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TIA Preview: Here's Lookin' At You
cosmosis points to this interesting glimpse presented on Cryptome at ways in which the proposed "Total Information Awareness" system currently being touted as a way to fight terrorism could be abused. It's also a reminder that there's plenty of possibly sensitive information on you and your neighbors that's floating out there already.
Yes, could be abused. I don't know about you, but in all seriousness I'd rather risk the chance that someone sees some irrelvant data of mine than to see another plane crash into one of our skyscrapers.
Honestly, how many people on Slashdot really have something to hide? I know that its disconcerting to know that you may experience an invasion of privacy but most of us are too inconsequential for the government to bother with.
Anyways, while I have my reservations about TIA, I'm sure adequate safeguards could be imposed to prevent most of these abuses.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
"Just show up, to be the first on our list!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm sure you'll have the same opinion once I've mined the TIA database for information so I can take out several credit cards in your name.
thanks, you big, generous patriot, you!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's not tradefoff. It's a pig-in-a-poke.
I'd rather risk the chance that someone sees some irrelvant data of mine than to see another plane crash into one of our skyscrapers.
So would I, if there were terms like that offered. But there aren't. The choice we have is not give up our privacy in return for an iron clad guarantee that there won't be another WTC style attack. The choice we do have is this: give up our freedom from government meddling in our private affairs in return for an uncertain difference in the probability of a future attack.
If this were a money question it would be simple. If you want my money, show me how the money will be used to benefit me. Here we are being asked to invest our freedom from government interference and they aren't showing us the prospectus.
There really ought to be a name for this fallacy: that drastic problems justify any sufficiently drastic measure. If a blindfolded man is walking toward a cliff, I can do several things. I can grab his collar; I can rip off his blindfold. I could also solve the problem by cutting off his legs and applying a tourniquet.
Personally, I don't think that TIA even rises to the cut-off-the-legs level of sensibility, because there is little guarantee that it will make us any safer. The problem with pre sep-11 was probably not that we didn't have enough data to anticipate and prevent the problem, but that what we did know couldn't be analyzed and acted upon effectively. If I had the money that will go into TIA to spend, I'd spend it educating an army of analysts in middle eastern culture and languages like Arabic, Farsi, and Pashtun.
And final thing. As far as I'm concerned, Uncle Sam is welcome to know where I spend every buck. I'm Mr. Boring (in case you didn't notice). However, I am concerned about other people who aren't boring, such as political enemies of the government. I'm not going to sell them out for a tiny and probably imaginary slice of safety.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've written about this in varying detail on my Web site. Here's an excerpt from one of the more pertinent entries:
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
I personally think a totally transparent world were everything was known about everyone would be a better one. The problem is that information is power, and nobody who currently enjoys and advantage in power is talking about redistributing that more evenly.
The Bush administration is the most secretive adminstration we've had in years. They believe they should be able to do the business of government outside the public's prying eyes. On the other hand, they are proposing to collect more information on private individuals. If we accept that information is power, then the effect the policies they are pursuing is to take power away from the people and give more power to the government.
I am willing to grant that the administration is doing this will good intentions, but largely because I don't think it matters a rat's ass what their intentions are. However, there's a rather sour irony, if we believe them: conservatives are attacking a program to empower the government at the expense of individuals because it is supposedly in the interest of the common good, while the left attacks it.
Finally, I was uncomfortable about Mr. Smith disclosing Adm Poindexter's address and phone number. Granted, Adm Poindexter will be doing a lot worse soon; however I think in all fairness Mr. Smith should have given out his own address and phone number too. He has no moral standing to criticize TIA otherwise.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I personally think a totally transparent world were everything was known about everyone would be a better one.
Either you haven't given this much thought or you've had the remarkably good fortune to have not met any bigoted jerks in your life. A lot of stuff that is (currently) private is private for a good reason. What if you were gay and your boss really disliked homosexuals? Unless he was a remarkably logical and self-aware person, it's quite likely that his disapproval of your private life would taint the professional relationship you have with him/her. Suppose your boss knew that your family has a history of heart disease and s/he found out that your last few health checkups were looking like you might be in for troubles down the road, too. Again, this kind of info could (consciously or subconsciously) influence important decisions when it comes time to lay some people off.
I could go on and on with examples, but I think the message is clear. People want their privacy because they simply don't trust their fellow man. And looking at the history of our species (and even current events!), I certainly don't blame them. I think your comment that a totally transparent society being a better one is really naive.
Just my 0.02
GMD
watch this
Start spreading this around at the bottom of your emails:
"NOY[F]B, P"
"None Of Your [Fucking] Business, Poindexter". The 'F' is optional, of course.
(And Extrans is broken. Plain Old Text allows links, but Extrans does not. I'm not surprised.)
Lowmag.net
But there is a good reason that the military has specifically not been allowed to spy on U.S. citizens. In fact, this is a fundamental property of all civillian governments.
So, what's the problem? All political candidates in the U.S. are going to be included in this wide net. Let's say you have two candidates in a close race, one who is for a larger military budget and less civillian oversight of the military -- the other is for a smaller military budget and more civillian oversight. What is to prevent this program from being used to find dirt on one candidate and giving it to the other, or otherwise using it to create enough of a scandal to tip the election.
But nobody would ever do that! That would be unethical and illegal. We've only had one president in the past 30 years caught for similar behavior. Just because Poindexter was found guilty of covering up a scheme to sell weapons to our enemy (Iran) to fund terrorists that congress specifically outlawed funding to (the contras in Nicargua), that doesn't mean he'd do something as unethical as influencing an election to get more funding and less oversight. Naaah.
Planes crash all the time, many thousands die every year from all sorts of accidents and violence. Civillian governments removing checks on their military is a rare occurance, and ultimately leads to much more death and destruction than Bin Laden could ever dream of.
Or, to really drive it home for the slashdot crowd -- military dictatorships often outlaw pr0n!
In practice, any attempt at the creation of a transparent society would run into a competition problem. Powerful people would still want their information hidden, and would enlist many undetectable methods to hide it (think "two sets of books") which investigators would then spend a great deal of time trying to pierce. But, you say, there's a legal guarantee to access that will prevent this problem! Yes, and where there's a law, there's a lawyer. When you're dealing with a problem of potential (as opposed to one involving an actual situation,) the amount of legal fudging can be astronomical. This is all well and good if you're Donald Rumsfeld or Bill Gates, but where does that leave the hoi polloi? Nowhere, and without any legal guarantee of privacy, they're fucked doubly- no right to defend themselves, and no practical ability to enforce transparency on the powerful. Also, socially effective issues on an individual level are not all newsworthy- the brave reporters at the local newspaper aren't going to do the legwork to run your personal TIA program on your employer to find out if he's a homophobe. You don't have the resources to exercise your "right" to transparency on a regular basis, so it becomes a liability since those with greater resources have no problem using it casually.
The bottom line is that many simple rights are there to give those with no power in a situation some area of breathing room, and a do what thou wilt sort of "right" like complete transparency is simply an invitation to abuse.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
... it is only advertised with such a pretext. The easiest way to prevent more planes from crashing into buildings is to have the State Department stop financing such actions. To quote Richard Sanders (How to Start a War: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents (1848-1989):
"Because public support is so crucial to the process of initiating and waging war, the home population is also subject to deceitful stratagems. Perhaps the most common pretext for war is an apparently unprovoked enemy attack... Every time the US has gone to war, pretext incidents have been used."