

Tomorrow’s Surveillance: Everyone, Everywhere, All The Time - Libertatea
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/29/tomorrows-surveillance/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

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dmix
Mass surviellenace is just a symptom of a bigger problem:

"The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to." \- Edward
Snowden

When any government starts granting itself unlimited powers, this kind of
thing will keep happening. Whether it's surveillance, suppressing political
dissent, chilling free speech or controlling economic interests.

Democratic representation becomes lost and illusionary.

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pvnick
Interesting article, but the author seems to fall into the trap of the
"national-security conservatives" implying that most of the FISC judges being
Republican is somehow worse. When Edward Snowden and I voted for Obama in 2008
we would have agreed. Now it's become obvious that's really a distraction and
that both parties are in on it. This is not a political issue. It's a human
rights issue and should be treated as such.

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358922
> When Edward Snowden and I voted for Obama in 2008 we would have agreed.

Edward Snowden did not vote for Obama.

Edward Snowden: "A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for
him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was
going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with
the policies of his predecessor."

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-
whistleblowe...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-
whistleblower-edward-snowden-why)

~~~
pvnick
Ah, that's right, good point. I actually campaigned for Ron Paul myself, but,
like Snowden, believed in Obama as my second choice.

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sendos
I wrote about this a while back, after watching a PBS documentary on domestic
spying. Basically, it seems to me that the US could one day turn into a
totalitarian regime with no way back [1]. Maybe it's overly-pessimistic, but
once all the total-surveillance tools are in place, if the government ever
turns totalitarian, it will be extremely difficult to overturn it

[1] [http://andrewoneverything.com/post/43837476217/the-us-
could-...](http://andrewoneverything.com/post/43837476217/the-us-could-one-
day-turn-into-a-totalitarian-regime)

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coldcode
It's both parties, in the US we basically live in a one party system, where
sub parties argue about how they are different in public but in secret act the
same to further their power. In the end we the people both inside and outside
the country become less and less important.

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6d0debc071
I wonder how easy it is to just zap cameras with lasers or the like without
being noticed. This was something that occurred to me in connection with
glass, but I don't see why it wouldn't become more generally applicable: As
hardware and software costs come down I can see people using better tools to
attack surveillance infrastructure than the old-fashioned _spray-paint the
speed camera_ approach.

~~~
polynomial
This might impose a kind of maintenance tax on surveillance equipment, in
terms of resources being allocated to fix broken equipment & 'catch the perps'
however I don't think it's enough to slow down the surveillance hydra which
can grow 2 new cams for every 1 taken out.

Also it's not just 'cameras' but more ubiquitous sensors that provide
surveillance data, increasingly embedded in the devices you use in everyday
life.

The problem of data collection is arguably moot. The question of who has
access to this data and what we do with it is the crux of the matter.

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pbsdp
The article vastly overstates the ability for normal people to avoid
survellience. We technologists are _building_ the centralized industrial
survellience state by voluntarily feeding metadata and content on our users to
centralized analytics companies -- eg, Google.

We're centralizing authentication authority in a few providers, enabling web
tracking across the Internet, assisting Facebook and Google in their
generation of shadow profiles for _everyone_.

We're building web apps and web services that require server side data storage
of user information, creating treasure troves of data. The network effects of
what we're doing make it consistently harder and harder for users to avoid
putting their data, identity, and 'meta-data' about their actions into the
hands of 3rd parties.

Centralized phone companies have provided a case study in the ease at which
governments can subvert centralized commercial entities, and even make the
relationship between commercial entities and the government a lucrative
symbiotic one.

We technologists are _building_ the big brother state in the name of 'the
cloud' and 'analytics'. We'vs convinced ourselves that webapps mean more
freedom, rather than less privacy. We've gleefully abandoned the cyberpunk
privacy tenants of the 90s that would have causes many to recoil at the very
idea of analytics, Ubuntu's sending desktop searches to Amazon, and
centralized monitoring of literally every tap and button press on a mobile
device.

 _We 're_ making it harder and harder for users to escape this orbit of
commercial industrial governmental spying, because technology is so
wonderously and necessarily pervasive, and the network effects to what we
build are so strong.

If users are going to escape this future of governmental techno spying, _we
must change now_. It will be up to us to provide the tools, and find
alternative solutions to the deaf to centralized spying apparatus.

