

Why You Should Embrace Surveillance, Not Fight It - pacofvf
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/03/going-tracked-heres-way-embrace-surveillance/

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api
This is bizarre. Where to start...

I think the real howler is the idea that there could _ever_ be a level playing
field between well-funded government and corporate intelligence operations and
private citizens. Even if I had access to all the same data as the NSA, there
is simply _no way_ I could "make that data work for me" to anywhere near the
extent that the NSA can. There are not enough hours in the day, nor do I have
access to a compute farm the size of the Houston Astrodome and a small power
station to power it.

This idea that small groups of amateurs with no funding can compete with
massive organizations with billions of dollars in funding has got to go. It
_occasionally_ happens, but on average it does not. On average the big guys
are going to mop the floor with you by sheer brute force. Even if every dollar
the NSA spends gets them only 1/100th as far as every dollar a private concern
might spend, the NSA will still win because they have more than 100X as many
dollars.

People will bring up Linux but it's a poor counterexample. It was small and
scrappy for a short while, but it very rapidly picked up the support of
industry and now has billion-dollar backers. It's also a case where almost
everyone shared a common interest, which is not necessarily the case with
surveillance. My interest does not equal your interest when it comes to us
spying on each other, so if you have a million bucks and I have a few thousand
you are going to win.

Then there's the issue of privacy to begin with. Anyone who thinks privacy is
obsolete has never started a business, negotiated a contract, or had a
girlfriend.

Finally there's this crackpot idea that eliminating boundaries is a good thing
that's going to make us more honest and open with each other. It will have the
opposite effect. If people think everything they say and do _anywhere_ is
public, they will simply self-censor under all circumstances... sort of like
how people behave in dictatorships with secret police everywhere. It'll also
mean everyone is all up in everyone else's business all the time, which is not
a world I want to live in. There is a reason people segregate into separate
dwellings and stop living communally the instant they have the economic
ability to do so.

Boundaries are extremely important at all scales in living systems. Your nerve
cells don't directly connect. Instead they link via synapses, permitting each
cell to control I/O on its own terms. Why? Because if every cell touched every
other cell the first malfunctioning cell would cause a cascade and give you a
foaming-at-the-mouth seizure.

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EGreg
It's freaky. I actually wrote an opinion piece with a similar point of view
and much better supported. I submitted it to New York Times opinion pages as
well as Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch. No response.

And this gets published in Wired two days later.

