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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Historically speaking, when the world was small towns and rural, “surveillance” was a fact of life. Everyone knew someone who knew someone else.

The big difference is that surveillance was localized and didn’t follow the person.

If someone did a crime or did something against local mores and got ostracized they could skip town and settle somewhere else to begin anew. Now, of course being the new person in a new place you were under scrutiny, but as long as you followed local practices your old peccadilloes or even crimes didn’t follow you.

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> The big difference is that surveillance was localized and didn’t follow the person

That is a big difference. But the big difference is how one-sided the new surveillance is. In a small town, they knew everything about you, but you also knew everything about them.

Today, parking regulations in my town are enforced by cars that circle around scanning every license plate parked on every street. I could probably find out who has access to that data if it were a priority for me. But what's stopping a private entity from doing the same thing? I'd never know it happened. Cell carriers selling my location data? I could easily have never known about this. Ad tracking companies having a record of most sites I visit? I don't even know who they are other than a few major ones.

Great point. What if all the data were available for everyone to access? Would it feel ok then?

(Not sarcasm)

Sure, but then I’m not sure it would be that valuable to law enforcement (maybe that’s the point).

Yes, I think that would basically be OK.

Even if "all the data" were accessible by all citizens, there would still be a massive asymmetry present in the government's ability to process that data into useful information.

Government and corporation. The FAANG companies clearly have enough processing power to churn an entire nation's big data streams.

Although, if one's goal were a town or even an individual city, I bet enough infrastructure to sift the data is buildable or rentable by individuals or small groups of individuals.

It becomes an interesting world when non-profits can afford big data resources.

I think that's our best option for avoiding oppression. Case in point, video of George Floyd. If we had widespread public (by the public) surveillance, I think people would feel safer. If someone is "disappeared," hopefully there'd be evidence that the ACLU could pursue.

The "extraordinary rendition" program the CIA was using to disappear terror suspects into places they could be tortured was discovered in part by airplane-spotting hobbyists. Because planes are extremely hard to hide, and there are people who watch airports to see what takes off and lands for fun.

When they pooled their data, they were the first group to notice the military had started running flights to and from locations they didn't normally fly, and it didn't take much investigative journalism after that to discover those planes were carrying people.

Do you have any sources for people who are interested in reading more on that?

Extraordinary rendition is a good search phrase.

Realistically, people would build tooling — either free, ad supported, or SaaS-based — that lets the average person synthesize publicly available data. Just making the data available allows motivated individuals / groups to do a lot of the work upfront, and then share the fruits of that work with everyone else, either for free or for a fee.

You see this already today with data from census bureau, FRED databases, COVID tracking tools, think tanks, etc.

David Brin went down the rabbit hole of asymmetric surveillance in is novel Earth. He also explored the idea more in the non-fiction book The Transparent Society. In both he imagines a world were privacy is essentially illegal. This levels the field between mega-corps/governments and individuals: instead of the false sense of privacy we have now everyone has equal access to everything.

Not only did this locality allow people to recover from past mistakes, it also limited the power of any one actor. As soon as a town loses faith in a ruler (or other large actor) that ruler loses the ability to locate more radical dissidents in that town. That's how revolutions are possible.

With total surveillance any revolution movement can be efficiently destroyed before it gains any momentum. That removes an important check on any government's (or corporation's) power.

I think it’s a big problem because many people do crime because they are poor or don’t have a solid family unit. Once they get into the system we don’t provide resources to rehab them but basically train them to become criminals. Or when they get out even if they satisfy what society asks of them, we make it really hard to recover with a felony on their record. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/felon-attorney-c...

being able to skip town and move somewhere else is good if you've refused to fight a duel of honor or sent love letters to someone of the same sex, not so good if you've killed a few people.

True. It had defects; however, I think for serious crimes they’d attempt to catch the person (Wanted postings), but for less serious things they would ostracize them and have them pack their bags.

It's true, but I think we paint an overly-rosy picture of what that was like.

Outsiders were shunned for a reason. Because one didn't know if they had left their previous town because they were too antisocial to coexist.

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