13 ms·

Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?

79 points by ulysses 13y ago

nawitus 13y ago
Avoiding surveillance is easy, but it costs money. It turns out most people don't want to pay for it, and the market decides in favour of surveillance. (I'm talking about voluntary surveillance here. Even if there's no voluntary surveillance, governments could obviously still spy on you).
chroem 13y ago
How I wish that this title weren't presented as a question...
- saraid216 13y ago
  Why? HN's favorite law applies perfectly fine here.
  - chroem 13y ago
    That's exactly what I mean. Despite the content of the article, the title really shows that anything other than mass surveillance is just wishful thinking at this point.
brianbarker 13y ago
Well it's already here, so no. The pertinent question is how can we dismantle the surveillance state.
- Fasebook 13y ago
  well, we can use the information to play the market and more solidify the power we already have until the world is our slave.
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
It's not so much that governments have less control over us, but rather that technology has enabled them to be more discreet about it. If you've ever read up on the history of intelligence gathering, psyops and unethical experimentation in the U.S., you'd be shocked by how much civil rights have been violated throughout history, even in the supposed land of the free. However, the old adage holds true: out of sight, out of mind. It's true that in general we have more liberties now than ever, but it's on the surface. The trade-off is that behind the scenes, you're worse now than ever. As for technology enabling Snowden to leak more than he could have without digital methods, that's correct. The Pentagon Papers were still relatively large, though. 7,000 pages out of over 20,000 source material, IIRC. Your example of the public uncovering a photo manipulation isn't really all that impressive, though. Just one propaganda piece dismantled, but it's not like things like this haven't been exposed before the advent of widespread digital photo manipulation. At best, the public may have a better eye for such deception, but in the long run these are all trivial issues anyway. Sousveillance is an excellent thing, but ostensibly it has no major effect on police conduct. Simply having citizens film officers is not a deterrent, since the police as an institution are fundamentally overpowered and not given enough oversight. They're state auxiliaries. It doesn't faze them. Widespread cryptography is a great thing, but at the moment it's inaccessible to most people and an arms race. Things will improve in the near future, but how practical will it be at deflecting bulk surveillance states is beyond the breadth of this post. On your last point, you're right about the Church Commission publicly exposing NSA and FBI malice. But ultimately, the only effect it had was some formal legislation that essentially did not hinder the agencies from performing clandestine and unlawful operations any bit. This is your fatal error in reasoning. You're expecting some surface legislative reform to solve much deeper structural issues. Remember Total Information Awareness and how scandalous it was in 2003? Did public outcry end it? Ostensibly it did, but in reality the agencies just learned to practice better OPSEC and moved to the same goal, but under different names, and more modularized. Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? Maybe. But probably not with your solutions.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  You are mostly correct, but pervasive surveillance of police behavior, even when it is entirely controlled by the police department results in deep cuts in the use of force, and of complaints against the police. Still, that doesn't make me an optimist about "sousveillance."
rayiner 13y ago
It's refreshing to read a level headed article on this situation that brings historical context into the analysis. I think the decentralization of technology point is key and underappreciated. Technology makes dystopia harder to maintain, not easier. In feudal times, someone who wanted to overthrow an oppressive tyrant had the very uphill battle of gathering together a large enough army of soldiers to create an effective resistance. Yet the dystopia of the future could be overthrown by a single hacker getting into critical computer or military systems.
- zenogais 13y ago
  Not necessarily true. It depends on whether you think technology is a part of the problem or the solution. I would recommend Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society" for a decent treatment of this point and a fairly convincing refusal of the idea that decentralised technology makes dystopia harder - it's just a different kind of dystopia.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I think technology is neutral. At the end of the day, it's always people that are the problem and the solution. The same technology that allows a despot to oppress people more easily simultaneously makes it easier for a faction to overthrow him. Consider Hitler's Germany. There were factions within the military that tried to overthrow him, but failed. My assertion is that widely distributed technology makes it easier for factions like that to succeed.
trekky1700 13y ago
I think super accurate mass surveillance is inevitable. It goes with expanding technological capabilities, both government and civilian. I think the real question needs to be focused at how it's applied, whether it's used solely for good or evil. Fretting over whether or how it's coming is simply illogical, focusing efforts on making sure it's used properly is the only forward thinking, reality accepting solution.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. Decisions have been made to apply technology in this way and to allow technology to be applied in this way. We're not surrendering to some sort of technological determinism, but to government contractors, Congressmen, judges, the unitary Executive, and a short list of private companies and individuals. The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. That we can't get back to that state is a failure of national character, not an advance in technology.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    > We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. That's kind of the point though. After the Cold War we gave the military every capability needed to oppress us 1000x over without too much fretting about police states, trusting that the government would not force us to live at the point of a gun. We didn't simply forbid the military from having missiles, which is the proposed equivalent here. > The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. Sure they were, ever since Smith v. Maryland, and for all the years before Katz v. United States. Any prohibitions on what government could look at regarding business records or on the wire were imposed by Congress, not by the Constitution.
  - randallsquared 13y ago
    "We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun." Weapons are not reducing in cost and size every year. It's possible in principle to know if someone has a weapon, and to exclude them from a given small area. Weapons have only a few specific uses (defense, hunting, target shooting or sparring, crime), and don't gain hundreds of new kinds of uses every week. The soaking of our society in computing power and recording is proceeding rapidly, and I don't think it can be stopped in any given jurisdiction without severely impacting the ability of that jurisdiction's business to compete economically. The ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on what individuals can record implies a police state, even if the police are kindly for now. I notice that people now calmly mention that they partially disagree with Brin, rather than dismissing his transparent society as completely beyond the pale.
higherpurpose 13y ago
And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology. Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will "stop" mass surveillance, as I assume metadata could still be collected unless we think of ways to anonymize almost everything, too, and not just decentralize everything, but at least it should severely limit the mass collection of the content itself. And if we decide as a society that mass anonymization is what we need (in other words, how the Internet was before Facebook, Google+ and post-9/11 NSA), I think we'll have the technical ways to do it. I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a person more freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much "richer" than we were decades or a century ago. It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any given country can fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a permanent state. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...
joesmo 13y ago
Even without technological advances, the US public school system has been able to teach false history (and other subjects including science) for decades. Sure it can be checked and a minority of students may be angry for being lied to but this has yet to stop the system. It's true that information is hardly it's primary purpose, that being babysitting, but the perception that school is for learning lends it much credibility. The other major problem is that we are now forced to choose between privacy and innovation. Want to use any cloud based service or any service that operates on remote data? You give up any right to privacy regardless of any corporate policy. Want to be secure and private? Put up with slow tor, no remote services, and no cell phone. If enough people chose the latter, it might make a dent in companies' bottom line to possibly get them to use their clout to influence policy towards privacy. It's unlikely that will happen, and even if it does, until corporate data can be protected from surveillance without a warrant, even that is moot.
- kungpooey 13y ago
  You dusted too much of the illusion away all at once. In a world where up is down and evil is good you have to start in small digestible bits... or realize you're paddling upstream with a straw. We lost the education and information war through exactly the systems of disguised brainwashing you mentioned.
mpyne 13y ago
Avoiding it is the easy part. The hard part will be maintaining the Open Internet in the face of what Snowden did. He started to force policymakers to realize that a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network defense needs, normal law enforcement (not to mention the spy agencies that most countries want to run), and even cultural/jurisdictional questions on things like data privacy rights. Because the next question that comes after "why was NSA sidestepping the Constitution by peeking at the data abroad?" is "wait, why was my data over in Europe??", just as Germany is now considering making an EU-centric e-mail so that their citizens' data remains safe from being treated under American law.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  > a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network defense needs There isn't a middle ground. Either the people have access to strong encryption, DHTs, cryptocurrency, etc., or we live in a panopticon, a soft cage, a managed illusion of freedom. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube. The real question is whether we need more than 10% of the military industrial complex we currently have, or whether this is a deadweight, dragging down our economy and destroying freedom.
- sentenza 13y ago
  The EU-only email thing is just a symptom of the broken worldview of some German politicians. They can't admit that they gambled away a lot of our freedom without even being aware of what their actions meant, so they engage in meaningless gestures to hopefully appease the lowly plebs. If they were honest and serious, they'd just get out there, tell everybody to encrypt everything, change as many laws as possible to force all entities under their control to maintain and transfer data only encrypted and pump money into better crypto. But as I said, if they were honest and serious...
sentientmachine 13y ago
The question is, which civilization will most thoroughly utilize the superpower that is the internet and getting millions of people to act in unison, as one. We will need new founding fathers to re-write the book on what the most perfect union looks like. Perhaps capitalism is not the best system, considering everyone can instantly know what everyone else is contributing or not contributing.
- MrZongle2 13y ago
  We will need new founding fathers to re-write the book on what the most perfect union looks like. Let me be the first to request that of our 21st Century founding fathers (gender-neutral), none of them are from our existing political or entertainment classes.
- onnoonno 13y ago
  Maybe we shouldn't be thinking in terms of utopia/dystopia or good and evil. If there is one thing about us, it is technology marching on. Maybe we're just slowly being converted (or converting ourselves) into the borg. And it isn't brutal, it is cozy, nice, a little bit dull maybe, because we are working on losing our ape-like rawness. If it would be brutal, it wouldn't be efficient, and we highly value efficiency! We have the drugs for 'fixing people', and the neuroscience progresses. Maybe we'll simply end up as some kind of big, self-aware, computing foam covering the whole planet. Which many here would describe as 'dystopian', yet it is interestingly close to the simple idea of 'utopia' from, let's say, the movie 'Avatar'.
afutd 13y ago
"'We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.' Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child's rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. 'So now they have to run everything.' The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind ... The only trouble was, no despot had the resources to plan every detail in his society's behavior. Not even planet-wrecker bombs had as dire a reputation for eliminating civilizations." --Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
- exratione 13y ago
  And Trygve Ytre and Gunnar Larson? Larson was millennia dead, of course. The civilization at Ytre had barely outlived the man. There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror. Most likely, Larson's own localizers had precipitated the end. All the wisdom, all the inscrutability, hadn't helped his world much. --Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
stretchwithme 13y ago
We can avoid it only if we wake up to the real problem. We don't get to pick who represents our interests. We can only vote for preselected choices. This concentrates power in the hands of a few. And these are more immune to voter desires and more subject to other forms of manipulation. Either you exercise your power. Or its up for grabs. We need proportional representation, at least in the House of Representatives.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  The city where I live has PR and I grew up in a country where it is the norm. I like it too, but it's not a panacea, you still get abuse, corruption, and political horse trading of all kinds.
  - stretchwithme 13y ago
    Yes, its not a panacea. If the people are clueless, even the best decision making system in the world will still yield bad decisions. Regarding horse trading, I'm not opposed to trading favors. If group 1 really wants X and don't really care about Y, while another really wants Y but is willing to give up X, why shouldn't they trade? Where I object to tradeoffs is where Goldman Sachs and former GS CEO Paulson trade favors, while those financing the goodies have no representation or even awareness of what's going on.
drdeadringer 13y ago
Avoid? We're here.
fleitz 13y ago
Sure it's easy to avoid surveillance state dystopia... learn from Winston... O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
I think the more pertinent question is how do we get out of a surveillance state dystopia? We've been in one for quite a while now.
snizzysnaps 13y ago
I'm tired of this argument. Really. LISTEN UP: There is only this tiny fraction of the population that cares about surveillance, represented by a tech minority, Hacker News, and Reddit. The rest of the country could care less. They're 10x more outraged that Netflix seems a little slow this week, or that their favorite jelly donut is out of stock at Krispy Kreme. We've had a surveillance state for 30 years, and nothing is going to change that. If you don't want to be surveilled get rid of all of your electronics. The truth is, the gov't is going to continue on the path of a Brave New World, not 1984. Don't believe me? 50% of ALL drugs produced in the world are used by Americans. All most people care about is their next bump of Oxycontin with a chaser of Xanex, and the next bit of TV or internet nonsense they are going to piss their time away on. Edward Snowden proved - that deep down - the masses don't care, and they certainly aren't going to do anything about it. I wish this circle-jerk would end.
- iamwithnail 13y ago
  They don't. But they should. And that's part of the problem.
suprgeek 13y ago
"Can we avoid a Surveillance State" - Very Unlikely. At every level of the Government, the incentives are perversely aligned against this. The local, city, state & national Govts. all want MORE surveillance not less. They will conitnue to chip-away making it more & more difficult to remain private & anonymous. The only force combating these pressures is un-organized & semi-organized "concerned" citizens (and a few watchdogs). What will the outcome be?
- swombat 13y ago
  Your comment responds to the title without addressing any of the points made in the article. Did you bother reading it?
adamrights 13y ago
That's why the importance of removing bad laws off the books, and reforming what we consider essential liberties is so important. Yes, the observation state is coming as many have said, but how we apply it, and who has the power of checks is the the real question. If every on foot police officer has a camera on their lapel that any citizen can log in to and monitor, if much of the technology behind the monitoring is transparent -- if the people ultimately control the monitoring and its usage is to detect weapons, explosives and true acts of terror...not petty things like teenagers with pot -- then I believe the coming 'monitored state' will not be as scary. So the removal of bad laws. Maximum liberty in the privacy of one's house, and then crazy cameras and detectors for explosives and the printed guns et al is where I hope/believe the future can head too. Call it the green tea party ;p EDIT: In my world every printed gun, hell every gun taken out of the household needs to be transmitting its location so I can log on to a 'like google maps/latitude' type app and see exactly where any weapons in the public space are...and anyone caught by the monitors or an officer without 'reporting' on their weapons would face the severest of consequences. On the counter side though, within the house hold, you can print and make whatever you want. You can do the vices you'd like, and you can petition for areas within the public space to do such things, as long as I can also see where it is taking place and avoid if I desire too.
einhverfr 13y ago
It is an interesting article. What it seems to be getting at is that there is an elaborate dance of power between individuals and the state. This dance of power exists everywhere and in all ages. It isn't clear to me that was is different in kind in Stalinist Russia, though, so part of this article seems to me to be a half-full vs half-empty glass problem. Moreover the present is always being rewritten by government and the media. This is something that's been apparent to a lot of people for some time. Not only did Noam Chomsky write extensively on this subject but Hilaire Belloc wrote more or less the same thing about newspapers in 1918 in "The Free Press".[1] One of the key things Belloc pointed to was the necessity of non-corporate, decentralized, topical, and outright propagandist press to counteract the effects of corporate newspapers. I think he'd be very pleased to see the current blogosphere. So the author's points about the necessity of decentralized technology actually go quite a bit further than the points he makes. On the other hand though, it seems to me that what this shows is that there is no bright line between dystopia and normal life. By some measures, of course, we are already in a surveillance state dystopia. So I am not sure the question is meaningful. The major problem that makes the dystopian elements of the present hard to dislodge however are the twin facts that: 1. American culture is very much focused on impersonal institutions of scale (central government, big corporations), and individualism, and this isolates individuals, denying them support break free from the impersonal institutional bonds that we have created in substitute for the bonds of family, neighborhood, and community (which were stronger when I was growing up and are stronger where I am living right now, Indonesia). 2. We place our primary protections of the individual not in social ties (common everywhere else) but in documents which purport to restrain the central government (namely the Bill of Rights). My view is that until we can start focusing on building stronger communities, decentralizing government and bringing the power closer to the people, and decentralizing the economy (disfavoring large businesses in favor of small ones) the dystopia will in fact deepen. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018
lovemenot 13y ago
We are in transition between a Nash equilibrium where information was scarce, to another where it will be hyper-abundant and there's a temporary window open to exploit the older paradigm, before it completely shifts to the newer. The solution to the problems of privacy is economic. As the quantity of data in the world expands exponentially, so the cost of using it scales. There is at present an unproven hypothesis that more big data delivers proportionally more value. It'll soon become obvious that this is not the case. That realisation will be at the root of the next popped bubble. Meanwhile data will continue to expand, with eventually no actor having a hope of resourcing the capture, storage and analysis of it all. As signal to noise ratio decreases, so the business model of any large data gathering entity will fail. The harder they come, the harder they fall.
- bishnu 13y ago
  Uh, how is this in any way a Nash equilibrium? And the rise of the pervading surveillance state has little to do with the perceived value of the data collected.
  - lovemenot 13y ago
    As long as we are only concerned about State actors, I'll answer your second question by pointing out that Congress and international equivalents must continue to fund their agencies' operations. That will become increasingly challenging in the face of incessant cost growth and uncertain benefit.
zcarter 13y ago
An interesting thought experiment that should be informing more of the discussion is to take inevitability for granted. If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access. Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can intrude, instead of a select few. Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.
ChuckFrank 13y ago
I worked on this. The Author has tried to examine the question about how to deal with a Surveillance State at a personal level. I don't recommend all the projects that I work on, but I certainly recommend this one. M Against M by Declan Tan. http://www.amazon.com/M-Against-Declan-Tan/dp/0982280998 http://www.amazon.com/M-Against-Declan-Tan/dp/0982280998
starmanjones 13y ago
declare void the illegally-installed federal constitution and revert to the articles of confederation. Problem solved. Put me and 4 likeminded men on the supreme court and it shall be done.
dizzystar 13y ago
This article misses the main thrust of mass surveillance, in my opinion, and touches on something I've heard few people ever express. Someone that lived in my building believed in some aspects of conspiracy theories. For example, he believed that Facebook was backed by the CIA. Why? According to him, if you thought about it, all of that information that they had to spend months digging for was now given to them for free, by upfront admission. The point is that we are willingly giving up our rights to privacy. We are openly using, and promoting to our friends, various sites that expressly user our data for their own means. We are the ones who are printing free copies of the keys to our castle. We are already halfway there. This trend will only get worse, in my opinion, and at the end of the day, we will blame the government, but really it was only us to blame because by openly publishing a large part of our private lives, we imply permission for anyone and everyone to have that information for free.
- darkmighty 13y ago
  Another argument that goes across this one is wether we can prevent at all essentially having all our lives "deducible" without sacrificing technological progress with two things in mind: a) Demanding better answers or better functionality ultimately relies on surrendering information (information problem) b) Computing power will allow machine-learning algorithms to deduce a lot from very little (computing power problem) Novel crypto may eventually produce solutions to this, but it's unclear. An example, regarding location privacy: http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf
- SkynetSystems 13y ago
  >Someone that lived in my building believed in some aspects of conspiracy theories. For example, he believed that Facebook was backed by the CIA. Facebook really was backed by the CIA though (through one of its investment arms) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGdWsxHJlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGdWsxHJlM
glasz 13y ago
sure we can. or could, rather. if we really would do, so many other things would not be. but we won't. we are sheep. and we like it.

79 points by ulysses 13y ago

Avoiding surveillance is easy, but it costs money. It turns out most people don't want to pay for it, and the market decides in favour of surveillance. (I'm talking about voluntary surveillance here. Even if there's no voluntary surveillance, governments could obviously still spy on you).

chroem 13y ago

How I wish that this title weren't presented as a question...

saraid216 13y ago
Why? HN's favorite law applies perfectly fine here.
- chroem 13y ago
  That's exactly what I mean. Despite the content of the article, the title really shows that anything other than mass surveillance is just wishful thinking at this point.

brianbarker 13y ago

Well it's already here, so no. The pertinent question is how can we dismantle the surveillance state.

Fasebook 13y ago
well, we can use the information to play the market and more solidify the power we already have until the world is our slave.

vezzy-fnord 13y ago

It's not so much that governments have less control over us, but rather that technology has enabled them to be more discreet about it. If you've ever read up on the history of intelligence gathering, psyops and unethical experimentation in the U.S., you'd be shocked by how much civil rights have been violated throughout history, even in the supposed land of the free. However, the old adage holds true: out of sight, out of mind. It's true that in general we have more liberties now than ever, but it's on the surface. The trade-off is that behind the scenes, you're worse now than ever. As for technology enabling Snowden to leak more than he could have without digital methods, that's correct. The Pentagon Papers were still relatively large, though. 7,000 pages out of over 20,000 source material, IIRC. Your example of the public uncovering a photo manipulation isn't really all that impressive, though. Just one propaganda piece dismantled, but it's not like things like this haven't been exposed before the advent of widespread digital photo manipulation. At best, the public may have a better eye for such deception, but in the long run these are all trivial issues anyway. Sousveillance is an excellent thing, but ostensibly it has no major effect on police conduct. Simply having citizens film officers is not a deterrent, since the police as an institution are fundamentally overpowered and not given enough oversight. They're state auxiliaries. It doesn't faze them. Widespread cryptography is a great thing, but at the moment it's inaccessible to most people and an arms race. Things will improve in the near future, but how practical will it be at deflecting bulk surveillance states is beyond the breadth of this post. On your last point, you're right about the Church Commission publicly exposing NSA and FBI malice. But ultimately, the only effect it had was some formal legislation that essentially did not hinder the agencies from performing clandestine and unlawful operations any bit. This is your fatal error in reasoning. You're expecting some surface legislative reform to solve much deeper structural issues. Remember Total Information Awareness and how scandalous it was in 2003? Did public outcry end it? Ostensibly it did, but in reality the agencies just learned to practice better OPSEC and moved to the same goal, but under different names, and more modularized. Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? Maybe. But probably not with your solutions.

Zigurd 13y ago
You are mostly correct, but pervasive surveillance of police behavior, even when it is entirely controlled by the police department results in deep cuts in the use of force, and of complaints against the police. Still, that doesn't make me an optimist about "sousveillance."

rayiner 13y ago

It's refreshing to read a level headed article on this situation that brings historical context into the analysis. I think the decentralization of technology point is key and underappreciated. Technology makes dystopia harder to maintain, not easier. In feudal times, someone who wanted to overthrow an oppressive tyrant had the very uphill battle of gathering together a large enough army of soldiers to create an effective resistance. Yet the dystopia of the future could be overthrown by a single hacker getting into critical computer or military systems.

zenogais 13y ago
Not necessarily true. It depends on whether you think technology is a part of the problem or the solution. I would recommend Jacques Ellul's "The Technological Society" for a decent treatment of this point and a fairly convincing refusal of the idea that decentralised technology makes dystopia harder - it's just a different kind of dystopia.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I think technology is neutral. At the end of the day, it's always people that are the problem and the solution. The same technology that allows a despot to oppress people more easily simultaneously makes it easier for a faction to overthrow him. Consider Hitler's Germany. There were factions within the military that tried to overthrow him, but failed. My assertion is that widely distributed technology makes it easier for factions like that to succeed.

trekky1700 13y ago

I think super accurate mass surveillance is inevitable. It goes with expanding technological capabilities, both government and civilian. I think the real question needs to be focused at how it's applied, whether it's used solely for good or evil. Fretting over whether or how it's coming is simply illogical, focusing efforts on making sure it's used properly is the only forward thinking, reality accepting solution.

pessimizer 13y ago
We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. Decisions have been made to apply technology in this way and to allow technology to be applied in this way. We're not surrendering to some sort of technological determinism, but to government contractors, Congressmen, judges, the unitary Executive, and a short list of private companies and individuals. The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. That we can't get back to that state is a failure of national character, not an advance in technology.
- mpyne 13y ago
  > We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. That's kind of the point though. After the Cold War we gave the military every capability needed to oppress us 1000x over without too much fretting about police states, trusting that the government would not force us to live at the point of a gun. We didn't simply forbid the military from having missiles, which is the proposed equivalent here. > The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. Sure they were, ever since Smith v. Maryland, and for all the years before Katz v. United States. Any prohibitions on what government could look at regarding business records or on the wire were imposed by Congress, not by the Constitution.
- randallsquared 13y ago
  "We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun." Weapons are not reducing in cost and size every year. It's possible in principle to know if someone has a weapon, and to exclude them from a given small area. Weapons have only a few specific uses (defense, hunting, target shooting or sparring, crime), and don't gain hundreds of new kinds of uses every week. The soaking of our society in computing power and recording is proceeding rapidly, and I don't think it can be stopped in any given jurisdiction without severely impacting the ability of that jurisdiction's business to compete economically. The ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on what individuals can record implies a police state, even if the police are kindly for now. I notice that people now calmly mention that they partially disagree with Brin, rather than dismissing his transparent society as completely beyond the pale.

higherpurpose 13y ago

And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology. Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will "stop" mass surveillance, as I assume metadata could still be collected unless we think of ways to anonymize almost everything, too, and not just decentralize everything, but at least it should severely limit the mass collection of the content itself. And if we decide as a society that mass anonymization is what we need (in other words, how the Internet was before Facebook, Google+ and post-9/11 NSA), I think we'll have the technical ways to do it. I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a person more freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much "richer" than we were decades or a century ago. It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any given country can fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a permanent state. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Pa...

joesmo 13y ago

Even without technological advances, the US public school system has been able to teach false history (and other subjects including science) for decades. Sure it can be checked and a minority of students may be angry for being lied to but this has yet to stop the system. It's true that information is hardly it's primary purpose, that being babysitting, but the perception that school is for learning lends it much credibility. The other major problem is that we are now forced to choose between privacy and innovation. Want to use any cloud based service or any service that operates on remote data? You give up any right to privacy regardless of any corporate policy. Want to be secure and private? Put up with slow tor, no remote services, and no cell phone. If enough people chose the latter, it might make a dent in companies' bottom line to possibly get them to use their clout to influence policy towards privacy. It's unlikely that will happen, and even if it does, until corporate data can be protected from surveillance without a warrant, even that is moot.

kungpooey 13y ago
You dusted too much of the illusion away all at once. In a world where up is down and evil is good you have to start in small digestible bits... or realize you're paddling upstream with a straw. We lost the education and information war through exactly the systems of disguised brainwashing you mentioned.

mpyne 13y ago

Avoiding it is the easy part. The hard part will be maintaining the Open Internet in the face of what Snowden did. He started to force policymakers to realize that a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network defense needs, normal law enforcement (not to mention the spy agencies that most countries want to run), and even cultural/jurisdictional questions on things like data privacy rights. Because the next question that comes after "why was NSA sidestepping the Constitution by peeking at the data abroad?" is "wait, why was my data over in Europe??", just as Germany is now considering making an EU-centric e-mail so that their citizens' data remains safe from being treated under American law.

Zigurd 13y ago
> a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network defense needs There isn't a middle ground. Either the people have access to strong encryption, DHTs, cryptocurrency, etc., or we live in a panopticon, a soft cage, a managed illusion of freedom. The toothpaste is not going back in the tube. The real question is whether we need more than 10% of the military industrial complex we currently have, or whether this is a deadweight, dragging down our economy and destroying freedom.
sentenza 13y ago
The EU-only email thing is just a symptom of the broken worldview of some German politicians. They can't admit that they gambled away a lot of our freedom without even being aware of what their actions meant, so they engage in meaningless gestures to hopefully appease the lowly plebs. If they were honest and serious, they'd just get out there, tell everybody to encrypt everything, change as many laws as possible to force all entities under their control to maintain and transfer data only encrypted and pump money into better crypto. But as I said, if they were honest and serious...

sentientmachine 13y ago

The question is, which civilization will most thoroughly utilize the superpower that is the internet and getting millions of people to act in unison, as one. We will need new founding fathers to re-write the book on what the most perfect union looks like. Perhaps capitalism is not the best system, considering everyone can instantly know what everyone else is contributing or not contributing.

MrZongle2 13y ago
We will need new founding fathers to re-write the book on what the most perfect union looks like. Let me be the first to request that of our 21st Century founding fathers (gender-neutral), none of them are from our existing political or entertainment classes.
onnoonno 13y ago
Maybe we shouldn't be thinking in terms of utopia/dystopia or good and evil. If there is one thing about us, it is technology marching on. Maybe we're just slowly being converted (or converting ourselves) into the borg. And it isn't brutal, it is cozy, nice, a little bit dull maybe, because we are working on losing our ape-like rawness. If it would be brutal, it wouldn't be efficient, and we highly value efficiency! We have the drugs for 'fixing people', and the neuroscience progresses. Maybe we'll simply end up as some kind of big, self-aware, computing foam covering the whole planet. Which many here would describe as 'dystopian', yet it is interestingly close to the simple idea of 'utopia' from, let's say, the movie 'Avatar'.

afutd 13y ago

"'We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.' Pham whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child's rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social control ever invented. 'So now they have to run everything.' The notion was terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind ... The only trouble was, no despot had the resources to plan every detail in his society's behavior. Not even planet-wrecker bombs had as dire a reputation for eliminating civilizations." --Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

exratione 13y ago
And Trygve Ytre and Gunnar Larson? Larson was millennia dead, of course. The civilization at Ytre had barely outlived the man. There had been an era of ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror. Most likely, Larson's own localizers had precipitated the end. All the wisdom, all the inscrutability, hadn't helped his world much. --Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

stretchwithme 13y ago

We can avoid it only if we wake up to the real problem. We don't get to pick who represents our interests. We can only vote for preselected choices. This concentrates power in the hands of a few. And these are more immune to voter desires and more subject to other forms of manipulation. Either you exercise your power. Or its up for grabs. We need proportional representation, at least in the House of Representatives.

anigbrowl 13y ago
The city where I live has PR and I grew up in a country where it is the norm. I like it too, but it's not a panacea, you still get abuse, corruption, and political horse trading of all kinds.
- stretchwithme 13y ago
  Yes, its not a panacea. If the people are clueless, even the best decision making system in the world will still yield bad decisions. Regarding horse trading, I'm not opposed to trading favors. If group 1 really wants X and don't really care about Y, while another really wants Y but is willing to give up X, why shouldn't they trade? Where I object to tradeoffs is where Goldman Sachs and former GS CEO Paulson trade favors, while those financing the goodies have no representation or even awareness of what's going on.

drdeadringer 13y ago

Avoid? We're here.

fleitz 13y ago

Sure it's easy to avoid surveillance state dystopia... learn from Winston... O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

lotsofmangos 13y ago

I think the more pertinent question is how do we get out of a surveillance state dystopia? We've been in one for quite a while now.

snizzysnaps 13y ago

I'm tired of this argument. Really. LISTEN UP: There is only this tiny fraction of the population that cares about surveillance, represented by a tech minority, Hacker News, and Reddit. The rest of the country could care less. They're 10x more outraged that Netflix seems a little slow this week, or that their favorite jelly donut is out of stock at Krispy Kreme. We've had a surveillance state for 30 years, and nothing is going to change that. If you don't want to be surveilled get rid of all of your electronics. The truth is, the gov't is going to continue on the path of a Brave New World, not 1984. Don't believe me? 50% of ALL drugs produced in the world are used by Americans. All most people care about is their next bump of Oxycontin with a chaser of Xanex, and the next bit of TV or internet nonsense they are going to piss their time away on. Edward Snowden proved - that deep down - the masses don't care, and they certainly aren't going to do anything about it. I wish this circle-jerk would end.

iamwithnail 13y ago
They don't. But they should. And that's part of the problem.

suprgeek 13y ago

"Can we avoid a Surveillance State" - Very Unlikely. At every level of the Government, the incentives are perversely aligned against this. The local, city, state & national Govts. all want MORE surveillance not less. They will conitnue to chip-away making it more & more difficult to remain private & anonymous. The only force combating these pressures is un-organized & semi-organized "concerned" citizens (and a few watchdogs). What will the outcome be?

swombat 13y ago
Your comment responds to the title without addressing any of the points made in the article. Did you bother reading it?

adamrights 13y ago

That's why the importance of removing bad laws off the books, and reforming what we consider essential liberties is so important. Yes, the observation state is coming as many have said, but how we apply it, and who has the power of checks is the the real question. If every on foot police officer has a camera on their lapel that any citizen can log in to and monitor, if much of the technology behind the monitoring is transparent -- if the people ultimately control the monitoring and its usage is to detect weapons, explosives and true acts of terror...not petty things like teenagers with pot -- then I believe the coming 'monitored state' will not be as scary. So the removal of bad laws. Maximum liberty in the privacy of one's house, and then crazy cameras and detectors for explosives and the printed guns et al is where I hope/believe the future can head too. Call it the green tea party ;p EDIT: In my world every printed gun, hell every gun taken out of the household needs to be transmitting its location so I can log on to a 'like google maps/latitude' type app and see exactly where any weapons in the public space are...and anyone caught by the monitors or an officer without 'reporting' on their weapons would face the severest of consequences. On the counter side though, within the house hold, you can print and make whatever you want. You can do the vices you'd like, and you can petition for areas within the public space to do such things, as long as I can also see where it is taking place and avoid if I desire too.

einhverfr 13y ago

It is an interesting article. What it seems to be getting at is that there is an elaborate dance of power between individuals and the state. This dance of power exists everywhere and in all ages. It isn't clear to me that was is different in kind in Stalinist Russia, though, so part of this article seems to me to be a half-full vs half-empty glass problem. Moreover the present is always being rewritten by government and the media. This is something that's been apparent to a lot of people for some time. Not only did Noam Chomsky write extensively on this subject but Hilaire Belloc wrote more or less the same thing about newspapers in 1918 in "The Free Press".[1] One of the key things Belloc pointed to was the necessity of non-corporate, decentralized, topical, and outright propagandist press to counteract the effects of corporate newspapers. I think he'd be very pleased to see the current blogosphere. So the author's points about the necessity of decentralized technology actually go quite a bit further than the points he makes. On the other hand though, it seems to me that what this shows is that there is no bright line between dystopia and normal life. By some measures, of course, we are already in a surveillance state dystopia. So I am not sure the question is meaningful. The major problem that makes the dystopian elements of the present hard to dislodge however are the twin facts that: 1. American culture is very much focused on impersonal institutions of scale (central government, big corporations), and individualism, and this isolates individuals, denying them support break free from the impersonal institutional bonds that we have created in substitute for the bonds of family, neighborhood, and community (which were stronger when I was growing up and are stronger where I am living right now, Indonesia). 2. We place our primary protections of the individual not in social ties (common everywhere else) but in documents which purport to restrain the central government (namely the Bill of Rights). My view is that until we can start focusing on building stronger communities, decentralizing government and bringing the power closer to the people, and decentralizing the economy (disfavoring large businesses in favor of small ones) the dystopia will in fact deepen. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018

lovemenot 13y ago

We are in transition between a Nash equilibrium where information was scarce, to another where it will be hyper-abundant and there's a temporary window open to exploit the older paradigm, before it completely shifts to the newer. The solution to the problems of privacy is economic. As the quantity of data in the world expands exponentially, so the cost of using it scales. There is at present an unproven hypothesis that more big data delivers proportionally more value. It'll soon become obvious that this is not the case. That realisation will be at the root of the next popped bubble. Meanwhile data will continue to expand, with eventually no actor having a hope of resourcing the capture, storage and analysis of it all. As signal to noise ratio decreases, so the business model of any large data gathering entity will fail. The harder they come, the harder they fall.

bishnu 13y ago
Uh, how is this in any way a Nash equilibrium? And the rise of the pervading surveillance state has little to do with the perceived value of the data collected.
- lovemenot 13y ago
  As long as we are only concerned about State actors, I'll answer your second question by pointing out that Congress and international equivalents must continue to fund their agencies' operations. That will become increasingly challenging in the face of incessant cost growth and uncertain benefit.

zcarter 13y ago

An interesting thought experiment that should be informing more of the discussion is to take inevitability for granted. If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access. Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can intrude, instead of a select few. Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.

ChuckFrank 13y ago

I worked on this. The Author has tried to examine the question about how to deal with a Surveillance State at a personal level. I don't recommend all the projects that I work on, but I certainly recommend this one. M Against M by Declan Tan. http://www.amazon.com/M-Against-Declan-Tan/dp/0982280998 http://www.amazon.com/M-Against-Declan-Tan/dp/0982280998

starmanjones 13y ago

declare void the illegally-installed federal constitution and revert to the articles of confederation. Problem solved. Put me and 4 likeminded men on the supreme court and it shall be done.

dizzystar 13y ago

This article misses the main thrust of mass surveillance, in my opinion, and touches on something I've heard few people ever express. Someone that lived in my building believed in some aspects of conspiracy theories. For example, he believed that Facebook was backed by the CIA. Why? According to him, if you thought about it, all of that information that they had to spend months digging for was now given to them for free, by upfront admission. The point is that we are willingly giving up our rights to privacy. We are openly using, and promoting to our friends, various sites that expressly user our data for their own means. We are the ones who are printing free copies of the keys to our castle. We are already halfway there. This trend will only get worse, in my opinion, and at the end of the day, we will blame the government, but really it was only us to blame because by openly publishing a large part of our private lives, we imply permission for anyone and everyone to have that information for free.

darkmighty 13y ago
Another argument that goes across this one is wether we can prevent at all essentially having all our lives "deducible" without sacrificing technological progress with two things in mind: a) Demanding better answers or better functionality ultimately relies on surrendering information (information problem) b) Computing power will allow machine-learning algorithms to deduce a lot from very little (computing power problem) Novel crypto may eventually produce solutions to this, but it's unclear. An example, regarding location privacy: http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf
SkynetSystems 13y ago
>Someone that lived in my building believed in some aspects of conspiracy theories. For example, he believed that Facebook was backed by the CIA. Facebook really was backed by the CIA though (through one of its investment arms) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGdWsxHJlM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIGdWsxHJlM

glasz 13y ago

sure we can. or could, rather. if we really would do, so many other things would not be. but we won't. we are sheep. and we like it.