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I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist. Highlighting instances of a

I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist. Highlighting instances of abuse and the quasi-legal nature of the industry doesn’t really get at the interesting part, which is _what motivates our leaders to allow surveillance in the first place_. I recently completed Barack Obama’s A Promised Land (a partial account of his presidency), and he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. I often think about this when I drive past Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores; our leaders seem more enticed by the power of this technology than they are afraid of vague abuses happening in _not here_. It seems like no one sees a cost to just not addressing the issue. By analogy, I feel that reporting on the dangers of fire isn’t really as effective as reporting on why we don’t have arson laws and fire alarms and social norms that make our society more robust to abuse of a useful capability. People who like cooked food aren’t going to engage with anti-fire positions if they just talk about people occasionally burning each other alive. We need to know more about what can be done to protect the average person from downsides of fire, as well as who is responsible for regulating fire and what their agenda for addressing it is. I’d love to see an article identifying who is responsible for installing these Flock cameras in my area, why they did so, and how we can achieve the positive outcomes desired from them (e.g. find car thieves) without the negatives (profiling, stalking, tracking non-criminals, etc).

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
It might be like prison reform and prisoners' rights - Nobody gets elected on a "soft on crime" platform, and civic engagement at the state and local level is so bad that people typically put up with cameras instead of agitating to get them banned. I say agitate. Show up, keep showing up, keep talking, keep telling friends. We can fight this. Democracy will work if we get people onboard, one way or another
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  You are more optimistic than I am. Flock and friends seem something like ChatControl. Those in power who want it have unlimited patience. They will keep pushing for expanded capabilities for the day when public attention has failed. Once they win, near impossible to revoke.
Gigachad 1y ago
I’m not totally opposed to surveillance, I just wish it was more transparent and limited to need to know uses. If the police need your google search history thats ok as long as they can get a warrant showing they have justification and then perhaps at a delayed time, the account owner should be notified that this happened. If they need access to your phone, rather than hacking it they should just take it off you and get the password from you. This limits tracking since this is a fairly disruptive and visible thing and prevents just passive tracking of everyone all the time. Businesses who use facial recognition for loss prevention should be legally required to only use their data for this purpose and never for marketing and analytics. They must not ever sell the data and delete it within a reasonable time.
- martin-t 1y ago
  What kind of crimes does surveillance prevent or help solve? 1) It does not _prevent_ the most serious crimes. People who are going to murder or rape someone are often not mentally capable or understanding how likely they are to get caught or caring about it in the moment. It might help solve it but there's usually more than enough conventional evidence. And these crimes are typically not what people coordinate with others so surveilling communication does not help much. 2) Stealing? Maybe. I can imagine cameras dissuade some opportunists but then again, shoplifting is reportedly high with self-checkouts and those are packed with cameras. Other kinds like burglars will probably just learn to be more careful with gloves and masks. And surveilling communication does not help unless we're talking organized crime and those people should be competent enough to use encrypted comms even if the major platforms are backdoored. 3) Crimes of opportunity like vandalism. Again, cameras are enough, if they work at all. The extra fraction of idiots who would be caught because they brag only about setting a trash can on fire it negligible compared to the downsides. --- What surveillance absolutely could deter and help catch is organized resistance like staging a protest/riot/insurrection or individuals doing research before an assassination. And that's why politicians, who are the most likely victims of these crimes, want surveillance. And you might genuinely believe that no current politician in your country deserves to be shot or that the current government should not be overthrown. But we have to keep in mind that the next government will inherit these systems. Nothing is permanent, no democracy will last forever. Historically, most countries have periods of freedom and authoritarianism, separated by collapse or revolt. At some point, in your country too, people will need to rise up to reassert their rights again. It's a matter of when, not if. --- I see where you are coming from and there were times in my life where more surveillance would have helped my side but ultimately, it's a balancing act and surveillance tips the scale in favor of people who already have a lot of power.
armchairhacker 1y ago
Everyone thinks when they have power, they’ll use it correctly, because they have (from their perspective) good intentions. An ideal government with total surveillance is the best case. You get the benefits of low crime without the drawback of corruption and ideology. The problem is in practice: - Large institutions aren’t good at exercising fine control: even if the leaders have truly good intentions, corrupt mid-level employees and inaccurate data lead to bad outcomes. - Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors, and unless they frequently pick better successors, someone will eventually pick a corrupt one. - Corrupt leaders seem to be good at ousting or sidelining good leaders, more than vice versa, perhaps because good leaders are less passionate about gaining and keeping power. Perhaps there are other reasons. Not just ideal governments, but even self-preserving governments don’t tend to last. Hence, although decentralization and privacy are never ideal, they should exist at least for backup, “just in case” (inevitably in practice) the centralized surveillance system goes rouge.
- bombdailer 1y ago
  There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other. Since governments and laws exist to ensure justice, freedom will always be the price we pay.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    >governments and laws exist to ensure justice Governments mostly exist to coordinate resource usage to out compete other societies. Some amount of justice and welfare and roads, or whatever other things (varied by society and time period), are what they pay us so that our compliance is mostly voluntary and is therefore substantially more efficient. You can bicker over exact word choice and the minute, but this general form is how it's always been from the present all the way back into the ancient world.
    - airstrike 1y ago
      Governments exist to monopolize violence in the hands of a few so that we may have less violence and more order overall.
martin-t 1y ago
Because when you call them leaders and when they see themselves as leaders, they see themselves as a separate class. A permanent difference from the " mere citizen" class. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on." -- Larry Ellison (who should not be anthropomorphized) And Ellison is not even a politician, he doesn't even has any kind of immunity. Meanwhile, EU politicians want to impose Chat Control on everyone except them. The core issue is that they see themselves as different from us. Politics should not be a career. It should be something a person does for 5, at most 10 years max and after that they are back to being like everyone else, with 0 benefits (and with potentially more surveillance, I think politicians' finances should be under extra scrutiny for the rest of their lives).
- lyu07282 1y ago
  It's really strange how we disconnected ideology from politics, in people's minds ideology only exists on the fringes of the far-left and far-right which are considered identical. If you criticize a politician you should be aware of their ideology, because they certainly are very much "political", but you aren't. When "leaders" talk about activists they say things like they were "politicized" as a derogatory term, in contrast to the default which is "depoliticized". Our leaders are waaaay more politicized than we are and way more ideologically consistent in their actions than you will ever realize.
- immibis 1y ago
  I wonder if Congress would behave differently if they were consistently called "law janitors" or "public servants" or if those terms would just acquire the same connotations as "leader" and "politician"
themafia 1y ago
> it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. That seems highly disingenuous or just ignorant. We publicly had this problem starting in the 1990s. The NSA used to have a program that would capture data but then encrypt it and protect it from random access. They discontinued that program and instituted a new one that had zero privacy protections in it. This was right at the turn when the "war on terror" started. Which was the excuse then used to abandon the better program for the egregious one since it was projected to be better for this particular use case. It's debatable whether that was true or not. > Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores Record it if you want. Law enforcement, at any level, should require an actual warrant to access it in any form. This isn't a binary. You can enhance security and privacy at the same time.
potato3732842 1y ago
> It seems like no one sees a cost to just not addressing the issue. It's the same "impose a small but poorly defined cost on everybody and act as though it's worth it because it maybe saves one defined life and therefore anyone who wants to call you out has an uphill battle" model you see used by bad people and dishonest comment section types the world over. Society has no good way to reason about these "it's not much individually but when you do it to all of society it adds the F up" type downsides. Like if you could save one life per year at the cost of making it take everyone an extra minute per day that's obviously not worth it at the scale of the united states because you're actually losing more life than you're saving. But replace the "one minute" with something more subjective and nobody calls it out.
- hammock 1y ago
  You hit on it. The harms of surveillance is an externality, like air pollution. We think they are SELLING surveillance to us in the court of public opinion, but they aren’t. We aren’t the customers! They’re selling it to political donors, megaglobocorporate, a ruling class. And Joe Plumber is only consuming toxic byproducts
King-Aaron 1y ago
> I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist. It boils down to one thing that allows these surveillance technologies to exist: public apathy.
- hammock 1y ago
  That’s tautology. Why are people apathetic about it?
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. This is a cowardly excuse. It's another way of saying that if you reform mass surveillance you'll be blamed for anything bad that subsequently happens, regardless of whether the mass surveillance would have prevented it. And bad things happen on a regular basis with or without mass surveillance, so then the politically risk-averse move is to not solve the problem you promised to solve and not expose yourself. Which is cowardly specifically because the candidate's original position was correct. You can solve crimes without mass surveillance, or prevent them by reducing poverty etc. If you do those things then the chances of something bad happening go down instead of up. And it will still not be zero -- it won't be zero no matter what you do -- but in that case you're only worried about adversarial pundits blaming you for things that weren't your fault, and adversarial pundits are going to do that regardless.
autoexec 1y ago
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. Obama didn't swear an oath to safety, but he did swear an oath to protect the constitution. He is an oath breaker and not a man of integrity, but if we choose to trust his excuse then maybe we can forgive him as an individual for being frightened by the horror stories told to him by power hungry three letter agencies, but we should never forgive him as a president for his failure to uphold his oath. Obama studied and taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how important the oath he took was and what would be at risk if the constitution was ignored. It will always be more "safe" to take people's freedom and control them. Safety is just not an acceptable excuse to take away the freedoms of every American.
octoberfranklin 1y ago
although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety Power corrupts.
calibas 1y ago
> _what motivates our leaders to allow surveillance in the first place_ Surveillance makes their jobs easier, so there's a kind of natural tendency towards authoritarianism. We've known about this for a long time, the 4th Amendment was created to put limits on government surveillance. If you're wondering why the government would allow private businesses to spy on everybody when the government itself isn't allowed to, that's because this allows for the government to effectively bypass the 4th Amendment. The government spying on everybody is against the Constitution, but a private business spying on everybody and selling the data to the government is "legal".
hulitu 1y ago
> I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist You mean to ask questions ? No way. /s
vintermann 1y ago
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety Assuming that he was sincere about wanting reform in the first place (and that's a big if for any book like this! The best you can say for Obama vs. most other politicians, is that he at least likely wrote it himself), what it means was that he was persuaded that mass surveillance was useful. He doesn't say how, or by who, he just vaguely waves at the burden of command.
sans_souse 1y ago
I know this isn't a popular stance but in the present age of surveillance, mandated 24/7 body cams on every civilian might actually not be such a bad thing so long as you aren't a bad person. [edit] ideal world, and all of that et al
- neogodless 1y ago
  Bathrooms? Bedrooms? Changing diapers? This is a weird stance.
  - sans_souse 1y ago
    How do you think that works with cops and body cams? I am genuinely asking what you think here. I would guess probably most turn them off but maybe not all do. Why? Because all that stuff is irrelevant in the case the records are checked in the first place. If you're job is to soft thru evidence for legal process, are you watching the cop take a leak? You only care about rhe specific time frame of the incident in question. In fact you're jurisdiction is only within some narrow time frame so you'd have no business watching anything outside of that. That's my point.
- Greenpants 1y ago
  You might want to read "The Circle" if you haven't already. The reader gets to see an open-minded perspective of exactly this. Given your prior, I'd be curious what you think of it after reading.
  - sans_souse 1y ago
    Late on this but thanks I'll check it out

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

It might be like prison reform and prisoners' rights - Nobody gets elected on a "soft on crime" platform, and civic engagement at the state and local level is so bad that people typically put up with cameras instead of agitating to get them banned. I say agitate. Show up, keep showing up, keep talking, keep telling friends. We can fight this. Democracy will work if we get people onboard, one way or another

3eb7988a1663 1y ago
You are more optimistic than I am. Flock and friends seem something like ChatControl. Those in power who want it have unlimited patience. They will keep pushing for expanded capabilities for the day when public attention has failed. Once they win, near impossible to revoke.

Gigachad 1y ago

I’m not totally opposed to surveillance, I just wish it was more transparent and limited to need to know uses. If the police need your google search history thats ok as long as they can get a warrant showing they have justification and then perhaps at a delayed time, the account owner should be notified that this happened. If they need access to your phone, rather than hacking it they should just take it off you and get the password from you. This limits tracking since this is a fairly disruptive and visible thing and prevents just passive tracking of everyone all the time. Businesses who use facial recognition for loss prevention should be legally required to only use their data for this purpose and never for marketing and analytics. They must not ever sell the data and delete it within a reasonable time.

martin-t 1y ago
What kind of crimes does surveillance prevent or help solve? 1) It does not _prevent_ the most serious crimes. People who are going to murder or rape someone are often not mentally capable or understanding how likely they are to get caught or caring about it in the moment. It might help solve it but there's usually more than enough conventional evidence. And these crimes are typically not what people coordinate with others so surveilling communication does not help much. 2) Stealing? Maybe. I can imagine cameras dissuade some opportunists but then again, shoplifting is reportedly high with self-checkouts and those are packed with cameras. Other kinds like burglars will probably just learn to be more careful with gloves and masks. And surveilling communication does not help unless we're talking organized crime and those people should be competent enough to use encrypted comms even if the major platforms are backdoored. 3) Crimes of opportunity like vandalism. Again, cameras are enough, if they work at all. The extra fraction of idiots who would be caught because they brag only about setting a trash can on fire it negligible compared to the downsides. --- What surveillance absolutely could deter and help catch is organized resistance like staging a protest/riot/insurrection or individuals doing research before an assassination. And that's why politicians, who are the most likely victims of these crimes, want surveillance. And you might genuinely believe that no current politician in your country deserves to be shot or that the current government should not be overthrown. But we have to keep in mind that the next government will inherit these systems. Nothing is permanent, no democracy will last forever. Historically, most countries have periods of freedom and authoritarianism, separated by collapse or revolt. At some point, in your country too, people will need to rise up to reassert their rights again. It's a matter of when, not if. --- I see where you are coming from and there were times in my life where more surveillance would have helped my side but ultimately, it's a balancing act and surveillance tips the scale in favor of people who already have a lot of power.

armchairhacker 1y ago

Everyone thinks when they have power, they’ll use it correctly, because they have (from their perspective) good intentions. An ideal government with total surveillance is the best case. You get the benefits of low crime without the drawback of corruption and ideology. The problem is in practice: - Large institutions aren’t good at exercising fine control: even if the leaders have truly good intentions, corrupt mid-level employees and inaccurate data lead to bad outcomes. - Good leaders seem to often pick bad successors, and unless they frequently pick better successors, someone will eventually pick a corrupt one. - Corrupt leaders seem to be good at ousting or sidelining good leaders, more than vice versa, perhaps because good leaders are less passionate about gaining and keeping power. Perhaps there are other reasons. Not just ideal governments, but even self-preserving governments don’t tend to last. Hence, although decentralization and privacy are never ideal, they should exist at least for backup, “just in case” (inevitably in practice) the centralized surveillance system goes rouge.

bombdailer 1y ago
There's a reason Plato's Republic looks authoritarian to people, because it models a city in which justice is the highest good, and justice and freedom are ultimately opposed to each other. Since governments and laws exist to ensure justice, freedom will always be the price we pay.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >governments and laws exist to ensure justice Governments mostly exist to coordinate resource usage to out compete other societies. Some amount of justice and welfare and roads, or whatever other things (varied by society and time period), are what they pay us so that our compliance is mostly voluntary and is therefore substantially more efficient. You can bicker over exact word choice and the minute, but this general form is how it's always been from the present all the way back into the ancient world.
  - airstrike 1y ago
    Governments exist to monopolize violence in the hands of a few so that we may have less violence and more order overall.

martin-t 1y ago

Because when you call them leaders and when they see themselves as leaders, they see themselves as a separate class. A permanent difference from the " mere citizen" class. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on." -- Larry Ellison (who should not be anthropomorphized) And Ellison is not even a politician, he doesn't even has any kind of immunity. Meanwhile, EU politicians want to impose Chat Control on everyone except them. The core issue is that they see themselves as different from us. Politics should not be a career. It should be something a person does for 5, at most 10 years max and after that they are back to being like everyone else, with 0 benefits (and with potentially more surveillance, I think politicians' finances should be under extra scrutiny for the rest of their lives).

lyu07282 1y ago
It's really strange how we disconnected ideology from politics, in people's minds ideology only exists on the fringes of the far-left and far-right which are considered identical. If you criticize a politician you should be aware of their ideology, because they certainly are very much "political", but you aren't. When "leaders" talk about activists they say things like they were "politicized" as a derogatory term, in contrast to the default which is "depoliticized". Our leaders are waaaay more politicized than we are and way more ideologically consistent in their actions than you will ever realize.
immibis 1y ago
I wonder if Congress would behave differently if they were consistently called "law janitors" or "public servants" or if those terms would just acquire the same connotations as "leader" and "politician"

themafia 1y ago

> it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. That seems highly disingenuous or just ignorant. We publicly had this problem starting in the 1990s. The NSA used to have a program that would capture data but then encrypt it and protect it from random access. They discontinued that program and instituted a new one that had zero privacy protections in it. This was right at the turn when the "war on terror" started. Which was the excuse then used to abandon the better program for the egregious one since it was projected to be better for this particular use case. It's debatable whether that was true or not. > Flock cameras or walk into grocery stores Record it if you want. Law enforcement, at any level, should require an actual warrant to access it in any form. This isn't a binary. You can enhance security and privacy at the same time.

potato3732842 1y ago

> It seems like no one sees a cost to just not addressing the issue. It's the same "impose a small but poorly defined cost on everybody and act as though it's worth it because it maybe saves one defined life and therefore anyone who wants to call you out has an uphill battle" model you see used by bad people and dishonest comment section types the world over. Society has no good way to reason about these "it's not much individually but when you do it to all of society it adds the F up" type downsides. Like if you could save one life per year at the cost of making it take everyone an extra minute per day that's obviously not worth it at the scale of the united states because you're actually losing more life than you're saving. But replace the "one minute" with something more subjective and nobody calls it out.

hammock 1y ago
You hit on it. The harms of surveillance is an externality, like air pollution. We think they are SELLING surveillance to us in the court of public opinion, but they aren’t. We aren’t the customers! They’re selling it to political donors, megaglobocorporate, a ruling class. And Joe Plumber is only consuming toxic byproducts

King-Aaron 1y ago

> I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist. It boils down to one thing that allows these surveillance technologies to exist: public apathy.

hammock 1y ago
That’s tautology. Why are people apathetic about it?

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. This is a cowardly excuse. It's another way of saying that if you reform mass surveillance you'll be blamed for anything bad that subsequently happens, regardless of whether the mass surveillance would have prevented it. And bad things happen on a regular basis with or without mass surveillance, so then the politically risk-averse move is to not solve the problem you promised to solve and not expose yourself. Which is cowardly specifically because the candidate's original position was correct. You can solve crimes without mass surveillance, or prevent them by reducing poverty etc. If you do those things then the chances of something bad happening go down instead of up. And it will still not be zero -- it won't be zero no matter what you do -- but in that case you're only worried about adversarial pundits blaming you for things that weren't your fault, and adversarial pundits are going to do that regardless.

autoexec 1y ago

> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety. Obama didn't swear an oath to safety, but he did swear an oath to protect the constitution. He is an oath breaker and not a man of integrity, but if we choose to trust his excuse then maybe we can forgive him as an individual for being frightened by the horror stories told to him by power hungry three letter agencies, but we should never forgive him as a president for his failure to uphold his oath. Obama studied and taught constitutional law. He knew exactly how important the oath he took was and what would be at risk if the constitution was ignored. It will always be more "safe" to take people's freedom and control them. Safety is just not an acceptable excuse to take away the freedoms of every American.

octoberfranklin 1y ago

although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety Power corrupts.

calibas 1y ago

> _what motivates our leaders to allow surveillance in the first place_ Surveillance makes their jobs easier, so there's a kind of natural tendency towards authoritarianism. We've known about this for a long time, the 4th Amendment was created to put limits on government surveillance. If you're wondering why the government would allow private businesses to spy on everybody when the government itself isn't allowed to, that's because this allows for the government to effectively bypass the 4th Amendment. The government spying on everybody is against the Constitution, but a private business spying on everybody and selling the data to the government is "legal".

hulitu 1y ago

> I wish journalists would explore why the technical methods & information sharing that enable this surveillance are allowed to exist You mean to ask questions ? No way. /s

vintermann 1y ago

> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety Assuming that he was sincere about wanting reform in the first place (and that's a big if for any book like this! The best you can say for Obama vs. most other politicians, is that he at least likely wrote it himself), what it means was that he was persuaded that mass surveillance was useful. He doesn't say how, or by who, he just vaguely waves at the burden of command.

sans_souse 1y ago

I know this isn't a popular stance but in the present age of surveillance, mandated 24/7 body cams on every civilian might actually not be such a bad thing so long as you aren't a bad person. [edit] ideal world, and all of that et al

neogodless 1y ago
Bathrooms? Bedrooms? Changing diapers? This is a weird stance.
- sans_souse 1y ago
  How do you think that works with cops and body cams? I am genuinely asking what you think here. I would guess probably most turn them off but maybe not all do. Why? Because all that stuff is irrelevant in the case the records are checked in the first place. If you're job is to soft thru evidence for legal process, are you watching the cop take a leak? You only care about rhe specific time frame of the incident in question. In fact you're jurisdiction is only within some narrow time frame so you'd have no business watching anything outside of that. That's my point.
Greenpants 1y ago
You might want to read "The Circle" if you haven't already. The reader gets to see an open-minded perspective of exactly this. Given your prior, I'd be curious what you think of it after reading.
- sans_souse 1y ago
  Late on this but thanks I'll check it out