Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, organised criminals for one, that way they know what they can get away with.
I know where I want to end up, but not how to get there from here: The Culture (Iain M Banks) is a surveillance anarchy where everyone is able to watch anyone at any time, and yet nobody really cares what you do.
That said, I do agree that there's a necessary selection effect to make the books interesting, as the fundamental problem of writing about a good day in a utopia is that the writer's idea of what that even means is unlikely to sell any copies — so I think of these books in a similar vein to how others say that Asimov's robot books are a demonstration of all the ways that the premise (in the latter's case, the Three Laws) don't really work as well as one might hope.
As I say, what I hope for is the promise of The Culture, but I don't know how to get there… or even if one can.
Who get swept up by authorities and out-competed by their technologically savvy adversaries. There's strong selective pressure on technologically inept criminals that doesn't necessarily exist for traditional businesses. There's no government organization out there every night rounding up Walmart employees in a bid to bring down the Walton family.
My go-to example of this is heroin in the UK: the substance is the most severe level of classification, nobody speaks in its favour even when they regard the war on drugs to be an abject failure ("war on drugs over, drugs declare victory" that kind of thing), yet the number of users of just that one substance exceeds the total UK prison population by a factor of 3.
If you broaden this to all UK users drugs of the same classification, it's around 10 times the total UK prison population. All illegal drugs, 32 times the total UK prison population.
And then there's all the non-drug crimes…
Monitoring with all these things can be done at low-quality in real-time using the compute attached to those sensors, anything that might be interesting can be automatically passed on to a higher level system.
Smart dust was discussed quite widely until very recently, and as all the parts of that are now basically ready, I think the stuff has actually been made and is currently being actively (but quietly, under NDA) investigated by intelligence agencies both for potential uses and potential countermeasures.
A few years ago, I did a Fermi calculation and my conclusion was that a laser microphone pointing at every window in Greater London would cost about the same as the annual budget of the Met Police.
At 128 kbit/s (e.g. for decent compressed audio), recording all 8 billion humans on Earth for a year (24 hours a day so even while asleep) would require about 4 ZB of storage; current storage prices were around $14/TB in 2022, which would thus cost $56 billion compared to $73.4 billion the US Director of National Intelligence requested for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program.
We don't talk about the information explosion "problem" because there isn't actually a problem: all the data on the internet has to be processed anyway just for people to be able to see it in the first place, and for quite some time now all the data we care about is on the internet anyway.
Doesn’t mean they should get it either.
London has more cameras than any other city in the west but leads crime significantly.
any link for the crime claim?
i checked multiple websites, and while hard to measure, London as a whole is not even in the top 10 european cities when it comes to crime.
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/censorship/
Refusing to disclose encryption keys could lead you to be prosecuted for “terrorist criminal association”.
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discus...
We have to fight that, bring crime back to the streets i say!! So we can stay at home and feel safe.
I mean, I don't even mean it to be insulting or anything. People can't be good at everything. It seems that police I've met so far (n<10) are pretty awesome people, but they don't seem to be particularly security conscious qua electronic security.
Else the police chiefs would (for one) realize that they need that end-to-end encryption themselves. It's a fairly basic building block, you'd think.
OTOH, maybe my impression is wrong, and there are exceptionally skilled police people who I've just never met? But why would they be advising their chiefs so badly then?
It is smarter and simpler than that: Once the use of encryption keys is banned, everyone using one will label himself "I am a terrorist" and will be at least annoyed endlessly by the judicial system.
https://www.laquadrature.net/en/2023/12/15/encryption-discus...
The problem is a very futuristic vision of what surveillance should look like.
I think that's about the same level of wrong as cops trying to abolish encryption — I can see what they're saying and why, but the world can't be as they want it to be.
I could almost imagine the collective police chiefs writing the same document except for :%s/e2e/money/g .
It would be roughly as practical in 2024, so that's a neat argument!
The imbalance of power is common and inevitable, the abuse of power needs some prerequisites. One of those is knowing so much that you know you can get away with the abuse.
> Europol’s Executive Director Catherine De Bolle, said:
> Our homes are becoming more dangerous than our streets as crime is moving online. To keep our society and people safe, we need this digital environment to be secured.
Well yeah, as per the traditional definition of "to be secured", that's exactly what stuff like end-to-end encryption is for. Seems like the problem is just that the European Police Chiefs apparently have a different definition of "to be secured".
So tell me, dear European Police Chiefs, whom do you think I should want my communications to be secured from? Aha, not you, you say? Well, sorry, I beg to differ.
If you can't correctly encrypt messages on disk and in transit you can't guarantee that you secured user's personal data.
