
How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? - broodbucket
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/stallman20131020
======
cromwellian
In the 80s, I got my first access to the internet after reading Steven Levy's
book "Hackers". In the chapter on RMS, he mentioned that RMS didn't use
passwords and didn't believe in security.

I found the dialup number to the MIT media lab, and tried logging in as 'RMS'
and viola, no password, and I had my first shell account on an internet-
connected Unix machine, although I was only a teenager, and didn't attend MIT.

RMS's act of charity benefited me greatly, I was relatively poor growing up in
inner city Baltimore, and his account was a life line to a new world of the
internet and away from the crackhouse infested streets.

I find it interesting that he has changed his standpoint from one of radical
transparency to techno-privacy.

Remember, RMS is the guy who hacked LCS's computer lab password file,
decrypted all the passwords, and emailed everyone suggesting they change their
password to empty string. Now, I get that what he really wanted was to allow
anyone to have access to LCS resources, and that would have been better served
by just allowing anyone to create an account. But some early GNU accounts
nevertheless did not have passwords, and I could read their email, shell
histories, etc.

I think there is an interesting question is to the extremes of privacy and
transparency in a democracy. If for example, it was not possible to
discriminate against people, and if the government could not abuse any
information gained on someone, then it might be the case that society would
better off if there was very little privacy, because private distributed abuse
amongst non-state actors would then be the biggest danger. If on the other
hand, the state is far more abusive, then the fraud and violence perpetrated
by small actors uncaught by surveillance is dwarfed by the damage done by the
state having this information.

The question is, is it black and white, or is there some level of justifiable
dragnet surveillance? Can democracy also tolerate Cryptoanarchy?

~~~
eksith
One could argue he hasn't changed at all. On the contrary, it's the obligation
of the actor to act transparently toward those acted upon.

In your case, you were the actor dropping in on RMS so the obligation was on
you to be transparent about it. I'm guessing you weren't, since it wasn't very
polite to peek at their email ;)

And therein lies the dilemma. Those with power will observe yet must be
transparent about said observation. However they aren't transparent for fear
of tipping their hand to what is essentially the proverbial "boogey man" that
is terror.

~~~
cromwellian
Well, I did nothing to conceal the fact that I ran the mail command. I was
only a teenager, knew nothing about Unix nor internet mail, and so I was
looking at shell history and trying commands at random exploring. The system
was regularly backed up and restored, so for example, if you installed
something like a MUD server on RMS's account, the next day it would be
reverted.

From what I could tell, the GNU accounts were held nothing more than mailing
lists, there was never any private correspondence that I could see.

I'm pretty sure RMS was aware his email and everything he did on the account
could be seen by everyone. In fact, his mbox file wasn't even protected, you
could grep the /var/spool/mail directory.

~~~
eksith
What a wonderful and innocent time in the computer world it was back then.
Thanks for sharing this. It seems they all treated mail as a message board;
just a means to share ideas publicly. And if you weren't going to put it on
those lists, they it didn't belong in email after all.

~~~
dredmorbius
Many of us who aren't quite as old-school as RMS _still_ treat electronic
communications in this way.

Yes, there's communications we'll make which are more privileged, but we
understand that fundamentally the system is open to observation and snooping.
If we've got something to say we don't want others to know, we say it in
person, using crypto, or through code (formal or informal) which will be
difficult for others to understand, if at all.

And there's still good old mail. First class will often reach someone faster
than they'll dig through their mail spool these days (and a letter indicates
an _investment_ in communication), even next-day mail is pretty cheap (much
less expensive than FedEx).

------
pjc50
We're used to thinking of places either as "free country", like the idealised
America that appears in films, or "police state" where vast numbers of people
are rounded up into gulags and dissent is impossible.

 _The current situation is neither of those_. It's a large expensive system of
state oppression .. that acts on remarkably few people(+). There is a gulag
archipelago, Guantanamo, but it contains only 46 prisoners now. Outside it,
hundreds of millions of people live pretty free lives in the western world. So
there's little public appetite for doing anything about it. If you're not
reading about it in the news you can ignore it entirely.

Perhaps the main output of the surveillance program is the targeting
information for drone strikes. This results in thousands dead .. but they are
a long way away, in a part of the world that has its own problems with
violence.

Your actual chances of being victimised by the surveillance state for engaging
in nonviolent leftwing politics are very small. But perhaps its worth noting
that radical leftwing groups seem more likely to be investigated by law
enforcement than radical rightwing groups that advocate all kinds of crazy
things, _including actual violence against the government_ (second amendment
supporters).

(+) (note that I'm talking about just surveillance here, as distinct from the
War on Drugs, the horrifyingly high American prison population, racism in the
police, or heavy-handed public order policing)

(note 2: I'm from the UK, which has its own problems with official support for
surveillance, occasional brutal policing, and particularly the state's role in
violence in Northern Ireland has not been properly dealt with nor atoned for).

~~~
angersock
You've overlooked the hundreds of thousands incarcerated in some way due to,
for example, the war on drugs--itself enabled by this electronic surveillance.

The problem is quite a bit worse, erring towards police state, when you take
into account that.

~~~
sliverstorm
For heaven's sake, the problem with the war on drugs is certainly not
effective enforcement. The problem with the war on drugs is the war on drugs,
and IMO undermining the effectiveness of the government's ability to enforce
is bound to end in tragedy. Improved digital enforcement abilities help the
gov't catch all sorts of white-collar criminals, such as tax dodgers.

~~~
angersock
"white-collar criminals, such as tax dodgers."

The number of folks I know that are poor and being raked over the coals by the
IRS is far less than the number of white-collar folks; and the worst crooks
(the ones responsible, for example, for the housing bubble) largely go
unmolested.

Funny how even though these advances let us catch the worst of the worst, our
.gov focuses on the smallest and weakest (the easiest ones to build a career
on!).

~~~
sliverstorm
_The number of folks I know that are poor and being raked over the coals by
the IRS is far less than the number of white-collar folks_

Ok, so that part is working like you hoped

 _the worst crooks (the ones responsible, for example, for the housing bubble)
largely go unmolested_

I'm curious, did these worst crooks break laws? Honest question. I want them
prosecuted too, but I've never been clear whether the problem is apathy on the
part of the enforcers or the absence of laws under which they can be pinned.
(i.e., maybe there were critical loopholes)

~~~
angersock
Bloody hell... meant to type _far more_ instead of _far less_. Always good to
proof thoroughly.

------
ohwp
_" Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is
prohibited."_

This stood out for me in the article. And I think this applies to all forms of
data.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It does, and it worries me that people seem to not understand how obvious and
true this is.

There is only one real limit of what we can do - laws of physics. Anything not
explicitly prohibited by them can be done. There is also one practical limit -
economics, i.e. whether or not we have resources to do something. And that's
it. Laws, customs, etc. are arbitrary limits we voluntarily impose on
ourselves, and they can and will be broken whenever it's convenient.

So basically here's a rule of thumb: whatever can be done will be done. It
also suggests the possible course of action. We can't fight laws of physics,
so if we want something not to happen, we need to influence the softer,
economic side. Make things we don't like prohibitively expensive. That's why I
think any solution to surveillance problem will need to be technical in a big
part.

------
JanezStupar
Does anyone remember the old days when Stallman was an over the top tin foil
hat crackpot?

~~~
chatman
That is extremely disrespectful towards a legend as RMS is.

~~~
broodbucket
I didn't realise how important free software was until I started using an ARM
laptop for day-to-day work. Absolutely tiny userbase, barely any binary
packages, but I could clone and make my way to everything I needed. Without
RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near where it is now.

~~~
rimantas

      > Without RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near
      > where it is now.
    

How do you know that?

~~~
reginaldjcooper
It's obviously impossible to know that, so instead of nitpicking, let's
graciously interpret it as acknowledging that he (et al) did contribute a
great deal to the foundations of free software we have today.

------
camus2
Define Democracy first , this is not a state , this is an ideal to acheive, no
country is fully democratic , but some are more than others. That's why one
cannot call a country a democracy, but compared to North Korea , most
countries are "democratic". Compared to Switzerland most are not.

~~~
dreamdu5t
While we're at it, let's define privacy.

It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced
government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other
people (such as Facebook).

~~~
comrade_ogilvy
>It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced
government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other
people (such as Facebook).

They are inexorably linked together, but we must speak precisely.

If the gov't convinced Facebook to sell its archive of data to the NSA for $1,
would it be okay? Because the law as it exists says, yes, FB is free to sell
its corporate intellectual property to anyone including the NSA. Ditto
Mastercard. Ditto AT&T. etc. etc.

We have no guarantee of privacy simply because nowhere is it written that we
any legal right to privacy. Maybe the problem is not solvable. But trying to
solve this as simply a gov't that needs a better kind of leash is surely a
doomed effort.

~~~
dreamdu5t
Yes it would be okay because I could choose a company that didn't sell the
information to the NSA, but that's not possible because government
surveillance is forced on everyone. The government is preventing market
solutions to privacy.

------
rarw
Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address
(1) the legitimate need for surveillance; (2) dangers of an internet (or other
communications networks) which law enforcement or government cannot access at
all; (3) the problems with arguing that government (or anyone for that matter)
should be banned from collecting and reading data sent across the web.

I understand the concern. As someone who has advocated for stronger electronic
privacy regulation, no one likes someone having the ability to look through
their stuff. However, the answer is more likely a balance than a denunciation
of all surveillance in any form. Surveillance with restriction is fine and
probably a good thing. It helps prevent crime and can help catch criminals
once crimes happen. Just as it's easy to argue that a government with
information will misuse it, bad people with a closed communication network
will use it to commit crime. Sure not everyone is going to plan a terrorist
strike, or organize a gang online but some will. Is it worth enabling that
kind of behavior?

Also what should and should not be private also has to do with where/when the
information is collected. If the government were hacking into all of our
computers and keeping back ups of our hard drives that's very different from
collecting things that are sent on the internet. Legally there is currently a
big debate about how to treat something that is taken from a stored medium -
like a hard drive - vs one that is captured in transmission - like an email
being sent. As it currently stands the government would have a hard time
justifying accessing your computer remotely without a warrant but an easy time
reading emails once they left your computer. Why? Because the sent email is
akin to yelling something in a public place. Once it leaves your computer,
it's not private while its being transmitted. If this sounds like a stupid
distinction, that's because it is.

~~~
tjr
_Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never
address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance;_

From the article:

 _For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific
crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the
Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the
power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political
reasons, but it is also necessary._

~~~
rarw
Which is why I said "articles like this" and not "this article." Your quote is
correct. My comment was on the general scope of anti-surveillance writing.

------
chatman
Brilliant piece from Stallman! Written with a paranoid, skeptic mindset with
firm dose of realism and full of practical advice.

------
lucb1e
> You have exceeded the allowed page load frequency.

Like, I just loaded the page. Is it down for other people, or does this
trigger just for me?

Edit: Oh nevermind, this website thinks x-forwarded-for is my real IP-address.
I set it to '"\ which occasionally triggers database errors on php or asp.net
websites, highly amusing :P

Edit2: Also interesting is when hackernews crashes just after I re-enabled my
header modifier and try to save the previous edit.

------
lttlrck
"If whistleblowers don't dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred
of effective control over our government and institutions."

Isn't there something very wrong with this line of thinking? Are
whistleblowers really the last bastions of democracy? Voters, protestors and
guns be damned, when all is lost we can depend on the whistleblowers? Are you
kidding me?

~~~
dwaltrip
Guns? Are you kidding me? You think it is more reasonanble forming militias to
hold the government in line, if voting and protesting are ineffective?

------
robotys
I believe it is hard to change government. You can ask them anything (reduce
surveilance) just expect them to do nothing.

Democracy is not even well understood by half of us, citizen of world.

what WE can do is follow the 'do nice to others' to the extreme. Outward
thinking instead of inward thinking. Then collectively, the world will be
better.

------
coldcode
About as we currently know about. But it depends on whether the surveillance
is acted on. Having everything I do and say in a database is not the same as
my vanishing one night into a police van never to be seen again.

------
miguelrochefort
Democracy is silly and won't withstand transparency.

That said, society can withstand 100% surveillance, total transparency. But
that surveillance has to be done by the people and be publicly shared.

~~~
Sagat
You would want to be filmed at all times, and have that footage available to
everyone? That's insane and I suggest reading Dave Egger's "The Circle".

~~~
bloat
That seems like a natural progression, technologically speaking. Millions of
microscopic camera drones everywhere.

The only thing to hope for in that case is that the footage is available to
everyone, and that the powerful are filmed as much as anyone else.

~~~
miguelrochefort
I'm glad to see that some people still use their common sense.

You are exactly right. This is what we should strive for, this is what the
future will be like.

Too many people think that privacy is inherently good, but they fail to see
how unsustainable and selfish it is. Knowledge is good, and trying to keep it
for yourself slows down innovation.

The future will be transparent, and people of the future will laugh at how
ridiculous we were for worshipping privacy.

Fighting for privacy is stupid. What we should really fight for is
transparency. And transparency can only be achieved by leaking all the data,
both from citizens and people on the top. WikiLeaks is a good start, but
thinking that transparency only apply to the government and corporations is
silly. The same thing should be done to all of us.

I never could understoud why people that support WikiLeaks are those who
support privacy the most. What is even more surprising is that these people,
that are inherently selfish, think they're some kinds of socialists and fool
everybody else in thinking they're some kind of heros.

Humans are weird.

------
alan_cx
Oh, way more that I wanted to type and a bit ranty. You're warned!!!!

Very sadly, he is completely wrong.

This is the beginning:

"How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with
human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce
surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds
to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must
reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use."

Not true. Not even slightly true. Its so tragic.

In principle, I could not agree with him more, but that does not appear to be
a reality the vast majority can be bothered with.

Why? The vast majority simply do not care. Worse still a huge chunk of
society, on a daily basis, give up more personal information than any
government can possibly hope to ask for. We in the UK groan when the census
comes up, every 10 years. But the average facebook profile contains more
personal information than any census has ever asked for. And many many people
up date FB _daily_. Imagine a government asked us to document our lives daily?
I could go on, but that's the general thrust.

So, how much surveillance can society withstand? Loads more.

Is it incompatible with human rights? Well, humans don't seem over bothered,
in fact they offer up more information that the government could ever ask for.
Hence the NSA/GCHQ slurping.

Because the government will only ever use the data in a small targeted way, it
will never ever negatively effect the vast majority of people. So they will
never be inconvenienced by it. Only "those" people will be effected, and
"they" are guilty evil doers. So, there will never be an uprising or revolt,
because most people are unaffected.

See, even people most out raged by this agree that its good if they can round
up terrorists, pedophiles or who ever the current bogyman is. Well, while we
accept that, we accept the method, and there for that "evil" must exist. When
it exists, it can be easily and silently abused. The expectations are the gaps
through which evil seeps. This is why we are or try to be absolute about
torture, chemical or biological weapons, racism, and so on. We know if we
allow it in any way, mission creep will happen.

Of course, the real hypocrisy of people is that when something bad happens, we
blame government for not having enough control over circumstances. We
immediately say, "why didn't they do this that or the other. They failed."
What if all this slurping of data could have prevented 9/11?

But in the end, from what I have seen, society can easily with stand a hell of
a lot more surveillance. We allow it, government moderates it's use such that
most never see the down side, government loves control, and we expect
government to have that control.

Truth is, really, people want more surveillance so that they can live nice
risk free lives. Frankly, I'm not sure people really want real freedom at all.
They want a freedom, or their freedom, one that suits their daily lives. But
are only too happy to deny freedom to others as long as their freedoms are
preserved.

If this slurping is really that evil and unacceptable, incompatibly with human
rights, why haven't millions of people descended on Washington and London,
rioting in the streets, bringing down our respective governments?

Or are all these out raged people trusting democracy and the ballot box will
sort it out?

Or, is it that really they don't care?

~~~
kubiiii
The author asks how much surveillance can democraty withstand. Not society.
Society can withstand loads more surveillance but the resulting regime cannot
be called a democracy.

~~~
rimantas

      > The author asks ho much surveillance can
      > democraty withstand.
    

In this case does question even makes sense? How many tranzistors can a cow
withstand? US system is not a democracy anyway (it is a repulic).

~~~
kubiiii
It is (or claims to be) both a democracy and a republic, like a cow is both a
mammal and has horns. Another interesting question would be how much US
surveillance can foreign democracies withstand?

~~~
NAFV_P
"Another interesting question would be how much US surveillance can foreign
democracies withstand?" Plenty, as long as you don't tell them about it.

------
nvk
Not this much.

