Category: Surveillance Society

The detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s husband has led to much hand wringing.  He was forced to give up the passwords to his phone and his computer, was threatened with jail, and was only allowed to have a lawyer if he chose one of the police’s list.  He was not, of course, allowed to be silent.  This is the law, nothing illegal was done.

But of more interest to me is an article by Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the Guardian.  He details the threats made by the government if he did not destroy or hand over the files, including the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement.  The most telling graph is this one:

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like “when”.

We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint.

It’s not just digital in the sense of online.  Again the endgame is this: recognition software linked to cameras, drones, even spy satellites.  Facial recognition, gait recognition, IR signatures and more.  This stuff is pretty reliable.  You will be tracked 24/7.  You will go nowhere without it being possible to know where you have gone.  You will do nothing online without it being tracked.  The hysteria over online bullying will be used to make online anonymity (as limited as it already is), straight up illegal.

Everything you do will be tracked.  Audio is being added to many cameras now, as well, so they won’t just see what you do, they will hear it.  Fools will dismiss this as paranoia, it is simply fact, this is the end game, this is where the surveillance web leads, when you add the telecom revolution on top of this.  This is more intrusive than what Orwell had in Big Brother, because they didn’t record, if someone wasn’t listening at the time, you were ok.

I have long said that I will know people are serious about change when it is a public ethic that a surveillance camera is evil, and the moment one is put up, it is destroyed.  If you want to stop this short of that, you will need draconian laws.

1) No audio surveillance.  Period.

2) The government cannot use surveillance to follow, watch or listen to anyone without a court warrant.  That court warrant expires in X years (probably 3), and once it expires, the person is given all records gained.  Furthermore there can be no blanket court orders, every one must be individual.

3) No public cameras.  If you need a place watched, hire someone to do it.  We have an unemployment problem anyway.

4) Private surveillance cameras in private places only, no transmission of those records off-site, no linking of those records to anything else (the standard practice in many stores is to photograph you as you pay and link that to your credit card) and all records are destroyed after 24 hours.  This applies not just to customers, but to employees, who should have rights as well.  As a business the results of their work are your business, the second by second record of how they do the job is rarely your business and if it is, hire a supervisor.

5) A right to privacy.  The current laws assume that if you are in a public place you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.  Those laws were not made with blanket surveillance and the telecom revolution in mind.  To put it in vulgar terms, regular photography is ok, but you cannot be stalked.  Someone cannot follow you around, photographing you, whether in person or remotely, without your permission, the above mentioned court-order or perhaps,  reasonable suspicion you are about to commit a crime.  I”m leery of the last, simply because of the abuse of such clauses we’ve seen from the police.  (ie. good laws cannot protect bad people, see Machiavelli.)

All of the above laws must be backed up with criminal sentences, not fines, or they will not be obeyed.

As I have said repeatedly, individuals have the right to know what their government is doing, and government has no right to know what citizens are doing except under very prescribed circumstances.

If you want some form of surveillance, the only good form would be making sure that every police officer has a camera on them at all times.  Even that I have doubts about, since sometimes it actually is best to let someone off with a warning.

A working society requires people to have discretion and use it.  No set of laws works in all circumstances.  But as with children, if they won’t use their discretion, if they won’t behave properly, then draconian laws are necessary. It is clear that our lords and masters think they have a right to track us 24/7.  That can’t be allowed, and what will happen if it occurs (and it’s close) is far worse than a few criminals getting away because there wasn’t a camera nearby.

I don’t have a lot to say about Prism, it’s nothing that I find surprising at all.  I would have been surprised if they weren’t doing this.  That does not, of course, mean that they should be doing it.  Basically, assume you’re being watched at all times. That does not mean a human being is watching you, but assume that an algorithim is watching your behaviour, and will flag you if your pattern of contacts seems suspicious.  Once you are tagged, assume that everything you’ve done online, and most of what you’ve done in the real world if you’re in most major metropolitan centers, can be back traced.  As pattern recognition becomes better, this will become even easier to do, and, indeed, automatic.  The online and the offline will be linked together.

Again, this is nothing I didn’t believe was already happening, which isn’t to say that proof isn’t a nice thing to have, for all the dullards with their heads in the sand, who refuse to believe the obvious till it becomes as obvious as a boot stomping their face, over and over again.

This feeds directly in to the nature of our society, both domestically in Western countries and internationally.  Our society is fundamentally unjust, as the charts in the Failure of Liberalism post make clear.  It is fundamentally unfair internationally, and much of the so-called progress of the last few decades has been a mirage (for example, Indians now live on less calories a day than they did 40 years ago.) The women being raped, and the men and women being butchered in the Congo are killed because of how we structure the international economy, and the people who die in factory fires, likewise.

Surveillance states aren’t uncommon at all.  Chinese and Japanese history are full of curfews, and people having to carry papers at all times, and restrictions on travel, and so on.  The late Roman empire was, in certain respects, a surveillance state.  Of course the USSR was, East Germany was, and indeed, many European countries, even today, require citizens to carry and show papers.

Citizen.

The problem with surveillance states, and with oppression in general, is the cost.  This cost is both direct, in the resources that are required, and indirect in the lost productivity and creativity caused by constant surveillance.  Surveillance states, oppressive states, are not creative places, they are not fecund economically.  They can be efficient and productive, for as long as they last, which is until the system of control is subverted, as it was in the USSR. We forget, in light of the late USSR’s problems, that it did create an economic miracle in the early years, and tremendously boost production. Mancur Olson’s “Power and Prosperity” gives a good account of why it worked, and why it stopped working.

Liberalism, in its classic form, is, among other things, the proposition that you get more out of people if you treat them well.  Conservatism is the proposition that you get more out of people if you treat them badly.

Post war Liberalism was a giant experiment in “treat people well”.  The Reagan/Thatcher counter-revolution was a giant experiment in “treat people worse”.  The empirical result is this: the rich are richer and more powerful in a society that treats people like shit, but a society which treats people well has a stronger economy, all other things being equal, than one that treats them badly.  This was, also, the result of the USSR/West competition.  (Treating people well or badly isn’t just about equality.)

Liberalism, classic and modern, believes that a properly functioning “freer” society is a more powerful society, all other things being equal.  This was, explicitly, Adam Smith’s argument.  Build a strong peacetime economy, and in wartime you will crush despotic nations into the dirt.

If you want despotism, as elites, if you want to treat everyone badly, so you personally become more powerful and rich, then, you’ve got two problems: an internal one (revolt) and an external one: war and being outcompeted by other nations elites, who will come and take away your power, one way or the other (this isn’t always violently, though it can be.)

The solution is a transnational elite, in broad agreement on the issues, who do not believe in nationalism, and who play by the same rules and ideology. If you’re all the same, if nations are just flags, if you feel more kinship for your fellow oligarchs, well then, you’re safe.  There’s still competition, to be sure, but as a class, you’re secure.

That leaves the internal problem, of revolt.  The worse you treat people, the more you’re scared of them.  The more you clamp down.  This is really, really expensive and it breaks down over generations, causing internal rot, till you can’t get the system to do anything, no matter how many levers you push.

What is being run right now is a vast experiment to see if modern technology has fixed these problems with surveillance and oppressive states.  Is it cheap enough to go full Stasi, and with that level of surveillance can you keep control over the economy, keep the levers working, make people do what you want, and not all slack off and resist passively, by only going through the motions?

The oligarchs are betting that the technology has made that change.  With the end of serious war between primary nations (enforced by nukes, among other things), with the creation of a transnational ruling class, and with the ability to scale surveillance, it may be possible to take and keep control indefinitely, and bypass the well understood problems of oligarchy and police and surveillance states.

Surveillance is part of the system of control.  “The more surveillance, the more control” is the majority belief amongst the ruling elites.  Automated surveillance requires fewer “watchers”, and since the watchers cannot watch all the surveillance, long term storage increases the ability to find some “crime” anyone is guilty of.  When you add in recognition systems based on face, gait or other criteria, you have the theoretical ability to track people from the moment they leave their homes till they return.  Other measures make it possible to see what people are doing inside their own homes (IR heat maps, for example).  A world in which everyone is tracked all the time is very possible.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

This is one of the biggest problems the current elites face: they want the smallest enforcer class possible, so as to spend surplus on other things.  The enforcer class is also insular, primarily concerned with itself (see Dorner) and is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people.  Not being driven primarily by justice or a desire to serve the public and with a code of honor which appears to largely center around self-protection and fraternity within the enforcer class, the enforcers’ reliability is in question: they are blunt tools and their fear for themselves makes them remarkably inefficient.

Surveillance expands the reach of the enforcer class and thus of the elites.  Every camera, drone and so on reduces the number of eyes needed on the ground.  The Stasi had millions of informers; surveillance reduces that requirement and the cost of the enforcer class.

The reliance on surveillance is however a weakness, one of many.  One of the simplest ways to reduce the power and reach of the oligarchy is to destroy surveillance equipment, much of which is very easy to reach.  I have frequently said that we will know that people are becoming more serious when they start destroying surveillance equipment, when it becomes an ethical imperative to do so; ideally when people believe that blanket surveillance is an ethical wrong.

I, am, thus interested to see that the Barefoot Bandit Brigade destroying surveillance cameras.  In the US, those who oppose current elites directly seem strongest around Oakland and in the Pacific Northwest.

It is best that the surveillance system be challenged and dismantled before it becomes comprehensive; once every person is tracked all the time it will be far harder to do so, especially as audio surveillance also expands.  Once everyone is both tracked and listened to, it will be virtually impossible to organize resistance.

The comprehensive surveillance state, combined with measures to deal with the loyalty of the enforcer class, is the end game: it is where current trends lead.  It will be justified to the public as a measure to decrease crime and protect innocents (especially children), but it will lead to a more advanced Stasi state.

Note: minor edits made.