Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Surveillance Society Page 2 of 4

Why Elites Are Creating Surveillance States

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On June 3, 2019

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It’s commonplace now to note that China is a surveillance state.

But most other countries–including the UK and the US–are on their way. Cameras proliferate everywhere, virtually everyone carries a phone which is tracked constantly (and 5G networks will be so precise they can tell which room of a building you are in), and audio surveillance is increasingly being added. (That much of this surveillance is private, rather than government, changes little.)

AI + various recognition algos (face, gait, etc…) and cheap long term storage means that, increasingly, it is possible to know where people were, when, and store that information for years. Cameras and phones and other devices which listen in, plus access to all chat, phone, email, and other messaging means we know what they were doing and saying.

1984 was nothing on this. Big Brother couldn’t store information (no video tape even) and someone had to actually be watching the camera and listening in when you did something The Powers That Be didn’t like. If no one was watching, you got away with it.

The endgame, as I’ve been pointing out for years, is a society in which where you are and what you’re doing, and have done is, always known, or at least knowable. And that information is known forever, so the moment someone with power wants to take you out, they can go back through your life in minute detail. If laws or norms change so that what was okay ten or 30 years ago isn’t okay now, well, they can get you on that.

Surveillance societies are sterile societies. Everyone does what they’re supposed to do all the time, and because we become what we do, it affects our personalities. It particularly affects our creativity, and is a large part of why Communist surveillance societies were less creative than the West, particularly as their police states ramped up.

Surveillance societies also just suck to live in: paranoia, fear, little freedom.

So why create them? I mean in one sense the answer is obvious: Surveillance is control, and powerful people always want small people under their thumb, and small people can be sold on arguments like, “This stops crime!” and “Oh, think of the children!”

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But there are three specific reasons for this upsurge in the surveillance state beyond, “We can, so why not?”

The first is that elites have become very aware that modern military technology is mostly not in their favour. Iraqis fought the US to a standstill. The US military had to pay militias to let it leave. You don’t do that if you won. The Taliban is straight up winning in Afghanistan. The biggest and arguably the most expensive military in the world has lost to opponents who don’t have one percent of its budget. Israel lost to Hezbollah the last time it invaded Lebanon, and even lost the e-lint war.

The issue is that a big military like America’s can’t be defeated on the battlefield by rabble, but technologies of area denial (most notably IEDs) mean that large parts of any sizeable country can be made into no go zones. The state can’t rule them and neither can the militias really (because air power can be used to devastate them).

Meanwhile technologies like drones, and, I suspect, in the longer run, weaponized robots, are actually technologies that will be more useful to the weak than the strong. Bombers that cost a billion bucks and can only be made by huge firms or government organizations, and then require teams of specialists to run and maintain? Those are weapons of the strong.

But drones and weaponized robots and IEDs are or will be technologies that any competent mechanic/engineer will be able to make.

What is even scarier is that, as Bush and Obama made clear, drones are weapons of assassination. Like daggers and pistols in earlier eras, they make it possible to kill important people and are really hard to stop.

That will remain true as they disperse out to non-state actors, which is already happening.

They are also excellent weapons of sabotage. A few drones shut down Heathrow Airport, Britain’s most important airport, for days, without having to do anything beyond buzz about.

So, the technological soup to which we are coming makes assassination, sabotage, and area denial easy (as does cyber warfare). A single ransomware attack can shut down an entire bureaucracy, private or public.

The only way our elites can see to stop this is to know what everyone is doing all the time. Oh, there is one other way, but they are ideologically opposed to it.

The Rise of Inequality

The other way to stop people from sabotage, assassination, and insurgency is to make life good. People who are happy, expect the future to be better than the past, and have great social ties (love/friendship) don’t commit violence except when it is socially acceptable violence.

But this requires actually letting ordinary people have stuff: money and good futures. It means not treating them badly at work. It means sharing power (because there is no shared wealth without shared power over time). It also means, in an increasingly small world, actually giving developing country inhabitants decent lives–equality within and between societies.

If you are the richest rich in the history of the world, you sure don’t want to do that. Moreover, you are aware that you have so much, and that other people want it, and you are scared. Especially because you know serious disruptions to the social order will occur as climate change and ecological collapse worsen.

So, to keep your position, and save your lives when things go bad, you need a surveillance state. People have good reason to hate you, the smarter among you realize that, and know that only real, credible fear will stop them.

Remember, the surveillance state, combined with the technologies we’ve discussed, already means the state can easily kill and capture you. If they know where you are, who all your friends are, and everything you’ve done or do, it’s just a matter of visiting some violence on you, and they have plenty of violent capability. Finding you is the important part. The rest is easy.

A Grand Experiment in Cost

Traditional surveillance societies were expensive. The East German Stasi reputedly had one-third of its population spying on the other two-thirds. That’s ludicrous. It guts productivity, making the state poor. Combined with the creativity effects of surveillance societies, you will eventually lose to healthy, non-surveillance societies.

But what if you only had to pay a few percentage points of people to spy on the others, and, if necessary, kill or capture, the rest of the population. What if most of the work was done by AI, algos, and robots? Even better, this gets rid of the need to keep a large number of internal police and spies loyal, so you need a much smaller class of people to keep your surveillance state running.

But wait! It gets better! (Worse.) What if these new technologies mean that you don’t actually need peons? What if you can do the manufacturing, delivery, and service jobs all with combinations of AI and robots. Who needs workers? Just give the peons a guaranteed annual income large enough for them to buy your shitty goods and services, stick them in sub-par housing, and run the society mostly without them!

Oh sure, the same technology could be used to create a utopia (luxury-automated communism) but why do that? That would mean you wouldn’t be the richest, most powerful elite the world has ever known.

As members of the powerful elite, the problem of peons and minions revolting has always been the thorn in your bowl of cherries.

Finally, finally, technology offers a solution. A possibility of a permanent state where you never can, or will, lose your power.

Give it a little longer and make sure that you get access to the new gene-editing technologies (and the peons don’t), and you can even give yourself another permanent advantage by making yourself and your children actually, biologically superior to the hoi polloi.

The possibilities! The possibilities! If you can just hang on and get all of this into place, this could be the greatest age of aristocracy and autocracy the world has ever seen, and one that has no reason to ever end.

Ahhhhh.

It’s always good to be rich and powerful, but potentially this is the best era ever to be rich and powerful, with the best yet to come!

The Telecom Revolution Is Mostly Authoritarian

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On May 14, 2019

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All major communications advances have had both liberating and authoritarian uses. And, I believe, every one has been stronger on the authoritarian side than on the liberating side.

(Originally published Jan 3, 2018. Back to the top, because this needs to be re-emphasized.)

Writing improved access to knowledge, but it was primarily used by nobles and temples to track slaves, debt, and workers wages (in grain). It enabled centralized states and a vast web of debt-slavery (with interest rates in Mesopotamia often at 30 percent or so.) Without writing, centralized states always amounted to feudal states; with writing, central administration, and bureaucracy were possible.

Taxes could be tracked, property assigned, and citizens could, in effect, have files (and very often did).

The telegram, which triggered the real beginning of the modern telecom revolution, centralized control in capitals. Viceroys and governors lost power, rebellions were more easily crushed (because news could travel fast) and companies could be run from HQ far better.

Each continued step in the electronic telecom revolution has continued the centralization, and the invention of recording devices and video cameras made possible a type of surveillance not possible before.

The problem with prior surveillance states was that they required a lot of people. They were inefficient. Paying everyone to watch everyone else has sharp limits. It also doesn’t record everything: What you were doing 14 years ago at 2:17pm in the afternoon is not usually available to be used against you now, when circumstances have changed, and something “on you” is needed.

Modern computer networks, which allow files to be easily shared, mean that your life is available to anyone with access, which increasingly, due to all the leaks, means anyone who really wants to know.

These records already control a vast amount of your life: Your credit score is used not just to determine how much money you can borrow, but often by landlords to see if they will rent to you, and by companies to decide if they will hire you. A criminal record makes almost all good jobs unavailable, and you can’t just “leave town” to avoid that.

China is putting together a central scoring system which will give every single citizen a number. Spend a lot of time playing computer games? Lower score. Have friends who say bad things about the government online? Worse score. And so on.

Meanwhile, the combination of security cameras everywhere and biometric recognition systems based on face, gait, and even infrared profile, means that combined with AI, where you are all the time can be tracked and stored. Cameras increasingly have audio attached.

And heck, most people in the first world now voluntarily carry a phone with them which acts both as a tracking device and a bug (turning the microphone on to listen to you is trivial).

Online, everything you do is tracked: where you go, what you buy, who your friends are, what sort of words you say, what your political opinions are, and so on. This information, while it still misfires often, can generally tell if you’re sick, what you’re sick with, what you want to buy, how your finances are doing, if you’re pregnant or have a young child, and far more besides. It will only get more all-encompassing as AI and algos improve, and as more information is hooked into the web.

It takes quite a bit of work now to go dark, and a great deal of work to leave your past behind. Even faking your death is harder than it used to be.

Further, computer networks make centralized control far, far easier. Even telephones in the age of expensive, long distance calls were not as good as what we have now. You can run Shanghai from Beijing or New York: or New York or San Francisco from Shanghai.

There has been a liberatory effect, best understood by those of us old enough to remember before the internet was widely available: It amounts to “information at our fingertips,” and it is far more a good than a bad. No longer, if we don’t know and don’t have a book at our fingertips, do we have to find an expert or run to a library for most inquires. If we want to learn about many things, including advanced topics like engineering or law, we need only an internet connection.

This is a real increase in freedom from experts.

But this is outweighed by the horrors of close supervision, as in Amazon warehouses, where workers are tracked not even minute by minute, but in seconds per task, by remote electronic supervision.

This is hell. This is the sort of supervision that could be used only rarely, at great cost, in the old world, because the supervisor had to be right there, with you.

Meanwhile, drones assassinate people in every continent but Australia (I think) and Antarctica, from central control in America. This easy assassination is something no one could do 30 years ago.

This is technology with hellishly authoritarian potential, and history tells us it will be used that way. The printing press may have broken much of the power of the Catholic Church, but it also led to states we still call absolutist.

The same will be true of these telecom technologies, especially combined with AI behavioural pattern recognition.

The bet, on the part of elites, is that this tech breaks the inefficiency problem of classical authoritarian surveillance states: Only a few people, comparatively, are needed. It will require a few percent of the population at most, not the previously necessary twenty to thirty percent for true comprehensive surveillance (with all the possibilities of petty corruption that then ensue: The USSR’s surveillance was extensive and, eventually, worthless.)

There is a widespread myth in our society that Progress is always Good.

It is not. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it isn’t. Generally, it is mixed, with bad dominating.

Right now, in much of the world, the good of the telecom revolution seems poised to be swamped by the bad (and this is without even discussing the data coming in showing that the more time you spend on your phone/computer, the unhappier you are. This data is not mixed, it is virtually all bad.)

Technology which can be used by elites to make other humans inferior, will be. It always has been, and it always will be, and the only way that is challenged is by commoners rising up, often violently, to insist otherwise.

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Amazon Rolls Out Face Recognition to Police

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On May 22, 2018

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Our panopticon is on track:

Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.

Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. According to its marketing materials, it views deployment by law enforcement agencies as a “common use case” for this technology. Among other features, the company’s materials describe “person tracking” as an “easy and accurate” way to investigate and monitor people. Amazon says Rekognition can be used to identify “people of interest,” raising the possibility that those labeled suspicious by governments — such as undocumented immigrants or Black activists — will be seen as fair game for Rekognition surveillance. It also says Rekognition can monitor “all faces in group photos, crowded events, and public places such as airports,” at a time when Americans are joining public protests at unprecedented levels.

This is only one piece of the full panopticon toolkit, of course: Various technologies which allow for seeing through walls will mean that eventually the authorities and most large corporations will know or be able to know everything you do, all day, no matter where you do it, but it is still part of an escalation.

China has particularly been a keen adopter of this sort of technology (though not from Amazon, obviously).

The core problem authorities are trying to solve here is part of the surveillance paradox: In the past, surveillance societies have just been too costly. When you need to have people watching other people, it takes too many people, and the watchers aren’t productive.

The second part of the paradox is harder to deal with, which is that surveillance societies tend to become uncreative: When you know everything you do or say is being judged, you tend to internalize the external rules for safety.

This surveillance doesn’t have to be governmental, of course, a measure of creativity in America shows a decline in children from the 80s onwards, almost certainly due to the widespread adoption of helicopter parenting and the tethering of children, so that they do not control their own time but are constantly under adult supervision.

This is only a real problem, however, societies exist which are more free than yours. If everyone is living under a surveillance society, then there is no competitive issue: Everyone has drones (er, human drones.)

But elites are also betting that mechanical drones, AI, robotics, and so on will reduce the need for humans to be creative: Machines will do that, and do it in ways of which their masters approve. Much safer than letting humans be creative.

Ironically, it may be that widespread social collapse due to various environmental issues may be our best bet at avoiding our masters desire for a steady state authoritarian dystopia.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The True Panopticon Will Read Your Thoughts

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On May 9, 2018

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We have this view of the big nasty surveillance state which was set by the novel 1984. But 1984’s technology was primitive: Big Brother couldn’t record, for example, so if no one was watching a monitor while you did whatever Big Brother didn’t like, you got away with it.

But Big Brother had nothing on what is coming down the line. In China, businesses are already making their employees wear caps which measure brainwaves, and they will move you about or even send you home based on your brainwaves. It’s not all bad; if an air traffic controller’s brain waves went into a pattern which showed lack of concentration ability, for example, they would remove that controller.

MIT has recently announced a headset which can read speech we didn’t actually say:

MIT researchers have developed a headset that can identify words you think of but don’t actually say, by reading signals the brain sends to the face and jaw during internal speech.

The AlterEgo headset captures the neuromuscular signals that occur when people intend to speak. It then uses a neural network to reconstruct the word.

This isn’t the same as reading thoughts, but a lot thoughts we would never say do hit that neuromuscular network, then get inhibited. We’ve all had the experience of “biting our tongue” — carefully keeping things we really want to say to ourselves.

This is still early days, and these are early and crude technologies. We know that the part of our brain which is aware and which considers us tends to be behind the times: The decision to do something is made before we are aware of it, we then back-fill with justifications for decisions we already made.

We can tell that, and in time we will be able to tell that with cheap, mobile equipment, and I am reasonably sure we will be able to tell in advance what the decisions are. We will be able to read intention, and read thoughts that don’t get to the face and jaw, even.

I trust the implications for freedom are obvious.

And this is all before we get to behavioural modification. We’re better at this than we think we are right now, through the mode of gamification, used by terribly addictive social media websites like Facebook and Twitter; but we’re terrible at it in the nitty-gritty of neurons and neurotransmitters and so on, because it’s so complicated.

Still, in time, we will be able to directly manipulate the brain and body to produce emotions and even thoughts on demand as well as to inhibit them. We’ll be able to make people like, hate, love, or fear, and do it directly.

This will have vast therapeutic value, to be sure. It could create a heaven. But such direct control over individuals will be abused, and it will almost certainly be abused at scale, over entire societies.

Because it is control, and people with power (this doesn’t just mean governments) always want more control, and always use it unless forced not to.

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Another Mile to the End of Privacy—and Freedom

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On February 5, 2018

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Privacy and freedom aren’t quite synonyms, but they are closely related.

he Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

Those who want to know everything about you want to control you. Whether that is to get you to buy things, or to make you work harder, or to form  your opinions, or to be able to arrest you whenever they want (and have the data available to always have something on you), doesn’t matter much.

We had freedom, such as it was, because we couldn’t be tracked easily. More and more we don’t, and this is qualitatively different from most older surveillance societies, which did not have minute by minute records going back years and years.

You will never be free in this new state. Don’t do anything that could be used against you, even 50 years later when mores and laws have changed.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

Do NOT Use Bitcoin Assuming It Is Anonymous

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On January 27, 2018

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Blockchain is a fundamentally totalitarian technology. It keeps track of every transaction ever made. Some crypto-currencies are better than others, but Bitcoin isn’t particularly anonymous.

Researchers at Qatar University and the country’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University earlier this week published findings that show just how easy it may be to dredge up evidence of years-old bitcoin transactions when spenders didn’t carefully launder their payments. In well over 100 cases, they could connect someone’s bitcoin payment on a dark web site to that person’s public account. In more than 20 instances, they say, they could easily link those public accounts to transactions specifically on the Silk Road, finding even some purchasers’ specific names and locations.

The researchers point out that they used only easily spotted addresses and simple matching techniques. They didn’t exploit, for instance, methods that other researchers have proposed for making less obvious connections between bitcoin addresses that identify “clusters” of addresses associated with dark web black markets. Nor could they use the means available to law enforcement to compel online services like the popular bitcoin wallet company Coinbase to cough up secret bitcoin addresses. “Our analysis shows a lower bound of what can be found,” Boshmaf says. More well-resourced and motivated hunters could potentially trace even more would-be anonymous bitcoin spenders, even years later.

The most anonymous technology for making untraceable purchases is known as “cash,’ which is why multiple countries are moving to phase it out (India being the largest), making it difficult, in particular, to make large purchases. Even places like the US and Canada, with their 10K reporting limit, haven’t raised that limit in decades, while inflation has made 10k a smaller and smaller amount of money.

Blockchains are far easier to use for totalitarian purposes than for non-totalitarian purposes. If you intend to use them for anonymity you MUST have done the necessary research into how to do so.

In general, using the internet for anything you want to remain private is dicey. The internet is not set up for it, and most powerful private and public actors in the world don’t want you to have any privacy. Understand this in your bones: What you do online is tracked, it is hard to make it anonymous, and it is often stored for long periods, so even if they can’t track it today, or choose not to, if you become of interest or techniques change, everything you’ve done online, now for decades, may turn into an open book.

This is becoming true offline as well, with the rise of surveillance cameras, often equipped with audio and permanent storage, combined with biometrics and pattern matching. The new AIs, while they aren’t going sentient, are extremely good at this sort of activity.

Still, offline is a harder problem, cash transfers are easier to conceal and harder to track, if you’re smart.

Know this, understand this, and act on this politically. Anyone who wants to remove cash is the enemy of anyone who values freedom. Anyone who wants blanket surveillance is the enemy of freedom.

There are no exceptions to this. This is law, natural law. Learn it in your bones, and use it to recognize the actual enemies of freedom.

Align yourself as you choose, but understand that the big killing and oppression is generally done by large actors, not by lone predators from whom government promises to protect you.

Government is a great slave. But as a master, it is a terror. If you don’t control your government, someone else will. And right now, someone else does.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

The Slow Bipartisan Slide to Authoritarianism

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On January 17, 2018

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The funniest thing about Trump are those who feel he is of a piece, separate from US history and somehow a break from it. That this government is significantly, qualitatively worse than those that came before, rather than an extension of it. (A good example is immigration policy, about which Trump is somewhat worse than Obama, but only somewhat, and where Obama had a chance to end Bush’s policies, he embraced them, instead.)

We now have the spectacle of the success of the cloture vote for re-authorization of section 702 of FISA, which allows warrantless spying on Americans who have contact with foreigners, and which has been changed to allow the database of all such conversations to be searched, trolling for crimes.

These seems like a fairly clear violation of the Bill of Rights prohibition on, well, warrantless searches, but there you go.

Eighteen Senate Democrats crossed the line to make this possible and so did 65 House Democrats. Obama, of course, supported the FISA bill (which was bad even without this newest addition).

Indeed, going back to 2001, the Patriot Act, the 21st century “daddy” of authoritarian overreach was opposed by only one Senator out of 100 (and he’s no longer in the Senate).

One can cavil that at least less Democrats voted for this, but somehow “enough” always do, and those who know how legislatures work will suspect that those who didn’t were given “walks” so they can say they voted against.

There are three likely possible outcomes of our ongoing realignment period. One is left-wing populism. The second is right-wing populism (a very different thing, and not what Trump is actually doing. Its policies are what Bannon prefers.)

The third is an authoritarian surveillance state which attempts to freeze current power relationships for as long as possible.

And that’s what too many Democrats and Republicans are more than okay with; that’s what they want.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Biometric Recognition Systems Are Just Totalitarian

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On September 12, 2017

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So, the next iPhone will have facial recognition unlocks.

This will be easy to beat, since the web is full of pictures of, well, almost everyone. Just use a hard to crack/guess password, people.

But it is a swell and dandy totalitarian technology. We are closing in on facial recognition which can only be defeated by full masks. Gait recognition is being worked on as well, retinal is well understood, fingerprint, etc.

As I warned years ago, combined with ubiquitous cameras, infra-red, and so on, and even without the foolishness of cell phones, tracking devices, and bugs people voluntarily carry with them, virtually all of your movements every day will be tracked. Cameras increasingly have mics as well, so it won’t just be video, but in many cases audio. You won’t be able to remember what you did ten years ago, but those with access to the system will know.

This is a panopticon like nothing the world has ever seen. Yes, the older world was high-surveillance by people, but it was nothing like, “We know exactly what you did at 3.33 pm 12 years, two months and three days ago,” and the surveillance was done by people you knew.

Any sensible society with the least concern for either privacy or civil liberties, would outlaw this technology. It will also absolutely crush creativity.

In the meantime, black bloc or not, if you are protesting, go fully masked (not partially), with mirror shades, and do something to alter your gait.

Of course many countries are making full masks illegal.

When this sort of tech is fully deployed, 1984 will look like a utopia.

Enjoy your freedom while it remains and be bitterly amused that the best chance we have for preventing this stuff creating a totalitarian nightmare is catastrophic climate change.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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