The window to deploy surveillance-resistant systems is running out
twitter.com
twitter.com
All: while I have you, please post thoughtful, substantive comments. Avoid snark, attack, flamebait, and ideological talking points. The latter lead to the repetitive, nasty sort of internet brawl we're trying to avoid here. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that.
Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.
It's a special sort of odd neoliberal fantasy where capitalists or technologists can route around an authoritarian social movement that seizes the power of the state.
Do you want to know what happens to people who think they can route around an authoritarian regime with clever computer code? There's a relevant XKCD about a $5 wrench [1], except instead of a $5 wrnech it's the entire apparatus of a developed nation-state.
If you really think authoritarianism is coming to your country, stop fucking around with prime numbers and get serious about the work of political persuasion.
Whether or not the state can surveil is a moot point if the owners of the tech are in on the game.
I'm not sure what this means, assuming weird auto-correct from authoritarian?
> An a11n regime needs the buy-in of private leadership because...
Only if that leadership is necessary to seize or hold power.
An authoritarian regime in the US would not need buy-in from major tech companies.
According to Tex Texin, the first numeronym of this kind was "S12n", the electronic mail account name given to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Jan Scherpenhuizen by a system administrator because his surname was too long to be an account name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym
Agree that i18n cemented it in the letter count form (homonym form is older, like K9 for canine).
Perhaps it's like i18n, except it's the will of the dictator that which gets translated for the masses.
None of these solutions do anything to solve the original problem, it just allows a portion of the population to ignore them.
Technology people are not the solution to this problem, we are the problem. And we really need to stop being the problem. There have been authoritarian governments before, and still are all over the world: but they've never had access to technology anywhere near as powerful as what we have today, e.g., ubiquitous user location or unencrypted smartphone backup or vast unprotected email databases. These technologies themselves are brand new: smartphone cloud backup is only 10 years old, and ubiquitous GPS-enabled smartphones are younger than my middle-school aged child.
But thanks to aggressive deployment by Silicon Valley we went ahead and created a surveillance utopia on a timescale so short that most citizens don't even realize what we've done. Future governments now have capabilities we could never have imagined a decade ago: centralized data repositories and collection systems that would make the Stasi blush. These systems now exist because people like us built them and decided to leave the problem of securing those repositories to the future. But we're running out of future.
Is more privacy the solution? I don't know. It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused, and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale. I suspect this could happen but would be slow and inefficient and full of friction. None of that has to happen now -- there is no friction -- because Silicon Valley has already done the architecture work and deployed the technology at scale. They did it recklessly and with no thought to how it might be abused, and now they're finding it difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. It will not get easier.
TL;DR: The data repositories already exist and all that's protecting them is a fig-leaf of legislation and honest government behavior that could disappear at any moment. Removing those repositories might not save us, but we need to try. We sure need to stop creating more of them.
I just don't see how developing new systems is any sort of solution.
> It's possible that authoritarian regimes are very efficient and will somehow force companies to build insecure systems that can be abused
The genie is out of the bottle. Issuing an edict to "do things like you did them in 2022" doesn't exactly require genius-level administrative talent...
It's also a bit presumptuous to assume that a future authoritarian regime wouldn't have expert technologists at their disposal... why do you make this assumption? Technologists are just people; a few will be partisans and many more will go along to get along. (To wit: how many of your colleagues at Johns Hopkins who have personal issues with the defense industry don't take boatloads of $$$ from DoD? Or at very least submit to NSF CFPs that are transparently adjacent to concurrently running DARPA programs? Ditto for colleagues who have beef with the tech industry?)
> and force consumers to adopt them at Google scale.
No forcing of consumers required. Just point a gun at whoever has market power and tell them to do things like they were done in 2022. After all, we are talking about an authoritarian regime.
You make a reasonable case for deleting existing troves of data, and a good counter-factual case for never developing smartphones in the first place. But, again, the genie is out of the bottle.
I think your thinking here is too binary. Clearly there exist possible futures where authoritarian governments are hyper-efficient and have brilliant technologists advising them. In those futures we're clearly doomed and thus we might as well give up now. The thing is, those futures are not inevitable. There are also many (IMHO more realistic) futures where governments are messy and inefficient (like they are today), where their authority is blunted by organizational and jurisdictional issues (as it is today), where their technologists are not hyper-competent (believe me, as they are today.)
In those worlds there is a huge difference between a scenario where the full weight of FAANGM's resources is pushing to build massive data repositories, and one where they've taken firm technological steps to limit it. We are in the first world and we should be in the second one.
> Issuing an edict to "do things like you did them in 2022" doesn't exactly require genius-level administrative talent...
I think that this will actually be more difficult than you think: this is why governments are spending ~millions right now to slow down the deployment of new encryption technology [1]. But stop worrying about 2022: what you should be worried about is 2036. Look at what we've done to privacy since 2007 -- the year the first iPhone launched. Now imagine someone from ~14 years in the future coming back to to explain what Silicon Valley has done with even better technology like wearables and powerful ML tooling. When you're in a hole, the most important step is to stop digging.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/01/uk-paid-724000-creepy-...
If an authoritarian movement takes over the US government, at least a majority of the Johns Hopkins CS faculty will continue taking grants from the NSF/DoD. Many of those grants will be more-or-less aligned with the objectives of that authoritarian movement. Non-authoritarian students will grind away on those projects.
Something similar would happen at FAANGM. No iCloud backups? NBD; lean on those companies to collect whatever data the state wants. You don't need super competent loyal technologists, because FAANGM and their employees will most of the time just do what you tell them. You don't need existing troves of data, because you can start collecting at any point and still get a huge amount of utility.
Could the authoritarian world be marginally better if big tech makes an about-face and stops collecting data? Sure. Is that difference enough to make any sort of significant difference in the lived experience of people or the trajectory of the authoritarian regime? Probably not.
I don't think you're wrong, per se, about the risks. But I don't think you have a compelling solution. And, anyways, there are much stronger arguments for reigning in data collection at big tech than the risk of impending authoritarianism.
Well, that has already happened. The NSA went to Google and other companies and asked them to implement PRISM, and they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
It is the only solution to prevent massive widespread reduction of freedom.
Sure, if there is enough incentive they might compromise your communication. At that point the wrench argument becomes very true.
So yes, technology did prevent the worst. It is true that it doesn't solve the problem of politcal ambitions of course, that was never the intend.
They are not what will change things, but they are a tool you can use to disperse ideas and make change happen.
Non-technological and technological solutions aren't mutually exclusive.
I guess I always think of the the quasiomnipotent totalitarian state as a kind of theoretical [anti?]ideal state, sort of like "what's the worst possible case scenario and how does this do in that scenario?"
The goalposts are always being moved but that doesn't mean you shouldn't adjust accordingly.
1. A technical solution may not in itself be the way to counter authoritarianism, but may assist in either resisting it or prevent it from gaining enough power. Since democracy is a state of permanent fight against the iron law of oligarchy (which ultimately leads to authoritarianism), any thing that reduces the power of the govt to a certain extent is good. In other words, we don't want the govt to be 100% efficient in whatever it does. Arguably modern tech in current state gives the govt near 100% efficiency in surveillance, so this has to be countered with any means, most of which are of course political and legislative, but surveillance-resistant technology can also play its part.
2. Authoritarianism is not the only threat. It's entirely possible to have a democracy in place and yet have a miserable existence under it. For example, if every perfectly democratic law we have now is enforced with 100% efficiency it will feel very close to a dystopia. Technology can help alleviate this to a certain extent.
The Conversations with Tyler Cowen podcast episode "Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy (Ep. 106)" has some interesting content in this regard. Tang works on the government side but the same principles are involved regardless of direction.
https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/audrey-tang-tyle...
Companies can never be surveillance resistant, they'll get court orders and follow them.
The only surveillance resistant (not surveillance-proof obviously) technologies are distributed, decentralized ones implemented in open source.
You're right that political activism is ultimately the only good answer. But it's not either/or, it is still quite useful in parallel to also develop, maintain and popularize decentralized systems as much as possible.
There’s a range on this - ask Apple about the FBI – and there are still several levels of usefulness: designing systems which don’t store data unnecessarily, forcing things to follow the legal process rather than quietly turning data over, and notifying the user when this happens. Obviously not all of this is possible to varying degrees but not all authoritarian states are the same, either.
The existence of Tor in the state of Russia and Russia being the Authoritarian state that it is supports the case.
With the internet and modern IT tools, authoritarian control over the populace is approaching turnkey. Well, it is, we just haven't had a strongman yet in the US (that wasn't an idiot).
The only defense is the speed of light. A question: at what amount of transit time from "the authority" to "the colony" does total information control fall apart? 1 light-minute? 1 light-hour? 1 light-day?
Nevertheless, space will be a whole new set of rules. The "authority" will be on Earth, and won't be able to think in terms of "space".
This is much needed on this website of cypherpunk idealism.
So... what? Don't try? Don't bother? That's like saying don't bother cooking your food because even cooked food can get you sick some of the time. Or do you believe that a hypothetical future authoritarian government can hire an army of thugs to kneecap everybody who they believe shared an anti-regime meme? Censorship-resistant tools are being used by dissidents today to organize against repressive regimes such as in Hong Kong. Laying the framework for anonymous communication today while it's easier just to be on the safe side is worthwhile.
Right, so my whole point here is...
...and how's that going?
> Private companies do not have freedom of operation in authoritarian regimes.
That seems to me like false dilemma of ideal freedom vs authoritarian regimes. Full-scale authoritarian regimes are scary but unlikely risk for western democracies. The real risk is small-scale creeping authoritarian policies accepted democratically with popular support.
We have to consider that liberty is not without real trade-offs between it and other values. It is fantasy to offer political persuasion as a solution. Different people have different preferences for political values and if there is a policy that is unacceptable for liberty-loving minority but satisfies preferences of majority by offering better support for other values, then it is unlikely than just political work can stop it (that would mean to convince others to accept a position detrimental to their own values). And there is enough people who in good faith would like to repress terrorist, CSAM, corruption, tax evasion, public health risks for a 'small' liberty restriction.
The thing about populist authoritarian movements is that they're popular. They're supported by a large segment of the population, and that segment is full of passionate intensity while the rest of us lack all conviction [0].
I can't think of a large populist authoritarian movement in the last hundred years that was defeated by mere "political persuasion".
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-comi...
a) becoming legally required to own and carry a particular kind of device and
b) being legally unable to fully control said device and
c) having that device explicitly working (again by legal requirement) against our own interests
It will be interesting to watch how things will progress and whether governments or corporations will be the ones holding control over the devices.
It will also be interesting to see how the mandatory usage and mandatory anti-user-services will be implemented in detail.
I guess that mandatory usage will be a race between mobile payment and government services like eID and eLicense. Anti-user-services will take some time to be fully developed, but I guess the first thing will be content scanning in messenger apps, closely followed by a list of illegal words or names.
Which would be very interesting because it's the Ludds who are building that tech. But hey, it pays well...
Bullshit.
Much of Silicon Valley likes to think they would be Ludds but they do so while hailing an Uber from their iPhone and hoping that their DoorDash is devlivered on time so they can eat while they watch a HBO Max show and they hope that nobody stole their Amazon Prime package.
For those unfamiliar, the Amish are a religious-society that avoid the conveniences of modern technology. They live in houses without electricity, and travel by in horse and buggy. It's sort of like they hit a point in history and saw where the world was going and decided, "nah, we're ok, we like how things are now."
When frustrated, I imagine a new-Amish. A secular society, who lives their lives (mostly) off the Internet. I'm not exactly sure what that would entail, nor do I think I'd actually want to live that way. It's just a fun thought experiment.
I agree, their religion probably does a lot to hold the Amish society together. It sets out a common set of rules that everyone plays by. There is also the strict punishment of social shunning for not following the rules. I wonder how fa
I disagree that a societal value system _must_ be religiously-transcendent to be effective. I can't name any such system that has had 100% success, but I reject the notion that it's impossible for a a functioning secular society to work.
To be sure, my idea of a new-Amish whose only rule is minimal Internet usage, would not work as a tight-knit community. There would have to be a bigger connection than a common disdain for the Internet.
No, quite the opposite
They're the ones who buy "smart locks" then get locked out of their place because they dropped their iPhone in a puddle or the lights went out
They're the ones who come with genius ideas like reinventing the bus with Uber or fall for stuff like uBeam because they're too lazy to plug their phone into a charger
1. key
2. iPhone
3. PIN pad.
But then they save the PIN on their phone instead of their memory because tiktok burned out their brain and they left the key home because "why do you need it since you have your iPhone!?11" and if this last point looks ridiculous remember this is exactly what happened with some Tesla owners going into areas of low cell service.
(You can tell I've been watching too many LockPickingLawyer videos.)
Much of Silicon Valley is just looking for a way to pay their exorbitant rent and/or become million(billion)aires. SV isn't going to take a principled stance on anything. Heck, the big players all know which side their bread is buttered on and the bigger they are, the more entwined in the corruption they are.
It will take a while of it getting progressively worse before an apathetic consumer class will finally be exploited enough to start demanding proper rules around all of this. I don't think progress will stop when the situation at it's worst. But I do think we'll have to get through that first.
We'll see about that, I guess. Revolutions in the past were successful because you couldn't control people so strongly and you needed the to work to be able to tax them.
With our new surveillance tech and automation I am afraid this has changed for the worse
1) Initially, when a new technology is discovered and leads to a paradigm shift, commercial/capitalist ventures are most efficient at digging down and innovating quickest. A depth first search if you will: relentlessly driving down costs, improving the technology and consuming or destroying the competition. Then, once the time is right, the exploitation begins. No longer are the newest models of $TECHNOLOGY strictly better than their predecessors, any progress is incremental and genuine innovation is partially co-opted by marketing.
When this happens the screws start getting tightened. Companies used to rapid growth due to merit try to maintain growth velocity by cutting cost, exploiting regulatory loopholes yet to catch up with the paradigm shift, and any other things not directly related to their new niche that the risk/reward calculators deem worth it (breaking laws, anti-patterns, etc.).
The reaction to this is two fold: 1a) governments want to stick their hand in the newly-added piece of the pie, 1b) people don't like being more and more exploited.
2) People understand when they're being screwed. Our sense of 'justness' is about as evolved as can get, people might not always be able to pinpoint what is screwing them over, but the anger still builds. I believe (really can't justify any of the things I'm claiming here as truth, it's just my opinions) that trust takes longer to build than to destroy. I loved google for 2 years, I've hated them for much longer. I feel intuitively that I'm being exploited when forced to help their machine learning algorithm detect traffic signs that only a few people will profit off. I feel like I've never entered into a fair contract where I'm obtaining search results in exchange for some of my attention; I'm just forced to fill these things out every once in a while to access a site unrelated to google. Can you believe my GP's site has a google captcha page on the contact form? Where I enter medical data? I _HATE_ that.
3) People like me (and you?) spread the word. After the initial rush described in point 1. other ways of working gain speed. Technology, organization, open source, education, they all make it easier and easier to replicate what was an enterprise deployment a decade ago as a small group, or even individual, today. One day a matrix bridge will allow me to message all my friends from a single, polished place, with good UX. One day later a friend will see me using it, and the word will spread.
The inherent nature of information favors the communicators, integrator and middle men. It's impossible for a silo to detect with certainty that you are not actually using a third party app, like a matrix bridge, to talk to your friends. A false positive will lead to more feelings as shown in point 2, a false negative is the natural result of progress in point 3.
4) Governments cannot afford a completely tech illiterate population. Security and military forces around the world have recognized for years already that information technology is another avenue to achieve their goals. Knowledge of the possibilities of information technology is a natural (but certainly not perfect) antidote to some of the ways an opponent might exploit your population. Organizations (in a liberal country) in this sphere will focus on education, partially to increase their own resilience against attack, and create a fertile recruiting ground for new recruits.
We gotta hold on till we get there.
Butlerian Jihad represent!
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.
That’s awfully vague. Are specters doing this to you?
Seems that some power analysis is in order.
Please don't feign naivety. It is a distraction to critical thought.
Here you distort a laxness in COVID mitigation to describe it as the very opposite.
The pandemic didn’t turn out to be a bogeyman that had no impact. Oh shucks—just a common cold after. But I guess that’s too “blue pill” of me to say.
The power elite sets policy. Not vague sentiments.
Thanks. Will do.
> The power elite sets policy. Not vague sentiments.
What do you mean by this? What's a power elite; doesn't it, in a democracy, rule with the approval of the society, and why would one be happy with a power elite's policy that lets it intrude into your private life anyway?
So what I am saying is a Butlerian Jihad is always a solution.
But that's what affluent people have always been doing whenever given unrestricted freedom. That's because they are better at using technology and finances and everything else.
Bitcoin was supposed to free money from financial institutions. But that's naive -- financial institutions have way more firepower and experience at subverting markets to their will.
The same goes for anything else. The larger the company the easier time it has to influence lawmaking, judicial, executive.
Maybe what we need is an equivalent of Butlerian Jihad but against organisations that are too big to be controlled.
Hence why people will settle space. It's treated as a pie in the sky joke today, but once it's "affordable" (ie, 250K per ticket) many people will go. Long term, it'll be an essential pressure release valve, as various discontents and dissidents go there to try and build their own versions of society. And that's great, the rest of us will just sit here trading freedoms for comfort and everyone will be happy.
There's already a movement to live at sea, in international waters, which makes a hell of a lot more sense -- but that movement has insufficient traction with the rich to fund itself. Living in space in the future will always be more expensive than living at sea is now.
Rich people have little reason to be dissidents (though they may want to pose themselves that way), and also it's near impossible to become rich in the first place without being highly conformist toward power, and those attitudes propagate even to heirs.
The migration to "Oh we now have mobile enabled -- X" is already happening, with "X" being boarding pass, driver's license, building pass, payment method, etc.
First, it's a convenience, then it becomes a requirement.
At that point, we'll need two devices. One to act like a wallet does now, with all those various passes, permits, and payment methods. For those wealthy enough and who GAF about various issues, that would be a very cheap device and the second device would be your "real" one.
Certain new models, maybe. Certain rental cars, maybe. But in the general case?
And where in the world is one required to run an app to use public transportation?
I just don't find this factual distortion from "could happen, might happen" to "is in the process of happening right now" to be very helpful.
>>~First a convenience, then a requirement.
It is starting at this stage as a convenient option [0][1]. The stage to be concerned about is when it becomes ubiquitious, then default, then mandatory. Might not be soon, but it is a large round rock rolling downhill. Might be stoppable, but that's usually the default progression.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_driver%27s_license [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/your-future-drivers-license-could-...
That said, another part of it was clearly in the future tense. >>At that point, we'll need two devices.
So, thanks for the alert, I'll try to be more clear next time.
My main concern was the assertions made in the comment I initially responded to, several layers up. Whose author seems to have ghosted us, since making them.
Who does any of the things you listed?
AFAIK we're actually in exactly the opposite situation. I can be imprisoned for not having a physical copy of my driver's license while operating my vehicle!
> First, it's a convenience, then it becomes a requirement.
What requires a smartphone app?
> At that point, we'll need two devices.
So, just to be clear, you're going to carry two smartphones. One that has a PNG of your driver's license on it and another that doesn't.
...why? What's the "win" here? And if you're so concerned with privacy why on earth are you carrying around that second smartphone? Just carry around the first one with the appropriate PNGs/QR codes and leave it at that.
I mean, all of this is kind of beside the point, but I'm asking for clarification because I'm genuinely bewildered about your threat model.
> For those wealthy enough and who GAF about various issues, that would be a very cheap device and the second device would be your "real" one.
If by "wealthy enough" you mean "has 40 bucks, or any friend who bought a smartphone in the last 3 years and doesn't want their old one."
>>why? What's the "win" here? The win would be that the one carrying all your 'required' stuff is not the same one as the one you use for telecommunications & other work. Separation. The one with all your licenses, accounts, etc. has ONLY that stuff.
And sure, if you want to carry only one with the minimal stuff, go for it.
>>If by "wealthy enough" you mean "has 40 bucks..." Yes, I'd make the license/pass/etc phone a cheap one, but it still might require a separate plan, which is monthly maintenance, etc...
>>I'm genuinely bewildered about your threat model.
I'd say the main post described it rather well.
Just the combination of nice-to-have options becoming mandatory/primary, the underlying device thus also becoming mandatory, and the device explicitly working against our interest.
While 'I've got nothing to hide', I still don't like my devices gathering data on me that isn't also useful to me.
E.g., right now, it's pretty optional to be tracked - just leave the smartphone behind, bring cash and your license/badge/whatever. We can't do that when all those passes are on the same device, along with our communications history and more...
[0] https://blog.dormakaba.com/this-is-why-smartphones-will-repl...
Are there places which are legally required to only accept test result certificates?
Not in NL. Why does this matter?
Any QR code which can be printed, can be copied. There's a vested interest for the operators of these systems to reduce the copyability of these codes (think: vaccine passports). Embedding a temporal code, changing the QR code every few minutes, and invalidating old codes, essentially OTP, is the most straightforward and industry standard way of doing this; it's inevitable.
We are right now in the process of…
But precedents that simply overturn other laws -- or as applies to the matter at hand, in the United States at least: the 4th Amendment - no.
Anyone can make "forward looking statements". If they're going to be useful and not dismissed as hysterical fear-mongering, then it helps if they're actually credible.
In some societies, "ability and availability to install mobile applications" is now taken for granted. This comes from the fact that in some societies the vast majority of the members take sheepish "what others do must be right" behaviour as granted. Those mentalities are enablers for regulations that may claim to mirror alleged "de facto" situations - making relevant prospects credible.
Surely many state supported sacrifices to privacy of the recent times (in some regions) were "supported" with "Don't they have FB anyway?" (thing is, of course, no they don't - a few would never).
> projecting and extrapolating from recent historical events
When some of the «recent historical events» come in "support" of already established desiderata of some parts (say, cashless society - to be intended as option dropping), creating an acceleration towards said trends, then they get relevant.
b) The device is FULLY controllable by me I can guarantee that.
c) I am glad it does, though this particular one isn't against my own personal interests.
I don't have to buy a phone. Yes, the apps make the border easier for Covid, but don't be ridiculous. I can fallback to filling out a piece of paper. Furthermore, I can buy an [PinePhone, Librem 5, etc] phone and "fully control" that.
As for c) that's been part of life since the government got the right to tap your phone or telegraph.
Right now there are troubling signs for the direction of American democracy, but the courts have held up and life is still pretty good and, for some, getting better. I know mistakes happen and it isn't perfect, but we're no where close to being forced to own and carry a device.
My bank has made it (almost) impossible to make payments without a phone, btw. Either you need to receive SMS messages or use their proprietary app. I could receive SMS messages without a phone but I would expect this to be a solution that eventually gives me more trouble than it's worth.
My bank has several buildings full of people, all within driving distance of my house. Any of those people will happily accept a stack of paper bills.
If you don't want to use digital forms of payment, why on earth are you using a bank that doesn't have physical branches located near your home?
Have you actually tried depositing large amounts of cash on a regular basis? Sounds like a good way to get your account flagged and suspended.
Not to mention the Treasury's seeming animosity toward cash as an instrument of payment.
I haven't been to a store that has refused cash and have never been required to use a banking app.
Just because you choose to use e-banking doesn't mean that cash and checks are inaccessible, or even particularly inconvenient.
In stores I mostly use cash, except for larger purchases where it becomes inconvenient. Those go to the credit card which I'll then pay with a check.
Bills here are paid with bank transfer. It doesn't have to be done though online banking, but doing so is obviously easier.
1. OP said "make payments", not "receive money". Literally no one is going to give a shit if you make your mortgage or car payment in cash.
2. LOL, yes, I deposit cash all the time, including a quite large sum at least twice a year (charity events). Cash-based businesses are still very much a thing.
3. I write like $10K worth of checks every month, and deposit around $3K-$6K worth of checks every month. No smartphone required.
Are you sure? To get a mortgage they check the source of your down payment and it cannot be cash. Seems odd if they don't also check source for payments.
Yes, absolutely sure.
> To get a mortgage
I said:
>> make your mortgage or car payment
Making payment on existing loan != taking out a new loan.
> they check the source of your down payment and it cannot be cash.
If you mean literal physical cash: the main reason for this is that no one involved in the transaction is interested in taking on the risk of carrying briefcases full of cash across town.
If you mean money in a bank account that is of unknown provenance: This isn't really an issue unless you make a huge lump sum deposit just before closing and have absolutely zero documentation regarding where it came from. Even then, giant sums recently deposited isn't a problem. You just have to prove that it's of non-criminal provenance. Recent pay stubs or sales receipts will do.
That has nothing to do with the money being "cash" or not, though.
And even then, it's mostly about access to giant piles of credit. If you don't need to borrow huge piles of someone else's money, then no one gives a shit. E.g., I've purchased property with a cashier's check, which is about as close to literal cash as you can get without major security risks involved.)
That's actually incorrect, to my understanding. If you have 100k in your bank account for a year, the lender doesn't care when you pay your down payment out of that regardless of where it came from. They object when there's a recent transfer/deposit of that money because it could indicate an undocumented loan, throwing off the debt to income calculations.
> They object when there's a recent transfer/deposit of that money because it could indicate an undocumented loan, throwing off the debt to income calculations.
Right. It's not some authoritarian plot. They just wanna make sure you're not a fibbing about your net worth before handing you a giant stack of their money. If you can prove the money is yours then they're fine.
But yes, you can go into banks and deposit money (even frequently, and in reasonably large amounts).
The flagging and suspending stuff is more what I'd be wary of using paypal or something similar, not an actual bank.
Many banks require you to call ahead if you want to make a large cash withdrawal, and if you make a large deposit you need to be able to document where you got the money from or had the authorities called on you.
Many in this branch of discussion seem to be measuring their possibilities against a current situation in their area - while in some other regions the situation is worse to desperate - and they are not seeing a trend.
You can (and in a way should) also wake up the sleepers, but it will be hard or less feasible to properly reach the masses.
Anyway, Germany used to require people to join the military and kill other people. Now they don't. Progress.
In Denmark where I live there are now trivial things that are impossible to do without an Apple or Google smartphone, and important things that are becoming very hard. Unless laws are specifically enacted to enshrine "analogue rights" or whatever, it will become impossible to exist here without a smartphone over the next decade.
Cash is largely dead and will die when the legal requirement to accept it is phased out at some point in the next few years. In addition to credit cards, there is one app for payments (owned by the largest retail bank) that has become the de facto standard for person-to-person transfers. So we are already at the point where not having a smartphone makes you a second class citizen, unable to participate in some parts of the economy.
Parking in many places requires an app from an app store.
There's lots of small community things, local classifieds etc., that exist in niche things that only have an app. Like I said, trivial things, but they add up to everyday life becoming harder.
As for legal requirement: the government single sign-on that is used to interact with all government services and is also mandated for many important things like banks, insurance etc., is app-centric, though not app-only. They used to send one-time pads on cardboard but recently switch to electronic tokens. All government ID (for public health etc.) is also moving to apps. You can still get plastic cards, of course.
- Your ID card already has RFID, and it will only get more powerful
- credit, payment, banking, passports, air travel ... all getting centralized.
- Go ahead and fallback to paper, that just means the paper is entered into a computer when you hand it in and they "review" it. What will probably happen is that the all-paper route will become FAR MORE ONEROUS will submitting to facial recognition, DNA samples, and the like to back-verify your identity, higher fees, wait times, until you submit to practical day-to-day needing a on-body computer device like a phone.
- all democracies know laziness is the key to functionally subverting rights, it's only going to get worse.
- even if you don't submit, all they people you know WILL, and the government can track you by tracking the people you know. So I guess, no friends for you.
Now, for every place I said government, cross that out and put in "multinational corporation that is a monopoly or cartel in all its markets"... and it's all there, turnkey, same policies, but even less legal / constitutional protection.
BTW, if you want to make a call over the telephone network, neither the PinePhone nor the Librem 5 carry a modem you can control. In both cases, the modem is a black box with non-free firmware that you're probably not even allowed to modify, depending on jurisdiction.
Oh, and it doesn't even have to be an emergency. You might find out that your hospital only accepts appointments made by phone, and will turn you around from the door due to COVID restrictions when you try to schedule a visit. What will you choose?
Granted, it's not a legal requirement to take advantage of your legally mandated health insurance, but it's a catch-22 that was constructed out of a clash of laws.
It's the idea of an actual smartphone not just maybe, hypothetically but "right now becoming" a legal requirement that seems to be -- more than a bit of stretch, here,
What's in everyone's coffee this morning?
I understand the slippery slope argument, even if I think it's kind of alarmist, but... I mean, come on. Present tense?!?! We are sooooo far off from a legal mandate to carry a smartphone that I'm not even sure how to politely react to this statement.
> it's not unreasonable to think we might end up in a situation like this.
This is perhaps a good use of the double negative, because it's certainly not reasonable either.
Just like the government doesn't have to pass laws or implement systems for surveillance when they can just rely on FANG to do all the data collection for them.
People who believe that smartphones are "legally required" in the US certainly do have a firm grip on "reality".
Am I doing this double quote thing right?
And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?
...
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
He should appeal to the media instead: they should make people aware not how much control they are giving away now, but how dangerous it can become in the future. But it seems to me very few people would listen or care.
Everybody cares, they just understand that they're powerless to change anything. The companies in question and the media share ownership.
Meanwhile many of my other relatives are afraid of being tracked, but they attribute that tracking to spy chips bill gates put in the covid vaccine. Meanwhile, as my father above pointed out, they carry their phones with them everywhere, and use facebook prominently.
In either case, I agree appealing to corporations makes no sense; in those rare cases where their bottom lines aren't aligned with future authoritarian states, it's because they want to become quasi-authoritarian fiefs themselves.
Tech companies don't have a great human rights history when there is money to be made.
Sure governments can make laws, but most of the laws are far behind what companies are already collecting voluntarily it would seem.
Perhaps start there Mr Snowdon?
This is basic stuff that anyone with an interest in technology can achieve with minimal funds.
Imagine if WhatsApp, Messenger, and Apple Messages were all fully end-to-end encrypted.
An authoritarian government comes in and demands that Facebook/Meta and Apple release a new version that is either not end-to-end encrypted or somehow allows the government to be able to see the messages.
Do you really think they will resist? Do you see Tim Cook or Mark Zuckerberg willing to have all their wealth confiscated and spend the rest of their life in prison on the charges of assisting terrorism (remember, we are talking about an authoritarian government. Remember also what happened to the Russian oligarchs to defied Putin, and the Jack Ma in China)?
So Facebook and Apple release the new version, and disallow using the old version (users get a popup saying they need to upgrade their app).
Do you really think any significant portion of users will not "upgrade" their apps to the less secure version and lose out on all their existing chat history and networks?
The people that would be aware of this and resist this, are likely using apps like Signal, Matrix, etc (apps that prize security over engagement and that have not come from the Silicon Valley tech giants).
It always makes me laugh to see people talk about privacy security from their MacBooks with their apple, Facebook, Google, reddit, Instagram and YouTube accounts. Meanwhile they really happy to handout your info when LE asks.
That is why a surveillance resistant system should 1) have open protocol 2) have free & open & fully auditable implementations 3) be sufficiently simple that disjoint groups (and individuals) can maintain and audit compatible implementations.
It's easy to make demands when the system is centralized; I don't think such a system can resist surveillance (or censorship or much else).
If the US goes (more) rogue at some point, Europe will be left holding the bag. The sphere around Russia and China will make it, but what does Europe have?
Both have a traumatic history of being invaded by empire builders and both have stark geographical vulnerabilities that left multigenerational scars.
I’ll take “Things that are not at all ironic” for $500, Pete.
Doesn't change anything about what I said about tech dependence though, especially between Europe/US (where Russia is not in the picture at all).
The truth is singular, we don't live in parallel universes. My prior is that 2+2=4. But, of course, this is not a place to fight about everything else. We have a free speech here, so that everyone can just stick to their own thoughts.
Your priors are still heavily dictated by your experience living within certain cultures.
If your hopes for an anti-authoritarian future rest in Europe, you're in for a major disappointment. As had as it's gotten here in America, we're still doing better than the rest of the world - at least for now.
It is fascinating that the topic seems to get so little thought in Europe though.
I guess this is like the Brits who talk about “Europe” as if it was a separate place even though they can literally drive to France.
So say that.
You could make similar remarks for many countries that would generally get a 'yes' to the question "is X a European country".
Well, if you're going to get all pedantic, Moscow is actually in Asia.
If you want to be pedantic.
I think that's exactly what Snowden is trying to say
Why the urgency?
Matthew Green @matthew_d_green Reminder to Silicon Valley: there’s an even chance that many governments in the world will be run by authoritarian movements in the future. Your window to deploy surveillance-resistant systems is running out.
I mean I agree, and I use services accordingly (Signal, NextCloud, Home Assistant) but, is there a special reason why he is saying it now, with some urgency? Did something happen?
I recently heard Eliezer Yudkowsky make this comparison in the (somewhat) related domain of AI safety: let's say you gained reliable intel that aliens were invading in exactly 30 years. Do you begin acting immediately, or do you wait? Anything you could do now, you could probably do next year. But the problem is, there's no obvious point at which to act; on any given day, you keep kicking the ball down the road.
The same logic applies even if the length of time is unknown (X years). There is a high probability of future crises regarding both AI safety, and authoritarian states leveraging surveillance and social algorithms. In both cases, if we wait for a clear instigating event, it may be too late.
You don't have to be "anti-vax" (which is a stupid stupid term) to be anti-vax-passport.
The people pushing for vax passports have no clue what they are unleashing. It is absolutely fascist, evil and incredibly surprising to me that 99% of the people on this website are in 100% favor of it.
EVIL.
I am fully vaccinated, but unable to get a QR code – digital or paper version. My circumstances are somewhat unusual: I moved back to the Netherlands after a few years abroad (I am a Dutch citizen), and due to the difficult rental market and not having a job (yet) I've been forced to stay in temporary accommodations. I can't "officially register" with the city there, and thus unable to get the QR code in spite of having all the other official documentation.
This is a problem for various reasons, and something that will finally be fixed next month or so when I start my new job, but it's not really something I can fix now. Never before has such a "unusual status" led to a near-complete exclusion from basic participation in social life. I can basically do bugger all except sit at home, and after being away for many years I don't know anyone, too. It's not a good situation. I guess I should count myself lucky as we don't require these things for public transport.
Is my situation unusual? Sure. But there are lots of unusual situations out there, ranging from simple ones ("I lost my phone this morning and now I can't go to {job interview,funeral,etc.}") to more complex ones.
Furthermore, since the current vaccinations only work so-so, it's not really clear to me how effective all of this really is and I wouldn't be surprised if the effectiveness was only very limited, or even net negative (just as bicycle helmets can provide a net-negative to cyclists safety, since cyclists tend to take more risks on average while wearing a helmet).
Overall, I'm not a huge fan, although I'm obviously biased on account of being disadvantaged quite a lot in my current situation.
Indeed, which is why we should think carefully about it.
> if that's the worst that happened to you during the pandemic so far, I'd count myself incredibly lucky and be happy about it
The worst? Actually, no; just the current situation relevant for this conversation. And there's always someone worse off, of course.
-- you are vaccinated;
-- we could assume you received papers at the vaccination;
-- said vaccination certificates are insufficient and you seem to require a different, related, complex document, which basically states the same of your vaccination certificate.
Though one understands the use of certificates as passes could boost practice for falsification of simpler certificates, the practice as described still seems absurd.
When will the madness end??
(/s)
Madness ends with discrimination. The importance of a licence to operating machinery dangerous for the nearby only after validation is clear-cut; that of limiting access to damaging intoxicants to weak decisors with unmyelinated brains is clear-cut; other contexts are not.
It's definitely a reference to smartphones, but I was thinking more of the everyday activities themselves moving over to de facto requiring a smartphone. E.g. ordering takeaway, using certain public services, ordering transportation, communicating electronically at all and so on. Plenty of authoritarian dreams are enabled by that trend.
Hopefully you're also speaking out against seatbelt laws, helmet laws, laws requiring women to wear tops places men aren't required, and second hand smoke laws?
Generally any laws where one person's freedom of choices for safety, apparel, and air polluting activities bump into other people's rights to not be annoyed by you and not cover your health expenses. In principle, they're all the same principles...
For instance, it's unclear how to rationalize against mandates for triangles of cloth on one's face in a public venue when folks are fine with mandates for triangles of cloth on one's chest at the beach. In only one of those is the lack of fabric known to kill people, but that's not the mandate we're fine with.
This whole "my freedoms!" thing needs to go back to first principles, build it back up across all domains to what we think it should be, with consistency.
An issue in fact is being revealed in these times with organized mutual assistance, "covering each other's health expenses", as a burden. Because it can go off the limits of good sense. As in: if one were mandated to eating salad and exercising, and to only use the car under emergency to minimize the risk of crashes, then mutual assistance would be a "shoved service" instead of a welcome feature.
> people's rights to not be annoyed by you and not cover your health expenses
The principle of "not damaging others" ("do not smoke in my face") cannot be simply mixed with "not being a burden to society" in matters that show less trivial tradeoffs.
Anyone can print a piece of paper. If vaccination requirements are going to have any teeth whatsoever, they will need to be much more invasive. A central database is the minimum. You'll need holographic cards with your picture, like driver's licenses. Spot checks on restaurants to ensure they're checking ids properly, and serious consequences for failure - you'll need a license to serve food, and the FABC (food and alcoholic beverage control) board will be able to fine you or revoke it.
Basically, you'll need to treat almost all of public society the way we treat alcoholic beverage sales.
I personally find that terrifying and would rather see covid run rampant.
So yes, to get 100% compliance you would need the measures you outline, but who says that’s the goal?
So there's no need for anything more complex than a piece of paper you can download + print. What you can't do is make a QR code of your own, change the validity reason of an existing code, or use somebody else's certificate with your own identity.
It's gross.
I don't think checking IDs is gross, and obviously if you do, there is nothing I could say to change your mind. But it doesn't change the fact that Covid passports are easily implementable with paper, there is no need for the to be "holographic picture ID".
We're heading to a state of affairs where you can't move in public anonymously. This is a dystopian nightmare.
Holographic cards would actually be better since it doesn't notify a central authority where and when everyone dines. You seem to be comfortable with the idea that "party of 6" sits down, and the waiter spends the next 5 minutes screwing with his phone scanning everyone's (printed?) QR codes and verifying faces. I would rather get covid.
Here in the US, ABC boards do in fact run stings on bars and restaurants to make sure they are checking ids. And yes history has shown that it is absolutely necessary if you want compliance.
It does not take 5 minutes either. In practice it takes about 5 seconds to scan and validate the cert.
You have built an elaborate fantasy of how bad the system would be, rather than look at how the systems deployed for half a billion people actually work. Literally none of your stated fears actually bears out in practice. Suggesting you'd rather just get Covid is just depraved.
Tell me, where is it that these systems are working for half a billion people?
I'm guessing this is somewhere with a vastly different cultural landscape than the US. Depraved or not, I still value what little anonymity I have left.
As most things, even if you were required to carry an electronic vaccine proof, you would simply be unable to do certain things; most bars require ID to enter, and I wouldn't be surprised if eventually they'll be required to use scanners that verify REAL ID status (given all US territories and states, outside of American Samoa[0], issue DLs or ID cards with REAL ID).
Unfortunately the Silent Majority just wants to be left alone. They are getting more vocal (Tea Party during the Obama years, most pro-Trumpers, others) but they are slow to act and lack any sense of retaliation when they are shut down [1]. They think if they keep their heads down the totalitarian system developing at a national level will leave them alone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b..., about 35 million Americans live in cities larger than 1 million total pop
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/irs-scandal-fast-fac...
> In May 2013, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released a report indicating the targeting involved delaying the processing of applications by certain conservative groups and requesting information from them that was later deemed unnecessary.
[edit] remove unrelated statement [\edit]
You get spun around when different people make different arguments?
Libertarianism leads to oligarchies led by the richest.
Billionaires seem to like this idea. I suspect the reason is so they won't have anyone nagging them to pay taxes and could write law without having to spend money funding think tanks and lobbyists.
My friend, you seem to have mispelled United States of America
but here you go, this [0][1]should have enough details and links to start you off.
You might also note that while the progressive Barack Obama had no problem pardoning Manning, he did no such thing for Snowdon. This was after the US House Intelligence Committee — not intelligence agency people, and both parties — UNANIMOUSLY voted to approve a report on Edward Snowden finding that he "did tremendous damage" to U.S. national security [2].
Perhaps you can explain how the whole airport fiasco and taking on Snowdon could have happened without Putin's direct approval - and why he'd do such a thing if it is "only" US civil rights issues at stake from Snowdon's theft.
Perhaps you can also explain how among the million+ documents Snowdon stole, only a few actually have anything to do with the headlines touting the civil liberty cause - e.g., exposing details of Israel’s killing of senior WMD proliferators in Syria [3]. Seriously, how does that improve anything in the US?
If you actually bother to look, without the hero-worshipping glasses and Qanon-level suspicion of anything related to government, you find that his massive story is a fraud.
[0] https://observer.com/2016/09/the-real-ed-snowden-is-a-patsy-...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200606111426/https://20committ...
[2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/house-intelligence-committee-rel...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20200226232346/https://www.jpost...
All with the background that the US deep state including the NSA are proven to infringe on every thinkable human right, if it just serves their own purpose. This is a bed they themselves made, they have to lie in it. (Pun not intended)
[0] is quite unusable from this POV, as the author is an ex(?)-NSA person. It is an opinion hit-piece, starts with character assassination, just repeats the accusations. The recommendation to submit himself to US secret (!) court system is a mockery, if you have followed the Assange show-trials. Secret court systems that always rule in favor of the state? That, being secret, cannot undergo the scrutiny of the public? Even if he is innocent, at this point nobody who makes this suggestions can be taken seriously. He would be at the mercy of a vengeful deep state while disappearing in a supermax prison for at least some years. Versus, living what looks like a decent live in Moscow. If Snowden was innocent, this is just the same as I would expect from a lying NSA mouthpiece. The story about getting trapped in Russia would include some severely dumb mistakes by the US. Revoking his passport exactly at this time, trapping him in the capital of one of their worst enemies? Again, nothing what Snowden did after his escape really depends on his motives.
[1] Interesting spy story. But again from an ex(?)-NSA person. Also, or, in consequence, a bit one-sided and very focused on the cold-war communist scare.
About the "without Putins approval". What do you mean? Even if a dictator like Putin had no involvement before, presented with such an opportunity, I'd fully expect him to personally take advantage of such a situation, showing the "hypocrisy of the west" and sticking it to the US. That's exactly what he is doing now, dangling Snowden in front of the world. Snowden seeking protection from a weaker country would have been very stupid for him, as Assange can surely tell in hindsight.
Anyway, all of this could also be a ruse of the NSA, to publicize a lot of things hat had been public knowledge anyways all at once, containing the public uproar and legalizing their forbidded deeds. Most things like the secret spy gear room etc. in advance. Did anyone in the NSA going rogue get punished for overstepping their boundaries, breaking numerous laws? I don't think so. The only ones who are punished are the messengers, and then law breaking only stopped, because the laws have been changed.
I'm not willing to say more, and I don't expect my comment will convince anyone here. But I assume there are a fair number of other HN readers working at big tech in positions where they can look into some of the claims in the leaked docs themselves, and draw their own conclusions.
* well, assuming no functioning government quantum computers a decade ago, and assuming P != NP.
With the number of supposed information technology professionals on here, it is really discouraging to see how often unthinking hero worship shows up here - I'm hoping it's just a few vocal ones, but it certainly isn't counterbalanced by many who actually examine the information space. It's sort of key data about the world.
I think people are starting to give little credit to the tinfoil hat people because maybe out of all of us, their brand of crazy has merit.
On the one hand, it means "insane school of thought". i.e. the Earth is flat. Something which is either totally off the wall, or at least unfalsifiable.
On the other hand, it means "non-mainstream school of thought" i.e. phones are being used to track people. It might be true, might not (well, now we know it is), but it's totally plausible.
Once you realise that you basically come to the conclusion that people who waffle on about "conspiracy theories" aren't using sound reasoning, because they're not interested in being understood.
Vaccines contain 5G chips being used to track people: conspiracy theory.
I think it's important to distinguish these two groups.
Even within the US mass-surveillance predates the current political climate.
We should seriously start looking for heroes elsewhere.
Recent pandemic was the perfect excuse to hit fast-forward on eliminating cash (although not a major transmission factor) and privacy along with it. Never let a crisis go to waste, as they say.