[ExI] Gov surveillance here to stay

[Anders Sandberg]

On 06/07/2012 09:06, BillK wrote:
> Why do you think your lovely smartphone includes unique ID, GPS,
> camera and microphone?

Because the consumers really want it. The fatal mistake of thinking it is 
because "They" put it there misses the far more unsettling aspect that *we* 
are voting with our wallets to produce a transparent, trackable world with 
smart gadgets.

Some of that is an accidental side effect (consider EFFs interesting  
demonstraiton that our browser customisation makes us identifiable:  
https://panopticlick.eff.org/ ) - many of these side effects suprise the  
Powers That Be too (consider all leaks due to improper redaction of PDFs). 
But I think what most people honestly do want is a world that has "magical 
properties" of transparency and services for them that also produce 
transparency for others - and they are not willing to pay much money or 
effort to reduce this information leakage.

If it was just They who did things, we could in principle stop Them. But  
now it is *us* who are doing it, and we are unlikely to stop ourselves.


> The future is here already. You must assume that every use of your
> phone, or internet access is recorded and scanned for possible threats
> to the state.
> If you are not plotting, then it will be no immediate inconvenience to you.

At least that is the common assumption. Given the growing number of more  
or less embarassing mistakes, there is a realy issue of false positives.  
Plotters are rare: people looking like plotters are far more common.

> Supercomputers and unlimited data storage enables the state to treat
> everyone as a potential criminal, so everything they do or say, every
> place they visit and every person they contact is now regarded as
> potential court evidence.

The really interesting thing is when this ability percolates downwards.  
Right now companies like Acxiom and Facebook are using similar methods. In 
a few years it will be feasible for smaller groups and individuals to do 
big data mining too.

I suspect the best strategy is to get people aware that we are careening  
into the transparent society, that we better get ultra-tolerant, and that 
we better get strong accountability measures into place to keep  
governments and other concentrations of power safe and sane.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE