Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?
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Fretting over whether or how it's coming is simply illogical, focusing efforts on making sure it's used properly is the only forward thinking, reality accepting solution.
Dismissing people who are opposed to the abuse of technology for purposes which are fundamentally anti-democratic as "illogical" is just a cheap piece of rhetoric. You should think more carefully about what you're supporting.
I mean, lots of people think technology leads to economic inequality by devaluing human labor, resulting in unemployment and pay stagnation, but you probably agree with me that it would be futile to pass a law for the express purpose of limiting industrial productivity per worker.
Even if lawmakers passed rules preventing the government from doing it, you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap. The value of the data is quickly outstripping the cost of obtaining it.
Better to focus on safety than on prevention.
Not if doing so was a felony. Sometimes, safety IS prevention (see toxic waste / dumping of).
Try again.
What about torrenting? How about we ban vehicles because they can be used as getaway cars for bank robberies?
Obviously the economic of inevitability of marijuana was stopped by the drug war.
>Better to focus on safety than on prevention.
You're talking about things which have a wide variety of perfectly legitimate uses which we (quite properly) allow in spite of the fact that they can, on occasion, be used to harm. This is obviously and substantially different.
Indeed, when you think about it, these very different things are nevertheless complementary. We allow potentially dangerous things to exist because we're (reasonably) well-assured that any truly harmful applications can be dealt with using the laws we reserve for handling grievous harms.
Regarding the "example" you brought up, the difference between robbery and pot is that pot is actually quite popular and the war against it is being waged with profound incompetence and for reasons that are increasingly suspect. Robbery, on the other hand, is - and remains - widely unwelcome in nearly any setting, even among thieves.
I'll do you the favor of assuming you're actually intelligent enough to grasp all this and that you're simply trolling. God help you if you're stupid enough for these distinctions to be truly baffling.
It's an appeal to emotion on your part, and judging by how you're now lashing out like a child, you still have quite a ways to go before you mature in this conversation.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/02/when-mexican-surveilla...
The surveillance technology gets cheaper over time, but so does the counter-surveillance technology. If they store everything then we encrypt everything, etc. But that balance doesn't exist in a vacuum. It very much matters whether we allow what the government is doing to be considered legitimate. If they're not allowed to do it and you find out that they did then you can have the evidence thrown out or file a lawsuit against the perpetrators; if they are allowed to do it and you employ or develop reasonable counter-surveillance technologies to prevent them from doing it then they may charge you with a crime just for thwarting their surveillance. That is a distinction that matters regardless of how cheap the technology gets.
In theory, but in practice most people can't be bothered. What I was thinking of above was not so much personal surveillance like the NSA tracking how often you called your mother, but more the mass impersonal stuff that yields an enormous amount of utility in the aggregate and that's totally public.
For example, consider people walking around with mesh networking devices. Even if you don't identify any of them personally, you could still extract a vast amount of intelligence from watching the pattern of anonymous dots swarming on a map. Or a sufficiently dense number of surveillance cameras plugged into a machine learning system would facilitate all kinds of surveillance, even if the cameras were private and the contents had to be subpoenaed.
As I've said numerous times, you're certainly not going to see any constraints on government until people bite the bullet and define what constraints should be on private entities for the gathering and storage of data.
Whether it's incredibly small drones, nanotech or your own cellphone, operated by either the private or public sector. Public sector information surveillance is just a small part, a minuscule part of what's possible.
We're not surrendering to some sort of technological determinism, but to government contractors, Congressmen, judges, the unitary Executive, and a short list of private companies and individuals.
The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. That we can't get back to that state is a failure of national character, not an advance in technology.
Weapons are not reducing in cost and size every year. It's possible in principle to know if someone has a weapon, and to exclude them from a given small area. Weapons have only a few specific uses (defense, hunting, target shooting or sparring, crime), and don't gain hundreds of new kinds of uses every week.
The soaking of our society in computing power and recording is proceeding rapidly, and I don't think it can be stopped in any given jurisdiction without severely impacting the ability of that jurisdiction's business to compete economically. The ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on what individuals can record implies a police state, even if the police are kindly for now.
I notice that people now calmly mention that they partially disagree with Brin, rather than dismissing his transparent society as completely beyond the pale.
That's kind of the point though. After the Cold War we gave the military every capability needed to oppress us 1000x over without too much fretting about police states, trusting that the government would not force us to live at the point of a gun. We didn't simply forbid the military from having missiles, which is the proposed equivalent here.
> The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to.
Sure they were, ever since Smith v. Maryland, and for all the years before Katz v. United States. Any prohibitions on what government could look at regarding business records or on the wire were imposed by Congress, not by the Constitution.
Don't we? I guess it varies depending on the neighborhood, but there are more guns in the U.S. than cell phones, and it's not just the government that's armed to the teeth, it's everyone from your local mugger to your local teenager (and I'm not just talking about school shooters, I'm talking about adults under 20 who legally hold as well as the range of kids illegally blasting themselves and others in the streets).
This is all to say, I agree with the parent; you can't close Pandora's box. Mass surveillance is quickly becoming too cheap not to be inevitable, not to mention that most people voluntarily crowdsource the surveillance behemoth by uploading their entire lives to facebook and passing everything else into google. One might argue that mass surveillance is already here, if it's a true dystopia remains to be seen.
I'll also note that a high number of guns per inhabitants is not always correlated with a large number of firearms crimes (see Finland or Switzerland). On the other hand, you have enough examples of lunatics killing a large number of people with modern firearms that I feel a lot safer in a place with tight gun laws than I would feel elsewhere.
It is not inevitable. Also all technologies are used by people meaning they are used for good and evil.
I say it is not inevitable for a couple reasons. First, in order to be super-accurate, you have to be able to make inferences based on existing data to a very high probability of correctness. Unfortunately, these inferences are based on hidden assumptions and can't be tested. Therefore you have no way of knowing how accurate the mass surveillance actually is. Worse, the more massive the surveillance becomes, the more of an inkblot you have to work with. As Heisenberg said, "Data does not imply theory."[1] And the more data you have the easier it is to delude yourself into thinking all the conclusions are perfectly accurate because of confirmation bias etc.
So you have solid epistemological reasons that the technology can never become super-accurate.
Additionally deployment isn't inevitable. What's really going on here is that companies are trying to sell products to the government, and Congress is allocating lots of money to buy them. Funding decisions are political and they are not inevitable.
So in my view, this technology creates more problems than it solves (on a good day even), and represents a way for wealthy individuals to get money transferred to them.
[1] Heisenberg, Werner. "Physics and Philosophy"
I couldn't disagree more strongly. If we have an issue I think it would be prudent to examine the entire issue especially the degree and kind of it's coming.
Your willing to make vast assumptions on something that affects the very fabric of our society and I find that quite disturbing.
The people who are using it for wrong will use it no matter what, the law has no meaning to them. Whether you outright ban it, or ban parts of it, individuals will ignore the bans and try to exploit it for wrong. This is also inevitable.
So, the important question to ask is what is the most effective way to establish and enforce a reasonable law that allows society to experience the benefits while acting against the detriments and those that would exploit them (for purposes of blackmail, industrial espionage, etc).
What else would you propose be done? Because almost all of what I've heard so far has been complaining, which history shows is the least effective way of actually getting anything done.
As a bit of a social experiment, I acually built this just a couple days ago: http://whereis.lelandbatey.com/
My location is updated via GPS every two minutes, and the last checked in location is marked on the map. I'm curious what will happen, if anything.
Why the remark on your web page about "nothing to hide, indeed"?
I do agree that a technological solution is more likely to work at avoiding a complete surveillance state than a political one, short of some miracle.
Gonna have to learn a lot to make this real.
The hard part will be maintaining the Open Internet in the face of what Snowden did. He started to force policymakers to realize that a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network defense needs, normal law enforcement (not to mention the spy agencies that most countries want to run), and even cultural/jurisdictional questions on things like data privacy rights.
Because the next question that comes after "why was NSA sidestepping the Constitution by peeking at the data abroad?" is "wait, why was my data over in Europe??", just as Germany is now considering making an EU-centric e-mail so that their citizens' data remains safe from being treated under American law.
There isn't a middle ground. Either the people have access to strong encryption, DHTs, cryptocurrency, etc., or we live in a panopticon, a soft cage, a managed illusion of freedom. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube.
The real question is whether we need more than 10% of the military industrial complex we currently have, or whether this is a deadweight, dragging down our economy and destroying freedom.
If they were honest and serious, they'd just get out there, tell everybody to encrypt everything, change as many laws as possible to force all entities under their control to maintain and transfer data only encrypted and pump money into better crypto.
But as I said, if they were honest and serious...
--Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
--Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a person more freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much "richer" than we were decades or a century ago.
It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any given country can fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a permanent state.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg
https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...
We don't get to pick who represents our interests. We can only vote for preselected choices. This concentrates power in the hands of a few.
And these are more immune to voter desires and more subject to other forms of manipulation.
Either you exercise your power. Or its up for grabs.
We need proportional representation, at least in the House of Representatives.
Regarding horse trading, I'm not opposed to trading favors. If group 1 really wants X and don't really care about Y, while another really wants Y but is willing to give up X, why shouldn't they trade?
Where I object to tradeoffs is where Goldman Sachs and former GS CEO Paulson trade favors, while those financing the goodies have no representation or even awareness of what's going on.
Consider Hitler's Germany. There were factions within the military that tried to overthrow him, but failed. My assertion is that widely distributed technology makes it easier for factions like that to succeed.
Moreover the present is always being rewritten by government and the media. This is something that's been apparent to a lot of people for some time. Not only did Noam Chomsky write extensively on this subject but Hilaire Belloc wrote more or less the same thing about newspapers in 1918 in "The Free Press".[1]
One of the key things Belloc pointed to was the necessity of non-corporate, decentralized, topical, and outright propagandist press to counteract the effects of corporate newspapers. I think he'd be very pleased to see the current blogosphere. So the author's points about the necessity of decentralized technology actually go quite a bit further than the points he makes.
On the other hand though, it seems to me that what this shows is that there is no bright line between dystopia and normal life. By some measures, of course, we are already in a surveillance state dystopia. So I am not sure the question is meaningful.
The major problem that makes the dystopian elements of the present hard to dislodge however are the twin facts that:
1. American culture is very much focused on impersonal institutions of scale (central government, big corporations), and individualism, and this isolates individuals, denying them support break free from the impersonal institutional bonds that we have created in substitute for the bonds of family, neighborhood, and community (which were stronger when I was growing up and are stronger where I am living right now, Indonesia).
2. We place our primary protections of the individual not in social ties (common everywhere else) but in documents which purport to restrain the central government (namely the Bill of Rights).
My view is that until we can start focusing on building stronger communities, decentralizing government and bringing the power closer to the people, and decentralizing the economy (disfavoring large businesses in favor of small ones) the dystopia will in fact deepen.
It's true that in general we have more liberties now than ever, but it's on the surface. The trade-off is that behind the scenes, you're worse now than ever.
As for technology enabling Snowden to leak more than he could have without digital methods, that's correct. The Pentagon Papers were still relatively large, though. 7,000 pages out of over 20,000 source material, IIRC.
Your example of the public uncovering a photo manipulation isn't really all that impressive, though. Just one propaganda piece dismantled, but it's not like things like this haven't been exposed before the advent of widespread digital photo manipulation. At best, the public may have a better eye for such deception, but in the long run these are all trivial issues anyway.
Sousveillance is an excellent thing, but ostensibly it has no major effect on police conduct. Simply having citizens film officers is not a deterrent, since the police as an institution are fundamentally overpowered and not given enough oversight. They're state auxiliaries. It doesn't faze them.
Widespread cryptography is a great thing, but at the moment it's inaccessible to most people and an arms race. Things will improve in the near future, but how practical will it be at deflecting bulk surveillance states is beyond the breadth of this post.
On your last point, you're right about the Church Commission publicly exposing NSA and FBI malice. But ultimately, the only effect it had was some formal legislation that essentially did not hinder the agencies from performing clandestine and unlawful operations any bit. This is your fatal error in reasoning. You're expecting some surface legislative reform to solve much deeper structural issues. Remember Total Information Awareness and how scandalous it was in 2003? Did public outcry end it? Ostensibly it did, but in reality the agencies just learned to practice better OPSEC and moved to the same goal, but under different names, and more modularized.
Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? Maybe. But probably not with your solutions.
Still, that doesn't make me an optimist about "sousveillance."
If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access. Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can intrude, instead of a select few.
Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.
Yes, the observation state is coming as many have said, but how we apply it, and who has the power of checks is the the real question.
If every on foot police officer has a camera on their lapel that any citizen can log in to and monitor, if much of the technology behind the monitoring is transparent -- if the people ultimately control the monitoring and its usage is to detect weapons, explosives and true acts of terror...not petty things like teenagers with pot -- then I believe the coming 'monitored state' will not be as scary.
So the removal of bad laws. Maximum liberty in the privacy of one's house, and then crazy cameras and detectors for explosives and the printed guns et al is where I hope/believe the future can head too.
Call it the green tea party ;p
EDIT: In my world every printed gun, hell every gun taken out of the household needs to be transmitting its location so I can log on to a 'like google maps/latitude' type app and see exactly where any weapons in the public space are...and anyone caught by the monitors or an officer without 'reporting' on their weapons would face the severest of consequences.
On the counter side though, within the house hold, you can print and make whatever you want. You can do the vices you'd like, and you can petition for areas within the public space to do such things, as long as I can also see where it is taking place and avoid if I desire too.
At every level of the Government, the incentives are perversely aligned against this. The local, city, state & national Govts. all want MORE surveillance not less. They will conitnue to chip-away making it more & more difficult to remain private & anonymous.
The only force combating these pressures is un-organized & semi-organized "concerned" citizens (and a few watchdogs).
What will the outcome be?
The other major problem is that we are now forced to choose between privacy and innovation. Want to use any cloud based service or any service that operates on remote data? You give up any right to privacy regardless of any corporate policy. Want to be secure and private? Put up with slow tor, no remote services, and no cell phone. If enough people chose the latter, it might make a dent in companies' bottom line to possibly get them to use their clout to influence policy towards privacy. It's unlikely that will happen, and even if it does, until corporate data can be protected from surveillance without a warrant, even that is moot.
Someone that lived in my building believed in some aspects of conspiracy theories. For example, he believed that Facebook was backed by the CIA. Why? According to him, if you thought about it, all of that information that they had to spend months digging for was now given to them for free, by upfront admission.
The point is that we are willingly giving up our rights to privacy. We are openly using, and promoting to our friends, various sites that expressly user our data for their own means. We are the ones who are printing free copies of the keys to our castle.
We are already halfway there. This trend will only get worse, in my opinion, and at the end of the day, we will blame the government, but really it was only us to blame because by openly publishing a large part of our private lives, we imply permission for anyone and everyone to have that information for free.
a) Demanding better answers or better functionality ultimately relies on surrendering information (information problem)
b) Computing power will allow machine-learning algorithms to deduce a lot from very little (computing power problem)
Novel crypto may eventually produce solutions to this, but it's unclear. An example, regarding location privacy: http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf
O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.
He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
M Against M by Declan Tan.
We will need new founding fathers to re-write the book on what the most perfect union looks like. Perhaps capitalism is not the best system, considering everyone can instantly know what everyone else is contributing or not contributing.
Maybe we're just slowly being converted (or converting ourselves) into the borg. And it isn't brutal, it is cozy, nice, a little bit dull maybe, because we are working on losing our ape-like rawness. If it would be brutal, it wouldn't be efficient, and we highly value efficiency! We have the drugs for 'fixing people', and the neuroscience progresses. Maybe we'll simply end up as some kind of big, self-aware, computing foam covering the whole planet. Which many here would describe as 'dystopian', yet it is interestingly close to the simple idea of 'utopia' from, let's say, the movie 'Avatar'.
Let me be the first to request that of our 21st Century founding fathers (gender-neutral), none of them are from our existing political or entertainment classes.
We're here.
but we won't. we are sheep. and we like it.
LISTEN UP: There is only this tiny fraction of the population that cares about surveillance, represented by a tech minority, Hacker News, and Reddit.
The rest of the country could care less. They're 10x more outraged that Netflix seems a little slow this week, or that their favorite jelly donut is out of stock at Krispy Kreme.
We've had a surveillance state for 30 years, and nothing is going to change that.
If you don't want to be surveilled get rid of all of your electronics.
The truth is, the gov't is going to continue on the path of a Brave New World, not 1984.
Don't believe me? 50% of ALL drugs produced in the world are used by Americans. All most people care about is their next bump of Oxycontin with a chaser of Xanex, and the next bit of TV or internet nonsense they are going to piss their time away on.
Edward Snowden proved - that deep down - the masses don't care, and they certainly aren't going to do anything about it.
I wish this circle-jerk would end.