On 06/26/2015 09:53 PM, Steve Kinney wrote:
On 06/25/2015 12:22 PM, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
2015-06-25 21:44 GMT+09:00 z9wahqvh <z9wahqvh@gmail.com <mailto:z9wahqvh@gmail.com>>:
this is absolutely tremendous, original, and insightful. in my opinion.
This is exceedingly strange coming from an In-Q-Tel security officer. In-Q-Tel basically invests in anything performing more collections in the US.
That was my first reaction as well: But on close inspection he seems take the exponential growth of universal surveillance as a given, while the ability to correlate the collected information into actionable intelligence can and should be restricted to large organizations: "Most privacy laws exist to block government actions. A few exist to block private institutional actions. But none exist to block individuals' actions."
I interpret this as a response to the accelerating progress of open source collection and analysis into contexts formerly monopolized by State and Corporate actors. A war of sorts is already underway on this front; else why is Barrett Brown doing time for the crime of investigative journalism? Nobody stands to lose more in a truly open society than our professional secret keepers and sanctioned violators of the secrets of others. Like the good folks who pay the bills at In-Q-Tel.
Good catch! So he's calling for laws to restrict surveillance and correlation by private institutions and individuals. Now his position makes sense :(
Recent events including the exposure of Federal employee records and the integration of ICWatch data into Wikileaks' searchable archives may be weighing heavily on the minds of State and Corporate strategists. What good is owning a Panopticon if the prisoners have data terminals where they can watch the guards and their employers as they go about their daily lives?
Secrecy as we know it may be on the way out: With the advent of networked everything, the secrecy tax Julian Assange wrote about years ago keeps growing and may reach a tipping point where State and Corporate secrecy no longer pays.
Propaganda as we know it may be on the way out: With the advent of networked everybody, identity groups and market segments created and manipulated by broadcast propaganda are running on inertia. The 'ego casting' and 'echo chamber' effects that segregate the Internet today are at best leaky containers whose walls are getting thinner all the time.
I wouldn't mind a world where privacy is a thing of the past, as long as the playing field is reasonably level. Control of access to information is the key to controlling whole societies; both secrecy and propaganda are essential to the operation of any repressive regime. Could authoritarian State and Corporate institutions exist in a world without privacy, where bad faith actors have no hiding places? A world where control of news, information, education and entertainment is diffused across tens of millions of actors?