How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
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I found the dialup number to the MIT media lab, and tried logging in as 'RMS' and viola, no password, and I had my first shell account on an internet-connected Unix machine, although I was only a teenager, and didn't attend MIT.
RMS's act of charity benefited me greatly, I was relatively poor growing up in inner city Baltimore, and his account was a life line to a new world of the internet and away from the crackhouse infested streets.
I find it interesting that he has changed his standpoint from one of radical transparency to techno-privacy.
Remember, RMS is the guy who hacked LCS's computer lab password file, decrypted all the passwords, and emailed everyone suggesting they change their password to empty string. Now, I get that what he really wanted was to allow anyone to have access to LCS resources, and that would have been better served by just allowing anyone to create an account. But some early GNU accounts nevertheless did not have passwords, and I could read their email, shell histories, etc.
I think there is an interesting question is to the extremes of privacy and transparency in a democracy. If for example, it was not possible to discriminate against people, and if the government could not abuse any information gained on someone, then it might be the case that society would better off if there was very little privacy, because private distributed abuse amongst non-state actors would then be the biggest danger. If on the other hand, the state is far more abusive, then the fraud and violence perpetrated by small actors uncaught by surveillance is dwarfed by the damage done by the state having this information.
The question is, is it black and white, or is there some level of justifiable dragnet surveillance? Can democracy also tolerate Cryptoanarchy?
In your case, you were the actor dropping in on RMS so the obligation was on you to be transparent about it. I'm guessing you weren't, since it wasn't very polite to peek at their email ;)
And therein lies the dilemma. Those with power will observe yet must be transparent about said observation. However they aren't transparent for fear of tipping their hand to what is essentially the proverbial "boogey man" that is terror.
From what I could tell, the GNU accounts were held nothing more than mailing lists, there was never any private correspondence that I could see.
I'm pretty sure RMS was aware his email and everything he did on the account could be seen by everyone. In fact, his mbox file wasn't even protected, you could grep the /var/spool/mail directory.
I remember a lot of universities allowed you to telnet in and log in as 'guest' with no password back then. IIRC, I could telnet into Berkeley XCF and UIUC.
Yes, there's communications we'll make which are more privileged, but we understand that fundamentally the system is open to observation and snooping. If we've got something to say we don't want others to know, we say it in person, using crypto, or through code (formal or informal) which will be difficult for others to understand, if at all.
And there's still good old mail. First class will often reach someone faster than they'll dig through their mail spool these days (and a letter indicates an investment in communication), even next-day mail is pretty cheap (much less expensive than FedEx).
Today hacking into anyone's /etc/passwd and decrypt all the password is a crime and your best friend will be more careful when handling secrets with you if you do that to him for "change your 123 to something more complicated".
An individual has right to privacy and to waive said privacy when it considers appropriate. The case with Stallman you mention was waiving some of his rights to give his colleagues easier access.
Powerful organization should be forced to be transparent to maximum extent that is reasonable - you shouldn't be forced to give out your trade/state secrets, but classifying everything as such and hiding is a worse transgression. They don't have the right to waive their transparency when it suits them.
Stallman, who liked to be called by his initials, RMS, in tribute to the way he logged on to the computer, used the Hacker Ethic as a guiding principle for his best-known work, an editing program called EMACS which allowed users to limitlessly customize it—its wide-open architecture encouraged people to add to it, improve it endlessly. He distributed the program free to anyone who agreed to his one condition: “that they give back all extensions they made, so as to help EMACS improve. I called this arrangement ‘the EMACS commune,’” RMS wrote. “As I shared, it was their duty to share; to work with each other rather than against.”
EMACS became almost a standard text editor in university computer science departments. It was a shining example of what hacking could produce.
But as the seventies progressed, Richard Stallman began to see changes in his beloved preserve. The first incursion was when passwords were assigned to Officially Sanctioned Users, and unauthorized users were kept off the system. As a true hacker, RMS despised passwords and was proud of the fact that the computers he was paid to maintain did not use them. But the MIT computer science department (run by different people than the AI lab) decided to install security on its machine.
Stallman campaigned to eliminate the practice. He encouraged people to use the “Empty String” password—a carriage return instead of a word. So when the machine asked for your password, you would hit the RETURN key and be logged on. Stallman also broke the computer’s encryption code and was able to get to the protected file which held people’s passwords. He started sending people messages which would appear on screen when they logged onto the system:
I see you chose the password [such and such]. I suggest that you switch to the password “carriage return.” It’s much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.
“Eventually I got to a point where a fifth of all the users on the machine had the Empty String password,” RMS later boasted.
Then the computer science laboratory installed a more sophisticated password system on its other computer. This one was not so easy for Stallman to crack. But Stallman was able to study the encryption program, and, as he later said, “I discovered that changing one word in that program would cause it to print out your password on the system console as part of the message that you were logging in.” Since the “system console” was visible to anyone walking by, and its messages could easily be accessed by any terminal, or even printed out in hard copy, Stallman’s change allowed any password to be routinely disseminated by anyone who cared to know it. He thought the result “amusing.”
Still, the password juggernaut rolled on. The outside world, with its affection for security and bureaucracy, was closing in. The security mania even infected the holy AI computer. The Department of Defense was threatening to take the AI machine off the ARPAnet network—to separate the MIT people from the highly active electronic community of hackers, users, and plain old computer scientists around the country—all because the AI lab steadfastly refused to limit access to its computers. DOD bureaucrats were apoplectic: anyone could walk in off the street and use the AI machine, and connect to other locations in the Defense Department network! Stallman and others felt that was the way it should be. But he came to understand that the number of people who stood with him was dwindling. More and more of the hard-core hackers were leaving MIT, and many of the hackers who had formed the culture and given it a backbone by their behavior were long gone.
The current situation is neither of those. It's a large expensive system of state oppression .. that acts on remarkably few people(+). There is a gulag archipelago, Guantanamo, but it contains only 46 prisoners now. Outside it, hundreds of millions of people live pretty free lives in the western world. So there's little public appetite for doing anything about it. If you're not reading about it in the news you can ignore it entirely.
Perhaps the main output of the surveillance program is the targeting information for drone strikes. This results in thousands dead .. but they are a long way away, in a part of the world that has its own problems with violence.
Your actual chances of being victimised by the surveillance state for engaging in nonviolent leftwing politics are very small. But perhaps its worth noting that radical leftwing groups seem more likely to be investigated by law enforcement than radical rightwing groups that advocate all kinds of crazy things, including actual violence against the government (second amendment supporters).
(+) (note that I'm talking about just surveillance here, as distinct from the War on Drugs, the horrifyingly high American prison population, racism in the police, or heavy-handed public order policing)
(note 2: I'm from the UK, which has its own problems with official support for surveillance, occasional brutal policing, and particularly the state's role in violence in Northern Ireland has not been properly dealt with nor atoned for).
The problem is quite a bit worse, erring towards police state, when you take into account that.
The number of folks I know that are poor and being raked over the coals by the IRS is far less than the number of white-collar folks; and the worst crooks (the ones responsible, for example, for the housing bubble) largely go unmolested.
Funny how even though these advances let us catch the worst of the worst, our .gov focuses on the smallest and weakest (the easiest ones to build a career on!).
Ok, so that part is working like you hoped
the worst crooks (the ones responsible, for example, for the housing bubble) largely go unmolested
I'm curious, did these worst crooks break laws? Honest question. I want them prosecuted too, but I've never been clear whether the problem is apathy on the part of the enforcers or the absence of laws under which they can be pinned. (i.e., maybe there were critical loopholes)
As an added bonus, most (all?) of those inmates are foreign nationals, who apparently don't count as people anymore in American politics.
The problem is our direction ... We are heading towards a police state. Not there yet, but that's where we will end up if you don't stop ever increasing mass surveillance and more rights/power for the police and the police like authorities we recently created.
IMHO privacy is very important for a functional society and democracy - once you are aware that someone is listening you don't express yourself as freely any more, most people will begin to self censor .... and freedom of speech is lost to a certain degree.
A search warrant needs reasonable suspicion and a second opinion by a judge. I think it's fair that we protect our privacy by the same means.
After all, last time I checked the risk of getting killed by a terrorist was about the same as the chance of being killed by a meteor.
This stood out for me in the article. And I think this applies to all forms of data.
There is only one real limit of what we can do - laws of physics. Anything not explicitly prohibited by them can be done. There is also one practical limit - economics, i.e. whether or not we have resources to do something. And that's it. Laws, customs, etc. are arbitrary limits we voluntarily impose on ourselves, and they can and will be broken whenever it's convenient.
So basically here's a rule of thumb: whatever can be done will be done. It also suggests the possible course of action. We can't fight laws of physics, so if we want something not to happen, we need to influence the softer, economic side. Make things we don't like prohibitively expensive. That's why I think any solution to surveillance problem will need to be technical in a big part.
I would never make fun of RMS, however his detractors I find very much a fair game.
As they say: "Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not After You "
edit
This is a major point he always makes about security. I am not buying his total obsession with GNU because that can't be prevented.
> Without RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near
> where it is now.
Its saying "we" treated him like a nut job foil hat man, but were wrong.
Its basically an apology.
It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other people (such as Facebook).
They are inexorably linked together, but we must speak precisely.
If the gov't convinced Facebook to sell its archive of data to the NSA for $1, would it be okay? Because the law as it exists says, yes, FB is free to sell its corporate intellectual property to anyone including the NSA. Ditto Mastercard. Ditto AT&T. etc. etc.
We have no guarantee of privacy simply because nowhere is it written that we any legal right to privacy. Maybe the problem is not solvable. But trying to solve this as simply a gov't that needs a better kind of leash is surely a doomed effort.
I understand the concern. As someone who has advocated for stronger electronic privacy regulation, no one likes someone having the ability to look through their stuff. However, the answer is more likely a balance than a denunciation of all surveillance in any form. Surveillance with restriction is fine and probably a good thing. It helps prevent crime and can help catch criminals once crimes happen. Just as it's easy to argue that a government with information will misuse it, bad people with a closed communication network will use it to commit crime. Sure not everyone is going to plan a terrorist strike, or organize a gang online but some will. Is it worth enabling that kind of behavior?
Also what should and should not be private also has to do with where/when the information is collected. If the government were hacking into all of our computers and keeping back ups of our hard drives that's very different from collecting things that are sent on the internet. Legally there is currently a big debate about how to treat something that is taken from a stored medium - like a hard drive - vs one that is captured in transmission - like an email being sent. As it currently stands the government would have a hard time justifying accessing your computer remotely without a warrant but an easy time reading emails once they left your computer. Why? Because the sent email is akin to yelling something in a public place. Once it leaves your computer, it's not private while its being transmitted. If this sounds like a stupid distinction, that's because it is.
From the article:
For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary.
Like, I just loaded the page. Is it down for other people, or does this trigger just for me?
Edit: Oh nevermind, this website thinks x-forwarded-for is my real IP-address. I set it to '"\ which occasionally triggers database errors on php or asp.net websites, highly amusing :P
Edit2: Also interesting is when hackernews crashes just after I re-enabled my header modifier and try to save the previous edit.
Isn't there something very wrong with this line of thinking? Are whistleblowers really the last bastions of democracy? Voters, protestors and guns be damned, when all is lost we can depend on the whistleblowers? Are you kidding me?
Democracy is not even well understood by half of us, citizen of world.
what WE can do is follow the 'do nice to others' to the extreme. Outward thinking instead of inward thinking. Then collectively, the world will be better.
That said, society can withstand 100% surveillance, total transparency. But that surveillance has to be done by the people and be publicly shared.
The only thing to hope for in that case is that the footage is available to everyone, and that the powerful are filmed as much as anyone else.
Maybe in the future, true power will be the ability to escape monitoring?
You are exactly right. This is what we should strive for, this is what the future will be like.
Too many people think that privacy is inherently good, but they fail to see how unsustainable and selfish it is. Knowledge is good, and trying to keep it for yourself slows down innovation.
The future will be transparent, and people of the future will laugh at how ridiculous we were for worshipping privacy.
Fighting for privacy is stupid. What we should really fight for is transparency. And transparency can only be achieved by leaking all the data, both from citizens and people on the top. WikiLeaks is a good start, but thinking that transparency only apply to the government and corporations is silly. The same thing should be done to all of us.
I never could understoud why people that support WikiLeaks are those who support privacy the most. What is even more surprising is that these people, that are inherently selfish, think they're some kinds of socialists and fool everybody else in thinking they're some kind of heros.
Humans are weird.
Very sadly, he is completely wrong.
This is the beginning:
"How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use."
Not true. Not even slightly true. Its so tragic.
In principle, I could not agree with him more, but that does not appear to be a reality the vast majority can be bothered with.
Why? The vast majority simply do not care. Worse still a huge chunk of society, on a daily basis, give up more personal information than any government can possibly hope to ask for. We in the UK groan when the census comes up, every 10 years. But the average facebook profile contains more personal information than any census has ever asked for. And many many people up date FB daily. Imagine a government asked us to document our lives daily? I could go on, but that's the general thrust.
So, how much surveillance can society withstand? Loads more.
Is it incompatible with human rights? Well, humans don't seem over bothered, in fact they offer up more information that the government could ever ask for. Hence the NSA/GCHQ slurping.
Because the government will only ever use the data in a small targeted way, it will never ever negatively effect the vast majority of people. So they will never be inconvenienced by it. Only "those" people will be effected, and "they" are guilty evil doers. So, there will never be an uprising or revolt, because most people are unaffected.
See, even people most out raged by this agree that its good if they can round up terrorists, pedophiles or who ever the current bogyman is. Well, while we accept that, we accept the method, and there for that "evil" must exist. When it exists, it can be easily and silently abused. The expectations are the gaps through which evil seeps. This is why we are or try to be absolute about torture, chemical or biological weapons, racism, and so on. We know if we allow it in any way, mission creep will happen.
Of course, the real hypocrisy of people is that when something bad happens, we blame government for not having enough control over circumstances. We immediately say, "why didn't they do this that or the other. They failed." What if all this slurping of data could have prevented 9/11?
But in the end, from what I have seen, society can easily with stand a hell of a lot more surveillance. We allow it, government moderates it's use such that most never see the down side, government loves control, and we expect government to have that control.
Truth is, really, people want more surveillance so that they can live nice risk free lives. Frankly, I'm not sure people really want real freedom at all. They want a freedom, or their freedom, one that suits their daily lives. But are only too happy to deny freedom to others as long as their freedoms are preserved.
If this slurping is really that evil and unacceptable, incompatibly with human rights, why haven't millions of people descended on Washington and London, rioting in the streets, bringing down our respective governments?
Or are all these out raged people trusting democracy and the ballot box will sort it out?
Or, is it that really they don't care?
> The author asks ho much surveillance can
> democraty withstand.
I have to admit, I find surveillance extremely creepy, but then I translate it into my head into an Iain Banks novel. The great orbital in Look to Windward, is essentially governed by the AI Mind at its heart, which lets them all go freely about their business, yet saves them from peril. I like that world, and if I knew the ones who save me would never abuse it, I'd be happy.
Given the fact it's probably impossible to stop surveillance, I think the real question is how we make sure it's used for good. As it stands, the people in charge appear to believe public knowledge and debate is a bad thing.
So my question is less: "how much surveillance can democracy withstand?" and more, "how little oversight can a democracy withstand?"
Soon they will access your car GPS to figure out if you were speeding or even if you possibly could have spent that time doing the work you claimed so that you can deduct your travel on the taxes. Where does it stop? And who watches the watchers? They are very resistant to any insight by anyone who isn't on a committee with insiders, i.e. politicians who have worked all their lives to get to the point where they can sit on these committees. Do you think they will say: "Stop! Enough!"?
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/us/other-agencies-clamor-f...
Societal and technological change are the result of the work of a small minority, which may very roughly correspond to the 20/80 Pareto principle. You can't expect everyone to be involved in complex conundrums. So it doesn't matter if the majority don't care about an issue. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do something about it.
Someone answered that already, thousands of years ago: "Only a few prefer liberty, the majority seek nothing more than fair masters."
The vast majority doesn't want freedom, or at least they don't truly want it, as they can not use/value/appreciate it. I would say that the ones who do are the ones that induce the demand for freedom in the rest of the population. It just is the the easiest way of achieving such things. In this light, although the wish for freedom is touted as a noble goal, it isn't that different than some other personal quest in which a minority reaps the benefits of something that a majority fought for. Maybe our freedom (i.e. all the things that define it) is currently just tending to be reshaped to a more natural form, fitting better our average human nature?
Because humans essentially stopped evolving after developing agriculture, and most are only really capable of thinking one year/harvest ahead.
Like so many other things, the long term consequences are just outside of their horizon, so they are not able to effectively assess the trades they are making. Like a chess program looking X moves ahead and not seeing the punchline X+1 moves ahead.
Second, if facebook makes a mistake you are probably served incorrect ads on a web page, if the government makes a mistake you can end up on the no fly list or in Guantanamo ...
But you are correct - most people don't value liberty or privacy.