Civic Hygiene – avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state (2013)

[0]: https://opensource.org/osd

[1]: https://www.json.org/license.html

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#JSON

Except we can (and do!) accomplish that with much simpler airplanes. The staggering costs and complexities of an F35 (the thrust:weight, maneuverability, and stealth) don't make sense for any "peaceful" application.

Good luck - this flies in the face of the entirety of human history.

> "what would it take to turn an AK47 or an AR15 into a water pump?"

As someone who has manufactured these from billet: why would you do this? (hence "word salad") Why does one thing at all relate to the other? Why not just manufacture a pump from the same raw resources? Why not both?

> Those who think weapons are necessary must always take lesser priority than those who invent technology to make the lives of their fellow human beings better.

Did the Allies in WWII not "make the lives of their fellow human beings better" using violence? Why didn't they just ask mean old Hitler: "Hey, be nice! Have a good spirit!"? The world has finite resources, inherently making anything often denies those resources (your time, actual materials, etc.) to other causes. "Better" is subjective.

> There are so many examples of the tool-makers winning harder and at greater scale than the bomb-manufacturer.

These organizations are often one in the same.

> We wouldn't be here now if the balance was the other way

The balance is already the other way regardless of your citation-free assertion. You're using the internet to proliferate this tripe - famously a DARPA invention.

> Imagine if those F35 mounting pylons were used to drop field-portable water-purification systems directly where they are needed most.

Why is a high-performance stealth aircraft required for this? Why does one thing have anything to do with the other? What peaceful purpose does stealth capability serve?

> Imagine if those ships were being used to bring power to the villages that need it most.

No need to imagine, this already happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powership

> Disarm them too.

With what? Words? Precisely how do you non-violently disarm someone who is willing and demonstrated to use violence to prevent you from disarming them? Again, the world's resources are finite, and control of these resources inherently requires violence.

Your ability to spread these "ideas" are rooted in violence: taxation, freedom generally. Freedom isn't free, and the price is paid in blood.

And then a group that prioritizes weapons over human-life-improving-tools kills the group that prioritizes life and takes your resources.

This is like the larger group version of suicide by cop.

We've been playing this game for as long as human beings have existed.

Also, I think your description of "warrior narcissists" as a shallow description of the spirit of these people. You mentioned something about "identity" in later comments, and I cannot help but wonder what do you mean by that. I don't think Putin's main motive is his self-image, nor do I think Israel's leadership is murdering Palestine's populace to appear heroic.

It would also help to not assume the motives of people criticizing your ideas by presuming them to be "warrior narcissists" themselves. Elevate the discussion, not downgrade it.

I'll always appreciate the spirit of pacifism and collaboration, but your comments seem quixotic, and not in a good way.

>How do you make sure a police state doesn't happen?

There is no way to be sure, all one person can do most of the time is make a personal effort and hope it is not overwhelmed by storm-trooper ambitions and communist-dictator tactics.

When I look at Flock, it is so sad. It's been 30 full years since I got my early webcams when they were made by Intel and were still expensive business machines intended for teleconferencing over dial-up. Without really needing the internet of course.

It didn't take long before I was using one for observing my fledgling company's parking lot 24/7, and on more than half my CRT monitor you could see every car that drove by on my street, which was almost constant during the daytime. This was 99% of the action compared to visitors who pulled in.

It didn't take that long before I could remotely call in to the cam plugged into the front office PC through dial-up networking in Windows 95, and when I got a smartphone in 2001 I no longer needed a remote laptop most of the time as long as I was OK with the small screen of the flip-phone form factor. Rather than leaving the spare land-line available for calling directly in, alternatively it was also possible to log into an ISP over dial-up from my company, then keep the line tied up so I (or anyone really) could have access over the internet.

When broadband internet came around it made a really big difference since the stream was not as compressed, and motion not nearly as blurry and jerky. It was nice having the choice between a private remote connection to my front office PC over direct dial-up whenever I wanted, as well as enjoying the faster speed of the public internet plenty of the time too.

Anyway it didn't take long to realize that if webcams ever really catch on, then our local law enforcement would be highly interested in what could be done if they could freely observe them like I was doing looking at my own stream. I didn't know anybody else that had a webcam at first, but for protection of my own building all I would have to do is give the law my IP address and they could pick up the stream no differently than I was. They already knew my location and I had an excellent relationship with all the first responders. Naturally nothing was encrypted back then so that wasn't even a consideration, there was really nothing confidential on my stream to begin with.

I really thought about it long and hard and it took quite a while trying to examine all the possibilities. There were a few obvious downsides regarding privacy which needed much further consideration, so I could not in good conscience pull the trigger until that had been justified very deeply.

I didn't expect to hesitate that long but it really did take more than a year to conclude without a doubt that the negatives outweighed the positives, but that was only in the short run. In the long run the virtually unlimited downsides could only accumulate in excess of the possible upsides, and it was a big unknown how scattered cams could be used to compromise general privacy. Eventually had to realize such a cam network would be more easily used in a predatory way rather than for protection from predators, regardless of who was watching or recording. At significant scale it seemed like it could very well become exponentially dystopian.

No big deal, if you're not capable of thinking of something overwhelmingly positive to base your business on, I understand.

At least I didn't pioneer it, and I assume a lot of other early webcam owners gradually engaged in some of the same thought processes or it would have gotten a lot worse a lot sooner. I sure did talk to a lot of them, as webcams got more popular over time. Most of them were on laptops though and very seldom were aimed at a public space.

There are so many worthwhile things to do which don't amount to spying on Americans.

Cryptocurrency is clearly a counterexample to your main point. The fact that some people use cryptocurrency tech to implement centrally managed private currencies is largely irrelevant. To the extent that cryptocurrencies are used to implement private currencies, it largely just hampers them technolgicially if it has any effect at all. These projects just like to use the term cryptocurrency to imply some level of legitimate decentralization or security that doesn't really exist.

It's like saying that because you can use a screwdriver as a weapon, it's inherently a destructive technology (or some mixture of destructive and constructive). On closer inspection it's clear that the screwdriver doesn't sit on the pareto front for weapons, but it does sit on the pareto front for manufacturing tools. So a screwdriver is clearly a technology whose existence favors construction over destruction. Similarly I would argue that technology like bittorrent or bitcoin favor decentralization over centralization.

As another example, surveilance technology favors centralization. None of what we are seeing now with flock would be possible without cheap mass produced digital cameras. The balance of technology favors cheap cameras (and counter-surveilance is often impossible or expensive) and it favors centralization because you need a lot of data to create inferences based on this spurrious data.

If we could have predicted these effects, perhaps we could have delayed the development of cheap cameras, but it just goes to show how complicated this game is. We could just as easily have said that more cameras would lead to unprecedented public transparency (e.g. bodycams on cops, dash cams). Unintended consequences.

And, to be clear, I’m not saying “politics” as in “did you hear what Trump said?” I’m saying politics as in “what is your city council doing, how are your neighbors doing, and what are the consequences of your work and economic choices and who’s paying them.” Most of the news is a circus; that stuff is not.

I like some platforms do give us choice over our data but rarely do they not have our data be a component of the product. OpenAI, and anthropic for example use our data for "analytic purposes" which is broad enough that we compromise our agency over our data.

So what do you do when the majority of the systems you use on a daily basis to function in a normal life, require you (or atleast the majority of the populace) to compromise on morals? Do you know its expensive rise-wise, cost-wise, socially etc to check in with you morals in that kind of environment. I'm just curious your thoughts on this or if I'm misreading it. edit: And I'm not all doom gloom, I have hope and desire and trust in a future where morals aren't compromised in this way - I just see it as coming with a higher up-front cost and being aware that the most common environments around you systematically actively oppose you.

That is definitionally not avoiding politics.

I think you misunderstand what politics is, at a fundamental level.

Watch how police states behave. What tools do they use? Typically, it's roots of trust. They take down sites by tampering with their domain name. They MITM web traffic by compelling certificate authorities to do unstrustworthy things. They spy on cell phones by mimicking external authorities that the phones are wired to trust explicitly and without input from the user. They insert devices into ISP infrastructure which users tend to assume is neutral.

So if we want to prevent this: Don't tolerate roots of trust that the user cannot configure. Use a threat model that includes nation states. Don't design with the assumption that trusted third parties will remain trustworthy. Think about how to protect your users privacy. Prefer peer-to-peer where possible, because your server may at one point become compromised and harm the users. Think about how they can protect themselves if that happens. Give them control over whether to install updates. Publish your API so users can make unauthorized clients if they don't trust yours. Prefer repeatable builds, and check hashes to spot malware. Review contributions and be wary of binary blobs that may have hidden use cases.

Mostly this is just sound engineering. It means doing your job well, which is not always the same as doing the job the shareholders asked for. They invested so they could have leverage, so ask yourself ahead of time if those are the same kinds of levers that police states want to pull. Shoot them down in the design phase if possible, sabotage them after the fact if necessary.

All of the above. Get involved with political organisations, NGOs, volunteering groups, go to protests and network with people there. So that when the government starts doing something that approaches a police state, you, your group, and many other groups of people will be out there ready to make their will known. Block roads, burn tires, occupy squares, remove cameras, etc. Is is easy? Not at all. Can you do it alone? No. Is it worth doing to avoid living in a police state? Yes.

Take a look at Russia if you want an example of what widespread political apathy leads to.

> Of course you can avoid politics. Just be a good person. Vote for who you think is the best candidate at the time. And move on with your life.

This has got to be one of the most naive takes I have ever seen on this subject.

Has it never occurred to you that often times being a good person means engaging in “politics”?

Correct, and the lessons in the CIA's very own Simple Sabotage Field Manual are still as helpful as when they were written.

Yes, but it’s still the case that you didn’t do it. You cannot directly control the actions of others, just your own. Do that, at least.

Getting other people to also not do it is the rest of the political act. It’ll never be the case that nobody’s willing to perform an act, but if all the people who are doing so under duress stop, at the very least it helps one identify the proper size and shape of one’s political coalition and the power therein.

And, yes, people have bills. That’s what we mean by politics. We’re 50 years behind the curve on building the capacity for people to act in their own interest or on their own beliefs; that’s no reason not to start now.

It ideally makes people better at identifying when something bad is happening and gives them tools to handle it. If they're amoral in the first place though a course isn't going to change that.

All the great people in history who would be regarded as ethical never took an ethics course.

Its hard to know whether an ethics course makes people behave ethically, but its clearly not a necessary requirement to ethical behaviour

What program? Or if you'd rather stay anonymous, can you share the curriculum somehow? I'm very curious about what a CS program of study looks like with that many ethics courses.

In the US, many undergrad programs award a minor with 15-18 hours of study in the subject (or 5-6 standard courses). Four ethics courses would basically get you to a philosophy minor.

"My ethics teacher has gotten his sons girlfriend pregnant. I think about this often"

Reply: "To be fair, you have to be really good a ethics to get away with that"

(And, to be fair, it's a discussion board on the Internet, so maybe my expectations are just out of whack.)

I also think there's a long, long way between here and there, especially in the US. Requiring ethics in CS programs seems more immediately attainable to me, but I agree that it isn't a standalone fix.

What about an ad system that can predict beliefs and home addresses? Ooops.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, every telecoms provider, every modern car maker..

A lack of technology doesn’t restrict a police state, see East Germany in the ‘60s-‘80s. It does, however, create more opportunity for crimes. In Seattle there was a shooting at the bite of Seattle festival. They don’t have firm ideas about the identities of all the suspects. There would be a greater chance that they would know who they are looking for if there were more securities cameras deployed at large public festivals.

To prevent a police state you need public participation in governance and a population that lives in the real world and not fantasy lands created by a intentional misinterpretation of events.

I call this https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Story-Logic_Bias

But that seems normal and historical. Stories are how we encode memorable concepts for transmission to each other and probably why the Bible is full of parables and so on.

Someone pointed out to me that said Harry Potter fanfiction author has written about this specific bias as well https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rHBdcHGLJ7KvLJQPk/the-logica...

How do you reconcile the values of those proposing moratorium up to and including bombing data centers with those who are building them as being the same?

Flaws exist but we can constraint-engineer to minimize adversarial optimization of parameters. Improvements allow us to asymptotically approach our goal optimum. Human discretion, on the other hand, is fluid and dodges all attempts at enforcement.

We require many human agents solely because transforming unstructured vision space into structured judgment was impossible in the past. Currently, in a sufficiently constrained environment (roadways) we are able to solve sufficiently constrained problems (speeding, running a red light).

One hopes that we are able to solve this problem in more spaces as time goes by.

the solution is not to have the power exist at all, anywhere.

* https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/

* https://i.ibb.co/WWWYznHX/flock-future.png

* https://www.cfr.org/education/learn/reading/what-fascism

We also never seem to accept this answer for other forms of tech. Should we ban encryption because it makes it easier for terrorists to hide? Should your phone run ever photo you take through a CSAM database to catch preditors? Should we ban 3d printers because someone might print gun parts? For some reason we understand that people motivated enough to commit crimes will find a way to do it. This is much truer when it comes to the actions of the state than it is for individuals. I'm never going to learn to smith parts for a gun, but I could figure out 3d printing pretty easily. If the state wants me dead or in jail, I don't think the Flock cameras are that meaningful.

There is obviously a spectrum here, but none of these companies are inherintly evil, the people working at these companies aren't either.

The evil ones are committing the crimes.

If you're a nerd developing open source (not an insult; I'm in that category), our job is to develop effective technology.

If you want to do politics, go into law and/or politics (or into business, so you can fund/control politics).

>"But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia. " -- Theo De Raadt

Do you seriously think that governments need Flock cameras when they have Apple, Microsoft and Google?