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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.
You are right...most of us are unimportant to the goverment, but what about those who are not? Our goverment has never been shy about using the resources at hand for personal or political gain.
Why don't you just have a little video camera and tracking device into your body? How about in your home too? Then big brother would be able to check and see if you are up to anything. Poof, no more crime. Sounds good?
Those who would trade liberty for security deserve neither. Our liberties must be a firm line in the sand, no compromises are possible. This "big brother knows best" and "what do you have to hide" is exactly the kind of thinking that results in tyrany. What, do you think this is some kind of joke, where oppression only happens in books? Your post is the equivalent of saying..."here ya go big brother, take these freedoms, I dont need 'em."
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
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.
Insert obligatory you don't deserve freedom quote.
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.
It is my freedom of privacy right. I can hide the fact that I have 28 spoons in the silverware drawer. If I don't want you to know that fact, that's your tough luck. And I certainly don't want my taxes spent on someone trying to find out how many spoons I have in my possession.
I'm sure adequate safeguards could be imposed to prevent most of these abuses.
Then you're not paying attention or at least not reading articles on slashdot. What safeguard is there from Fat Wallet from getting the supoena from Wallmart due to the DMCA? What safeguard is there for the librarians who are/have been coerced into giving up patron data and prohibited BY LAW from telling anyone they gave up the records?
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
Here's an example:
1. track all purchases by everyone made in the US
2. put it in one big database
3. Compare each person's purchases against certain profiles...sleeper cell terrorist, arsonist, political dissident
3. Generate a report for each law enforcement division across the country which lists the license plates, names, and descriptions of the twenty most suspect people.
4. Start reading their email and monitoring their library activity
5. Find out the word jihad appears in one of their emails, or they make soem joke about shooting someone, and notice they've checked out a copy of "civil disobedience". Check their web browsing activity, notice they've read the anarchist's cookbook.
6. Conduct a raid, which is legal without a search warrant if terrorist activity is suspected.
Mostly computerized. Efficient enough to implement nationwide. Total invasion of privacy. Guilty until proven inneocent. All legal.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
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.
You're right, it's sad how easily people will trade rights and freedoms for some perceived security from the government.
From a larger perspective, over many nations, cultures and over the course of history, the kinds of freedoms enjoyed in modern democratic republics are really the exception and not the rule. The rule has been that the government in control will use any means available to keep themselves in power.
Often overlooked, too, when people sacrifice these freedoms to a seemingly trustworthy government is that there is absolutely no guarantee that later governments will respect the same limits that people implicitly assumed would apply.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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
It may be true that you're too inconsequential for the government as a whole to care about, but that doesn't mean that there's no problem with that information being out there. The government for better or worse is made up of individuals, and some of those individuals will have access to that information; in fact it will be more useful to the government if lots of people within the government have access to it. Most of those people may be fine, but there are still people who are going to abuse any power they get.
Take the more limited example of existing police databases. There are plenty of examples of police officers who have abused those systems to harras ex-girlfriends, get even with people who have pissed them off, etc. Extending those databases to include even more kinds of data that could be abused will only make things worse. For one thing, it will make abusing the database more tempting, by making more kinds of mischief possible. For another thing it will make the potential abuses more damaging.
The key thing to me is that such abuse is all but inevitable, while the supposed benefits are largely hypothetical. Every time people have created databases of this general type, that data has been used abusively at least occasionally. There's every reason to think that the TIA database will be abused, too. At the same time, there's no certainty that it will be possible to use that same data to track down potential terrorists. I know for sure that given such a database I would find it much easier to write a script that took somebody's license plate number, dug up their credit card purchases, and emailed ones that were potentially embarrasing to all of their known email contacts that to track down possible terrorist activity.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Put that way, TIA looks like the ultimate out-of-conext box.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl
You are SO FUNNY. No government is trustworthy. So where exactly should I move to that has trustworthy government?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I have a far more radical idea. If the government is untrustworthy, badly managed, taking the wrong approach, or whatever, how about trying to improve it? The United States is still at least nominally a representative democracy, and one of the underlying principles is that the government is subject to change if the people don't like it. Identifying problems, like TIA being a really bad idea, is the first step in fixing them.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
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