Category: Surveillance Society Page 1 of 4

So, we have this proposal for cameras and mics in classrooms:

Johnson’s not a particularly important person and one can pick apart his logic (teachers don’t have guns), but the logic of unchecked surveillance — of cameras and microphones everywhere — leads to this place and far worse.

Right now, governments and corporations track your every move through your phone. They can force your microphone on and listen to you, and we know that they have. Infrared, gait recognition, and facial recognition, combined with drones, satellites, and ubiquitous cameras mean that it will soon be possible to track citizens’ movements 24/7 and listen in much of the time. Add in the cameras and microphones most people voluntarily put into their houses, which are in no way secure and which EULAs often allow access to anyway, and there is little to none of your life that will be unknown.

We are heading to this place. It is not in question — there is a VAST appetite for information in corporations so they can train their AIs and model and manipulate you, and from governments driven by the idea that “well, if we don’t surveil everyone and anything bad happens, we can be blamed,” from police and intelligence agencies.

There is an argument, put first, so far as I know, by David Brin, that mass surveilance is inevitable. The technology will exist (he wrote in 1998) and it will be used, and the only question is whether it ends up that everyone is surveilled and everyone can watch it, or if only criminals, government, and big corps get to watch and listen, and the rest of us are just passive victims.

I will suggest that there is a third path.

We live in a time when we have repeatedly refused to actually control technology if a profit can be made from it. Obviously, evil technologies have been allowed to run rampant to the point where we may render our entire planet unliveable.

So we assume we can’t control technology: “If it exists, it will be used.”

There is a counter-example. The Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate didn’t like firearms. They limited them and, over time, got rid of most of them except for a few old ones.

That ended badly for them: The American White Ships came, forced Japan open, and the Shogunate fell to a an internal rebellion, whose motto might as well have been “More guns! Lots more Guns! And Gunships! And EMPIRE!”

But only the first part applies to rejecting most surveillance technology because surveillance tech is not a competitive advantage between states (one can argue it makes training modern “AIs” easier, but that is minor).

Surveillance states, where people know that everything they do or say is recorded, create stultifying conformity. Almost everyone acts the same way and the easiest way to act the same way is to think and feel the same way.

Since the age of helicopter parenting and insecurity (which requires kids to go to school and get good grades and do everything right), measures of American creativity have crashed.

But this is a general rule: States where you can’t be different without being punished, where you can’t say or think what others disagree with, are obviously less creative.

Less creative states are less competitive states in eras where technology and culture matter.

If any state is brave enough to outlaw surveillance tech (except in limited circumstances), and do the work to make it stick (ie. re-engineer modern telecom tech, which is designed to be insecure from the ground up, plus be pro-active and criminally punitive to those who violate the law) they will have a massive advantage over surveillance states, technologically and culturally. I’m willing to predict, with near 100 percent certainty, that if most countries go to full-surveillance state mode, whichever ones don’t are the places which will have technological and artistic golden ages — especially if they are also smart enough to welcome refugees from surveillance states.

Freedom; real freedom, is a competitive advantage in eras where technology or culture (really, the two are intertwined) determine who wins. States which embrace surveillance technology will be ones where elites are more concerned with maintaining their internal position, i.e., staying in charge of their society and keeping the peons down, rather than those who look outwards to competition against other societies and who want the most vibrant and interesting culture internally.

The choice to embrace surveillance states is the choice to stagnate.

Many think it is otherwise, “we must embrace all technologies without choosing how they are used or we will fall behind.”

This is an immature stance; a foolish one. The mature, intelligent stance is to look at technologies and see what their results are likely to be, and then use them intelligently, to control technology and not be controlled by it.

Certainly there are technologies that are so bad overall that, as long as we have individual states, we will have to use them or fall behind in a world where those who fall behind are treated abominably; but surveillance isn’t one of those technologies. Rather, embracing it will make societies less competitive and reduce their inhabitants’ quality of life. Its only advantage is for those seeking a steady-state police state or cyberpunk dystopia.

All others should steer well clear, and all individuals who aren’t themselves very powerful should understand that surveillance is intended to dis-empower them — to get the most out of them possible, while giving the least in return, and turning them into automata for the benefit of the overlords (think Amazon warehouses and delivery drivers).

You cannot be more free than if you are unknown to your masters. The more they know, the more they will control. If you let the powerful turn you into a surveillance object, they will wring you dry, and you will have to hope that some society, somewhere, is still free and defeats your dystopia.

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Might as well send anyone who cares for an itinerary:

While this is for smart-phones, old-style cell phones can also be compromised.

If you have a phone on you, even off, it can be used to track all your movements and listen to what you are saying. Even putting it in a Faraday bag will not stop it from storing tracking movements; the moment you remove it, it will broadcast again, and not all Faraday cages are strong enough to block a phone in any case.

You should not carry a phone, at all, if you are doing anything the State or other large actors dislike. So that it is not obvious when they need to be concerned, you should occasionally not take your phone with you on other trips.

If you need comms, find another way other than cell phones. Even a burner isn’t that great -— the second you contact any other phone, you can be compromised. Old fashioned walkie-talkies with pre-agreed one use codes are better. If you need to record or take pictures, use a device which has no internet connectivity without a cable. Nothing wi-fi or cellular-enabled.

There are NO secure online comms, also. None. Things like Tor and a good (non-Western based) VPN make it a bit harder, but if anyone cares enough, they can find you — plus you don’t know what services has been compromised. Tor is heavily subsidized by the security state, a smart person doesn’t assume it’s reliable for anything the US cares about.

If anything matters, use offline comms. If you must send a message, go yourself, make sure neither you nor the recipient have a phone, and leave out any place you habitually frequent, at the very least. If you’re a messenger, same rules: Write it down, then have it burned (not shredded) after receipt.

If you do not personally control the communications network, you do not know if it has been compromised. In the last Hezbollah-Israel war, Hezbollah won the e-lint war: They had built their own private fiber-optic network underground AND Israeli soldiers carried and used cellphones. Hezbollah knew where Israeli troops were, and Israel only found out where Hezbollah troops were when a bunker opened up on them.

In the early 2000s, the Pentagon ran a war game against Iran. The General running the Iranian side, among other things, used motorcycle messengers. The US expected to have e-lint, didn’t, and that lack was one reason they lost the game.

There’s a vast array of very good surveillance tech now, of course. If someone really wants to track you and listen in on your comms, they can. But they assume e-lint will work and they have less human-intelligence than they did.

Finally, if you are doing something the State REALLY doesn’t approve of (not, of course the wonderful American and Canadian states, who are always good, mind you, but only bad states), remember the first rule of getting away with it.

STOP.

Set a date when you’ll stop and become an ordinary, boring citizen. When the date happens, just stop. Wipe everything and walk away.

Likewise, if you ever think something is OFF, stop immediately.

If you have comrades, once you stop, you never contact them again.

The longer you do whatever it is, the more likely some .01 percent audit or some-such will catch you, no matter how brilliant and careful you’ve been.

Also, don’t keep records, eh?

We’re moving into a very dystopian, surveillance state world. Gait recognition, infrared tracking, mics that can hear through walls, drones, and satellites mean the long game will have pretty much everyone under surveillance all the time, even if you aren’t being watched in particular.

For now, however, don’t make it easy for them, and to start, leave the damn phone at home. (Oh, and don’t assume cryptocurrency is anonymous. Even criminals who really know what they’re doing don’t always get away with that. Cash is still anonymous, given proper safeguards.)

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So, you may have heard of Clearview:

The app, says the Times, works by comparing a photo to a database of more than three billion pictures that Clearview says it’s scraped off Facebook, Venmo, YouTube, and other sites. It then serves up matches, along with links to the sites where those database photos originally appeared.

Clearview is only for law enforcement for now, but this is the future. Facial recognition, combined with other metrics like gait analysis, means the end of public anonymity.

There’s a strand of thinking which claims that no one has an expectation of anonymity in public, but the loss of it will be catastrophic. If someone knows who you are, and where you are, they can easily stalk you or rob you when they know you aren’t at home. This sort of technology in the wild (and even in the hands of cops) will lead to rapes and assaults. “I like how she looks. I wonder who she is? Cool, now that I know it’s easy enough to find out where she works and lives.”

It will wind up in the wild. It’s not too far from a reverse image search to this, and the images required for the training are in the wild, as Clearview notes.

Add this to corporate and government databases, with real-time scraping of public phone data and heat maps of public travel become possible. Add it to financial information (every time you use your credit, debit, and charge cards) and even finer grade surveillance is possible. Add in GPS data and/or security cameras and where you are at all times of day will be known.

The potential for abuse by corporations is massive: They already attention farm us, using conditioning techniques to make us click and buy and spend hours a day on social media. (Yes, this is very effective conditioning.) The abuse by your boss, well, just hope you never do–or have never done–anything your boss doesn’t approve of. You ain’t seen cancel culture yet.

The potential political abuses are, I trust, obvious.

And then there is the potential for abuse by parents, who already obnoxiously track their kids in ways that would look ludicrous to previous generations of children and which have, among other things, shown up as a generational decline in creativity.

The larger issue is this: People who are constantly under surveillance become super-conformers out of defense. Without true private time, the public persona and the private personality tend to collapse together. You need a backstage — by yourself and with a small group of friends to become yourself. You need anonymity.

When everything you do is open to criticism by everyone, you will become timid and conforming.

When governments, corporations, schools, and parents know everything, they will try to control everything. This won’t often be for your benefit.

Solutions for this are simple. Make it illegal. Make public images and data private by default and do not allow consumers to opt out of it without real payment per image or data piece. (This will gut training AI, which is good, because most current AI is bad (a topic for another time).)

People should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity. Software like this should be illegal.

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