focused only on the merits of spying.
Yes, it is obviously helpful to steal secrets. Yes, this gives us an edge in negotiations, allows us to steal technologies, and so on.
However people get pissed off at us when they discover that we have done so. See Angela Merkel's cellphone. Some of our attempts to assist spying leave us open to harm. See backdoors deliberately left in software that black-hats later discover. Lack of trust has a cost. I've seen estimates that US companies have lost tens of billions of dollars in contracts because other countries don't trust us with their data.
And when everyone knows that we spy, everyone else is likely to spy back just to level the playing field. But spying is asymmetric; small players can do it effectively with very little in the way of resources, and big players have more to lose.
When I put together everything I know, I believe that our aggressive spying programs are a net economic loss for us. We could be better off by spying in a much more targeted way, but with very large penalties for anyone who we caught spying on us.
Obviously I have biases and incomplete information. But I'm not convinced that spying is a good justification for the NSA, even if we were honest with ourselves about it.
To riff on this, the reason is a cultural issue regarding the value of self-restraint. Self-restraint is no longer valued. In fact, self-restraint is considered a critical weakness. To not take any action you can get away with, that advances your interests, is weak. It's lack of value is written in stories of police brutality, it's written in the manner in which popular elections are conducted, it's written in the policies of our executive agencies, and it's written in the way business is conducted. Confronted with clear evidence of wrong-doing, leaders are no longer expected to apologize and resign; we expect them to deny, to resist, to fight to the bitter end, no matter what. They wait out the public, they wait out the courts, and they win.
The question that I am having a hard time answering is simply: how did it get this way? Bush had a profound impact on this culture; there was a man who knew the anti-value of self-restraint! The anti-value of self-reflection, of taking responsibility for mistakes. Wall Street learned the anti-value of self-restraint, because they gambled, lost big, and got bailed out anyway. Police are taught the anti-value of self-restraint, because there is risk to the officer when using too little force, but virtually no risk to the officer when using too much.
Power delegitimizes itself when it shows a systematic lack of self-restraint.
Really? I'm not disputing this, but I'd love to see some evidence backing it up. What I remember from the Snowden disclosures is the vast majority of the leaked information actually did relate to violent threats to national security. Am I remembering wrong, or did I miss something?
If you're really interested in the subject of the NSA's history, and what it does, James Bamford's work is pretty interesting. Very dry books, tinged with his politics (more so Body of Secrets [1] than the Puzzle Palace [0]), but interesting none-the-less.
[0] The Puzzle Palace http://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Palace-National-Intelligence-Or....
[1] Body of Secrets http://www.amazon.com/Body-Secrets-Ultra-Secret-National-Sec....
Body of Secrets is an easier read, because it's written more around historical events. The Puzzle Palace got a little too in the weeds for my liking. One of its primary sources were a ton of unclassified internal memos, newsletters, etc, and he goes into things like who ran grounds security at the NSA's Fort Meade location.
(By the way, it also at best useless for fighting terrorists too...)
Is there a single non-throwaway commenter that disagrees with 'btilly on this?
Not, like, disagrees about whether it's the most important NSA concern, but disagrees that the gravity of this concern is outweighed by the importance of the work that NSA is doing.
To be sure: there are tons of people who disagree with him around the US. But I'm surprised if many of them comment here.
I had my brilliant russian buddy (grew up studying in the ussr) poking holes in my logic from a discussion level.
Then I started thinking, what if this pissed off someone spying on us. They could hack my machine (windows) and throw some CP or something on there that would ruin my life (I have no fear of anything I've got on my computers as a result of my own downloading).
So I killed the project.
Just like the article posts, with the fear of Hoover. I have the same fear of the government. Funny thing is I'm a pretty liberal person for the most part.
Our government operating like it does, from local police being above the law all the way up to the 3 letter agencies and congress themselves. Is really disheartening.
In war time I believe there is no doubt of their value.
But the lack of tangible tactical results in terms of data (in the broader fight against terrorism, domestic and otherwise) they have so far provided to the public is almost sad and embarrassing... considering the expenditure. So far they can only point to a small number of "real" terrorists or threats which they neutralized.
Results should be the only thing that matters.
Most of it would be in trade deals and other global political diplomacy that we'd never know about. Regardless of the technical capabilities that Snowden revealed.
The singular thing that scares me - that I can say with absolute certainty is immoral and dangerous - are secret rubber-stamp FISA courts.
edit: In the end, it is reasonable to assume we do not have adequate data on the successes of these programs. 2 paths then arise. 1) Then you wait for more data. 2) You examine those people that you reasonably know to have access and take a look at their moral history and actions to determine the ethical issues; it's the only somewhat good data you can add to the set to maybe get a conclusion.
You do not need data to make a moral argument based upon principle. There is no conjecture involved. (You could read some Kant on this, if you like.) You need data only to determine a particular consequentialist ethics that involves a balance of good and bad outcomes often understood in lay terms as "effectiveness." I think most commenters here would agree that effectiveness is the wrong way to evaluate this system, since epistemologically we cannot know its effectiveness. (... Although many doubt it could ever be truly effective in the presence of creative adversaries.) We can only know that is it categorically wrong.
The issue with this idea is that it is a tautology. You can neither prove it nor deny it from the outside where the public sits. You simply do not have the access to the data and cannot reveal it. Those that have pay a heavy price.
What then? You have to take Occam's razor, that the simplest explanation is the correct one. Combine this with Hanlon's razor to not attribute to conspiracy what you can reasonably contribute to stupidity, and you may have an answer that passes the sniff test.
I'd elaborate, but I doubt anyone wants to hear it. Whenever I do comment on HN about it, as long as I stay nice, I get a few upvotes, but the replies are extremely hard-line responses that make it difficult to have a conversation.
(I skimmed your comment history for the elaboration, but found nothing in my brief search. Sorry!)
A lot of the concern over the loss of privacy from a 1st Amendment standpoint revolve around the idea that the US government will eventually start to silence dissenters. I don't worry about this, because I can write this comment, and as long as I don't literally make a direct or actionable threat against someone, no one on the planet but me will know who wrote it. Even after everything I've read about what the NSA is doing, I still don't think they have the capability of identifying someone in a position like mine without a warrant.
The idea that this comment is safe makes me think the US government isn't yet at a point where the article writer seems to think it is.
This ignores the relatively sanguine nature of Russian politics in general. You don't get an Ivan the Terrible every day.
It's nearly impossible to explain just how bloody the Russian Revolution was ( even if you could cleave it cleanly from WWI, a blood-soaked thing of there ever was ). I don't care how noble and popular a "movement" in the US could be, I do not think the American people will ever tolerate armed insurrection on any scale.
I'm also gonna say that while the US is not categorically dictator-proof, it's damned close. If a POTUS used the military while under impeachment proceedings, I'm pretty sure what would happen next. I don't think there's a commander alive that would go along with essentially war crimes under an unstably footed CIC.
Never say never, but Congress can pass a resolution and oppose whatever military force POTUS used. I'm pretty sure of which way that would break.
We as readers of HN should not assume we have a monopoly of wisdom about subjects such as the Roman Empire. Certainly more than one US govt official has read a few books on the subject and decided a good bit of the Empire's instability was caused by rebellious legions and fickle praetorians.
As a country we have been rather lucky in that our obvious political crises - coups, putsches, and rebellions - have been infrequent. Now maybe under the veneer things have been a little less tranquil - think the movie "8 Days In May" - but that's something not likely to be made public until after the fall of the US.
To me the question is whether the NSA will become a fickle praetorian in its quest to thwart the rebellious legions.
The math doesn't sit quite as well with me. As someone recently mentioned, the projected threat of terrorism cannot be effectively measured by deaths to-date because those numbers can suddenly grow exponentially in the event of an attack. The probability of extra surveillance is baseless, etc. The points are valid, the statistical argument is weak and unnecessary.
>9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the US - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke...
>Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.
Also see his essay Terrorism is not about Terror: http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror
Not so long ago such ludicrous incidents would have been written off as being the misguided actions of 'nutters'. Now of course they are 'attacks' by 'terrorists', prompting hyperbole about 'heightened terror threat levels' and Al-Qaida cells.
Don't forget the Four Lions
Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.
— Cardinal Richelieu
My point is they already have all they need, publicly available any time they desire it. You write it for them and publish it for them! It's fanciful to imagine privacy protects you, IMO.
> My point is they already have all they need, publicly available any time they desire it
Which doesn't mean you need to be lax and give them even more, or even accept such situation as normal. Don't feed the machine. To put it differently, the argument that "privacy is dead, so ignore the issue" is invalid and actually only facilitates the problem.
I agree that you may be marginally safer if you're not "feeding the machine". But let's not delude ourselves - if the government turns evil, we're fucked either way, and no amount of Internet privacy will help much. There's too much data out there, and even more in the physical, material world.
That's exactly the point. Therefore helping that abuse (by either being lax with privacy, or by assuming it's pointless) is not something that you should be doing if you care about this issue.
> But let's not delude ourselves - if the government turns evil, we're fucked either way, and no amount of Internet privacy will help much.
It's not an argument to ignore this. That's the whole point of pushing for FOSS, privacy respectful technology, no DRM and so on. The more pervasive the technology is in society (and it's surely becoming so), the higher is the potential of that abuse if said technology is prone to it. So taking care to prevent it on all levels is essential if you care about it as an individual.
NSA surveillance is a backdoor to democracy because it enables blackmailing of politicians or inconvenient people. The CIA does this all the time abroad using information the NSA gathered.
I still am pretty much the same mind of the author, and blanket survelience is intrusive, ineffective and anti-anerican; both literally and in sentiment.
However, and I still not sure what role I trust the gov't to play here, the need for defense is pretty strong.
Let's take this red test for example:
While $100k is a lot of money to me, we will assume many people could have access to this amount.
There were > 1 million people in times square on NYE.
The strike cabanilities of an inclined individual are higher now than ever. This is the negative sode effect of the otherwise positive shift in individual autonomy and lowering of power distance between entrenched heirarchies and individuals.
A flock of drones can be purchased and controlled remotely and outfitted with bombs or guns and used to conduct an attack previously reserved for the u.s militaries indiscriminate bombing raids on other countries.
Analytical tooling and conputation can be purchased cheaply. Trend analytics, macroshift evaluation and near real time satelite imagery can be had for little money.
Biohacking is quite new but even after the overhype of the synthesis of (i think it was) smallpox from discrete labs, this is still semi-possible.
So, I don't think it is up to the government to fix this, especially with blanket survelience, but we do need to come up with a reasonable way to mitigate threats.
5 people and 100k could basically outfit a safehouse, a drone fleet, real time intelligience and a small bio labratory giving those who would not use that amazing luxury for good, the ability to create a high impact negative change event.
So if surveillance is an answer to a potential terror plot then what needs to be known is whether it can actually be effective. Terror plots are not the norm of human life. They are feared more because we humans are designed by nature to be afraid first when we see a lion, run away and think later. If we stood there contemplating the possibility of of having a deep conversation with that lion that lion would have managed to have a meal deep in its stomach. Thought is very low on mother nature's agenda. Even other great apes don't comment here! Basically we are more afraid of the danger because we are primed to be so. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while fear is a danger is a logical thing it shouldn't be the only thing to consider when deciding on surveillance. Currently it is the only reason presented to the public and it is not good enough on its own.
What I am driving at is that while the blanket "people" who watch fox news and are scared of brown people label terroists as myslims, i am proposing a different idea of "distuptive event".
It had nothing to do with edgecases like 9/11. Look at it like gun violence. I think people should be able to own guns, but the more people own guns, the more ahootings there are. If 0 people had guns, there would be 0 shootings.
So, suppose you were (i am) willing to accept x amount of ahootings to keep this right and we know some people will legally pr illegally obtain guns and do ill with them.
My point, is that eventually, people will have the same access to the strike capabilities of small governments in the 90s for very little money. I believe we should retain these rightts, we will have casualties to such freedom, but we also need to expect that as peoplehave the ability to affect global change positively, they do negatively as well.
Whena group of small people have the power to go to mars for example that is great, however similarly many peoplewill have access to satellites in > 10 years. So we need to be pretty cognizant of how we handle this.
It is easy to preach to the choir. It is much harder to produce an argument that can reach people who don't alread agree with you.
The technologies of today, especially the ease and rapidity with which information can be exchanged by private citizens, seems to me at least, a hindrance to an "overthrow" of our government...a freely functioning "Fourth Estate", journalism--the press, also acts as a safeguard...
At the point where either of those are verifiably co-opted I'd become very concerned...
Surveillance, per se, doesn't worry me so much...tens of thousands of covert operations are in play every day around the globe...those in play to guard against terrorism on U.S. soil are likely just the tip of a vast iceberg...
What? Give me one example where surveillance was the _reason_ and main tool for ascending dictator.
Given as my family lived and suffered from this kind of dictatorship throughout three consecutive generations, I hope I can explain why I don't think that this is surveillance.
You see, when you write to NKVD to say that your neighbor said a joke about Stalin, they don't actually check if what you've said is true. They don't honestly care. The accuracy of your report is completely irrelevant to the system, and even further — if these reports were actually checked, the system wouldn't be as effective, because this would mean that the system actually had rules.
Instead, this report system was based on complete paranoia and random violence. Random violence, not based on any actual rules, but only pretending to be, is much more effective in putting people in a state of learned helplessness and upholding the regime — while (in the example of 30s Soviet Union) killing almost the whole elite several times over.
This has nothing to do with surveillance.
Maybe not the main tool for Hitler to reach his position as Fürer but it was certainly one of the main tools to keep him in power.
I understand and agree with what you were probably trying to say ;)
Yes, every regime is trying to get information about who's trying to destroy it. But (1) it's not a tool to get to power as much as a tool to hold to power, and (2) it's not inherently evil: if you have some regime that you actually like and don't want to see violently overthrown, you would support such measures, implemented in a reasonable way (!), too.
(I don't have a firm opinion on what modern surveillance will do politically over time, just answering your specific question.)
Update: take for example google/twitter/facebook and how they have a lot of control over what we do online. Because they have that info they can influence our lives. Facebook's mood experiment is a recent example. Also if a picture of an election candidate is shared a lot, that candidate gets more votes by causation. Google/twitter/facebook don't have a political agenda behind their abilities and people are concerned about their influence. It makes more sense to be concerned about politically controlled agencies.
Please, stop analyzing things as being "good" or "bad". By any reasonable person's standards, the whole today's world is just awful. It's not usable. Use "worse" and "better" instead: when we compare things to one another, only then can we get somewhere.
Furthermore, the fact that billions of people are voluntarily using social media, all stored on private company's cloud servers, along with ML, massive computing increases gives those who'd use surveillance for power grabs exponentially more power than the Stasi, KGB, Hoover's FBI, etc. could have ever dreamed of.
But that's what the quote from the post is claiming.
> Furthermore, the fact that billions of people are voluntarily using social media, all stored on private company's cloud servers, along with ML, massive computing increases gives those who'd use surveillance for power grabs exponentially more power than the Stasi, KGB, Hoover's FBI, etc. could have ever dreamed of.
No, Hoover wouldn't. When you compare Hoover's era to today, compare how easier it is to track paper letters and phone calls than email and skype, and more importantly, how much more of emails and skype calls do we have now than then. The only thing that have gotten easier is to bulk process them, yes. But if you actually want to tap communications of certain individuals for some legitimate reasons (and I think we all can agree that in the most corrupt and awful country, there are some situations where these legitimate reasons exist), you would need much more man-hours and effort to do that.
The poster pointed out that if we're taking a 3000 years view, it's worth considering the great filter hypothesis[0]. If one is to believe it's ahead of us (as an explanation for why we haven't seen any signs of aliens yet, and mind you, this is not a joke), then it stands to reason we'll likely fuck ourselves over with some future technology. Given that, mass surveillance may be a way to avoid this fate.
Also, the poster pointed out that "the debate is silly. This level of surveillance is inevitable."
--
The comment I was about to post in response:
Actually, I do agree, for two reasons.
1/ SIGINT is basically inevitable, barring total collapse of technological civilization. We're only starting to be good at data gathering and processing, and there is no reason to suspect we won't be getting much better very quickly. Look - 100 years ago we could barely record a person's voice. Today, we use sound to acquire pictures. We use light to acquire sound. Between cheap microphones being good enough to pin-point the position of a firearm discharge in a big city and your mobile phone about to be equipped with a 3D geometry sensor and a fucking radar on a chip, with NASA being able to map ocean floor using gravity sensors, that by the way happen to be Cold War-era technology, does anyone really believe we can stop mass surveillance? It's a side effect of useful high-tech tools. You basically can't have one without the other.
2/ Progress of technology also keeps increasing the amount of power a single person can wield. Throughout almost all history, the biggest damage an ordinary individual could do to other people is to set something on fire. Burn down a building, maybe. 100 years ago, an ordinary citizen could at best drive someone over, or blow something up. In the last few decades, bombs had become easy, and people were worried about terrorists with crude nukes. Today, a teenage hacker could do anything from blowing up a gas station to shutting down power in a large area. Tomorrow, your high-school friend may be playing with potentially dangerous viruses in their basement.
This is not a joke. We're entering an era where playing with self-replicating machines is getting very easy very quickly. Today it's not just big biotech companies doing that - your local hackerspace is most likely doing baby steps with reprogramming bacteria too.
Now tell me, honestly, how are we going to defend against that? And keep in mind - it's not the angry that are the problem. It's the crazy ones.
Surveillance will probably have to be a part of the answer, but I fear it will be far from enough.
1/ I agree with you on the premise that it is somehow inevitable but it is a lawless arena today.
2/ Also the single person does end up having more capability but also protection from them is also more possible.
But the problem with it is that in its current form surveillance is secret and the decision of action based on the surveillance is done in secret. There is an exclusion of democracy in any country when it comes to surveillance. Laws governing response to surveilled information are non-existent. This means we don't as a people have known effective means of using surveillance nor can we come to know unwanted side effects. Also citizens of a democracy are treated as unqualified individuals to know about surveillance. There used to be a caste system in the past of people who were worthy and those who are not. Kingdoms, dictatorships and communist states are the classical examples. Today the caste system is whether you belong to the surveillance community or not. Yes we need it but we need it to be governed by rules. Surveillance is a product of wanting to have an upper hand on the international landscape however we are discovering that it is slipping into domestic situations like the parallel construction cases exposed by Snowden. So while surveillance is inevitable and necessary it really is the wild wild west of government.
I would like to believe that, but for now if it comes to biohazard events, I'm not reassured. If we had good enough mitigation strategies today, people generally wouldn't catch communicable diseases so much as they do. And I haven't heard of any potential research on something that could tip things in favour of defense. Again we encounter the same dynamics that make airport security theater ineffective - the assymetry between attack and defense. The defender has to handle all possible attack variations, while the (either human or random in nature) attacker can just focus on one strategy, a strategy that will not be known to the defender beforehand.
For now, the best short-term strategy is infrastructural - basically what the health services are doing today, but even more of it.
I totally agree with you about present surveillance situation being a total Wild West. I have no clue what to do with it, and while I don't really mind data gathering per se, I'm very much against the shenanigans governments and private companies are pulling on us with said data. We desperately need to figure out a good solution.
I think that one obstacle on the road to that solution will be attempting to protect the idea of privacy at all costs. I think we'll end up having to give up a big part of it, or even the whole concept entirely - in exchange for reducing the power it gives to the governments and corporations. For instance, you can't really blackmail people with stuff everyone knows everyone does, because nobody will care.
As for privacy, I think we don't have as much privacy as we think we do. The thing that technology introduced is the recording of our already public moments. Now they can be played back at someone else's discretion and that someone else can control the narrative of our lives portraying us against our will in whatever way that someone wants. We're stuck here.
Not many people realize the FBI started as a domestic intelligence agency first and only became primarily a federal law enforcement arm later on. This would make suppressing foreign-backed or (what they deem) dangerous political dissent their priority early on.
The fact J Edgar Hoover controlled the FBI for more than half of its existence. He is also 1/12th of the people who have held the position.
I'd say that is a strong enough argument in and of itself. You just need one guy at the top of the surveillance pile pulling the same tricks and 1 in 12 odds is pretty high.
[ Yes, I'm aware this isn't technically accurate but its close enough for rhetoric purposes. ]
Deleted comment
Do you have a citation for this?
In addition to the (currently) unavailable high-resolution imagery which would be required, atmospheric distortion would render any text illedgible, and it seems very unlikely the individual characters would be resolvable. Many of the techniques used to reduce/compensate for atmospheric distortion in telescopic imaging are not possible in Earth observation.
Also, things will get worse since satellites are not really the future. Solar-powered high-altitude planes that can keep themselves aloft for years are potentially much cheaper to launch and operate, and much more flexible, so I'm guessing this is where things will be heading in the next few years. They may be easier to detect and shoot down, true, but they seem perfect for domestic surveillance ops.
It's off by orders of magnitude. KH-11 had/has a 2.4m primary mirror. Wikipedia (correctly) says the following:
>"Assuming a 2.4-meter mirror, the theoretical ground resolution with no atmospheric degradation and 50% MTF would be roughly 15 cm (6 inches). Operational resolution would be worse due to effects of the atmosphere"
16-point typeface is 5.8mm tall, so you probably need at least 0.58mm resolution to read it, and 2mm resolution to separate the characters.
2mm/150mm = 1/75 = 0.013
You need 75x better resolution than KH-11 to resolve characters.
0.58mm/150mm = 0.0038
You need (1/0.0038) 259x better resolution than KH-11 to read 16 point text.
You need ~2-2.5 orders of magnitude better resolution than the largest known earth-imaging satellite can provide, and that is assuming the phone is perpendicular to the satellite with no atmospheric distortion.
Found a youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTXnJF5MnHQ
Check that one as well, DARPA's 1.8 gigapixel camera for continous monitoring of, well, small cities from altitudes up to 20 000 feet. And something tells me that's not the real state of the art.