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Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not

Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped. Now take a step back, the problem with mass surveillance is that it gives disproportionate power to those who have access to it over those who don't. So instead of banning surveillance, which would be futile, it'll be much more practical to call for transparency, so the power generated by surveillance data is not concentrated to the select few.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I agree. I think there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and pretending that we can somehow control this is a fool's game that only fools would believe. The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Create a level playing field, and watch innovation take off as people try to gather their lives back together.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  It's interesting that more people are starting to speak up about it. Funny enough, I shared my thoughts on this a month ago: "When we allow for organizations such as the NSA to monopolize these tools for their own ends, we take the power away from ourselves to shape our own identities and for what purposes such information is used. We must realize that if we have already let things get to this point, that there will be no going back. That is why it is important for us to shift the focus on how data is collected on us as a whole, in favor for public uses."[0] [0]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-source-were-open-source http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-...
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  What does it mean that everyone has the same level of access? Would you just publish a big public database of all of the data collected via PRISM so everyone can just read everyone elses email?
  - nooneelse 13y ago
    How about this as a starting point... Terminals with access to the DB and analysis tools in every city hall. Accounts and access for all citizens of good standing (make a new security clearance level for this to codify the notion - revoked for stalking, felonies, publishing DB information outside the terminals etc). Access is logged and also in the DB. A set of forums reachable through the terminals that allow discussion of findings and policies (some with real names attached some with pseudonyms). The implication being, that you could read someone's email, but it is a matter of record that you did. Or perhaps the new citizens' security clearance would be stratified so that one needs to earn one's way up the scale of accessing info about other people, perhaps quorum's to grant higher clearance levels or temporary opening of some records. Yeah, rather unrealistic techno-utopian in thinking, I admit. But this is an entry-level idea of equal access taken straight-forwardly. Born a bit from me trying to keep myself wondering, how would this work in Banks' Culture?
- hobs 13y ago
  The only way this would work is when all the powerful people realize this is a terrible idea for their lives to be shared and put a stop to it. Knowing this much about people's lives is literally a danger to many of them, especially in the hands of everyone. The ability to pretext and get more information about people would go from a somewhat guarded skill to something any child could do, and problems like domestic abuse victims being tracked down via those types of things now becomes a trick anyone can pull. We need to put the genie back in the bottle, now.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  "The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access." Except that's not true. Before it was the NSA it was criminals and Chinese government-backed hackers stealing our documents. Suppose we implemented a transparent society in some utopia. What about the non-utopian foreigners and criminals? Another way forward is secure communications and storage. That would place natural limits on surveillance. If you are suspected of a very serious crime, the FBI would have to plant a bug to intercept your communications.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Advocates of a totally transparent society seem to be forgetting that there are significant reasons for privacy other than embarrassing personal details -- espionage, extortion, kidnapping, burglary, identity theft, blackmail, and more all become vastly simpler to execute and harder to prosecute when everyone knows everything about everyone, except the aforementioned criminals who know how not to leave a trail.
  - redxaxder 13y ago
    A society with a massive surveillance dragnet that everyone has access to is not necessarily totally transparent. Public access to the dragnet data would make it easier to evade the dragnet.
egocodedinsol 13y ago
fwiw, it has worked reasonably well for nuclear weapons, both in the sense that only nation-states have access (hopefully) and that only a select few nations have access.
- mpyne 13y ago
  I agree, but it's also essentially impossible to use nuclear weapons in a way which isn't transparent, which is not the case with PRISM. I do not agree with giving everyone access to surveillance tools for use, but I think improved transparency into those programs is something that can be done and should be done.
  - flumbaps 13y ago
    Yes, a nuclear blast is a lot more visible than an ongoing mass surveillance program. However, I would say that it is extremely hard to keep something like PRISM secret forever. Even if there is only a tiny probability of the information leaking each year, over the years the chance of keeping it secret decreases geometrically. All it takes is one upload to wikileaks. I agree that more transparency is a good idea. In fact, I think more transparency and less funding is a good idea for the intelligence agencies in general. We're living in a comparative time of peace, which means the incentives for these agencies (and the closely related private contractors) are to inflate their budgets and create work for themselves. Currently this seems to be driving an obsessive mission to monitor everything and everyone. This is bad enough of itself, but it could easily turn into creating enemies where none exist.
- pcrh 13y ago
  Restricting technology has worked in many areas in addition to nuclear technology, e.g. eugenics, abortion (in some places), access to firearms (in some places), wiretapping (previously), degraded GPS, etc. There is also no reason why commercial organizations should not be constrained in what information they are allowed to collect. There is no reason, technological or otherwise, why governments should not be restricted in what information they can collect on citizens without just cause.
- mayanksinghal 13y ago
s_q_b 13y ago
That's strikes me as impractical. Just because the police can enter my house for certain reasons doesn't mean everyone should have that right. Similarly, there are legitimate reasons for the government to conduct surveillance. That does not mean everyone should have the same access to that information. This route would sound the death knell for privacy far more quickly and surely than current surveillance programs ever could.
alan_cx 13y ago
Er, no. I don't want to be spied on, no matter how "open" the process is. My problem isn't the openness, its the spying in the first place. I don't care if its a select few, or the whole worlds population, I don't want to be spied on. I have done nothing wrong. I am not a suspect. I don't expect to be treated like one as some sort of evil default, thank you very much. Get your suspect first, then do the spying. Not violate the population's privacy to find a suspect. Do that and people who say the West has become some sort of Nazi/Communist terror state will begin to sound less mental. Sorry, but bending over and taking it rectally is no solution what so ever. It is a weak, lazy, cowardly, surrender.
- wslh 13y ago
  I would say sarcastically that if NSA is spying without much efforts, just pushing a button and analyzing the data with well known algorithms then US can reduce their deficit by a big amount firing all those "analysts". They can even anonymize the information and crowdsource the analysis like Kaggle.
- leot 13y ago
  We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not. The internet permits much more anonymity and privacy than people had previously: we no longer need to mail physical letters, post physical signs, or tell people things in person in order to communicate some piece of information. Humans have more privacy, not less, because they don't need to physically go to adult cinemas, video stores, or peep shows; and the walls of a house are much thicker than those of a shack, a straw hut, or a teepee. What has changed over the last few hundred years has not been a decrease in our abilities to be anonymous or private, since in the past it was harder to be discreet. The change has rather been that instead of a town or a village knowing through the grapevine what's going on, it is a central authority who is collecting all the information, with all the attendant power that having such information affords. The problem is thus not a lack of privacy and anonymity -- we have more of it than we ever did. What we suffer from is massive disparities in who knows what about whom (as compared with most of human history). This is the problem which is rectified by greater transparency.
hemancuso 13y ago
Lock picking and door smashing have undoubtably advanced since the fourth amendment was adopted. Your argument essentially suggests that technology renders the fourth meaningless to the extent that we should constant to always be searched as long as we know about it. Doesn't seem like a good argument.
AnthonyMouse 13y ago
>So instead of banning surveillance, which would be futile, it'll be much more practical to call for transparency, so the power generated by surveillance data is not concentrated to the select few. Transparency is necessary but not sufficient. Being able to see the government taking bad risks doesn't cut it if we can't actually stop them. And the problem is that it's not just the government and it's not just our government. You can't just come up with some restrictions on the FBI or the NSA (good luck with that anyway, and good luck enforcing it) while you ignore what China or large corporations might be doing. Part of the answer to surveillance technology has to be anti-surveillance technology. And I think one of the big things we need to push for is: We need more bandwidth. We need a national push for gigabit fiber to the home. Copious transmission capacity attacks vulnerability to surveillance in two ways: The first is that it reduces the practicality of storing all the data, by increasing the volume of data by an order of magnitude or more. We can price the spies out of the market. The second is that it facilitates anti-surveillance technology. Tor is slow because it's bandwidth starved. Most people have piss-poor uplinks which are a factor of ten or more slower than their downlinks, which becomes the bottleneck if those users were to operate a relay. We need to solve the bandwidth shortage to make widespread use of that sort of technology practical.
- andrewflnr 13y ago
  Yes. Don't give up, math is on our side. AFAICT, this is still true if quantum computing takes off. If surveillance is a technological problem, let's solve it. I think it's just a matter of time. People already want more bandwidth for more mundane reasons, and there's enough people who want user-friendly crypto that someone is going to get it right eventually.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    The math is on our side in the case of encryption. Not all surveillance is meaningfully countered by encryption.
another 13y ago
Even if you disagree with him (and to some extent I do), Brin was quite prescient on this topic. _The Transparent Society_ [1] anticipated most of this debate, 15 years ago, and it is well worth [re-]reading. [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html
- vacuo 13y ago
  You read my mind. As soon as I read this article I thought of David Brin. For a shorter introduction to his work, check out the five-page essay [1] he wrote a few years before publishing his full book. [1] Speaking of small cameras: The Transparent Society. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html
grey-area 13y ago
Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped. Just because technical advancement cannot be stopped, that doesn't mean that all technical capabilities should be available freely to everyone, without legal limit. Many things are technically possible but still illegal, for good reason.
flumbaps 13y ago
I would argue that although the advance of technology makes mass scale surveillance easier, it also makes it harder to hide. Secrets are harder to keep now, and that cuts in both directions. I think banning mass surveillance wouldn't necessarily be futile. With vigilance and enough political will, such a ban could be enforced and maintained. Also, there are also other technologies that can affect whether or not mass surveillance is practical. Cryptographic tools like Tor and Bitmessage, represent another technological advance that can only be delayed.
marvin 13y ago
We have the technological capability of blowing up cities with nuclear weapons as well. We have decided to create laws and follow moral judgement in order not to do it. We can do the same thing with surveilance.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I agree. I think there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, and pretending that we can somehow control this is a fool's game that only fools would believe. The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Create a level playing field, and watch innovation take off as people try to gather their lives back together.

cinquemb 13y ago
It's interesting that more people are starting to speak up about it. Funny enough, I shared my thoughts on this a month ago: "When we allow for organizations such as the NSA to monopolize these tools for their own ends, we take the power away from ourselves to shape our own identities and for what purposes such information is used. We must realize that if we have already let things get to this point, that there will be no going back. That is why it is important for us to shift the focus on how data is collected on us as a whole, in favor for public uses."[0] [0]: http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-source-were-open-source http://blog.pictobar.com/post/52533760444/the-nsa-is-closed-...
jiggy2011 13y ago
What does it mean that everyone has the same level of access? Would you just publish a big public database of all of the data collected via PRISM so everyone can just read everyone elses email?
- nooneelse 13y ago
  How about this as a starting point... Terminals with access to the DB and analysis tools in every city hall. Accounts and access for all citizens of good standing (make a new security clearance level for this to codify the notion - revoked for stalking, felonies, publishing DB information outside the terminals etc). Access is logged and also in the DB. A set of forums reachable through the terminals that allow discussion of findings and policies (some with real names attached some with pseudonyms). The implication being, that you could read someone's email, but it is a matter of record that you did. Or perhaps the new citizens' security clearance would be stratified so that one needs to earn one's way up the scale of accessing info about other people, perhaps quorum's to grant higher clearance levels or temporary opening of some records. Yeah, rather unrealistic techno-utopian in thinking, I admit. But this is an entry-level idea of equal access taken straight-forwardly. Born a bit from me trying to keep myself wondering, how would this work in Banks' Culture?
hobs 13y ago
The only way this would work is when all the powerful people realize this is a terrible idea for their lives to be shared and put a stop to it. Knowing this much about people's lives is literally a danger to many of them, especially in the hands of everyone. The ability to pretext and get more information about people would go from a somewhat guarded skill to something any child could do, and problems like domestic abuse victims being tracked down via those types of things now becomes a trick anyone can pull. We need to put the genie back in the bottle, now.
Zigurd 13y ago
"The only way forward is for everybody to be guaranteed the same access." Except that's not true. Before it was the NSA it was criminals and Chinese government-backed hackers stealing our documents. Suppose we implemented a transparent society in some utopia. What about the non-utopian foreigners and criminals? Another way forward is secure communications and storage. That would place natural limits on surveillance. If you are suspected of a very serious crime, the FBI would have to plant a bug to intercept your communications.
nitrogen 13y ago
Advocates of a totally transparent society seem to be forgetting that there are significant reasons for privacy other than embarrassing personal details -- espionage, extortion, kidnapping, burglary, identity theft, blackmail, and more all become vastly simpler to execute and harder to prosecute when everyone knows everything about everyone, except the aforementioned criminals who know how not to leave a trail.
- redxaxder 13y ago
  A society with a massive surveillance dragnet that everyone has access to is not necessarily totally transparent. Public access to the dragnet data would make it easier to evade the dragnet.

egocodedinsol 13y ago

fwiw, it has worked reasonably well for nuclear weapons, both in the sense that only nation-states have access (hopefully) and that only a select few nations have access.

mpyne 13y ago
I agree, but it's also essentially impossible to use nuclear weapons in a way which isn't transparent, which is not the case with PRISM. I do not agree with giving everyone access to surveillance tools for use, but I think improved transparency into those programs is something that can be done and should be done.
- flumbaps 13y ago
  Yes, a nuclear blast is a lot more visible than an ongoing mass surveillance program. However, I would say that it is extremely hard to keep something like PRISM secret forever. Even if there is only a tiny probability of the information leaking each year, over the years the chance of keeping it secret decreases geometrically. All it takes is one upload to wikileaks. I agree that more transparency is a good idea. In fact, I think more transparency and less funding is a good idea for the intelligence agencies in general. We're living in a comparative time of peace, which means the incentives for these agencies (and the closely related private contractors) are to inflate their budgets and create work for themselves. Currently this seems to be driving an obsessive mission to monitor everything and everyone. This is bad enough of itself, but it could easily turn into creating enemies where none exist.
pcrh 13y ago
Restricting technology has worked in many areas in addition to nuclear technology, e.g. eugenics, abortion (in some places), access to firearms (in some places), wiretapping (previously), degraded GPS, etc. There is also no reason why commercial organizations should not be constrained in what information they are allowed to collect. There is no reason, technological or otherwise, why governments should not be restricted in what information they can collect on citizens without just cause.
mayanksinghal 13y ago

s_q_b 13y ago

That's strikes me as impractical. Just because the police can enter my house for certain reasons doesn't mean everyone should have that right. Similarly, there are legitimate reasons for the government to conduct surveillance. That does not mean everyone should have the same access to that information. This route would sound the death knell for privacy far more quickly and surely than current surveillance programs ever could.

alan_cx 13y ago

Er, no. I don't want to be spied on, no matter how "open" the process is. My problem isn't the openness, its the spying in the first place. I don't care if its a select few, or the whole worlds population, I don't want to be spied on. I have done nothing wrong. I am not a suspect. I don't expect to be treated like one as some sort of evil default, thank you very much. Get your suspect first, then do the spying. Not violate the population's privacy to find a suspect. Do that and people who say the West has become some sort of Nazi/Communist terror state will begin to sound less mental. Sorry, but bending over and taking it rectally is no solution what so ever. It is a weak, lazy, cowardly, surrender.

wslh 13y ago
I would say sarcastically that if NSA is spying without much efforts, just pushing a button and analyzing the data with well known algorithms then US can reduce their deficit by a big amount firing all those "analysts". They can even anonymize the information and crowdsource the analysis like Kaggle.
leot 13y ago
We know that people behave better when they're accountable for what they do and say, and worse when they're not. The internet permits much more anonymity and privacy than people had previously: we no longer need to mail physical letters, post physical signs, or tell people things in person in order to communicate some piece of information. Humans have more privacy, not less, because they don't need to physically go to adult cinemas, video stores, or peep shows; and the walls of a house are much thicker than those of a shack, a straw hut, or a teepee. What has changed over the last few hundred years has not been a decrease in our abilities to be anonymous or private, since in the past it was harder to be discreet. The change has rather been that instead of a town or a village knowing through the grapevine what's going on, it is a central authority who is collecting all the information, with all the attendant power that having such information affords. The problem is thus not a lack of privacy and anonymity -- we have more of it than we ever did. What we suffer from is massive disparities in who knows what about whom (as compared with most of human history). This is the problem which is rectified by greater transparency.

hemancuso 13y ago

Lock picking and door smashing have undoubtably advanced since the fourth amendment was adopted. Your argument essentially suggests that technology renders the fourth meaningless to the extent that we should constant to always be searched as long as we know about it. Doesn't seem like a good argument.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

>So instead of banning surveillance, which would be futile, it'll be much more practical to call for transparency, so the power generated by surveillance data is not concentrated to the select few. Transparency is necessary but not sufficient. Being able to see the government taking bad risks doesn't cut it if we can't actually stop them. And the problem is that it's not just the government and it's not just our government. You can't just come up with some restrictions on the FBI or the NSA (good luck with that anyway, and good luck enforcing it) while you ignore what China or large corporations might be doing. Part of the answer to surveillance technology has to be anti-surveillance technology. And I think one of the big things we need to push for is: We need more bandwidth. We need a national push for gigabit fiber to the home. Copious transmission capacity attacks vulnerability to surveillance in two ways: The first is that it reduces the practicality of storing all the data, by increasing the volume of data by an order of magnitude or more. We can price the spies out of the market. The second is that it facilitates anti-surveillance technology. Tor is slow because it's bandwidth starved. Most people have piss-poor uplinks which are a factor of ten or more slower than their downlinks, which becomes the bottleneck if those users were to operate a relay. We need to solve the bandwidth shortage to make widespread use of that sort of technology practical.

andrewflnr 13y ago
Yes. Don't give up, math is on our side. AFAICT, this is still true if quantum computing takes off. If surveillance is a technological problem, let's solve it. I think it's just a matter of time. People already want more bandwidth for more mundane reasons, and there's enough people who want user-friendly crypto that someone is going to get it right eventually.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  The math is on our side in the case of encryption. Not all surveillance is meaningfully countered by encryption.

another 13y ago

Even if you disagree with him (and to some extent I do), Brin was quite prescient on this topic. _The Transparent Society_ [1] anticipated most of this debate, 15 years ago, and it is well worth [re-]reading. [1] http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

vacuo 13y ago
You read my mind. As soon as I read this article I thought of David Brin. For a shorter introduction to his work, check out the five-page essay [1] he wrote a few years before publishing his full book. [1] Speaking of small cameras: The Transparent Society. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html

grey-area 13y ago

Ease and scale of surveillance was more a result of technical improvement, and if history has shown us anything, technical advancement can only be delayed, not stopped. Just because technical advancement cannot be stopped, that doesn't mean that all technical capabilities should be available freely to everyone, without legal limit. Many things are technically possible but still illegal, for good reason.

flumbaps 13y ago

I would argue that although the advance of technology makes mass scale surveillance easier, it also makes it harder to hide. Secrets are harder to keep now, and that cuts in both directions. I think banning mass surveillance wouldn't necessarily be futile. With vigilance and enough political will, such a ban could be enforced and maintained. Also, there are also other technologies that can affect whether or not mass surveillance is practical. Cryptographic tools like Tor and Bitmessage, represent another technological advance that can only be delayed.

marvin 13y ago

We have the technological capability of blowing up cities with nuclear weapons as well. We have decided to create laws and follow moral judgement in order not to do it. We can do the same thing with surveilance.