Gauging the Dangers of Surveillance 111
An anonymous reader writes "We have a sense that surveillance is bad, but we often have a hard time saying exactly why. In an interesting and readable new article in the Harvard Law Review, law professor Neil Richards argues that surveillance is bad for two reasons — because it menaces our intellectual privacy (our right to read and think freely and secretly) and because it gives the watcher power over the watched, creating the risk of blackmail, persuasion, or discrimination. The article is available for free download, and is featured on the Bruce Schneier security blog."
Yeah, but (Score:2, Interesting)
As a practical matter, a lot of this comes under the "genie is out of the bottle" territory. The genie emerged in 1995 and hasn't looked back. It's improved our lives in many ways; in others, I often have a fondness for life as it was before the WWW, Google, and Facebook. At least I wouldn't feel like dozens of private companies are tracking, archiving, and big-data analyzing every move I make in both the physical and online worlds (in the context of what "people whose preferences are similar to yours al
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What exactly are you talking aboot ?
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Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Interesting)
WONDERFUL Comment in the Schneier blog:
name.witheld.for.obvious.reasons â March 29, 2013 1:07 PM
"Surveillance, more specifically acts carried out by officials on persons without proper legal standing, is an illegal act. I, as a private citizen, cannot endlessly trail behind someone day and night, I'd be guilty of stalking. There is no inherent right of the government to stalk citizens (and quite possible persons) just because the government has the capability. There is another issue regarding prima facia, evidence or data collected by "authorities" must be testable, and not just by a judge, but by a jury as well. If the government is the accuser and the prosecuted then the balance and subjective nature of the evidence comes into question. The United States government has lost the rationale basis for prosecution, not just by tepid reasoning but by the false assumption that it is the government that must protect itself from the I consenting governed. It is by virtue of the people, the suspect, that the government is given any weight in respecting the person/individual. It's asking the rape victim to consent to being guilty of inducing the act and denying the production of evidence at trail. "Just trust us, you're guilty of involuntarily F'ing yourself."
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Re:Yeah, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, you didn't read the PDF, or you failed to understand what you read.
Google Glass is just one of many surveillance methods. It's marketed to the masses as "something cool", and they buy it. By doing so they "consent" to being monitored by Google. Which may or may not be alright. There are, however, not one, but TWO other considerations.
1: The people with Google Glass are going to be survelling other people who have NOT consented in any way to being tracked.
2: Google and virtually all other corporations are either selling or giving information to the government.
We have seen legislators attempt to legalize the growing practice of corporations and government freely exchanging data. The goal is to have all corporations and the government accessing each others data bases, freely. There may be monetary exchanges involved or not, but the free access is what counts.
Gun rights is a hot button issue right now. How many of us thinks that government should be able to access the data bases of all gun and ammunition retailers in the nation, to compile an inventory for each and every citizen in the nation?
OK, depending on your personal views on gun rights, you may come up with a different answer than I have. Let's try another example - your reading habits.
Do you really want Uncle prying into your reading history? Let us suppose that your professional reading is all taken from sources A through F. And, let us suppose that your entertainment, hobby, and self improvement reading are taken from an entirely different set of sources - G through M.
Your reading habits in some vague way resembles the reading habits of some known criminals, and in some other vague way resembles those of known terrorists. Extremely vague resemblances that your professional reading doesn't reflect, nor does your other reading - but when taken together, they set off an alarm.
Suddenly, you're the subject of full time government surveillance, because the companies from which you purchase your reading material has submitted their data bases to the NSA or whoever correlates all that data.
No big deal, right? UNTIL you decide that you'll take the children to visit their grandparents on the other coast of the United States, or in Bangladesh, or wherever. You approach the gate to board your plane, with children in tow, and a TSA agent takes you to a back room for an interrogation, and you find that you're on a "No-Fly" list.
All in secret, all behind your back, you've been monitored and judged, and found unworthy of your civil liberties. No judge, no jury, no counsel available, no chance to deny any allegations - you've been judged, based on your reading habits.
It's all hypothetical, right? Purely conjecture, right? Can't happen in America, right?
Go study the laws being authored and submitted to the legislatures for consideration.
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The people with Google Glass are going to be survelling other people who have NOT consented in any way to being tracked.
If Google Glass ever becomes popular, I would not be too surprised if sales of cell phone jammers start to proliferate. In my location they would be redundant. I pay Telstra to fuck up the signal for me. :-(
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I don't give a fuck whether I uphold your moral standards. The main reason why I don't frequent casinos and strip clubs is that I studied statistics and hence don't enjoy gambling and that I think paying for sex cheapens the experience. Aside of that, they might be fun places to go. And if you're a politician, you'd rather get my vote when you spend your leisure time in casinos and strip clubs than when you use churches to meet with your buddies from some corporations to be their ho.
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What gets me is that the same people involved with increasing surveillance legislation (and, and imagine, secret programs that are impervious to oversight) are themselves American citizens and subject to the same surveillance.
They are in effect saying "I can't be trusted, and need to be monitored more closely."
Re:Yeah, but (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone that is seriously bothered by the idea of being monitored should read Surveillance Countermeasures [amazon.com]. It's an older book that deals more so with real-world surveillance but over all it's a good read and might just save your life.
It's always been this way. (Score:1)
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Thomas Jefferson got it right: "Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching." They are.
Welcome to 2013 (Score:1, Insightful)
These things have been obvious since Orwell or even before, which is well over sixty years ago. What has this site come to?
Re:Welcome to 2013 (Score:5, Interesting)
These things have been obvious since Orwell or even before, which is well over sixty years ago. What has this site come to?
Yes but despite that I feel it is almost unstoppable force of technology, just like copyright is doomed through incredibly accurate and ubiquitous data duplication equipment aka computers it seems surveillance is an unstoppable force of smaller, smarter and more networked electronics and optics. This isn't East Germany where you had to recruit almost every citizen, what you need is the cooperation of a handful of people in payment processing (electronic cash), telecom (communication, GPS positioning) and social media (networks, on site surveillance). Imagine for example you had access to GPS coordinates and could access any Facebook upload within 100 meters, regardless of geo-tagging and privacy settings. It's a silent army of spies who might snap a photo with you in the background. Include Google Glass on top and any traditional sense of privacy is gone.
I will admit it, in the battle of privacy versus convenience the convenience wins hands down particularly since many places have made it inconvenient to use cash since they fear robberies, being available 24x7 (but not to my boss) is worth carrying a cell phone over and there's only so much you can do with friends and family blogging their lives which happens to intersect with mine and so on. The Internet won't ever forget and the more of our lives go online, the more just isn't going to age and go away. That and camera phones, luckily of all the stupid, silly, embarrassing, crazy or illegal things we did very little if anything is documented. And you won't find them linked to my name on Google, I don't really care what an old classmate has in a dead tree photo album on a bookshelf. Today I'd probably find myself tagged on Facebook for shits and giggles...
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Yes but despite that I feel it is almost unstoppable force of technology, just like copyright is doomed through incredibly accurate and ubiquitous data duplication equipment aka computers it seems surveillance is an unstoppable force of smaller, smarter and more networked electronics and optics.
This is about the first time I've seen someone posting on Slashdot that understood that the "Information wants to be free" mantra is a double-edged sword. We can't just pick and choose the parts to our liking - we can try, but the world will ignore us.
The globalization of IT jobs is another example of information wanting to be free. Great news, right?
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You are right that surveillance itself is probably inevitable. But what can change is whether the data can be kept.
In the past (it is changing, unfortunately) personal data in Europe could only be used for the reason it was gathered and could only be kept for as long as it was being used for that reason.
This idea, which can be abused, feels reasonable to me. I don't mind that a telecoms company might need to keep a record of the texts I've made for a few days, or an ISP to keep email records for a week or s
Respect (Score:3)
I think lists are an even bigger problem (Score:5, Insightful)
The government has shown that they are willing to use lists against people. During WW2, US citizens of Japanese and German descent were taken into internment camps using data from the Census.
Another recent debacle was when a gun owner's list got published in a major newspaper. People had their houses robbed and more firearms entered the hands of criminals.
These lists also cost money to maintain. We're pissing away billions each year on these lists which could instead go towards infrastructure maintenance which is actually vital for our nation's security.
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Another recent debacle was when a gun owner's list got published in a major newspaper. People had their houses robbed and more firearms entered the hands of criminals.
Citation please.
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Yeah, firearms prevent robberies, not encourage them.
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Re:I think lists are an even bigger problem (Score:4, Informative)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=gun+list+newspaper+robbed [lmgtfy.com]
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Is there any evidence these were linked to the gun list rather than just an intersection between the set of people who get robbed, and the set of people on the gun list?
Or are these just people who got robbed and would've been robbed regardless and blamed it on the publication of the list?
You'd need to get the number of people on the list, and the burglary rate for the area to see if an abnormally large number of people got robbed relative to the size of the list for it to have any meaning.
As an aside, I've
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Is there any evidence it isn't? Who cares?
We know for a fact that thieves will data mine the Internet on things like social networks for targets who are on vacation. We also know for a fact that thieves will target houses with guns because clean guns have an inordinate value to criminals.
I have relatives who had nothing but guns stolen while they are on vacation, twice. They had to get a high-end gun safe and sign up for home security monitoring. It's an anecdote, but it demonstrates the threat.
And while I
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"Is there any evidence it isn't? Who cares?"
People here were making the claim that people were broken into and had guns stolen because of the leaked list, hence the onus is on them to prove that it was indeed because of the leaked list. I care, because I prefer facts in discussions, rather than made up bluster.
"I have relatives who had nothing but guns stolen while they are on vacation, twice. They had to get a high-end gun safe and sign up for home security monitoring. It's an anecdote, but it demonstrates
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Direct link: http://www.google.com/search?q=gun+list+newspaper+robbed [google.com]
First result: http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/17/coincidentally-another-home-on-the-journal-news-list-was-robbed-of-its-guns/ [dailycaller.com]
I wonder how long until the victims band together to sue Gannett? Perhaps they are simply waiting for proof that the robberies were connected to the publishing of the list by the Journal News.
Re:I think lists are an even bigger problem (Score:4, Informative)
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An old fat guy who hides behind a bushy beard and likes to have children sitting on his lap... I knew something's not right about that dude.
Re:I think lists are an even bigger problem (Score:5, Informative)
Good points on priorities. See also on privacy: http://fyngyrz.com/?p=25 [fyngyrz.com]
I saw that link on slashdot recently in someone's comment, and it is an insightful essay on privacy. There is a sense that a certain degree of privacy is both a human right and a human requirement in our society, and government should have a duty to protect it (even for reasons beyond ensuring the government remains accountable to the people policitcally).
But failing that, we should at least have David Brin's "Transparent Society" where everyone can watch the watchers:
http://www.davidbrin.com/transparency.html [davidbrin.com]
See also my suggestion:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319 [ideascale.com]
There are also chilling effects. My house has electric heat, so if I grew hydroponic vegetables instead of running the heaters in winter, I would still get the heat via the lights (thermodynamics) and I'd also get fresh veggies all winter. But I know if I buy a lot of hydroponic equipment, I'll most-likely end up on some government list somewhere to have my door kicked in (see another comment here by someone else about an example of that and our misguided drug laws). Or see:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/pinellas-hydroponic-garden-shop-has-attention-of-deputies-searching-for/1204506 [tampabay.com]
So, buy hydropoincs and have your dogs shot as a result of data mining?
"Why do SWAT teams kill all dogs when serving a warrant at a household?"
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110721154445AAWtx8u [yahoo.com]
Or, see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse [wikipedia.org]
Although another reasons I don't do it is concerns about humidity and mold, and also finding the space, so that is not the only concern, beyond the cost of the equipment.
Thankfully, in the USA we are nowhere near the total squashing of dissent like was accomplished using the 1930s German gestapo secret police, although they apparently mostly used neighbors turning in neighbors since it was before the internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo [wikipedia.org]
"According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo wasâ"for the most partâ"made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by citizens for their information.[36] Gellately argued that it was because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a prime example of panopticism.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo -- at times -- was overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations.[38] Many of the local offices were understaffed and overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many denunciations.[39] Gellately has also suggested that the Gestapo was "a reactive organization" "...which was constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing co-operation of German citizens".[40]
After 1939, when many Gestapo personnel were called up for war-related work such as service with the Einsatzgruppen, the level of overwork and understaffing at the local offices increased.[39] For information about what was happening in German society, the Gestapo continued to be mostly dependent upon denunciations.[41] 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information prov
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"First we do need to clear up the idea of what is private"
In the U.S., privacy should encompass what the Government or your business partners do not need to know.
The Government needs to know that for which they have probable cause or reasonable suspicion is necessary for them to know. Multiple amendments to our Constitution addrfess this.
Your business partners should similarly be limited, if for no other reason than they should not know what they need not know.
Just because they *can* does not give them per
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having not yet prevented any attack
And even if the TSA had prevented an attack, I believe we should regard this 'My ability to feel safe is more important than your silly little freedoms!' mentality as poisonous.
Re:I think lists are an even bigger problem (Score:4, Interesting)
"Thankfully, in the USA we are nowhere near the total squashing of dissent"
How close do we need to be for it to be wrong?
Control of information is power (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point in our over surveilled society it is still a goodly amount of work to assemble a case against the innocent. But with more and more information being gathered and more and more information processing capability it shouldn't be too long before a few clicks of a button show all your law breaking ways.
This might seem like slightly paranoid thinking and in most sensible parts of the western world government people have better things to do. Yet in various small towns you hear of the Sheriff bringing his police to bare against any opponent. I can imagine what kind of resources might be available to hunt down whistle-blowers, investigative reporters, and the people they care about. Or the police looking to discover who uploaded the next Rodney king video. If they had license plate scanning, facial recognition, cell phone records, and internet records then they are golden.
Then you get the false positives. Recently I read about a couple who had the police kick in their door because they were suspected of running a grow-op because of recent hydroponic purchases. They were law-abiding ex-CIA and were growing tomatos and such.
Now think about the power the American people suddenly had over the government when Watergate happened. Now think about how many resources were applied by the government to find out who leaked what? Think about how many resources were applied to the Pentagon papers? Now give the government access to today's/tomorrow's records and see how long Deep Throat remains secret?
My theory is quite simple. The second amendment needs its own amendment and that should read that the people should have near unlimited access to any government records and that the government should have extremely limited access the people's information. This way power will be in the correct hands for a democracy.
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Nothing like using minor offences to cast doubt on your political foe, all done covertly of course.
We should be VERY sceptical of what passes as news these days.
Captcha: actuals
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In the USA, mass-media controls information. And the big business industry controls mass-media.
They also control the government. And they use it to do the unpopular stuff. Which creates the desired illusion, that the government would be to blame. When really, there is no such thing as an actual US government. It's just a industry union.
This saves the industry from being hated. So then in can go, and present itself as the "good guys" against "evil government", by doing meaningless popular token stuff.
And tha
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In the words of Chomsky:
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So what exceptions would you gladly like to see the government routinely classify EVERYTHING under ever after?
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Yet in various small towns you hear of the Sheriff bringing his police to bare against any opponent.
I hope this isn't normal practice in the US....
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http://www.news-journal.com/news/police/panola-county-sheriff-arrested-charged-in-corruption-investigation/article_211e132a-57d9-5607-a1b5-c66ca3368304.html [news-journal.com]
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/news/local/chesterfield-co-sheriff-face-corruption-charges-fr/nWzyH/ [wsoctv.com]
and the best one:
http://www.copblock.org/15718/story-of-how-a-corrupt-sherrif-got-taken-down-by-a-20-year-old/ [copblock.org]
And this is just a tiny sample. Can you imagine these goons with automated access to well pro
Re:Control of information is power (Score:5, Interesting)
You break the law. Every single day in your life. It becomes more and more impossible not to do so. I'm pretty sure I did today, and I don't even know that I did. There is almost certainly some ridiculous law hidden somewhere, maybe one that rode on a paperclip attached to a sensible one, maybe one that had a completely different intention and just happens to apply as well because the wording is so broad that it fits.
The pure amount of laws you're supposed to heed goes up. New laws get passed daily, and few are ever stricken from the book. This houses an inherent danger. Not only that you are by default guilty "and we'll find out what you're guilty of if we need to". Once it becomes obvious that it is impossible to heed every law, the whole concept of laws becomes questioned. If I cannot be law abiding, why keep trying?
And this is very dangerous. Because sensible laws get lumped together with laws that make no sense whatsoever.
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Well, technically, having it in the yard might already constitute "possession".
Of course, it would be far fetched to assume you ripped that feather off a bird against its will, but then again, by the letter of the law...
buggedplanet.info - we're all probably bugged (Score:1, Interesting)
http://buggedplanet.info/ [buggedplanet.info]
And see Wikileaks spy files. We're all probably rooted by government(s).
Google Glass: Corporate / Private Surveillance (Score:1)
We have a sense that surveillance is bad ...
Do We? The glee over Google Glass suggests otherwise. If a Google Glass app can recognize a person via facial recognition, or by their fashion sense, then there is a hell of a lot of surveillance going on. Many seem quite open to the idea of surveillance if they have a camera. Note: the facial/fashion recognition is not running locally on the glasses/camera. Its too demanding to be done locally (for the foreseeable future), users will be sending an image to be processed remotely by google or whoever else is
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Re:Google Glass: Corporate / Private Surveillance (Score:4, Insightful)
You didn't think government was the only threat to privacy did you?
Some corporations seem to gleefully hand over information to the government upon request, and even assist the government in its spying at times. A corporation having tons of information about you probably means that the government could easily get that information as well.
I know some of you don't mind spying, but I do. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it is a bit of a cliche around here. But it really is a lot like the book 1984 if you think about it.
Seriously. Think about it.
Cameras are almost everywhere but your house. I know for me, cameras start just a few short steps outside of my door.
Cameras on the street, in every store. Then on the internet, they track you with cookies, flash cookies that can't normally be deleted. ISPs often have deals with the government to just route all their traffic through the government.
Companies like Google and Facebook largely make their money by spying on users and selling the information.
The governments seem to introduce another bill almost every month to increase their ability to spy on the citizens even more than they already did.
Just the other day there was a story here saying the FBI is crying because their spying on gmail users wasn't "in real time".
And I think it might have been in the same story, the FBI was also complaining that they were having a hard time monitoring all the chatting in online little games like "Words with Friends". Because "criminal conversations sometimes happen there."
Well they do everywhere else, too. Including face to face. Do we need a government agent to monitor face to face conversations too? Just in-case someone says something criminal?
It's really all way too much for me.
Knowing about this stuff from slashdot and elsewhere, now using the "normal" internet, feels like I'm being watched all the time.
And I am. Even if it's "just" an automated system that archives things for later possible viewing.
I feel strongly that all of this has a huge chilling effect on free speech for a lot people. And that we should be working on getting much of this rolled back.
But anyway, in the meantime, I do have a few partial solutions:
I have started using startpage.com for my searches. It's the Google results without the spying. They claim to not even save your ip.
And I use lavabit.com for email. It was started as a response to Gmail's horrible privacy (lack of it) policies. It also claims to keep the tracking and monitoring of users to a minimum. And not archiving your mail for possibly forever after it's deleted, as Google does.
Lastly, I use a good no logging VPN for a lot of my browsing because I just prefer the freer feeling of it compared to the "bunch-of-surveillance-cameras" feel that the regular internet has for me.
Call me paranoid, or whatever, for not enjoying being spied upon non-stop. I know most of the other sheep don't care. But myself, I feel uncomfortable with it. And I opt out of it whenever I am able.
Posting from behind my no-logging VPN. :)
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Intended purpose: catch cheating spouses.
Or even more likely, obsessively monitoring a mate because jealousy/control issues make everyone sexually compatible look like a romantic threat -- or stalking an ex to find out whether they're filing for a restraining order or moving somewhere else in an attempt to escape. (I've known a few people that cheated, but far more like me that dated an insecure paranoid control freak...)
The real problem is ... (Score:3)
... when the watcher does more than just watch.
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I like the saying:
And about that, I like what Cardinal Richelieu, known from the inquisitions, supposedly said:
That is the core of the problem.
It's like the religious concept of "original sin". If everybody is a "sinner", everybody must "repent". In other words: Obey.
That's what makes it totalitarian.
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So are you talking about your government ... or about your next-door neighbor?
I have little doubt that the entire concept of privacy will be moot within 20 years, at least if you are outside your own home. But it won't just be the police watching you; it will be your employer and your neighbors and your friends and your family, and they will probably do an even better job of it. Combine crowd-sourced video from multiple sources, and I can see a day when anyon
Say what? (Score:2)
"... we often have a hard time saying exactly why."
???
Who is this "we"? I have never had even the slightest problem articulating why ubiquitous surveillance is bad. Very bad.
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It's basic civics to understand why citizens are supposed to be concerned about government abuse of its power - because the result is ineffective or incompetent police/justice/whatever services, not because it's offensive in some abstract ideological sense.
Though it occurs elsewhere, it's primarily a US problem. In the US, the Constitution is often regarded as nearly sacred revelation, with the result that, like regular sacred revelation, people embrace the rule without having any understanding of it, and
Facebook, anyone? (Score:1)
You often hear stories of people not getting a job, because a recruiter saw some incriminating posts on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Is this a legitimate use of publicly available information, or is it a breach of person's privacy? Facebook is for some a mental dump, where they can vent their frustrations or indulge in guilty pleasures. Should a recruiter have the right to dismiss the candidate based on their posts on Facebook or Twitter?
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If you post it publicly on the web, for all to see (Score:2)
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If you misunderstood that public means public, well, that's bad, but some very bad things are also happening in this arena.
That would be dumb (Score:2)
Facebook is for some a mental dump, where they can vent their frustrations or indulge in guilty pleasures.
That would be REALLY dumb. Facebook is for posting things you want to share with everyone you know, and everyone they know. If you send out your "brain dumps" and "guilty pleasures" to everyone in town, well that's just stupid.
I'm More worried about economic freedom (Score:2)
Great idea (Score:2)
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which is that wealth inequity and the lack of economic security are much bigger issues than privacy.
What if I just said that they're all problems? We can tackle more than one problem at once, and if you're really worried about economic security, maybe you should ask the government to stop wasting so much money spying on its own people.
Hopefully you do to. Debt is dumb! (Score:2)
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By the measure used in your Walton statistic, someone with $1 and no credit card debt or car loan is wealthier than 25% of country. There's a lesson there. A large portion of the country has negative wealth, meaning they owe more than they have. Virtually all get there the same way. To have negative net worth - buy stuff you can't pay for. The wealthy, by your definition, are simply those who spend lesss than they make, people who save. You can whine, or you can learn something from that fact.
So I suppose you're never going to take out a loan to buy a house? Or I suppose you think those running the megacorps didn't take out debt to finance their startup, or that those very corporations don't issue billions in bonds total to raise capital for expansion or to cover operating costs during temporary shortfalls?
Sure, I guess you could go homeless for the first 40 years of your life, or rent and still be in the hole because 40 years later you have no equity and are still paying out the ass for basic s
Visa != home ownership. Investment != spending (Score:2)
Yes, when you get laid off, if you won't invest it (Score:2)
Even if you d
Don't do illegal things in public, then (Score:2)
Surely if you're worried about being seen doing illegal things, you keep the illegal things private or don't do them at all?
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April Fools! ...Right?
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I merely hope it was a joke. If it wasn't... well, poking holes in the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" logic doesn't exactly seem difficult, so I suppose it wouldn't be too problematic if it turned out he truly believes what he posted.
A third essential reason (Score:2)
There is a third reason not mentioned, but can be seen in places and societies that were subject to inter-generational surveillance, such as Ceausescu's Romania. People adopt by learning to be deceptive in their entire lives, for wearing false face becomes essential for anything you do that stands out might be perceived as a threat, and anyone else might get you in trouble. All personal relationships, families, friends, marriage, work, become managed through such deception as a basic survival skill. It i