Category: Surveillance Society Page 2 of 5

Policing the Police

On June 1, 2020

GUEST POST by Webstir

In this time of police brutality, who can we depend upon to police the police? Who can we depend upon to police the prosecutors? The judges? Our lawmakers? You. That’s who. It’s your job. More than that, it’s your duty to your fellow man. And it’s not really even very difficult. All it takes is a little creative thinking.

Know this: If you’re protesting, you’re being surveilled. But to protest effectively, you must come to the protest organized. To do so requires that you surveil. To surveil effectively you must preserve your anonymity. If you don’t, anticipate a retaliatory response that will attempt to destroy your life. Or, even take it.

A smart first step is to hire a lawyer. The lawyer is your public face. They are ethically bound to preserve your anonymity so long as you aren’t using their services to commit a crime. But lawyers aren’t cheap. The way around this is to gather as many people you trust as you can and pool your resources. Send one of your pool to hire the lawyer and have them issue a Freedom of Information Act request to your local law enforcement agencies. Have them seek names, ranks, and badge numbers of every officer in the agency’s employ. Hell, if you’re enterprising, you can have the lawyer seek disciplinary records as well.

And remember, that same lawyer will also help save your bacon should you find yourself locked up – which you very well may.

Next, enrich the information you’ve gathered. Start plugging the names into public information web sites like Intellius, TruthFinder, Spokeo, or BeenVerified. These sites are a wealth of information. They will likely tell you email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, criminal histories, debts, relatives, and close associates. Other resources are county property record web sites and the Secretary of State web sites. If these require personal identification to access, use your lawyer. Take the data you found and then track down their social media profiles. Download the pictures of them from the social media sites in their civilian capacities and record any posts that appear useful.

Now it’s time to put the information you’ve gathered to use. Assemble a packet of each and every officer with a plain clothes face picture. Use your pooled resources to print hundreds of these packets and distribute them among your pool and among protestors. Make an electronic copy and distribute it to your associates online. Remember, you’re being surveilled. There are black hat cops among you and you’re going to want to be able to identify them. If someone is advocating violence and you don’t know him or her, check the list.

At the protest, use your information. Buy a bullhorn. When the cops get close, start calling them out by name. Tell them what you know about them. Tell them you know where they live. Tell them you know who their family members are. Tell them you know how much they’re in debt. Tell them about their latest post on Facebook.

The police rely on fear to control you. Being just a badge number instead of a human allows them to do that. Destroy their illusion of anonymity. Make them scared. Think about it. What would you do if a crowd of angry protestors were telling you they know everything about you down to your latest social media post? Me? I’d begin worrying about my family. I might also begin to think about a career change. Think too, about the likely response of the law enforcement agencies once they know all their information is out there. A likely response is to assign some of their resources to protect their dwellings and families. These are resources that aren’t hitting you upside the head with a baton or spraying mace in your eyes. That’s a win.

Also, take pictures of badge numbers when you find yourself in the thick of it. Once home, track them down on your database and distribute widely on social media. Tell the story of what you saw the officer do and post pictures and video of them if you have it. Tag them in the post. Let them know you’re watching their every move.

Finally, this tactic doesn’t have to be restricted to the police forces alone. Prosecutors and elected officials are often every bit as complicit as the cops themselves. Remember who is giving them the green light. Use the same tactics on them. Know your enemy. And remember, “[t]hose who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Stay peaceful, but be prepared to fight power with power. Knowledge, is power. Exercising it is your duty. Go forth, and sow fear among your oppressors.

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.

Protect Yourself from Retaliation After the Riots

By Ian Welsh

On May 30, 2020

29 Comments

In the years since the Ferguson riots, prominent protesters have been systematically killed. Nobody knows who is killing them, and police somehow can’t catch anyone.

The most likely explanation is that they are being killed by cops.

In New York, the man who filmed the choking death of Eric Garner was repeatedly hassled by cops, and is now in jail.

After the Minneapolis riots, the police will take revenge. If they know who you are, they will come for you. If they can find a way to get you legally, they will. If they can’t, they’ll take care of you anyway.

Fortunately, we are in the age of Covid-19.

WEAR A MASK. During the day, wear shades as well. Do not carry your phone, it is a tracking device which the police can use, retroactively, to see exactly where you were at all times. If you must have a phone, use a burner. If you are going to take pictures and video and upload later, make sure you don’t have people’s identifiable faces in them. Do your research into how to upload data safely, in a way you can’t be identified. To begin with, do NOT use a US-based VPN. I suggest a VPN from an unfriendly country: Vietnam, Russia, whatever.

Also, if you are willing to destroy property, make sure to destroy all surveillance cameras first. Every camera you destroy may save multiple people from jail or death.

Insurrections such as this one come to an end. The cops will want revenge, and they will take it.

Protect yourself.

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 End of Public Anonymity Is Close

By Ian Welsh

On January 24, 2020

32 Comments

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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Thank God I Was Born Before Cellphones

By Ian Welsh

On July 30, 2019

19 Comments

Parents, your child’s specific location and current activity should be none of your goddamn business. (Yeah, I know this one will get love.)

Called “Safe Campus Smartwatches,” the wearables “send the children’s locations in real time to their respective parents’ smartphones”https://t.co/cAJW9FR7NC

— Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) July 29, 2019

When I was young, I walked the streets of downtown Vancouver at age 6. I took the bus on my own to the YMCA. After class there, I wandered around downtown before going home. As a teenager, I walked through Calcutta’s slums alone.

My parents knew where I was in very general terms, and I was expected to show up for meals and bedtime. Other than that, I did what I wanted outside of school.

Modern parents seem to have this idea that children are incapable of taking care of themselves. This may be true, if they are never given any freedom or the right to make their own decisions, but it’s not true otherwise.

So what I see is that modern adults get to 18 and suddenly the supervision stops and guess what? A lot of them are incapable.

The conversation around adulting is absurd. “Adulting” is simply the removal of close support and supervision. More of life is now up to you. (Minus, of course, your boss, who also has far more control over you than a boss did 40 years ago.)

This isn’t to say that taking care of oneself is necessarily easy. It’s harder now, in many countries (and especially in the US) than it was two generations back, because jobs are shittier, inequality is up and the social safety net has been reduced. No question, it’s harder. But it’s not harder than it was, say, in the 30s.

We are what we do. We become what we do. Children who are subject to constant monitoring, who cannot make their own decisions about what to do, who cannot be free, never learn to be free. When they are suddenly given the partial freedom we grant after high school, is it a surprise they don’t know how to “adult?”

Nor are children possessions. They are people. They deserve a reasonable amount of freedom, an amount that is far more than we currently grant in the US and Canada. The idea that they are incapable is ridiculous, for most of history, children (and certainly teenagers) had many of the same responsibilities as adults far younger than we now allow.

Yeah, it’s good we don’t have actual child (pre-pubescent) labor. It’s not good that we keep them firmly under thumb.

(And yeah, it’s not about danger. The danger is miniscule, and such danger as exists is almost all from family and other known adults, not from strangers.)

Children treated like they can’t make choices and can’t handle freedom will not learn how to make good choices or handle freedom.

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.

Who Bans or Encourages Crypto?

By Ian Welsh

On July 24, 2019

9 Comments

Iran, apparently, intends to legalize crypto.

India intends to ban it.

Iran needs a way to get money and resources in and out of the country, because it is under sanctions.

India has had a huge war on cash, ostensibly to crack down on corruption. (Well, partially that, but partially to give corporations a cut of every transaction.)

It’s fairly clear who is doing what, why.

Also, anyone who cracks down against cash is anti-freedom. This includes our otherwise decent Nordic brothers. Crypto isn’t actually a freedom technology, by the very nature of the ledger (tracking every transaction). It’s more naturally a totalitarian technology, we just haven’t caught up to the fact (just as drones are a weapon of the weak).

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.

Why Elites Are Creating Surveillance States

By Ian Welsh

On June 3, 2019

18 Comments

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!”

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

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

By Ian Welsh

On May 14, 2019

63 Comments

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.

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.

Amazon Rolls Out Face Recognition to Police

By Ian Welsh

On May 22, 2018

31 Comments

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.