5 ms·

> It’s a way of seeing everybody all the time. Fundamental to liberal democracy is the ability to have sacrosanct private spaces. That is where the life of civi

> It’s a way of seeing everybody all the time. Fundamental to liberal democracy is the ability to have sacrosanct private spaces. That is where the life of civil society exists. It is where our own personal lives exist, where we are able to pursue our dreams and passions. And it is often where we hold power to account. When you uncover those spaces, you fundamentally put all of those things at risk. Are satellite surveillance not already a threat in this sense? I have heard such images have a resolution down to 1 cm.

maroonblazer 7y ago
Bostrom makes a compelling argument that we may find ourselves needing to rethink this assumption of privacy in the name of preventing bad actors from wiping out civilization. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
- salawat 7y ago
  I disagree. His paper comes off more as whataboutism, or a call toward paying more attention to underlying issues of poor ethical/moral fabric underlying society today; particularly and most obviously illustrated in the tech industry today. Yes. Our ability to effect the world is amplified greatly from what it has ever been before; but before abandoning essential liberty, perhaps we should take a moment to collect ourselves, sit down, and realize that if we're willing to give up everything, then civilization is already lost; therefore, the proper direction is not further breakdown or restriction of liberties, but a revival of the collective cilized spirit that hitherto has graced our ancestors in bringing us to this point. Technology and our bewitchment by it, and the power conferred through it's use are things tempered by prudence and an active sense of obligation to those around us, and those we'll be leaving behind to carry on after us. I'm incredibly alarmed at the willingness to embrace the sacrifice of essential liberty nowadays... It's mind boggling.
  - harshreality 7y ago
    Hi there, John Stuart Mill. Bostrom's argument is not at all that bad people do bad things so therefore we need total surveillance. It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end. Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
    - salawat 7y ago
      >Hi there, John Stuart Mill. I've been called a modern day Spinoza, hadn't been called out as Mill yet though. At least I'm in good company. >It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end. Yes. I know. That is consistent with my interpretation. What I said spoke not to the message of the paper, but what it means in the backdrop of current events. I also strongly disagree with the conclusion that civilization ends because some crazy gets his hand on a thing. I say civilization ends once people start panicking about some crazy getting a thing, and seriously considering we have to either full stop technological development, or cleanse the world of "problematic sub-populations" for the sake of something that might not even happen. >Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. Correct. It isn't. Nor was I attempting to do so. My argument was that seeing as civilization is already lost if we're considering hitting the full stop button, drugging the masses, or going off into flights of fancy creating a world with zero space for essential liberty; the only way to go is up. We have to reaffirm our commitment to personal liberty, rebuild the civic framework of trust, and embark on rational, prudent ways of hardening society against whatever new "threats " there are to be dealt with due to mischief caused by members of the very civilization we so deem to protect. Civilization predicated on essentially null liberty, and iron-fisted systemic control isn't civilization. It's barbarism. Civilization is what you have when everyone has the means to put one over on everyone else, but we all decide to build/do something productive instead of trying to cause others harm. Do some people make the harmful choice? Yes. Those people generally set the level the rest of us respond on. Creating a self-correcting dynamic. >If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried. And this is the type of thing that indicates to me, that for at least right now, civilization is dead or dying. See, humanity doesn't go away when civilization does. Our works and infrastructure, and everything else don't just disappear. We just start acting in the most base, animalistic ways conceivable. Dystopian literature is not a thrice damned instruction manual. It is a cautionary tale. A warning, a description of a societal failure state. To take any option as laid out in these tales and to consider it a valid, agreeable, or desirable way to advance is to reject the central tenet of civilization. That people, given the means and freedom to employ them will generally do positive things, and for the one's that don't, we have ways of dealing with that; but in the interest of not succumbing to our baser natures as human beings, we bind the employment of those means through systematized, impartial codes, so at the very least, we protect ourselves from unraveling the civic trust that makes our current state of being possible. It is through the respect of personal liberty, and prudence in the application of violence or coersion that the state of civility bears fruit. I'll happily accept the possible risk of sudden existential collapse. If it's going to be, then it'll be. Everything historically recorded, everything being actively researched, and everything existing as even a kernel of a nightmare in a creative's eye is bound by time, space, and the laws of physics. Time we will have, and make no mistake; nothing creates unity in a civilization like sudden existential crisis. Some might even argue, that is how our civilizations mature. By being tested repeatedly, and managing to survive intact. In case you thought the following were just platitudes, I recommend you think about what they really mean before being swayed by this alarmist/surrendering rhetoric. Land of the Free, home the Brave. Those that would sacrifice essential Liberty for Safety, deserve and will find neither Liberty, nor Safety. The cost of Liberty is eternal vigilance. I'll gladly wear Mill's mantle, because someone clearly needs to.
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  The tech is in the hand of bad actors, they are wiping out civilization. If you have no privacy, you have no freedom of thought, you cannot learn to think, and cannot become a person. Water bags, yes ("the last man lives the longest"), humans no, civilization no. Surveillance and militarization protect that undertaking of destruction, they don't prevent it, they get arrayed against those who would attempt to prevent it. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j... It's like the people who invaded Iraq and made ISIS possible, then go on and tell people what to do about ISIS, and so on. How about bringing to justice the and seeing judged in our history books the "bad actors" in past and present we know exist for sure, rather than rationalizing continued obedience to them by squinting hard, to try and see "silver linings" in clouds they are seeking to force upon us? That's the mechanism here, it's not like we live in a normal world as free adults, and someone says "hey, tech is getting very powerful, let's talk about privacy". No, we rationalize what we see powerful conglomerates pushing over decades, in an arms race against civilian populations that begun before we were even born. > It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction. -- Noam Chomsky > What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. -- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
salty_biscuits 7y ago
Diffraction limit for visible light would imply a rather huge aperture to be able to resolve 1cm on the ground from a low orbit. One that would stretch credulity. I would guess 5cm is achievable. Commercial applications are limited to 40ish cm. When I worked in aerial surveys we were working with an 8cm ground resolution, this was a good trade off point for wide field of view, motion blur, exposure, resolution and camera cost. So you can do a lot better for much cheaper with a plane (drones included). Plus you can fly under clouds and it is easy to change where you want images.
- nradov 7y ago
  We know the payload size and weight limits of the largest launchers, so it's fairly easy to work backwards from there and calculate the maximum achievable resolving power of spy satellites. They can play some clever tricks with adaptive optics to boost clarity a little bit but obviously the stories about 1cm resolution or reading newspaper headlines from space are ludicrous.

maroonblazer 7y ago

Bostrom makes a compelling argument that we may find ourselves needing to rethink this assumption of privacy in the name of preventing bad actors from wiping out civilization. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

salawat 7y ago
I disagree. His paper comes off more as whataboutism, or a call toward paying more attention to underlying issues of poor ethical/moral fabric underlying society today; particularly and most obviously illustrated in the tech industry today. Yes. Our ability to effect the world is amplified greatly from what it has ever been before; but before abandoning essential liberty, perhaps we should take a moment to collect ourselves, sit down, and realize that if we're willing to give up everything, then civilization is already lost; therefore, the proper direction is not further breakdown or restriction of liberties, but a revival of the collective cilized spirit that hitherto has graced our ancestors in bringing us to this point. Technology and our bewitchment by it, and the power conferred through it's use are things tempered by prudence and an active sense of obligation to those around us, and those we'll be leaving behind to carry on after us. I'm incredibly alarmed at the willingness to embrace the sacrifice of essential liberty nowadays... It's mind boggling.
- harshreality 7y ago
  Hi there, John Stuart Mill. Bostrom's argument is not at all that bad people do bad things so therefore we need total surveillance. It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end. Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
  - salawat 7y ago
    >Hi there, John Stuart Mill. I've been called a modern day Spinoza, hadn't been called out as Mill yet though. At least I'm in good company. >It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end. Yes. I know. That is consistent with my interpretation. What I said spoke not to the message of the paper, but what it means in the backdrop of current events. I also strongly disagree with the conclusion that civilization ends because some crazy gets his hand on a thing. I say civilization ends once people start panicking about some crazy getting a thing, and seriously considering we have to either full stop technological development, or cleanse the world of "problematic sub-populations" for the sake of something that might not even happen. >Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. Correct. It isn't. Nor was I attempting to do so. My argument was that seeing as civilization is already lost if we're considering hitting the full stop button, drugging the masses, or going off into flights of fancy creating a world with zero space for essential liberty; the only way to go is up. We have to reaffirm our commitment to personal liberty, rebuild the civic framework of trust, and embark on rational, prudent ways of hardening society against whatever new "threats " there are to be dealt with due to mischief caused by members of the very civilization we so deem to protect. Civilization predicated on essentially null liberty, and iron-fisted systemic control isn't civilization. It's barbarism. Civilization is what you have when everyone has the means to put one over on everyone else, but we all decide to build/do something productive instead of trying to cause others harm. Do some people make the harmful choice? Yes. Those people generally set the level the rest of us respond on. Creating a self-correcting dynamic. >If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried. And this is the type of thing that indicates to me, that for at least right now, civilization is dead or dying. See, humanity doesn't go away when civilization does. Our works and infrastructure, and everything else don't just disappear. We just start acting in the most base, animalistic ways conceivable. Dystopian literature is not a thrice damned instruction manual. It is a cautionary tale. A warning, a description of a societal failure state. To take any option as laid out in these tales and to consider it a valid, agreeable, or desirable way to advance is to reject the central tenet of civilization. That people, given the means and freedom to employ them will generally do positive things, and for the one's that don't, we have ways of dealing with that; but in the interest of not succumbing to our baser natures as human beings, we bind the employment of those means through systematized, impartial codes, so at the very least, we protect ourselves from unraveling the civic trust that makes our current state of being possible. It is through the respect of personal liberty, and prudence in the application of violence or coersion that the state of civility bears fruit. I'll happily accept the possible risk of sudden existential collapse. If it's going to be, then it'll be. Everything historically recorded, everything being actively researched, and everything existing as even a kernel of a nightmare in a creative's eye is bound by time, space, and the laws of physics. Time we will have, and make no mistake; nothing creates unity in a civilization like sudden existential crisis. Some might even argue, that is how our civilizations mature. By being tested repeatedly, and managing to survive intact. In case you thought the following were just platitudes, I recommend you think about what they really mean before being swayed by this alarmist/surrendering rhetoric. Land of the Free, home the Brave. Those that would sacrifice essential Liberty for Safety, deserve and will find neither Liberty, nor Safety. The cost of Liberty is eternal vigilance. I'll gladly wear Mill's mantle, because someone clearly needs to.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
The tech is in the hand of bad actors, they are wiping out civilization. If you have no privacy, you have no freedom of thought, you cannot learn to think, and cannot become a person. Water bags, yes ("the last man lives the longest"), humans no, civilization no. Surveillance and militarization protect that undertaking of destruction, they don't prevent it, they get arrayed against those who would attempt to prevent it. e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j... It's like the people who invaded Iraq and made ISIS possible, then go on and tell people what to do about ISIS, and so on. How about bringing to justice the and seeing judged in our history books the "bad actors" in past and present we know exist for sure, rather than rationalizing continued obedience to them by squinting hard, to try and see "silver linings" in clouds they are seeking to force upon us? That's the mechanism here, it's not like we live in a normal world as free adults, and someone says "hey, tech is getting very powerful, let's talk about privacy". No, we rationalize what we see powerful conglomerates pushing over decades, in an arms race against civilian populations that begun before we were even born. > It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction. -- Noam Chomsky > What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened. -- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"

salty_biscuits 7y ago

Diffraction limit for visible light would imply a rather huge aperture to be able to resolve 1cm on the ground from a low orbit. One that would stretch credulity. I would guess 5cm is achievable. Commercial applications are limited to 40ish cm. When I worked in aerial surveys we were working with an 8cm ground resolution, this was a good trade off point for wide field of view, motion blur, exposure, resolution and camera cost. So you can do a lot better for much cheaper with a plane (drones included). Plus you can fly under clouds and it is easy to change where you want images.

nradov 7y ago
We know the payload size and weight limits of the largest launchers, so it's fairly easy to work backwards from there and calculate the maximum achievable resolving power of spy satellites. They can play some clever tricks with adaptive optics to boost clarity a little bit but obviously the stories about 1cm resolution or reading newspaper headlines from space are ludicrous.