The US government after WWII was wondering how to avoid a situation in their own country that lead up to the holocaust. They studied Sigmund Freud to learn how to "manipulate" the crowds into "being happy" or create the illusion of happiness with distraction or consumerism. Freud's uncle, (Hugo Bernaise[1]) enjoyed massive influence among political circles and and gave them and corporations advise[2] on manipulating and controlling the masses.
There is an excellent BBC mini series (also available on youtube) called "The century of the self" ... The episode that talks specifically about Freud and Bernaise is called "Engineering Consent".
The documentary may seem slightly dated but in light of recent geopolitical developments and our discussion about government and corporate surveillance it's worth every minute!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engineering_of_Consent
This may help reduce the asymmetry of power, but is it not a case of "throwing the baby out with the bath water"? We lose the exact freedom we are trying to protect - the freedom to act so-called "recklessly" or "inappropriately" in respect to popular opinion.
Privacy is only necessary now because when you lose it, when someone else holds such a detailed profile of your behavior, there's a deep power imbalance. If you received a similarly detailed profile on everyone who was privy to yours, it wouldn't be so bad - and that's exactly what GP proposed.
I think there's something deeply immoral about asking someone to ignore, for your sake, some physical phenomenon that's occurring as much in their universe as yours.
1. It's not information that wants to be free, but access to published information. Where the roots of the word "publish" in "public" are germane. In addition to published information, information on public institutions such as governments, government agencies, bureaucracies, major social actors, the wealthy (who've gained strongly through socially-mediated systems), and those guilty of crimes against society.
2. Information doesn't balance power imbalances, it magnifies them. Though the empowered and disempowered have different vulnerabilities and strengths. Hence information can work against the empowered and disempowered in different ways.
Absent a handle or pivot point for power, information yields none. You simply have understanding of a process you cannot manipulate.
Except it would be because some entities posess much better capabilities to leverage that data.
But privacy that is conditional and breachable by only few is very very bad.
But most every day people don't have the resources to pay for marketing & servers to run massive operations.
For precisely this reason they become useless when open-sourced.
And on the other hand it's not like they're great works of art. They're weekend hacks driving a rest API or phantomjs. Most of the "art" is threading or concurrency and getting it all to go over a 4K line "free proxy" list without falling over too badly.
Want 10k Twitter accounts? It's not magic. It's just some dumb scripts and a bit of patience.
You don't need massive server power (a $5 droplet will do fine) but you do have to have a bunch of time to waste.
For fairness, here's a blog post by Brightplanet, one of the subjects of the OP, called "What is OSINT and how can your organization use it? [0]
Many of the same issues that came up in discussion of the recent OKCupid study [1] apply to this piece. I liked what AnhonyMuse wrote in reply to my comment: "people want to create a binary distinction between 'public' (meaning public domain, can be used for anything by anyone) and 'private' (meaning something known solely to a single individual), with no intermediary steps between them."
This point applies especially to people's feelings on "social media surveillance." To those most concerned about it, an easy argument exists: if you didn't want to be surveilled, why did you post it "publicly" on the Internet? The problem with this argument is that, as AnthonyMuse pointed out, people have different definitions, and therefore expectations, of what is public.
Personally, I think that "open source intelligence" or "social media surveillance," or whatever you want to call it, needs to become as mainstream as Google. Its power is only "creepy" or corruptible so long as only a few entities can wield it. Surveillance in the hands of a few is dangerous; surveillance in the hands of many is powerful. When everyone has the power to spy on everybody else, then everyone must correctly calibrate their "expectations" for what is public and what is not. If you know that some percentage of your friends on social media are using "surveillance" tools, then you'll be more careful about what you post, because you will understand the true meaning of "public." Whereas if all the surveillance continues to happen in secret, you will continue to post recklessly, blissfully unaware of just how "public" your posts are.
We need to democratize open source intelligence in order to balance the power between those who currently hold it and those who don't. Why should the NSA have all the fun?
Will the "next Google" be a company that indexes the "deep web" [2] and provides a search engine for it?
[0] https://brightplanet.com/2013/04/what-is-osint-and-how-can-y...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11705677
[2] Deep web meaning pages behind paywalls or requiring registration. Not Tor.
P.S. I feel the same way about propaganda. Why should government agencies be the only ones with the power to propagandize their message? Everyone should have access to top-of-the-line shilling software!