
Surveillance Kills Freedom by Killing Experimentation - humanetech
https://www.wired.com/story/mcsweeneys-excerpt-the-right-to-experiment/
======
oedmarap
The generalization and broadening of scope of such laws is one of the most
troubling agendas/trends of the surveillance state.

From what I've observed, countries are only more and more eager to adopt
intelligence gathering methodology in a collective manner ( _à la_ Five Eyes).
I'll quote Atlas Shrugged for this one:

> There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is
> the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough
> criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it
> becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation
> of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the
> kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively
> interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on
> guilt.

~~~
hi5eyes
girl uses song lyrics in a instagram caption post

gets slapped with "an eight-week community order, placed on an eight-week
curfew and told to pay costs of £500 and an £85 victim surcharge."

[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-
merseyside-43816921](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921)

oddly enough I had just learned about this and laughed about it 2 days ago

surveillance state ethos is becoming a joke in the mainstream zeitgeist with
memes propogating about "the fbi man" watching our selfie cameras and asking
our google home/alexa device "wiretap" what the best recipes are available...
most people are very aware of what's happening with their data and they've
chosen convenience

~~~
nyolfen
has the UK gone fucking insane in the last ten years or so? was it always like
this? it seems like i just keep hearing these mind-boggling police state
stories lately. maybe in the US we have to worry more about getting shot by
the cops but i'd take that astronomical chance over worrying about posting
song lyrics on my instagram or making a dark joke:
[https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7686779/vile-grenfell-
effigy-t...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7686779/vile-grenfell-effigy-
thought-police-rod-liddle/)

~~~
petre
When you have to worry about getting shot by the cops rather than the
criminals, then there's something seriously wrong with your society.

~~~
b1r6
I'd rather have that than the UK dystopia.

~~~
F_r_k
I'd rather have neither of those

------
vbuwivbiu
[https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-
emotions/2016...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-
emotions/201602/ravens-know-theyre-being-watched-bird-brain-theory-mind)

People (and ravens) cannot help but act differently when they're being
watched. Being watched (by anonymous viewers) is a stressful vigilance state.

~~~
tokai
I feel a little bad about it, but scaring corvids have become somewhat of a
past time for me.

You can get very close to them, when they are foraging on the ground, if you
turn your face away from them and only look indirectly. Then when you've
gotten close you stare directly at the poor bird. Except for jackdaws, I
haven't met any corvid that isn't gravely startled by a such sudden leer.

City birds are very used to us humans paying them no attention and happily
dart around our legs. But if they get the sense you are watching, can no
amount of french fries make them take the risk of sticking around.

~~~
tzs
Careful!

Crows (and probably other corvids) learn to recognize individual humans, and
are smart enough to know that whether a human is friendly, indifferent, or
hostile varies from human to human and is fairly consistent for a given human.

Oh, and there is evidence that they have some way of communicating their
knowledge of individual humans, so a crow that has decided to dislike you can
tell other crows you are bad, and they will start acting as if you had wronged
them, too, and can pass on the message.

Corvids are fun to play with. I've got several Steller's jays [1] coming by
every day to get peanuts, and recently a flock of about 20 crows. But with the
crows I'm limiting my messing with them to things that they can't interpret as
hostile or annoying, because I do not want 20 crows trying to annoy me back.

The crows would win.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steller%27s_jay)

~~~
Theodores
Before I make a few on-topic words, first I have to commend you for having got
the taste for bonding with 'god's messengers'. I advise you to indulge
further. You will be in good company, read about Tesla the man and his
relationship with feathered friends. Go fully avian, try and work these bird
brains out for yourself as you are doing, it is all extremely rewarding.

In a former workplace I used to feed the gulls and film them in slow motion. I
had them taking homemade wholewheat bread (that I baked for them...) out of my
hand with them flying quite hard into the wind. The bread could have letters
written on them so a video could have a 'get well soon' or 'happy birthday'
type of personal message spelled out for someone. Getting that one take with
'nobody' dropping the squares of bread was an art, particularly since slo-mo
requires being massively quick.

I had names for about twenty of the gulls, could individually recognise fifty
of them as 'regulars' and, depending on the gulls busy schedule, could have a
hundred of them to entertain.

Unlike my other workmates I had them follow me as I walked to and from the
office, not just at lunchtime, my presence would always be noted. It would
take them a few hundred yards to realise I had 'the wrong bag' and to calm
down. I had plenty of assistants - workmates that sometimes needed to chill
out - but they never had the full 200 yards of 'Mexican wave' from the
feathered ones.

The 'Mexican wave' from the gulls was actually quite cool. Fancy clothes and
fancy cars might impress some but having a flock of birds follow you in some
ribbon in the sky has magic to it that money can't buy. Well it can if you are
into your home baking and don't mind spending $0.50 on flour every day.

Anyway, that is way off topic, however, as it happens I really would like
facial recognition for gulls, to use the tech of surveillance for some
conservation work. As well as the faces the missing feathers, broken feet and
other characteristics could be part of the A.I. with each gull resolving to a
made up name by way of a one-way 'hash'. Therefore if one of 'my' gulls was
spotted two miles away (e.g. Percy) then he/she should resolve to the same
name in someone else's picture. They should be able to find out where this
particular gull normally hangs out and also have the same given name of
'Percy'. If 'Percy' then crops up regularly in their photos then they will
have a name to the face, he won't be just a random gull, more of a
recognisable neighbour.

The app is not something I have chosen to dedicate my life to, however, it is
an interesting thought experiment in the age of surveillance. This is because
we only see the oppressive side as victim, obviously with 'nothing to hide'.
To understand things that stress you out it is helpful to imagine what the
view is like from the other end of the telescopic panopticon. This makes it a
bit easier to survive in the more normal 'Winston Smith' 1984 mode.

In 1984 there are a few details that can be missed on the initial few read-
throughs. He has health problems that aren't due to Big Brother but then they
are. There is also the small matter of him actually doing very little with his
life. The 'proles' are able to procreate, party and live a little. Meanwhile
our protagonist who is 'party' is not partying. He never goes to dinner
parties, never entertains kids in a wider family, doesn't go on holiday or get
on with those normal things. Big Brother ain't stopping him but because
Winston has a fight going on in his head he isn't able to emotionally engage
with people doing normal happy life things. Obviously Orwell wasn't writing
that detail in and Winston's health issues may have been autobiographical but
these also happen to be finer points of surveillance society if you are not a
'prole', 'proles' being the 'nothing to hide' crew.

~~~
tokai
I have thought about if computer vision could be used to identify individual
birds as well. Maybe image data with ultraviolet light included would be
useful. A digital camera that captures the ultraviolet spectrum might be
expensive though.

------
djacobs
This is the way we should be talking about privacy. Using vivid examples that
are relevant to everyday people’s lives on both sides of the political divide.
Avoiding broad, philosophical-sounding proclamations.

I hope people on HN are taking note.

------
_mu_
As a librarian at a large university library I feel this.

I'm uncomfortable poking too much around in scihub. Even though it's not
something a national security agency would care about (I hope). Could any
connection between papers from scihub and myself, be a huge issue both with my
career and potentially for my institutions position when negotiating licenses.
It might be paranoid, but there are so many possible ways to be compromised,
that I choose to direct attention elsewhere.

I find it sad that I'm afraid to inquire on one of the most important
developments in scholarly dissemination in resent years. I'm a research
librarian for Price's sake.

~~~
kanzure
I have a few thoughts about privacy for you.

Don't use academia.edu or researchgate. It's a big story waiting to get out.
There's absolutely no privacy on these sites and they track everything. I get
an email notification from these sites every time someone does a _search
query_ that happens to display my paper as a result. I also get notified when
someone has been reading a paper through their platform. The privacy
implications are really gross. I hope that they delete this data, stop
collecting it, and that nobody ever gets a copy of that.

Academic PDFs downloaded from academic publishers include deanonymizing
information such as your name, your institutional affiliation, IP address, and
sometimes your email address. I wrote a tool to help remove this information
from pdfs:
[https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia](https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia)

As for scihub, many of your concerns can be mitigated by having an offline
copy. There are torrents published by scihub (or libgen's scimag, which is
supposedly a mirror of scihub?). I have had a lot of trouble getting a
relatively complete copy due to low seeder bandwidth and lack of seeders.
There's a forum somewhere that you can request libgen users to seed certain
torrents, your mileage will vary.

I think every academic library should have a complete copy of scihub. Keep in
mind, scihub isn't just using library ezproxy accounts, she also has a large
cache of files. Supposedly that's 70 million papers at the moment. It's about
~50 terabytes or something.

My recommendation is that scihub should be running pdfparanoia on all of their
papers. It only removes visible watermarks. I haven't investigated invisible
watermarks yet. I'm definitely interested in those.

Turning up the paranoia dial a little more, I am concerned that scihub may
have a deal with a nation state actor for the purposes of phoning home about
research article downloads from certain countries, in exchange for allowing
scihub to continue to operate. Going further, this could include pdf malware
(or metadata tainting for fingerprinting) or browser exploits. This level of
international espionage would be very useful to a nation, and might explain
any nation's interest in keeping scihub operational despite political or civil
court pressures. Of course, it's also helpful that scihub is running in an
area of the world that doesn't really care about demands from U.S. courts, so
none of this is necessary to explain the continued existence of scihub.

Ever since I began thinking about the deanonymizing data inserted into pdfs by
academic publishers, I've been wondering about collaboration between academic
publishers and nation state entities. This is a concern even in absence of
scihub existing. Also, many of these publishers have really bad web security
and it's trivial to take data like apache logs or whatever, because they are
publishers not software experts especially the smaller publishers. Who else is
taking that data, and what can they do with it?

Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human
progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against the
priority of making complete mirrors of scihub. I am deeply worried about that
data trove disappearing. It's one of our most important data sets...

~~~
jancsika
> Academic privacy is extremely important for the freedom of science and human
> progress, and I haven't figured out how to juggle those priorities against
> the priority of making complete mirrors of scihub.

Just to be clear-- the fundamental priority is for _scientists_ to demand free
public access to the research that pubic funds have paid to produce. There are
many ways to achieve that. It could but doesn't necessarily mean mirroring
scihub or even using scihub.

Whatever the approach it requires no technology. It's a social problem. Until
some sizable group of prominent scientists take a stand and demand that
discovering and reading research papers be as easy as discovering and reading
a Wikipedia entry (and accessible/maintained by a similarly reputable entity)
the fundamental problem will go unsolved.

Until then practical discussions about digital privacy are unfortunately part
of a continual cat-and-mouse game.

~~~
yuhong
I dislike the current debt-based economy that depends on extracting more money
from consumers anyway. Student debt and universities is a good example of the
problems. You can also see this in things like textbooks.

------
pmarreck
Also ever relevant are Martin Fowler’s thoughts on the matter of privacy or
lack thereof

[https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-
privacy.html](https://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html)

------
moretai
It's odd that people welcome it. I've had a person tell me that he doesn't
mind being watched because it helps catch terrorism and crimes and such.

~~~
Valmar
That's because they've been brainwashed into blindly accepting mass
surveillance being supposedly necessary, due to terrorism, crime, etc.

Problem with the reasoning is that surveillance doesn't really stop terrorism
and crime.

Indeed, if I were a criminal worth my salt, I'd slither into positions where I
am effectively exempt from surveillance, or could control how surveillance is
used against me.

~~~
AmericanChopper
I think it’s a bit dismissive to say they’ve been brainwashed. With some of
the career choices I’ve made, I’ve given up huge amounts of my expectation to
privacy. I thought about these things and came to my own conclusion for my
personal life, and I don’t think brainwashing ever came into it.

I have a big problem with how deeply flawed the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is
(it’s almost a direct Kafka reference ffs), but people are allowed to have
their own opinion on privacy and surveillance.

~~~
livueta
This may have been implicit in your comment, but it's not just dismissive:
it's actively counterproductive if your goal is increasing awareness of the
real harms of indiscriminate surveillance.

In today's polarized political environment where terms like bot/shill/NPC are
thrown around willy-nilly, implying that someone lacks agency over their views
is a fantastic way of getting them to shut down and refuse to engage with you
as anything but a tribal enemy.

That's a particular shame because opposition to indiscriminate surveillance
has the potential to transcend partisan feuding, as exemplified by Schneier's
careful selection of examples that have appeal across the spectrum.
Sanctimonious sniping by tech elites at them darn brainwashed masses is one
way to ensure that an anti-surveillance coalition of 2a defenders and
immigration reformists remains a fantasy.

Note that I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting
terrorism/crime, but tone of messaging is everything.

~~~
PavlovsCat
They made up their mind to be okay with it a long time before that comment.

> I don't disagree that mass surveillance is a poor way of fighting
> terrorism/crime

No, it itself is bad for reasons that make other crimes and terrorism bad.
It's a crime worse than terrorism, we're just too primitve to have it on the
books yet. And plenty of entitites using surveillance also commit terrorism
and other crimes, and are in bed with all sorts of people who do all sorts of
things, as long as its useful. It's a great "tool" to fight activism of all
sorts, and it's used for that.

Actually, I would say it's not _even_ a tool, it's a weapon. I hope future
historians will get a chuckle out of this, to me it's like people arguing
about how useful a minigun is for hunting deer. As Hannah Arendt said,
intellectuals are great with coming up with all sorts of high-fallutin,
complicated explanations, they're the best at not seeing the obvious, not the
quickest to understand. It really just boils down to this: when they came for
X, Y and Z, it was more comfortable to rationalize that than to realize that
they're going through the alphabet, backwards, and that all of us could have
been born as anyone, and that even when they came for Z, they really came for
you.

But you see, if people don't care about others, I also don't care about them.
If X Y Z are not enough for someone, I'm not going to bend over backwards to
explain to them them how they will also get affected at some point, how it
already changed them, how ultimately, _nobody_ gains from it, not even the
very tippity-top, and so on.

If a kid kicks a dog, yes, you probably shouldn't descend on it with fury and
preach to it for hours on end how horrible a person they are. But you _also_
probably shouldn't just say "it's great you have this much energy, but check
out this pillow". No, they hurt another being, they wouldn't want to be hurt
that way themselves, it's not okay and they shouldn't do it again -- if there
is no way to tell them that without them getting upset, let them get upset.
Some things are simply too serious to be _too_ soapy and sloppy about.

At this point, the sheer amount of crimes people have NOT cried bloody murder
about, the rationalizations they already invested in, are enough to make
people upset regardless of how nice you are. Nevermind personal choices, we
are too many _generations_ into too much bullshit for anyone to come away from
a good, hard look unscathed. If they want to hold people who haven't even been
born hostage with their petty selves, their fragile egos, their life choices
that can't have been for nought, then they need to be overcome, not catered
to.

The quality of seeds is not determined by how a rocky surface interacts with
it, but what happens when there's fertile soil and some rain. Sometimes when
the seeds are actually fine, but there's still a holdup, the soil might simply
not be fertile, it might be rock. Maybe it needs more time and rain, but
either way you don't wait around until something grows or doesn't. Instead you
do rounds, and only after you've done at least one round can you even _begin_
to justify focusing on the patches where nothing has grown. But instead, those
patches actually demand a veto right, seeking to stop the whole thing even
though the fault is with them.

If you get hung up on "brainwashed" you're simply not going by the strongest
most possible interpretation, and _take_ offense at a word people people use
in casual conversation without a problem for decades. And that's not even
getting into serious thinkers, or any of that.

> _Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall
> should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and
> in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not
> unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat
> difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the
> way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it
> possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never
> existed at all._

\-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

> _The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the
> discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large
> sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that,
> through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by
> the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like
> an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble._

\-- Hannah Arendt

Someone who not sometimes trembles to their core because of that, who never
loses sleep because of the realization that right now, millions of people are
in physical and/or psychological _agony_ , which is carefully curated and
hidden from sight -- how could I be moved in the least by them trembling over
being called anything but innocent yet wise?

Let's say 5% of the people had no problem with being this "unflattering"
because that's a near invisibly tiny thing compared to what others endure and
what's at stake. Those, without interference from the rest, would probably
achieve more than 30% who have the top priority to never be offended and never
be sad.

How many women were suffragettes, how many weren't? This very notion that it
all needs to be made inoffensive and smooth enough, until everybody can agree
on it, itself may impede progress way more than people who are more blunt
about it than you.

------
mar77i
Interesting to see hard-learned lessons in software development generalized
into the rest of life so neatly.

> We can’t really justify all our decisions, many them are hunches, many of
> them are wrong.

[https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-
developer...](https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-
developers.html)

------
zzo38computer
Certainly there is too much surveillance which not only prevent your freedom
but also waste too much energy.

------
tatrajim
In China now the goal is the make surveillance omnipresent. Already in premier
universities, including Peking University, classroom lectures are routinely
surveilled to monitor inappropriate discourse.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Can China have an innovative science and technology sector under persistent
omnipresent surveillance??

~~~
pmarreck
No. But let them figure it out the hard way. Those who do not remember history
are doomed to repeat its mistakes.

~~~
chongli
It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through in
order for a tiny elite to learn. I can't think of a better solution, though.

~~~
pmarreck
> It's a terrible thing for well over a billion people to have to go through
> in order for a tiny elite to learn

And this is why we have democracies. Also, if history is any indication, it
won't end well (although East Germany's end was remarkably peaceful).

------
hazeii
Not a new result, but should be more widely known and understood.

An argument easily extended to running an adblocker suggests you'd going to be
more creative and productive because there are fewer eyes watching you.

------
_Schizotypy
People on MySpace censored themselves after 9/11? I didn't know middle and
high schoolers were so politically aware.

~~~
wand3r
I didnt see this in the article and myspace was started in 2003, 2 years after
9/11.

~~~
coldtea
The parent makes a sarcastic comment, based on:

> In the months and years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many of us
> censored what we spoke about on social media or what we searched on the
> internet.

from the TFA.

i.e. Which those "many of us" were, and what "social media" were they
censoring themselves in around 9/11?

Since

(a) the only successful website that one would classify as "social media" back
then was MySpace, and

(b) it was mostly for teens,

(the parent asks) if people on social media back then censored themselves,
does that mean that teens of MySpace censored themselves? Either the article
is BS on that part, or teens at the time quite politically aware....

~~~
acct1771
The TFA?

