Double Secret Surveillance
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now take a step back, the problem with mass surveillance is that it gives disproportionate power to those who have access to it over those who don't.
So instead of banning surveillance, which would be futile, it'll be much more practical to call for transparency, so the power generated by surveillance data is not concentrated to the select few.
The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Create a level playing field, and watch innovation take off as people try to gather their lives back together.
"When we allow for organizations such as the NSA to monopolize these tools for their own ends, we take the power away from ourselves to shape our own identities and for what purposes such information is used. We must realize that if we have already let things get to this point, that there will be no going back. That is why it is important for us to shift the focus on how data is collected on us as a whole, in favor for public uses."[0]
[0]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-...
Terminals with access to the DB and analysis tools in every city hall. Accounts and access for all citizens of good standing (make a new security clearance level for this to codify the notion - revoked for stalking, felonies, publishing DB information outside the terminals etc). Access is logged and also in the DB. A set of forums reachable through the terminals that allow discussion of findings and policies (some with real names attached some with pseudonyms).
The implication being, that you could read someone's email, but it is a matter of record that you did. Or perhaps the new citizens' security clearance would be stratified so that one needs to earn one's way up the scale of accessing info about other people, perhaps quorum's to grant higher clearance levels or temporary opening of some records.
Yeah, rather unrealistic techno-utopian in thinking, I admit. But this is an entry-level idea of equal access taken straight-forwardly. Born a bit from me trying to keep myself wondering, how would this work in Banks' Culture?
The ability to pretext and get more information about people would go from a somewhat guarded skill to something any child could do, and problems like domestic abuse victims being tracked down via those types of things now becomes a trick anyone can pull.
We need to put the genie back in the bottle, now.
Except that's not true. Before it was the NSA it was criminals and Chinese government-backed hackers stealing our documents. Suppose we implemented a transparent society in some utopia. What about the non-utopian foreigners and criminals?
Another way forward is secure communications and storage. That would place natural limits on surveillance. If you are suspected of a very serious crime, the FBI would have to plant a bug to intercept your communications.
Public access to the dragnet data would make it easier to evade the dragnet.
I do not agree with giving everyone access to surveillance tools for use, but I think improved transparency into those programs is something that can be done and should be done.
I agree that more transparency is a good idea. In fact, I think more transparency and less funding is a good idea for the intelligence agencies in general. We're living in a comparative time of peace, which means the incentives for these agencies (and the closely related private contractors) are to inflate their budgets and create work for themselves. Currently this seems to be driving an obsessive mission to monitor everything and everyone. This is bad enough of itself, but it could easily turn into creating enemies where none exist.
There is also no reason why commercial organizations should not be constrained in what information they are allowed to collect.
There is no reason, technological or otherwise, why governments should not be restricted in what information they can collect on citizens without just cause.
And of course my stance is quite biased, because I am an citizen of one of the very few countries that has not signed NPT and agrees with the stand my government has made.
This route would sound the death knell for privacy far more quickly and surely than current surveillance programs ever could.
I don't want to be spied on, no matter how "open" the process is. My problem isn't the openness, its the spying in the first place. I don't care if its a select few, or the whole worlds population, I don't want to be spied on. I have done nothing wrong. I am not a suspect. I don't expect to be treated like one as some sort of evil default, thank you very much.
Get your suspect first, then do the spying. Not violate the population's privacy to find a suspect. Do that and people who say the West has become some sort of Nazi/Communist terror state will begin to sound less mental.
Sorry, but bending over and taking it rectally is no solution what so ever. It is a weak, lazy, cowardly, surrender.
The internet permits much more anonymity and privacy than people had previously: we no longer need to mail physical letters, post physical signs, or tell people things in person in order to communicate some piece of information. Humans have more privacy, not less, because they don't need to physically go to adult cinemas, video stores, or peep shows; and the walls of a house are much thicker than those of a shack, a straw hut, or a teepee.
What has changed over the last few hundred years has not been a decrease in our abilities to be anonymous or private, since in the past it was harder to be discreet. The change has rather been that instead of a town or a village knowing through the grapevine what's going on, it is a central authority who is collecting all the information, with all the attendant power that having such information affords.
The problem is thus not a lack of privacy and anonymity -- we have more of it than we ever did. What we suffer from is massive disparities in who knows what about whom (as compared with most of human history). This is the problem which is rectified by greater transparency.
> We know that people behave better when
> they're accountable for what they do and say
For some definition of "better" that's probably true. We also know that feeling like they have no privacy causes people to stop taking risks - creative, financial, personal, etc.
A world with massive surveillance is a world of joyless automatons and basically zero social progress.
A recent post suggested that without secret communication, much social progress wouldn't have come about.
Consider this though: a surveillance world where people break the law en masse - London Street Riots, 4/20 (see tumblr, reddit) in the USA.
Society, culture, and cooperation are almost entirely responsible for the wealth we've accumulated and were born into. (Potential) social scrutiny and the internalization of social norms are required for ensuring that people behave in ways that don't hurt others. When this scrutiny comes from Big Brother then, yes, we have horrible tyranny. When it emerges, messily, from the intersecting interests and values of the crowd, then the outcome tends to be pretty good.
What you're saying here is that people conform to social norms better when they can be "held accountable" for not doing so. Now imagine some of the unhealthy social norms of the past and how people were "held accountable" for violating them.
Anonymity has a cost, but it is a cost that must be paid or we do not have a free society in any sense of the word.
Well, Heil yourself, 'cos Im not interested. I want to be part of a human race, not a damned Borg Collective.
They can even anonymize the information and crowdsource the analysis like Kaggle.
The scale & invisibleness of PRISM is part of what makes it so repugnant to us. If the NSA had 1000 guys in "NSA" t-shirts walking the streets in every major city, it would be irritating but almost laughable.
Transparency is necessary but not sufficient.
Being able to see the government taking bad risks doesn't cut it if we can't actually stop them. And the problem is that it's not just the government and it's not just our government. You can't just come up with some restrictions on the FBI or the NSA (good luck with that anyway, and good luck enforcing it) while you ignore what China or large corporations might be doing.
Part of the answer to surveillance technology has to be anti-surveillance technology.
And I think one of the big things we need to push for is: We need more bandwidth. We need a national push for gigabit fiber to the home.
Copious transmission capacity attacks vulnerability to surveillance in two ways:
The first is that it reduces the practicality of storing all the data, by increasing the volume of data by an order of magnitude or more. We can price the spies out of the market.
The second is that it facilitates anti-surveillance technology. Tor is slow because it's bandwidth starved. Most people have piss-poor uplinks which are a factor of ten or more slower than their downlinks, which becomes the bottleneck if those users were to operate a relay. We need to solve the bandwidth shortage to make widespread use of that sort of technology practical.
[1] Speaking of small cameras: The Transparent Society. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html
Just because technical advancement cannot be stopped, that doesn't mean that all technical capabilities should be available freely to everyone, without legal limit. Many things are technically possible but still illegal, for good reason.
Also, there are also other technologies that can affect whether or not mass surveillance is practical. Cryptographic tools like Tor and Bitmessage, represent another technological advance that can only be delayed.
Dragent surveillance is only good for guilt by association. It's un-American, in that a defendant can't face accusers (it's SEKRIT!), and in that there's no previous suspicion.
Fruit of an evil tree, in deed.
During the trial of Sir Raleigh, the prosecution moved affidavits for its witnesses into evidence, without giving the accused the right to cross-examine those that had made the affidavits.
Raleigh, conducting his own defense, objected on the grounds of hearsay. He was overruled, since the prosecution anticipating this attack brought the prosecution under Norman civil law, which allows for hearsay.
It was a large scandal at the time, an emblem of the state exerting arbitrary power. It marked legal thinking for generations, eventually leading to the American Sixth Amendment.
If "we the people" don't speak out against this, both on a grassroots and lobbying level, there is no motivation for our governments to abstain. States love to spy on one another; it gives justification for their budgets. Only individual citizens, businesses, and other free thinking organizations have anything to lose.
Given that they're already forbidden ... now what?
The technology exists, it can be done.
Edit: the whole Chicken Little "the genie is out" scaremongering is defeatist garbage. No people more than HN readers know that the effort required to collect and parse all the information flowing through the internet is not trivial. It is easy to stop since only well-funded outfits can do it.
And you think depriving the government - particularly the department of defense - of tax dollars is "easy"?
The task you've described should be fulfilled by the judicial system.
But ultimately we're still relying on getting the government to protect us from the government... and still wondering why it never works.
Copyright is a more-apt comparison than it may appear: the trope of citizen information and data is that hey, once you give it to a third party, the government can get access to it on the slightest of pretexts (Smith v. Maryland).
Contrast this with copyright: every single use and re-use must be licensed. Aside from the first-sale doctrine (which has been getting whittled in the digital age), a movie which licenses your favorite Skrillex cut cannot turn around and allow other people to use it willy-nilly, the way Comcast and Google can do with your emails.
So it's not just that the government promised not to use this information as part of the people's case without recourse and then did anyway, it's that the government is selectively using this information in ways that are actively detrimental to ongoing criminal cases being fought by defense attorneys.
You can't just pick and choose, whether you're the one prosecuting or you're the one providing information for the defense. Once we allow the government to pick and choose which information gets released in which trials, the entire judicial system becomes more of a farce than it already is.
We have seriously damaged the structure of the country.
This exactly what I feared, and I thought would happen. They're using the information gathered from the mass spying as "evidence" for probable cause to get individual warrants. This is the worst case scenario becoming real. They're doing fishing expeditions with the mass spying apparatus and then "legally" obtain the warrants to prosecute people.
For some reason, NY Times doesn't paywall requests coming in from Google.
Wait - did I just violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision?