Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It

This is bizarre. Where to start...

I think the real howler is the idea that there could ever be a level playing field between well-funded government and corporate intelligence operations and private citizens. Even if I had access to all the same data as the NSA, there is simply no way I could "make that data work for me" to anywhere near the extent that the NSA can. There are not enough hours in the day, nor do I have access to a compute farm the size of the Houston Astrodome and a small power station to power it.

This idea that small groups of amateurs with no funding can compete with massive organizations with billions of dollars in funding has got to go. It occasionally happens, but on average it does not. On average the big guys are going to mop the floor with you by sheer brute force. Even if every dollar the NSA spends gets them only 1/100th as far as every dollar a private concern might spend, the NSA will still win because they have more than 100X as many dollars.

People will bring up Linux but it's a poor counterexample. It was small and scrappy for a short while, but it very rapidly picked up the support of industry and now has billion-dollar backers. It's also a case where almost everyone shared a common interest, which is not necessarily the case with surveillance. My interest does not equal your interest when it comes to us spying on each other, so if you have a million bucks and I have a few thousand you are going to win.

Then there's the issue of privacy to begin with. Anyone who thinks privacy is obsolete has never started a business, negotiated a contract, or had a girlfriend.

Finally there's this crackpot idea that eliminating boundaries is a good thing that's going to make us more honest and open with each other. It will have the opposite effect. If people think everything they say and do anywhere is public, they will simply self-censor under all circumstances... sort of like how people behave in dictatorships with secret police everywhere. It'll also mean everyone is all up in everyone else's business all the time, which is not a world I want to live in. There is a reason people segregate into separate dwellings and stop living communally the instant they have the economic ability to do so.

Boundaries are extremely important at all scales in living systems. Your nerve cells don't directly connect. Instead they link via synapses, permitting each cell to control I/O on its own terms. Why? Because if every cell touched every other cell the first malfunctioning cell would cause a cascade and give you a foaming-at-the-mouth seizure.

It's freaky. I actually wrote an opinion piece with a similar point of view and much better supported. I submitted it to New York Times opinion pages as well as Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch. No response.

And this gets published in Wired two days later.