Gravity.
712 karma · joined March 19, 2009
If you read the wikipedia article, you will find that chilling effects are not only the result of vague laws and inconsistent enforcement but also the result of any legalistic behavior that might cause others to self-police or self-censor.
As for your assertions about universal surveillance, I find your position has a number of serious conditions:
1. It requires total surveillance of everyone.
2. It requires totally unambiguous laws and norms.
3. It requires total stasis of society.
4. It requires total faith in system by the governed population.
There are two major issues with this position:
1. Society must transition to this system somehow and survive.
2. People and systems in the material world are imperfect and we have no existence proof of any social system which achieves anywhere near the requisite levels of assurance.
I can only see this kind of system working in a society with 0 or 1 people in it. That is to say, I believe what you propose is impossible to enact by its very fundaments.
However, you continue to argue that attempting to create such a system is desirable. Due to this, I can only fathom that either:
1. You are a naive totalitarian.
2. You are a long-playing troll.
Because of this line of reasoning, I must conclude that the attempt to bring your proposed social system into being will not succeed and that the intermediate state will be much worse than the present state as totality will never be reached but concentration of power will corrupt.
If you insist that your proposed system is possible, how will you deal with dissenters such as myself who will refuse to live inside such a system? Doesn't the existence of dissent mean that you cannot reach totality? Or perhaps you believe that such a system can be made to accommodate dissent? What if the resistance is violent? Should the surveillance state kill anyone trying to resist its total surveillance, total laws, total stasis, and total faith? That would surely solve the dissent problem but perhaps the result would be neither stable nor pleasant...
A free society is one where people are free to question social norms, express themselves, and act in ways that don't violate others' rights. A society with ubiquitous surveillance is no longer a free society because people cannot freely and openly question social norms through action, express themselves, or act in ways that may be annoying or unbecoming but which do not violate others' rights. In a surveillance society, even one where "everyone knows", these behaviors are implicitly and globally discouraged by the act of recording all behavior and saving it in perpetuity.
I recommend reading about chilling effects < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect >.
Your server analogy is badly flawed because it is analogous to your cop/intersection example. A more appropriate analogy would be universal connection/request logging at the ISP level. It's not OK to have all of your society's unencrypted Web requests recorded and correlated by your government. Do you think it's OK? Why? What benefit does it confer to the people?
At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to
combating terror threats from the Islamic State,
Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies
marketing something expressly to allow people to hold
themselves beyond the law.”
In the twentieth century, the modern state gained the power to destroy all life on Earth. In the twenty-first century, the modern state and the modern citizen gained the power of private machine-assisted telepathy, memory, and computation. The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society.
1. Hashes don't "sign" things (not directly anyway)
2. Hashes aren't unique in theory or practice (using a 256-bit hash on every 257-bit number will generate 2^256 collisions by the pigeonhole principle).
The difference between Facebook and telephony is striking. You pay for a telephone connection. Other people pay for your Facebook experience to be mediated to their wishes. Telephony is p2p and we typically frown on operator intervention and worry about excessive centralization. Facebook could be p2p but is centralized and has heavy operator intervention.
Offering communications services for free and then attempting to 'monetize' the interactions that you mediate is distasteful.
Teaching is a narrative.
Media is a narrative.
Examining the root causes rather than the narrative fabric is rational. Most governmental actors are either intentionally or ignorantly not rational in this respect.
Practically speaking, nearly all the energy used in this process is generated by means that emit atmospheric carbon.
Yet.
> if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?
Not specific. Every vehicle. All the vehicles in this place at any time without regard to if they were "pulling a runner". There is a database.
One big question informing the choice is "do I want to program primarily lazily or primarily eagerly?" Another is "is time to achieve system performance a big factor in success?"
If eager, performance-eager -> Ocaml If lazy, performance-lazy -> Haskell
This is because it was not competently designed and implemented.