[ cross-posting will fail unless someone else wants to do it ] The leading snippet of the forwarded piece,
What surveillance really is, at its root, is a highly effective form of social control. The knowledge of always being watched changes our behavior and stifles dissent. The inability to associate secretly means there is no longer any possibility for free association....
is called "anticipatory compliance," a term due to Shoshana Zuboff who said "[W]e anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness. ... Once anticipatory conformity becomes second nature, it becomes progressively easier for people to adapt to new impositions on their privacy, their freedoms. The habit has been set," and that quotation is from a couple of decades ago. More recent and more relevant to this topic is this: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-paradigm-be-the-frict... which is too long to quote and too good to abridge. Speaking for myself, I touched on this in my column for IEEE S&P of last January, Identity as Privacy http://geer.tinho.net/ieee/ieee.sp.geer.1301b.pdf In the meantime, and with allowances for approximation, as of 2013, it is possible to: recognize your face at 500 meters recognize your iris at 50 meters recognize your heartbeat at 5 meters recognize your gait by your smartphone via its accelerometer read your keystrokes on your smartphone via its accelerometer identify your car from its Bluetooth tire pressure sensors geo-locate you indoors via Wifi interaction with other devices know what you are doing via your Smartgrid elec meter identify you even if you never post photos; someone else has read 1" block letters from orbit etc. Disconnecting as a purposive decision is no longer a mere reaction to the demise of some "expectation of privacy" but rather the realization that the Internet is more and more a tool of control, not emancipation. As the source of risk is dependence, risk reduction goes straight to dependence reduction. --dan _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork