progression of technologies

Fri Jun 26 20:53:35 PDT 2015

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On 06/25/2015 12:22 PM, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
> 2015-06-25 21:44 GMT+09:00 z9wahqvh <z9wahqvh at gmail.com 
> <mailto:z9wahqvh at 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.

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?