
Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia? - ulysses
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/02/can-we-avoid-a-surveillance-st.html
======
trekky1700
I think super accurate mass surveillance is inevitable. It goes with expanding
technological capabilities, both government and civilian. I think the real
question needs to be focused at how it's applied, whether it's used solely for
good or evil.

Fretting over whether or how it's coming is simply illogical, focusing efforts
on making sure it's used properly is the only forward thinking, reality
accepting solution.

~~~
motters
Mass surveillance isn't inevitable, it's a political decision and a decision
which is reversible. PRISM and Xkeyscore didn't invent themselves - they took
money and manpower and above all political will to come to fruition. We have
nuclear weapons, but nuclear proliferation isn't inevitable.

Dismissing people who are opposed to the abuse of technology for purposes
which are fundamentally anti-democratic as "illogical" is just a cheap piece
of rhetoric. You should think more carefully about what you're supporting.

~~~
anigbrowl
Technology is like water, it finds its own level. When you make sensors and
storage as cheap as dirt then you're going to end up with widespread
deployment. In many polities, people seem to think that the costs are
outweighed by the benefits (of improved security and so on). I'm not sure that
they are and you are clearly sure that they aren't, but ultimately the
criteria for arriving at a given position are arbitrary.

I mean, lots of people think technology leads to economic inequality by
devaluing human labor, resulting in unemployment and pay stagnation, but you
probably agree with me that it would be futile to pass a law for the express
purpose of limiting industrial productivity per worker.

~~~
bduerst
It is an economic inevitability.

Even if lawmakers passed rules preventing the government from doing it, you
can bet the private sector would fill the market gap. The value of the data is
quickly outstripping the cost of obtaining it.

Better to focus on safety than on prevention.

~~~
alexqgb
"...you can bet the private sector would fill the market gap."

Not if doing so was a felony. Sometimes, safety IS prevention (see toxic waste
/ dumping of).

~~~
trekky1700
There's lots of felonies the private sector commit anyway. Industrial
espionage is already a major market in the world.

~~~
alexqgb
Uh, sure. And maybe we should legalize murder on the grounds that not every
killer is in prison.

Try again.

~~~
bduerst
Don't be so juvenile. Should we ban all axes from the private sector because
someone could use it as a murder weapon?

What about torrenting? How about we ban vehicles because they can be used as
getaway cars for bank robberies?

Obviously the economic of inevitability of marijuana was stopped by the drug
war.

>Better to focus on safety than on prevention.

~~~
alexqgb
I was referring to things that are illegal (murder, kidnapping, assault, theft
etc.),because they severely harm the life, limb, or property of others. I was
pointing out that just because our laws against these crimes do not stop every
instance, there is no reason to abolish the law itself.

You're talking about things which have a wide variety of perfectly legitimate
uses which we (quite properly) allow in spite of the fact that they can, on
occasion, be used to harm. This is obviously and substantially different.

Indeed, when you think about it, these very different things are nevertheless
complementary. We allow potentially dangerous things to exist because we're
(reasonably) well-assured that any truly harmful applications can be dealt
with using the laws we reserve for handling grievous harms.

Regarding the "example" you brought up, the difference between robbery and pot
is that pot is actually quite popular and the war against it is being waged
with profound incompetence and for reasons that are increasingly suspect.
Robbery, on the other hand, is - and remains - widely unwelcome in nearly any
setting, even among thieves.

I'll do you the favor of assuming you're actually intelligent enough to grasp
all this and that you're simply trolling. God help you if you're stupid enough
for these distinctions to be truly baffling.

~~~
bduerst
You were being juvenile by grouping murder with meta data. How does meta data
"severely harm the life, limb, or property of others"?

It's an appeal to emotion on your part, and judging by how you're now lashing
out like a child, you still have quite a ways to go before you mature in this
conversation.

~~~
alexqgb
Note the direct parent. It referred to industrial espionage, not metadata.

[https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman)

------
mpyne
Avoiding it is the easy part.

The hard part will be maintaining the Open Internet in the face of what
Snowden did. He started to force policymakers to realize that a cypherpunk-
style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible with both network
defense needs, normal law enforcement (not to mention the spy agencies that
most countries want to run), and even cultural/jurisdictional questions on
things like data privacy rights.

Because the next question that comes after "why was NSA sidestepping the
Constitution by peeking at the data abroad?" is "wait, _why_ was _my_ data
over in Europe??", just as Germany is now considering making an EU-centric
e-mail so that their citizens' data remains safe from being treated under
American law.

~~~
Zigurd
> _a cypherpunk-style completely open Internet is fundamentally incompatible
> with both network defense needs_

There isn't a middle ground. Either the people have access to strong
encryption, DHTs, cryptocurrency, etc., or we live in a panopticon, a soft
cage, a managed illusion of freedom. The toothpaste is not going back in the
tube.

The real question is whether we need more than 10% of the military industrial
complex we currently have, or whether this is a deadweight, dragging down our
economy and destroying freedom.

------
afutd
"'We think the governance has opted for ubiquitous law enforcement.' Pham
whistled softly. Now every embedded computing system, down to a child's
rattle, was a governance utility. It was the most extreme form of social
control ever invented. 'So now they have to run everything.' The notion was
terribly seductive to the authoritarian mind ... The only trouble was, no
despot had the resources to plan every detail in his society's behavior. Not
even planet-wrecker bombs had as dire a reputation for eliminating
civilizations."

\--Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

~~~
exratione
And Trygve Ytre and Gunnar Larson? Larson was millennia dead, of course. The
civilization at Ytre had barely outlived the man. There had been an era of
ubiquitous law enforcement, and some kind of distributed terror. Most likely,
Larson's own localizers had precipitated the end. All the wisdom, all the
inscrutability, hadn't helped his world much.

\--Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

------
lovemenot
We are in transition between a Nash equilibrium where information was scarce,
to another where it will be hyper-abundant and there's a temporary window open
to exploit the older paradigm, before it completely shifts to the newer. The
solution to the problems of privacy is economic. As the quantity of data in
the world expands exponentially, so the cost of using it scales. There is at
present an unproven hypothesis that more big data delivers proportionally more
value. It'll soon become obvious that this is not the case. That realisation
will be at the root of the next popped bubble. Meanwhile data will continue to
expand, with eventually no actor having a hope of resourcing the capture,
storage and analysis of it all. As signal to noise ratio decreases, so the
business model of any large data gathering entity will fail. The harder they
come, the harder they fall.

~~~
bishnu
Uh, how is this in any way a Nash equilibrium? And the rise of the pervading
surveillance state has little to do with the perceived value of the data
collected.

~~~
lovemenot
As long as we are only concerned about State actors, I'll answer your second
question by pointing out that Congress and international equivalents must
continue to fund their agencies' operations. That will become increasingly
challenging in the face of incessant cost growth and uncertain benefit.

------
higherpurpose
And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology.
Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will
"stop" mass surveillance, as I assume metadata could still be collected unless
we think of ways to anonymize almost everything, too, and not just
decentralize everything, but at least it should severely limit the mass
collection of the content itself. And if we decide as a society that mass
anonymization is what we need (in other words, how the Internet was before
Facebook, Google+ and post-9/11 NSA), I think we'll have the technical ways to
do it.

I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the
author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a
person _more_ freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see
the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing
jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much
"richer" than we were decades or a century ago.

It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any
given country _can_ fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I
think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't
stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a
permanent state.

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg)

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-
Pa...](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/%5BEnglish%5D-White-Paper)

------
brianbarker
Well it's already here, so no. The pertinent question is how can we dismantle
the surveillance state.

~~~
Fasebook
well, we can use the information to play the market and more solidify the
power we already have until the world is our slave.

------
stretchwithme
We can avoid it only if we wake up to the real problem.

We don't get to pick who represents our interests. We can only vote for
preselected choices. This concentrates power in the hands of a few.

And these are more immune to voter desires and more subject to other forms of
manipulation.

Either you exercise your power. Or its up for grabs.

We need proportional representation, at least in the House of Representatives.

~~~
anigbrowl
The city where I live has PR and I grew up in a country where it is the norm.
I like it too, but it's not a panacea, you still get abuse, corruption, and
political horse trading of all kinds.

~~~
stretchwithme
Yes, its not a panacea. If the people are clueless, even the best decision
making system in the world will still yield bad decisions.

Regarding horse trading, I'm not opposed to trading favors. If group 1 really
wants X and don't really care about Y, while another really wants Y but is
willing to give up X, why shouldn't they trade?

Where I object to tradeoffs is where Goldman Sachs and former GS CEO Paulson
trade favors, while those financing the goodies have no representation or even
awareness of what's going on.

------
rayiner
It's refreshing to read a level headed article on this situation that brings
historical context into the analysis. I think the decentralization of
technology point is key and underappreciated. Technology makes dystopia harder
to maintain, not easier. In feudal times, someone who wanted to overthrow an
oppressive tyrant had the very uphill battle of gathering together a large
enough army of soldiers to create an effective resistance. Yet the dystopia of
the future could be overthrown by a single hacker getting into critical
computer or military systems.

~~~
zenogais
Not necessarily true. It depends on whether you think technology is a part of
the problem or the solution. I would recommend Jacques Ellul's "The
Technological Society" for a decent treatment of this point and a fairly
convincing refusal of the idea that decentralised technology makes dystopia
harder - it's just a different kind of dystopia.

~~~
rayiner
I think technology is neutral. At the end of the day, it's always people that
are the problem and the solution. The same technology that allows a despot to
oppress people more easily simultaneously makes it easier for a faction to
overthrow him.

Consider Hitler's Germany. There were factions within the military that tried
to overthrow him, but failed. My assertion is that widely distributed
technology makes it easier for factions like that to succeed.

------
einhverfr
It is an interesting article. What it seems to be getting at is that there is
an elaborate dance of power between individuals and the state. This dance of
power exists everywhere and in all ages. It isn't clear to me that was is
different in kind in Stalinist Russia, though, so part of this article seems
to me to be a half-full vs half-empty glass problem.

Moreover the present is always being rewritten by government and the media.
This is something that's been apparent to a lot of people for some time. Not
only did Noam Chomsky write extensively on this subject but Hilaire Belloc
wrote more or less the same thing about newspapers in 1918 in "The Free
Press".[1]

One of the key things Belloc pointed to was the necessity of non-corporate,
decentralized, topical, and outright propagandist press to counteract the
effects of corporate newspapers. I think he'd be very pleased to see the
current blogosphere. So the author's points about the necessity of
decentralized technology actually go quite a bit further than the points he
makes.

On the other hand though, it seems to me that what this shows is that there is
no bright line between dystopia and normal life. By some measures, of course,
we are already _in_ a surveillance state dystopia. So I am not sure the
question is meaningful.

The major problem that makes the dystopian elements of the present hard to
dislodge however are the twin facts that:

1\. American culture is very much focused on impersonal institutions of scale
(central government, big corporations), and individualism, and this isolates
individuals, denying them support break free from the impersonal institutional
bonds that we have created in substitute for the bonds of family,
neighborhood, and community (which were stronger when I was growing up and are
stronger where I am living right now, Indonesia).

2\. We place our primary protections of the individual not in social ties
(common everywhere else) but in documents which purport to restrain the
central government (namely the Bill of Rights).

My view is that until we can start focusing on building stronger communities,
decentralizing government and bringing the power closer to the people, and
decentralizing the economy (disfavoring large businesses in favor of small
ones) the dystopia will in fact deepen.

[1]
[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018)

------
vezzy-fnord
It's not so much that governments have less control over us, but rather that
technology has enabled them to be more discreet about it. If you've ever read
up on the history of intelligence gathering, psyops and unethical
experimentation in the U.S., you'd be shocked by how much civil rights have
been violated throughout history, even in the supposed land of the free.
However, the old adage holds true: out of sight, out of mind.

It's true that in general we have more liberties now than ever, but it's on
the surface. The trade-off is that behind the scenes, you're worse now than
ever.

As for technology enabling Snowden to leak more than he could have without
digital methods, that's correct. The Pentagon Papers were still relatively
large, though. 7,000 pages out of over 20,000 source material, IIRC.

Your example of the public uncovering a photo manipulation isn't really all
that impressive, though. Just one propaganda piece dismantled, but it's not
like things like this haven't been exposed before the advent of widespread
digital photo manipulation. At best, the public may have a better eye for such
deception, but in the long run these are all trivial issues anyway.

Sousveillance is an excellent thing, but ostensibly it has no major effect on
police conduct. Simply having citizens film officers is not a deterrent, since
the police as an institution are fundamentally overpowered and not given
enough oversight. They're state auxiliaries. It doesn't faze them.

Widespread cryptography is a great thing, but at the moment it's inaccessible
to most people and an arms race. Things will improve in the near future, but
how practical will it be at deflecting bulk surveillance states is beyond the
breadth of this post.

On your last point, you're right about the Church Commission publicly exposing
NSA and FBI malice. But ultimately, the only effect it had was some formal
legislation that essentially did not hinder the agencies from performing
clandestine and unlawful operations any bit. This is your fatal error in
reasoning. You're expecting some surface legislative reform to solve much
deeper structural issues. Remember _Total Information Awareness_ and how
scandalous it was in 2003? Did public outcry end it? Ostensibly it did, but in
reality the agencies just learned to practice better OPSEC and moved to the
same goal, but under different names, and more modularized.

Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? Maybe. But probably not with your
solutions.

~~~
Zigurd
You are mostly correct, but pervasive surveillance of police behavior, even
when it is entirely controlled by the police department results in deep cuts
in the use of force, and of complaints against the police.

Still, that doesn't make me an optimist about "sousveillance."

------
zcarter
An interesting thought experiment that should be informing more of the
discussion is to take inevitability for granted.

If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access.
Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when
everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology
intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can
intrude, instead of a select few.

Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-
have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.

------
adamrights
That's why the importance of removing bad laws off the books, and reforming
what we consider essential liberties is so important.

Yes, the observation state is coming as many have said, but how we apply it,
and who has the power of checks is the the real question.

If every on foot police officer has a camera on their lapel that any citizen
can log in to and monitor, if much of the technology behind the monitoring is
transparent -- if the people ultimately control the monitoring and its usage
is to detect weapons, explosives and true acts of terror...not petty things
like teenagers with pot -- then I believe the coming 'monitored state' will
not be as scary.

So the removal of bad laws. Maximum liberty in the privacy of one's house, and
then crazy cameras and detectors for explosives and the printed guns et al is
where I hope/believe the future can head too.

Call it the green tea party ;p

EDIT: In my world every printed gun, hell every gun taken out of the household
needs to be transmitting its location so I can log on to a 'like google
maps/latitude' type app and see exactly where any weapons in the public space
are...and anyone caught by the monitors or an officer without 'reporting' on
their weapons would face the severest of consequences.

On the counter side though, within the house hold, you can print and make
whatever you want. You can do the vices you'd like, and you can petition for
areas within the public space to do such things, as long as I can also see
where it is taking place and avoid if I desire too.

------
suprgeek
"Can we avoid a Surveillance State" \- Very Unlikely.

At every level of the Government, the incentives are perversely aligned
against this. The local, city, state & national Govts. all want MORE
surveillance not less. They will conitnue to chip-away making it more & more
difficult to remain private & anonymous.

The only force combating these pressures is un-organized & semi-organized
"concerned" citizens (and a few watchdogs).

What will the outcome be?

~~~
swombat
Your comment responds to the title without addressing any of the points made
in the article. Did you bother reading it?

------
joesmo
Even without technological advances, the US public school system has been able
to teach false history (and other subjects including science) for decades.
Sure it can be checked and a minority of students may be angry for being lied
to but this has yet to stop the system. It's true that information is hardly
it's primary purpose, that being babysitting, but the perception that school
is for learning lends it much credibility.

The other major problem is that we are now forced to choose between privacy
and innovation. Want to use any cloud based service or any service that
operates on remote data? You give up any right to privacy regardless of any
corporate policy. Want to be secure and private? Put up with slow tor, no
remote services, and no cell phone. If enough people chose the latter, it
might make a dent in companies' bottom line to possibly get them to use their
clout to influence policy towards privacy. It's unlikely that will happen, and
even if it does, until corporate data can be protected from surveillance
without a warrant, even that is moot.

------
dizzystar
This article misses the main thrust of mass surveillance, in my opinion, and
touches on something I've heard few people ever express.

Someone that lived in my building believed in some aspects of conspiracy
theories. For example, he believed that Facebook was backed by the CIA. Why?
According to him, if you thought about it, all of that information that they
had to spend months digging for was now given to them for free, by upfront
admission.

The point is that we are willingly giving up our rights to privacy. We are
openly using, and promoting to our friends, various sites that expressly user
our data for their own means. We are the ones who are printing free copies of
the keys to our castle.

We are already halfway there. This trend will only get worse, in my opinion,
and at the end of the day, we will blame the government, but really it was
only us to blame because by openly publishing a large part of our private
lives, we imply permission for anyone and everyone to have that information
for free.

~~~
darkmighty
Another argument that goes across this one is wether we can prevent at all
essentially having all our lives "deducible" without sacrificing technological
progress with two things in mind:

a) Demanding better answers or better functionality ultimately relies on
surrendering information (information problem)

b) Computing power will allow machine-learning algorithms to deduce a lot from
very little (computing power problem)

Novel crypto may eventually produce solutions to this, but it's unclear. An
example, regarding location privacy:
[http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf](http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/locpriv.pdf)

------
fleitz
Sure it's easy to avoid surveillance state dystopia... learn from Winston...

O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the
loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But
it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.

He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

------
chroem
How I wish that this title weren't presented as a question...

~~~
saraid216
Why? HN's favorite law applies perfectly fine here.

~~~
chroem
That's exactly what I mean. Despite the content of the article, the title
really shows that anything other than mass surveillance is just wishful
thinking at this point.

------
ChuckFrank
I worked on this. The Author has tried to examine the question about how to
deal with a Surveillance State at a personal level. I don't recommend all the
projects that I work on, but I certainly recommend this one.

M Against M by Declan Tan.

[http://www.amazon.com/M-Against-Declan-
Tan/dp/0982280998](http://www.amazon.com/M-Against-Declan-Tan/dp/0982280998)

------
sentientmachine
The question is, which civilization will most thoroughly utilize the
superpower that is the internet and getting millions of people to act in
unison, as one.

We will need new founding fathers to re-write the book on what the most
perfect union looks like. Perhaps capitalism is not the best system,
considering everyone can instantly know what everyone else is contributing or
not contributing.

~~~
onnoonno
Maybe we shouldn't be thinking in terms of utopia/dystopia or good and evil.
If there is one thing about us, it is technology marching on.

Maybe we're just slowly being converted (or converting ourselves) into the
borg. And it isn't brutal, it is cozy, nice, a little bit dull maybe, because
we are working on losing our ape-like rawness. If it would be brutal, it
wouldn't be efficient, and we highly value efficiency! We have the drugs for
'fixing people', and the neuroscience progresses. Maybe we'll simply end up as
some kind of big, self-aware, computing foam covering the whole planet. Which
many here would describe as 'dystopian', yet it is interestingly close to the
simple idea of 'utopia' from, let's say, the movie 'Avatar'.

------
lotsofmangos
I think the more pertinent question is how do we get out of a surveillance
state dystopia? We've been in one for quite a while now.

------
nawitus
Avoiding surveillance is easy, but it costs money. It turns out most people
don't want to pay for it, and the market decides in favour of surveillance.
(I'm talking about voluntary surveillance here. Even if there's no voluntary
surveillance, governments could obviously still spy on you).

------
drdeadringer
Avoid?

We're here.

------
glasz
sure we can. or could, rather. if we really would do, so many other things
would not be.

but we won't. we are sheep. and we like it.

------
snizzysnaps
I'm tired of this argument. Really.

LISTEN UP: There is only this _tiny_ fraction of the population that cares
about surveillance, represented by a tech minority, Hacker News, and Reddit.

The rest of the country could care less. They're 10x more outraged that
Netflix seems a little slow this week, or that their favorite jelly donut is
out of stock at Krispy Kreme.

We've had a surveillance state for 30 years, and nothing is going to change
that.

If you don't want to be surveilled get rid of all of your electronics.

The truth is, the gov't is going to continue on the path of a Brave New World,
not 1984.

Don't believe me? 50% of ALL drugs produced in the world are used by
Americans. All most people care about is their next bump of Oxycontin with a
chaser of Xanex, and the next bit of TV or internet nonsense they are going to
piss their time away on.

Edward Snowden proved - that deep down - the masses don't care, and they
certainly aren't going to do anything about it.

I wish this circle-jerk would end.

~~~
iamwithnail
They don't. But they should. And that's part of the problem.

