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Comment by brlewis | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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