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I think super accurate mass surveillance is inevitable. It goes with expanding technological capabilities, both government and civilian. I think the real questi

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.
- vectorpush 13y ago
  but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. Don't we? I guess it varies depending on the neighborhood, but there are more guns in the U.S. than cell phones, and it's not just the government that's armed to the teeth, it's everyone from your local mugger to your local teenager (and I'm not just talking about school shooters, I'm talking about adults under 20 who legally hold as well as the range of kids illegally blasting themselves and others in the streets). This is all to say, I agree with the parent; you can't close Pandora's box. Mass surveillance is quickly becoming too cheap not to be inevitable, not to mention that most people voluntarily crowdsource the surveillance behemoth by uploading their entire lives to facebook and passing everything else into google. One might argue that mass surveillance is already here, if it's a true dystopia remains to be seen. https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/
  - sentenza 13y ago
    It's not like that in all countries, though. If the technology was inevitably reaching everybody, then guns would be readily available independently of cultural and political frame.
    - vectorpush 13y ago
      Well no, guns aren't as ubiquitous around the world as they are in the U.S, but they're pervasive enough that every single despot around the world employs guns to the effect of realizing modern dystopias for the unlucky humans who are born into violent oppression. The "inevitability" phase of guns has long passed.
      - paul_f 13y ago
        The fact that guns are ubiquitous in the US means that an oppressive regime cannot use their monopoly on guns against the people. I'll take that side of the bargain any day.
        trekky1700 13y ago
dreamfactory2 13y ago
It's not inevitable or a logical conclusion - we can simply legislate against. The law is nothing if not to prohibit actions which would otherwise be profitable yet harm society. There is also a strong security argument that this kind of info aggregation and centralisation creates a massive single point of failure. The security folk who authored these programs have screwed up massively.
motters 13y ago
Mass surveillance isn't inevitable, it's a political decision and a decision which is reversible. PRISM and Xkeyscore didn't invent themselves - they took money and manpower and above all political will to come to fruition. We have nuclear weapons, but nuclear proliferation isn't inevitable. Dismissing people who are opposed to the abuse of technology for purposes which are fundamentally anti-democratic as "illogical" is just a cheap piece of rhetoric. You should think more carefully about what you're supporting.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Technology is like water, it finds its own level. When you make sensors and storage as cheap as dirt then you're going to end up with widespread deployment. In many polities, people seem to think that the costs are outweighed by the benefits (of improved security and so on). I'm not sure that they are and you are clearly sure that they aren't, but ultimately the criteria for arriving at a given position are arbitrary. I mean, lots of people think technology leads to economic inequality by devaluing human labor, resulting in unemployment and pay stagnation, but you probably agree with me that it would be futile to pass a law for the express purpose of limiting industrial productivity per worker.
  - bduerst 13y ago
    It is an economic inevitability. Even if lawmakers passed rules preventing the government from doing it, you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap. The value of the data is quickly outstripping the cost of obtaining it. Better to focus on safety than on prevention.
    - alexqgb 13y ago
      "...you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap." Not if doing so was a felony. Sometimes, safety IS prevention (see toxic waste / dumping of).
      - trekky1700 13y ago
whyme 13y ago
There's no such thing as mass surveillance being used solely for either good or evil. At least as long as people are not perfect, which I expect will be forever.
milsorgen 13y ago
>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. I couldn't disagree more strongly. If we have an issue I think it would be prudent to examine the entire issue especially the degree and kind of it's coming. Your willing to make vast assumptions on something that affects the very fabric of our society and I find that quite disturbing.
- trekky1700 13y ago
  The technology is coming, whether anyone here likes it or not. Whether it's nanotech, web prying or any other things we haven't even dreamed up yet. This is inevitable, you can't ban research and development into it. The people who are using it for wrong will use it no matter what, the law has no meaning to them. Whether you outright ban it, or ban parts of it, individuals will ignore the bans and try to exploit it for wrong. This is also inevitable. So, the important question to ask is what is the most effective way to establish and enforce a reasonable law that allows society to experience the benefits while acting against the detriments and those that would exploit them (for purposes of blackmail, industrial espionage, etc). What else would you propose be done? Because almost all of what I've heard so far has been complaining, which history shows is the least effective way of actually getting anything done.
lelandbatey 13y ago
Indeed, I get the feeling that whining isn't the solution; trying to get out in front of it is. As a bit of a social experiment, I acually built this just a couple days ago: http://whereis.lelandbatey.com/ http://whereis.lelandbatey.com/ My location is updated via GPS every two minutes, and the last checked in location is marked on the map. I'm curious what will happen, if anything.
- flycaliguy 13y ago
  You should make it leave a line of where you have been.
  - dwiel 13y ago
    As well as which locations are unusual behavior, given your past behavior - there's no hiding a quick trip to <embarrassing place> in the haystack.
    - lelandbatey 13y ago
      These are all excellent suggestions. I initially built it to just gather data about where I am, but these are great ways I can use this data. Gonna have to learn a lot to make this real.
- jnbiche 13y ago
  I don't get it. How is a real-time update of your personal data "getting out in front of it"? Making surveillance easier doesn't mean we're somehow avoiding a surveillance state. Why the remark on your web page about "nothing to hide, indeed"? I do agree that a technological solution is more likely to work at avoiding a complete surveillance state than a political one, short of some miracle.
einhverfr 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. It is not inevitable. Also all technologies are used by people meaning they are used for good and evil. I say it is not inevitable for a couple reasons. First, in order to be super-accurate, you have to be able to make inferences based on existing data to a very high probability of correctness. Unfortunately, these inferences are based on hidden assumptions and can't be tested. Therefore you have no way of knowing how accurate the mass surveillance actually is. Worse, the more massive the surveillance becomes, the more of an inkblot you have to work with. As Heisenberg said, "Data does not imply theory."[1] And the more data you have the easier it is to delude yourself into thinking all the conclusions are perfectly accurate because of confirmation bias etc. So you have solid epistemological reasons that the technology can never become super-accurate. Additionally deployment isn't inevitable. What's really going on here is that companies are trying to sell products to the government, and Congress is allocating lots of money to buy them. Funding decisions are political and they are not inevitable. So in my view, this technology creates more problems than it solves (on a good day even), and represents a way for wealthy individuals to get money transferred to them. [1] Heisenberg, Werner. "Physics and Philosophy"

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.
vectorpush 13y ago
but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. Don't we? I guess it varies depending on the neighborhood, but there are more guns in the U.S. than cell phones, and it's not just the government that's armed to the teeth, it's everyone from your local mugger to your local teenager (and I'm not just talking about school shooters, I'm talking about adults under 20 who legally hold as well as the range of kids illegally blasting themselves and others in the streets). This is all to say, I agree with the parent; you can't close Pandora's box. Mass surveillance is quickly becoming too cheap not to be inevitable, not to mention that most people voluntarily crowdsource the surveillance behemoth by uploading their entire lives to facebook and passing everything else into google. One might argue that mass surveillance is already here, if it's a true dystopia remains to be seen. https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/
- sentenza 13y ago
  It's not like that in all countries, though. If the technology was inevitably reaching everybody, then guns would be readily available independently of cultural and political frame.
  - vectorpush 13y ago
    Well no, guns aren't as ubiquitous around the world as they are in the U.S, but they're pervasive enough that every single despot around the world employs guns to the effect of realizing modern dystopias for the unlucky humans who are born into violent oppression. The "inevitability" phase of guns has long passed.
    - paul_f 13y ago
      The fact that guns are ubiquitous in the US means that an oppressive regime cannot use their monopoly on guns against the people. I'll take that side of the bargain any day.
      - trekky1700 13y ago

dreamfactory2 13y ago

It's not inevitable or a logical conclusion - we can simply legislate against. The law is nothing if not to prohibit actions which would otherwise be profitable yet harm society. There is also a strong security argument that this kind of info aggregation and centralisation creates a massive single point of failure. The security folk who authored these programs have screwed up massively.

motters 13y ago

Mass surveillance isn't inevitable, it's a political decision and a decision which is reversible. PRISM and Xkeyscore didn't invent themselves - they took money and manpower and above all political will to come to fruition. We have nuclear weapons, but nuclear proliferation isn't inevitable. Dismissing people who are opposed to the abuse of technology for purposes which are fundamentally anti-democratic as "illogical" is just a cheap piece of rhetoric. You should think more carefully about what you're supporting.

anigbrowl 13y ago
Technology is like water, it finds its own level. When you make sensors and storage as cheap as dirt then you're going to end up with widespread deployment. In many polities, people seem to think that the costs are outweighed by the benefits (of improved security and so on). I'm not sure that they are and you are clearly sure that they aren't, but ultimately the criteria for arriving at a given position are arbitrary. I mean, lots of people think technology leads to economic inequality by devaluing human labor, resulting in unemployment and pay stagnation, but you probably agree with me that it would be futile to pass a law for the express purpose of limiting industrial productivity per worker.
- bduerst 13y ago
  It is an economic inevitability. Even if lawmakers passed rules preventing the government from doing it, you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap. The value of the data is quickly outstripping the cost of obtaining it. Better to focus on safety than on prevention.
  - alexqgb 13y ago
    "...you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap." Not if doing so was a felony. Sometimes, safety IS prevention (see toxic waste / dumping of).
    - trekky1700 13y ago

whyme 13y ago

There's no such thing as mass surveillance being used solely for either good or evil. At least as long as people are not perfect, which I expect will be forever.

milsorgen 13y ago

>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. I couldn't disagree more strongly. If we have an issue I think it would be prudent to examine the entire issue especially the degree and kind of it's coming. Your willing to make vast assumptions on something that affects the very fabric of our society and I find that quite disturbing.

trekky1700 13y ago
The technology is coming, whether anyone here likes it or not. Whether it's nanotech, web prying or any other things we haven't even dreamed up yet. This is inevitable, you can't ban research and development into it. The people who are using it for wrong will use it no matter what, the law has no meaning to them. Whether you outright ban it, or ban parts of it, individuals will ignore the bans and try to exploit it for wrong. This is also inevitable. So, the important question to ask is what is the most effective way to establish and enforce a reasonable law that allows society to experience the benefits while acting against the detriments and those that would exploit them (for purposes of blackmail, industrial espionage, etc). What else would you propose be done? Because almost all of what I've heard so far has been complaining, which history shows is the least effective way of actually getting anything done.

lelandbatey 13y ago

Indeed, I get the feeling that whining isn't the solution; trying to get out in front of it is. As a bit of a social experiment, I acually built this just a couple days ago: http://whereis.lelandbatey.com/ http://whereis.lelandbatey.com/ My location is updated via GPS every two minutes, and the last checked in location is marked on the map. I'm curious what will happen, if anything.

flycaliguy 13y ago
You should make it leave a line of where you have been.
- dwiel 13y ago
  As well as which locations are unusual behavior, given your past behavior - there's no hiding a quick trip to <embarrassing place> in the haystack.
  - lelandbatey 13y ago
    These are all excellent suggestions. I initially built it to just gather data about where I am, but these are great ways I can use this data. Gonna have to learn a lot to make this real.
jnbiche 13y ago
I don't get it. How is a real-time update of your personal data "getting out in front of it"? Making surveillance easier doesn't mean we're somehow avoiding a surveillance state. Why the remark on your web page about "nothing to hide, indeed"? I do agree that a technological solution is more likely to work at avoiding a complete surveillance state than a political one, short of some miracle.

einhverfr 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. It is not inevitable. Also all technologies are used by people meaning they are used for good and evil. I say it is not inevitable for a couple reasons. First, in order to be super-accurate, you have to be able to make inferences based on existing data to a very high probability of correctness. Unfortunately, these inferences are based on hidden assumptions and can't be tested. Therefore you have no way of knowing how accurate the mass surveillance actually is. Worse, the more massive the surveillance becomes, the more of an inkblot you have to work with. As Heisenberg said, "Data does not imply theory."[1] And the more data you have the easier it is to delude yourself into thinking all the conclusions are perfectly accurate because of confirmation bias etc. So you have solid epistemological reasons that the technology can never become super-accurate. Additionally deployment isn't inevitable. What's really going on here is that companies are trying to sell products to the government, and Congress is allocating lots of money to buy them. Funding decisions are political and they are not inevitable. So in my view, this technology creates more problems than it solves (on a good day even), and represents a way for wealthy individuals to get money transferred to them. [1] Heisenberg, Werner. "Physics and Philosophy"