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RMS: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?
Covalent writes "RMS describes how much surveillance is too much (hint: it's all too much) and how to combat, circumvent, and prevent future surveillance. How much of what is suggested is plausible? How much is just a pipe dream? Discuss!"
The article contains an extensive list of things we do that give too much data to centralized organization, and offers solutions to combat all of them. From the article: "The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state. We must redesign digital systems so that they do not accumulate data about their users. If they need digital data about our transactions, they should not be allowed to keep them more than a short time beyond what is inherently necessary for their dealings with us."
What Mr. Stallman refers to freedom is what his idea of freedom is. Anything else is worthless. Slashdot would be better off without the Stallman dogma.
He will eat his toe cheese in front of a large public audience and is publicly on the record as supporting pedophilia and bestiality. He already known to the internet at large as a sick fuck, what will more privacy really afford him?
Look at GMail, vs hush mail vs tormail vs lavabit and the like. The public just doesn't care and probably can't be made to care.
Anyone who doesn't realize this in this day and age is dangerously out of touch with reality.
Quoting Jefferson about privacy and safety two hundred years after the fact isn't exactly relevant to today's world, which is riddled with 1) destructive technology and 2) religious fundamentalists
Long Answer: only the sky is the limit.
After more than a decade of the "war on terror" and its massive abuses, it's safe to say there is no democracy left to be withstanding anything.
What he's saying should have been the predominant engineering mindset of the 90's and last decade. Unfortunately most of us were collecting data, just because we could.
There's hope, but we have to pull together!
It's too bad that the eminently sensible advice in that opinion piece will be ignored by techies because it comes from a guy perceived as icky.
It's too bad that anyone who takes that advice seriously and wants to act on it, then seeks out RMS for help, will likely be repulsed at some point.
In times of upheaval, ideologues are often the only people thinking straight enough to find a way out. Why did ours have to come wrapped in this particular package, a marketing nightmare that makes selling good sense so difficult even within the tech community?
I despair for the future and this is but one reason among legions.
With all the cellphone and miniature cameras, you're more likely to be surveilled doing embarassing stuff by random people rather than having the government sift through all that data.
Camera hidden in a shirt button or glasses, dashboard cam, cell-cam for those wanying a good picture, etc.
Last I checked, Democracy is what gave us the Surveillance State.
The only way to stop surveillance of civilians is to have a clear and unequivocal constitutional amendment that strictly enshrines the right to privacy and limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
This is a lot tougher than it sounds as previous language that was pretty plain language to the people that wrote them (read the Federalist papers sometime) about limiting the right of the Federal government from infringing the rights of the people. The first and second amendments alone have been trampled with literally tens of thousands of laws that take away or limit said rights (I haven't even touched the other amendments).
What you really need is an entirely secondary constitutional amendment that spells out in plain language that "Shall make / not" means exactly what the dictionary says it does. Once you can do that and wipe out tens of thousands of laws that have been written to take away the effective meaning of your rights to begin with you can have an effective right to privacy.
The right to privacy is a wonderful idea, but it's worthless until we restore the concept of the "right" to begin with.
to ha4pen.[ My baby...don't fear Or chair, return
There was an article, or a cartoon, or something that I read once.
1970: You want to give every American a little tracking device so that we know where they are at all times, and can follow them as they move around? You're out of your mind if you think that will happen.
2010: I need another iPhone!
Whats happeing now makes people in the industry uncomforable, at the least. Whats a real worry is what the future will be like. If it continues down the current path Democracy as we know it will be dead. Then welcome to a new model of socialism.
I was watching an old Ellery Queen (shot in the 70s) episode last night, it featured a Russian diplomat, who asked if the detective's office was bugged. "I beg your pardon!" Queen's father roared furiously. "This is America!" I actually LOL'd...then cried inside.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Well, since the frog's still in the pot despite the water simmering all around, my guess would be that "democracy"(America) can still stand a fair bit moar.
Stallman speaks of a need to redesign digital systems, but then instead goes on about how systems already in place should respect our privacy. E.g. 'There should be laws forcing servers to delete our data!' 'CCTV shouldn't be internet connected!' etc.
This still falls into the same old trap of relying on things outside of your control to provide security. There will always be some degree of reliance on outside systems, but that should be minimized, not relied upon. If the thing protecting the security of my data is the behavior of my government or the trust of external servers, then that technology is not secure.
Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, so anyone could watch what the camera sees. To restore privacy, we should ban the use of internet-connected cameras aimed where and when the public is admitted, except when carried by people
I've actually thought that open and accessible cameras in public are a good idea - so long as they are accessible by the public. To me this would be akin to the many-eyes philosophy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus's_Law
More like democrazy like I just typo'd in the title by accident, see, my subconscious even knows the truth.
What do you even call an implied democracy? Because that is as close as it gets.
> The goal of making journalism and democracy safe therefore requires that we reduce the data collected about people by any organization, not just by the state.
The only way to maintain security is transparency. This paranoid desire to control stems from a choice to compromise by living under undesirable conditions. Identify and assert that people will use information in ways you don't like, but without a victim exploitation is preferred over tyranny.
When you start tracking me in a grocery store and displaying ads as I move around it ...
You've gone too far.
Capiche?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
it's how that data is used.
We are going to be watched, because modern society is watching everything.
Democracy can handle the monitoring of everything, if protection and regulations are in place an enforced.
NSA? all that data they have in no way impacts democracy.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We don't have a democracy in nations like the UK or USA. 'Voting' does NOT equal democracy. In the UK or USA you can ONLY bring one of a number of shell-entities into power that represent the exact same interests. Liberal, Labour or Conservative - Republican or Democrat - whoever the sheeple 'vote' for, the same force controls the nation. The same over-arching agendas are pursued and implemented.
In the UK, a party that had sought to win power for decades (the Liberals) on an unchanging ticket that access to education was the most important issue for British people, increased the cost of university to the highest in Europe the moment they gained power- following the exact agenda Tony Blair had laid down, but couldn't achieve while a 'Labour' flavoured government was in power.
The sheeple have different expectations of the likely obscenities inflicted on them by 'left' and 'right' wing governments, so their masters implement more of their right-wing seeming agendas when Republicans rule, and agendas that seem 'left' flavoured when the Democrats rule. This way, across time, every agenda on the list gets implemented while the sheep shrug their shoulders and say "what do you expect from the Democrats?" and "what do you expect from the Republicans".
Of course, today things are so much worse, so the sheeple accept both left AND right-wing agendas from either party- war-mongering by Obama is positively applauded by all the George Soros controlled mock-liberal outlets, for instance.
NSA full surveillance (and the equivalent in most significant nations) is designed to ensure that the will of the sheeple CANNOT disrupt the status quo, or threaten the true rulers of the nation. NSA full surveillance achieves these three goals
1) provides near realtime feedback of the impact of propaganda campaigns in the mainstream media, allowing the control messages to be fine-tuned, or whole projects aborted if the sheeple are proving completely resistant (see Obama's failure to holocaust Syria as a recent example of this- even with saturated media demonisation of the ordinary people of Syria and their leaders, Obama could not get enough US sheeple to back his plans to bomb Syria back to the Stone Age).
2) to gather potential blackmail material on ALL powerful or influential people in the USA. A simple act, like having illicit sex, can compromise a person to such an extent, 90%+ of those so threatened would support an agenda they might otherwise oppose.
3) to identify arising grass-roots political and social organisations and their leaders, so such activity can (if needed) be co-opted or strangled at birth.
How can ANYONE challenge those currently in TRUE power (the puppet-masters behind people like Obama), when those in power how access to the NSA resources listed above? You simply cannot. All you can hope for are "palace revolutions" where the monsters end up fighting each other for supremacy. People-power revolutions (very rare in Human History) are impossible in nations like the USA, and that includes the 'revolution' of democratically voting someone else into power.
unless you use the term Democracy very loosely.
All we need is a constitutional amendment that whatever the government does to the people, the people can do to the government.
If the government can read anyone's email, then I can read the email of anyone who works for the government. If they can listen to my calls, I can listen to theirs. If the can see my bank and medical records, I can see theirs.
FTFY
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
That was a truly awesome concern troll, but it worries me that people might not appreciate it if they discover that old BenEnglish still programs in COBOL and stores his excrement in baby food jars in his cellar...
The real question is how much surveillance can a democracy stand before it ceases to be a democracy? Eventually, people in power become arrogant, people not in power become paranoid and afraid to fight back. When that happens, you no longer have a democracy. Doesn't matter if you still have a "free" press (that just happens to be pro-regime), elections without any irregularities (that only the offically recognised party can participate in), no violence in the streets (and no cameras), no dissidents (that are willing to come forward), etc. Authoritarian types all over the world are more sophisticated than they used to be. They know how to eliminate opponents without leaving any fingerprints.
He says laws are insufficient, and proposes that these surveillance technologies should have built-in artificial limitations that defy the will of the user. What does that sound like?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't know how much surveillance a democracy can withstand. I'm more concerned about how much a republic can withstand, since I live in one (the USA). Now I'm usually not a nit-picker over things like this; but when a guy who's known for insisting on "GNU/Linux" makes this error I feel compelled to call him on it.
The U.S. was set up as a republic. I think we should remember this. Yes, we are a "democratic republic," but a republic nontheless.
A republic isn't "mob rule." We vote for people to *represent* us.
As for serveilence, I'm on the fence. Corporations, I think, go overboard by forcing data mining, when they could just as easily give users the choice: if a user likes a service and trusts them, then OPT IN to data mining (gasp! Opt in!). You'll still get a fairly good sample of people that way.
As for the government, the U.S. has stopped terror attacks due to serveilance. While I don't like the government prying into what coffee shops I like, if a couple guys are plainning to blow up a building, it would be pretty nice for the government to find out and take action. Stallman even mentions at the bottom of the article that we need *some* surveilance to keep us save.
I suppose the real solution is to take advantage of the way the republic is laid out. Intead of your browsing history sent to Washington, just your hometown or state has a hold of it. That way if they see you're doing something sketchy, that small segment can report only what it needs to to higher ups, or deal with the situation locally.
Reading past some very busy sock puppets lets try for some basic solutions: ... later any person with time and skills.
We know the internet as a whole is watched domestically. The encryption offered by many top US brands is junk, the legal/commercial protections offered by US brands is junk. The coding skills of some US staff is very surveillance friendlily by design or lack of academic interest.
So what can people do:
Use a chip thats well understood: http://guiodic.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/richard-stallman-interview/ ~Lemote machine.
Use an open OS thats well understood. Think about the file system, OS, the connection hardware, encryption and other networking. Most of the intrusion options have been talked about since the 1980's thanks to the press, law reform, political efforts or political boasting been more informative than was expected.
Thanks to Snowden good developers everywhere can now face their design teams, bosses with real options about the kinds of US hardware and software they import. Think of the internet as an intranet and your computer having aroused the skilled admins on 24/7 duty.
Air gap, self designed white box, face to face meetings, physical security, better crypto will make the internet more safe. Where one gov got in, so can ex gov staff, people/groups able to afford ex gov staff and a long list of other "friendly" countries
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
RMS may know all there is to know about technology, but he apparently knows little about history or politics. "[R]estore democracy"? Might be true if it ever existed in the US.
Stop believing that it's okay to ignore "eminently sensible advice" and you'll encourage others to do the same. Nobody is always pleasing to everyone. Your criticism against RMS here ends up reading as an ad hominem attack without evidence or a backhanded compliment which you think is more important to raise than the substance of the arguments presented. There's no reason to despair unless you are looking for a reason to do nothing but throw up your hands.
Eben Moglen is also giving a series of talks about what "Edward Snowden [has] done to change the course of human history", "the evolution of surveillance since World War II threaten democracy", and what it means now "that information can be both so powerful and so easily spread". One hopes you'll take these talks for what's offered in the talks.
Digital Citizen
How much surveillance can a democracy withstand? That will be very hard to answer in the absence of a democracy to test it upon. Democracy, liberty, rights, etc., all that has been gone for some time now. We live in a nation that has the appearance of democracy without the substance. Over the last 30 years public policy has continuously moved in a direction opposite from what the overwhelming majority of people want. Polls have continuously shown for 30 years that people believe the minimum wage should be high enough to keep a family above the poverty line. The inflation adjusted minimum wage is as low as ever. Polls have continuously shown for 30 years that the overwhelming majority of people believe that deficits should be handled by bigger taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. During that same time taxes on the wealthy and big corporations have gone way down to the lowest levels since before the depression. There is no democracy only democracy theater.
-- QED
We could call it ARCFUELFAN! It would be positively electric!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
All we need is a constitutional amendment that whatever the government does to the people, the people can do to the government.
I think that was the implicit point of the 2nd amendment.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
Germany post WW2 is NOT a democracy for very obvious reasons. It is an "rechtstaat" or however that is spelled. Which means the law is the absolute ruler in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
To be a modern liberal democracy, you first got to have the rule of law to curb the excesses of democracy. Democracy got to be curtailed, to survive.
But what is a rechtstaat? What is a law? A law is anything that is enforced. Good or bad. You can have a rechtstaat that sends people to the gas chambers. There is no law that says laws got to be good to be counted as laws.
Democracy is even worse, far to often people seem to assume that democracy == good. NO! In reality elections are won because people think the other candidate is a poopyhead. Or the candidate just doesn't understand that he should promise lower taxes, lower spending and increased services!
Neither democracy nor the rechtstaat are under attack from surveillance because the rechtstaat doesn't care what the laws are as long as they are enforced and democracy is to busy watching American Idol. Freedom and human rights might be under attack but what election has even been about those?
True democracy is HORRIBLE! Do you REALLY want to live in a society where the majority has absolute and total control? So you need a law state to curtail democracy to protect individuals and minorities from the majority. Democracy, to survive, to prosper must be controlled.
It is a paradox but real life outside the classroom is full of them. Surveillance really does not matter. What matters is what is done with the surveillance.
To godwin this post, what matters is not a register of who is or who is not Jewish, what matters is that it matters whether you are or not. Most privacy nuts worry to much about the list and to little about the gas chambers. To translate, if you wish to use drugs you can protest against searches OR you can attempt to legalize drugs. Which do you think creates the better world?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The problem with surveillance now is that we can catch more criminals than we can afford to catch. It seems as if the US has way too many people who live outside the law or at least turn to crime occasionally. But every time we catch a criminal the cost beats us over the head. Catch another heroin dealer and there goes 40K a year just for his prison sentence and lord knows how much for police and courts. Then to top it off when we release these folks their lives are screwed up and one way or another some kind of welfare will have to be given to keep them from rotting on the sidewalks. Then we also have the children and mates of these folks who also are very likely to end up in poverty and crime as well. So the more spying we do and the more catching we do the poorer society becomes.
Then we get to stamp the label of monster upon ourselves as we confront the effect of criminal justice. Certainly we can not use prisons without providing medical care to inmates. But we still have honest, working poor, who are denied medical care. In a way that forces us to provide socialized medical care of some sort. In the end the only way out of this loop is to have a population that is devoutly religious. Faith does work to limit crime.
... does it?
Why do AMERICANS keep writing 'an' instead of 'a', and 'and' instead of 'an'? Don't you bother to READ what you're typing? Unbelievable.
It all boils down to trust. In the [not so long] past, we trusted big names. Today those big names aren't trustworthy anymore as they've shown how they collaborate with surveillance authorities at the expense of freedom and privacy. The problem is we have always blindly trusted unknown entities based on arbitrary criteria. And it yielded the situation we all know today.
If we want to keep out of this surveillance network (at least in the digital communications environment) we need to reconsider what a trusted network is. People I trust are people around me, fellows I can meet and talk to in real life. The only way to keep data safe is to either keep it out of any network or to distribute it across trusted hosts, e.g. machines which I know are managed by and belong to trusted peers. It basically means: flee from giants and manage our data ourselves.
how about we go the OTHER way?
total absolute surveillance BUT tagged and indexed. And the right to DELETE it!
dunno, but the "digital-era" is per se a surveillance age. it is or it isn't. there's no fuzziness.
trying to limit the inherent possibilities of a technology with the same technology is prolly the wrong way to do it.
so this is a proposal:
i have a mobile phone in my pocket. i leave work, go to subway, ride it home, grab some dinner and go home.
at home i start up a app called "delete-me". this app queries the mobile phone GPS data log then connects
to the "internet" and sends a request for all data from spy-cameras that have recorded me on my way home
to be deleted. i think the "digital-era" technology can do this wonderfully!
of course the discussion can start over and over again, like does the "request for deleting" get recorded and can this ALSO be recorded?
etc. ad absurdum .
this whole recording thingy is prolly the future and the reasonable way to deal with it, is to EDUCATE people.
in essence we need to educate people to be spies themselves, that know how to disappear and stay "low-profile".
the buck stops here.
i assure you it's a democracy, but you don't have the right to delete your data : )
Surveillance should be applied, 24/24, on each elected person FIRST, to make sure no corruption is done at this level.
Some police officers are now under such surveillance, and it help their works, and I just hope it'll go much more farther (Google Glass someone?)
We, citizens, should ALWAYS have the last words.
I can't call that English
The US is a democratic republic which means we elect people to make decisions for us. And its not going that great right now because people keep voting for people because reasons other than their knowledge and experience. For example Obama had no prior economic, military nor executive experience. Democracy is mob rule. It gave us Prop 8 in California and hindered all civil rights issues. The average person has little to no specialized knowledge on the issues they vote on. THe majority is always going to support an issue on rumor, gossip and flat-out wrong information their friend or the internet told them. What we need are small groups of representatives who are well versed on an issue -- like scientists and global warming.
Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage.
Casteism