Comment by walid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walid | Hacker News Reader

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On the 2 points you raise:

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.

> 2/ Also the single person does end up having more capability but also protection from them is also more possible.

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.

From a digital point protective measures such hack proof system can be expensively engineered https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc1MTg but biology is a little bit trickier. I can think of biosuits of the future being like what we see in SciFi which is currently unrealistic but still plausible. I don't know where future protective technologies can go but there has always been some form of measure and countermeasure being developed in parallel one as a byproduct of the other.

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.

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