
Stop Thinking That Tech Hacks Are the Solution to Our Surveillance Woes - rvschuilenburg
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/08/yah-surveillance-sucks-but-technology-isnt-the-only-solution/
======
throwit1979
Disagree completely. Technological solutions are the only feasible ones
because the majority of the population is absolutely fine with the status quo.

In a democracy, complacency guarantees that nothing will change and in fact
will likely get worse.

For those of us to whom privacy actually matters, we need to recognize that we
are in the vast minority, and as such, our voice will be completely incapable
of effecting political change. Technological tools then become our only
option.

Then there's the issue that even IF political action had a chance, it would
_still_ be ineffective. Case in point: voting for "the other guy" HAS ALREADY
FAILED everyone who actually bought Obama's lies about reducing the police
state.

~~~
vbuterin
Agreed. Here's an interesting article:

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21582004-crime-
plungin...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21582004-crime-plunging-
rich-world-keep-it-down-governments-should-focus-prevention-not)

Quoting:

> Cherished social theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted
> that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic
> diversity would unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong.
> Young people are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent
> and to have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better behaved
> than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued that crime could never be
> curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.

> The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved. Car
> immobilisers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security guards and
> marked money have all but done for bank robbery. Alarms and DNA databases
> have increased the chance a burglar will be caught. At the same time, the
> rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic gizmos are so cheap.

It's not liberal politics or conservative politics or even socialist or
libertarian politics that is responsible for the fall in crime. It's good old-
fashioned technological solutionism.

~~~
saurik
Criminals and governments are fundamentally different adversaries, and it is a
mistake to assume that techniques that help against the former are even semi-
useful against the latter; if you build enough technology to try to keep them
out (already hard: they not only have access to immense resources, but likely
also are slightly ahead on technological advances) at best you can hope to rot
in the system while they figure out what to do with you (or, if you are a
provider, maybe you can get away with pulling a Lavabit).

------
borplk
A few notes,

\- Technology solutions can't get very far. At some point they will be
attacked by legislation at a level that renders them unusable. (e.g.
encryption of such and such becomes illegal)

\- Technology solutions inevitably create an arms-race so the surveillance
state keeps growing bigger and bigger. And also creates the mindset that we
can do nothing but to continue looking for better technical solutions.
Eventually we forget why we are doing all of this in the first place, when
politicians are supposed to be our employees who are supposed to serve us and
act on our behalf.

\- For as long as the majority of people don't understand the value and
importance of privacy we're going to continue to see these issues. When people
buy the "if you have nothing to hide" argument, it's not going to change.

\- People only start to care when they feel sufficiently threatened, and in
this case they don't understand the threat, until it's far too late, and then
it suddenly clicks for the average Joe, years after many people have been
warning them in advance but they dismissed them as crazy people

\- You can see examples of the point above all throughout the history. A
minority keep warning people about a certain point, the majority doesn't feel
it's important and continues to ignore it until it's too late, now everyone
understand the mess they are in and at this point usually revolution and civil
wars start. Then after lots of suffering they all vow to never repeat what
they did, and to do something to never end up in that situation again, then
they forget, and rinse and repeat.

~~~
altero
I guess the key is to run faster then others, so bear will not eat you. Most
people do not care about privacy.

------
scotchmi_st
To the author of the article I say, "can't we have better legislation /and/
tech hacks?"

I don't think anyone would disagree with the idea that we can't solve the
surveillance problems just through technology alone (apart from maybe some of
the more naive HN members). But since we are partly in this mess because of
technology, I don't think it's too radical to suggest that we can in part help
get ourselves out of it using technology as well. To suggest that the tech
community are a bunch of introverts, unconcerned with "the plight of the
majority" sounds kinda dull to me, and certainly unoriginal.

------
at-fates-hands
It seems to me the article takes the same approach to prevent someone from
stealing your car. You can take certain measures like locking your doors and
installing a car alarm which will thwart most thieves who are looking for an
easy mark. However, if a professional car thief wants to steal your car, guess
what? They're going to steal your car.

In a sense, it makes it harder for government to eavesdrop on you, but if they
really want to get your information, they can.

All your doing by using these tools is making your private information harder
to get at. Which I don't think is a bad thing. Outside of the government,
these tool will do wonders to thwart identity thieves and other malicious
hackers from getting at your information so it's not completely worthless to
use them.

~~~
DerpObvious
But if you're trying to stop mass car theft by people simply opening the doors
and driving off, taking the keys out and locking the door is pretty effective.

Sure, professionals could still target specific cars, but it would cut in to
their potential for mass theft, by simply making each one take longer.

------
ynniv
The problem is that you can't effectively enforce legislation against it. Even
if we were to crack down on the surveillance apparatus that we can see, unlike
analogous physical action electronic interception is practical with a tiny
amount of equipment. Until you're ready to hand inspect every foot of
communication line (which are almost always underground or undersea), and
evaluate every switch on them down to the silicon, there's no point in
attacking the problem with laws. A law can stop a large government program,
but every 18 months the problem gets twice as easy for a smaller group to
tackle.

You can't legislate that people be nice to each other, and you can't legislate
that people not copy bits.

~~~
saraid216
Legislation isn't really the trick, IMO. The trick is to find NSA recruits
before the NSA does and educate them on ethics and why it's wrong to do stuff
like this.

But that's _hard_ politics and most HNers don't have the stomach for it.

------
squozzer
Yeah, let's burn our bras, I mean smartphones.

Or donate money to whatever -- so far that hasn't worked. I doubt EFF with a
10x increase in budget could accomplish 10x objectives. Even if they could,
that wouldn't give us 10x freedom.

But I'm often wrong about these things.

Once, in the murky past, I used to tell people "changing the world" isn't the
point of activism -- it's "changing ourselves."

------
Zigurd
Defeatism. Mass surveillance can be blinded. High-intensity efforts at
cracking encrypted communications and storage don't scale up.

Mass surveillance is only worthwhile if you have comprehensive visibility into
_potential_ high-value targets. If the 20% of people who are actually doing
something more meaningful than cat videos routinely use encryption, then mass
surveillance only gets you cat videos.

~~~
wes-exp
_mass surveillance can be blinded_

Suppose the political climate creates incentives such that ordinary people are
compelled to report on each other. Explain to me how technology blocks that?

~~~
Zigurd
Technology can't stop them threatening your children. But those tactics don't
scale up and they invite a harder response.

------
betterunix
Tech hacks are _part_ of the solution. They are not the only part, of course,
but tech solutions help to ensure that the other part of the solution,
politics, does not fail. It is not hard for laws to change; it is hard for
technology to be replaced, especially when it is standardized and widely used.
If the law forbids the government from reading our emails without a warrant,
then the email system should be designed to support the law -- e.g. by
encrypting messages.

------
wes-exp
J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance mania was pretty low-tech by today's standards.
As was the Stasi. These were clearly political problems first and foremost.

Maybe technology can help, but, it shouldn't be overvalued.

~~~
betterunix
Technology supports the law. That swings in one direction with CALEA: telecom
equipment is now designed to support on-demand eavesdropping. There is no
reason that things could not swing in the other direction, so that technology
is used to ensure that the government is not abusing its power. If the
Internet had been designed to protect personal privacy, things like PRISM
would have been much more difficult to implement. Laws can be changed easily
when there are no real-world issues standing in the way.

------
northwest
I would really like to see a place where possible solutions are actually being
discussed, voted on and worked out, like I tried to say here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935)

It kind of really sucks that we're still discussing that we should be
discussing _solutions_.

~~~
bsbechtel
Northwest, I was going to comment that this article is full of complaints, but
doesn't offer up a single, actionable solution. I wrote a post on Medium a
while back ([https://medium.com/surveillance-
state/7d456a6a04df](https://medium.com/surveillance-state/7d456a6a04df))
trying to identify some of the root causes of our problems and offer up a fix.
My ideas may not be the best course of action, but at least it's putting
something out there.

I'd love to work on building a community that can evaluate, develop, and test
out different ideas (although my time is somewhat limited right now). I'm
pretty experienced developing in Python/Django, and have plans to teach myself
Meteor this fall.

Let me know your thoughts.

------
api
I've been saying this forever. This is a _political_ problem.

Tech hacks aren't necessarily bad, but they can only go so far and all have
major problems. There tends to be a trade-off between security and usability,
which turns most users off from using things like darkets and meshnets. In
addition, I'm not familiar with any meshnet that could stand up to a
determined assault from a well-equipped foe. Any Internet-based meshnet is
vulnerable to filtering at the ISP level, and any truly wireless decentralized
meshnet is vulnerable to jamming, detection and confiscation, etc. All meshnet
protocols I'm familiar with have denial of service vulnerabilities as well.

Ultimately I think only a two-pronged approach can work. Tech hacks can make
it a little harder to implement a universal total surveillance state, but only
political action can solve the political problems that lead to its creation.

~~~
drdaeman
> Any Internet-based meshnet is vulnerable to filtering at the ISP level

Theoretically - yes, ISPs are in full control of what's passing through them.
But, if we're not considering a whitelisting only explicitly allowed sorts of
non-encrypted communications, filtering with reasonably good success should be
quite a costly task.

------
drdaeman
I disagree.

I think the only way to effectively prevent anyone from picking their nose
into your letters is protecting the letter by various means, not telling
others that they must behave so and really not read what you wrote there.
Sure, protecting against powerful TLAs is not easy, but certainly not
impossible (always keeping in mind there's no absolutely perfect solutions and
everything could eventually wear out). If the otherwise would be the case,
many countries won't be so upset with strong crypto.

I also believe that laws that try to "protect" privacy are actually worsening
the situation, not improving it. That's because they make false beliefs with
general population that one's communications are secure, even though in
practice they're frequently as secure as an unsealed postcard.

------
gmuslera
Is not a solution, is a temporary mitigation.

Even if democracy seem that lost its meaning in US (either by power grabbing
or media controlling population) the political way must kept to be tried.

But while that is in the works (and will take time, is not that they will
admit that they are wrong, they know they are, they must be forced to change
their ways by international and national pressure), some technical hacks could
help. And at the very least, if popular enough, is another way to tell the
government that the country don't like what they are doing.

------
altero
For sub-humans outside of US the encryption is the only solution. Political
solution would be declaration of war to USA, which is not very practical.

~~~
Joeboy
Yes, it bothers me that so much of the outrage is about spying on _Americans_
, and concerns me that a "political solution" is fairly likely to maintain our
second class status.

------
gbin
I only trust the mathematical proof that I am not spied on and here is why:
There is always something missing in those articles. It is always about
American gov spying on American people ! What about allies spying on americans
and american gov on allies ? It is a world wide problem with intricacies of
local laws and loopholes.

The political solution is impossible to obtain, it can at best mitigate one of
those.

------
dclowd9901
The drive to try to solve the problem with tech is simply more emblematic of
the actual problem: nobody's willing to do the hard and undesirable work of
pushing for policy change, or even becoming policy makers themselves.

It's a pity that even while we watch our grandest creation crumble at the
hands of overeager, underqualified career politicians, we can't be persuaded
to kill the beast from the inside.

Any of us is educated enough and capable of working in congress. I mean,
Christ, Michelle Bachmann was a running mate for president.

------
acabal
I don't think so. Laws change all the time, and a society's fears and
priorities change over time too. Technology both gives us the ability to
archive and analyze communications forever, and to provably protect (encrypt)
them forever. Laws only give us the ability to protect our communication as
long as the complex web of human desires and emotions allows it.

------
mathattack
I'm with the spirit of this argument. This won't be won by some subset of very
smart people fighting the powers that be. The governments of the world are
hiring very smart people too. I hate to say it, but this needs a political
solution.

