
UN privacy head slams 'worse than scary' UK surveillance bill - stevetrewick
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/10/un_privacy_head_slams_uk_surveillance_bill/
======
benevol
_Cannataci read Cerf 's full quote: "Privacy may actually be an anomaly.
[...]"_

 _" I cannot understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could
say anything so dumb. It's just dumb."_

What's happening here is not Cerf being dumb, because obviously he's not. He's
been bought by Google a long time ago and Google has _destruction of privacy_
as their business model (just like Facebook, and the rest of them).

Good money has allowed Vint to brainwash himself into actually thinking that
destroying privacy is acceptable. He's basically just attempting to find a way
out of the inner conflict he must have, working for Google. (So yes, he'd
actually benefit from seeing a shrink.)

~~~
icanhackit
Quoted ad nauseam on HN but always fitting: _It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it._

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair#Quotes)

------
PebblesHD
Absolutely spot on! I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the
behaviour of various world governments, be it in the UK, Australia, France,
the U.S., everywhere the government is making a grab for more and wider
surveillance powers, the majority of the population seem totally oblivious.
There needs to be much wider awareness of this for any serious changes to
happen on a wide scale. Problem is, how do you accomplish that?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Maslov's hierarchy of needs. Most people don't have time to think about lofty
goals like "privacy" when they need all the focus they can get to care about
more basic needs like "shelter" and "putting food on the table".

~~~
PebblesHD
A very valid point and an equally troubling problem with modern society.
Worrying about things like shelter and putting food on the table should be a
non-issue in the 21st century, instead it is a modern epidemic and must be
fixed. Having said this non-corporeal but none-the-less essential concepts
like privacy, liberty and an expectation of trust in leadership should also be
a given, sadly they suffered the same fate.

~~~
adventured
People have to worry a lot less about putting food on the table in the 21st
century than at any other time in world history. Calorie counts have been
going up a lot, for decades, across every country that formerly used to suffer
deficits. Major famines are practically non-existent today, and were not
uncommon in prior centuries.

See: calorie count increases across Africa, Asia, South America.

Poverty and global inequality also have been dropping gradually for decades.

Instead of being modern epidemics, these things are former, ancient epidemics
that are being eradicated rapidly.

~~~
anon1385
Just because famine no longer exists doesn't mean people aren't having to
worry about putting food on the table. In the UK over a million people had to
visit emergency food banks last year[1], compared to only 125,000 in 2012.
Hospitals are seeing such levels of malnourishment that they have started
discreetly giving away food parcels to patients[2]. It's estimated that up to
40% of patients admitted to UK hospitals are malnourished and the number of
people admitted to hospital specifically because of malnutrition has risen
dramatically in the last year.

If you are wanting to suggest that this is due political decisions rather than
a famine or overall lack of food then yes that is true, but it doesn't change
the fact that there are a lot of people in the UK struggling to feed
themselves and their children.

What's happening in Asia or Africa isn't particularly relevant to the level of
political engagement in the UK, which is what this discussion is about. That
fact that things are getting worse in the UK while improving in much poorer
countries just makes the situation even less excusable.

[1] [http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-
projects](http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-
hospital-...](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/28/nhs-hospital-
tameside-food-parcels-patients-risk-malnutrition)

------
zimbatm
I don't mind losing some privacy but it has to be symmetrical. Right now the
government is like the clothed guy on a nudist beach and it's awkward.

~~~
avmich
That's not enough. Government is a service for you - it should be naked by
default, while you're clothed by default.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's impossible as long as there are real actors that are a threat to it -
i.e. as long as there is more than one government in the universe and all want
access to the same resources.

~~~
avmich
Can you explain why? "Default" doesn't mean "always" \- we can talk about
hiding something, which is related to external threats. Why this can't work?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I stupidly misread you as saying "all-public". Let's call it a brain-fart.

I'm all for government transparency, but I also accept that as long as nations
compete with each others, there are areas in diplomacy, trade, espionage and
military that need to stay secret.

------
lukasm
Cannataci read Cerf's full quote:

> Privacy may actually be an anomaly. Privacy is a construct of the modern
> industrial age. In the past, everyone lived in small, self-contained
> communities where everyone knew who was dating the baker's daughter and what
> the sheriff had for lunch. It is only when populations started migrating en
> mass to cities that anonymity emerged as a by-product of urbanization.

>This, Cannataci said, was "pure, undiluted rubbish," adding: "I cannot
understand how a person of the intelligence of Vint Cerf could say anything so
dumb. It's just dumb."

I just finished rereading What You Can't Say. Maybe "privacy is dead" is the
modern taboo?

~~~
TeMPOraL
I always thought exactly like Mr. Cerf said in that quote, so could someone
please tell me why is this exactly "pure, undiluted rubbish"?

~~~
jpgvm
It's worth reading the rest of it too.

Specifically he feels that the way Vint Cerf argued may have been applicable
to his culture but many others less so.

His point was that privacy was present in many of these cultures before the
advent of cities and that cities did not simply invent privacy out of thin
air.

That said I think a lot of this is misconstruing on both sides.

My personal opinion is privacy and an expectation of it existed well before
cities or even towns and that what really come with cities was anonymity.
Which is a different concept entirely.

I think it would be fair to say if you sent a rider or a pigeon so a trusted
advisor you had an expectation others would not hear/read your message, this
is true of the postal system and one would expect of telephone and Internet
communications.

However, things get really rough when cities happened. Because of the rise of
anonymity law enforcement needed new powers to actually find perpetrators of
crimes. As such some privacy was sacrificed in the name of making our
communities safer. Mostly in the form of allowing law enforcement some limited
wire tap and post interception powers.

Unfortunately this didn't map very well to the Internet because of the nature
of the 2 mediums. Intercepting someones written and spoken communications
between another human is one thing. Being able to spy on what is effectively
their thoughts and interests is entirely another. The bandwidth and expression
of the Internet and the rich mediums we have built on it are greatly
underestimated by the frankly out of date politicians and policy makers of
today. They don't realise how much damage they are potentially doing to the
future of such a promising system.

~~~
tremon
> However, things get really rough when cities happened

When did "cities happen"? Rome had more than a million residents about 2,000
years ago. Cities like Athens and Alexandria had over 100,000 residents
centuries before that. I think I understand the point you're making, that
anonymity within a community is easier to achieve when the community is large,
but that's not the only anonymity available.

Before cities, we already had anonymity due to fleeting associations (e.g.
nomadic groups, traveling merchants), due to separated communities (e.g.
soldiers did not know each others' past, their homes would not have known
their actions), or due to migration (e.g. leaving one community and joining
another).

Those forms of anonymity have mostly disappeared, not because "cities
happened", but because of better administration. So far, our administrative
capability has always been limited by the amount of effort it required. What
has changed with the Internet is that we now leave a (digital) papertrail of
almost everything we do, so there is no longer an effort-based limit on the
amount of records we can preserve.

That to me is what makes Cerf's comment unpalatable (I hadn't encountered it
before): to pretend that "we've never had anonymity" is foolish at best, and
manipulative at worst. Given his current employer, I'm more inclined towards
the latter.

Another poster already commented that "what we now call privacy, used to be
called freedom and liberty". I think that's a very good one-liner, but it's
not really accurate: privacy is a requisite for freedom and liberty, but it's
not the same thing. This is probably the first time (since the StaSi) that
that requisite has come under so much attack, which is probably why it's
receiving so much more attention than before.

------
wicket
It's shame that The Register had ruin a good story with their shoddy, tabloid-
esque journalism by claiming that the UN privacy head called Vint Cerf "dumb".
He never called him "dumb", he actually highlighted his intelligence but
claimed that he said something "dumb". There's a huge difference. One implies
a personal trait whereas the other refers to a single occurrence which may be
an anomaly.

------
envy2
After all of Cameron's "let's ban end-to-end encryption" remarks, it
unfortunately seems like many key interests are just relieved it isn't
_worse_.

Nice strategy, now that I think of it.

------
musha68k
I always wonder if UK politicians had to read Orwell in high school, 1984 was
mandatory reading for me here in Austria.

~~~
venomsnake
Probably. As a textbook.

But if you look throughout UK history - the only freedoms they really cared
about are the strong individual property rights. When property is equal-ish
distributed - all the other rights also are. But with property increasingly
concentrated ...

So this bills are not unexpected - they don't infringe on anyone's property -
so they get a pass from the powerbrokers.

------
hoodoof
The worse something is for the citizens, the more governments seem to want it.

Government: "Oh it's REALLY bad for the people? Well we certainly need that."

The more complaints, the more valuable it must be to the government.

------
gorhill
Imagine a new device to read and record people's thoughts at all time is
invented.

That UK surveillance bill is "worse than scary" because according to how its
proponents/supporters rationalize it, the logical consequence of this
rationalization is that it's perfectly acceptable that all citizens should be
permanently hooked to such device if it existed.

------
snowdensgranny
Hi - I've been sent here from a lovely techie at reddit. I am THE most non-
technical person but, this subject fascinates me. I've been following Snowden
and some of the related issues and I am passionately against government mass
surveillance (GMS). I have to read most things twice or three times - I am not
as clever as all you in this thread but I hope I can contribute a new angle.

I recently asked a friend in the UK about the Snoopers Charter and she said,
'Hey, I've got nothing to hide and if it stops terrorists then carry on.'
Nothing I said or sent her to read resonated... even when I said, 'Mass
Surveillance hasn't stopped a terrorist, it's driven them underground making
you more unsafe and the fact your shit is being stored and could one day be
hacked by terrorists is making you more unsafe and...Sweetie, I was 18 with
you...I KNOW you have shit to hide."

She, I believe, is a good example of the average person in the UK at least.

So why does she not care? Probably for the reasons you all mention however, I
thought further. What is 3-for-2 at Tesco's has relevance to her life...if the
government want to record her posting about it on facebook, she cares nothing.

Or so I thought. I considered further. I think, on a deeper level, she
actually does care and this may be the problem and the reason why the
pitchforks are still in garages.

Years ago, we all lived close to our families and saw them a lot. We cared
about their lives a lot. What my child buys in the shops matters to me. As
humans the only thing that actually matters is that we 'matter' to others and
as this kind of interaction happened, it validated us as important beings.

Once, I managed to sit through 4 minutes of Big Brother reality TV show when
it first came out before my eyes and ears bled with the utter triviality of
it. People are very, very trivial. They don't matter. But they desperately
want to believe they do.

As we have spread out and live far apart, these validations from family have
decreased - yes, skype. Yes phone calls. But I'm still not there, physically,
discussing 3-for-2 shampoo deals with my daughter if she's 350 miles away and,
frankly, some people may actually be aware enough to sense that that's not
worth discussing in a skype call, even with their mum.

So, on some deeper level, the fact that the government cares enough to, not
just listen but actually record and store all our details, means we must be
important enough and that we matter. When I explained to my friend that the
governments can actually pull together ALL your records and analyse it so they
can actually predict when you will run out of shampoo...I know she shrugged it
off, but did I also see her flush? Flush with a sense that someone taking THAT
much interest in her meant that she mattered?

I posit that THIS is what we may be fighting. Those against mass surveillance
are people who either have this need satisfied or don't have this need in the
first place.

It struck me that my rants about this are falling on deaf ears because I am,
in effect saying, 'Why on earth do you think you're interesting enough to be
under total surveillance?" People don't want to admit that they need
validation but they sure as hell don't like feeling they don't matter - hey,
only interesting people who MATTER actually get spied on.

I believe that if more and more common people (i.e. the non techie, 3 for 2
deal type people) cannot be brought into this debate and made to see, nay,
feel, the consequences than our freedom and privacy and the right to develop
without scrutiny and our freedom to speak when we do have something
interesting to say will continue to be eroded to the point where humanity will
lose the ability to debate hence, ironically, becoming more uninteresting. The
very thing that people fear will be brought to bear.

------
Umn55
"I find it shocking the lack of public reaction to the behaviour of various
world governments"

Human reasoning doesn't work on logic:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ)

So you shouldn't, the vast majority of the public is stupid, uneducated and
illiterate.

Lastly capitalist societies are not set up to defend themselves vs the rich...
see here, the spying is for dissidents not terrorists.

Important:

[http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137](http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137)

~~~
dang
We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550507)
and marked it off-topic.

