It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed. The memory of tyrannical governance was fresh. Information is no different, if the government posses this information - so should the citizens.
This means dismantling the five main pillars that are used to nullify, misdirect, or otherwise diminish the power of the vote - both a a signaling mechanism that members of the electorate can use to unify themselves, and as a reliably severe punitive tool that the electorate can use to avenge themselves when their "representatives" betray their interests. Listed in no particular order, they are
1. Gerrymandering (aka partisan redistricting) 2. Closed primaries 3. Private campaign finance 4. The "revolving door" that allows private industry to offer well-paid sinecures to public "servants" who have systematically betrayed the public's trust. 5. Myriad restrictions on ballot access.
It's important to recognize that while each of these pillars diminishes the power of the vote, the really insidious effect comes from their interaction. But those knock-on effects can all be stopped by addressing the fundamental - and fundamental anti-democratic - structures at their roots.
Eliminating any one of these abominations tilts the balance back in favor of the good guys. All of them together can be lethal to the ambitions of people who's own ambitions are anathema to a self-governing republic.
That's pretty much when I understood what "oligarchy" meant and how very much there we were.
Snowden didn't help my mental picture of the country.
Your suggestion of a democratization of spy programs is actually one of the premises of "The Circle", the book is meant to paint a dystopian future.
They were more brutal because they substituted brutality in lieu of these sorts of technological innovations. They couldn't spy on everyone, so they had to crucify the few opponents they could definitively catch (or some sacrificial lambs, when they couldn't.)
Not to mention, it's much easier to overthrow a brutal dictator. Your government is killing your friends, drafting your family into the military, and sending your coworkers to work camps? Hell yeah, we won't stand for that! But if your government is just quietly watching, while your family is sitting at home, with food in their fridge - will you pick up a weapon to fight against that regime? Will your friends, family, neighbors?
You are right to point out that the majority of people are just comfortable enough, struggling to pay for debts they incurred in one way or another and generally have no incentive to fight totalitarian overreach of the state.
Unfortunately the institutions for the indoctrination of the young are set up in a way by now, that they are very good at producing hyper-focused well-working replaceable cogs for industry, together with their Ayn Rand reading, libertarian overlords in one nice package. They do all that, while setting you up for a life of indebted servitude, if you don't happen to choose a profession that requires you to be highly compliant with the current system to be successful.
So I guess if there is one thing to fix it would be education, a properly educated general public would hopefully be less apathetic and compliant than it is today. Technology has the potential to make education much more widely available and independent of having to assemble in one place and be subjected to abuse and brainwashing of authority figures.
Ok, go ahead and square that with the operation of the government today. I'm pretty confident you will find it impossible to construct a convincing argument.
It's easy to reverse some of this. If they're recording license plates and they or someone else will do it regardless, then stop having license plates. The justification for having them doesn't really apply to self-driving cars anyway.
Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical. That clearly isn't the case -- the constitution has been preventing police from searching your home without a warrant since 1789, even though they absolutely do have the operational capability to do that.
More to the point, even if they're not prohibited from spying, as long as we're not prohibited from defending against that spying we haven't lost. Encryption works. Tor works. In many cases the lack of prohibition on spying would be irrelevant if not for the existing prohibitions and impediments to strong anonymity, as with regulations on digital money transfers.
What's interesting is that your conclusion is still mostly right. Government secrecy is the cancer of democracy. But governments being transparent to their people in no way requires people to be transparent to their governments.
You seriously believe that? You think the government makes common sense decisions? So ok, no more plates. How long until we hear about them logging the serial numbers broadcast by our tire pressure sensors? Or what about the unique magnetic signature of our vehicles detectable by all the loops already embedded in the road? If the government has the technical ability to do something that will expand power and responsibility, it will do it. It has been demonstrated time and time again.
> ... as long as we're not prohibited from defending against that spying we haven't lost.
Yeah we'll see. Tampering with NIST, clipper chips, export controls. This is not sustainable, people will eventually tire. Also, the argument sounds very similar to what was said about TSA security theater: "No, we aren't impeding your freedom of movement - you can take the bus!" Guess what, the TSA is at the bus station now. "No, we aren't violating your fourth amendment rights - if you want to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures than you can use encryption!" Guess what happens next. It is a bullshit argument - I shouldn't have to run myself ragged.
> Your argument seems to be that you can't effectively prohibit something that technology makes practical.
No, my point is that you can't prevent something technically practical while the government operates in secret, enjoying a monopoly on information. That is why warrantless home searches aren't extremely common, because it would be impossible to do in secret - old papers have very little to do with it.
Decisions like that are made in the open. You can tell if your self-driving car has a license plate on it and keep lobbying to remove it until they do.
> How long until we hear about them logging the serial numbers broadcast by our tire pressure sensors? Or what about the unique magnetic signature of our vehicles detectable by all the loops already embedded in the road?
So it's a cat and mouse game. So what? If they want to log RFID tags they have to spend a billion dollars putting readers everywhere, at which point people rip the tags out and the readers are useless. Find some other way (and some other billion dollars) to fingerprint individual cars and people will realize that it's profitable to sign up their self-driving car to transport Uber passengers and suddenly tracking the cars is meaningless. And so it goes.
> Tampering with NIST, clipper chips, export controls. This is not sustainable, people will eventually tire.
All of those things failed. Nobody gets tired of winning.
> Also, the argument sounds very similar to what was said about TSA security theater
The analogous thing to not having TSA security theater is not having mass surveillance. You're arguing the opposite -- mass surveillance for everyone. You can't make the slippery slope argument when you want to start at the bottom.
> No, my point is that you can't prevent something technically practical while the government operates in secret, enjoying a monopoly on information.
Which I'm not disagreeing with. Government secrets should be aggressively minimized. But once again, governments being transparent to their people in no way requires people to be transparent to their governments. And there is apparently some dispute about what is technically practical.
> That is why warrantless home searches aren't extremely common, because it would be impossible to do in secret - old papers have very little to do with it.
Which is all we need to do here. Make it so that spying on you requires them to physically enter the space you're in so that it's only practical to do it according to the rules with probable cause rather than in bulk in secret.
Yes, and rarely. I've spent 5 minutes trying to think of such an example and failed, maybe you have something in mind?
> If they want to log RFID tags they have to spend a billion dollars putting readers everywhere, at which point people rip the tags out and the readers are useless.
Lol, you throw out a cost like it would be some sort of problem for them to spend money that isn't theirs. You know how you keep people from ripping the tags out? You require manufactures to install them in every vehicle manufactured after September 1st 2007. If people actually start tampering with this legally mandated safety device, lean on the states to add it to the vehicle inspection requirements... for safety. But few will tamper with the tracking, er, safety device - because it adds convenience to their lives and they can't even be bothered to install PGP.
> All of those things failed. Nobody gets tired of winning.
Only the clipper chip failed. Also, I'm tired - as are many of my friends and coworkers. Up until two years ago about 80% of my time was spent as a security researcher, I burned out. I'd like a systemic fix, because I'm tired of the game.
> ... not having mass surveillance. You're arguing the opposite ...
I argue the opposite as a method of harm reduction, I thought I made it clear in my top post that an end to state spying would be ideal. Where you and I part ways, I think, is that I believe that it is impossible to prevent and verify. You seem to actually believe the whole "consent of the governed" thing.
> ... only practical to do it according to the rules with probable cause rather than in bulk in secret.
Until they start monitoring power consumption, in the interest of finding grow houses. [0] Or monitoring sewers in the interest of catching bomb makers. [1] Please don't suggest that we add this to the cat and mouse game, where I now need to invite strangers over for pee parties and hook my dryer up to a noise generator that randomly turns it on in order to stay ahead in the privacy game.
[0] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2469854/internet/bitcoi...
[1] http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/sewer-sensors-detec...
Because self-driving cars will be in constant contact with some central digital infrastructure that will be tracking everything ("for quality control purposes") and the authorities can far more easily and effectively tap into that data than place license plate readers along the roadside. Tying the "session" together between purchasing information (that's already centralized and freely accessible), car route, and user history, is a piece of cake.
People like Edward Snowden have said surveillance can be used for good purposes. For example, fast forward and imagine auto insurance companies using this traffic monitoring data: Instead of structuring their prices based around age/gender/racial/class discrimination, they can use actual statistics to determine a little more about how safe someone is driving. Or instead of civil engineers having to waste time, money and other resources doing traffic studies...what if they could see the effects of their work in real-time? I think this technology could be used for very good purposes if there was just some transparency and rules surrounding it.
Who has no problem? The gov or the people?
If the license plate tracking gets to that point within metropolitan areas (presumably where cameras are most dense) or they start doing it from blimps or whatever, at least there is precedence for striking it.
It's not going to stop the collection but it should at least prevent the data being used against you in court. Of course, parallel construction. Sigh...
You should learn about how CIs are blackmailed, used, and discarded, and, often enough die. If informants were outed and the use of CIs ended, it would be a benefit to everyone.
Wikileaks? Cables? We lost all our allies, right?
Don't fear radical transparency. It will be to your benefit.
Undoubtedly, the power between the people and the government is unbalanced, but unrestricted transparency is not a one stop solution to the problem.
Let's stipulate all the bad wickedness you would like me to think there is. How much of that has the actual means to threaten the US in any economically or militarily significant way?
With radical transparency may find that we're harming ourselves more by overspending on security theater, and that, for all their wickedness, most of those wicked people can't afford a bus ticket to the next town, much less to actually do anything with their wickedness.
Yes. Your intentions aren't malicious. There are many millions of people whose intentions are malicious. It takes very few of them to do you, your family, your neighbors serious harm.
It shocks me how many people on this site seem to not understand that sometimes.
How is it logical that a few kids in SF building some world-changing piece of software is expected, but a few kids in _____ building a piece of software and whaling a few executives in the DOD, DOJ, DOE and damaging critical national infrastructure is beyond possibility.
How how does is it not clear that exposure of an infrastructure of information gathering would eradicate our ability to do anything but read newspapers about what's going on in the rest of the world?
Yes we need better or different protection against domestic spying. As always technology is ahead of the government, and the professional politicians are simply not technology savvy enough to understand the implications of what they let happen.
We need a continuation of the values and knowledge development that our current tech-centric generations hold. When young people start not caring about how their tech works, is when we'll end up with more of the same convenience over propriety issues we're currently dealing with.
Come off it, and stop watching "24" reruns. The risk you face, I face, everyone faces, is practically nil. We all know the numbers. You have no need to pay more attention to terrorism than you pay to lightning, or slipping in the bathtub.
Moreover, this is true in places that don't have an HSA, an NSA, a CIA, or an FBI. There is no difference in outcome regarding terrorism in Latvia where they all they can afford is to deploy an anti-terrorism potato, or in Alabama, where you have camo'ed citizens armed-up and waiting for ISIS to invade.
And, 24 was rubbish, if it's any consolation.
I think you underestimate them; i would say they are full well aware of exactly the implications, and that it seems to them like their wet dreams are coming true.
> When young people start not caring about how their tech works, is when we'll end up with more of the same convenience over propriety issues we're currently dealing with.
I'm sorry, but i think this ship has already sailed. Or do you believe that currently a majority of "young people" do in fact "care about how their tech works"?
We live in perhaps the finest times of this specie's history, and it's foolish to limit and harm ourselves out of an unspecified anxiety that somebody, somewhere could do something to harm us. We cannot live in fear.
Yeah it's a huge mess here in Sweden. /sarcasm
Anyway, the whole idea that the state needs to operate in secret to perform its duties is ridiculous and only serves bad actors. Who would seriously wish for a secret police force anyway? Maybe we should be focusing on preventing and deescalating, through systemic and scalable solutions, instead of masked weekend warriors kicking down doors and shooting people. Also, if you want a laugh - here is a funny story about what happens when you allow the DEA to operate in secret: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/540/a...
I don't know, that's not such a bad analogy. To put it another way, a key is just a really funny way to write down a bunch of numbers, and a key-lock is just a really esoteric number-pad.
People have actually broken into houses by cutting working keys from pictures they took of victims unlocking their doors—so it's not even obscurity aiding the security per se (or rather, it used to be, but then we greatly standardized the way key-locks work.) Instead, it's just concealment, like the concealed face of a credit card in your wallet.
Normal people don't have a moat.
A major reason that e.g. home invasions are risky (and thus are deterred) is that the criminal doesn't know when the mark or the neighbors will be away from home, what security may be in place or whether there is anything worth stealing. If you put that information on the internet for anyone then every time you come home from work all your electronics will be missing.
Replacing that "security through obscurity" with actual physical security is not something most people can afford.
EDIT: There would need to be a concomitant cultural change as well. As it stands folks are not aware of or engaged with what their government is doing.
Even if we replaced every government official today, it could quickly devolve back to its current state.
Theoretically. First you would need someone with these beliefs to run for office. You would need them to win office, in a position where they have the power to change the laws. Then you would need them to resist the temptation to listen to lobbyists trying to change their mind. Then you would need a vote to pass. Then you would need the government agencies to agree (just because the law says something, doesn't mean everyone agrees). Generally this would take going to a high court who forces the government to comply. Hopefully that court is public and not a private rubber stamp committee.
Theoretically, we can revoke government positions. But we need politicians to do it on our behalf, and we don't really have politicians who are willing to do that.
Pulling off such a takeover is possible, though it would be a lot of work. Voter turnout for Senate and House has been between 36% and 53%.[0],[1] Traditionally campaign finance has been considered a barrier to electing good representatives; however, the hold campaign advertising has over our election process may be weakening. People under 35 spend less time consuming traditional media where campaign ads run and more time on YouTube and social media. A campaign focused on voters under 35 might be enough to create significant change. In California, for example, there are almost enough people between the ages of 18-35 to make a win possible if those people voted as a team.[2]
[0]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0397.p...
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_Sta...
[2]: http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/california/demograp...
You can repeat the Constitution until you're blue in the face, but just because something sounds easy on paper doesn't mean it's easy or even plausible in reality.
[1] - http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POLICE_TRACKING_AP...
It's worth noting that no longer do citizens have the ability to arm themselves with "the same class of weapons" as the government. Unless you're willing to sell APCs and cruise missiles to private parties, there's no way a rebellion can outgun country's military.
Not at this rate. I think officials see the Snowden-fallout and say, "hey, that wasn't so bad. the public barely cares. Yo Comey, hit the press & equate encryption to child abuse; we can win this narrative." Lack of transparency is certainly an issue, but i'd say the bigger one how to make sense of this information to the public.
We just need a lot more of that and we'll be good :)
That said, I feel like the right to bare arms was included specifically for overthrowing oppressive governments (and in case the British came back?).
At what point does a government become sufficiently oppressive as to be overthrown by the people? Without defining that, I feel like government can just keep employing the "but terrorists" excuse and the overton window to keep stripping us of more and more of our privacy and rights.
As for the second thing you said, sounds like you probably just need a little more soma.
Here in the UK most people I know feel safer with surveillance, it's used primarily to keep law and order.
We don't live in some authoritarian state where it's used for nefarious means, it's used to keep the public safe.
And seriously, why would you care if you're sitting on a database? What difference does it make to anything?
And I want to know when this mythical time was when we all had total privacy? I don't understand what bothers people so much about a person in a CCTV monitoring station looking at them sitting on a bus, or a spook reading the emails I send to my parents. Honestly, no-one cares.
I don't particularly mind CCTV coverage of cities, if we still live in 1970 and technology limits it to essentially manual viewing of feeds to follow criminal suspects. In that world, ordinary citizens walking around a city centre are items of data that are discarded forever as soon as the tape reels run out. Even if they're kept, the volumes of data involved are so huge that they're effectively lost in time anyway.
The world we live in today is not that world. We are not far from being able to use facial recognition to track the whereabouts of every single citizen and save it forever, indexed along with the video recording of them at the time. We already have the capability to do that using cellphones. We can save the entire life history of individuals using these records and collate them into a viewable form near-instantly.
As I alluded to in my earlier post, the way we're going it's not a huge leap to imagine voice recognition allowing for phone calls to follow suit. Why is voice recognition important? Because it turns weeks and weeks of trawling through transcripts into a search query with instant results.
It's a completely different ball game. It's permanent, searchable, indexable super-fast memory. 'Forgetting' becomes obsolete.
In the old world of tape CCTV cameras, my neighbours knew more about me than the Government. Now, it's almost certainly the other way around, and if not, only because they've decided not to type 'stegosaurus' into the Big Database of Everything.
Except when it's not. No one disagrees the advantages afforded to us with access to data. However with great power comes great responsibility and our leaders, including the institutional powers behind them, invariably show a lack of the latter.
"Honestly, no-one cares."
That is patently untrue. People who understand the disadvantages and pitfalls of unfettered access to data care very much and fight for our rights even if we are too busy to make it a priority in our lives. The EFF have made it their job to care for example.
It would be political suicide for a UK politician to use the data the police and security forces have for political gain (assuming they got caught of course). It just doesn't happen.
> "That is patently untrue. People who understand the disadvantages and pitfalls of unfettered access to data care very much and fight for our rights even if we are too busy to make it a priority in our lives. The EFF have made it their job to care for example."
It's nice there are people out there making sure things don't get too out of hand. I just question their underlying beliefs about our need for privacy.
Also the "no-one cares" goes both ways. I seriously doubt the state cares about my conversations with friends, most people just aren't that interesting. Perhaps Hacker News suffers from collective delusions of grandeur ;)
I'm actually fine with a CCTV operator in a monitoring station viewing the feeds. I'm also OK with the recordings being kept a short time in case they are needed to investigate something not spotted at the time. What I'm not comfortable with is them being kept more than a month or so. CCTV footage kept long term may be linked with Face recognition for detailed and personal tracking.
Likewise with the ANPR, I would be OK with it kept and accessible for a month or so (although I think a judge should approve searches both on a particular event (time and location) and for searches on a particular number plate.
We may not yet live in a authoritarian state but can you rule out one occuring in the next 50 years? What if legal and reasonable things today are outlawed, gay rights roled back and they search the ANPR for people who may have frequented gay bars or the archived communications data for anyone who used Grindr.
In my view the collected knowledge is more dangerous than the terrorists to a free society and oversight and limits on retention are required.
You are right though that the majority of the public do not feel this way yet. That doesn't mean we shouldn't oppose the surveilance where not fully justified and try to educate them.
I would also note precisely what you said "people I know feel safer with surveilance" and while I think you may be right I'm really not sure how much safer they actually are.
The UK government don't misuse surveillance for political reasons, if they did there would be uproar. We're not slipping into an authoritarian state, that would be completely at odds with British culture and where we're really heading.
I'm just tired of seeing a trend of people who post here all spouting the same anti-surveilance, privacy is everything, ideals. Without adding any caveats for the benefits and protection we gain from people watching over us. It feels like there is total disregard here for what we would lose by giving it up.
I'm okay with giving up a little privacy for the greater good.
Well I'm don't. At times there may be suspicions and warrants to go after lawyers and journalists but at other times that may endanger whistleblowers and it should be overseen by judges issuing warrants.
> The UK government don't misuse surveillance for political reasons, if they did there would be uproar. We're not slipping into an authoritarian state, that would be completely at odds with British culture and where we're really heading.
Prove it. And how would we ever find out that the government were misuing surveilance? A whistleblower could immediately be identified by correlating movements with the relevant journalist or internet traffic. Secondly trusting today's government and security services isn't enough you need to trust all future ones too.
> I'm just tired of seeing a trend of people who post here all spouting the same anti-surveilance, privacy is everything, ideals. Without adding any caveats for the benefits and protection we gain from people watching over us. It feels like there is total disregard here for what we would lose by giving it up.
I never called for the security services to be disbanded, CCTV to be removed or ANPR to be stopped. I said limit retention. Is it possible that some crimes will not be solved that could have been with unlimited retention - Yes. Is it also possible that legitimate speech, whistle blowing and reporting could be deterred by the current surveillance - Yes. These things have to be balanced.
> I'm okay with giving up a little privacy for the greater good.
So am I. With the emphasis on "little" and "greater good". Your approach seems to be "all" privacy with little information on the "greater good" that will come from it or acknowledgments of the harms done. I believe of association, thought, speech and movement are also goods that are damaged by omniscient government (if people avoid doing legitimate things because of the surveilance).
-
Overall though I agree with basically everything you say. I'm just tilted a little more towards longer retention and more information than you I guess.
I concede it is possible that I jumped in here and made blanket statements that aren't 100% realistic. The general sentiment does reflect my opinion though.
Thankfully this is why we have democracy, so a more tempered approach most people agree with can be used :)
-
By the way your comments come across as more balanced and reasoned than I lot I read expressing basically the same viewpoint.
There are plenty of people who hold positions of government power that have done far worse than abuse surveillance for their own ends.
I'm from the UK and I absolutely, utterly disagree with what you are saying, most of which is baseless.
There have been abuses, there are corrupt intentions at work and there most certainly are people who do not think this level of surveillance is a good thing.
I seem to remember one of the Pirate Bay founders said something along those lines. Not even because it's "already lost" but because we need to start treating the cause and not the symptom. Yeah it's great that we can use encryption to avoid government snooping for now, but how long will that be feasible? The long-term solution would be to stop them from doing it in the first place.
If someone is logging your access to a something, they are required to provide you with the logs on request.
I think Europe at least would go for it. In Japan telephone cameras are required to make a clicking sound. This is an extension of the concept.
1. A law requiring the government to delete this data after a certain amount of time.
2. Legal penalties for abusing this data. Perhaps standards for how the data must be protected.
There is/was almost zero prosecution of individuals involved in the global financial collapse of 2008. Occupy Wall Street protestors, on the other hand, were beaten, arrested, maced, and so on.
Rules against authority figures in this country are for show at best. Didn't used to be that way, but here we are.
The only thing you can take from them is funding. So did Congress -- took away money from IRS and brought their operational budget to those levels from 2008.
And now - pick one that is correct:
A) The director of IRS cut off $80MM bonuses promised to all those hard working ants that scrutinized non-profit applicants and further lost backup tapes that have been miraculously found years later; OR,
B) The director of IRS cut off funds for customer support telephone line, forcing people to wait minimum 30 minutes on the line before a real person answers, admitting on the record that majority of taxpayers won't be able to reach out for help in this tax period.
Any solutions to this clear abuse of power and disrespect to fellow citizens??
Actually it's even more serious. If you try to avoid it it's a criminal act and your labeled as a criminal. To be very honest I'd rather move to a remote place getting away of this evolution.
Honest question: What's stopping you?
A huge number of people say they'd readily give up life in a nation that infringes their privacy for a different life away from prying eyes, but very, very few people actually bother to do it. There are plenty of nations where surveillance is still at the 'none' level, beyond a few paper records for things like passports and car registration. And generally they're quite cheap to live in and have nice weather. So why are you still living in the apparently awful conditions where you are now?
Could it be that privacy is actually much less important to you than ready access to, say, a good internet connection?
True. Network effects negate the advantages of encryption. You can't use TOR to hide when posting to FB, in other words.
Ostensibly to reduce the amount of uninsured/untaxed drivers on the roads.
Don't want to sit around in databases? Well, here's a nice list of just a few of the things you can't have:
Bank account; Car/motorcycle; Mobile telephone; Internet-connected computer; Credit/debit card; Visible face (oh, we might be safe there, for a few years)
Unless of course you're a criminal, in which case you can handily avoid a lot of this!
I used to think we could escape surveillance using technology. Fool's errand. We'd need an entire culture change. It's gone.
If blanket video coverage of public areas is fine, why not blanket audio coverage? Add in facial and audio recognition. Now consider you're running about with a microphone webcam combo in your pocket, the power and battery life of which will only increase.
I hate it with every ounce of my being, but I can't see a way out here. I can't see the 'line', any more.