> Tracing our every move and our every thought is a clear human rights violation.
Not being snarky, but under which legal system? Maybe in the EU to some extent? AFAIK, the U.S. does not classify privacy as a human right, though there are people who believe it should be.
Human rights, unless explicitly protected by a society's law, do not exist in a practical sense.
Last I heard (several years ago), Snowden's position is that he'd be happy to stand trial in the US, as long as the proceedings were public. Is that still the case?
this reads more like a hope than an actual argument. AFAIK, the protests in hong kong are more about sovereignty than government surveillance (though I would be happy to be corrected). I don't get the impression that the average american cares very much about surveillance, whether it's by corporations or the government. they might make some offhand remarks about how they don't like it, but you don't see anything like the BLM or occupy protests. it's too abstract. I don't really see any mainstream politicians even discussing mass surveillance by the government. at most, they might make some empty threats toward google/facebook/twitter.
The Patriot Act has been a big deal politically multiple times. Net Neutrality was discussed by mainstream politicians.
I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
> The Patriot Act has been a big deal politically multiple times.
It has? I must have missed it. It's regularly scorned on HN, but I haven't seen much mainstream concern about it at all. Certainly not the level of concern that it deserves.
> The Patriot Act has been a big deal politically multiple times. Net Neutrality was discussed by mainstream politicians.
the patriot act generates a round of discussion whenever it's up for renewal, but I don't get the impression that there's emphatic popular opposition. IIRC, it actually failed to be renewed this year, but only because trump feared it might be used against him in an investigation.
net neutrality isn't quite the same situation. it's actually important to the big internet companies so it gets some strong support.
> I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
I honestly don't know what this would look like. imo, a large part of why police brutality gets so much attention is because there are concrete examples of police killing people who didn't do anything to deserve it. if you ask around, you'll probably find at least a couple people you actually know have had bad experiences with the police. what's the equivalent of this for surveillance? seeing toaster ads after you buy a toaster on amazon just doesn't bother people the same way.
I have had multiple conversations with family and friends, both technical and non, where they express the concern about their phone or Facebook listening to conversations. They may not use the work "surveillance", but people are definitely concerned.
A bill for "my phone is not allowed to eavesdrop" would have wide public support, and would open up the conversation on all the ways that surveillance takes place that does not include listening to conversations.
In my city, we are working on an ordinance to put oversight of surveillance technology into the hands of a community commission. Definitely hundreds, but possibly thousands, of people have called in, emailed in, or otherwise commented in support of our efforts.
Saying the public doesn't care about surveillance is oft-repeated reductionism, even around HN, and I think we could level-up ever so slightly by widely admitting that average people are just as complex as you, and have lots of interesting cares, when the context is right.
> Saying the public doesn't care about surveillance is oft-repeated reductionism, even around HN, and I think we could level-up ever so slightly by widely admitting that average people are just as complex as you, and have lots of interesting cares, when the context is right.
I'm not arguing they are simpletons who just don't understand tech, but it's quite clear that most people don't care enough to do anything about it. take me as an example. in the abstract, I dislike being the subject of surveillance. but in practice, I don't care enough to sacrifice the convenience of the google ecosystem. I certainly don't care enough to replace my android phone with an iphone, even though I could afford it.
You could have said the same thing about food back in the early 20th century. I dislike adulterated food just as much as anybody but in practice I don't care enough grow my own food even though I could afford it.
Even if the public cares and is able to restrict government surveillance, how will we stop private surveillance?
For a couple hundred dollars I can install a computer-vision enabled camera that tracks and logs the face of everyone that passes, the clothes you are wearing and each car that passes. Security systems like Verkada already do this, and it is perfectly legal for companies to install these overlooking busy streets and public areas.
This tech will only get cheaper, smaller, and harder to notice. It's ridiculous to think that mass surveillance will be beaten.
I believe the average citizens have duly noted that they are potentially under surveillance, and are thus self-censoring to some extent. They may view it as uncomfortable and a bit chilling, but by and large a small price to pay for the possibility to catch terrorists, preferably before the act.
I believe this will be status quo until it becomes increasingly obvious that "terrorists" are gradually coming to include normal political opponents and that these tools are being used by oligarchical forces to suppress democracy itself. It hasn't happened yet, but we're getting close.
It's interesting because people (quite rightly) speak fearfully of the Chinese social credit system.
Over here in the US, we seem to be accidentally building something that is somewhat similar, but far more haphazard and inconsistent: online outrage mobs. I'd wager more people are self-censoring due to these than anything the US government has put into place.
> I don't get the impression that the average american cares very much about surveillance, whether it's by corporations or the government.
More than that I'd wager they'd be more likely to support it. As we've seen in the past just advertise it as a way to nab the most heinous form of criminals (terrorists, child predators, etc.) and enough people will be ok with it. Hell, even here, a site you'd expect to be strongly anti-surveileance, I've seen comments that basically equated to "I'm ok with [mass surveillance tech] because it's going to help stop [bad guy group]".
Yeah, if the CCP had evolved into the liberal democracy people were hoping they would (in the lead up to 1997, e.g.), then Hong Kongers would not mind so much.
He knows you when you're sleeping,
He knows when you're awake,
He knows when you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake.
Is it then a surprise that folks don't care about surveillance's consequences? Maybe Christopher Hitchens was on to something real with "Religion poisons everything".
One silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists.
The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed.
The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies.
I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change.
ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1]
Sounds like something I’d like to get behind, but then in the first paragraph it makes it sound like it’s something only “people of color” need to worry about. That’s a miscalculation I think. Getting control from many police forces means needing republican support, and everyone should be concerned.
What I can tell you from experience is that people of color, and religious people, are the most likely to get activated on this idea at the early stages. They can be among the most impacted by the harms of mass surveillance technology, and are among those that stand to gain the most from controlling it.
They also are often already organized, and often already have the ear of elected representatives from their past activism.
All of these things combine to make it a very good idea to engage those communities at the outset of an effort. I am not a person of color, nor am I religious, but I have been able to play an important role in my city's effort.
Technologists need to help, not necessarily lead, these community efforts. Email me if you'd like more support on getting started!
Perhaps, but when courting support, dumping half to a local majority of the potential audience in the first paragraph is ill-advisesd. Locally, police surveillance is equal opportunity.
This is the first bit of one of those ACLU articles. IMHO it doesn't sound like anyone is being "dumped", rather, the ACLU is choosing to focus on a particular audience. Which there are a lot of legitimate reasons to choose to do.
Also the statistical makeup each community is going to vary; so in some places you might be correct about "half to a local majority" of the community being white (not sure if that's what you meant), in other places, it'll be the other way around.
"The increasing use of surveillance technologies by local police across America, especially against communities of color and other unjustly targeted groups, has been creating oppressive and stigmatizing environments in which every community member is treated like a prospective criminal. Many communities of color and of low income have been turned into virtual prisons where residents’ public behavior is monitored and scrutinized 24 hours a day."
Many such decisions are made statewide. Even in one as blue as California there are significant voters in red counties. Exclude them at your peril, as was proven in 2000 and 2016.
The biggest failing with the democratic party is thinking that centrists or conservatives are not worth addressing, and it continues to earn them defeat.
There is no such "dumping." The plight of those communities is real, and it is used as an example. There are many more examples not mentioned, but that doesn't mean they are excluded from the inventory of harms a coalition will represent and work to fix.
Perhaps you don't have any rural republican friends but as a centrist, I do. And I can assure you they wouldn't make it to the second paragraph. Diversity is important in more ways than one. Not including "white" voters is a recipe for failure.
They matter in swing States like Florida, where 57% of Cuban-Americans voted for Trump and 66% of all Latinos voted for the Republican Governor DeSantis.
That conservatives see no ownership of problems characterized as specific to their black and brown neighbors (family, selves...) is orthogonal to the issue of what to do about those issues.
Which Republicans? There are several flavors these days.
Also the question would be if reducing the area of government in question also reduced the ability of that part of the government to perform it's function; if so, than a reduction vs oversight agency is not an apples-to-apples comparison, imho.
To me this is exactly what the FIRE movement is about (Financial Independence, Retire Early). I know some people just want to live on the beach or run a hobby farm or foster 10 rescue dogs at a time, but many will have the time, desire, and bandwidth to participate in activities like this which require the type of bandwidth that very much feels like a job. Good on you!
> One silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists.
This is absolutely not assuring. All this means is that the wrong people are going to be surveilled, arrested, and punished.
What I'm going to watch closely is where wide-spread surveillance and hard law & order measures will be implemented and how people react. The typical scenario is lawlessness that then leads to people voting for a strongman that enacts authoritarian policies. But I can absolutely see people voting for more public surveillance and law & order from a position of wealth as a replacement of social control / delegation of control to the state. Basically: you no longer have the grandmother on the window sill keeping an eye on the street and informing the parents of misbehaving kids, you'll have a camera.
I can certainly see the allure. I wonder how a competition within the Western System between surveillance and anti-surveillance locations will fare. Techno-authoritarianism can be very efficient, and even more so when it's not used to keep a corrupt system from toppling over (this is where somebody might jump up and say that that's exactly what it's doing in Western countries, but that's besides the point for local surveillance), and the question becomes how much more efficient it would be and how willing people are to trade privacy for comfort.
Right, all laws require enforcement. A local ordinance, such as ours (which, by the way, includes enforcement teeth), is the beginning of community control, not the end.
Absolutely. In my city, they implemented red light cameras in a (good) way that loses money.
Yet they still did it -- because it's really a surveillance network that happens to issue tickets. The map of cameras captures 95% of traffic entering or leaving the city and captures many transit chokepoints, with 30 day local video retention of all traffic.
I learned from jury service that this is important because surveillance video is a key investigative tool and being able to key events to a trusted reference point is important. If some event happens in a 10-minute window (due to cameras with bad time sync), you can use an independent event (say a bus passing by) to reduce the period of uncertainty.
> complex technology picked up by cities and counties... will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists
You don't know that. There are almost certainly nonpublic "partnerships" that you are not aware of.
“This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” [1]
"Because of partner relations and legal authorities, SSO Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA." [2]
Technological ineptitude is something that is utterly reckless to take for granted. First, the internet was free and for nerds. Then companies took notice and conquered it. Now governments are coming too. The only thing that governments know how to do, by definition, is to dominate territory and the internet is the new frontier
The only reason we have mass surveillance is because we don’t have a way to surveil only those who should be surveilled. But I agree, once there’s a way to do so, mass surveillance will end in favor of highly targeted surveillance.
Remember there are enough laws that no one is in compliance with all of them. That leaves anyone unpopular at risk of retaliation. Therefore, the more data points you have on an opponent, the more control you have.
I'm not the commenter you asked, but I'm saying we don't know, we cannot easily know and we shouldn't bring ourselves into a position where we even have to ask.
Surveillance isn’t going anywhere - nearly every country is utilizing it (be it widely known or unknown) and that trend is only increasing.
The hope of democratic nations is to use it well, with ample checks, balances, and protections. It is arguably a necessity for national and international security. Proper checks should keep it confined to this space.
Surveillance has been in use for decades by most countries, somewhere along the line we forgot though that the enemy isn’t surveillance itself, it is abuse.
You have to trust that an unbroken line of honest surveillance users will exist at all points in government and business, decade after decade, across all political parties and industries. How exactly is that going to happen when even convenience store chains are recklessly using ai driven mass surveillance now?
Sadly I think this Snowden article is nonsense. I don't see any way of rolling back global surveillance going forward. It's great to organize on a local level to make a point but the extent of data capture by shadowy state sanctioned organizations has been going on for decades and is now that data cam be parsed and manipulated by increasingly sophisticated AI. Add in divide and rule social engineering and cancel culture and we are rapidly accelerating into an era that is extremely Orwellian.
I'm also disappointed to see Snowden write '..a youth rebellion that relied on lasers and traffic cones as sword and shield, and that it would come to paralyze one of the world’s richest and most powerful governments'. For me this is nonsense. Rioting and lawless behaviors are arguably being allowed as part of a 'problem, reaction, solution' crackdown to justify future more draconian policing. There is no paralysis.
Agreed. This is just cement to bind together the tragedy that is the offshore capitalist empire, less and less freedom and less and less rights. I'm so disapointed with what was done to the world, it's turning into a homogeneous panopticon with no end in sight
The only way to truly roll back surveillance is political action to dismantle it at the state level. Unfortunately Snowden always points away from this avenue to niche, technological pseudo-solutions like cryptography which have by now proven unable to disrupt the system's functioning as a whole.
Of course, that political action could take many forms. In a 1968 short story titled 2068 A.D. Frank Herbert wrote:
"Prominent in 2068 history books is the account of the violence at the turn of the century when people revolted against computer control. Computer stored data (growing out of the old National Data Center) had been used to harass and persecute those whose views didn't conform with those of the majority. In the bloody revolt, most computers were destroyed, their data erased."
We can and should fight back, this makes the job of the surveillance state harder. But my concern is, that I think the problem will eventually get much worse than it is today.
I believe that eventually this kind of surveillance will be run almost entirely by sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. It partially is already, but as the technology improves, the amount and quality of the automated surveillance will increase.
Masks, lasers, cones, they might be quite effective against current technology, but that is going to change as the technology improves and an AI can determine your identity from your gait, or a combination of other features such as the width of your shoulders, the length of various bones in your body, etc. China is almost certainly already working on this kind of software as a direct response to the Hong Kong protests.
Governments will continue to work towards innovating and improving their surveillance programs, specifically in a way that reduces the amount of actual humans that are involved (to reduce the probability of another like Snowden) as well as reduce the visibility of the program to not trigger and go against human's "desire to be free" the article mentions.
Think this is bad? Wait until you see what "strings" will come attached to eventual-UBI. Show up at a riot? No more UBI. Interfere with law enforcement? No more UBI. Out past 10pm? No more UBI. UBI will be handed out like a driver's license - a privilege to be revoked at will. Endgame will be total compliance, and for bonus points, the cool kids all will cheer it.
Great to hear from Snowden. I hope he's right. Basically all this misery is a direct result of 9/11, without which none of this would ever have been allowed. Of course it was tragic but the measures introduced were overblown and ignored the real cause of the issue. He is right and I do see the privacy-first movement slowly creeping from the shadows into the mainstream. About time!
However I shudder to think what the Corona crisis will do to society. As we've seen with 9/11, it usually takes many years for the worst abuses to really emerge. The crisis itself sets the public opinion in motion, first fought (like in many places they are now) when the measures are actually needed. But eventually everyone seems to get in line behind it, though by that time the actual crisis is already over. Then nobody criticises the measures anymore even though they're no longer needed. They get used to the sense of 'safety' when there is no more rational danger.
The 9/11 attacks were much more a result of poor US intelligence processes than of the tools they had available to them! Even the response to that realisation was baffling: The answer to having too many agencies that don't communicate was... to build yet another agency. :/
I'm not looking forward to a world where the virus is gone but everyone has become a hardcore germaphobe, and the government enforces this by law. I have strong hayfever so part of the year I'll be coughing and sneezing, but it's not contagous at all. Fun times ahead with a lot of suspicion around me :( I'm afraid Corona will be gone in a year or 2 but all its negative effects like social distancing, masks and mandatory quarantines will persist much longer under the label of 'safety'. We were pretty safe before Corona, thank you very much. I know these things are needed now but they won't be forever.
In the same way we've been groped by airport security for 20 years now and all our comms catalogued in order to obtain some kind of undefined idea of 'safety' which nobody cares to elaborate because of 'security concerns'. We never find out know how this information has really helped, ostensibly because 'the bad guys can learn from that', but then again, in almost every case the 'bad guys' were just using tech like plain unencrypted SMS anyway and were plainly operating on the radar. The truth is that too many people make too much money around it all for it to be reconsidered.
Of course I will fight overzealous Corona measures (after Corona is gone) just like I've fought surveillance (by promoting safe tools), but it takes a long time for public opinion to really sway back and do something about it. Basically, people are lemmings :(
We already convince the masses to install a contact tracing app. Its perfectly benign in most countries, maybe a bit buggy. Next corona season they will improve it. Eventually peer pressure will make it very distasteful to go outside and not bring your contact tracing device. When most people have contact tracing, and since most people have location history on their devices, putting both data together will happen at some point. If the data exists, it will be used. Always. Either directly or through "leaks" and exploits.
In berlin we're also becoming used to seeing police everywhete all the time because of corona. Small things that together can erode our freedom. Death by thousand cuts and all.
even in the midst of a pandemic most people are far from being a "hard-core germaphobe". most people who follow Covid avoidance advice do completely sensible things like wear a mask in public spaces, social distance when indoors with other people, and wash / hand sanitize their hands more.
if those actions continue for the foreseeable future, I don't think society is really worse off in anyway - at least not that I can see
Yes, right now people are fighting it even though it's common sense to have these measures.
But eventually they'll get used to it and the false sense of safety it gives them when the danger has already passed, and they'll be fighting to give it up. Wait and see! People have a slow momentum.
> Today, the Hong Kong uprising is in ashes and the mass arrests have begun. If you ever needed proof that networks are balanced on the knife-edge of liberation and oppression, here it is.
Ha, well played, Doctorow. I preordered a dead trees copy of this release of Homeland/Little Brother (both of which I had already read) to read the Snowden intro. It arrived not long ago, and I did just that.
The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Coming Cryptopocalypse.
the only reason global mass surveillance is even technically possible os because turnkey mass scale crypto exists.
if NSA and FVEYs could not conceal their own penetration and exfiltration of all the world's data, then they would not be able to do it on a scale like we saw reveales in Snowden's leaks. cryptography PROTECTS the Surveillance State MORE than it protects us Plebians. the asymmetrical advantage of weilding cryptographic supremacy is what makes NSA's regime physically possible.
all modern crypto is based on a handful of crypto primitive math algorithms. we blindly trust them to be secure because nobody yet knows how to crack them. but if some lone wolf math genius pulled an Isaac Newton and invented a solution to FACTOR and proved P=NP, then crypto as we know it would cease to exist. no more RSA, no more ECC, no more AES, no more SHA3.
this wont even require quantum computers, because it is presently unknown whether there exists a classical solution to insoluble problems like FACTOR and P=NP.
what if a classical solution does exist? what if it is found in the next 10 years?
i believe it will be found.
i agree with Snowden's sentiments. the mass surveillance state is an anomaly, a blip of time where a lack of mathematical progress was met with the rise of the global Internet, where it was convenient for NSA to use crypto as a weapon against all of us. post-cryptopocalypse, life is going to be very inconvenient for NSA and the FVEYs. the cost of hoarding secrets will become too great compared to the risk of losing those secrets due to a newly leveled cryptographic playing field. leveled in the sense that anyone can realistically attack any known ciphers.
the future of cryptography is its past. the 18th century. manually designed cryptosystems intended to have very short shelf lives, because they get cracked so frequently. only militaries and banks will have the resources to design and deploy cryptosystems. since it will be so much more expensive to deploy encryption, only truly important secrets will be encrypted at all. there will be a massive cultural shift in how our Intelligence Agencies operate. they won't even resemble themselves as they are today.
for this reason, i am a radical optimist about the fall of the mass surveillance state.
I wonder how they'll try and combat anonymous networks like TOR and I2P once these become faster and more popular. Thanks to federation and distributed technologies, I think they'll have a hard time snooping on people.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadNot being snarky, but under which legal system? Maybe in the EU to some extent? AFAIK, the U.S. does not classify privacy as a human right, though there are people who believe it should be.
Human rights, unless explicitly protected by a society's law, do not exist in a practical sense.
The tech employees of these corporations are aware and enjoy the profits. When do we start holding them accountable.
I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
It has? I must have missed it. It's regularly scorned on HN, but I haven't seen much mainstream concern about it at all. Certainly not the level of concern that it deserves.
the patriot act generates a round of discussion whenever it's up for renewal, but I don't get the impression that there's emphatic popular opposition. IIRC, it actually failed to be renewed this year, but only because trump feared it might be used against him in an investigation.
net neutrality isn't quite the same situation. it's actually important to the big internet companies so it gets some strong support.
> I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
I honestly don't know what this would look like. imo, a large part of why police brutality gets so much attention is because there are concrete examples of police killing people who didn't do anything to deserve it. if you ask around, you'll probably find at least a couple people you actually know have had bad experiences with the police. what's the equivalent of this for surveillance? seeing toaster ads after you buy a toaster on amazon just doesn't bother people the same way.
A bill for "my phone is not allowed to eavesdrop" would have wide public support, and would open up the conversation on all the ways that surveillance takes place that does not include listening to conversations.
Saying the public doesn't care about surveillance is oft-repeated reductionism, even around HN, and I think we could level-up ever so slightly by widely admitting that average people are just as complex as you, and have lots of interesting cares, when the context is right.
I'm not arguing they are simpletons who just don't understand tech, but it's quite clear that most people don't care enough to do anything about it. take me as an example. in the abstract, I dislike being the subject of surveillance. but in practice, I don't care enough to sacrifice the convenience of the google ecosystem. I certainly don't care enough to replace my android phone with an iphone, even though I could afford it.
How would this possibly work?
Happy to tell you, or anyone who is curious, about it! Email in my profile.
For a couple hundred dollars I can install a computer-vision enabled camera that tracks and logs the face of everyone that passes, the clothes you are wearing and each car that passes. Security systems like Verkada already do this, and it is perfectly legal for companies to install these overlooking busy streets and public areas.
This tech will only get cheaper, smaller, and harder to notice. It's ridiculous to think that mass surveillance will be beaten.
I believe this will be status quo until it becomes increasingly obvious that "terrorists" are gradually coming to include normal political opponents and that these tools are being used by oligarchical forces to suppress democracy itself. It hasn't happened yet, but we're getting close.
Over here in the US, we seem to be accidentally building something that is somewhat similar, but far more haphazard and inconsistent: online outrage mobs. I'd wager more people are self-censoring due to these than anything the US government has put into place.
People have changed what they search for since the Snowden whistleblowing.
More than that I'd wager they'd be more likely to support it. As we've seen in the past just advertise it as a way to nab the most heinous form of criminals (terrorists, child predators, etc.) and enough people will be ok with it. Hell, even here, a site you'd expect to be strongly anti-surveileance, I've seen comments that basically equated to "I'm ok with [mass surveillance tech] because it's going to help stop [bad guy group]".
Those two things are not unrelated.
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In fact, if the exemplary tools of resistance are lasers and traffic cones, it sounds like the system is well on its way to being perfected.
The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed.
The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies.
I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change.
ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1]
[0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-...
[1] https://www.aclunc.org/publications/fighting-local-surveilla...
They also are often already organized, and often already have the ear of elected representatives from their past activism.
All of these things combine to make it a very good idea to engage those communities at the outset of an effort. I am not a person of color, nor am I religious, but I have been able to play an important role in my city's effort.
Technologists need to help, not necessarily lead, these community efforts. Email me if you'd like more support on getting started!
Also the statistical makeup each community is going to vary; so in some places you might be correct about "half to a local majority" of the community being white (not sure if that's what you meant), in other places, it'll be the other way around.
"The increasing use of surveillance technologies by local police across America, especially against communities of color and other unjustly targeted groups, has been creating oppressive and stigmatizing environments in which every community member is treated like a prospective criminal. Many communities of color and of low income have been turned into virtual prisons where residents’ public behavior is monitored and scrutinized 24 hours a day."
The biggest failing with the democratic party is thinking that centrists or conservatives are not worth addressing, and it continues to earn them defeat.
When I read "people of color" anywhere, I assume myself excluded.
Maybe you should keep reading, then.
They just want to solve the problem with less government instead of an oversight agency.
Also the question would be if reducing the area of government in question also reduced the ability of that part of the government to perform it's function; if so, than a reduction vs oversight agency is not an apples-to-apples comparison, imho.
This is absolutely not assuring. All this means is that the wrong people are going to be surveilled, arrested, and punished.
I can certainly see the allure. I wonder how a competition within the Western System between surveillance and anti-surveillance locations will fare. Techno-authoritarianism can be very efficient, and even more so when it's not used to keep a corrupt system from toppling over (this is where somebody might jump up and say that that's exactly what it's doing in Western countries, but that's besides the point for local surveillance), and the question becomes how much more efficient it would be and how willing people are to trade privacy for comfort.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/san-francisco-police-a...
Yet they still did it -- because it's really a surveillance network that happens to issue tickets. The map of cameras captures 95% of traffic entering or leaving the city and captures many transit chokepoints, with 30 day local video retention of all traffic.
I learned from jury service that this is important because surveillance video is a key investigative tool and being able to key events to a trusted reference point is important. If some event happens in a 10-minute window (due to cameras with bad time sync), you can use an independent event (say a bus passing by) to reduce the period of uncertainty.
You don't know that. There are almost certainly nonpublic "partnerships" that you are not aware of.
“This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” [1]
"Because of partner relations and legal authorities, SSO Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA." [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-ns....
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/15/us/documents.....
Remember there are enough laws that no one is in compliance with all of them. That leaves anyone unpopular at risk of retaliation. Therefore, the more data points you have on an opponent, the more control you have.
- https://whistleblowersofamerica.org/2019/04/01/what-is-whist...
- https://whistleblower.org/timeline-us-whistleblowers/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kxzq/dmvs-selling-data-...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
- https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/danielwagner/she-told-t...
- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-us-government-employee...
Think you're safe at home?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge
Think it is new?
- https://theconversation.com/j-edgar-hoovers-revenge-informat...
The hope of democratic nations is to use it well, with ample checks, balances, and protections. It is arguably a necessity for national and international security. Proper checks should keep it confined to this space.
Surveillance has been in use for decades by most countries, somewhere along the line we forgot though that the enemy isn’t surveillance itself, it is abuse.
Of course, that political action could take many forms. In a 1968 short story titled 2068 A.D. Frank Herbert wrote:
"Prominent in 2068 history books is the account of the violence at the turn of the century when people revolted against computer control. Computer stored data (growing out of the old National Data Center) had been used to harass and persecute those whose views didn't conform with those of the majority. In the bloody revolt, most computers were destroyed, their data erased."
I believe that eventually this kind of surveillance will be run almost entirely by sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. It partially is already, but as the technology improves, the amount and quality of the automated surveillance will increase.
Masks, lasers, cones, they might be quite effective against current technology, but that is going to change as the technology improves and an AI can determine your identity from your gait, or a combination of other features such as the width of your shoulders, the length of various bones in your body, etc. China is almost certainly already working on this kind of software as a direct response to the Hong Kong protests.
Governments will continue to work towards innovating and improving their surveillance programs, specifically in a way that reduces the amount of actual humans that are involved (to reduce the probability of another like Snowden) as well as reduce the visibility of the program to not trigger and go against human's "desire to be free" the article mentions.
However I shudder to think what the Corona crisis will do to society. As we've seen with 9/11, it usually takes many years for the worst abuses to really emerge. The crisis itself sets the public opinion in motion, first fought (like in many places they are now) when the measures are actually needed. But eventually everyone seems to get in line behind it, though by that time the actual crisis is already over. Then nobody criticises the measures anymore even though they're no longer needed. They get used to the sense of 'safety' when there is no more rational danger.
The 9/11 attacks were much more a result of poor US intelligence processes than of the tools they had available to them! Even the response to that realisation was baffling: The answer to having too many agencies that don't communicate was... to build yet another agency. :/
I'm not looking forward to a world where the virus is gone but everyone has become a hardcore germaphobe, and the government enforces this by law. I have strong hayfever so part of the year I'll be coughing and sneezing, but it's not contagous at all. Fun times ahead with a lot of suspicion around me :( I'm afraid Corona will be gone in a year or 2 but all its negative effects like social distancing, masks and mandatory quarantines will persist much longer under the label of 'safety'. We were pretty safe before Corona, thank you very much. I know these things are needed now but they won't be forever.
In the same way we've been groped by airport security for 20 years now and all our comms catalogued in order to obtain some kind of undefined idea of 'safety' which nobody cares to elaborate because of 'security concerns'. We never find out know how this information has really helped, ostensibly because 'the bad guys can learn from that', but then again, in almost every case the 'bad guys' were just using tech like plain unencrypted SMS anyway and were plainly operating on the radar. The truth is that too many people make too much money around it all for it to be reconsidered.
Of course I will fight overzealous Corona measures (after Corona is gone) just like I've fought surveillance (by promoting safe tools), but it takes a long time for public opinion to really sway back and do something about it. Basically, people are lemmings :(
In berlin we're also becoming used to seeing police everywhete all the time because of corona. Small things that together can erode our freedom. Death by thousand cuts and all.
if those actions continue for the foreseeable future, I don't think society is really worse off in anyway - at least not that I can see
But eventually they'll get used to it and the false sense of safety it gives them when the danger has already passed, and they'll be fighting to give it up. Wait and see! People have a slow momentum.
Don't take freedom for granted.
Today it’s in Wired. :D
remember this presentation from a few years ago?
The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Coming Cryptopocalypse.
the only reason global mass surveillance is even technically possible os because turnkey mass scale crypto exists.
if NSA and FVEYs could not conceal their own penetration and exfiltration of all the world's data, then they would not be able to do it on a scale like we saw reveales in Snowden's leaks. cryptography PROTECTS the Surveillance State MORE than it protects us Plebians. the asymmetrical advantage of weilding cryptographic supremacy is what makes NSA's regime physically possible.
all modern crypto is based on a handful of crypto primitive math algorithms. we blindly trust them to be secure because nobody yet knows how to crack them. but if some lone wolf math genius pulled an Isaac Newton and invented a solution to FACTOR and proved P=NP, then crypto as we know it would cease to exist. no more RSA, no more ECC, no more AES, no more SHA3.
this wont even require quantum computers, because it is presently unknown whether there exists a classical solution to insoluble problems like FACTOR and P=NP.
what if a classical solution does exist? what if it is found in the next 10 years?
i believe it will be found.
i agree with Snowden's sentiments. the mass surveillance state is an anomaly, a blip of time where a lack of mathematical progress was met with the rise of the global Internet, where it was convenient for NSA to use crypto as a weapon against all of us. post-cryptopocalypse, life is going to be very inconvenient for NSA and the FVEYs. the cost of hoarding secrets will become too great compared to the risk of losing those secrets due to a newly leveled cryptographic playing field. leveled in the sense that anyone can realistically attack any known ciphers.
the future of cryptography is its past. the 18th century. manually designed cryptosystems intended to have very short shelf lives, because they get cracked so frequently. only militaries and banks will have the resources to design and deploy cryptosystems. since it will be so much more expensive to deploy encryption, only truly important secrets will be encrypted at all. there will be a massive cultural shift in how our Intelligence Agencies operate. they won't even resemble themselves as they are today.
for this reason, i am a radical optimist about the fall of the mass surveillance state.
But that's maybe 20 years away