UN: Nations hide rise in private digital snooping
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Nope, it's all of the above. Or rather, nobody is evil, just each party needs data for various reasons. Governments trump everybody, so if your information is being recorded, it's accessible to a government somewhere. (And you can be assured that tons of information about you is recorded daily)
Interesting (to me) is the fact that we've spent the last twenty years cranking out various sci-fi dramas about all the things that could go wrong in a future society. There was cloning, nuclear war (an old favorite), alien invasion, designer babies, prison cities, artificial intelligence, memory wiping -- tons of stuff. All the time, the people who produced and consumed such fiction said "You know, it's good that we bring up these ideas. We're going to need to deal with this kinda thing in the future. It's morally important. This is deep, thoughtful work."
Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind. And now when you point it out to folks, they either think it doesn't matter or they're so overwhelmed they give up thinking about what they could possibly do about it. The unstated question is: Gee, why didn't somebody tell me about this!
They either did not care or called people pointing the increasing attacks on our liberties "conspiracy nuts".
Ironically that is caused by an increase in freedom that the internet brought about.
We have long had the right to freedom of speech but it was expensive to interact with a large number of people. The internet made it much easier to actually use the rights heralded by politicians.
I think sci-fi has done a better job of realising some of the social implications of this explosion in rights. For example in showing how national allegiance can be lost in favour of geographically desperate groups of like minded indviduals.
They want it, not need it. But respecting privacy is like exercising self control with no tangible benefit, so they just don't.
People are definitely evil when they shrug off the moral implications of what they're doing for a pile of cash or turn a blind eye to the consequences of doing something. There are a lot of evil people on here and each little action adds a paper cut to society.
Instead, we have an informational-goo. Software is eating the world, turning everything into bitstreams, and contaminating everything it touches as more things become digitised, more things can become digitised. And we're being flooded, swamped, clogged up, with unusably too much data while at the same time adding more at accelerating rates.
It's a kind of digibesity and leads to organizational digibetus and immobility as every employee trapses round through a sludge of gigabytes of old email and log data, reports slow against bloated databases, decisions drag as more and more people need to read more and more procedures and look up references in ever-bigger, ever-slower reference silos.
It's a kind of global hoarding disorder.
I wonder what the mid-stages and end-game of a Gray G0o01100 catastrophe is?
On the flip-side, this one's nicely timed, given the preface and thrust of Cypherpunks[0], for the same day as the review of Assange's case in Sweden... which according to Assange's recent interview[1] should get thrown out after tomorrow's appeal[2]. I wonder if the UN gets it now? Of course, it's semi-irrelevant anyway since the US will cockblock[3] them on actually actioning anything remotely related to real, functional, positive change, but it's a nice gesture on the human rights commissioner's part for national-level change-makers to point the finger at.
0. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/
1. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/7/exclusive_inside_embass...
2. http://www.thisdayinwikileaks.org/2014/07/15-july-2014.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...
When people caught doing it will be severely punished, then you'll know the tide has turned. Until then, even if new laws are passed to "limit" the surveillance, they probably won't change much, as they'll keep doing it in secret, and then get protected by higher-ups when getting caught.
Digital privacy is one of these funny freedoms which everyone either greatly over or under-estimates.
I don't think anyone with a firm grasp on politics really thinks digital privacy will spark violent uprisings, so I'll put the question another way: do you really believe you're morally justified in killing over domestic spying?
What however is happening more and more, is that recorded data is kept indefinitely and is networked.
Have you heard what Binney has said what the software he wrote for the NSA does?
There are various domains from where it gathers data (cellphone, banking, social media, gps etc.). These domains are graphed and mapped in such a way that they can pull out all the attributes any individual has from any any or all of the domains.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc
In other words, the data doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's all being graphed and correlated in order to build a comprehensive picture of your life.
What's really dangerous about ubiquitous spying is that it enables other abuses and forms of corruption that were previously impossible or cost-prohibitive. It's these abuses, which seem virtually inevitable in a privacy-less world, which will likely incite public anger and resistance.
It's just a thought that has been floating around my head recently.
However, modern social science indicates clearly that people behave differently when they believe they are under surveillance and when part of large groups. So there is a real, psychological requirement for privacy and anonymity some of the time. There has to be space for this... a balance.
In general, "behind closed doors" has been put forward as an appropriate scope for that in a physical sense, though we are increasingly digitally monitored there as well. For instance, it is not uncommon for national gestapo of various ilks to seize hardware and search for digital evidence when someone is 'suspected' of something (ie. pretty much as they please). Similarly, mobile and landline telephones and wifi access are monitored, as is probably cable TV activity. And in general, the population of many regions is uploading photos of each other in these environments, providing streams of public social network and other online activity that can accurately predict their movements in and out of the home. So pretending that "behind closed doors" means private doesn't really fly anymore. In addition to this personal privacy, we need an option for public anonymity ... including online.
Sousveillance, as it is called, is part of the answer - governments have no reason to be less transparent than the governed. But areas of opacity are necessary too.
These days, my gran might mention these subjects over a cup of tea after talking about the cricket, and she's a dyed in the wool establishment conservative.
I advocate nonviolent means to fight dictators for two reasons: I don't like seeing my innocent neighbors get killed, and I have seen nonviolent means work to overthrow dictators. The largely peaceful transition from martial law and one-party dictatorship to pluralistic rule by law with free press and free elections that I saw in Taiwan[1] is just one example of a people power revolution where the dictator was baffled because there were few violent incidents on the part of the opposition to stir up a violent response from the regime. There are other examples from around the world.
An organization that collects real-world advice on how to win freedom even under dictatorship nonviolently, and how to keep the revolutionary movement from turning into another dictatorship, is the Albert Einstein Institution founded by Gene Sharp, an occasional nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. I have recommended before here on Hacker News that readers who are really, truly interested in winning freedom for themselves and guaranteeing freedom for people around the world ought to read the free, downloadable materials on the Einstein Institution website.[2] If you are not willing to learn the art and craft of forging a cohesive, effective resistance movement based on real-world examples, this is all just talk. Talk is cheap. I know actual freedom fighters who succeeded against dictators whose techniques included total control of all mass media with "prior restraint" of publication and complete domination of the country's education system and targeted assassinations of opponents. The dictators still lost. You (we) can win, but only if you (all of us) learn to fight effectively. That doesn't take violence. Winning in a people power democracy movement does take mental toughness, because the dictator's side could use violence, but always the people outnumber the rulers. The people just have to learn how to stand together, overcoming their own fear.
Start your reading with From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation if you are wondering where to start among the several handbooks on the Einstein Institution website.
I'd settle for the HN crowd stopping scooping up gobs of data under a "it's different when I do it" copout. But even that much won't happen. (por exemplo the inevitable rationalizations in reply to this comment)
If you collect data, and it was made accessible to everyone to access and leverage to the fullest if they choose, … ?:
"Information Asymmetry and Power in a Surveillance Society" http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/53109/1/MPRA_paper_53109.pdf
"This paper has engaged in a wide ranging discussion around the issues of information asymmetry in contemporary life. We have examined the relationship between such asymmetries and how power is ineluctably interrelated to such imbalances. Within this, we demonstrated how key technologies and techniques have been, and continue to be, employed to deepen and widen the information gap.
Unsurprisingly, we note that there are marked differences between those who inhabit the opposite banks – we are witnessing an entrenchment of power and information within a small, exclusive group on one side while the general population bears the weight of evermore intrusive surveillance.
One potential,and possibly democratic, move would be to ensure that knowledge is spread more equally and transparently.[…]"
Then the government can still use the data.
The point is not that any database has on you it's what you get when you combine the public and private history of everyone. So, suddenly a joke taken out of context or an angry x and your on the next 'no fly list'. The more information someone has the easier it is to find something they dislike even if it's simply being to normal.
It's the lost of anonymity that's important not your drunken photo's.
That is the case now, however under the scenario that I'm putting forth (and what general societal trends are moving towards), what we call "private" today is increasingly becoming "public".
So now that joke everyone can make can still be taken out of context by everyone, but how one ends up on a no fly list or any list anyone is free to see/compile/disregard will no longer be the black box event it is now, especially if the information about people who decide (human biases involved in such decision making will be increasingly open to see for all) how one get's placed on such list becomes increasingly public or theoretically everyone would be on a no fly list because of some aspect social behavioral norms people will violate at least once in their life or because anyone is capable of making such jokes, it will become meaningless to compile such lists in the first place especially if how one becomes on such lists and those who enforce such lists are available to such potential scrutiny by everyone else.
It's the lost of anonymity
I suggest that people/organizations/governments are coming to terms that it's the lost illusion of anonymity/control over what information propagates, that was never an inherit property of the universe, but merely local maxima we have constructed from prior limitations/experience that we were (and increasingly less) constrained to for our relative existence, that now has become (and become increasingly more) something we're able to see beyond and challenge now on multiple levels now that our capabilities have shown us that our constructed ideas of reality and how things are not nearly as absolute as we have conditioned ourselves to be.
That's not to say that anonymity can not exist to any degree, even now, I think people will gain anonymity in other forms like from apathy to sifting through all the information that is increasingly more available about everyone and everything else.
Classified information for example has never been completly private, but the vast majority if it is reasonably well protected.
Whether one declares information as classified or public isn't an inherit property of the information itself, and as everyone has increasingly similar access (relative asymmetry approaches 0 on a scale from 0 to 100) to information (which seems to be the direction of our collective behaviors, especially if we compare to prior times in human history), trying to classify any information in either state or on a spectrum, seems increasingly like an exercise in futility/irrelevance (to me) in the face of what we are seeing take place and the capabilities on the horizon.
Individuals, corporations, low level government workers, and the government as a collective all have differing access to different types of information. Also, it's not just pieces of information but also the ability to deal with that that's restricted. For example you might look at a few tweets, but twitter rate limits you without paying them a lot of money.
Edit: (removed redundant crap).
Sure, Russia got copy's of the design for both the first Atomic and Hydrogen bombs. So, every country with nuclear weapons can trace their designs back to those same researchers. Yet, even after 10's of thousands of people have seen them (or a derivative design) and 70 years good luck finding detailed documentation on Google.
Beyond that, I don't really know what to say beyond that things change. A lot of the social constructs that we are born into may be totally irrelevant in our lifetime regardless of our opinions about them, some people can adapt to such, and some people will go to their grave with cognitive dissonance of such change clinging to their memories of a world that was but will never be again.
Instead, I will point out that most dictators in the world rationalize their actions as necessary to ensure a greater good that will ultimately outshine whatever it is they know they should not be doing. I don't have the time or interest to provide a peer reviewed article about how this pattern repeats over the last 5,000 years of World history, but I will provide an example form my home country. You may google for other examples if you feel it's due.
Porfirio Diaz came to power in Mexico in 1876, under the platform of "no reelection" due to the recurrent problem of 19th century Mexican politicians running for office multiple terms (last example was Benito Juarez, who died during his 4th term, but there are others). After this he:
1. Appointed close friend, Manuel Gonzalez, as successor in 1880 election. 2. Amended the constitution to allow a non consecutive 2nd term reelection. 3. Came back to rule in 1884. 4. Extended the presidential term from 4 years to 6 years (which remains the norm in the country to this date). 5. Removed all restrictions to reelection and remained in office through electoral fraud and assassination of political rivals for the next 27 years. 6. In 1908, he claimed that Mexico was "ready for democracy" and organized an election that allowed other candidates for the first time in two decades. 7. However in 1910, he had the other candidate, Francisco I. Madero, put in jail. Then the election was carried on, and he claimed to have won by "overwhelming advantage". 8. This fact triggered the civil war know as the Mexican Revolution, which forced him to flee to France in 1911, leaving behind a country drawn in open warfare for 6 more years (and in the ballpark of 25 years of instability and low intensity conflict).
I think this is the crux of the problem. The reality is that no, a service does not have a right to collect data about you. The service provider may ask that you provide certain data to use the service, but that collection is not a right.
> It only becomes an issue when the company behind that service has its hand in many pies and correlates all of the related data, or worse, if they share or sell that data to other entities.
The notion that one has a right to collect data from users of a service is the same notion that says the service provider has ownership of that data. But this is faulty, the data is not owned by the service provider, it was merely collected and stored. This distinction is important: if you feel you own the data, you feel that you should be able to sell it. If you feel you are a custodian of data, then you are defaulting to protecting that data from others that a user never agreed to give it to in the first place.
Last year my family went to have a family portrait taken by a professional (service provider or portraits) photographer. The photos (data) that were produced from the photo shoot belonged to the photographer. That photographer was more than happen to sell me family portrait, but the law is fairly clear that he in fact owns the data (all photos that were taken), i.e. he has copyright over the data.
The best interim approach is to destroy all means of facilitating the dictatorship. In this case that means destroying the tools by which we work, destroying the banks, the commerce regimes and the communication and logistic platforms muck like the Russians did when they pulled out of the Eastern Bloc. No one has to be hurt to do that but people will go hungry, jobless and penniless. This will however open their eyes to the situation.
I'm not advocating this as a solution nor would act upon it but I'm without a better option in my mind.
Edit: to the down voters. This is not reddit. Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.
This is why you are being downvoted. It seems unlikely you have kids, but you must have parents and grandparents. Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?
If it means that the world is a better place afterwards for them, some hardship for us all is not a bad thing. That includes me and my family. It's not an anarchist pipe dream. It happens when the government sends your country to war as well don't forget.
I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe and they'd do it again to be free from opression.
I talk to a lot of people from the rather war-torn bits of Eastern Europe
but it seems to me that if you had a comprehensive sample of people from eastern Europe of my generation you would come to the conclusion that what I said is the way to go. The countries in eastern Europe that have the brightest prospects now are those whose transition from dictatorship was via a nonviolent people power protest movement, while those that really just traded dictators in palace coups are still very lousy places to live. But don't take my word for it--look up some examples and some principles of how to win freedom with people power, nonviolently.
What complete and utter nonsense. Someone willing to pay a price now for a better future tomorrow is the same as corrupted governments prying into the private lives of their citizens. What a brilliant comparison you've drawn.
It's this fear of change and desire to protect the status quo that has our societies in the rotting state that they're in, by the way, so while you may take comfort in knowing your parents and grandparents are ok now, and that your pockets are moderately protected, that it's your choices in protecting this status quo that is making the future look very bleak for our children.
Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.
Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.
The site founder has said otherwise on more than one occasion. About 2341 days ago he wrote,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.
"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against that."
Downvotes are, of course, especially appropriate when a comment is BOTH uninformative in the context of the discussion and uncivil besides. I'm happy to upvote comments I disagree with (as a factual matter) if those comments prompt me to think about an issue I haven't thought about before, or if the comment contributes to the discussion being more nuanced in other ways. But there appears STILL to be no general rule in the Hacker News Guidelines[1] prohibiting downvoting to express disagreement. Submissions of course cannot be downvoted by anyone (they can be flagged) and no submitter or commenter can downvote child comments to what they have just posted. It's the overall sense of onlookers that determines net karma of a comment.
I might even agree with you, but in the context of the thread, I'm afraid if I don't exercise my downvote, I might lose it.
This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand. Once that happens, the powerful people have to give up, because they themselves can only rely on other people to stay in power.
They got it right in 1776-1783 when they put their lives on the line, and fought for their independence. Britain never would have "given up" their North American colonies peacefully.
Britain also tried to take America back in the War of 1812, but was again thwarted by the costs of maintaining a war abroad (and the war had come to a stalemate by 1814).
Unlike most revolutions we see today (which are revolutions at home, and become civil wars if they turn violent), the American Revolution succeeded through violence because it was against a foreign adversary and because the Americans were able to make it too costly for Britain to maintain their war effort. These preconditions do not apply to local revolutions, where no side has an economic incentive to stop fighting until the other sides are crushed. Each factions' lives are on the line, largely eliminating the cost consideration. It's not like King George III or the members of Parliament were in danger of losing their lives, families, and lands if the Americans won.
This is a cute theory, but history provides countless examples of soldiers not refusing orders and shooting unarmed citizens. It's been happening in the Middle East for the past few years. It happened prior to the American Revolution (events such as the Boston Massacre likely contributed to the 2nd Amendment). And it will happen again over and over again.
Soldiers have several things to weigh when contemplating orders to fire on fellow citizens. The "moral upper hand" is one of them, but history has shown it's often not the strongest motivator. The 2nd Amendment is an amendment firmly grounded in reality and written by people who had seen government at its worst. Americans have lived in a relatively peaceful country for a long time and have largely learned to love Big Brother by now, so they are more worried about the 1/1e12 chance of a terrorist attack than the chance of their own government oppressing and spying on them. The 2nd Amendment establishes a firm deterrent that, in the limit, discourages how far and how fast the government can exercise its various forms of abuse.
And I haven't frankly seen much evidence that 2nd amendment is effective deterrent. First, it's a bit of a fantasy - in the U.S., you hardly see gun owners among the revolutionaries. For a good reason - it's a bit naive to expect people go with handguns against tanks or drones. And U.S. government seems pretty oppressive compared to many countries which don't have equivalent of 2nd amendment.
Second, most people consider violent revolutionaries to be terrorists (e.g. compare how we view Unabomber and Martin Luther King), which actually supports the theory. The same is actually true in islamic countries - for example here: http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/01/concerns-about-islamic-e...
I think it's irrational, albeit probably a common bias in revolutionary thinkers, to assume that the likely result of such violence will be the people viewing you as their liberator rather than their oppressor. Which is of course why such revolutions typically require purges and secret police, and spawn violent counter-revolutions of their own. I don't see how one form of oppression is better than the other.
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Blanket declarations of nonviolence are one of the surest ways to neuter a revolutionary movement before it has even begun. For every successful nonviolent movement, there are a dozen failures.
For an alternative to your readings, I suggest this excellent book:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-...
I am amused to see you arguing this just minutes after asserting on another thread that the best response to bullying is to not allow bullies to make you feel bad about yourself, though.
I think it's unwise to universally swear off any tactic when dealing with an oppressive situation, from simple bullying to an authoritarian government. You have to determine on a situational basis which tactics are going to be most effective, and then follow through with them.
My most controversial (gauged by variance in karma as downvotes and then upvotes rolled in) ever comments were about the issue that has been most discussed on HN since early June 2013, namely Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA documents and Snowden's role in today's world. I'd be glad to see NSA surveillance programs under much more strict legal scrutiny and oversight by Congress. But I think it's more significant than many people notice that Snowden traveled first to the territory of China and then to Russia as the documents were disclosed, so I can't count him a hero any more than I can count Kim Philby as a hero. Both were misguided and ultimately unhelpful to the world in some of the same ways.
How can you make such a radical (I mean that as a compliment) case for non-violent freedom fighters yet you don't consider Snowden a non-violent freedom fighter (which is implied by you considering him a non-hero).
I'm not so eloquent today, so I'm going to have to let this comment stand as it is for now. Hopefully many readers can see for themselves the contradiction that is so obvious to me.
Are you as harsh in your judgement about the "freedom fighters" of Taiwan who ended up putting into power rather corrupt DPP politicians? That would be unfair, just as your condemnation of Snowden for purely circumstantial connection to China and Russia. He did not give "comfort" to those regimes. You're showing an excessive bias against anyone who shows any association with the regimes of China or Russia. I lived in Taiwan for 5 years so I understand where it is coming from, but it is built on blind hate, it clouds your reasonableness.
Also, for someone who constantly adds links to the Albert Einstein institute... something established after he died, I wonder how you reconcile your US nationalist, anti-Snowden views with my favourite Einstein quote: Nationalism is an infantile disease; the measles of mankind?
As long as we're all firmly in the "the problems are global" camp - as per the UN Human Rights commissioner's comments - can't we just agree to drop the ridiculous hat tips to nationalism already?