Brin

[Bill Stewart]

Bob - I'm not sure if you copied David separately/Bcc on your reply,
and I've dropped Cc:s to some of your lists that I'm not on,
and I missed your original message that David flamed you for
which you're flaming back about, but....

Perhaps I've missed some really critical things the time or two
that I've read "The Transparent Society", or projected too much
liberarian hype into my reading, but to me the big points were
- Moore's Law, etc., will make networked cameras so appallingly cheap
         that that they'll be pretty much universal.  It'll do it to other
         information technologies as well, but the public has an easier time
         understanding what a camera means than a database, so that's the
         one to focus on when you're writing popular science.

- Usual digressions into what Moore's Law and cheap and universal mean,
         and some implications about the realism of expecations of privacy
         that need to be said slowly for people who haven't spent years
         talking about geodesic economies and therefore don't get it (:-)

- Lots of people will be watching you on cameras, either because they
         feel like it, or because they're watching something else
         and it's too much trouble to not watch you at the same time.
         And you'll be watching lots of people or things, for similar reasons,
         and realistically there's not much that'll stop it.

- The government will be watching you, like it or not.
         Brin spends a while discussing the issue of whether we should
         try to stop them from doing so through legislation,
         but basically views it as a lost cause for economic reasons,
         and all the related reasons of power, convenience, control, etc.
         (I don't remember how much time he spent on the "even if they ban
         government from watching you most of the time, they'll always
         give themselves exemptions even if they bother following the rules,
         so just get used to it" issue, but it was there.  Video's too cheap.)

- We might be watching the government, or we might not,
         and the government are the only major group that can easily
         make it hard to watch them, because they can throw you in jail
         if you get in their face, and they've got enough control over
         their actions to make it difficult to watch them.
         THIS IS WHERE WE NEED TO FOCUS AS CITIZENS, because if you don't
         force them to do their work in the sunshine, they won't,
         and because getting them not to watch you is a lost cause.

- Cypherpunks technologies are mostly a lost cause, because
         Bad Guys (mainly the government) will use them to do their bad 
things,
         whereas they can put cameras in your ceiling to watch you type 
your passwords,
         hide bugs under your bed (next to the Communists) to listen to the
         conversations you're having on your EnCryptoPhone, etc.
         Making sure the government is maximally watchable is more important,
         and if you say you're allowed to hide your actions,
         they'll make sure they're allowed to hide theirs,
         and they're better at this organized coercion thing than you are.

Perhaps I'm putting words in Brin's mouth, especially about the latter,
but it has seemed to have been the major bone of contention
between Brin and various Cypherpunks.  Meanwhile, Big Brother *is*
increasingly watching us, even if in GeodesicWorld nobody else
has bothered paying enough to watch hi-res videos of most of us very often,
and BB is trying very hard to make himself much less accountable,
because if we can see where George is, we can question him,
and if that happens, the Terrorists Have Won...

         (Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has been promising
         heavy scrutiny of the Worldcom Debacle, if nothing else because
         they're so pleased to have dishonesty from somebody who's
         not in the Oil Business or Military-Industrial Complex for a change.)


At 12:54 PM 06/25/2002 -0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:
>I should say, at this point in things, that I've never complained at
>all about Brin's heralding some mechanical ubiquity of *observation*,
>per se, any more than I complain about the market, celestial
>mechanics, or the weather. You can't fight Moore's (or Metcalfe's, or
>whoever's) Law, and all that.
>
>I *do* think that observation done by people of their own property
>(call it supervision, I guess), is much better than observation by
>states of their own citizens (call that surveillance). In fact, I
>would go far enough to say that the former is just plain common
>sense, and the latter is the very definition of totalitarianism.
>...
>Put in less Proustian terms, the *market* for such things will
>determine which side will prevail: Monopolistic surveillance with the
>"consent" of the "governed", versus the supervision of private
>property by a whole swarm of individual market actors. It will not be
>decided, as some people seem to want, Dr. Brin among them,
>apparently, by having two "monkeys" fight it out in an internet zoo
>cage somewhere about who gets to control some pile of intellectual
>bananas.