Saying the public doesn't care about surveillance is oft-repeated reductionism, even around HN, and I think we could level-up ever so slightly by widely admitting that average people are just as complex as you, and have lots of interesting cares, when the context is right.
I'm not arguing they are simpletons who just don't understand tech, but it's quite clear that most people don't care enough to do anything about it. take me as an example. in the abstract, I dislike being the subject of surveillance. but in practice, I don't care enough to sacrifice the convenience of the google ecosystem. I certainly don't care enough to replace my android phone with an iphone, even though I could afford it.
For a couple hundred dollars I can install a computer-vision enabled camera that tracks and logs the face of everyone that passes, the clothes you are wearing and each car that passes. Security systems like Verkada already do this, and it is perfectly legal for companies to install these overlooking busy streets and public areas.
This tech will only get cheaper, smaller, and harder to notice. It's ridiculous to think that mass surveillance will be beaten.
How would this possibly work?
A bill for "my phone is not allowed to eavesdrop" would have wide public support, and would open up the conversation on all the ways that surveillance takes place that does not include listening to conversations.
More than that I'd wager they'd be more likely to support it. As we've seen in the past just advertise it as a way to nab the most heinous form of criminals (terrorists, child predators, etc.) and enough people will be ok with it. Hell, even here, a site you'd expect to be strongly anti-surveileance, I've seen comments that basically equated to "I'm ok with [mass surveillance tech] because it's going to help stop [bad guy group]".
I believe this will be status quo until it becomes increasingly obvious that "terrorists" are gradually coming to include normal political opponents and that these tools are being used by oligarchical forces to suppress democracy itself. It hasn't happened yet, but we're getting close.
Over here in the US, we seem to be accidentally building something that is somewhat similar, but far more haphazard and inconsistent: online outrage mobs. I'd wager more people are self-censoring due to these than anything the US government has put into place.
People have changed what they search for since the Snowden whistleblowing.
I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
the patriot act generates a round of discussion whenever it's up for renewal, but I don't get the impression that there's emphatic popular opposition. IIRC, it actually failed to be renewed this year, but only because trump feared it might be used against him in an investigation.
net neutrality isn't quite the same situation. it's actually important to the big internet companies so it gets some strong support.
> I think the takeaway is that we need to find a better way to speak to the average American about surveillance. Speak in plain terms that matter to them. Or maybe they will just never care?
I honestly don't know what this would look like. imo, a large part of why police brutality gets so much attention is because there are concrete examples of police killing people who didn't do anything to deserve it. if you ask around, you'll probably find at least a couple people you actually know have had bad experiences with the police. what's the equivalent of this for surveillance? seeing toaster ads after you buy a toaster on amazon just doesn't bother people the same way.
It has? I must have missed it. It's regularly scorned on HN, but I haven't seen much mainstream concern about it at all. Certainly not the level of concern that it deserves.
He knows you when you're sleeping,
He knows when you're awake,
He knows when you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake.
The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed.
The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies.
I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change.
ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1]
[0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-...
[1] https://www.aclunc.org/publications/fighting-local-surveilla...
Yet they still did it -- because it's really a surveillance network that happens to issue tickets. The map of cameras captures 95% of traffic entering or leaving the city and captures many transit chokepoints, with 30 day local video retention of all traffic.
I learned from jury service that this is important because surveillance video is a key investigative tool and being able to key events to a trusted reference point is important. If some event happens in a 10-minute window (due to cameras with bad time sync), you can use an independent event (say a bus passing by) to reduce the period of uncertainty.
You don't know that. There are almost certainly nonpublic "partnerships" that you are not aware of.
“This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” [1]
"Because of partner relations and legal authorities, SSO Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA." [2]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-ns....
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/15/us/documents.....
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/san-francisco-police-a...
I can certainly see the allure. I wonder how a competition within the Western System between surveillance and anti-surveillance locations will fare. Techno-authoritarianism can be very efficient, and even more so when it's not used to keep a corrupt system from toppling over (this is where somebody might jump up and say that that's exactly what it's doing in Western countries, but that's besides the point for local surveillance), and the question becomes how much more efficient it would be and how willing people are to trade privacy for comfort.
This is absolutely not assuring. All this means is that the wrong people are going to be surveilled, arrested, and punished.
They also are often already organized, and often already have the ear of elected representatives from their past activism.
All of these things combine to make it a very good idea to engage those communities at the outset of an effort. I am not a person of color, nor am I religious, but I have been able to play an important role in my city's effort.
Technologists need to help, not necessarily lead, these community efforts. Email me if you'd like more support on getting started!
Not being snarky, but under which legal system? Maybe in the EU to some extent? AFAIK, the U.S. does not classify privacy as a human right, though there are people who believe it should be.
Human rights, unless explicitly protected by a society's law, do not exist in a practical sense.
Of course, that political action could take many forms. In a 1968 short story titled 2068 A.D. Frank Herbert wrote:
"Prominent in 2068 history books is the account of the violence at the turn of the century when people revolted against computer control. Computer stored data (growing out of the old National Data Center) had been used to harass and persecute those whose views didn't conform with those of the majority. In the bloody revolt, most computers were destroyed, their data erased."
However I shudder to think what the Corona crisis will do to society. As we've seen with 9/11, it usually takes many years for the worst abuses to really emerge. The crisis itself sets the public opinion in motion, first fought (like in many places they are now) when the measures are actually needed. But eventually everyone seems to get in line behind it, though by that time the actual crisis is already over. Then nobody criticises the measures anymore even though they're no longer needed. They get used to the sense of 'safety' when there is no more rational danger.
The 9/11 attacks were much more a result of poor US intelligence processes than of the tools they had available to them! Even the response to that realisation was baffling: The answer to having too many agencies that don't communicate was... to build yet another agency. :/
I'm not looking forward to a world where the virus is gone but everyone has become a hardcore germaphobe, and the government enforces this by law. I have strong hayfever so part of the year I'll be coughing and sneezing, but it's not contagous at all. Fun times ahead with a lot of suspicion around me :( I'm afraid Corona will be gone in a year or 2 but all its negative effects like social distancing, masks and mandatory quarantines will persist much longer under the label of 'safety'. We were pretty safe before Corona, thank you very much. I know these things are needed now but they won't be forever.
In the same way we've been groped by airport security for 20 years now and all our comms catalogued in order to obtain some kind of undefined idea of 'safety' which nobody cares to elaborate because of 'security concerns'. We never find out know how this information has really helped, ostensibly because 'the bad guys can learn from that', but then again, in almost every case the 'bad guys' were just using tech like plain unencrypted SMS anyway and were plainly operating on the radar. The truth is that too many people make too much money around it all for it to be reconsidered.
Of course I will fight overzealous Corona measures (after Corona is gone) just like I've fought surveillance (by promoting safe tools), but it takes a long time for public opinion to really sway back and do something about it. Basically, people are lemmings :(
if those actions continue for the foreseeable future, I don't think society is really worse off in anyway - at least not that I can see
But eventually they'll get used to it and the false sense of safety it gives them when the danger has already passed, and they'll be fighting to give it up. Wait and see! People have a slow momentum.
In berlin we're also becoming used to seeing police everywhete all the time because of corona. Small things that together can erode our freedom. Death by thousand cuts and all.
The hope of democratic nations is to use it well, with ample checks, balances, and protections. It is arguably a necessity for national and international security. Proper checks should keep it confined to this space.
Surveillance has been in use for decades by most countries, somewhere along the line we forgot though that the enemy isn’t surveillance itself, it is abuse.
I believe that eventually this kind of surveillance will be run almost entirely by sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. It partially is already, but as the technology improves, the amount and quality of the automated surveillance will increase.
Masks, lasers, cones, they might be quite effective against current technology, but that is going to change as the technology improves and an AI can determine your identity from your gait, or a combination of other features such as the width of your shoulders, the length of various bones in your body, etc. China is almost certainly already working on this kind of software as a direct response to the Hong Kong protests.
Governments will continue to work towards innovating and improving their surveillance programs, specifically in a way that reduces the amount of actual humans that are involved (to reduce the probability of another like Snowden) as well as reduce the visibility of the program to not trigger and go against human's "desire to be free" the article mentions.
Don't take freedom for granted.
In fact, if the exemplary tools of resistance are lasers and traffic cones, it sounds like the system is well on its way to being perfected.
But that's maybe 20 years away
Today it’s in Wired. :D
remember this presentation from a few years ago?
The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Coming Cryptopocalypse.
the only reason global mass surveillance is even technically possible os because turnkey mass scale crypto exists.
if NSA and FVEYs could not conceal their own penetration and exfiltration of all the world's data, then they would not be able to do it on a scale like we saw reveales in Snowden's leaks. cryptography PROTECTS the Surveillance State MORE than it protects us Plebians. the asymmetrical advantage of weilding cryptographic supremacy is what makes NSA's regime physically possible.
all modern crypto is based on a handful of crypto primitive math algorithms. we blindly trust them to be secure because nobody yet knows how to crack them. but if some lone wolf math genius pulled an Isaac Newton and invented a solution to FACTOR and proved P=NP, then crypto as we know it would cease to exist. no more RSA, no more ECC, no more AES, no more SHA3.
this wont even require quantum computers, because it is presently unknown whether there exists a classical solution to insoluble problems like FACTOR and P=NP.
what if a classical solution does exist? what if it is found in the next 10 years?
i believe it will be found.
i agree with Snowden's sentiments. the mass surveillance state is an anomaly, a blip of time where a lack of mathematical progress was met with the rise of the global Internet, where it was convenient for NSA to use crypto as a weapon against all of us. post-cryptopocalypse, life is going to be very inconvenient for NSA and the FVEYs. the cost of hoarding secrets will become too great compared to the risk of losing those secrets due to a newly leveled cryptographic playing field. leveled in the sense that anyone can realistically attack any known ciphers.
the future of cryptography is its past. the 18th century. manually designed cryptosystems intended to have very short shelf lives, because they get cracked so frequently. only militaries and banks will have the resources to design and deploy cryptosystems. since it will be so much more expensive to deploy encryption, only truly important secrets will be encrypted at all. there will be a massive cultural shift in how our Intelligence Agencies operate. they won't even resemble themselves as they are today.
for this reason, i am a radical optimist about the fall of the mass surveillance state.