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Snowden: 'The Central Problem of the Future' Is Control of User Data (techcrunch.com)
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey interviewed Edward Snowden via Periscope about the wide world of technology. The NSA whistleblower "discussed the data that many online companies continue to collect about their users, creating a 'quantified world' -- and more opportunities for government surveillance," reports TechCrunch. Snowden said, "If you are being tracked, this is something you should agree to, this is something you should understand, this is something you should be aware of and can change at any time." TechCrunch reports: Snowden acknowledged that there's a distinction between collecting the content of your communication (i.e., what you said during a phone call) and the metadata (information like who you called and how long it lasted). For some, surveillance that just collects metadata might seem less alarming, but in Snowden's view, "That metadata is in many cases much more dangerous and much more intrusive, because it can be understood at scale." He added that we currently face unprecedented perils because of all the data that's now available -- in the past, there was no way for the government to get a list of all the magazines you'd read, or every book you'd checked out from the library. "[In the past,] your beliefs, your future, your hopes, your dreams belonged to you," Snowden said. "Increasingly, these things belong to companies, and these companies can share them however they want, without a lot of oversight." He wasn't arguing that companies shouldn't collect user data at all, but rather that "the people who need to be in control of that are the users." "This is the central problem of the future, is how do we return control of our identities to the people themselves?" Snowden said.
Technology has often caused people's minds to change and develop. For example, the popular novel, and the stories, may have been the big thing which increased people's empathy for others in that period in history. Knowledge (awareness) is often transformative (for the mind).
So is this new world all about "companies controlling the info", or is it that there's so many organisations collecting information that, come 2050, everyone will wake up in the morning knowing what every politician had for breakfast that day and who they are meeting? Will we browse the supermarket aisles and, instead of seeing simple labels like "organic", we'll actually see the whole production chain history of that product?
And what will that kind of awareness do to the development of the human mind? We may look back at today's age and wonder in amazement at how simple-minded all our news and views about the world were. It may mean the end of ideologies and most religions. We're only just beginning.
I was going to say the same thing. Personal freedoms and privacy protection are important, but it is all meaningless if we destroy this world that is hosting us.
Feed the NSA and GCHQ just what they expect to see.
All the West has is data collection. Junk encryption supported by the big US and UK brands was the way in so offer keywords to the collectors.
So the NSA and GCHQ gets everything thanks to the support of US and UK brands.
Give the security services everything they could every want with digital collection.
Lots of online meetings, conversations, chats, forums, faith, cults, politics in every daily internet log kept by the ISP.
Make it interesting, get the contractor or gov worker addicted to the next days amazing fictional instalment. Add some story arcs over the years.
If your a journalist create a few dozen amazing whistelblowers and informants deep in gov or retired. People who have found a conscience after decades in gov and now just want to talk. Create a hint of their decades of documents and add future meetings to the cloud OS. Create a code that they can use.
Don't get fancy, just that material has been sorted and further clarification is needed.
Walk around with your cell phone in city areas, cafes full of "contacts" i.e. government workers and contractors.
Stop for 5 or 10 minutes during for a file hand over. It will show up nice on a map of cell phone movements.
A journalist cell phone stopping for a "meeting" can result in the questioning of 10's of security clearances in minutes. Ensure the contractors have to consider every phone thats next to a journalist everyday for weeks, months, years. Thats 100's of government workers and contractors who had trackable contact with a journalist known to have cultivated a lot of informants. Turn digital tracking into a script and a total work of fiction.
Make sure 100's of fictional files exist packed with keywords any gov would find interesting. Ensure all networked computers running everyone fav US consumer junk OS's.
Slowly a gov worker or contractor will slowly understand that its all fictional junk.
That is the real the problem with tracking your own citizens digitally. The ability for creativity outpaces digital collection that can only focus on keywords and can only afford to task so many contractors to read vast amounts of fictional material and make a determination.
Long term the security services will then have consider the option to task teams of 9 people in shifts per interesting person. Thats East German numbers of gov workers and informants to track one person who can use a consumer OS...
If the US and UK govs want the "normalisation” of government surveillance give them something to read.
Support the junk US bands, their developers, big brand cryptographers who only have the skills to help govs and fill your devices with fictional fun.
If your onto a real story, use your brain and paper notes, avoid CCTV, give your tracked phone to a friend for the day.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Many of these problems can't be solved where people are afraid to speak up and offer solutions that may differ from the norm.
The issue I see with meta data collection is it makes us fearful to look at these "dangerous" ideas. While most of these ideas may be stupid there are often a few points in them that often shows a point on where some people are struggling. But if we to research them we can get blacklisted and our Findings will not be listened to because we are flagged as a dangerous person.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I would say that the risk is not about Islam, Christianity or any other form of religion, but the radicalisation of any religion as a call to arms of the disenchanted for someone else's political agenda. Torture, execution, biological warfare and ethnic cleansing have been performed in the name of most religions in the world.
Politically in the current climate, it's easier to dissect the population based on skin colour or religion rather than behaviour.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I gather originally, group-think and group-identity around a common myth, is what allowed disparate tribes to unite. Islam is just version 3 after Christianity (v2) and Judaism (v1) and Zoroaster (v0). But because group identity is exactly what you want when fighting a war, it is always inherently weaponisable. Which is perhaps why modern people find religion and ideology inherently scary. Because they are.
The saving grace is that most people, whatever their inherited cultural differences, tend to just want to get on with their lives. And the general movement is towards greater empathy, because humanity does grow, and stats that, there are currently fewer wars overall than in previous times, are to be taken seriously. But that's no consolation to anyone currently unlucky enough to be in the middle of one.
Religions are scary. That's why everyone has to insist that they are all of peace. Because we really need everyone to not feel threatened. Because you don't want to help anyone activate the red button to weaponise them any further.
The Middle East is unfortunately still "developing" and doesn't really have a lot of stable nation states. They have a very difficult transition. And they are actively weaponising religion. But that doesn't mean that the the millions of people who are part of those groups culturally, are intent on any of that crap themselves.
The above mentioned law, voted in France in... 1978 (!) offers a good start: government entities are allowed to collect user/citizen data and make databases out of it. But they are expressly NOT allowed to share it with others (even other branches of the govt). This should be expanded to the private sector. And it also should actually be _applied_ because in later years in France they've been stepping all over this law.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Remind us what country you're living in right now Eddie? Perhaps ask your mate Putin about government data control, misinformation and spying.
Once a gov and mil starts spying on their own people legally the dynamic changes.
A gov has to find people with the tested intellectual disposition who really enjoy spying domestically with no court oversight.
To hand them the keys to junk cryptography and then collect it all.
Most governments who try that then face data walking out as staff contact the press or have to have massive internal oversight to try and prevent staff misuse of access. Staff cults, faiths, politics then surface deep within trusted areas.
Good staff who know they are not trusted don't preform that well and walk out. The ranks become filled with staff who hide their true interests to advance.
Foreign governments move in with offers of friendship, support, cash, understanding in a frenzy of recruitment. Digital tracking is sold as perfection but the more skilled humans spies always get in.
Even the contractor buddy system starts to break down as the teams influence each other and total corruption sets in.
The classic East German issue has not been solved. How to have informants and undercover officers working on groups of 5-10 protesters, spying and reporting on each other, creating vast amounts of files on other deep cover informants. Given the US love of agencies reporting only to to mil, police and different sections of the US gov domestic collection becomes vast with a lot of duplication. Great for contractors and overtime but not much use for what govs crave.
The more domestic data thats created, the more informants that are needed and have to keep their cover and so create more data to collect.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I agree with Snowden, think he made a great attempt on warning everyone, which unfortunately wasn't effective enough... there, I said it.
Here's the thing: data collection and the erosion of privacy is only the beginning. Government and big corporations are still not leveraging their power much, but they are building it, and in time they'll use it. I imagine it now as something like pollution right around the industrial revolution. The general population will be mostly dismissive of it's consequences, mostly because they cannot understand how much it'll affect them in the future, and how many economies are currently being built around it.
The majority will say that it's a worthy tradeoff for all sorts of reasons, usually rooted in fear or convenience. Fear of terrorism, fear of criminals, fear of the future, because it makes my life easier, because I get services I could not get otherwise, because I can call for Uber with my voice alone, etc.
"I have nothing to hide" or "my life is boring" arguments must be something pretty close to people in the past thinking "but I live in farmland" or "the air is clean enough in my garden/city". It's because dangers like those requires a certain level of abstraction and/or statesmanship that most don't have or can't be bothered with.
People can easily let go of fundamental democratic rights as long as they don't perceive it as a threat. Problem is, much as we're only seeing large scale disasters and climate change overall only now (and some are still in denial of the challenges we'll be facing from now on), the consequences of privacy erosion and large scale data collection will only be felt, fully leveraged and weaponized, in a few decades. By then, it'll already be too late to do something... we'll at most be able to mitigate consequences if we survive the onslaught.
Democracy relies on a delicate balance of power between governments and the people. What data collection essencially does is handle too much power in the hands of a few. Eventually, the imbalance of power corrupts. We might get lucky for a while with politicians/businesses who either don't want to make use of that power, or politicians who don't know how to, but with it just sitting there waiting for someone to seize the opportunity, it'll eventually happen.
It doesn't have to be anything like over the top dystopic fiction too, at least not for quite a while. Much like Hitler didn't get to form the 3rd reich overnight, lots of predominant muslin countries were much less radicalized in the past, and North Korea didn't just expontaneously form out of nowhere, changes are gradual.
You really don't need to be a genius to understand the problem though. The devices you use in a daily basis are a huge part of you now.
For mass surveilance, the main problem is going through all that data and picking what's relevant to use. This problem will get solved with AI eventually.
And then, whatever agency decides to use this will be able to pull your dossier and decide from a miriad of choices how to control you.
They'll know where you are, what you are doing, who are your friends, who you have been in contact with, what are your interests, what devices you use to further extract more information, what is your position in relation to politicians and laws, what or who can be used to change your mindset, what your weak points are, what blind spots you have, etc etc.
And all that is only considering that the data remains on a government or private company's hand without leakage. They still have an interest to keep the country in general intact, since they depend on it to thrive. All that data falling into the hands of hackers and criminals living in other countries, then the scenario gets a whole lot grimmer.
Pandemics Civil and international war The ongoing islamisation of the population Pollution and the depletion of natural resources, including fossil fuels Science denial Donald Trump The collapse of the European Union America's sovereign debt
All of these things concern me more than control of my personal data. Yes, control of my personal data concerns me - particularly my genome and corporations' attempts to patent something that is inherintly part of me and which they didn't invent. But the above issues are bigger problems.
Well, keep in mind that the original interview was about technology topics, and giving this is Snowden we're talking about here, we're inevitably going to be talking privacy. When he said it's the central issue of the future, he probably meant within that context - as opposed to, for example, the government spying on its citizens. In his mind, there's generally some outrage and opposition to governments trying to enact spying laws - not enough, as the UK's Investigtory Powers bill demonstrates, but generally something. In contrast, most people think nothing of Google or Twitter's collection of knowledge on them, nor has anyone really made much noise about this in politics. Snowden has the ability to put a face on privacy decisions for the news, and in turn to normal people, and so I'm betting that'll be his next target.
The ongoing islamisation of the population
This isn't related to the above paragraph, but please don't say this, it hurts. Fundamentalists groups, such as evangelical, baptist, and mormons, are about as conservative as their islamic counterparts, such as ISIS or Assad's backers. If want an ISIS comparison, look at the KKK - and if you want a public execution match, well, lynching has been around for many hundreds of years before al-quaeda was even a figment in somebody's mind. Furthermore, on social issues, islam Americans are much more relaxed than their Christian counterparts are. Islamists are more likely to accept gay people, far less tolerant of violence, much more accepting of other cultures, and hilariously enough, waaaaaay more likely to see themselves as Americans first and Muslims second (there's a 10 point gap between these two). Note that Christians as a whole are more open then either of these two, but for all the people
Furthermore, there's a lot of free passes we give to hardcore evangelicals that we don't give to muslims - we let people oppose laws because of the bible, which is illegal under the First Amendment by the way, but if a guy says he opposes a law because of the Quran he's labelled a terrorist and gets death threats. If a muslim were to disprove of gay marriage, it's seen as backwards and unacceptable, but if evangelical Christians do, it's seen as acceptable, for no reason other then that they got here first. America isn't accepting of immigrants and never has been, despite the long tirade to the contrary, and if we ever want to live up to the founding father's ideals, then we're going to have to leave these backwards parts of our history behind - and that, my friend, starts with not being xenophobic of immigrants for no reason other then that they're different from you. Of course, Muslims as whole still have a long way to go - but the key point is that they're doing their best, and they're not trying to enshrine their views into law. In contrast, this minority of Christians has become increasingly militant, increasingly violent, and increasingly authoritarian - and given that the darkest eras in our country's history has come from when these wackos had influence, we should be far more scared of the likes of Mike Pence then we should be from the guy down the street who fled from being cooked alive on the street by bombs or from being executed for refusing to kill somebody else.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Should those who disagree with you be in power and have access to you and the ability to effectively collaboratively control the outcome of your life by denying you access to employment, denying you access to fiscal services and to be able to digitally distort the public perception of you. All those other things cease to be a problem for you because you simply would not be able to survive long enough for them to be a concern.
Want more privacy, fight for it by demanding that governments legislate more privacy controls, including audits of company data and custodial sentences for invading the privacy of others and holding excessive and unnecessary data.
Fair unfair, who gives a fuck, sounds like a good idea to me. Enforced privacy controls and requirements for data audits and the requirements the companies regularly provide full details to individuals of the data kept and the require that the delete all legally unnecessary data upon request. Never to forget serious criminal penalties for those executives who think your privacy is something they can steal and trade on the open market, with only one goal in mind, the commercial manipulation of your choices. Yeah, so, fuck em. Besides ijiot we can tackle more than one problem at a time.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I know people think government surveillance is new, but it isn't. In the 1800s the government routed all their telegraph lines through their offices so they could monitor them. Based on that monitoring, they arrested many journalists that they said were against the state. And *gasp* they didn't have a court order, or any oversight. Anything you send over a network is monitored. Anything. Networks are not secure. Never will be either, simply because the purpose of a network is to share information between endpoints. And with access anyone can be an endpoint on the network.
His past actions and success at a very high risk task give me confidence that privacy is an important issue for him, even more than personal liberty, from there I conclude he has given a lot of thought to these issues, so what he says is related to topic of user privacy is likely to be well thought through and not first random thought that popped in his mind. If he starts talking about random topics I might up vote your comment.
This "dork with a thumbdrive" has actually worked on surveillance programmes and on projects to collect and make sense of our data. That should give his opinions some weight. In addition, in previous interviews he has shown good insight in matters of privacy. This is not some dimwit celebrity telling us how to vote or save the planet; but a knowledgable insider actually worth listening to.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Why are we continually subjected to "Snowden Says"? It's not like he was some eminent security mind or data theorist. He's just some dork with a thumbdrive.
You come across as an authoritarian, believing who says something to be important, and not what is being said.
His statements seem to hold up to logic, and appear to be well thought out and valid. That's the value.
His fame only serves to get his thoughts spread; it doesn't lend any credence or to his words, nor do they invalidate them.
If Snowden (or Trump, for that matter) says something valuable, I'll check it out. If he utters twaddle, I'll discard it just as much as I'd discard balderdash from any other person.
I was going to say the same thing. Personal freedoms and privacy protection are important, but it is all meaningless if we destroy this world that is hosting us.
Not everyone would agree with that. Some would prefer to die free to live a slave.
Aaaaaaargh I'm an idiot, I should have checked the preview more carefully. Here's the ending of my second paragraph, and my sincere apologies for not having caught that.
"...but for all the people who are afraid that of muslims, if you really are against what you perceive as a culture of barbaric cultural practices, I sure hope you're leading a progressive movement within one of these churches, assuming you're a member. The alternative is that you are, at best, a misinformed hypocrite, which I'm afraid the vast majority seem to be."
Furthermore, I screwed up the first link. Rather than linking to this webpage itself (duh), it's supposed to go here.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
People like to say that right up until they're actually faced with the choice.
Also, it depends on your definition of "slavery". If you mean, "be put in chains and whipped and forced to pick cotton", then the number of people who would rather die is not zero. If your definition of slavery is, "I have to pay taxes, the government knows my Social Security number and I have to sell cakes to anyone who comes into my store, even the gays" then anyone who tells you they'd rather die is bullshitting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Equal?
Do you mean 'equivalent'?
Even then, they are not.
Islam has various sects with beliefs along a spectrum of 'peace be upon you' to 'surrender or die'. And these sects vary on the topic of secular rule, from an opinion of no opinion to an opinion of absolute religious rule in all of life, for everyone. The most radical Islamic beliefs are either nonviolent and benevolent, or committed to rule by the sword and global domination in the name of their god. We tend to consider the most violent sects as 'radical', failing to also recognize the other extreme. 'Militant' doesn't even describe the violent extremists adequately. But we recognize them.
Buddhism is commonly thought of as a religion, but I'm not sure it isn't better described as a philosophy. And widely misunderstood. But it is not reliant on belief in a deity. Not very religious. Not totally nonviolent, but if you've angered an observant Buddhist, you've done something I think of as wrong.
Hinduism, being a collection of beliefs with commonalities, does rely on deities, but even within that collective there is some discord. Not a monolith, but common enough to be named. Sadly, they sometimes fight among each other.
Christianity is described as a collective group of beliefs encompassing Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxies, Mormon, and a variety of others. Some of those I named I do not grant as actually 'Christian', but they self-identify as such, and I won't exclude them for the purposes of this discussion. Violent Christianity is, to me, almost an oxymoron, but I'm prejudiced. I cannot easily identify a Christian nation today, which is not a problem I seek to address.
Judaism also is composed of various sects, ranging from very relaxed observance to strict, widely considered archaic, practices. And it is not now practiced as historically required by the most ancient beliefs. It is also probably the most persecuted, subjectively yes.
Equal? Hardly. Equivalent? More accurate but still not 100%. To indict religion as a destructive force is, in my mind, a shallow and incomplete understanding of the dynamic. If you include Communism as a religion, you then encompass the best and worst of humanity. You need not hang the motivation for evil on philosophy.
Or, as my good friend reminds me, the best of humans are, at best, human.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm sorry, but this is bullcrap. The greatest number of deaths through war have come from non-religious origins. Taking religion out of man has lead to the deaths of ten of millions if not hundreds of millions of people. Religion couldn't touch that scale if they wanted to. 31 Million people have died because of religion in recorded history. Stalin killed 50 Million people in his life.
You say Religions are scary. I say anti-Religion is even scarier.
Also, it depends on your definition of "slavery". If you mean, "be put in chains and whipped and forced to pick cotton", then the number of people who would rather die is not zero. If your definition of slavery is, "I have to pay taxes, the government knows my Social Security number and I have to sell cakes to anyone who comes into my store, even the gays" then anyone who tells you they'd rather die is bullshitting.
You don't have to be whipped to be a slave. Most slaves weren't, but they were still slaves.
It's about having all freedom, privacy and choices about your own life taken away. Totalitarianism is also a form of slavery.