Ian Welsh

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

Category: Surveillance Society Page 4 of 5

Extinction or Whole World Totalitarianism Events

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On January 4, 2015

52 Comments

It’s time to talk technology, and the catastrophic futures it makes possible—and how to avoid them.  This isn’t just about climate change, which, if it goes really wrong, could wipe out humanity (if, for example, the oxygen cycle gets screwed up: entirely possible.)  It is about a wild variety of technologies, from ubiquitous surveillance to genetic engineering, to nanotechnology.  It is not hard to forsee the possibility of creating a totalitarian state in which revolt is impossible.  The new neuroscience, which is becoming more and more reliable at telling when people are lying and seeing decision points before we are consciously aware of them, combined with implants and surveillance, makes it possible to envision a society in which revolt not only couldn’t succeed, it couldn’t even be thought about, or not for long enough to do anything about it.

(Kicked back to the top as it’s important and timely given the work that I will be doing over the next few months.)

Likewise, the Galts may one day decide, with improved methods of production, that 99% of humanity is superfluous to requirements, and get rid of the useless eaters.

We can also imagine a world of tailored humans: through genetic engineering, nanotech, cybertech and so on, in which some people are really are so superior to the rest of humanity that the mass are ants.  We forget that in much of history it was so.  The old Punch comics, with the small, twisted, deformed poor people were not caricature, that’s what people who worked hard and had inadequate nutrition all their lives looked like.  They were weaker, stupider and uglier than the nobility.   This wasn’t innate, but it was real.  The nobility saw themselves as better than their inferiors because they were.

That superiority was environmental, but if we decide to ration transhuman technologies based on who can pay, well, it will be more than environmental, especially after multiple generation of artificial selection.

All of these technologies  are vastly dangerous, and all of them suggest the possibility of the creation of catastrophic end states: the complete end of humanity, the creation of totalitarian states, the creation of a new untouchable aristocracy; surveillance societies in which the very possibility of even mental privacy does not exist.

We could turn away from them; we could reject them.  Those who say that is impossible are wrong.  A world state could probably pull it off, in the same way that the Tokugawa Shogunate was able to control key technologies for centuries; a system which ended only because it was upset from the outside.  Absent the possibility of an outside shock, a world state could run for a very long time.

But these technologies also offer the ability to create radically better ways of living: truly affluent societies with what amount to replicators; humans who suffer far less from pain, disease and mental infirmity; an end to aging; and wondrous possibilities for creation of artifacts and life forms we can’t even imagine today.  There are those who feel that anything “unnatural” is to be avoided: I say that the historical and pre-historical record is one of mass rape, mass murder and mass extinctions, of violence and cruelty and want.  I am not willing to put aside transhuman technologies from fear, because the human condition is suffering and fear, and I want that to end.

So we come to points of failure.  While we all live on Earth, to these technologies, we are one society, no matter what our apparent divisions.  We are going to move towards something much closer to world government in the next century, not because we want to, but because without it we are not going to be able to mitigate and reverse climate change, and if we don’t do that, well, we could have an extinction event.  No individual country can manage  the earth’s ecosphere, there will be international organizations capable of using force to ensure compliance, or we will lose billions of people.

Earth is a bad place to experiment.  Changes spread too easily, too uncontrollably.  Nanotech in the wild, genetic changes on a mass scale, neuro-monitoring technology, and so on, cannot be contained to one society, one geographic region, not least because if one group does obtain a decisive advantage they WILL use it to subjugate others.

This is why I support, and have long supported, getting off the rock: spaceflight, and colonization.  Get out into space, into the Oort cloud: learn how to live not just on other planets but in space itself, and we can experiment to our heart’s content, separated from each other by the vast gulfs of vacuum.  If one society goes bad, it doesn’t have to take everyone else down with it.  Add (ideally) a caveat that societies can run themselves as they want, but can’t prevent emigration (they can prevent immigration) and you have a model which no longer has a single point of failure, has a frontier for the discontents to go to, and allows us to experiment with radical changes to who and what we are.

There are two tasks for the next cycle, the next ideological and technological age.  The first is to stabilize the earth, and provide a good living to everyone without destroying the ecosphere.  The second is to create workable space colonization so that humanity is no longer vulnerable to having a single point of failure, and can experiment to find the full possibilities of our new sciences and technologies, fully knowing that many of those societies will go bad, in horrible ways, but hoping that some of them will create radically better ways of living and of being human.

Perhaps we could do all this on Earth, but if we blow it the consequences are too high.  And anyone who has read or lived history knows that eventually we WILL blow it.  Run Earth, the storehouse of virtually all life, conservatively, let the experimentation take place of off-world.

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The Surveillance State is About Power, by Matt Stoller

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On March 24, 2014

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This post is by Matt Stoller,

originally posted at Tech President.

Since 2000, the American political system has been rocked by the dot.com crash, 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse, the housing crash, bailouts, and now, Edward Snowden’s revelations of vast government surveillance that served as an unknown institutional backdrop to much of it. Considering the last fourteen years, it’s time we begin trying to understand the relationship between people with lots of guns and people with lots of money.

When I think about surveillance in American culture, I usually start with a literary metaphor, the great American novel, The Great Gatsby. This is a story about Jay Gatsby, a man who grew up poor, made a fortune as a bootlegger, and then built up a myth about how he came from a wealthy family so as to attract the love of his life. It’s a story about identity, and reinvention, the mystery of who we really are.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby today, it would be a very different book. Well, it wouldn’t be a book at all. It would be a one-page story about a guy who made up a bunch of lies about himself, and then someone ran a credit check.

To me, that’s what it means to live in a surveillance society. Basic parts of the American story, such as the right to be forgotten, to reinvent yourself — these disappeared over the last sixty years, without a genuinely open debate, as institutions justified by the Cold War became institutions justified by the War on Terror.

What Snowden has given us is the opportunity to really have this debate, anew.

So I want to talk about four myths of the modern surveillance society in which we find ourselves. I define surveillance state as a state in which personal record-keeping is automated and controlled by well-capitalized politically connected institutions.

The Surveillance State Isn’t New
The first myth is that this kind of state is new. Every few years, someone prominent makes a claim that we could fall into a dystopia. From Orwell’s 1984 to Snowden’s “turnkey totalitarianism,” they always say we are on the verge of becoming a different kind of society, one in which your every move is logged and tracked by powerful entities. But we’ve been living in it in one form or another for at least forty years.

At some point, we stopped being on the verge, and got there. And now we’re here. We are in a surveillance state, as per the various warnings we’ve received. But what we’ve found is that totalitarianism is not necessarily related to technological capacity. The most totalitarian state in the world today, that of North Korea, is the least advanced state when it comes to digital technology. And the Nazi regime, while it used a quite advanced information technology infrastructure for the time to track down, categorize, and kill Jews, was a totalitarian regime before it was a technologically sophisticated one.

Still, much of what we do is tracked and digitally archived, and it is being used to make decisions about our lives. In one way or another, this has been the case since at least 1973, when Visa computerized its operation, which was shortly followed by credit reporting agencies. So we should move beyond the question of whether we are building the tools for an authoritarian political state, and start talking about what kind of surveillance state we want. It’s a creepy question, but it’s one we’ve avoided talking about, until now.

What Bright Line?
The second myth is that there is a substantive difference between commercial surveillance and political, or national security surveillance. There isn’t, and there never has been. In fact, it’s pretty clear that building the technology and cultural institutions for a mass surveillance state — data brokers, credit bureaus, credit card companies, the NSA, the FBI, and so forth — has been a key part of our tacit unacknowledged national industrial policy since World War II.

I’ll just tell you a quick story about the politics of this state. In the 1960s, Congress actually had what was called a special subcommittee on invasion of privacy, chaired by a Kennedy ally and Congressman named Neil Gallagher. This subcommittee conducted the first hearing on credit reporting agencies. It also investigated early FBI efforts to computerize government data.

It turns out that the first national credit reporting agency, then known as the Retail Credit Corporation, today known as Equifax, was an ally of J. Edgar Hoover. It conducted the background checks for FBI agents. And it was J. Edgar Hoover or the Treasury department that blackmailed and destroyed the careers of several politicians interested in either commercial or political privacy problems. At one point, in 1971, Congress was on the verge of establishing a standing committee called the Select Committee on Privacy, Human Values, and Democratic Institutions, which Hoover sabotaged.

This was prescient — in the 1970s, many of the laws involving both commercial and political surveillance were put in place. Our privacy laws regarding commercial surveillance and political surveillance are looser than they should be, because the national security apparatus protected the commercial sector from the most aggressive politicians who wanted to protect our privacy.

This alliance continues today, which is detailed in Robert O’Harrow’s wonderful book published in 2005, No Place to Hide . After 9/11, the government went on a buying spree, hiring data brokers like Axciom, Lexus-Nexis, Choicepoint, and so forth to fortify the the intelligence community.

The analogy to the Cold War is clear. After Pearl Harbor, the government repurposed Ford and GM into manufacturers of tanks. During the war, the government subsidized the expansion of our industrial base and created technology like radar, the computer, and atomic power. After 9/11, the government repurposed the data broker industry into parts of the government surveillance apparatus. It subsidized the data industry and helped accelerate the creation of the facial recognition, biometrics, and big data technologies.

And even if you dislike government surveillance, you’d have allies in government. The TOR browser, which the NSA despises, was developed with help from the Navy, and its ongoing development is funded by the State Department. The division between the commercial sector and the public sector might be a convenient rhetorical choice, but it is incoherent as an analytical framework through which to understand the politics of a surveillance society.

The Issue is Power
The third myth is that this is a battle between convenience and privacy. I reject this framework, not because I think we can have both but because it’s a sideshow to the real question of power. For example, industry is rife with what are known as “cooperative databases,” or blacklists. There’s one for insurance companies called CLUE (or ‘Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange’), so these companies can share details about whether you have ever made an insurance claim or whether your dog has been mean to the mailman. There’s another for retailers, who can list the names of their employees they suspect of shoplifting. Agribusiness wants data about the soil of farmers who use its products, so that company can use its monopoly to extract as much as possible from the farmers under its thumb.

An executive at Ford Motor recently said that his company knows when anyone speeds, because it has data from all GPS units installed in cars it sells. This opens up the possibility of just getting rid of speeding altogether, or the creation dynamic speed limits based on weather, and so forth. Questions of data privacy are super-creepy. But it’s not just about convenience, it’s a question of power, and who wields it.

And We Are Not Powerless
And the fourth myth is that we are powerless against this surveillance society. We are not. At all. If you look at how our surveillance society evolved, it’s clear that the public shapes it through a variety of mechanisms. In 1968, the Wall Street Journal was reporting on how insurance companies were discriminating against gay men and sexually active single women — these companies would hire the Retail Credit Corporation to send detectives out and get credit reports on people that wanted insurance. Retail Credit would have their men ask neighbors if the man was a manly man, or if the woman slept around. Then these insurance companies would charge higher prices to these sub-classes, or what’s called ‘discriminatory pricing.”

Retail Credit also worked for corporations and the government, doing similar background checks at all levels. Millions of people were investigated to see if they were sexually deviant, and if they were, they were ripped off economically. With such pervasive surveillance, it’s not a surprise that the Stonewall Riots happened, that the gay rights and women’s rights and civil rights movement happened. And in the 1970s, Congress passed laws – weak laws, but laws nonetheless – prohibiting credit discrimination based on race, creed, gender or religion, often spearheaded by those who also cared about government overreach and questions of privacy. And credit, remember, was the first place where most people interact with algorithms and what we call big data.

The public didn’t fight back against surveillance by demanding less of it, the public fought back against surveillance by making the taboo a non-taboo. One democratic response to surveillance is to acknowledge taboos, and take away the power of the watchers to manipulate you.

We are not powerless, and we never have been.

Obviously I can only touch on a few aspects of what a surveillance society means. Surveillance cuts across national security, antitrust, finance, economics, pricing, information policy, and democratic values. It’s a big big thing. The people with the guns and the people with the money have a common interest in ensuring that they are in control of the surveillance apparatus, and that you have as little access to it as possible.

I mean, I’m sure the Department of Homeland Security would love to be able to read the email of everyone getting on a plane, to make sure that no one is thinking of bombing it. That might or might not be a legitimate usage of surveillance. But then, American Airlines would also like to be able to read your email, so that it can charge $10,000 for a flight if it knows you have to be in Los Angeles tomorrow for your mother’s funeral.

It’s time to start making this surveillance regime explicit, and purpose it for the real social problems we face, like disaster relief, climate change, resource depletion, and so forth. We can do remarkable things with the information we collect and analyze, and we can equally do terrible things with it. But that choice, as always, is up to us.

Matt Stoller is a former political consultant. He writes about history at mattstoller.tumblr.com. Follow him @matthewstoller.

Rational People Sell Out: WhatsApp Edition

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On February 21, 2014

24 Comments

A while back I wrote something which made a number of people angry:

Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so.  The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological.  Rational people sell out.

As you’ve probably heard, WhatsApp (the largest messaging system outside North America) was just bought out by Facebook, for 19 billion.  A normal enough story, but Robert Myers pointed me to this article on WhatsApp’s ethics:

He had just three rules as he experimented with the early iterations: his service would defiantly not carry advertising, an experience satisfyingly absent from his Soviet upbringing; it would not store messages and thus imperil individual citizens’ privacy; and it would maintain a relentless focus on delivering a gimmickless, reliable, friction-free user experience.

Now that Facebook owns it, how long will it be before all information is stored, the NSA has a backdoor and there are ads?

Rational people sell out.  When there are bad actors (and Facebook is a bad actor), who have so much money that they can make you filthy rich overnight, it is rational to sell out.  (Assuming they don’t have you already because they funded you with a very nasty contract).

This is a supremely important point.  People are very confused about rationality.  Rational is not a synonym for “good”. It is often rational to be a complete scumbag and to act in ways which will hurt other people (or at least not help them.)  This is true even in the long run, because you don’t have to deal with most people.  Betray millions of people, who cares?  There are millions more who will be happy to give you whatever you want when you are a billionaire.

The response to that, of course, would be “it’s only an app company.”  True, but it’s also a way of communicating without it being so easy to be spied on, and soon that will be gone.   You can’t create anything good in tech, without it being bought out. It cannot be done. People will always sell. Only open source offers the possibility of it, but open source projects, once they get big, almost always take money from dubious sources, because only dubious sources have a lot of money right now, and even a small team of developers still costs hundreds of thousands or millions a year to support.

Ethics which are negotiable for cash, aren’t ethics you can build a society on.  Rational people betray.  Systems that work take betrayal off the table by simply forbidding it, and backing it up with an irrational attachment to norms.  “We don’t spy on people, period.  We don’t torture.  We don’t allow pharma companies to price their drugs so high that people can’t afford them.  We don’t allow vote suppression.”

As I wrote on rationality and ideology in the past:

Note, finally, the use of the word irrational.  We think of irrationality as bad, but rational decision making leads to betrayal.  If someone’s going to offer me more than I can otherwise earn to betray the rest of my people, a lot of folks are going to take that deal unless they have the irrational belief that it’s wrong, and a rational belief that if they do it, those who have an irrational belief in the system will hurt them, or even kill them.

Irrational people don’t sell out. Rational people do: unless they know that irrational people will find them, and hurt them, if they do.

You cannot have a prosperous, free society without irrational attachment to social norms which are not always in the interest of individuals. You must take various forms of betrayal and race to the bottom off the table. It will always be in someone’s interest to exploit people, to pollute, to spy, to torture. Rationality does not stop such behavior in individuals.

The Future of War in the Developed World

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On January 23, 2014

76 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write about the fact that people don’t understand the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan and Mexico for some time.

In simple terms: the US military, the most expensive, most powerful military in the world, lost in Iraq (they had to pay bribes to leave). They are losing in Afghanistan.  In Mexico the state has been unable to control drug gangs.  In Lebanon, the IDF, the most powerful military in the Middle East, was defeated by Hezbollah. Hezbollah also won the e-lint war against the IDF.

(Kicking this to the top again, I want more people to see it. – Ian)

Technology is not necessarily on the side of the great powers, of the big armies.  IEDs are cheap, any halfway competent mechanic can make them with materials that are readily available even in Afghanistan.  Weapons are widely available everywhere, and soon it will be trivial to 3D print most of them.  Drones, which people are so scared of (with reason) are essentially remote controlled airplanes, they are not hard to make, and they will spread to guerillas, resistance movements, terrorists and so on.

These are, yes, terror weapons, as the US, in its use of bombing and drones, well understands.  They are also area denial weapons, weapons that prey on the psyche of the opposition, leaving them no peace and quiet.

They are weapons whose widespread use can and will destroy nations by destroying the peace and stability required for prosperity and normal life.

But they are very, very effective.  They will work in virtually any nation if a large enough portion of the population wants them to work.

Do not think that the more intelligent members of current elites don’t know this. They understand what many on the left don’t: that first world militaries can be defeated, have been defeated, and that it can happen in their own countries.

And I suspect they are very very scared.  The surveillance state, routine assassinations by the executive, the loss of habeas corpus, and so on, are their response.  Total surveillance, and the ability to take people out anywhere, any time, is their answer, which is why I keep saying that I will know people are serious about revolution when they take out surveillance systems as a matter of routine, when surveillance becomes ethically anathema.

Be scared, not because those on the left who insist that modern militaries are unbeatable and all anyone can do is supplicate the powerful are right, but because militaries are very fightable, but such fights leave countries in ruins.  If the elites continue on their current course, in many first world countries, Iraq and Afghanistan and Mexico are the future.  People with no future will fight, and too many people now know how this form of war works.

This is the future of war.  If elites continue on their path of unaccountability, their insistence on destroying the future, and their crushing of prosperity, this is what will happen.

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How to resist in a surveillance state

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On January 21, 2014

23 Comments

I want to highlight two items relating to surveillance of people who dare resist the status quo.  First, your cell phone:

The New York Timesreports that the Ukrainian government is using advanced surveillance technology to track protesters in the streets.

The Ukrainian government used telephone technology to pinpoint the locations of cellphones in use near clashes between riot police officers and protesters early on Tuesday, illustrating that techniques that can be used to target commercial information can serve law enforcement as well.

People near the fighting between riot police and protesters received a text message shortly after midnight saying “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

The phrasing echoed language in a new law making participation in a protest deemed violent a crime punishable by imprisonment. The law took effect on Tuesday.

The device used in Kiev is most likely what’s known as an ‘IMSI catcher‘, which tricks cell phones into thinking it is a cell phone tower. Any phone within a certain distance of the device will therefore send identifying information to it, allowing the operator to automatically compile a list of every person nearby with a cell phone. The systems can also capture web, phone, and text content from mobile devices, as well as automatically serve content like text messages to every phone within range. For that reason, advertisers and corporations increasingly use them to target people with location-specific pitches for products and services.

Back in 2012, a security researcher in the United Statestold an audience of hackers in New York that the NYPD routinely used IMSI catchers at the Occupy Wall Street protests, enabling the intelligence division to keep nearly perfect records of every person in attendance.

Second, corporate infiltration of NGOs and protest movements:

Another estimateof the prevalence of corporate espionage–but perhaps a self-serving one–comes from Russell Corn, managing director of Diligence, a corporate intelligence agency. Corn says that “private spies make up 25 per cent of every activist camp. ‘If you stuck an intercept up near one of those camps, you wouldn’t believe the amount of o
utgoing callsafter every meeting saying, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to cut the fence’,’ he smiles. ‘Easily onein four of the people there are taking the corporate shilling.’”

I doubt it’s one in 4, but I bet it’s high.

Here is the bloody rule: if you are involved in these activities you either don’t take a cell phone,  or you put it in a Faraday bag (I have just learned, joy, that taking the batteries out might not be enough, as there is a backup battery you don’t control, meant to avoid loss during battery changes and so on).  In addition to being a tracking device you take with you, it is also possible to use your phone as a bug, to listen in remotely. Laptops are also problematic if they have a camera, can connect to the internet, or have microphone.  At the least, keep them powered off.

The technological revolution did not happen unless you want everyone to know your business.  There are times when you do, but if you don’t, turn this stuff off.

Next: infiltration.  Assume that your movement is infiltrated.  Figure out how to identify the moles.  When you do, if you’re serious, you need to figure out a way to punish them so  that whoever sent them won’t, or can’t, send more. I leave how to do that to the reader to figure out.

Next, forget democratic decision making when it comes to specific tactical decisions.  One person should know what you’re going to do, and he or she should not tell ANYONE until just before it is to be done, and hopefully too late for effective counter-action.

Finally: assume surveillance.  Learn how to obscure your identity, and learn where the blind spots of the system are.  A lot of countries are making wearing masks during demonstrations illegal, but there are other ways. Again, I leave how to do this an exercise to the reader, but bear in mind, it doesn’t take much to screw up facial recognition, and gloves are still your friend, and not illegal.

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Surveillance States and the End of Freedom

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On August 19, 2013

89 Comments

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.

The Logic of the Surveillance State

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On June 9, 2013

73 Comments

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.

The Logic of Surveillance

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On February 16, 2013

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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.

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