
John Perry Barlow – Online privacy double agent - denzil_correa
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/online-privacy
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pmoriarty
Barlow seems to agree with David Brin's thesis in _" Transparent Society"_[1]
that the inevitable loss of privacy of ordinary citizens will correspond with
an increase in transparency of governments, the powerful, and the aparatus
they create.

This is dangerously naive optimism. The asymmetry in power and resources
ensures that no such balance in transparency is possible. Ordinary citizens do
not have gigantic datacenters and armies of mathematicians, spies, and
computer scientists at their beck and call to monitor the government with.

That's not to say there hasn't been some notable progress with respect to
government transparency, but they are a few fireflies when compared to the
floodlights that the powers that be have at their disposal.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society)

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parasubvert
Depends on how you define power. Power to me is command over resources: land,
labour, capital, energy, knowledge. As the economy progresses, knowledge
becomes the key resource to maintaining secrets. But knowledge is leaky and
always getting obsoleted by new knowledge.

Today, privacy is enforced by a power imbalance in the knowledge between how
to encrypt or verify and the power to forcibly decrypt or forge. What happens
if hacks become commonplace tools? If Assymetric encryption gets compromised
through a new tool that can factor primes more quickly on a cloud, for
example. Will global commerce halt? Will global espionage stop? I doubt it.
More likely we will erect broader political and social structures to fight
forgery, and otherwise to expect transparency.

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fulafel
But in context of mass surveillance we are talking about a power and capital
intensive system for producing that secrely kept knowledge ("intelligence").
It hasn't been about breaking crypto, just stick and carrot to get cooperation
from infra providers and then building systems to refine it all.

This'd is not about to become accessible for the average citizen.

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parasubvert
"It hasn't been about breaking crypto"

It has to a large extent, and will continue to be so as non-cooperating
application/service providers encrypt their end-to-end data to minimize
snooping.

The final source of power I neglected is the power to incarcerate or do
violence, of course. Though the average citizen doesn't have that power to
compel the installation of a tap on the AT&T backbone. But it's a very crude
power that can only be taken so far without backlash.

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xnull2guest
I don't really get a sense from this article that Barlow is a double agent.

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irremediable
Agreed. Presumably, the article's use of quotation marks means he described
himself that way. I'm guessing it was tongue-in-cheek, though.

