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Rant: Ugh. People still don't grok the privacy situation wrt law enforcement. Here's me trying yet again trying to convey my understanding. Our prior legal no

Rant: Ugh. People still don't grok the privacy situation wrt law enforcement. Here's me trying yet again trying to convey my understanding. Our prior legal notions are moot when the "dragnet" is the entire planet, encompassing all people for all space and time. Folk understanding of legal notions like probable cause, reasonable doubt, burden of proof, innocent until proven guilty, alibis, etc. no longer apply. Identifying suspects and checking their alibis is obsolete. Law enforcement will use big data to rule out non-suspects. Then whoever is left must be the perp. In the case of Zachary McCoy in this article, LE found a match. What I'm saying is in the near future, LE will rule out non-matches. So if LE can't establish an alibi for you, globally, you're a potential suspect. Reverse strategy, same end result. But bigger scope. In the mid-aughts, law enforcement was already using warehoused demographic data to solve cold cases. Imagine how much better they can do their job today. (And yet so many crimes go unsolved. All the downside of forfeiting our privacy, none of the benefits. Infuriating.) ACLU's objection to Apple's CSAM effort hit HN's front page last week. Perfect example of preparing to fight the last war. The ACLU, like most everyone else, still hasn't internalized what's happening/happened. Forgive me, I still can't articulate my notions about privacy very well. Despite 20+ years of effort. Even when I try talk to other privacy advocates. When I try to simply example the technical capabilities of various players, and what that might mean, I'm dismissed as "paranoid, sweaty kook". (Actual quote from a local newspaper.) When I write that I don't know what privacy even means any more, I'm dead serious. My only kindred spirit, matching my pessimism, has been Shoshana Zuboff (author of Surveillance Capitalism). I remain open the possibility that I am in fact insane.

salawat 5y ago
You are not insane. The part you have trouble articulating I think revolves around 3rd Party Doctrine, and the complete seeming death of professional discretion. When I was growing up, you wanted to keep records? Paper, or get out. So people only tracked the important things. Queries happened at the speed of a human being able to synthesize information, etc. Further, if you wanted to cross-reference different sources, you were doing footwork, which meant you were doing that one thing at a time. Nowadays, we've massively parallelized the data collection, classification, cleaning, organizing, and cross-referencing to the degree that about the only thing standing in your way is learning the names of providers with the juiciest datasets. The Internet did it's original job maybe a bit too well. Information is propagated without any sense of discretion in the name of financial viability. Walking things back... Well... The only option is to destroy the data itself. By it's very existence, by collecting it, it destroys any semblance of privacy. Cellular technology in particular is a glaring example of a set of data that never should have been made queryable, but here we are.

salawat 5y ago

You are not insane. The part you have trouble articulating I think revolves around 3rd Party Doctrine, and the complete seeming death of professional discretion. When I was growing up, you wanted to keep records? Paper, or get out. So people only tracked the important things. Queries happened at the speed of a human being able to synthesize information, etc. Further, if you wanted to cross-reference different sources, you were doing footwork, which meant you were doing that one thing at a time. Nowadays, we've massively parallelized the data collection, classification, cleaning, organizing, and cross-referencing to the degree that about the only thing standing in your way is learning the names of providers with the juiciest datasets. The Internet did it's original job maybe a bit too well. Information is propagated without any sense of discretion in the name of financial viability. Walking things back... Well... The only option is to destroy the data itself. By it's very existence, by collecting it, it destroys any semblance of privacy. Cellular technology in particular is a glaring example of a set of data that never should have been made queryable, but here we are.