6 ms·

The only way to fight surveillance is to make all secrets of every state and every single individual on the planet public knowledge. Total surveillance of every

by x5n1 11y ago

The only way to fight surveillance is to make all secrets of every state and every single individual on the planet public knowledge. Total surveillance of everybody at all times available to anyone who wants it. To completely destroy the concept of being alone. That way there is perfect alignment between elites, people, corporations, and governments as to their attitude and thereby policy toward surveillance. We need to hack this and make this a reality. Hackers of the world unite!

twobits 11y ago
I totally agree with this. Privacy is a lost war. We have to turn this on its head. Seems paradoxical, but anyone who doesn't like the surveillance state, having lost the war for privacy, should be FOR surveillance and accessibility to it for all. Equalize the power.
aethertap 11y ago
I think this would only work if everyone also had perfectly equal power to abuse the resulting information flood. In the U.S., it's common knowledge (or at the very least, common belief) that the majority of politicians are corrupt and routinely do things that would land the rest of us in prison. Despite that knowledge, we generally have no power to do anything meaningful about it because they make the rules. I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched and I'm subject to arbitrary action by people who have power. I think total surveillance, even if it includes the powerful few, would be a disaster for human rights and freedom in general. So what if the dictator is impeccable in his daily routine, if he's watching every move of a population and subjecting them to unequal treatment under the law?
- x5n1 11y ago
  The point is that hypocrisy would eventually cause a change, but there would be a period where things would work the way that you describe.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    hypocrisy has never stopped anyone from doing what they want.
- aethertap 11y ago
  > The point is that hypocrisy would eventually cause a change, but there would be a period where things would work the way that you describe. That may be possible, but it's also possible that total surveillance would result in a permanent entrenchement of whoever manages to gain (or maintain) power through the transition. It's very hard for a competing ideology to rise in prominence if it's possible to detect and crush every individual who starts to disagree, before they can even communicate it to anyone else. I think it's likely that with total surveillance we'd soon see the rise of rapid automated enforcement, which would be a incredible impediment to any attempt at changing the status quo.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Don't even pretend like we're not 100% there right now. You are describing reality as it exists currently, nothing more. The tolerance of ideological debate is at the pleasure of those in power, but try to take it any further than you will be visited by various systems of control.
- twobits 11y ago
  "I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched" That's already the case. There is (near) total transparency for the population. The only way to fight back, is to have total transparency for the powerful few too. But they make the rules, and have the money and the power, so this ain't happening.
thomasrossi 11y ago
There is a plethora of math that will show you this is not a self-enforcing agreement:( But yea, it would be nice
btbuildem 11y ago
Thanks but no thanks. Total transparency for government organizations, total privacy for individuals.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  The world is already ahead of that; increasingly, the actual, hard power lies in the hands of private corporations.
  - deftnerd 11y ago
    That actually brings up an interesting thought. Corporations are able to be ruthlessly competitive with each other in some part because they keep things secret when they can. Is it plausible that one of the reasons that major corporations have so much power now is because the government was TOO open for enough decades that the corporations were able to out compete?
  - adventured 11y ago
    The hard power is - more so than at any other time in history - in the hands of central governments. Governments used to have to go begging to private wealth to finance themselves, during panics, at times of war, etc. Today Bill Gates is hilariously undersized compared to the US Government (as are all corporations); 120 years ago, Rockefeller by himself towered over the US Government. During the 19th century governments of Europe had to beg for private financing for wars and bailouts. What corporation, anywhere on earth, has any meaningful hard power? Tanks, jets, machine guns, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, nukes, legal surveillance capabilities, thousands of soldiers, transports, military bases, the legal right to knock down your door and arrest you, the ability to put you in prison for 15 years with minimum sentencing laws, the legal ability to steal your property at gun point through civil asset forfeiture with no compensation, the right to arrest you for smoking pot, and on it goes. Name a few corporations with anything even resembling those powers. All real control over currencies today rests with central governments and their proxies (eg the Fed). That was not the case prior to the global establishment of the modern central banks in the last century. A little over a century ago, JP Morgan ruled the financial markets, and was vastly more powerful than the US Government in financial matters. Today, one month of QE is bigger than the entire fortune of the world's wealthiest man. At what other point in world history, other than the last century, have governments been singularly all-powerful when it comes to military might? No domestic entity even remotely dares threaten the big governments of today. See: China, Russia, US.
nota_bene 11y ago
Money being equivalent to power, privacy will always be distributed inequally. So if you think transparency could be applied to everybody in society, you're wrong. Rich people will have the means to protect their privacy, not the "middle class" and not the poor nor the extremely poor.
nitrogen 11y ago
No, this is not where we should go. The human psyche simply cannot handle that scale of unforgetting, unrelenting, unforgiving violation.
- JadeNB 11y ago
  > The human psyche simply cannot handle that scale of unforgetting, unrelenting, unforgiving violation. I don't like it either, and it's completely foreign to my (and almost everyone's) current way of living, but there are a lot of things about the current way of living that would have been completely foreign to anyone a century ago. (Imagine how previous generations would have felt about the quantity of information we make public, intentionally and un-, on social media!) I am not defending or supporting this, but I think that it might be overambitious to declare (presumably without evidence beyond emotional reaction) what the human psyche can or cannot support.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    Two centuries ago, the kind of thing that we post today on social media was common knowledge, passed from person to person as gossip. People that didn't have that trail of information were viewed with suspicion.
    - JadeNB 11y ago
      I know that the "oh noez social media" attitude that I might have seemed to be promulgating can be overblown, but I don't think that this response doesn't get at the heart of it. It's true that people in your community likely knew about you, and newcomers to a community would have had to build up that background of trust; but I think that there's a huge difference between the sort of reciprocal information sharing that goes on in physical communities, and the undifferentiated, omni-directional outward flow of information that social media makes possible.

by x5n1 11y ago

twobits 11y ago

I totally agree with this. Privacy is a lost war. We have to turn this on its head. Seems paradoxical, but anyone who doesn't like the surveillance state, having lost the war for privacy, should be FOR surveillance and accessibility to it for all. Equalize the power.

aethertap 11y ago

I think this would only work if everyone also had perfectly equal power to abuse the resulting information flood. In the U.S., it's common knowledge (or at the very least, common belief) that the majority of politicians are corrupt and routinely do things that would land the rest of us in prison. Despite that knowledge, we generally have no power to do anything meaningful about it because they make the rules. I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched and I'm subject to arbitrary action by people who have power. I think total surveillance, even if it includes the powerful few, would be a disaster for human rights and freedom in general. So what if the dictator is impeccable in his daily routine, if he's watching every move of a population and subjecting them to unequal treatment under the law?

x5n1 11y ago
The point is that hypocrisy would eventually cause a change, but there would be a period where things would work the way that you describe.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  hypocrisy has never stopped anyone from doing what they want.
aethertap 11y ago
> The point is that hypocrisy would eventually cause a change, but there would be a period where things would work the way that you describe. That may be possible, but it's also possible that total surveillance would result in a permanent entrenchement of whoever manages to gain (or maintain) power through the transition. It's very hard for a competing ideology to rise in prominence if it's possible to detect and crush every individual who starts to disagree, before they can even communicate it to anyone else. I think it's likely that with total surveillance we'd soon see the rise of rapid automated enforcement, which would be a incredible impediment to any attempt at changing the status quo.
- x5n1 11y ago
  Don't even pretend like we're not 100% there right now. You are describing reality as it exists currently, nothing more. The tolerance of ideological debate is at the pleasure of those in power, but try to take it any further than you will be visited by various systems of control.
twobits 11y ago
"I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched" That's already the case. There is (near) total transparency for the population. The only way to fight back, is to have total transparency for the powerful few too. But they make the rules, and have the money and the power, so this ain't happening.

thomasrossi 11y ago

There is a plethora of math that will show you this is not a self-enforcing agreement:( But yea, it would be nice

btbuildem 11y ago

Thanks but no thanks. Total transparency for government organizations, total privacy for individuals.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
The world is already ahead of that; increasingly, the actual, hard power lies in the hands of private corporations.
- deftnerd 11y ago
  That actually brings up an interesting thought. Corporations are able to be ruthlessly competitive with each other in some part because they keep things secret when they can. Is it plausible that one of the reasons that major corporations have so much power now is because the government was TOO open for enough decades that the corporations were able to out compete?
- adventured 11y ago
  The hard power is - more so than at any other time in history - in the hands of central governments. Governments used to have to go begging to private wealth to finance themselves, during panics, at times of war, etc. Today Bill Gates is hilariously undersized compared to the US Government (as are all corporations); 120 years ago, Rockefeller by himself towered over the US Government. During the 19th century governments of Europe had to beg for private financing for wars and bailouts. What corporation, anywhere on earth, has any meaningful hard power? Tanks, jets, machine guns, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, nukes, legal surveillance capabilities, thousands of soldiers, transports, military bases, the legal right to knock down your door and arrest you, the ability to put you in prison for 15 years with minimum sentencing laws, the legal ability to steal your property at gun point through civil asset forfeiture with no compensation, the right to arrest you for smoking pot, and on it goes. Name a few corporations with anything even resembling those powers. All real control over currencies today rests with central governments and their proxies (eg the Fed). That was not the case prior to the global establishment of the modern central banks in the last century. A little over a century ago, JP Morgan ruled the financial markets, and was vastly more powerful than the US Government in financial matters. Today, one month of QE is bigger than the entire fortune of the world's wealthiest man. At what other point in world history, other than the last century, have governments been singularly all-powerful when it comes to military might? No domestic entity even remotely dares threaten the big governments of today. See: China, Russia, US.

nota_bene 11y ago

Money being equivalent to power, privacy will always be distributed inequally. So if you think transparency could be applied to everybody in society, you're wrong. Rich people will have the means to protect their privacy, not the "middle class" and not the poor nor the extremely poor.

nitrogen 11y ago

No, this is not where we should go. The human psyche simply cannot handle that scale of unforgetting, unrelenting, unforgiving violation.

JadeNB 11y ago
> The human psyche simply cannot handle that scale of unforgetting, unrelenting, unforgiving violation. I don't like it either, and it's completely foreign to my (and almost everyone's) current way of living, but there are a lot of things about the current way of living that would have been completely foreign to anyone a century ago. (Imagine how previous generations would have felt about the quantity of information we make public, intentionally and un-, on social media!) I am not defending or supporting this, but I think that it might be overambitious to declare (presumably without evidence beyond emotional reaction) what the human psyche can or cannot support.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Two centuries ago, the kind of thing that we post today on social media was common knowledge, passed from person to person as gossip. People that didn't have that trail of information were viewed with suspicion.
  - JadeNB 11y ago
    I know that the "oh noez social media" attitude that I might have seemed to be promulgating can be overblown, but I don't think that this response doesn't get at the heart of it. It's true that people in your community likely knew about you, and newcomers to a community would have had to build up that background of trust; but I think that there's a huge difference between the sort of reciprocal information sharing that goes on in physical communities, and the undifferentiated, omni-directional outward flow of information that social media makes possible.