On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 1:03 PM, John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:40:22PM -0700, Sean Lynch wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 10:01 AM, <xorcist@sigaint.org> wrote:
>
> > I'd like to bounce an idea around. At the outset, I'm going to say that I
> > don't really like the idea. Like getting a root canal, I'd rather not have
> > a some guy drilling around in my jaw, but what can you do?
> >
> > Some years back, maybe 8 years ago now, prior to the Snowden revelations,
> > a Kiwi buddy and I were discussing the arising surveillance state.
> >
> > I ventured the idea that the only way to combat it, is for citizens to put
> > web cams in their windows, in their cars, have body cams.. whatever.. and
> > have a distributed system where we can live stream that stuff up. Open
> > source surveillance, if you will.
> >
> > The idea scared the hell out of him, and rightly so. My take on
> > surveillance tech is that it is like nukes. The only viable strategy is
> > deterrence. The genie is out of the bottle, the tech isn't going anywhere,
> > and so if we're going to preserve freedom, the technology needs to be
> > under our control.
> >
> > Open source surveillance is a monster, but its a monster that would bite
> > police and agents of the state as easily as us. Rather than the
> > government/media being able to selectively pick-and-choose which camera
> > angles, and which clips to release, we'd have to ability to check, and
> > disprove.
> >
> > I don't like what it means, in terms of enabling stalkers, but perhaps
> > that is mitigated by the ability to catch those fucks on camera?
> >
> > I'd love to hear reactions and thoughts on this. It's not something you're
> > going to catch me truly arguing for, its really more of a devil's advocate
> > type thing.. like I say, I just see it mostly as a fucked strategy for
> > dealing with a fucked situation.
> >
> >
> >
> This seems like exactly David Brin's proposal in The Transparent Society.
>
> http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html


I think the one thing that can be said in favor of this proposal
(sort of) is the huge number of extra judicial killings by
corrupt/cowardly/disgusting US cops that have been caught on phone
cameras in the past few years, killings that would no doubt have
otherwise been covered up.

My main objection is that Brin is basically throwing up his hands with respect to any kind of pushback against surveillance, saying it's inevitable. I'm not just assuming this from what he's written there, either; he's commented on my Facebook threads about surveillance by actually saying we should ignore that stuff and focus on his sousveillance instead. Though he seems to do a lot of self-promotion on Facebook generally, so perhaps he's just overdoing it.

But it's not actually true that surveillance is a "done deal" or that we have no control over the form it takes. We don't have to allow the State to contract out to private companies for red light cameras and ALPRs and then let them sell the data to whomever they want. We can force the implementation of retention & sharing policies. What you don't have can't be exfiltrated or abused. We may not be able to prevent its being collected in the first place, but we can sure as hell stop the construction of the databases, at least where we know about them. And we'll never know about them if we don't keep paying attention.

The problem is that Brin seems to view this as a fight against the technology. But it's really a fight against blindly deploying technology with no thought as to how it's used. We may not be able to stop surveillance, but there are lots of different ways to bring it into the light and regulate it where it's deployed by government, and citizen sousveillance is only a small part of that.
 

The Quantum Thief (recommended recently by Mirmir) has a really
interesting take on privacy in the moving martian city Oubliette -
the gevulot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gevulot_(Jean_Le_Flambeur_universe)


John