Switching gears

Sean Lynch seanl at literati.org
Mon Sep 26 13:29:02 PDT 2016


On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 1:03 PM, John Newman <jnn at synfin.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:40:22PM -0700, Sean Lynch wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 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.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > This seems like exactly David Brin's proposal in The Transparent Society.
> >
> > http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html
>
>
> I think the one thing that can be said in favor of this proposal
> (sort of) is the huge number of extra judicial killings by
> corrupt/cowardly/disgusting US cops that have been caught on phone
> cameras in the past few years, killings that would no doubt have
> otherwise been covered up.
>

My main objection is that Brin is basically throwing up his hands with
respect to any kind of pushback against surveillance, saying it's
inevitable. I'm not just assuming this from what he's written there,
either; he's commented on my Facebook threads about surveillance by
actually saying we should ignore that stuff and focus on his sousveillance
instead. Though he seems to do a lot of self-promotion on Facebook
generally, so perhaps he's just overdoing it.

But it's not actually true that surveillance is a "done deal" or that we
have no control over the form it takes. We don't have to allow the State to
contract out to private companies for red light cameras and ALPRs and then
let them sell the data to whomever they want. We can force the
implementation of retention & sharing policies. What you don't have can't
be exfiltrated or abused. We may not be able to prevent its being collected
in the first place, but we can sure as hell stop the construction of the
databases, at least where we know about them. And we'll never know about
them if we don't keep paying attention.

The problem is that Brin seems to view this as a fight against the
technology. But it's really a fight against blindly deploying technology
with no thought as to how it's used. We may not be able to stop
surveillance, but there are lots of different ways to bring it into the
light and regulate it where it's deployed by government, and citizen
sousveillance is only a small part of that.


>
> The Quantum Thief (recommended recently by Mirmir) has a really
> interesting take on privacy in the moving martian city Oubliette -
> the gevulot.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gevulot_(Jean_Le_Flambeur_universe)
>
>
> John
>
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