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The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever
- foolzcrow 6y agoThank you. Tracing our every move and our every thought is a clear human rights violation. Slavery is alive and well.
- kyleee 6y agoprobably wise to have a new word for it other than slavery, though I sympathize with the sentiment.
- ilstormcloud 6y agoEven more so because actual(old school) slavery still exists in a lot of places.
- jxramos 6y ago* surveillery * digital captivity * chains of surveillance
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agoI think webs is more palatable than chains.
- mcrad 6y agoYes, economic slavery. Perfect word to describe the situation, regardless how hurt some might feel or think about it. Let's call it what it is.
- ativzzz 6y ago> Tracing our every move and our every thought is a clear human rights violation. Not being snarky, but under which legal system? Maybe in the EU to some extent? AFAIK, the U.S. does not classify privacy as a human right, though there are people who believe it should be. Human rights, unless explicitly protected by a society's law, do not exist in a practical sense.
- na85 6y agoIs the page not loading properly for me, or is this "article" just a single paragraph?
- pcl 6y agoWritten by Edward Snowden, fwiw.
- 082349872349872 6y agoLast I heard (several years ago), Snowden's position is that he'd be happy to stand trial in the US, as long as the proceedings were public. Is that still the case?
- leetcrew 6y agothis reads more like a hope than an actual argument. AFAIK, the protests in hong kong are more about sovereignty than government surveillance (though I would be happy to be corrected). I don't get the impression that the average american cares very much about surveillance, whether it's by corporations or the government. they might make some offhand remarks about how they don't like it, but you don't see anything like the BLM or occupy protests. it's too abstract. I don't really see any mainstream politicians even discussing mass surveillance by the government. at most, they might make some empty threats toward google/facebook/twitter.
- AtHeartEngineer 6y agoI think the average American cares some, they just aren't aware of what they can do and aren't aware of the extent surveillance is happening.
- take_a_breath 6y agoThe Patriot Act has been a big deal politically multiple times. Net Neutrality was discussed by mainstream politicians. I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago> The Patriot Act has been a big deal politically multiple times. It has? I must have missed it. It's regularly scorned on HN, but I haven't seen much mainstream concern about it at all. Certainly not the level of concern that it deserves.
- pdog 6y agoThe article doesn't really explain why mass surveillance or surveillance capitalism has to end. In fact, if the exemplary tools of resistance are lasers and traffic cones, it sounds like the system is well on its way to being perfected.
- loteck 6y agoOne silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists. The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed. The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies. I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change. ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1] [0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/community-control-over-police-surveillance https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-... [1] https://www.aclunc.org/publications/fighting-local-surveillance-toolkit https://www.aclunc.org/publications/fighting-local-surveilla...
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSounds like something I’d like to get behind, but then in the first paragraph it makes it sound like it’s something only “people of color” need to worry about. That’s a miscalculation I think. Getting control from many police forces means needing republican support, and everyone should be concerned.
- loteck 6y agoWhat I can tell you from experience is that people of color, and religious people, are the most likely to get activated on this idea at the early stages. They can be among the most impacted by the harms of mass surveillance technology, and are among those that stand to gain the most from controlling it. They also are often already organized, and often already have the ear of elected representatives from their past activism. All of these things combine to make it a very good idea to engage those communities at the outset of an effort. I am not a person of color, nor am I religious, but I have been able to play an important role in my city's effort. Technologists need to help, not necessarily lead, these community efforts. Email me if you'd like more support on getting started!
- xwdv 6y agoThe only reason we have mass surveillance is because we don’t have a way to surveil only those who should be surveilled. But I agree, once there’s a way to do so, mass surveillance will end in favor of highly targeted surveillance.
- feanaro 6y agoThis is only if you believe that dragnet surveillance is not done on purpose, in order to control the masses.
- xwdv 6y agoControl the masses to do what exactly?
- AndrewBissell 6y agoWhat not to do is the better way to pose the question.
- mac01021 6y agoOk. Not to do what?
- mixmastamyk 6y agoNot inconvenience those in power. Remember there are enough laws that no one is in compliance with all of them. That leaves anyone unpopular at risk of retaliation. Therefore, the more data points you have on an opponent, the more control you have.
- mac01021 6y agoAre you saying that citizens with a mind to criticize an administration/senator/whatever are regularly blackmailed into refraining from doing that?
- jjcon 6y agoSurveillance isn’t going anywhere - nearly every country is utilizing it (be it widely known or unknown) and that trend is only increasing. The hope of democratic nations is to use it well, with ample checks, balances, and protections. It is arguably a necessity for national and international security. Proper checks should keep it confined to this space. Surveillance has been in use for decades by most countries, somewhere along the line we forgot though that the enemy isn’t surveillance itself, it is abuse.
- paulpauper 6y agoAgree. Covid has only given the surveillance state the justification it needs to grab more power.
- gentleman11 6y agoYou have to trust that an unbroken line of honest surveillance users will exist at all points in government and business, decade after decade, across all political parties and industries. How exactly is that going to happen when even convenience store chains are recklessly using ai driven mass surveillance now?
- olivermarks 6y agoSadly I think this Snowden article is nonsense. I don't see any way of rolling back global surveillance going forward. It's great to organize on a local level to make a point but the extent of data capture by shadowy state sanctioned organizations has been going on for decades and is now that data cam be parsed and manipulated by increasingly sophisticated AI. Add in divide and rule social engineering and cancel culture and we are rapidly accelerating into an era that is extremely Orwellian. I'm also disappointed to see Snowden write '..a youth rebellion that relied on lasers and traffic cones as sword and shield, and that it would come to paralyze one of the world’s richest and most powerful governments'. For me this is nonsense. Rioting and lawless behaviors are arguably being allowed as part of a 'problem, reaction, solution' crackdown to justify future more draconian policing. There is no paralysis.
- paulpauper 6y agoagree. once rights are forfeited, they cannot be reclaimed. Patriot Act will not be undone anytime soon.
- olivermarks 6y agoThis is a global problem created by the offshore capitalist empire, US law is local in comparison...
- Avicebron 6y agoAgreed. This is just cement to bind together the tragedy that is the offshore capitalist empire, less and less freedom and less and less rights. I'm so disapointed with what was done to the world, it's turning into a homogeneous panopticon with no end in sight
- AndrewBissell 6y agoThe only way to truly roll back surveillance is political action to dismantle it at the state level. Unfortunately Snowden always points away from this avenue to niche, technological pseudo-solutions like cryptography which have by now proven unable to disrupt the system's functioning as a whole. Of course, that political action could take many forms. In a 1968 short story titled 2068 A.D. Frank Herbert wrote: "Prominent in 2068 history books is the account of the violence at the turn of the century when people revolted against computer control. Computer stored data (growing out of the old National Data Center) had been used to harass and persecute those whose views didn't conform with those of the majority. In the bloody revolt, most computers were destroyed, their data erased."
- nickalaso 6y agoWe can and should fight back, this makes the job of the surveillance state harder. But my concern is, that I think the problem will eventually get much worse than it is today. I believe that eventually this kind of surveillance will be run almost entirely by sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. It partially is already, but as the technology improves, the amount and quality of the automated surveillance will increase. Masks, lasers, cones, they might be quite effective against current technology, but that is going to change as the technology improves and an AI can determine your identity from your gait, or a combination of other features such as the width of your shoulders, the length of various bones in your body, etc. China is almost certainly already working on this kind of software as a direct response to the Hong Kong protests. Governments will continue to work towards innovating and improving their surveillance programs, specifically in a way that reduces the amount of actual humans that are involved (to reduce the probability of another like Snowden) as well as reduce the visibility of the program to not trigger and go against human's "desire to be free" the article mentions.
- claydavisss 6y agoThink this is bad? Wait until you see what "strings" will come attached to eventual-UBI. Show up at a riot? No more UBI. Interfere with law enforcement? No more UBI. Out past 10pm? No more UBI. UBI will be handed out like a driver's license - a privilege to be revoked at will. Endgame will be total compliance, and for bonus points, the cool kids all will cheer it.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoGreat to hear from Snowden. I hope he's right. Basically all this misery is a direct result of 9/11, without which none of this would ever have been allowed. Of course it was tragic but the measures introduced were overblown and ignored the real cause of the issue. He is right and I do see the privacy-first movement slowly creeping from the shadows into the mainstream. About time! However I shudder to think what the Corona crisis will do to society. As we've seen with 9/11, it usually takes many years for the worst abuses to really emerge. The crisis itself sets the public opinion in motion, first fought (like in many places they are now) when the measures are actually needed. But eventually everyone seems to get in line behind it, though by that time the actual crisis is already over. Then nobody criticises the measures anymore even though they're no longer needed. They get used to the sense of 'safety' when there is no more rational danger. The 9/11 attacks were much more a result of poor US intelligence processes than of the tools they had available to them! Even the response to that realisation was baffling: The answer to having too many agencies that don't communicate was... to build yet another agency. :/ I'm not looking forward to a world where the virus is gone but everyone has become a hardcore germaphobe, and the government enforces this by law. I have strong hayfever so part of the year I'll be coughing and sneezing, but it's not contagous at all. Fun times ahead with a lot of suspicion around me :( I'm afraid Corona will be gone in a year or 2 but all its negative effects like social distancing, masks and mandatory quarantines will persist much longer under the label of 'safety'. We were pretty safe before Corona, thank you very much. I know these things are needed now but they won't be forever. In the same way we've been groped by airport security for 20 years now and all our comms catalogued in order to obtain some kind of undefined idea of 'safety' which nobody cares to elaborate because of 'security concerns'. We never find out know how this information has really helped, ostensibly because 'the bad guys can learn from that', but then again, in almost every case the 'bad guys' were just using tech like plain unencrypted SMS anyway and were plainly operating on the radar. The truth is that too many people make too much money around it all for it to be reconsidered. Of course I will fight overzealous Corona measures (after Corona is gone) just like I've fought surveillance (by promoting safe tools), but it takes a long time for public opinion to really sway back and do something about it. Basically, people are lemmings :(
- toper-centage 6y ago
- drummer 6y ago> Today, the Hong Kong uprising is in ashes and the mass arrests have begun. If you ever needed proof that networks are balanced on the knife-edge of liberation and oppression, here it is. Don't take freedom for granted.
- sneak 6y agoHa, well played, Doctorow. I preordered a dead trees copy of this release of Homeland/Little Brother (both of which I had already read) to read the Snowden intro. It arrived not long ago, and I did just that. Today it’s in Wired. :D
- justanotheranon 6y agohttps://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whitepapers/cryptopocalypse_reference_paper.pdf https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/whit... remember this presentation from a few years ago? The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Coming Cryptopocalypse. the only reason global mass surveillance is even technically possible os because turnkey mass scale crypto exists. if NSA and FVEYs could not conceal their own penetration and exfiltration of all the world's data, then they would not be able to do it on a scale like we saw reveales in Snowden's leaks. cryptography PROTECTS the Surveillance State MORE than it protects us Plebians. the asymmetrical advantage of weilding cryptographic supremacy is what makes NSA's regime physically possible. all modern crypto is based on a handful of crypto primitive math algorithms. we blindly trust them to be secure because nobody yet knows how to crack them. but if some lone wolf math genius pulled an Isaac Newton and invented a solution to FACTOR and proved P=NP, then crypto as we know it would cease to exist. no more RSA, no more ECC, no more AES, no more SHA3. this wont even require quantum computers, because it is presently unknown whether there exists a classical solution to insoluble problems like FACTOR and P=NP. what if a classical solution does exist? what if it is found in the next 10 years? i believe it will be found. i agree with Snowden's sentiments. the mass surveillance state is an anomaly, a blip of time where a lack of mathematical progress was met with the rise of the global Internet, where it was convenient for NSA to use crypto as a weapon against all of us. post-cryptopocalypse, life is going to be very inconvenient for NSA and the FVEYs. the cost of hoarding secrets will become too great compared to the risk of losing those secrets due to a newly leveled cryptographic playing field. leveled in the sense that anyone can realistically attack any known ciphers. the future of cryptography is its past. the 18th century. manually designed cryptosystems intended to have very short shelf lives, because they get cracked so frequently. only militaries and banks will have the resources to design and deploy cryptosystems. since it will be so much more expensive to deploy encryption, only truly important secrets will be encrypted at all. there will be a massive cultural shift in how our Intelligence Agencies operate. they won't even resemble themselves as they are today. for this reason, i am a radical optimist about the fall of the mass surveillance state.
- LockAndLol 6y agoI wonder how they'll try and combat anonymous networks like TOR and I2P once these become faster and more popular. Thanks to federation and distributed technologies, I think they'll have a hard time snooping on people. But that's maybe 20 years away