Little Brother, Re: Switching gears

Stephen D. Williams sdw at lig.net
Wed Sep 21 10:30:28 PDT 2016


That's called "Little Brother"; we (for various forms of "we") have talked about it a lot.  The difference now is that it is doable
in a wide range of circumstances due to bandwidth, storage, compression, cameras, and AI filtering, plus possible IoT, etc.
integration.  For a completely neutral example of real reality shows: http://explore.org/  But beware, you may become hooked.

I think it could be good, especially in certain areas.  You could have graduations of privacy where when enough people have declared
something as needing public attention, it is opened to all, replicated, etc.  The flip side is that if something should be private
and the only interest is prurient or bullying, then enough veto votes should be able to shut it down and excise the memory of
something.  Like Google blurring faces in Street View.  Voting on the right/wrong side of history perhaps affects your karma score,
weighting future votes, modulo fog of war discount.  Conversely, at certain types of events, like a concert or parade, marathons,
etc. the default could be public as people could then have memories, virtual selfies, etc.

Legally, in the US at least, whenever you are viewable from publicly accessible land, it is legal to photograph or video you.  (But
not always to capture audio...)  There are few restrictions, some quirky: You can be photographed through your house window, but not
by a zoom lens.  (I.e. only by a lens with a view similar to your eyesight.)

The problems in managing this securely, fairly, and while supporting valid societal interests without trampling anyone are very
similar to the problems in creating a secure distributed communication overlay network without enabling unfettered terrorist use.


On 9/21/16 10:01 AM, xorcist at sigaint.org wrote:
> I'd like to bounce an idea around. At the outset, I'm going to say that I
> don't really like the idea. Like getting a root canal, I'd rather not have
> a some guy drilling around in my jaw, but what can you do?
>
> Some years back, maybe 8 years ago now, prior to the Snowden revelations,
> a Kiwi buddy and I were discussing the arising surveillance state.
>
> I ventured the idea that the only way to combat it, is for citizens to put
> web cams in their windows, in their cars, have body cams.. whatever.. and
> have a distributed system where we can live stream that stuff up. Open
> source surveillance, if you will.
>
> The idea scared the hell out of him, and rightly so. My take on
> surveillance tech is that it is like nukes. The only viable strategy is
> deterrence. The genie is out of the bottle, the tech isn't going anywhere,
> and so if we're going to preserve freedom, the technology needs to be
> under our control.
>
> Open source surveillance is a monster, but its a monster that would bite
> police and agents of the state as easily as us. Rather than the
> government/media being able to selectively pick-and-choose which camera
> angles, and which clips to release, we'd have to ability to check, and
> disprove.
>
> I don't like what it means, in terms of enabling stalkers, but perhaps
> that is mitigated by the ability to catch those fucks on camera?
>
> I'd love to hear reactions and thoughts on this. It's not something you're
> going to catch me truly arguing for, its really more of a devil's advocate
> type thing.. like I say, I just see it mostly as a fucked strategy for
> dealing with a fucked situation.

sdw

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