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Ask Slashdot: What Will It Take To End Mass Surveillance?
Nicola Hahn writes: Both the White House and the U.S. Intelligence Community have recently announced reforms to surveillance programs sanctioned under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But do these reforms represent significant restructuring or are they just bureaucratic gestures intended to create the perception that officials are responding to public pressure?
The Executive's own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has written up an assessment (PDF) of reform measures implemented by the government. For those who want a quick summary the Board published a fact sheet (PDF) which includes a table listing recommendations made by the board almost a year ago and corresponding reforms. The fact sheet reveals that the Board's mandate to "end the NSA's bulk telephone records program" has not been implemented.
In other words, the physical infrastructure of the NSA's global panopticon is still in place. In fact, it's growing larger (PDF). So despite all of the press statements and associated media buzz very little has changed. There are people who view this as an unsettling indication of where society is headed. Ed Snowden claimed that he wanted to "trigger" a debate, but is that really enough? What will it take to tear down Big Brother?
The Executive's own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has written up an assessment (PDF) of reform measures implemented by the government. For those who want a quick summary the Board published a fact sheet (PDF) which includes a table listing recommendations made by the board almost a year ago and corresponding reforms. The fact sheet reveals that the Board's mandate to "end the NSA's bulk telephone records program" has not been implemented.
In other words, the physical infrastructure of the NSA's global panopticon is still in place. In fact, it's growing larger (PDF). So despite all of the press statements and associated media buzz very little has changed. There are people who view this as an unsettling indication of where society is headed. Ed Snowden claimed that he wanted to "trigger" a debate, but is that really enough? What will it take to tear down Big Brother?
n/t
An all out revolt is probably the only way this will change at this point. Society has been on a downward spiral for a while now. Historically the only way to recover was lots of bloodshed. People in power never want to relinquish power or money, which is essence is what the mass surveillance is all about. Squashing descent, getting a leg up on any one selling things you want to sell, putting competition out of business, etc..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
the only way it will end is with civil war, sadly its the only thing that will let it happen.
In an open society, the only solution to protecting oneself against mass surveillance is to permit anyone who has been surveilled by the system to enter the system, on demand, and ask when , why, for how long, and for reasons one has been surveilled. The Key problem yet tobe solved (it may be unsolvable) is how to limit access to the open system by those persons who are truly a danger to society.
Mass surveillance WILL become universal, because just a few people can cause havoc -especially as those persons become more able to access deadly weapons of mass destruction. If we don't solve this problem, mass surveillance WILL be abused and used as a means of control, rather than a means of protection.
after the revolution, you could basically use the same paperwork we used some 200+ years ago ;)
except, update it to reflect the electronic age. keep the general ideas, though.
and enforce THAT and stop the feature-creep!
any system of laws that expands past a wall (like in a lawyer's office) is already too big. start small, put time-limits on everything and re-evaluate each one as its about to expire.
this is what to do after the revolution. I'm not sure what to do from now until then, though..
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
...great big meteor.
A post on popular message board Slashdot is sure to help get you closer to your goal of ending mass surveillance.
"Squashing descent"?? WTF?
It will take a president with balls! One who will go back to the policy of "Mess with us and we will nuke your ass!". Then there won't be a need for surveillance.
I don't want to do a sig now
JFK tried to get rid of the CIA and then he got killed. It's been downhill ever since. The USA was probably the last country on earth I would've guessed to be a surveillance state but there it is. Now ain't that a peach?
The surveillance has gotten so massive, I can honestly say I don't really care at this point.
Being able to understand the technical implications, and yet still not really caring - how can you possibly make any headway?
I would wish you good luck but it would be disingenuous.
The good news is that as the government surveils us, so now we surveil them - with a constant flow of leaks from within, with cameras on every citizen 24x7. That's why none of this really matters.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It would take a swing in public opinion such that the people overwhelmingly demand that it be dismantled (and vote accordingly).
Of course, that would require that the public is willing to accept that some acts of terrorism will probably occur that might (at least theoretically) have been prevented via mass surveillance.
Given that, I'm guessing it isn't too likely. (and even if it was dismantled, it would all be brought back by popular demand shortly after the next Very Bad Thing happened)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I think he means "quashing dissent."
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
The Constitution and Bill of Rights is in my opinion beautifully written with the exception of claiming some people are not full people. Take away that wording and it's worth trying again in just about identical fashion.
The unfortunate side is that History is cyclical because no matter how good the design people corrupt the system for gain. So in a few hundred years we will be back to the same point again.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The answer is not to restore darkness so we won't be prey to those who can see clearly as we stumble about, but to bring everyone together into the light.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Cansomeeeeeffgofififirirjfnv one please droll me in m
Yeah. Good luck on the way down, especially if you were stupid enough to reproduce.
In an open society, the only solution to protecting oneself against mass surveillance is to permit anyone who has been surveilled by the system to enter the system, on demand, and ask when , why, for how long, and for reasons one has been surveilled.
And what will that give you? We're watching everyone, all the time, looking for terrorists or such. That's the whole point of this bulk surveillance program, they don't need to target it. They don't need an excuse for why they're looking at you. They aren't particularly looking at you. What do you want, every query they've run on the data to check for any suspicious pattern that's hit you? Everybody's probably given some kind of risk score.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's too damn easy. Get over it, and just make sure nobody gets the advantage.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Standing on the Soap Box didn't work and the use of the Ballot Box has been corrupted by gerrymandering and at this point blatant bribery. The only question now is whether the people will have a chance to sit in the Jury Box or if they will be forced to turn to the last resort of all defenses of liberty, the Ammo Box.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
The ONE think they fear is effective encryption.
It is a sad situation, because that will also get in the way of legitimate (and yes, it can exist) investigation, however that is the arms race they are forcing you in to.
NOT encryption-when-you-have-something-to-hide, but encryption of EVERYTHING, as standard operating principle.
Right now exception is a nice bold flag to them that you should be monitored, however if even 20% of the population are regularly using it, that no longer works.
We are starting to see some very small movements in the encryption systems to escape from the over-complex not interoperable situation they let themselves
be pushed in to, and THAT is a big part of the problem, but some people now get it, and in a few years we may well have a much better choice in the area of
easy to use, interoperable, and open enough to be trustable encryption systems... and then the monitoring will work much less.
They will of course still see who is 'communicating' with who for some forms of link, that will be the next step.. protect the content first.
Like many things, the governments stupidity is going to make sensible law enforcement more difficult.
Go USA! and all that.. sigh.
That's all
The Constitution and Bill of Rights is in my opinion beautifully written with the exception of claiming some people are not full people.
*sigh*
Did you know that the northern states wanted the slaves counted at 0% while the southern states wanted them counted at 100%? Seems backwards doesn't it? 60% was a compromise, like a lot of things in those days; what it did was accelerate the end of slavery by moving up the day of reckoning when the agrarian south would no longer be able to outvote the populous north in the United States Congress. Not to roam too far off topic here but the 3/5th's clause has got to be the most misunderstood part of the Constitution. Uninformed people parrot that line as though it enshrined "less than equal" into the law when what it actually did was reduce the power of the slave-holding states and so accelerate the demise of that abominable institution.
I'm not certain what else the people of the day could have done about it. I suppose they could have fought the Civil War right then and there, immediately after kicking the British out, but that doesn't seem terribly likely to have ended well for anybody, slave or freedman. If there was a better way to thread that needle the smartest men of the day couldn't figure it out. Frankly I've never heard anybody of our generation figure it out either and we've got 20/20 hindsight to work with.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Thanks for the correction! It's late and I'm relying on spell check more than normal. Time to turn in for the evening :)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In the ideograms of Laotzu -- "Do nothing. That way everything will get done."
The Soviet-style surveillance state was disassembled when the Soviet Union imploded. This was due to various causes, including but not limited to a rising consumerist demand with a resulting balance-of-payment deficit, the cost of military "defense" against capitalism, mismanagement, corruption in high and low places, a failing currency and fiscal policy, and cynicism of the populace with respect to government's inability to plan for the future.
All of these conditions obtain currently in the USA. So, doing nothing will allow us to coast to the same fate as our former adversary.
And Laotzu will be shown to be right again.
Eh, surveillance is a problem only because it creates an imbalance of power between the people who have information and those who do not. There are a few approaches that could create some sort of balance.
1. Full transparency. With enough technological progress, eventually everyone will have universal access to essentially a God's eye view of everything that ever happens. Anyone would be able to reconstruct and playback a 3D model of any past event, perhaps even including the neural impulses in your brain and interpret your thoughts. This makes it impossible to lie or conceal things, and you can see everyone's actions and decisions simply as manifestations of their life's experiences.
2. Legislated opacity. Everyone is guaranteed the right to privacy. But no one knows if anyone is secretly spying. Unless we secretly spy on them. If we openly spy on those in power, they'll just figure out how to hide their spying better. So maybe we need two competing government agencies always spying on each other, ready to go to the press if they find some misconduct on the other side. Oh wait, that sorta sounds like what we have.
So if there's any mass surveillance that goes on, we ought to make sure it applies to those holding power in public office first. But if we really manage to achieve that, we'll see them legislating surveillance out immediately.
It would take money, centuries long term thinking, sheer will, and understanding. The point isn't to give up and say, Oh well, everything is recorded anyways, my data is for anyone to see. It's an idealistic nudism almost :P The government is forcefully making everyone Catholic by assuming the position of the global Padre Facebook confessions. What do you mean you don't want to give me your diary? Have you sinned my son? But who's going to make a difference? Whoever's got the time and money :)
The system will know everything about you and what it means, it will learn more about you than you know yourself and even predict your behaviour better than you can even when you think you have autonomy of action. This will be an offshoot of marketing and advertising more than intelligence surveillance but the end result is the same except that the data on you will also be for sale.
Info exhaust. You can take down big brother by creating info exhaust. Run bots accessing random web sites, generate other kinds of random traffic. Lie to corporate BB. Overwhelm their ability to gather and analyze. .
Squashing descent, getting a leg up on any one selling things you want to sell, putting competition out of business, etc..
When trying to promote radicalism, it helps to come across as well spoken rather than crazy.
That is not how you spell "dissent".
Destroy your Samsung TV!
Insurmountable semantic signal to noise ratios. Moral and legal arguments do nothing.
super rich and powerful. If it ever does.
An all out revolt is probably the only way this will change at this point. Society has been on a downward spiral for a while now. Historically the only way to recover was lots of bloodshed. People in power never want to relinquish power or money, which is essence is what the mass surveillance is all about. Squashing descent, getting a leg up on any one selling things you want to sell, putting competition out of business, etc..
Its easy to paint the situation as the masses being dominated by the people in power but the truth is that a revolt is unlikely to work for the simple reason that the average person really isn't just a passive observer; they really want much of what they claim they don't want. In terms of the specifics, its easy to claim that one doesn't want mass surveillance but that's just a symptom of a more fundamental truth. The truth is that given the choice presented to the people in power, most people would choose the same thing: namely given a choice between using every means at one's disposal to stop terrorism or not, most people would in fact choose to use every means at one's disposal, even if it infringed on personal freedom.
And the reason why a revolt is unlikely is the same reason why the Occupy Movement didn't generate lasting results in the same way many other movements did. Revolutions require people willing to do whatever it takes to achieve a result, often without the kinds of compromise that people normally engage in. A revolution to stop people from doing whatever it takes to achieve a goal is difficult to achieve when backed only by people unwilling to do whatever it takes to achieve that goal.
George Washington famously assumed enormous military, and thus political power when he became the leader of the Continental Army, and his hands were not entirely clean when wielding it. But without him, there probably is no revolution that survives. When the war was over he surrendered that power by resigning his commission. The number of people both willing and able to exercise such vast power to achieve an end which results in surrendering that power entirely (even if only temporarily) is exceedingly small. Most people willing to do the latter have no capacity to do the former and vice versa.
To put it another way, what you need is a leader willing to say "I would rather see Americans die than surrender their freedom" that is also so popular he isn't immediately driven out of the country by pitchforks the next day, and can convince the average American (or for that matter any other citizen of any other country) to accept those values. Until such a person arrives, all revolutions to change the situation will fail, because none will genuinely have the support of the people.
Someone will probably come along and say that's a false choice, but that's missing the point. The point is that is the general perception: you either have the values that say "do everything you possibly can, pushing the envelope as far as you can" or you don't. If you don't, someone will always come along and say they would do more, and they would be correct, and because there's no way to prove it with certainty you'd always take the blame for the next person killed. That's just reality. You did everything possible, or you didn't. Leaders don't want to say they didn't, and citizens don't want excuses for why they didn't. That needs to change somehow, but most people I think don't really want that to change, deep down.
If you want to make real change you have to become a politician and write the laws. Talk is cheap action is what gets the job done. With all the crazies out there surveillance needs to happen continue when everyone else stands by and does nothing.
Wide spread, end to end encryption would need to be implemented. In order to do that, you need one or two major providers to start advertising that they are completely encrypted, and that the competition is just handing your data to the government. That's one hell of a marketing 2x4 that the NSA is giving away for free to the first company to wants to step up and claim it.
"The Banana Computer Corporation is proud to announce that our platform is completely encrypted from end to end, and will protect you and your loved ones from digital threats such as Eastern European Identity thieves, illegal government spying, and other data theft. And what about the other companies? They can't be bothered to protect your loved ones (shows cute little child playing ABC game on smart phone, with a superimposed image of what looks like a leering pedophile hacker Nazi rapist frantically typing to steal your data) so why give them your business? Switch to Banana Computer to protect your family today.
Its like ten million new free subscribers to the first company to encrypt and give the NSA the finger, I am puzzled why nobody is pursuing this...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Surveillance, in the sense of cameras and such watching you, is something that fundamentally wasn't possible centuries ago, and now is. Our "Sensors" tech is near-irreversibly better. This is not going to change. There are countermeasure "Stealth" techs, but in most situations Sensors have the advantage.
It's just electronics. It can overloaded with data. Time for everyone to talk about Bombs, Killing, Shootings, Sex Drugs and Rock-n-Roll!
I said TALK! If you hurt anyone then your the problem too.
Earthean
Pffft. the solution is simple. Shine the light on the politicians. Organize a group of people to start following around all of congress and the senate, paparazzi style, and record everything they do, and post everything. Record whats in their trash, which stall they took a dump in at the mall, what they buy at the grocery store and how much they pay for gas at the gas station. Follow them with video cameras rolling constantly.
A week of that and you will get some nice strong privacy laws.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
With all the snoops and thieves out there who aren't from the government, you should be encrypting everything of importance regardless of what happens to the government agencies.
With encryption, the only thing the goobernmint can collect is what they claim is all they want: identification of the end points.
Encryption forces them to approach the provider of the service with a valid warrant in their jurisdiction in order to obtain the data you've transmitted.
Of course with US vs. Microsoft, it's clear the US doesn't understand this concept of "jurisdiction" very well. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The limits on surveillance — both by fellow citizens and the government(s) — have never really been laws of men, but those of nature.
How well can a human being see? With nice lenses? With a bunch of cameras? With a high-flying drone?
How much could a human being remember? How much can he record on a piece of papyrus? A bound book? A magnetic tape? A computer?
Our inventions expand our powers. We use them — and abuse them too.
You may be able to push back on some fronts — like forcing EZ-Pass and similar toll-collectors to allow anonymous transponders. You may even be able to, one day, abolish license plates from vehicles.
But to roll back ordinary surveillance, you'll have to destroy/ban/abolish the technology, that enables it. Because you can not outlaw remembering what one has seen. Nor can you outlaw making records to aid one's memory... The populist Europeans attempted introduction of the "right to be forgotten" — not realizing, it may some day be used, for example, by ex-lovers to demand, the other side be forced to forget the good times they once had together.
Maybe, we have to make a dramatic shift in our attitude towards the very perceiving of others. Currently, you can watch/hear/perceive (and — almost always — record) anything visible/audible/perceivable from anywhere, where you can legally be. Can we make it illegal to look at people or listen to them without their explicit permission? I doubt it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'd advocate a deliberate attempt to fill any and all surveillance systems with so much bullshit it becomes impossible to use, and thus the standard practice for sensible engineers to say "there's no point trying to log that, it'll just be filled with garbage". I encourage people to emit white noise as much as they can.
Simple things help: Every time I order pizza from pizza hut, I put in a bullshit name and address. If their database got one new entry entry per pizza ordered for every pizza ordered, they'd stop recording your details. When I order stuff from internet retailers, I always fill the phone number in as 88888888. If they want to contact me, they can use my email address, that's what it's for. I've started refusing to partake in any service that requires me to make a new account. It's actually not painful in the least.
More complex things might also help. For a while I've been wondering about a browser plugin that takes all the nonsecure web page requests you make and has other peoples computers quietly and collectively replicate them millions of times, filling everyone's surveillance history with everyone elses surveillance history.
It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.
If you want security, you can live in a prison. I don't need my privacy destroyed to feel safe. I never felt unsafe even in a world of commies or terrorists.
The same people that perpetrate false flag attacks are the same people that want mass surveillance. They are scared of the collective power that the Internet can provide to the little guy. Prior to 9/ 11, a bill was being created to provide REAL data protection and privacy. The people in power do not like privacy for all. After 9/11 the masses were caught in an emotional distraction, a slight of hand, suckered by the 3 card Monte hustler, convinced that the evil cavemen did it and managed to ensure only 1 camera angle was able to capture the plane flying into the pentagon. A third rate reject insurance adjuster wouldn't buy that story, not sure why we bought the Saddam WOD, Osama, afghanistan, ISIS, etc.
People don't read and many lack the ability to critically think.
Imagine a program that has your browser reading left, right, commie, capitalist, straight, gay, rt.com, cnn.com, aljazeera, every possible side of the fence, etc. A spider program that gathers links, builds a small dB and moves on, constantly reading to mask what u actually read.
Imagine a program that sends GPS coordinates from tx, ca, NY all in a matter of mins. If you want to disclose your location, u can disable it, but the location masker should be enabled by default, a TOR-like concept for the smartphone.
Your computer and smartphone could be running these programs at all times. This is only the beginning.
We have the technological capability to destroy the validity of the data they house. You can make a difference
Many guillotines.
Well, it will take getting rid of ridiculous laws like the Patriot Act and making new ones so this doesn't happen again. That's what it takes in a democracy anyway. All the people talking about insurrection and bloodshed are looking a bit too far back in history and think that violence is the only way to do things because that's what they would support. It's barbaric and NOT the answer. The People need to take back their government by not electing corrupt or stupid, selfish people in the first place. That's what has gotten us into this mess. We're the only ones to blame for this. We elected the a-holes in the first place. How about taking responsibility for your actions and doing the right thing without resorting to violence. You know, like civilized people do? Stop hearing only what you want to hear and think about and investigate who you are voting for instead of electing idiots and crooks that tell you want to hear at election time and screw you over once in office. Look beyond your own selfish needs and think ... just effing think! of someone other than yourself and those you give a shite about and try to act in EVERYONE's best interests, not just your own. Dammit!
As I read it, things usually get better during long periods of difficult reform, but worse after a revolution. Sometimes when the balance between big powers changes there are opportunities for small nations to reassert their independence from an external tyrant, but that isn't a revolution in the same sense.
The 1917 Russian revolution would be an example of things getting worse after a revolution. The French revolution results were more mixed, but some things got a lot worse for a while, and its debatable how much the revolution itself really helped. The 1989 Polish revolution would be an example of escaping from an external oppressor, where things got better because the society was already capable of supporting a much better order than had been imposed from without.
The problem with revolutions, is that the a corrupt society is usually corrupt at more than just the top level - the people who abuse power at the top are able to do that in large part because of the corruption of those below them. When they are overthrown violently, even worse elements are commonly able to take advantage of the breakdown in civil institutions.
I'm not defending the people at the top - I hate the 1%. And I'm not against violence where it makes sense. But if people had what it takes to make things better after overthrowing their moneyed overlords violently, in most places they have what it takes to do it better without the violence. We have a lot of power already. If we don't use it because we're lazy or busy or brainwashed, a revolution isn't going to help with that.
Don't worry. I don't think Slashdot needs any more radicalization.
1) set up a guillotine in front of the washington monument
2) kill all tyrants
3) restore the constitution
I don't think that they do. Universal surveillance can be valuable for all sorts of things. Used correctly it can almost eliminate crime (except of course crimes committed by the entity that controls the surveillance).
So far it seems that the public is willing to accept almost unlimited surveillance. They may know that its a deal with the devil,but many people are willing to make those deals.
I think Slashdot is not a representative sample - the posters here tend to think more deeply about issues than does the general public, and I think we are more aware of just how badly a surveillance society could go.
You do realize that the "War on Terrorism" is just creating more targets every day it persists, right? That if we actually grew a pair and cut Israel off from all the aid we give them (in spite of the horrific things they've done to the Palestinians) and stopped invading countries for our own benefit and not theirs we'd have a lot less international terrorism and could focus on the domestic terrorism (gangs, whacko militias and such) that really needs to get cleaned up in our own house.
The only people to blame for all this mess is ourselves because we're the ones that elected these idiots that created the Patriot Act and all these spy programs to begin with. Stop voting for these a-holes that want this to continue.
I have no idea... but I'm sure it's a subject we will all be watching closely.
Ed Snowden claimed that he wanted to "trigger" a debate, but is that really enough?
A debate needs to begin somewhere/time.
What will it take to tear down Big Brother?
See 2nd Amendment to US Constitution.
That's it. Nothing will end mass surveillance. This is what all governments have always wanted and at last it's economically feasible to make it happen. The chilling effect and self-censorship are not simply unintended consequences: they're planned and desired. Together with the widespread control of the internet, dissent will be a thing of the past. It's a done deal. It won't go away, unless the whole civilization crumbles and that would not be desirable at all. We live now in the Surveillance Age. The tools we naively believed would take us to unprecedented levels of personal freedom and worldwide democracy have turned out to be the whips and the chains of our masters. Welcome to the new world: this is where we'll stay.
you might get strong privacy laws for the privileged.
An excellent place to start would be to look to see what stopped Senator Joseph McCarthy and the equally insane House Un-American Activities Committee. Senator Joseph McCarthy couldn't have shown much better that people like him exist and the system shouldn't exist that enables them. The present day NSA insanity is a Senator Joseph McCarthy wet dream. He had to claw and scrape for the pittance of data he had which the NSA would now laugh at as a joke as they probably gather more data in millionths of a second than Senator Joseph McCarthy gathered the whole time he terrorized the US.
Lessons that should have been learned from the House Un-American Activities Committee is that they could do far more damage than the people they were hunting ever dreamed they could.
So we have the NSA doing their damnedest to repeat history so the key would be to repeat history as to how to stop it. The key seemed to be when the Senate voted to censure him which was such a wonderful humiliation that the asshat died from alcoholism a few years later. So what the senate should do is to identify the few key players who are supporting the NSA and turf them this would then take the wind out of their civil rights violating sales making them an easy target for further reforms that should one by one effectively shut them down.
The final key would be to make a complete list of all the things good they have done and a complete list of bad things they have done. I suspect that in the end that it would be like a surgeon who used a 9mm pistol as his primary method of surgically removing zits. Yes he got the zits but the collateral damage was just not worth it and it would have been better for him not to have operated at all.
To me this is quite simple. Terrorists are first and foremost defined by their criminal activities. Thus use the traditional laws to go after and punish them. I don't care why the guy put a bomb in his underwear. He put a bomb in his underwear!!! I don't think that it counts as misdemeanour if looked at as just a normal crime. I don't care why the guy shot the cartoonist. He shot someone. If any of the above was part of a larger plan then there is a conspiracy which is another serious crime. If there is enough evidence to get a wiretap then a judge will issue a warrant. These are not complicated things. If anything makes it complicated it might be that it involves having to liaise with some international counterparts.
...they've already tasted the power, and they want more.
It begins with your online accounts, back-door access to the data systems you know and "trust" (Yahoo, GMail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), extending on to IoT monitoring (XBox Kinect sending your data to Microsoft nightly? Samsung TVs recording your room and sharing it with third parties?), license plate cameras everywhere, mailbox RFID monitoring, Stinger cells and much more.
Nay, the only thing that will stop Mass Surveillance at this point, is two words: Mass Extinction.
Like WW3 or fascism for a few decades. Unless mass-surveillance is made "unthinkable", it will continue. But do not worry, the governments of the world, lead by the US, are hard at work to arrange that decades of fascism. When humanity comes out of them, things will look a bit different.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That is paranoid BS. But true AI is not going to happen anytime soon and maybe not ever.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well - just tearing down Big Brohter.
While obvious, it's worth mulling over that: those at the moment in power show *no signs whatsoever* that they want to change direction. If they intend any change, it's rather "more of this", and they take every opportunity to follow through. A nutcrack shooting someone? "More of this". A bombing? "More of this". A rag army of piss-poor people radicalized by some criminals? "More of this".
Without changing fundamentally how the world works, this won't change. The Elected Representatives have *no motivation* to change that.
Eh, surveillance is a problem only because it creates an imbalance of power between the people who have information and those who do not.
Eh, not exactly. You will always have an imbalance of information, and anyone high enough in the food chain will get exemptions to monitoring through state's secrets or some such; you already know full transparency will never be equally applied.
One of the more important aspects of 4th amendment protections is setting up a chain of custody for information, which current infringements do not have. Parallel construction might as well be used to frame someone, as the path of the original evidence can not be scrutinized. And this only gets worse with mass surveillance as the validity of sources isn't under lawful checks at each step.
This is the aspect that is most frightening, as if people assume they are always under surveillance, there is never the need to question the the validity of what's being presented, when it could just be a complete fabrication. You can never know for sure.
now what would Lenin, commander Nestor Mahno and/or Robespierre say about ending various unsuccessful governmental initiatives? Pablo Escobar also had some fine ideas about reorganisation of the legal system. There are countless examples of successful reform!
Every time I order pizza from pizza hut, I put in a bullshit name and address.
I'm rather curious how the driver finds your front door with a made-up address...?
That aside, I think something that labor intensive and impractical is really never going to catch on, since it requires a good deal of extra work by normal people to really work. I think total, end-to-end encryption for anything you don't want snooped on is the only real, practical solution. I'm not nearly as worried about Pizza Hut collecting my ordering habits. But I only surf behind a VPN now. My ISP sees nothing but pseudo-random noise. I suppose the NSA might be able to theoretically piece together outbound and inbound traffic from the commercial VPN's exit to the open net that I use, but at least I'm making it a hell of a lot harder for them. Also, there's actually good, viable end-to-end personal chat-type communication available now as well in products like Threema and WhatsApp, if people care enough to make use of it. I think the trick is that we need to make it dead-simple for everyone to use, and tell them "if you don't want to be snooped on - use this".
I remain unconvinced that the NSA eavesdropping program will ever be shut down. Maybe the only way would be to de-fund it, I suppose. It's incredibly hard to dismantle government bureaucracies once they've been established, as history has shown us.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The US citizens are afraid of so many things including Islam, terror, their neighbors, bees, black people, etc. Then stop electing those people. Why the fuck are you either elect crazy republicans which would first shoot and never ask, or the democrats who occasionally ask but also make politics for wall street combind d with gunboat diplomancy.
> What will it take to tear down Big Brother? Only solution is to end global state-wide centralized tyrranic governments.
Including tyrrany of majority - the [state-wide, both direct and by choosen war criminal] democracy.
This is coming. I don't want it to come, and neither do you.
But one day, there will be such a security breach that regular people for whom monitoring happens to other people will find every phone call they've made, every email/text/IM they've sent, every street camera picture that's been taken of them, every URL they've visited, and every nude airport scan available for searching, downloading, and scrutinizing going back at least a decade.
Some will find surprisingly more.
This will hurt you, me, the super-paranoid dude with the encrypted hard drive, the boring grandma, and the powerful politician.
After the dust settles from the several million ruined marriages, the inevitable political scandals, and the rampant identity theft, things will change. For a while.
New politicians will get elected. Privacy laws will be enacted. Watchers will be appointed to watch the other watchers. Whatever government surveillance exists will go further underground. Everyone will encrypt everything.
And then people will relax and thighs will go back to some version of what we have now.
Mass surveillance isn't always a bad thing: it's only bad if the means to surveil is restricted to a privileged class. What if the mass surveillance is ubiquitous, where the means to surveil is available to anyone with motive? In such a modified world of mass surveillance, there are strong potential benefits that can emerge, not universally bad ones. We can already see some of the benefits of such a shift in the ability of citizens to use mobile devices to surveil public police misbehavior. Now imagine if that was the rule rather than an exception? What if all the data snarfed up by the NSA was available to anyone with the desire to sift through it?
Don't mindlessly try to end "mass" surveillance out of fear of the ruling class; instead change who has access to it. Ending mass surveillance entirely is the Luddite response to what is fundamentally a social problem.
You do realize that the "War on Terrorism" is just creating more targets every day it persists, right?
I hear guys and gals working military hardware production have caught on. Hard to say who else knows about this little secret.
That if we actually grew a pair and cut Israel off from all the aid
We can't do that... with signage around town reading "Support Israel" ... cutting them off isn't supporting them.
in spite of the horrific things they've done to the Palestinians
So they routinely kill more Palestinians in a single hour of shelling than a decade of "rocket attacks from Gaza" ... this isn't a bad thing...they are only defending themselves... only anti-Semites would think Israel is bad for killing people intentionally kept poor and miserable by Israel.
and stopped invading countries for our own benefit and not theirs
Invasion creates jobs. Shouldn't everyone have a job? Who is against jobs?
we'd have a lot less international terrorism
Drug trafficking and terrorism .. sounds like a job for the CIA.
could focus on the domestic terrorism (gangs, whacko militias and such) that really needs to get cleaned up in our own house.
Keeping drugs and hookers illegal will teach these low life scum a lesson.
The only people to blame for all this mess is ourselves because we're the ones that elected these idiots that created the Patriot Act and all these spy programs to begin with. Stop voting for these a-holes that want this to continue.
Is the candidate with the most signs against spy programs? I vote for the candidate who can afford the most signs.
And the low tech problems:
- Lost passwords:
user encrypts everything. user lose key/password. user is locked out of encrypted data.
Today, with the help of some hacking (e.g.: wiring a vintage floppy reader) you can access any old data that you dig up from your basement. 25 year from now, you won't necessary be able to find the credential you might need to access data that you encrypted today. And no hardware hacking will help much (unless by that point quantum computing has progressed to the point where rigging a machine to decrypt the lost data is possible. And the cryptographic algo is quantum-forceable).
- Kept password:
user is afraid of the former situation. And decides to write down passwords. On post-its left on the screen. In plain view for everyone.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101...
Totally going in the wrong direction.
There's an upcoming vote, but it only affects provincial government. Although they can stop this from happening it's questionable that they will.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
This may be seen as quibbling, but I really don't believe there is any substance in attributing motivations and aspirations to masses of people or some statistical "average person" - except insofar as a mass of people may be organized to an agenda. Different people want different things to different degrees. Statistically you can posit that there is critical mass for certain changes and not for others. National elections are a good example of statistical conclusions, even warped as they are by undue sinister influencing agents and by corrupt tabulation and perhaps intimidation.
As an illustration, whether the proportion of citizens who are net takers in the economy is 47% or 53%, and the proportion of net producers is the mirror figure - either way there are just about as many takers as producers. There are an awful lot of both. There is little reason to believe that feelings about (perhaps "devotion to" is a better term) liberty and privacy are much different.
Be that as it may ... I submit a specific alternate to your postulate that a leader willing to put large forces under arms in harm's way is the only method to effect fundamental change. The alternate is a new Gandhi. The general principle worked well enough for Martin Luther King, Jr. This is not say we won't get our hair mussed a bit, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a 1775 style revolution with cannons mowing down rows of sons and would-be masters.
I think he is fully aware that he is 100% full of shit, but he is devoted to the big lie.
...the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Society, not to be that guy... has ALWAYS been on a downward spiral. Yet, somehow, things have gotten better for a lot of people, which just goes to show... somehow, things can manage to shoot UP out of a downward spiral. Or... it's not really a downward spiral after all.
BTW, on the original topic, what will it take to end mass surveillance... don't look to the book, "1984" for an answer. For those of you who don't recall the book, or never read it... (SPOILER ALERT!) Big Brother wins in the end. Winston happily lets the government kill him so that he won't have any more bad, or forbidden thoughts, because they succeeded in breaking him.
Perhaps the plain and simple truth is that early and middle-history America was, for some people, a golden age of freedom and responsive government that's long gone, and will never come again. Hope you all enjoyed it while it lasted, because it's looking increasingly like it's over now.
A full on, in your face uprising by the masses. A revolution. But the masses have McDonalds', TV, and Buzzfeed, so they are unlikely to bother. Which is pretty much how it was designed...
FALSE!!! The answer is not encryption because they will simply ban encryption. The TRUE answer is YOU engaging in direct POLITICAL action to bring the laws and candidates YOU want into place. Then you can encrypt all you want forever. You can even outlaw wiretaps.
The answer is not political action with candidates, because the people *don't care*.
The answer is getting people to care.
That means schools and media campaigns, and exposing abuses of the system. Right now the system works in secret, so misuses of it don't come to light much, but I doubt very much there are none. You're handing a bunch of well-meaning people something of a ring of power--a way to invisibly steal into everyone's life. Some of them are going to misuse that power, most trivially with simple voyeurism and most seriously by effective blackmail. The FBI has *never* demonstrated that it is serious about rooting out government corruption outside of a few very limited cases (e.g. bid rigging, bribable prison guards, the rare elected official), and this would be a *great* and important place to have an effective organization doing that.
Yeah, it would be CRAZY to think that people might be ungrateful and angry at the US when the US invades their country and kills hundreds of thousands of people.
(sarcasm off now)
Yes, of course radical islamists cause trouble, but to pretend that the US doesn't ALSO cause trouble (and create the righteous anger against the West which enables radical islamists to find more willing recruits) is really ignorant. War widows and orphans make great terrorists. A lot of people in the US would also become radicalized and violent if, e.g., Russia (to take an example unrelated to Islam) invaded the US (e.g. to "liberate" us from whoever our current president happened to be) and hundreds of thousands of US citizens died.
... Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You actually believe that "protecting us from terrorism" is the only reason the mass surveillance apparatus exists, and that the government would happily dismantle it there was no foreign terrorism threat?
Terrorism is the convenient pretext for ramping up what the government was already doing.
It will take a reboot of the universe.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
It will only take one thing: Lack of the possibility. As long as they technologically can, it will happen. They are and always have been above and beyond the law due to their nature of being "secret" services. The very concept of secret service is to get intelligence by any means necessary, as long as you don't blow your cover. Because if you don't blow your cover, nobody will ever know what laws you have broken, so you are essentially above the law.
Be a little realistic, a secret service has and uses back-doors to virtually every known dataset in their own country, and sometimes even from other countries. Google database, Facebook database, passports database, AT&T phone records database, I mean they show this even in the movies, where they kind of tone it down, I image in reality they are not as moral as they want to seem in the movies (as in we can't tap that guy's phone/email/facebook account without a warrant, it's not legal/ethic, yea right). The only true hindrance is that they can't use it in court unless they prove it was obtained under a warrant. But with all the secret courts existence, it's absolutely a breeze to get a back dated warrant.
The technology is here, the power is here, all it takes is the right political context (some big ass fear inducer in the population) and the right leader for the US to become an Orwellian state.
But you don't want to hear that do you?
Thanks for the giant surveillance state. You built it.
... that is the ONLY thing that will end mass surveillance...
What's up with that? I have to close it every time I open e new window
"What will it take to end mass surveillance?" This is the wrong question, the right question is how long will it take before we stop caring? Privacy on the internet is an illusion (probably perpetrated by people wanting to sell security). With the right justification, any form of communication is subject to monitoring, but you are probably safer sending a letter through the post office than an e-mail, simply because of the legal hurdles involved in interfering with the interactions between two government agencies US Postal service and the NSA. I think the notion of internet privacy contradicts the idea of free an open information. Sure I want to read the entire content of the Library of Congress, but I don't want anyone to know that I did? I consider the internet in the same way I consider the other side of my front door, anything that happens out there is happening in public, regardless of how I try to disguise it. People will eventually come to the same conclusion and simply stop caring whose looking at them when they walk out the front door.
maybe some nukes detonated in the atmosphere. massive solar flare. CIA quantum computers becoming self-aware...
A massive change in opinions regarding the core subject.
Slavery was deemed acceptable for a long time.
Surveillance still is. What's needed is that surveillance gets ostracized, by a large amount of people. So it becomes impossible to get elected as a surveillance-proponent.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
When the penal system overflows and we simply can not afford to arrest one more person they might as well stop spying. At some point we will be able to discover multiple thousands of felonies ever day. I suspect we already have reached the saturation point for arresting the multitudes. We might even become so wise as to see clearly that the justice system is actually creating crime these days. Somehow locking criminals up with other criminals simply does not make them all better people.
I'm rather curious how the driver finds your front door with a made-up address...?
It's pickup, not delivery. They still insist I put in a full address for pickup.
Oh yeah ENCRYPTION that's the ticket! It's the answer because... we think encryption is cool and we like to talk about it. The extra cycles and massive overhead of it fit so well into our every day lifestyle, social conventions and habits already, it will be easy as butter to bread.
Whenever the subject turns to Civil Liberties, privacy and especially Freedom of Association, and I hear CRITTERS MADE OF FUCKING MEAT flapping and squealing and wheezing about encryption being a solution, I wonder, have they really given it enough thought.
It's a like-like-like dere's dese nano-supercharged characters in some Neal Stephenson saga who have fantastic reconfigurable polymers and nanotech-grit embedded in their pores, and the raise of an eyebrow and nod of the head precipitates a public key exchange Then the gents' throat sacs become engorged with a fluid ring of octave-resonant modulators, and the cilia in their ears pulls apart and twists like some virtual Enigma Machine plugboard to bring into place a Session Key and the two gentlemen begin to converse in a series of chirp-noisy warbles... And WHAM! The bus squashes the stupid ugly toad-people who have deliberately re-configured their biology because long ago someone took Slashdot by storm with the idea that HIDING BEHIND ENCRYPTION is the answer for everything and these poor bloated idiots whose senses are reconfigured for their Clear Private Channel cannot even resolve the world around them. "Oh but that's solvable, so simple!" We cry. "There needs to be a third device in the loop that also receives a copy of the session key. It is a device attached to their ear-pods with a quantum Monster Cable, and it scans ambient sounds and injects encrypted packets into the private stream so the toad-gentlemen can perceive plain text sense data such as traffic noise as they converse!" Too bad it relies on a Malaysian chip that contains an NSA backdoor... "Oh but that's solvable, so simple... we just use THREE of them and turn one upside-sown like 3DES..."
But I don't know how those weird toad-people snuck into my message in the first place. Oh yeah, now I remember. THAT is how all this "normal" chatter around here about hiding behind encryption and Who Cares Anyway I Have No Secrets Ha Ha stuff sounds to me. Like a small pond full of croaky toad people.
This is serious shit that can be resolved in yours-mine-our time.
But it has to get CREATIVE and a little BIZARRE.
Because such things are the only way to cut through the noise.
Once again you see a story about NSA ending "telephone records collection program"
When they don't NEED the record collection program.
They have backbone taps. They want to keep those taps.
So they want YOU and CONGRESS to talk about telephone record metadata instead.
They want to control the discussion.
People have to press Congress and the Press to de-fund and dismantle FULL-TAPS and UTAH.
And if they try to change the subject, people have to jump upand shout,
"If you cannot address the real issue, you're an UGLY FUCKING TOAD!"
This has to happen in a National press conference, on billboards, on T-shirts.
It really will be THAT HARD to get the subject on track.
For the part of my point that actually makes sense, please see this previous Slashdot post.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The 4th and 5th amendments are not enough to assure personal freedom from search in the digital & wireless age. Only an amendment to the constitution that spells out this freedom can prevent it's continued abuse.
We must decide how much freedom we want to give up in order for law enforcement to investigate / prevent terrorism. We could draw a line between the enforcement agencies, preventing trickle down of personal info that is unrelated to terrorism. Or we could outlaw the gathering of this info entirely. But only a definitive constitutional amendment can compel all authorities and future presidential administrations to stay within boundaries that are sufficiently clearly marked to prevent routine abuses.
You really don't think Intel / AMD / Broadcom / et al have TLA-mandated backdoors, Pollyanna?
It will take civil war and/or an successful invasion, I suspect.
And in the final tally, the lives lost will not have been worth it an interruption the the surveillance state.
And since the technology is likely to still exist after the bloodshed, it won't take long at all to set up a new surveillance state.
The exposition and prosecution of elite pedophiles.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Treason Trials... Lots of them...
Vote for people who will repeal it
Vote out everyone that voted for the patriot act and/or still supports it.
Only YOU can prevent abuse of power.
I agree with your first statement 100%.
"...because we're the ones that elected these idiots..."
These idiots were 'selected' not 'elected' by the powers that be. Elections only give the people the illusion of choice. For example, 'Dubya' was not voted into office by the American people; he was appointed by the "justice" department.
However, I do agree that ultimately we are responsible because, elections or no, we have allowed these monsters to take control.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
A little Islamophobic, are we?
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
a bit of end-to-end encryption, and the NSA will see their efforts turn mostly moot. The real problem here is informing and educating people.
Everyone complains about mass surveillance from the government, which is less government, but at the same time, people are screaming for more government involvement by demanding "Net Neutrality".
Make up your minds!
My custom made parabolic tin-foil hat gives me +5 save vs. surveillance.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Remember the old days of the Internet, when only the knowledgeable could get through?
It was a sort of an university club, where only your fellow geeks could follow and had a say.
The occasional Cuckoo's Egg was found using traditional police work.
I think the solution will be one for geeks, not for the population.
It will probably involve heavy configuration, using new protocols (IPv6/IPSEC anyone?).
Some few companies who think that geeks matter will be present.
The rest, including 'mom, google, etc. will be outside, in the bad-old-internet.
People need to just stop being fucking cowards.
This means the God-n-Guns groups and the For-The-Children as well.
"Sir, we caught a bunch of our webcam surveillance employees passing around a certain video and...this is embarrassing, but it apparently got out on the internet too."
"What webcam was this video from?"
"Well, you see, that's the really bad part...."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Not encryption, not even government collapse, will end it. Encryption will slow them down, but all encryption is eventually overcome given enough resources. Government collapse would also be a bump in the road, as it's never 100% collapsed -- some parts would remain standing in the ashes -- usually the strong parts. And as history shows, those with the "power" will do and take all they can in order to remain standing, at the expense of everyone else.
No, the idea of privacy is an ever-fleeting myth, whether you view it from a technological or socio-political viewpoint, or simply one of human consciousness.
Lots of people want to mock the Constitution and claim that "it failed to stop oppressive government!". What they're ignoring though is that rules always mean nothing if people don't uphold them and Americans have grown incredibly lazy and allow politicians to do pretty much whatever they want without any consequences.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
People can't even be bothered to generate and exchange PGP keys with their own friends and family, and then someone talks as though those same people might be willing to vote or revolt.
That's not laymen I'm talking about (they care even less); that's self-labeled geeks/nerds. Slashdot doesn't care enough, for it to ever get to a point as extreme as voting.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The powers-that-be are fairly well entrenched, they will continue to amass power and means to coerce the plebes into submission until overthrown, unfortunately this will likely require violence. History states as much. Pay attention to it, or learn the hard way!
If you had to dream up the worst possible place to keep your personal data, you'd pick, "Scattered across the Internet in places controlled by strangers." Pull that thread and you arrive somewhere near this solution. http://www.arthurfontaine.com/...
My other
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with "No."
Mass surveillance won't end. We have a new era of existence now, and that era includes easy access to anything you've ever communicated.
The thing we'll need to keep in check is how the information collected is used, which is part of the reason why personal right and acceptance of others is so important.
No, just a large electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike will be enough to take down the system. Tim S.
But do these reforms represent significant restructuring or are they just bureaucratic gestures intended to create the perception that officials are responding to public pressure?
Anything our government does at this point is just smoke and mirrors. Without major reorganization the corruption runs too deep to be easily cut out.
With that said, the government gets away with much of what it does because the corporations are complicit, a lot of the surveillance being done is by corporations with profit in mind and the results are "shared" with government entities that otherwise have no legal reason to possess such data. Crack down on the corporations tracking/monitoring citizens first with massive corporate fines and long prison sentences for executives.
Another tactic the government has been using is they simply "grant" themselves the power to do "x" and no one steps up and says they can't do that. Thus agencies like the department of justice have granted their agents the power to perjure themselves on the witness stand with scams like parallel reconstruction and the civilian population seems totally okay with that. If I get caught lying on the witness stand I go to prison, it should be the same for police and government officials. You know, it's all part of that justice for all and equal protection under the law bit.
Our government also has too many "secret" laws, "secret" gag orders, "secret" lists, and "secret" databases for any free nation. How can citizens comply with the law if if is "secret"? Get rid of this crap. Go back to actually having probable cause and a warrant.
Only then can Constitutional restrictions be reinstated on government organizations. Like any corrupt organization the current mentality that "we know better" has become so entrenched that nothing can be done short of massive prison sentences and a complete re-structuring of how government operates will be necessary. When a single congressman can remove a bill without allowing it to come to a vote is not democracy by any definition of the word.
Think of a classic, classified computing facility with physical conduits, some of which are painted red.
These conduits carry classified information.
This is information that in order for the country to work, the government needs to know but not publish.
There are other conduits carrying power and less sensitive information, perhaps colored white.
There are strict procedures preventing information from crossing from Red to White without defined procedures.
(Mr Snowden found a hole in these procedures and one hopes they have been adjusted.)
Now consider the concept that there is information necessary for the country to work that the government needs to hold in trust but not use and not publish.
This doesn't not fit into either red or white conduits or the thinking or procedures carefully governing them.
We need a new way of thinking and perhaps a new color. Blue seems historically appropriate.
It seems that with the ability to do bulk collections comes a great responsibility.
Perhaps another color with the physical barriers and defined procedures and way of thinking separate from the Red/White thinking would help with the responsibility.
The likely alternative path is to continue to treat Blue as Red until mission creep or human nature causes an outrage which forces the issue.
has pipes
A sufficient Coronal Mass Ejection / EMP event, similar to or greater than the Solar Storm of 1859 could disable the electrical and digital means of surveillance, except for maybe those who live near 10-15 degrees of the equator.
The way I see it, unless something like that happens, which essentially means bringing modern 21st century civilization down, nothing is going to change. It really is only a matter of time until ubiquitous and omniscient surveillance happens, probably sometime in the next 20-30 years.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
By and large, the public does not care. They certainly do not care enough to do anything about it.
If people really cared, it would take self sacrifice. People would have to refuse to go to work, for weeks, if not months. We would have to stop working long enough to really throw a wrench into the system. Not only that, we would have to some how convince others not to take our jobs while we are out there doing whatever it is we would do when we were proving to the government that we are not there to perpetuate their system.
Good luck with that.
1. Technical improvements and changes in human behavior that will render all forms of surveillance useless. Encryption, anonymity, decentralization. Abandon all forms of insecure communication such as e-mail, Skype and so on and completely rely on Freenet and Tor-like darknets. Use of open source software as well as hardware.
2. Armed revolt like it was in year 1917 in Russia/USSR with subsequent mass executions of former government workers. Complete change of ideology. Execution of every person who worked for government. Public hangings and firing squad for all NSA employees. The russian communist revolutionaries already set a bloody example by executing every person who was suspected to be a tzarist sympathizer.
Both scenarios are unlikely to happen. The 1984-like society is most likely scenario how humanity will develop in future. I'm glad I have experienced BBS era of freedom.
With cameras, phone tabs, smart phone monitoring, and computer monitoring.
Seriously. Let's turn it around. Make sure the watchers are watched, from the lowliest policemen to the president of the USA. I'd be in favor of monitoring all corporate transactions too, and banning cash or otherwise untraceable transactions for corporations.
In a democracy, citizens need privacy. As a society, we can't afford to have it for politicians or corporations.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Anarchy.
And the only way that will happen is if the pictures of people's junk that have been intercepted, get leaked. With names attached.
That sound you hear is the sound of me clapping.
I think it might be possible to end it if you say to the leaders in power now "sure, we trust you with these tools, but can you guarantee the people 30 years from now will be as trustworthy as you?" Because that's what it's kind of about. The people in charge now, I think, have a decent "gut feeling" for what crosses the line in terms of privacy. They have these tools to spy and they're looking for people who are looking to do a lot of damage. Maybe their good at it, maybe their bad, but their goal SEEMS kind of like it's in the best interest of people at least. But, the people 30 years from now? Who grew up with the internet and all this stuff? Will they have the same "innate" sense of what should be private and what shouldn't be?
except, update it to reflect the electronic age. keep the general ideas, though.
and enforce THAT and stop the feature-creep!
JHFC, how many times do we have to do the same experiment before people will believe that a government, based on a monopoly on violence, will always end in abuse of the People. By definition, at its very core, inevitably, every single time it's been tried.
We have nearly three hundred years of political, social, scientific, philosophical, psychological, and mathematical (e.g. game theoretical) advancement since the authors who influenced Madison put pen to paper.
To re-purpose the same old, demonstrably failed ideas would be the biggest waste of an opportunity ever conceived.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
God forbid they have the tools they need to do their jobs. I mean, seriously, look how abusive they are with it. Look at the hundreds of thousands of American Citizens who are monitored and sent to re-education camps for posting stuff on facebook. We're almost as bad as China. This is madness. Repent!! /sarcasm
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Well, when did all this surveillance of us escalate? It wasn't there during the Cold War, when we were spying on the Soviets. It started after 9/11, and escalated due to the PCMC repulsions on just spying on the enemy i.e. Muzzies. As a result, in airports, for example, you have 89-year old grandmas and 2 year old kids in strollers being checked, instead of restricting it to people who are Muslim, and match a particular profile.
Therefore, nothing short of a world where few practice Islam (as opposed to today's 1.8 billion) is going to solve this one. Since there are millions of Muslims here in the West - behind enemy lines - it will be a hybrid of a war and a civil war, where a combination of military and civil operations would have to end the practice of Islam worldwide, and stamp out its doctrines just like Nazism and Communism were stamped out (well, the latter is at least discredited, except for a lot of trolls on various blogs, including this one).
Once that happens, there will be no need to employ mass surveillance, and a combination of no-need, as well as surveillance fatigue by the people doing the surveying, will ensure an end to it. Just like the end of the Cold War brought about the 'Peace Dividend', the obliteration of Islam will bring about a 'No mass surveillance' dividend.
Be that as it may ... I submit a specific alternate to your postulate that a leader willing to put large forces under arms in harm's way is the only method to effect fundamental change. The alternate is a new Gandhi. The general principle worked well enough for Martin Luther King, Jr. This is not say we won't get our hair mussed a bit, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a 1775 style revolution with cannons mowing down rows of sons and would-be masters.
I never said or implied that change required armed forces. What I said was it required someone willing to stick to their principles without compromising them even if it meant people had to die. Gandhi was in fact one such leader who preached non-violence to such an extent he told his own supporters they needed to be willing to die non-violently rather than kill or fight back to convince the British that they would never be able to break their resolve. That is entirely analogous to what I mentioned above that it would take a leader willing to say they would rather see Americans (or other citizens) die at the hands of terrorists rather than destroy their civil rights trying to protect them. Gandhi was able to convince huge numbers of people that it was better to die in the pursuit of freedom than live under oppression. It would take that kind of leader, I think, to reverse the trend of using ever stronger government controls to fight terrorism and other crimes.
When the government says "because of Apple's iPhone encryption one day a child will die" the people have to say "I'd rather a child die than the American people be oppressed." A leader has to convince them to say it and believe it. Gandhi actually managed to do it, so its possible. But its not easy to find Gandhis.
The 1917 Russian revolution would be an example of things getting worse after a revolution.
The Russian revolution is often called the, "bloodless revolution". Things might have been fine if it were not for the usual fascist powers (U.S., Germany, etc.) invading immediately afterward, and sparking the very bloody civil war that resulted in Stalin coming to power, and a perversion of the ideals of the revolution.
The USA was the pinacle for all e-business, from e-mail to hosting to operating systems. With the snowden revelations and Wikileaks, people are now wising up to the inherent issues of digital hegemony. Now other countries host their own e-mails and websites, new methods of payment are cultivated (like Bitcoin), and non-US variants of operating systems are also getting developed. Once the US is no longer the only game in town and people have other options, then it will no longer matter how draconian the US wants to get. Sure, the US is powerful, but I see other places getting savvy about tech so that en masse, or as a collective, they can slow down the imperial hegemony and her 'five eyes'. I used to do all my e-business with the US, as they were the only game in town. Now, I can (and do) go elsewhere! So if America continues to behave this way, people will simply look for or create alternatives. The schoolyard bully can only dominate for so long. The age of empire is over.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
All it takes is surveillance of the Mighty. Congress, President, every police department and enforcement agency, and don't forget the IRS.
Their laundry is a lot dirtier than ours.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Ugh, I see why that would annoy you.
It reminds me of the (now bankrupt) Radio Shack stores that insisted I give them my phone number whenever I purchased anything from them, even if I paid cash. I figured it was none of their damned business what my home phone number was, so I simple refused to give it to them. The poor clerk stammered and told me that their computer required it to ring up the purchase, so I told them to enter 123-456-7890 or something stupid like that. Modern grocery stores are also annoying with their stupid "club cards" or whatever they want to call them that track all your purchases.
I sort of wonder if we're the last generation that's going to really care whether we're tracked and monitored by everyone and everything? Maybe the kids that grow up in this world will wonder why we kicked up such a fuss about it...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
The answer is getting people to care.
Hmm ...
Have you ever tried to get apathetic people to care?
It will take the blood of patriots, and a well watered tree of freedom, before this goes away, if ever. No law will deter the unlawful, and our spies ignore laws with impunity, no mirror will every shed light on the truly powerful individuals perverting the system to their favor. And, honestly, unless people's televisions and Internet get shut off, and food becomes scarce enough for hunger to be a concern of the common man, people will just go along with universal surveillance.
The fastest way to shut this stuff down would be a dump of the phone call logs for:
* All members of the House and Senate
* The President, Vice President, and all Cabinet Secretaries
* The Supreme Court Justices
It would take the media about one day to map phone numbers to names of lobbyists, and a little longer to show the patterns of calls followed by votes and other actions.
A few days after that, these programs would be defunded.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Do you even know what are you talking about? the amount of wrongness you managed to cramp in a single phrase now needs an entire dissertation just to be refuted. Please, come back only after reading at least a couple of history books.
Obligatory reading: On revolution, by Hannah Arendt
A *very* nice, provocative and insightful essay comparing the US revolution against the French and Russian revolutions. Highly recommended.
When we get most of the computer community to agree to not co-operate with mass survailence.
When we stand out and identify what indivudals and groups do, and do our damnest to avoid them(boycot).
When we create an alternative society to Marketing-based culture, where people can't be told what to do by some snazzy PR firm with money to spam your facebook feed.
When they are so scared about implementing anything in mass because they know at least one nerd in the shop will have the good concise to expose the plot.
Its when we the people say we will not let greed get the way of our ethics, and we stop believing that we have right to dissent instead of just being another monkey at a terminal, today's cog in the machine.
Take a look to your left and right, we are the solution.
Easy--All it takes is politicians having skin in the game.
When we find out that politicians have misused mass surveilance to political ends, then they will become forever accountable for never repeating that mistake, a la Watergate.
You don't want that. You only pretend you want it because you know your real goals are morally and logically indefensible.
You will never stop admitting this.
Butlerian jihad.
We need an "Information Age Bill of Rights".....
Many have called for it. But it would need to be on a Constitutional level. That makes it very difficult to do.
What will it take to tear down Big Brother?
TEN PERCENT OR 33-million Americans adopting the mindset that the U.S. Congress is the fundamental problem for most issues besieging citizens and other individuals. This mass of people focused on lawfully forcing Congress to stop accepting 'contributions' from corporations and wealthy. We, the people need a myriad of changes, and the first one is ending politicians from becoming bought 'n' sold pawns to do the bidding for the filthy rich — only an Article V Amendments Convention will accomplish that goal. This 'convention' is constitutionally mandated to PROPOSE amendments, then following a thorough public discussion only amendments worthy of passage will be presented to the States for RATIFICATION. The best-of-the-best become law.
BIG BROTHER will never relinquish any POWER acquired without being lawfully forced to obey the will of the owners of America — We, the People! Money and Power is what they LOVE; however they FEAR informed citizens willing to challenge never-ending wars, private banksters and Wall Street gamblers/tycoons that rob the public treasury, political parties that choose who we will vote for in virtually every election, excessive taxation for everything under the sun, unrelenting control over our children's education, laws that allow and promote corporate welfare, and so many other things that make citizens debt slaves.
Imagine PUBLIC BANKS that loan money to create/enhance small businesses for realistic profits that are returned to the public banks instead of greed-driven shareholders. Same with STUDENT LOANS for our children. And your MORTGAGE for homeownership without the FEAR of having Wall Street and Private Banksters stealing your biggest investment! Realistic profits like those charged by the Bank of North Dakota — a PUBLIC BANK working for the citizens of North Dakota!
It is your duty/responsibility to educate yourself and your children, and legally force Congress to yield to calling a convention for citizens to modify the law of the land so it works equally for every individual, not just the corporations and wealthy. Time to wake-up, then wake others up too.
— Anonymous Coward AKA OneSovereignCitizen
As far as the US is concerned, the biggest problem is the antiquated two party system. One side proposes something and the other side says No just because. This leads to total deadlock in the legislative and oversight process allowing the dozens of three letter agencies to take on a life of their own while constructing supposed security challenges that require continuation of expensive surveillance programs (such as scanning all email and reading all posts on slashdot) that so far have yielded zero results. And all that is done in secrecy with a rubberstamping FISC that is not made up of elected judges and is not open to any kind of public control, either directly or indirectly. Any attempts to change that get shouted down by the other side as "unamerican", "bad for US businesses", or "taxes kill jobs". What the US needs is at least three or four more political parties that bring a different position into play. Yes, within the two parties there are different wings from left to right, but in the end they are all bound to the party line pressure. Having more parties will force coalition governments where more checks and balances come into play and not just one opinions prevails. I know there are independents, the Green Party, the Communist Party, some radical Nazi parties, Working Families Party, and probably a bunch more that I never heard about. Anyone who dislikes the status quo of "either you are with us or against us" should seek out existing alternatives. It is up to the voters to bring the same variety of choice that we enjoy (or loathe) in the cereal aisle to the political stage. Don't like mass surveillance? Vote for those who advocate repealing the Patriot Acts, shutting down the NSA, cut funding for FBI/CIA so that they are forced to weed out programs that generate no results, and above all bring any form of surveillance under the control of public courts with elected judges...and that all the way up to the Supreme Court with strict term limits. Yea, sure, we can employ encryption and all kinds of techie tricks, but what good does that do if it is a sure ticket to jail or CIA interrogation camps in who knows where with a blind eye on torture.
That's BS. Any system, if left to run long enough, will abuse its citizens. Governments are a lot better than anarchy though, and I don't know how you expect a government to work without a monopoly on violence.