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Edward Snowden Promotes Global Treaty To Curtail Surveillance
An anonymous reader writes: In a video appearance, Edward Snowden said domestic digital spying on ordinary citizens is an international threat that will only be slowed with measures like a proposed international treaty declaring privacy a basic human right. "This is not a problem exclusive to the United States.... This is a global problem that affects all of us. What's happening here happens in France, it happens in the U.K., it happens in every country, every place, to every person," he said.
Even if a global treaty is struck to declare privacy a basic human right -- who is going to provide the oversight, who will punish those that breach the treaty and how will such punishment be administered?
Reality check: There's just no way this is going to work.
Aren't there global treaties that outlaw torture?
What happens at Gitmo, who is punished for the violations and how is that punishment metered out?
This, I am afraid, is nothing more than an exercise in futility. We have already lost our right to privacy and the only way it will return is probably by way of an armed uprising.
If our grandfathers and great-grandfathers could see just how many of the rights and freedoms they fought to protect have now been lost in the name of "safety" and "security", they'd turn in their graves.
The problem is not that US or EU don't want to respect human rights, but that now the technology for total surveillance exists, and it can't be made to disappear any more. Even if US and EU stopped surveilling, other actors would still do it.
Some, like FB, would do it for practical and economical reasons, just because there are server logs and they need to optimize advertising and user engagement. Other, like various totalitarian regimes, would still do it because they see it as a counterbalance for the increased social activism powered by the increase in connectivity that has permeated all societies. People got new powers in the last two decades, and the state got new powers too. They are afraid of these more connected and organized masses.
Even if countries didn't do it, corporations and various shady groups would still do it. All it takes is to put a monitor on the pipe or a video camera on the highway to record everything that passes through there. And when one party does it, all parties need to do it to keep up and not come at a disadvantage in security.
What we need to do is it to regulate how this information is being used to restrain our rights. We need to learn to be more tolerant - we all have our secrets and they shouldn't be weaponized against us, at least not in the public moral court. So we need to adjust our social standards to allow for more diversity, because now we all live in a panopticon and there's no turning back to the privacy and anonymity times of our parents.
Maybe something good will also come out of this. With more data and analysis power, we could guide our policies and avoid some excesses that usually went unnoticed in the dark ages of information. And now we need to accept the reality of our panopticon society and build a better way of living in it.
For example, declare tracking an individual or an individual's property by any automated system, whether government or privately owned, generally illegal. Likewise, storing such records should be generally illegal. Make a few exceptions such as when there is a warrant, or if the individual requests it (where such request must be at the very least "check this checkbox to confirm you want to be tracked, data will be stored for n days", not "click here to agree to wall of text").
Otherwise: all cameras will use image recognition to log where you've been, all cars will be tracked via license plate readers and onboard GPS, all cell phone owners will be tracked and their location logged for years, all purchases (cash or credit card) will be tracked and logged. And all this data will be sold, and God help you if the government doesn't like you.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It's not treason when it is exposing people who defy the constitution instead acting against the nation itself. It looks a lot more like patriotism.
However, if you define treason as beating a Russian at chess and patriotism as selling weapons to a terrorist group that had killed over one hundred US Marines less than one year earlier (the "patriot" North selling to Hezbolla), then all bets are and treason means defying "The Party" instead of the nation. That line leads to the direct opposite of what George Washington and others had in mind IMHO. I'm pretty sure Franklin and Jefferson would be cheering for Snowden if not the entire lot of them.
Sure, the US is a military superpower these days, however the five eyes have been sharing intelligence since they won WW2. The code cracking techniques developed by Turing and others were a very closely held secret. It wasn't until the late 60's that the rest of the world woke up to the fact their encryption methods were transparent to the five eyes. The event that did more to bring this military and commercial spying to light than anything else was the invention of modern encryption methods. But make no mistake, this arrangement is nothing new, it was born in the UK during the darkest days of WW2 when Churchill awarded Turing his code cracking buddies an "unlimited budget".
None of those men and women could possibly foresee what it would become after the war, what they saw were immediate results such as the rapid destruction of the Nazi U-boat fleet, the successful Naval ambush at Midway island, and a thousands of smaller missions that co-opted the enemy's command and control systems to the allies advantage. The U-boat campaign is when Churchill shared his secret weapon with Eisenhower, who immediately set up a similar operation in the US that was more focused on the war with Japan. People who worked in the centers during the war were told they would face a firing squad if they discussed their work with their friends or family.
This is the real reason "terrorist" websites are not expunged as soon as they appear is that co-opting those communications systems, mapping the enemy's org chart, predicting their next move, etc, is much more productive than disrupting or destroying the comms systems and wondering who they are and what they are up to.
So to get back on topic, it's obvious a treaty won't work because only those who cheat can win, and if the cheat is the world's only superpower, who do we think is going to punish them, God? anyone who can remember 9/11 can also remember GWB spitting the dummy at the UN and announcing to the entire world the US can not be restained by anyone. It's also obvious that the currently agreed upon human rights are not fully respected by any nation, and are totally irrelevant to (say) Saudi Arabia.
Human nature is unlikely to change in my lifetime, it is still trying to evolve onto something that fits our invention of civilization. That is both fortunate and unfortunate at the same time. Ten thousand years is not enough time to declare civilization an evolutionary success story. The fact that SETI and similar efforts have not found any alien comms after listening for 4-5 decades is not a very encouraging sign. It may turn out that human civilization makes the planet uninhabitable for humans, much like the oxygen produced by primitive cyanobacteria eventually made much of the planet uninhabitable for cyanobacteria (but much more efficient in terms of time)
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.