How do you stop the mass surveillance machine once the gears are turning?
This is a question I ask myself frequently, and I can't find the right path to get out of this vicious cycle.
This is a question I ask myself frequently, and I can't find the right path to get out of this vicious cycle.
- all surveillance cease at some fixed moment and
- all information collected for a preceding fixed period (say 3 years', or maybe all of it) be made available for public inspection forever.
By "all" I mean just that - ALL information. Everything collected about everybody: presidents, prime ministers, senators & congressmen, corporations, churches, public and private institutions, trusts, public and private officials, their secretaries, clerks, bartenders and hired courtesans,etc - all of us would have our private information revealed.
This would cause an upheaval in the politics of the nation but would also provide a bonanza of invaluable information for society to review going forward. Do you want to know how corporate leaders break the law? Just look at the data and gather statistics. Are our politicians making illegal deals? Ditto. And of course, is my wife hiding something from me?
Allow prosecutions to proceed and the revealed information to be submitted as evidence. We might have to set up special courts and do triage to handle the influx of lawsuits and criminal arrests but we could at least get some of the rats out of the barn. Whether we burn the barn down or not is society's choice (doesn't seem we have a very good barn right now anyway - reminds me a bit of Animal House).
That not to say it's all bad, there are some possible upsides to a world with less privacy. For example, with the lack of any expectation of privacy for vast swaths of the average day, we may see a shift to people aligning their beliefs and actions, and that may be made easier by a shift in some of the less tolerant beliefs. This would by no means be a guaranteed, it would take work.
In the end though, I think whether privacy is somehow protected or not, one of the most important things we can do is make sure we are informed of, and inform the public of, what's likely and what's possible to have intercepted by surveillance. No matter the outcome, that's useful information for everyone to have, so they can act accordingly.
Also, either extreme is primed for a big disruptive phase-change if some new technology comes along that makes it easier to conceal or uncover things.
To some degree, privacy is important because people judge bases on social norms. If that is lessened, so it the benefit of privacy (not necessarily to the same degree).
(Alaska has an absolute right to privacy in their state constitution)
Our only hope is to better align our laws with our beliefs. Removing victimless crimes like drug laws will redirect this mass surveillance machine toward violent criminals. Full transparency in the government will prevent government officials from using the surveillance for personal gain or to harm political opponents.
If that's not the case and you really would only part with the pie for that high of a price, and no other pie will do for the child, then what is there to complain about? How much do you think it costs to buy a pie made by, say, Gordon Ramsay? Feel free to replace with someone who is actually a good chef and not just a famous one if I made a poor choice.
To me it is like asking should we allow animals to kill each other. Not only can we not really stop it, even if we could it would kill any carnivores.
Suppose I have a store card for a grocery store chain. If this grocery store sells my data to a health insurance company and the insurance company increases my premium based on my food purchasing habits, do you think it is fair? I am under the reasonable assumption that my purchase history is for the grocery chain only and in return for that data, I get some discounts on my purchases.
There was a case a while ago where a forum sold their users posts to a drug company. The forum members didn't expect that. Do you think it is fair?
In both examples above, the companies are most likely acting legally (After all, who reads 20 pages of legal crap before signing up for a forum) That doesn't mean it is the right thing to do.