4 ms·

We can have democracy or a surveillance society, but we cannot have both

53 points by yew 6y ago

yew 6y ago
> No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart. > [...] > Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue. > Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.
- sirspacey 6y ago
  If democracy relies on a consensus of what is “normal” than it has no possibility of surviving and probably shouldn’t. If democracy has a feature worth keeping at all, it is a shared functional definition of rights that we honor whether the other person or people seem “normal” or not. Our votes are not agreement. They are consensus.
cyberlurker 6y ago
The use of 9/11 to further surveillance policies is really unfortunate because the existing intelligence agencies mostly got it right before hand. The administration was briefed that a threat was imminent. I am curious if anyone could build a legitimate argument that internet surveillance would have made the intelligence accurate enough to stop the attack.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I know a moderate amount about the history of US surveillance, the two WTC events, and the activity just before the last event. The FISA court existed since 1978, so was available before the events. ATT's Room 641A since 2003. Total digital surveillance around then. (There's a documentary that discusses the transition from targeted to total dragnet under the DNI's direction basically overnight) and the building of several new data centers to store it. Verizon domestic phone metadata collection started in 2013 also. FYI: any historical legal limits on govt. surveillance that you thought you knew, are exactly that, historical. There is no limit on what can be collected or how at this time, whether domestic or international. Also, FISA was used in the Mueller investigation long after it was learned the warrant information was fabricated. Yahoo allowed the govt. to do email keyword scanning on its servers via a govt-supplied kernel module since around 2015. So that's the rough timeline for total digital surveillance, and mostly started after 2001. You're correct that the govt. had enough info from many sources (Saudi embassies in US and Canada, pre-event operatives in US and Canada, foreign governments) so didn't need Internet sources at the time. (Canada was used as a base since Egyptian jihadis could avoid US airport immigration.) Would Internet scanning have helped in 2001? Well, maybe, but 2001 was very early in the development of the Internet. Also, integrating that info at the time with other info would have been sporadic. Today the problem is the volume of Internet traffic related to similar events, and staying ahead of it (collection, translation, scoring, etc.) But some of the most effective and well-known types of attacks can be done spontaneously by a single person with no warning. Fusion reports sent to local LEO are usually ignored because of the volume and vagueness. What can be detected an hour or so before an attack is mass cell phone traffic from one building as participants say farewell to their families. Ultimately to understand this event's issue, just read the Koran. It's an ideology problem, not a digital surveillance problem. There's no secret what the motivations and goals are. Is there a better or different way? I don't know. After the incompetence of the last event, it's hard to argue for less surveillance. The US is not good at policies in general. The Chinese government is going with surveillance down to monitoring individuals using facial recognition and QR codes.
- acct776 6y ago
  Why was redis_mlc's comment killed? Any explanation appreciated.
owl_troupe 6y ago
>In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. She sums up two decades of modern history in one sentence. Also, her take on why antitrust approaches won't work is brand-new to me and it raises a critical point. Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. They may be a necessary, albeit, temporary fix to the issue of competition in the marketplace, not the real harm inherent in surveillance for profit. >Another thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case — that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the planet.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. Even worse, it was seminal liberal makework. The owners of Standard Oil were saw their holdings double in value as it was broken up, and were now the owners of the resultant entities. It was money and effort burned for no purpose other than to support the careers of the kind of "progressives" that don't have a class-based critique or worker orientation. It was a pseudo-technocratic solution that didn't even really have a clear theory about how it would solve the problems that the size and market control of Standard Oil had raised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell When it comes to surveillance, I'm not sure that anything short of a Butlerian Jihad can stop this train. Limiting government surveillance powers just allows them to farm out surveillance to favored companies. Breaking up those favored companies just makes trying to stop the aggregation a game of whack-a-mole that no one would have the authority or interest to play. We need to create enforceable rights based on values that are new. But the people who profit from surveillance will be powerful enough, if they aren't already, to destroy or silence any voice that endangers their business model.
  - creato 6y ago
oliv__ 6y ago
How ironic that this is published on the NYtimes of all places.
- avmich 6y ago
  Arguably the leading newspaper of the country?
  - acct776 6y ago
    LA Times' integrity makes them look like a joke.
    - acct776 6y ago
      (The NYT, that is)
- drallison 6y ago
  Please point out the irony. If this op-ed were published in the Rupert Murdoch's NY Post or read on Fox News, it might be ironic, but in the NY Times by Shoshana Zuboff, it is serious analysis. If you find it interesting, read her book. For those who do not remember 11th grade English: If something is ironic it's unexpected, often in an amusing way. If you're the world chess champion, it would be pretty ironic if you lost a match to someone who just learned to play yesterday. Ironic is the adjective for the noun irony. In contemporary speech, when we call something ironic, we often mean sarcastic. [From www.vocabulary.com]
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    Probably referring to their recent high-profile spat over publishing the legal name of a blogger contrary to their wishes, or perhaps appointing Sarah Jeong to the editorial board after her unethical revelations concerning Noami Wu (which were a violation of the agreement with Wu). I’m sure you can find other ironic examples of NYT disregarding the privacy of vulnerable people for their own interests.

53 points by yew 6y ago

yew 6y ago

> No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart. > [...] > Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue. > Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.

sirspacey 6y ago
If democracy relies on a consensus of what is “normal” than it has no possibility of surviving and probably shouldn’t. If democracy has a feature worth keeping at all, it is a shared functional definition of rights that we honor whether the other person or people seem “normal” or not. Our votes are not agreement. They are consensus.

cyberlurker 6y ago

The use of 9/11 to further surveillance policies is really unfortunate because the existing intelligence agencies mostly got it right before hand. The administration was briefed that a threat was imminent. I am curious if anyone could build a legitimate argument that internet surveillance would have made the intelligence accurate enough to stop the attack.

redis_mlc 6y ago
I know a moderate amount about the history of US surveillance, the two WTC events, and the activity just before the last event. The FISA court existed since 1978, so was available before the events. ATT's Room 641A since 2003. Total digital surveillance around then. (There's a documentary that discusses the transition from targeted to total dragnet under the DNI's direction basically overnight) and the building of several new data centers to store it. Verizon domestic phone metadata collection started in 2013 also. FYI: any historical legal limits on govt. surveillance that you thought you knew, are exactly that, historical. There is no limit on what can be collected or how at this time, whether domestic or international. Also, FISA was used in the Mueller investigation long after it was learned the warrant information was fabricated. Yahoo allowed the govt. to do email keyword scanning on its servers via a govt-supplied kernel module since around 2015. So that's the rough timeline for total digital surveillance, and mostly started after 2001. You're correct that the govt. had enough info from many sources (Saudi embassies in US and Canada, pre-event operatives in US and Canada, foreign governments) so didn't need Internet sources at the time. (Canada was used as a base since Egyptian jihadis could avoid US airport immigration.) Would Internet scanning have helped in 2001? Well, maybe, but 2001 was very early in the development of the Internet. Also, integrating that info at the time with other info would have been sporadic. Today the problem is the volume of Internet traffic related to similar events, and staying ahead of it (collection, translation, scoring, etc.) But some of the most effective and well-known types of attacks can be done spontaneously by a single person with no warning. Fusion reports sent to local LEO are usually ignored because of the volume and vagueness. What can be detected an hour or so before an attack is mass cell phone traffic from one building as participants say farewell to their families. Ultimately to understand this event's issue, just read the Koran. It's an ideology problem, not a digital surveillance problem. There's no secret what the motivations and goals are. Is there a better or different way? I don't know. After the incompetence of the last event, it's hard to argue for less surveillance. The US is not good at policies in general. The Chinese government is going with surveillance down to monitoring individuals using facial recognition and QR codes.
acct776 6y ago
Why was redis_mlc's comment killed? Any explanation appreciated.

owl_troupe 6y ago

>In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. She sums up two decades of modern history in one sentence. Also, her take on why antitrust approaches won't work is brand-new to me and it raises a critical point. Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. They may be a necessary, albeit, temporary fix to the issue of competition in the marketplace, not the real harm inherent in surveillance for profit. >Another thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case — that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the planet.

pessimizer 6y ago
> Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. Even worse, it was seminal liberal makework. The owners of Standard Oil were saw their holdings double in value as it was broken up, and were now the owners of the resultant entities. It was money and effort burned for no purpose other than to support the careers of the kind of "progressives" that don't have a class-based critique or worker orientation. It was a pseudo-technocratic solution that didn't even really have a clear theory about how it would solve the problems that the size and market control of Standard Oil had raised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_Tarbell When it comes to surveillance, I'm not sure that anything short of a Butlerian Jihad can stop this train. Limiting government surveillance powers just allows them to farm out surveillance to favored companies. Breaking up those favored companies just makes trying to stop the aggregation a game of whack-a-mole that no one would have the authority or interest to play. We need to create enforceable rights based on values that are new. But the people who profit from surveillance will be powerful enough, if they aren't already, to destroy or silence any voice that endangers their business model.
- creato 6y ago

oliv__ 6y ago

How ironic that this is published on the NYtimes of all places.

avmich 6y ago
Arguably the leading newspaper of the country?
- acct776 6y ago
  LA Times' integrity makes them look like a joke.
  - acct776 6y ago
    (The NYT, that is)
drallison 6y ago
Please point out the irony. If this op-ed were published in the Rupert Murdoch's NY Post or read on Fox News, it might be ironic, but in the NY Times by Shoshana Zuboff, it is serious analysis. If you find it interesting, read her book. For those who do not remember 11th grade English: If something is ironic it's unexpected, often in an amusing way. If you're the world chess champion, it would be pretty ironic if you lost a match to someone who just learned to play yesterday. Ironic is the adjective for the noun irony. In contemporary speech, when we call something ironic, we often mean sarcastic. [From www.vocabulary.com]
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Probably referring to their recent high-profile spat over publishing the legal name of a blogger contrary to their wishes, or perhaps appointing Sarah Jeong to the editorial board after her unethical revelations concerning Noami Wu (which were a violation of the agreement with Wu). I’m sure you can find other ironic examples of NYT disregarding the privacy of vulnerable people for their own interests.