
All Activities Monitored - dangerman
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/all-activities-monitored
======
ohazi
So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents,
expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general
public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers.

This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive
expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable.

Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what society will look like
when this sort of surveillance is made available to the general public.
Imagine a free, Google-Maps-like application that allows you to see individual
people and rewind with half second resolution.

This would be such a massive wrench thrown into the gears of society that I'm
having trouble coming up with anything coherent.

~~~
dawg-
You just described Life360, which is running on my phone right now.

Also, corporations monitoring customers is not as scary as you make it out to
be with your connection to the military. Yes it sucks. But you can choose
which company to be a customer of. With the rise of corporate surveillance,
the choices we all make about consumption just got another layer of
importance.

~~~
smolder
With the rise of pervasive surveillance, I think the choices we all make are
going to cease to be important. We can be micromanaged into making the "right"
ones. We truly become cogs in an uncaring, world destroying machine, with no
more agency than rats in lab experiments. For people with a strong conformity
streak, this may sound fine. If you don't like being told what to do, and
don't like the direction of society in general, it's pretty dismal.

~~~
smolder
In retrospect this comment is hyper cynical even for me, and doesn't make a
lot of sense that our choices wouldn't matter. I just can't get past the idea
that my whole online life is there for someone with sufficient privilege to
dig through. I feel so violated by the betrayal of mass surveillance because I
invested most of my life into the internet thinking it was actually intended
to be safe and egalitarian, not a spy machine and a tool for social control.

------
gumby
For some perspective on this level of surveillance (and what it's like when
the technology extends to the consumer level) check out this 21 year old book
by David Brin, "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose
Between Privacy and Freedom".

(Preferably get it from your local library, if you still have one, or a small
independent bookseller.)

~~~
JohnFen
I have a very hard time picturing how someone could have freedom without
privacy.

~~~
smolder
I agree, and it's specifically because everything is hierarchical. If you have
more power you are free to be more private than everyone else, and know more
about everyone else than they know about you. The ideal transparent society
can't exist without a level playing field, so it's not going to happen.

------
Animats
"It's 10 PM. Do you know where your Congressman is?"

~~~
Buttons840
Heh. If we can't stop it we can at least exploit it, right?

All this surveillance and transparency might actually make things better _iff_
we can force the government to be more transparent than the people. Imagine a
government that is so well surveilled by the people that the people could
trust it to surveil them in return. That doesn't seem to be where things are
heading though.

------
mlb_hn
Seems parts are a bit misleading and exaggerating capabilities. E.g.

>> Images from the cameras are in turn fed to computer programs that allow
analysts to track suspects, and even to rewind to look back over their paths,
like watching TiVo.

I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the
analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image
recognition back in 2006.

~~~
sedachv
> I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the
> analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image
> recognition back in 2006.

I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program,
but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in
1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued
development until two years ago:

[http://www.ai.sri.com/software/freedius](http://www.ai.sri.com/software/freedius)

I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007
International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't
remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated
track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the
problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.

Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering
Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":

[http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/1552.pdf](http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/1552.pdf)

The "massive track datasets" were automatically derived from surveillance
motion sensors, of course.

Automated surveillance capabilities were very far along by 2006.

The really interesting thing is that FREEDIUS is publicly available under the
Mozilla Public License:

[https://github.com/SRI-CSL/f3d](https://github.com/SRI-CSL/f3d)

Drone away!

------
seph-reed
> "Eyes in the Sky tells the story of a top-secret surveillance system that
> helped turn the tide in Iraq."

Everyone loves a good under-dog story!

------
JohnFen
This is utterly terrifying. What can we ordinary people do to protect
ourselves from this stuff?

~~~
kylek
This wiki says they use smartphone cameras
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare#Phase_two](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare#Phase_two)

Anyone want to build a drone-seeking high-powered-laser-pointer turret to
dazzle them?

~~~
JohnFen
I don't really think this would count as a solution, but it is an interesting
technical challenge.

I own a bunch of small, very powerful lasers (intended for engraving) that
would have a high chance of not just dazzling a camera, but permanently
damaging it. I wonder how feasible it would be to build a system that can
physically locate a moving drone with enough accuracy. Maybe by tracking its
RF signals?

Hmm, this might be a fun project, purely for intellectual purposes. I also own
a bunch of RC aircraft that I could use as targets...

------
whatshisface
> _The advent of this technology, combined with artificial intelligence and
> vast data banks, makes almost nonsensical the ideas of privacy and probable
> cause of an earlier age._

That's like saying that the invention of atomic weapons made almost
nonsensical the idea of not being vaporized. The fact that I _could_ be
vaporized more easily now that at any time in history has nothing to do with
my hardline anti-vaporization position, except possibly that it steels it.

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
The reason why we haven't seen use of atomic weapons is that it's clear that
use of atomic weapons will be met with more atomic weapons.

It's not clear that the state is worried about retaliation against wide area
surveillance.

~~~
whatshisface
I don't think it was ever clear that atomic weapons wouldn't be used,
especially not near the time of their invention. Remember the Cold War?

~~~
jdbernard
He didn't say they wouldn't be used, quite the opposite. He said there was
certainty that if they were used, your opponent would respond with more of the
same. This led to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction from the Cold
War.

Stated another way: if we use them we know they will be used on us, so we'd
better not use them.

OP's point was the there is no similar guaranteed retaliation that might
motivate restraint in the use of surveillance.

