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Comment by analyst74 | Hacker News Reader

Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped.

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.

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Er, no.

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.

We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

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

The majority sometimes holds the minority 'accountable' for things that are clear violations of human rights. This kind of transparency would enable persecution on a massive scale.

Surreptitious, massive Internet surveillance does nothing to address your first paragraph.

We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

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.

Only automatons if people ACCEPT being watched and self-censor.

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.

I think this is true for most definitions of "better". Our definitions of good, in the first place, are learned, reinforced, and enforced, from observing social norms. In their absence (as we get on Freenet, Tor, 4chan, etc.) we see people behaving much more anti-socially much more often.

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.

>We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not.

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.

We also know people behave better if guarded by people with guns and dogs.... "Better"? What you really mean is they conform. They do as told. And lose individuality and creativity.

Well, Heil yourself, 'cos Im not interested. I want to be part of a human race, not a damned Borg Collective.

I would say sarcastically that if NSA is spying without much efforts, just pushing a button and analyzing the data with well known algorithms then US can reduce their deficit by a big amount firing all those "analysts".

They can even anonymize the information and crowdsource the analysis like Kaggle.

Do you wait for someone to perform a public illegal act before they become a "suspect"? Rely on tips from informants?

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.

>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.

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.

Yes. Don't give up, math is on our side. AFAICT, this is still true if quantum computing takes off. If surveillance is a technological problem, let's solve it. I think it's just a matter of time. People already want more bandwidth for more mundane reasons, and there's enough people who want user-friendly crypto that someone is going to get it right eventually.

The math is on our side in the case of encryption. Not all surveillance is meaningfully countered by encryption.

Lock picking and door smashing have undoubtably advanced since the fourth amendment was adopted. Your argument essentially suggests that technology renders the fourth meaningless to the extent that we should constant to always be searched as long as we know about it. Doesn't seem like a good argument.

That's strikes me as impractical. Just because the police can enter my house for certain reasons doesn't mean everyone should have that right. Similarly, there are legitimate reasons for the government to conduct surveillance. That does not mean everyone should have the same access to that information.

This route would sound the death knell for privacy far more quickly and surely than current surveillance programs ever could.

Even if you disagree with him (and to some extent I do), Brin was quite prescient on this topic. _The Transparent Society_ [1] anticipated most of this debate, 15 years ago, and it is well worth [re-]reading.

[1] http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

You read my mind. As soon as I read this article I thought of David Brin. For a shorter introduction to his work, check out the five-page essay [1] he wrote a few years before publishing his full book.

[1] Speaking of small cameras: The Transparent Society. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html

I would argue that although the advance of technology makes mass scale surveillance easier, it also makes it harder to hide. Secrets are harder to keep now, and that cuts in both directions. I think banning mass surveillance wouldn't necessarily be futile. With vigilance and enough political will, such a ban could be enforced and maintained.

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.

I agree. I think there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and pretending that we can somehow control this is a fool's game that only fools would believe.

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.

It's interesting that more people are starting to speak up about it. Funny enough, I shared my thoughts on this a month ago:

"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-...

What does it mean that everyone has the same level of access? Would you just publish a big public database of all of the data collected via PRISM so everyone can just read everyone elses email?

How about this as a starting point...

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 only way this would work is when all the powerful people realize this is a terrible idea for their lives to be shared and put a stop to it. Knowing this much about people's lives is literally a danger to many of them, especially in the hands of everyone.

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.

"The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access."

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.

Advocates of a totally transparent society seem to be forgetting that there are significant reasons for privacy other than embarrassing personal details -- espionage, extortion, kidnapping, burglary, identity theft, blackmail, and more all become vastly simpler to execute and harder to prosecute when everyone knows everything about everyone, except the aforementioned criminals who know how not to leave a trail.

A society with a massive surveillance dragnet that everyone has access to is not necessarily totally transparent.

Public access to the dragnet data would make it easier to evade the dragnet.

Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped.

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.

We have the technological capability of blowing up cities with nuclear weapons as well. We have decided to create laws and follow moral judgement in order not to do it. We can do the same thing with surveilance.

fwiw, it has worked reasonably well for nuclear weapons, both in the sense that only nation-states have access (hopefully) and that only a select few nations have access.

I agree, but it's also essentially impossible to use nuclear weapons in a way which isn't transparent, which is not the case with PRISM.

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.

Yes, a nuclear blast is a lot more visible than an ongoing mass surveillance program. However, I would say that it is extremely hard to keep something like PRISM secret forever. Even if there is only a tiny probability of the information leaking each year, over the years the chance of keeping it secret decreases geometrically. All it takes is one upload to wikileaks.

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.

Restricting technology has worked in many areas in addition to nuclear technology, e.g. eugenics, abortion (in some places), access to firearms (in some places), wiretapping (previously), degraded GPS, etc.

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.

I would argue that it has not worked reasonably well. The part that worked well, is that only nation states have access to the technology. The part that hasn't worked well is that only a few nations, most of them being allies to each other, have access to them. And the countries have gone to great lengths to keep their own enormous stockpile of weapons while aggressively forcing other nations to not work on militarized nuclear technology (and at times civil tech) on the argument that once they have it, they will be able to bully their neighbours.

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.

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