The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology
longreads.com
longreads.com
Gorgon Stare was featured in PBS Nova Rise of the Drones (2013)
Skip to 30m mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o?t=30m29s
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/eye-sky
If you didn't worry about all of the potential for abuse, the ability it provides to help solve crime is pretty compelling.
Thanks for the great link (and also for automatically setting it to the 30 minute mark).
This can be done at effectively metropolitan scale.
IIRC, both these systems are being tested domestically.
Then I want people to consider Planet [1](formally Planet Labs). Their goal is to get a picture of Earth every day. They currently have 14 satellites that get 0.72m resolution (sample)[2]. That's easily enough to see a car. The 3m[3] seems good enough to do what they describe in the RadioLab episode. Honestly it is only a matter of time before Planet or another company gets sub 100cm resolution AND has a constant view of the globe. While this product is transformative in many different ways and can do a lot of good for humanity (seriously, it can do a LOT of good) I have ZERO doubt that it will be used to track people. It really isn't a matter of inventing technology, it is a matter of how much to spend (inventing more will make it cheaper).
So I think we should think very carefully about this technology. I'm extremely concerned with privacy but at the same time I do not think we should prevent the march of innovation (even if you really could). But we've seen how it has been used. We see how it IS being used. But I want people to also think how it WILL be used as technology gets better. This isn't a conversation for tomorrow. We do have to think about it now and decide how we want to handle these things. I'm not entirely sure how it should be handled. But the idea that the US, Russia, China, or even NK could have access to constant monitoring of the entire planet is a scary idea and well past Orwellian. I think we're far from a constant monitoring being feasible, but we're at least close enough where the idea is realistic (where it isn't sci-fi anymore).
Side note: I wonder how much more difficult it would be to be a spy if this technology existed.
[0] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wnycs-radiolab/e/eye-in-the...
[1] https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/
[2] https://www.planet.com/assets/images/products/imagery/skysat...
[3] https://www.planet.com/assets/images/products/imagery/planet...
Are satellite surveillance not already a threat in this sense? I have heard such images have a resolution down to 1 cm.
Yes. Our ability to effect the world is amplified greatly from what it has ever been before; but before abandoning essential liberty, perhaps we should take a moment to collect ourselves, sit down, and realize that if we're willing to give up everything, then civilization is already lost; therefore, the proper direction is not further breakdown or restriction of liberties, but a revival of the collective cilized spirit that hitherto has graced our ancestors in bringing us to this point.
Technology and our bewitchment by it, and the power conferred through it's use are things tempered by prudence and an active sense of obligation to those around us, and those we'll be leaving behind to carry on after us.
I'm incredibly alarmed at the willingness to embrace the sacrifice of essential liberty nowadays... It's mind boggling.
Bostrom's argument is not at all that bad people do bad things so therefore we need total surveillance.
It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end.
Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
I've been called a modern day Spinoza, hadn't been called out as Mill yet though. At least I'm in good company.
>It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end.
Yes. I know. That is consistent with my interpretation. What I said spoke not to the message of the paper, but what it means in the backdrop of current events. I also strongly disagree with the conclusion that civilization ends because some crazy gets his hand on a thing. I say civilization ends once people start panicking about some crazy getting a thing, and seriously considering we have to either full stop technological development, or cleanse the world of "problematic sub-populations" for the sake of something that might not even happen.
>Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument.
Correct. It isn't. Nor was I attempting to do so. My argument was that seeing as civilization is already lost if we're considering hitting the full stop button, drugging the masses, or going off into flights of fancy creating a world with zero space for essential liberty; the only way to go is up. We have to reaffirm our commitment to personal liberty, rebuild the civic framework of trust, and embark on rational, prudent ways of hardening society against whatever new "threats " there are to be dealt with due to mischief caused by members of the very civilization we so deem to protect.
Civilization predicated on essentially null liberty, and iron-fisted systemic control isn't civilization. It's barbarism. Civilization is what you have when everyone has the means to put one over on everyone else, but we all decide to build/do something productive instead of trying to cause others harm.
Do some people make the harmful choice? Yes. Those people generally set the level the rest of us respond on. Creating a self-correcting dynamic.
>If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
And this is the type of thing that indicates to me, that for at least right now, civilization is dead or dying. See, humanity doesn't go away when civilization does. Our works and infrastructure, and everything else don't just disappear. We just start acting in the most base, animalistic ways conceivable.
Dystopian literature is not a thrice damned instruction manual. It is a cautionary tale. A warning, a description of a societal failure state.
To take any option as laid out in these tales and to consider it a valid, agreeable, or desirable way to advance is to reject the central tenet of civilization. That people, given the means and freedom to employ them will generally do positive things, and for the one's that don't, we have ways of dealing with that; but in the interest of not succumbing to our baser natures as human beings, we bind the employment of those means through systematized, impartial codes, so at the very least, we protect ourselves from unraveling the civic trust that makes our current state of being possible.
It is through the respect of personal liberty, and prudence in the application of violence or coersion that the state of civility bears fruit.
I'll happily accept the possible risk of sudden existential collapse. If it's going to be, then it'll be. Everything historically recorded, everything being actively researched, and everything existing as even a kernel of a nightmare in a creative's eye is bound by time, space, and the laws of physics. Time we will have, and make no mistake; nothing creates unity in a civilization like sudden existential crisis. Some might even argue, that is how our civilizations mature. By being tested repeatedly, and managing to survive intact.
In case you thought the following were just platitudes, I recommend you think about what they really mean before being swayed by this alarmist/surrendering rhetoric.
Land of the Free, home the Brave.
Those that would sacrifice essential Liberty for Safety, deserve and will find neither Liberty, nor Safety.
The cost of Liberty is eternal vigilance.
I'll gladly wear Mill's mantle, because someone clearly needs to.
Surveillance and militarization protect that undertaking of destruction, they don't prevent it, they get arrayed against those who would attempt to prevent it. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
It's like the people who invaded Iraq and made ISIS possible, then go on and tell people what to do about ISIS, and so on. How about bringing to justice the and seeing judged in our history books the "bad actors" in past and present we know exist for sure, rather than rationalizing continued obedience to them by squinting hard, to try and see "silver linings" in clouds they are seeking to force upon us? That's the mechanism here, it's not like we live in a normal world as free adults, and someone says "hey, tech is getting very powerful, let's talk about privacy". No, we rationalize what we see powerful conglomerates pushing over decades, in an arms race against civilian populations that begun before we were even born.
> It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
-- Noam Chomsky
> What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
Stross's Laundry Files novels feature a hybrid magical/technological device codenamed Scorpion Stare. It's a weapon rather than a surveillance technology, but it's also built into government surveillance systems as a hidden feature. And the technology behind it was discovered by dissecting actual gorgons (which are a real thing in the Laundryverse).
Laundry Files are a great read. One of my all time favorites.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/psa-gorg...
It's a adequately intimidating sounding name for an overreaching gov surveillance program that was intended for warfare zones and being applied to domestic citizens. Exactly like "Stingrays" from a couple years ago.
The same thing in the "homeland" security world would obviously result in a similar overreaction in a country where so many people are paid to be paranoid and overly sensitive to risk. But the deterrents and personal risks of messing with actual security services are so much higher which lowers the likelihood.
Plus how many crazies have tried the "mass shootings to start a {cultural/race} war" thing and completely failed. Or all the groups from the 1970-90s preaching nonsense about the triggering of some symbolic event resulting in mass societal change or utopia (see: Branch Davidians). It always fails spectacularly. Same with ISIS. I wish people would stop trying those strategies, which always harms innocent people caught in between, while the overreaction just feeds into the group's now (self-fulfilled) victim complex which just further adds fuel to their sales pitch to the fringe, creating more conflict and overreaction.
As the URL suggests, the author wrote the book sapiens.
If anyone is interested in seeing something similar playing out in real time these days, take a look at Sri Lanka.
Integration of all the imagery from ground-based surveillance cameras is a bigger threat to privacy. At half a meter, about all you can do is find fires and follow cars.
[1] https://platform.digitalglobe.com/earth-imaging-basics-spati...
The workflow was:
1. Bomb goes off
2. Plane lands, disk packs taken off, loaded into computer
3. DVR type interface, zoom to the time/place where the bomb went off.
4. Rewind. Observe some guys messing around with something on the side of the road.
5. Draw a box around their truck.
6. Run the tape forward. Computer automatically tracks the truck. Observe where truck goes back to.
7. Run the tape backward. Observe where truck came from.
8. Kick down two doors that night.
9. Integrate this with your mobile phone tracker. Observe all phones that came to either of the two addresses within a time window.
10. See what other places these phones went to. Find places that are common to multiple bombings. Repeat.
11. You now have the leadership chain.
Roadside bombs essentially stopped being a problem. This was attributed to the "Anbar Awakening", but my belief is that it was essentially due to these two technologies.
Edit: so other people have pointed out firing ballistics into the air is actually really dangerous. Signal jamming the drone seems like a safer kind of direct action.
Could also indirectly resist the military industrial complex by lobbying state and federal governments. That would be the safest way to bring down a drone.
The overwhelming majority of the world lives less than a few dozen feet from their neighbors. Homes tend to cluster together even in the middle of nowhere.
Now please, pretty please, stop encouraging people to discharge their firearms into the air.
(I haven't done the math, but I know the notion that a penny dropped from the Empire State Building is false; a penny's terminal velocity is too low. And birdshot is a lot lighter than a penny.)
Bullets fired on ballistic trajectories can be lethal OTOH, That's even a machine gun doctrine to hit enemies behind cover...
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/88696-before-you-p...
Still I think his energy would be better spent talking to our local government about setting up a drone ban.
Sure, lots of folks see homeless individuals as less than human and would happily say "Let's shoot them! Problem solved!"
But if some fine upstanding citizen's stray bullet is tracked back to him, it's potentially felony manslaughter anyway.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I used to see drones above my tent at night when camped at the foot of some bluffs below expensive housing. I don't believe the people in the expensive housing had any idea I was there. I did my best to have tree cover, to come in under cover of darkness and remain quiet and so forth.
I was trying to avoid telling that personal anecdote because I'm routinely given shit for telling my personal anecdotes to explain what I mean.
I was amused and showed it to my neighbor one day and he immediately (and seriously) told his wife "See, I told you we should move out of this neighborhood"