Slashdot Mirror
Gauging the Dangers of Surveillance
An anonymous reader writes "We have a sense that surveillance is bad, but we often have a hard time saying exactly why. In an interesting and readable new article in the Harvard Law Review, law professor Neil Richards argues that surveillance is bad for two reasons — because it menaces our intellectual privacy (our right to read and think freely and secretly) and because it gives the watcher power over the watched, creating the risk of blackmail, persuasion, or discrimination. The article is available for free download, and is featured on the Bruce Schneier security blog."
As a practical matter, a lot of this comes under the "genie is out of the bottle" territory. The genie emerged in 1995 and hasn't looked back. It's improved our lives in many ways; in others, I often have a fondness for life as it was before the WWW, Google, and Facebook. At least I wouldn't feel like dozens of private companies are tracking, archiving, and big-data analyzing every move I make in both the physical and online worlds (in the context of what "people whose preferences are similar to yours also looked at..."), while hackers around the world are trying to figure out how to crack my bank accounts.
What makes the difference between an oppresive regime and one that is not regarding surveillance is respect. And is becoming too evident that the government don't have any for the "common" citizens.
The government has shown that they are willing to use lists against people. During WW2, US citizens of Japanese and German descent were taken into internment camps using data from the Census.
Another recent debacle was when a gun owner's list got published in a major newspaper. People had their houses robbed and more firearms entered the hands of criminals.
These lists also cost money to maintain. We're pissing away billions each year on these lists which could instead go towards infrastructure maintenance which is actually vital for our nation's security.
If the government has a magical 100% of information about our daily lives then the most diligently law abiding of us are still probably open to legal difficulties. Have you read all 36,000 pages of the tax code? Have you ever stepped off the curb just a moment after it said, "Don't walk"? Even if you only broke fairly minor laws here and there a overzealous prosecutor could line up the charges and ruin your life. That is if you don't cooperate with his request to do something you didn't want to do.
At this point in our over surveilled society it is still a goodly amount of work to assemble a case against the innocent. But with more and more information being gathered and more and more information processing capability it shouldn't be too long before a few clicks of a button show all your law breaking ways.
This might seem like slightly paranoid thinking and in most sensible parts of the western world government people have better things to do. Yet in various small towns you hear of the Sheriff bringing his police to bare against any opponent. I can imagine what kind of resources might be available to hunt down whistle-blowers, investigative reporters, and the people they care about. Or the police looking to discover who uploaded the next Rodney king video. If they had license plate scanning, facial recognition, cell phone records, and internet records then they are golden.
Then you get the false positives. Recently I read about a couple who had the police kick in their door because they were suspected of running a grow-op because of recent hydroponic purchases. They were law-abiding ex-CIA and were growing tomatos and such.
Now think about the power the American people suddenly had over the government when Watergate happened. Now think about how many resources were applied by the government to find out who leaked what? Think about how many resources were applied to the Pentagon papers? Now give the government access to today's/tomorrow's records and see how long Deep Throat remains secret?
My theory is quite simple. The second amendment needs its own amendment and that should read that the people should have near unlimited access to any government records and that the government should have extremely limited access the people's information. This way power will be in the correct hands for a democracy.
You didn't think government was the only threat to privacy did you?
Some corporations seem to gleefully hand over information to the government upon request, and even assist the government in its spying at times. A corporation having tons of information about you probably means that the government could easily get that information as well.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I know it is a bit of a cliche around here. But it really is a lot like the book 1984 if you think about it.
Seriously. Think about it.
Cameras are almost everywhere but your house. I know for me, cameras start just a few short steps outside of my door.
Cameras on the street, in every store. Then on the internet, they track you with cookies, flash cookies that can't normally be deleted. ISPs often have deals with the government to just route all their traffic through the government.
Companies like Google and Facebook largely make their money by spying on users and selling the information.
The governments seem to introduce another bill almost every month to increase their ability to spy on the citizens even more than they already did.
Just the other day there was a story here saying the FBI is crying because their spying on gmail users wasn't "in real time".
And I think it might have been in the same story, the FBI was also complaining that they were having a hard time monitoring all the chatting in online little games like "Words with Friends". Because "criminal conversations sometimes happen there."
Well they do everywhere else, too. Including face to face. Do we need a government agent to monitor face to face conversations too? Just in-case someone says something criminal?
It's really all way too much for me.
Knowing about this stuff from slashdot and elsewhere, now using the "normal" internet, feels like I'm being watched all the time.
And I am. Even if it's "just" an automated system that archives things for later possible viewing.
I feel strongly that all of this has a huge chilling effect on free speech for a lot people. And that we should be working on getting much of this rolled back.
But anyway, in the meantime, I do have a few partial solutions:
I have started using startpage.com for my searches. It's the Google results without the spying. They claim to not even save your ip.
And I use lavabit.com for email. It was started as a response to Gmail's horrible privacy (lack of it) policies. It also claims to keep the tracking and monitoring of users to a minimum. And not archiving your mail for possibly forever after it's deleted, as Google does.
Lastly, I use a good no logging VPN for a lot of my browsing because I just prefer the freer feeling of it compared to the "bunch-of-surveillance-cameras" feel that the regular internet has for me.
Call me paranoid, or whatever, for not enjoying being spied upon non-stop. I know most of the other sheep don't care. But myself, I feel uncomfortable with it. And I opt out of it whenever I am able.
Posting from behind my no-logging VPN. :)
... when the watcher does more than just watch.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's basic civics to understand why citizens are supposed to be concerned about government abuse of its power - because the result is ineffective or incompetent police/justice/whatever services, not because it's offensive in some abstract ideological sense.
Though it occurs elsewhere, it's primarily a US problem. In the US, the Constitution is often regarded as nearly sacred revelation, with the result that, like regular sacred revelation, people embrace the rule without having any understanding of it, and therefore fail to recognize when the rule has simply been bypassed.
These things have been obvious since Orwell or even before, which is well over sixty years ago. What has this site come to?
Yes but despite that I feel it is almost unstoppable force of technology, just like copyright is doomed through incredibly accurate and ubiquitous data duplication equipment aka computers it seems surveillance is an unstoppable force of smaller, smarter and more networked electronics and optics. This isn't East Germany where you had to recruit almost every citizen, what you need is the cooperation of a handful of people in payment processing (electronic cash), telecom (communication, GPS positioning) and social media (networks, on site surveillance). Imagine for example you had access to GPS coordinates and could access any Facebook upload within 100 meters, regardless of geo-tagging and privacy settings. It's a silent army of spies who might snap a photo with you in the background. Include Google Glass on top and any traditional sense of privacy is gone.
I will admit it, in the battle of privacy versus convenience the convenience wins hands down particularly since many places have made it inconvenient to use cash since they fear robberies, being available 24x7 (but not to my boss) is worth carrying a cell phone over and there's only so much you can do with friends and family blogging their lives which happens to intersect with mine and so on. The Internet won't ever forget and the more of our lives go online, the more just isn't going to age and go away. That and camera phones, luckily of all the stupid, silly, embarrassing, crazy or illegal things we did very little if anything is documented. And you won't find them linked to my name on Google, I don't really care what an old classmate has in a dead tree photo album on a bookshelf. Today I'd probably find myself tagged on Facebook for shits and giggles...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thomas Jefferson got it right: "Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." They are.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Yes but despite that I feel it is almost unstoppable force of technology, just like copyright is doomed through incredibly accurate and ubiquitous data duplication equipment aka computers it seems surveillance is an unstoppable force of smaller, smarter and more networked electronics and optics.
This is about the first time I've seen someone posting on Slashdot that understood that the "Information wants to be free" mantra is a double-edged sword. We can't just pick and choose the parts to our liking - we can try, but the world will ignore us.
The globalization of IT jobs is another example of information wanting to be free. Great news, right?
You are right that surveillance itself is probably inevitable. But what can change is whether the data can be kept.
In the past (it is changing, unfortunately) personal data in Europe could only be used for the reason it was gathered and could only be kept for as long as it was being used for that reason.
This idea, which can be abused, feels reasonable to me. I don't mind that a telecoms company might need to keep a record of the texts I've made for a few days, or an ISP to keep email records for a week or so to allow them to investigate spam complaints.
I then don't mind that the authorities, with a warrent, might be able to access that data or that they might request that for me, specifically, due to an ongoing investigation, might be able to ask for data to be kept longer.
But the ubiquitous keeping of data for a long time allows anyone with sufficient access to build a 'circumstantial case' about anyone and everyone. While it's comedy, 'My Cousin Vinny' shows just how easy it can be to build a circumstantial case and how it's easy to convince others that innocuous statements or questions are evidence of guilt.
Making it a requirement that data is deleted after a short period of time would make things better without trying to put the surveillance genie back into the bottle. Making it as easy for the common man to get that data preserved as it is for the authorities would also even the balance some. If I am mugged on the street then I'd like to have any possible surveillance tapes preserved - this should be a simple process because the warrant to preserve should be independent of the warrant to view the tapes so a judge can grant an order to preserve safe in the knowledge that objections can be made when the case to view the data is made.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.