5 ms·

We Should All Have Something to Hide (2013)

239 points by citizensixteen 11y ago

chinathrow 11y ago
(2013)
awakeasleep 11y ago
There are a couple different arguments that have been developed to counter the government requests/propaganda for access to our data. Here, Moxie works on one I don't think has been popularized yet- To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. That is an argument against allowing the government to have total information awareness, because that access would allow the government to enforce laws perfectly, which would make some unjust laws permanent. I believe that is the weak bit of the argument- although it's true, there is a big gap between how the government could move from information awareness to perfect enforcement. Instead, I'd take the argument in the direction that a database of the criminal behavior on every citizen would create the prefect tool for the suppression of dissent. Anyone who became politically inconvenient would have their entries combed for wrongdoing, and their life destroyed. The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window. Which brings me to my point. We need a reference detailing historic government abuses of data. It should focus on: How data was collected The original purpose of collection The benign intentions of the original collectors How the data moved from the collecting administration to the abusive administration It seems like there should be a wealth of historical examples. What data did the Stasi have, Mao's china, the purges of intellectuals in russia and SE Asia. I bet there are even records of Torquemada's Inquisition. I want us to make the posibility of a good administration collecting data, and then that data being captured or inherited by a bad administration, a part of the mental vocabulary of the US population. Yeah it's ambitious, but I think that is the best chance we have at fighting the Government here. And, I believe that an earnest civil servant could understand the danger, and want to limit his own power, once this was properly explained.
- nothrabannosir 11y ago
  Dutch municipalities had comprehensive files on every citizen, including religion. Germany invaded, Holland capitulated in 5 days, and the files proved an organizational treasure trove for rounding up jewish families and deporting them. "Also, the civil administration was advanced and offered the Nazi-German a full insight in not only the numbers of Jews, but also where they exactly lived." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands#The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Net... It wasn't immediately obvious what, exactly, was happening to the Jewish families when Germany took over. But even if it had been, destroying all those files in 5 days would have required extraordinary coordination and determination. And that is assuming you make the decision to scorch the earth the second Germany attacks; not exactly a move which would inspire confidence. Underground resistance forces spent the following five years trying to burn down as many town halls as they could.
- mojuba 11y ago
  It's a very good point. Moreover, an abusive administration will almost definitely take over soon, because the scope of data the current one has will attract all kinds of "evil forces", including (but probably not limited to) powerful corporations.
- 542458 11y ago
  You don't even have to leave the US - COINTELPRO is a great example of this. In the 50s and 60 the FBI used surveillance data of questionable legality to target a number of groups deemed "undesirable". This included trying to convince Nobel peace prize winner Martin Luther King Jr to literally kill himself via harassing anonymous letters that threatened the release of embarrassing personal details. Here's a key quote from the letter: "No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record." Nice, eh? When that failed, his marriage was attacked instead, and anonymous audio recordings (again, questionable legality) were sent to his wife. This continued in various forms up to MLK jr's eventual assassination. You don't even need the entire government to be corrupt and malicious - a single bad department or group can cause an enormous amount of damage, which won't be found out about until decades later (if at all!). Edit: Source https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...
ck2 11y ago
Most people have committed a few felonies this year and either don't even know it or don't care. Once prosecuting people becomes as automated as a license plate scanner generating hundreds of tickets per day, suddenly they are going to wish they had a little more privacy to balance the government being overbearing. The problem is we give incredibly powerful weapons (both literally and figuratively) to law enforcement and then when going after the real big criminals turns out to be too difficult, they turn their eyes to the easy to catch regular folks with little way to defend themselves, just so crime prevention figures can look good in the budgets.
- _0ffh 11y ago
  Well, a wsj article from 2009 claims in the US it is an average of three felonies per day [1], and I doubt the situation has become better since then. [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...
  - LinuxBender 11y ago
    It is an interesting post and certainly a concern around automated law enforcement in the future. That is certainly something folks need to keep in mind. There are some skeptics breaking down that article however.[1] I am not saying I agree or disagree with their analysis. It is still very much a concern even if that article chose the incorrect examples to use for their thesis. [1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-average-american-unwittingly-commit-three-felonies-a-day http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-a...
    - _0ffh 11y ago
      Thanks for the link, it's good to be skeptical. But even if the number is inflated by an order of magnitude, it's still a very frightening one. And it's two orders of magnitude away from ck2's estimate.
wereHamster 11y ago
> Law enforcement used to be harder. If a law enforcement agency wanted to track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people. It is not inconceivable. It was very much real in east germany! People tracked each other, everybody became a law enforcement agent.
maus42 11y ago
(The post is from 2013. Shouldn't that be mentioned in the title?)
- LinuxBender 11y ago
  It should include 2013. This is only becoming more true every year. I hope that more folks read this post.
ikeboy 11y ago
From 2013.
studentrob 11y ago
We should. But we might not be allowed to in the digital world in the future. A bill by US lawmakers, set for release in March, could require encrypted devices to be able to give un-encrypted data to law enforcement. Feinstein says the bill is "coming along ... some people are making it a lot harder than we think it needs to be". An alternate proposal is also on the table http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016/02/march-is-encryption-bill-month-hackers-going-after-japans-infrastructure-a-mixed-final-2015-tally-212865 http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016...
stegosaurus 11y ago
I don't think the battle here is about privacy, encryption, or any of that stuff. It's really about trust in government. It's about the specific meaning of the word 'trust' - the idea that 'trust' and 'distrust' are not equivalent to 'good' or 'bad'. I can distrust my government, without thinking that they are bad. When speaking to friends and family about this, that feels like the barrier. They believe that current western governments are generally 'good', and that historical ones were 'bad', accidents of some sort, that can't or won't happen again. That troubles me, more so than any specific issue of the day.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  As a programmer... in some ways I feel like it's an issue of abstraction. Naming variables is hard. Right? We have this 'Terrorism' abstraction. But that's not really what it is. You might have an instance of Terrorism, that affects two people. Then is it really Terrorism? Shouldn't it be something else? I'd say it's just Violence. The same happens all over the place. Child abuse, theft, piracy, etc. The battle seems to be fought and won by the media when we decide on how to categorise and name things. So we end up in some frankly absurd situations, because we think we're discussing Y, when actually we're discussing X. I don't know how to solve this, I just want to get it out of my brain, because it really frustrates me and stops me bothering with debate most of the time when people don't even seem to realise they've done it. If I thought that eliminating privacy would save 1 billion lives, I would do it. No euphemisms. That would be a sacrifice I'd feel sensible in making. But I don't want to talk about 'encryption' and 'terrorism' because it's just bollocks, really. It's an absurd simplification; it's a euphemism. You're not discussing anything real anymore, you're just giving platitudes.
  - njohnson41 11y ago
    I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but later redefine them to mean whatever crazy thing they actually meant. People seem to use this intentionally and unintentionally a lot. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...
everyone 11y ago
Its a bit worrying that someone feels its necessary to write an article explaining how the government constantly spying on everyone could be bad.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
13thLetter 11y ago
If this is genuinely important to you, don't forget to vote against every politician who supports mass surveillance. Do it in primaries and the general election. Write someone in if you have to, but do it, and don't make excuses about the lesser evil.
Finnucane 11y ago
" If a law enforcement agency wanted to track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people." On the other hand, the Stasi and the KGB were infamous for the vast armies they employed in this task. Maybe they couldn't track everyone all the time, but they could track enough people enough of the time that people were generally aware there was a non-zero chance of being tracked, and doing anything that might arouse the suspicions of the authorities carried risk. Also, in those societies, everyone was at risk, whereas in the US, the risk is perceived to be weighted toward 'others'--if you are not in the targeted group, it is easier to be complacent.

239 points by citizensixteen 11y ago

(2013)

There are a couple different arguments that have been developed to counter the government requests/propaganda for access to our data. Here, Moxie works on one I don't think has been popularized yet- To reform unjust laws, people must be able to break those laws. That is an argument against allowing the government to have total information awareness, because that access would allow the government to enforce laws perfectly, which would make some unjust laws permanent. I believe that is the weak bit of the argument- although it's true, there is a big gap between how the government could move from information awareness to perfect enforcement. Instead, I'd take the argument in the direction that a database of the criminal behavior on every citizen would create the prefect tool for the suppression of dissent. Anyone who became politically inconvenient would have their entries combed for wrongdoing, and their life destroyed. The weakness with THAT argument is that it assumes a conspiratorial, immoral federal government. Many of us may be able to imagine that, but it's an idea at the periphery of the Overton window. Which brings me to my point. We need a reference detailing historic government abuses of data. It should focus on: How data was collected The original purpose of collection The benign intentions of the original collectors How the data moved from the collecting administration to the abusive administration It seems like there should be a wealth of historical examples. What data did the Stasi have, Mao's china, the purges of intellectuals in russia and SE Asia. I bet there are even records of Torquemada's Inquisition. I want us to make the posibility of a good administration collecting data, and then that data being captured or inherited by a bad administration, a part of the mental vocabulary of the US population. Yeah it's ambitious, but I think that is the best chance we have at fighting the Government here. And, I believe that an earnest civil servant could understand the danger, and want to limit his own power, once this was properly explained.

nothrabannosir 11y ago
Dutch municipalities had comprehensive files on every citizen, including religion. Germany invaded, Holland capitulated in 5 days, and the files proved an organizational treasure trove for rounding up jewish families and deporting them. "Also, the civil administration was advanced and offered the Nazi-German a full insight in not only the numbers of Jews, but also where they exactly lived." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Netherlands#The_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Net... It wasn't immediately obvious what, exactly, was happening to the Jewish families when Germany took over. But even if it had been, destroying all those files in 5 days would have required extraordinary coordination and determination. And that is assuming you make the decision to scorch the earth the second Germany attacks; not exactly a move which would inspire confidence. Underground resistance forces spent the following five years trying to burn down as many town halls as they could.
mojuba 11y ago
It's a very good point. Moreover, an abusive administration will almost definitely take over soon, because the scope of data the current one has will attract all kinds of "evil forces", including (but probably not limited to) powerful corporations.
542458 11y ago
You don't even have to leave the US - COINTELPRO is a great example of this. In the 50s and 60 the FBI used surveillance data of questionable legality to target a number of groups deemed "undesirable". This included trying to convince Nobel peace prize winner Martin Luther King Jr to literally kill himself via harassing anonymous letters that threatened the release of embarrassing personal details. Here's a key quote from the letter: "No person can overcome the facts, no even a fraud like yourself. Lend your sexually psychotic ear to the enclosure. You will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time. . . . Listen to yourself, you filthy, abnormal animal. You are on the record." Nice, eh? When that failed, his marriage was attacked instead, and anonymous audio recordings (again, questionable legality) were sent to his wife. This continued in various forms up to MLK jr's eventual assassination. You don't even need the entire government to be corrupt and malicious - a single bad department or group can cause an enormous amount of damage, which won't be found out about until decades later (if at all!). Edit: Source https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr-martin-luther-king-jr-and-dangers-unchecked-surveillance https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr...

ck2 11y ago

Most people have committed a few felonies this year and either don't even know it or don't care. Once prosecuting people becomes as automated as a license plate scanner generating hundreds of tickets per day, suddenly they are going to wish they had a little more privacy to balance the government being overbearing. The problem is we give incredibly powerful weapons (both literally and figuratively) to law enforcement and then when going after the real big criminals turns out to be too difficult, they turn their eyes to the easy to catch regular folks with little way to defend themselves, just so crime prevention figures can look good in the budgets.

_0ffh 11y ago
Well, a wsj article from 2009 claims in the US it is an average of three felonies per day [1], and I doubt the situation has become better since then. [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438900830760842 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487044715045744389...
- LinuxBender 11y ago
  It is an interesting post and certainly a concern around automated law enforcement in the future. That is certainly something folks need to keep in mind. There are some skeptics breaking down that article however.[1] I am not saying I agree or disagree with their analysis. It is still very much a concern even if that article chose the incorrect examples to use for their thesis. [1] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-average-american-unwittingly-commit-three-felonies-a-day http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22530/does-the-a...
  - _0ffh 11y ago
    Thanks for the link, it's good to be skeptical. But even if the number is inflated by an order of magnitude, it's still a very frightening one. And it's two orders of magnitude away from ck2's estimate.

wereHamster 11y ago

> Law enforcement used to be harder. If a law enforcement agency wanted to track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people. It is not inconceivable. It was very much real in east germany! People tracked each other, everybody became a law enforcement agent.

maus42 11y ago

(The post is from 2013. Shouldn't that be mentioned in the title?)

LinuxBender 11y ago
It should include 2013. This is only becoming more true every year. I hope that more folks read this post.

ikeboy 11y ago

From 2013.

studentrob 11y ago

We should. But we might not be allowed to in the digital world in the future. A bill by US lawmakers, set for release in March, could require encrypted devices to be able to give un-encrypted data to law enforcement. Feinstein says the bill is "coming along ... some people are making it a lot harder than we think it needs to be". An alternate proposal is also on the table http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016/02/march-is-encryption-bill-month-hackers-going-after-japans-infrastructure-a-mixed-final-2015-tally-212865 http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2016...

stegosaurus 11y ago

I don't think the battle here is about privacy, encryption, or any of that stuff. It's really about trust in government. It's about the specific meaning of the word 'trust' - the idea that 'trust' and 'distrust' are not equivalent to 'good' or 'bad'. I can distrust my government, without thinking that they are bad. When speaking to friends and family about this, that feels like the barrier. They believe that current western governments are generally 'good', and that historical ones were 'bad', accidents of some sort, that can't or won't happen again. That troubles me, more so than any specific issue of the day.

stegosaurus 11y ago
As a programmer... in some ways I feel like it's an issue of abstraction. Naming variables is hard. Right? We have this 'Terrorism' abstraction. But that's not really what it is. You might have an instance of Terrorism, that affects two people. Then is it really Terrorism? Shouldn't it be something else? I'd say it's just Violence. The same happens all over the place. Child abuse, theft, piracy, etc. The battle seems to be fought and won by the media when we decide on how to categorise and name things. So we end up in some frankly absurd situations, because we think we're discussing Y, when actually we're discussing X. I don't know how to solve this, I just want to get it out of my brain, because it really frustrates me and stops me bothering with debate most of the time when people don't even seem to realise they've done it. If I thought that eliminating privacy would save 1 billion lives, I would do it. No euphemisms. That would be a sacrifice I'd feel sensible in making. But I don't want to talk about 'encryption' and 'terrorism' because it's just bollocks, really. It's an absurd simplification; it's a euphemism. You're not discussing anything real anymore, you're just giving platitudes.
- njohnson41 11y ago
  I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but later redefine them to mean whatever crazy thing they actually meant. People seem to use this intentionally and unintentionally a lot. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

everyone 11y ago

Its a bit worrying that someone feels its necessary to write an article explaining how the government constantly spying on everyone could be bad.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

13thLetter 11y ago

If this is genuinely important to you, don't forget to vote against every politician who supports mass surveillance. Do it in primaries and the general election. Write someone in if you have to, but do it, and don't make excuses about the lesser evil.

Finnucane 11y ago

" If a law enforcement agency wanted to track someone, it required physically assigning a law enforcement agent to follow that person around. Tracking everybody would be inconceivable, because it would require having as many law enforcement agents as people." On the other hand, the Stasi and the KGB were infamous for the vast armies they employed in this task. Maybe they couldn't track everyone all the time, but they could track enough people enough of the time that people were generally aware there was a non-zero chance of being tracked, and doing anything that might arouse the suspicions of the authorities carried risk. Also, in those societies, everyone was at risk, whereas in the US, the risk is perceived to be weighted toward 'others'--if you are not in the targeted group, it is easier to be complacent.