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.
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.
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.
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.
Gonna have to learn a lot to make this real.
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.