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NZ Professor Advocates Civil Disobedience Against Mass Surveillance
nut writes "We're all aware of how much surveillance we are under on the internet thanks to Edward Snowden. Gehan Gunasekara, an associate commercial law professor at Auckland University in New Zealand, wants us all to start sending suspicious looking but meaningless data across the internet to overload automated surveillance systems. Essentially he is advocating a mass distributed Bayesian poisoning attack against our watchers."
So this is what fear looks like.
The man has won. People are too afraid to do anything that gets any attention since the over reactions are a clear and present danger. In a sense the terrorist won too since America seem to be loosing all the rights defined in the constitution. It saddens me that the tools that can be used to increase communication and understanding around the world have turned inward to monitor, cower and censor us.
We should do this, and make user-friendly encryption tools more widely available to the non-geek community as well.
Tools are not the problem. The problem is that at a certain scale you need some infrastructure to distribute and authenticate encryption keys and at that point you'll run into the same problem we're at now
Oh if only there were some decentralized trust management system like PGP!
If only someone from the 1970's could travel Half a Century into the future to tell us about Diffe-Hellman key exchanges.
If only Six Degrees were about level of separation required to link all humanity to an Erdos Number of One.
WHY! Oh Why? Why have I wound up trapped in this Math Forsaken Timeline AGAIN?!!
Please, sir! Tell me they haven't outlawed plotting the series of Zn+1=Zn*Zn+c too?!
Security be damned, I just couldn't live in a world without beauty...
While we were jerking ourselves off in the streets over finally nailing Osama, we forgot to consider that he had already achieved what he wanted the better part of a decade before he was snuffed out. He's bogged us down in military action on at least two fronts that has gone on for over a decade and shows no signs of resolving (or gave certain government agents the justification to carry out actions they already desired in the first place), he's given politicians the tool of fear to leverage the American people into accepting the erosion of every vital liberty that we were founded on, and he has contributed to significantly speeding along our national debt to astronomical new heights.
The saddest part is that everyone playing Reddit-liberator in 2013 couldn't have given the slightest fuck when everyone else was screaming about what was being done the dozen years prior to this. Thus, we end up with things which dwarf The USA PATRIOT Act (which was to have sunsetted years ago, but like inch you give the government, will never be given back).
Frankly, I don't even know that any amount of dissent and disapproval from the citizens will ever amount to anything. If principles, law, and opinion mattered, they wouldn't have been doing these things in the dark to begin with. At best, a wave of overwhelming disapproval will scurry them all back into the dark (where they'd rather be, anyway) to carry on as they have for years with total disregard for the public.
Meanwhile, those who would risk exposing the government or make their dissent a focus of their attention wind up with the IRS being thrown at them like a rabid dog. They end up on no-fly lists. They end up on watch lists. They end up being investigated. Their entire histories end up being investigated. Their every association investigated. Intimidated. Threatened. They end up charged with espionage and treason. They end up running to other nations for their lives, for exposing those within a free government who are working to squelch the very freedom that government is meant to protect. The sad thing is, these are not the lunatic ravings of a paranoid conspiracy nut. Not any longer. These are documented incidents and practices in the mainstream press (and until the press were the victims of targets of these investigations, surveillances, intimidations, and threats -- even they weren't bothering to report on these stories). What was once the unthinkable fantasy-land of paranoid guys who see black helicopters everywhere is now both real and, apparently, accepted.
And that is why I say "you first" in response to the urging for civil disobedience, dissent, and political activism (at least as far as constitutional issues go). Because, when you take that bold step forward, most of your fellow citizens are taking a giant step back. Hell, half of them are flat out against you.
In general one problem is that when these NSA/Google and Edward Snowden cases are forgotten in the popular media, the discussion about the wiretap agencies cools down and we forget about them after some months. At the same time they continue to do their job, silently in the background. Thus it is important to keep the discussion alive and keep developing aggressive methods to protect our privacy.
Okay, maybe this is just whooshing over my head, but ... "so the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists"?
But, but, I WANT them to find the "actual terrorists".
I DON'T want them to accuse innocent people of being terrorists. I don't want them to break down doors with guns blazing because someone didn't answer the door fast enough. I don't want them to frighten young children (or adults that have the mental capacity of young children) at airports. I don't want the police to pay a visit to people just because someone Googled "pressure cookers" while his wife Googled "backpacks". I don't want them to arrest people for wearing suspicious T-shirts, or kick people off of airplanes because they are speaking Russian (or Arabic, or Spanish) to each other. I don't want them to shoot to kill because someone dark-skinned is running for the train. I do not want the police to act on false positives.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!