Slashdot Mirror
Reconciling Human Rights With Ubiquitous Online Surveillance
Max_W writes "Here is the text of Article #12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 'No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.' U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said yesterday 'While concerns about national security and criminal activity may justify the exceptional and narrowly-tailored use of surveillance programs, surveillance without adequate safeguards to protect the right to privacy actually risks impacting negatively on the enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms.' Is it realistic to expect the compliance with this article from the world's major players in the age of large storage disks, fast networks and computers? Or are we entering a new brave world, a new phase of human civilization, where quaint notions of privacy and traditional moral principles are becoming ridiculous? Then what to do with the Article #12? Shall it be 'intentionally left blank'? Shall it be updated to a new wording? What words could they be?" In the U.S. and the EU, government bodies are fond of coming up with domain-specific bills of rights, not so big on publicly striking out the various guarantees.
They want to make our lives transparent. We have to do the same to theirs. The state must live by the same rules as its subjects.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
US tortures people, and you expect them to provide basic human rights? We have a long way to do before our government isn't just providing basic rights on a convenience basis.
Maybe we can aim for some point in the future where maybe there is a chance that basic rights will generally be given to everyone (no exceptions!), but I don't see it happening here anytime soon.
Poor Timothy and Max seem to remain under the illusion that governments, any governments, really rule and act based on their bodies of laws.
Governments have always, and always will, do as they damned well please till the next revolution. Then guess what? In no time the new boss is the same as the old boss.
Why? Easy: money. Pure and simple. Just money. Power is a means to acquire and control wealth.
Universal Declarations and Bills of Rights don't amount to jack diddly fuck if the wrong well-heeled toe gets stepped on.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
We need to work towards making it technically infeasible to achieve the present level of surveillance. Strong end-to-end encryption needs to be ubiquitous. Real end to end, not via some intermediate web-based key holder. Emails, instant messages, and texts should be encrypted by default, no cleartext ever sent. Ideally, some onion-router way to hide origin and destination from the man in the middle should also be default, but I'm not sure how to make that work.
We need to make 1984 harder for the fuckers. Right now, there's nobody fighting back, so they win by default.
States have been constrained in their surveillance by technology, not by ethics.
What reason is there for this to change now?
you can go pretty far without technology. usa could have started going through _all_ mail(you know, opening it with a letter opener and seeing if you're dating a black dude) and not just prison mail a long time ago if ethics department didn't say no. so ethics does affect it, even in usa.
why do you think they took to making the surveillance in secret? because it's a tactical advantage? heck no, it's because public morality could have struck it down.
even gitmo exists because they have some ethic rules they comply to(us soil, different rules). sure, they use defective thought but still..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No, just stamp "[deprecated]" on it.
Why did I have to spend so much time in elementary school learning about The Constitution, when they were just going to deprecate it later on?
It would also be interesting to hear an new version of The Gettysburg Address, updated to reflect recent events. I'm not convinced that this "Of the people, by the people, for the people" stuff is really quite accurate these days.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
How can an international treaty mandate freedom? The mandate itself is tyrrany.
It isn't a treaty. Its merely a resolution with no force of law.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We're full of "universal" rights and whatnot... but fail to live up to them. Or rather, our politicians. The bureaucrats... play their little games. Or not so little, as the case may be.
If we don't want them to run rampant, we as the world's peoples need to take a stance. Do we want ubiquitous surveillance? Then do nothing. Do we want to have something of a private live left? Well, there's work to do. And some very unpalatable questions to find suitable answers to.
Our technology is so powerful that "because we can" is no longer a valid reason. We must choose what we want our technology to do. And to choose, we must understand the consequences of what our technology can do, and what it means to willingly forego some or all of the things it might have done. In extreme cases you can even portray this as trading saved lives, caught terrorists, convicted child pornographers, agains having some privacy left.
And so we must come up with answers to questions like, how many lives is privacy for all worth? How many abducted little girls may be allowed to die for not having to justify every step you take? Because, again, that is how the snoopers will portray it. And so we must answer, or find more reasonable ways to frame the same question. That, or lose the fight before it started. In a sense, we already lost while we were ignorant and we must now claw back what was once rightfully ours. From the jaws of those who claim to protect us (from privacy and liberty, but I digress). How much is it worth to you?
No they won't. In the future there will be superintelligent ants and they'll have ant passports and ant driving licences and ant credit cards and they'll be tied in to the same mortgages and travel restrictions and limits on their freedom as we have now. And the ant queen will be a figurehead and the real power will lie with the spiders.
So be nice to your spiders.
perhaps if you Americans quit spying on everyone, quit torturing by redefining the words and moving to offshore bases in order to skirt the law, stop persecuting your own citizens who expose your sickening ethics, killing poor villagers in far off lands by remote control, and the list goes on, and on and on.
then maybe, just maybe Slashdots international readers wouldnt treat this place as a cesspool of hate to vent at you
right now the world is pissed with you and we learnt from 9/11 going down that path doesnt do anyone any good.
vote the bastards out and start prosecuting some of your millionaire "representatives" for their actions.
vote them back in and you will be held complicit in their crimes, simples really, start playing the nice guys.
Exactly. Technology has nothing to do with this.
You're not secure in your home because your door is unkickdownable. Pretty sure doors have been kicked down since the invention of doors and kicking.
You're not free to say what you want because tyrants have never figured out a way to shut people up. "Grrrrrrr those filthy peasants! If only there were a way to make them silent, like a sharp object you could poke them with until they were quiet or dead! Alas, no such 'pointy stick technology' exists, so I will have to suffer their insults instead."
You have unalienable right to not have these things happen to you, which is why we consent to be governed only in way that does not infringe upon these rights. Hell, we can't even consent to be deprived of our rights. That's what "unalienable" means.
This is entirely a political problem, and is neither caused by nor solvable with technology.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"Really it's pretty simple. The people who have the power to make the rules, also have the power to ignore that parts they don't like."
Sure... until somebody gets mad enough to shoot them through the head. Which someone inevitably does, and always has done.
Tyranny is self-limiting.
Exactly. Technology has nothing to do with this.
You're not secure in your home because your door is unkickdownable. Pretty sure doors have been kicked down since the invention of doors and kicking.
You're not free to say what you want because tyrants have never figured out a way to shut people up. "Grrrrrrr those filthy peasants! If only there were a way to make them silent, like a sharp object you could poke them with until they were quiet or dead! Alas, no such 'pointy stick technology' exists, so I will have to suffer their insults instead."
You have unalienable right to not have these things happen to you, which is why we consent to be governed only in way that does not infringe upon these rights. Hell, we can't even consent to be deprived of our rights. That's what "unalienable" means.
This is entirely a political problem, and is neither caused by nor solvable with technology.
That is why anonymity is so important. While a tyrant has the power to burn down the whole village because an anonymous person who might be from there insulted him he can only do that so many times before one of the members of his royal guard assassinates him in revenge for killing his cousin who was a villager.
Anonymity is the way to embarrass, or even harm, people who have power over you without repercussion. It is the great equalizer and that is why governments everywhere are working so hard to get rid of it.
The UN chief says that appropriate safeguards are needed to protect privacy - well they WERE doing a great job......until Snowden came around.
Think about it - what better way to protect your privacy than by not even telling you that they're invading it? If neither you nor anybody else in the public knows that your privacy has been violated, then obviously it hasn't been, because it's being kept private!
Then Edward Snowden came along and ruined the whole thing - simply knowing that our privacy has been violated means that it IS being violated. If it weren't for him, all our data would still be safely kept private (in the hands of the NSA).
I think that is true, but there is not any fundamental reason why something that is technologically possible can't be prohibited by law. Nor any reason governments can't be made subject to the law. In the U.S., Nixon was about to be impeached over misuse of federal resources to attack and embarrass his personal enemies.
The question being posed: "Or are we entering a new brave world, a new phase of human civilization, where quaint notions of privacy and traditional moral principles are becoming ridiculous?"
I then ask why are these supposed secrets of surveillance so sensitive if public knowledge of them is quaint and ridiculous?
More like a total lack of bravery and just more of the same old race to the bottom ... and I consider myself an optimist!
Um, there is no reason to believe there has been a significant difference between the two guys w.r.t. mass surveillance. For example, the need to give the telephone companies retroactive immunity for illegal acts stems from the Bush era.
Both R & D are happy to sell the rest of us 'commoners' down the river in the name of 'terrorism' and 'child molester'.
And we are complacent enough to let them.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!