38 ms·

Is there a way that we can better balance the needs to surveil against the legitimate fears of the populace about chilling effects that broad law enforcement do

by mrex 4y ago

Is there a way that we can better balance the needs to surveil against the legitimate fears of the populace about chilling effects that broad law enforcement domination of electronic media could create? Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions? Because the only alternative, to me, seems worse: a world in which our adversaries maintain the advantage in information asymmetry against us, knowing more about our own society than we do, and thereby maintaining an ability to act against our society in ways we cannot detect or attribute.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
noir_lord 4y ago
> Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions? Unlikely, every system of checks and balances requires someone to set up and enforce those checks and balances so that person can then circumvent them. It's the classic "How do you protect yourself from a rogue admin" There are steps you can take (use a quorum etc) but against a malicious actor with sufficient power there isn't much of a defence.
- iasay 4y ago
  Indeed. You actually can't protect yourself from a rogue administrator. The rogue administrator or quorum is subject to a unitary instruction from above which can override that. Which is ultimately everything from management to the government which can use everything up to the threat of violence against the person to comply. The best situation to be in is never put yourself in a position where you can be made to do this or have it normalised. If people refuse to work for surveillance and tracking companies then they would not exist. But some people are attracted to power. And they are the people who shouldn't be allowed to work for them.
MrPatan 4y ago
> Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions? How about, giving the public access to the data as well? You want to see my messages and pictures? OK, then I want to see the politicians' and the police ones too.
- hulitu 4y ago
  That's not how it works. They want to have access to your data, but you should not have aceess to their data. If i am inverstigated and delete messages from my phone it is obstruction of justice. If i am a politician doing this (US, Germany, EU) then it is in the interest of my fellow citizens.
  - ziddoap 4y ago
    >That's not how it works. They didn't say that's how it works. They were proposing a potential solution to achieve better balance, per the GPs question.
michaelt 4y ago
We could make it mandatory for corporations providing message-decrypting to the security services to charge £100,000 for each person monitored in a given calendar year. Easily affordable for genuine ticking time-bombs and terror threats - but too expensive for spies to stalk their ex-girlfriends or track everyone at a large protest.
- randomhodler84 4y ago
  Not a good idea. Uhh, not expensive enough. They spend more anyway. 0days suitable for targeted surveillance go for 10-25x that.
toolz 4y ago
Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried? It's obvious they don't when you look at even the citizens in their own countries. Which country has a handle on their people and can manipulate them at will? None of them. I wouldn't worry so much that they're capable of manipulating other countries. When you stop worrying about the boogeyman you can start considering that people should have liberties and freedoms, most of which are dangerous and require a great deal of personal responsibility. It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value. History was not advanced on the backs of central planners taking as much control as they could. If you want people to thrive, you empower them, you don't spy on them.
- mrex 4y ago
  >Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried? Yes, they undoubtedly do. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and many other nations run active cyber campaigns against the US with varying degrees of success, but often absolutely stunning scope and scale. Their purposes in doing this are to advantage themselves and disadvantage us. This sort of social engineering can be very subtle, and very effective: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredit-natural-gas-fracking-635052 https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi... >It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value. I realize you don't know me, and that as you say this you have no way to know that I'm someone who values freedom far more than most people do, to the extent that I've spent much of my life studying civics and law and their intersection with technology. Freedom is what makes life worth living. But maximizing freedom sometimes means taking non-intuitive actions. For instance, imagine a world where China's government instantly knew everything that was said on Twitter, who said it, where they were, etc... but the US government did not. Imagine what an advantage that would constitute. Is that likely to lead to a world, or a personal experience for me and my loved ones, of greater freedom? No way.
  - 4y ago
imtringued 4y ago
What if you just solve the problem by making society a better place? Why shoot up schools if you have a happy and fulfilling life?
- mrex 4y ago
  >What if you just solve the problem by making society a better place? Because I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, how to better society in a way that wipes out all the dictatorships and malign powers of the world that mean to do us harm merely for their own gain. Ultimately the world is not always a friendly place, and sometimes if you aren't the shark at the table, you're the fish.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  This is true for the vast majority of people, but some percentage of our population will have Psychopathy/Sociopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder. There appears to be a genetic component to this, so it seems like no matter how nice we make society we're still going to have to deal with these kinds of people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde...
stephen_g 4y ago
“Balance” arguments are always fallacious and only lead to increasing surveillance. The real conversation should be about limiting surveillance to only what is absolutely necessary and proportional. “Balance” gets you to “Well, we would put the cameras in every room of your house, streaming back to law enforcement, but we’re willing to find a balance between privacy and security so we won’t put them in your bathrooms”. Whereas of course, assessing whether it’s necessary or proportional, putting streaming surveillance cameras in people’s houses would fail both tests.

by mrex 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

noir_lord 4y ago

> Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions? Unlikely, every system of checks and balances requires someone to set up and enforce those checks and balances so that person can then circumvent them. It's the classic "How do you protect yourself from a rogue admin" There are steps you can take (use a quorum etc) but against a malicious actor with sufficient power there isn't much of a defence.

iasay 4y ago
Indeed. You actually can't protect yourself from a rogue administrator. The rogue administrator or quorum is subject to a unitary instruction from above which can override that. Which is ultimately everything from management to the government which can use everything up to the threat of violence against the person to comply. The best situation to be in is never put yourself in a position where you can be made to do this or have it normalised. If people refuse to work for surveillance and tracking companies then they would not exist. But some people are attracted to power. And they are the people who shouldn't be allowed to work for them.

MrPatan 4y ago

> Can we somehow effectively, assuredly, in a way that citizens can trust, limit the surveillance activities to legitimate national security and lifesaving actions? How about, giving the public access to the data as well? You want to see my messages and pictures? OK, then I want to see the politicians' and the police ones too.

hulitu 4y ago
That's not how it works. They want to have access to your data, but you should not have aceess to their data. If i am inverstigated and delete messages from my phone it is obstruction of justice. If i am a politician doing this (US, Germany, EU) then it is in the interest of my fellow citizens.
- ziddoap 4y ago
  >That's not how it works. They didn't say that's how it works. They were proposing a potential solution to achieve better balance, per the GPs question.

michaelt 4y ago

We could make it mandatory for corporations providing message-decrypting to the security services to charge £100,000 for each person monitored in a given calendar year. Easily affordable for genuine ticking time-bombs and terror threats - but too expensive for spies to stalk their ex-girlfriends or track everyone at a large protest.

randomhodler84 4y ago
Not a good idea. Uhh, not expensive enough. They spend more anyway. 0days suitable for targeted surveillance go for 10-25x that.

toolz 4y ago

Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried? It's obvious they don't when you look at even the citizens in their own countries. Which country has a handle on their people and can manipulate them at will? None of them. I wouldn't worry so much that they're capable of manipulating other countries. When you stop worrying about the boogeyman you can start considering that people should have liberties and freedoms, most of which are dangerous and require a great deal of personal responsibility. It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value. History was not advanced on the backs of central planners taking as much control as they could. If you want people to thrive, you empower them, you don't spy on them.

mrex 4y ago
>Rather than address these questions, I think you have an extremely important question to resolve. Do these boogeymen exist? Are they capable of social engineering to the extent we should be worried? Yes, they undoubtedly do. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and many other nations run active cyber campaigns against the US with varying degrees of success, but often absolutely stunning scope and scale. Their purposes in doing this are to advantage themselves and disadvantage us. This sort of social engineering can be very subtle, and very effective: https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredit-natural-gas-fracking-635052 https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi... >It scares me how little people seem to value freedoms as if they were some relic of the past with waning value. I realize you don't know me, and that as you say this you have no way to know that I'm someone who values freedom far more than most people do, to the extent that I've spent much of my life studying civics and law and their intersection with technology. Freedom is what makes life worth living. But maximizing freedom sometimes means taking non-intuitive actions. For instance, imagine a world where China's government instantly knew everything that was said on Twitter, who said it, where they were, etc... but the US government did not. Imagine what an advantage that would constitute. Is that likely to lead to a world, or a personal experience for me and my loved ones, of greater freedom? No way.
- 4y ago

imtringued 4y ago

What if you just solve the problem by making society a better place? Why shoot up schools if you have a happy and fulfilling life?

mrex 4y ago
>What if you just solve the problem by making society a better place? Because I don't know, and I don't think anyone else knows, how to better society in a way that wipes out all the dictatorships and malign powers of the world that mean to do us harm merely for their own gain. Ultimately the world is not always a friendly place, and sometimes if you aren't the shark at the table, you're the fish.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
This is true for the vast majority of people, but some percentage of our population will have Psychopathy/Sociopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder. There appears to be a genetic component to this, so it seems like no matter how nice we make society we're still going to have to deal with these kinds of people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorde...

stephen_g 4y ago

“Balance” arguments are always fallacious and only lead to increasing surveillance. The real conversation should be about limiting surveillance to only what is absolutely necessary and proportional. “Balance” gets you to “Well, we would put the cameras in every room of your house, streaming back to law enforcement, but we’re willing to find a balance between privacy and security so we won’t put them in your bathrooms”. Whereas of course, assessing whether it’s necessary or proportional, putting streaming surveillance cameras in people’s houses would fail both tests.