i disagree with the assumption that it's a solvable problem. people remain fallible and the correct solution is to mitigate our downside by minimizing state power. not disagreeing with the idea that we also need to work on lots of other ways to reduce its power and ability to track people btw.
The problem is automated and centralised surveillance. The government can aggregate this data and build movement patterns on all citizens. They might not do it, but they could. And once something to exert power is possible, It'll be done eventually.
The problem isn't with the ideal scenario, the issue is when systems fail or are used outside of the ideal scenario. Generally this will be in a muzzling and controlling capacity when it comes to surveillance.
Interestingly merely paranoia of surveillance results in self muzzling and self imposed restrictions.
In the end the results are not conducive for societies progress.
I am sure most politicians and intelligence people want to keep people safe, the problem is it is unlikely to be their only motivation.
Lets say we do manage to come up with an alternative that would keep people safe without requiring mass surveillance then it would not remove any of the other motivations (say business espionage). I think appealing to a technical solution for a political problem is unlikely to work, but it could be possible.
That's an unproductive, defeatist argument. You could say that about any problem facing humanity today. It just amounts to an excuse to do nothing.
Let's instead start a discussion about shrinking the surveillance state, with the goal of one day overturning it. Even though the odds are against us. Because you gotta draw the line somewhere.
People should realize that political solutions have failed spectacularly.
Technical solutions are the only possible answer, that and cultural responses.
Vast state surveillance is made possible by technical expertise. We shouldnt laud those who assist the government in this task nor in any tasks. We should shun colleagues who choose to assist the enemies of humanity, those in positions to hire should not hire those with backgrounds in government and make it known through back channels that such people are not desirable, that you will be black balled if choose to assist these heinous entities in their oppression.
Finally those able and willing should consider other methods of raising the cost of state surveillance, but openly recommending such things is potentially a crime in the eyes of the state.
What counts as a problem is hardly so clearly defined, usually it's a matter of politics. You say it's a privacy issue but another person could say it's a precision issue and be no less wrong. After all, had the police used a more precise form of software surveillance they probably would have been able to find the right person.
The root problem isn't the surveillance state. As long as we keep fighting and have conflict over resources and past wrongs, we're locked into this feedback loop of an arms race. Information and intelligence are a key advantages in conflicts.
We want our conveniences, we want our privacy, yet we don't want terrorists. We want our iPhones, our cars, and our comforts, and we don't want to see the price exacted from the rest of the world.
Surveillance seems like a very big problem, but only because it is so personal. It's distracting us from the real problems of the world, and that is pretty much every one of us are selfish, adding fuel to conflicts. We're crazy.
I think these problems might have to do with a current conflict within the US society that needs to be talked about and surveillance or the lack of it is neither the reason nor the solution.
Maybe there is no solution to this problem. I have yet to be convinced that surveillance has been effective at all at combatting terrorism, and even if it's been occasionally effective its ROI is terrible.
Our various societies are generally willing to accept certain tradeoffs because there are no black and white answers. In the US, society as a whole is currently willing to accept a relatively enormous amount of collateral damage to allow widespread gun ownership. This causes multiple orders of magnitude more deaths than terrorism, and yet for now, it's deemed acceptable to protect certain liberties.
If encryption is allowed to be truly secure, it's possible that more people will die in terrorist attacks. It's also possible that more people will get away with truly terrible things like child pornography. But the freedoms that we give away generally never come back, or they take an enormous amount of time to come back. For me, maintaining those liberties is worth the tradeoff.
Surveillance is not a solution. I would say surveillance isn't needed if the root cause of that problem is actually solved. Take for example, country A goes to war with country B or destabilizes it. Now people in country B will want to take revenge. Individuals will want to take matters into their own hands for the injustice done to them(making them so called terrorists -there is also religious terrorism which I believe is all for silly reasons). And because people in country B are also humans, many many fellow humans in country A will also sympathize with their sufferings and would want to correct their own country. Some of them may turn to become "terrorists". Now the root cause for creating terrorism was country A itself.
There is also the problem with media. Giving religious terrorists the attention they crave is the last thing we should do. That only gives them a sense of satisfaction.
There are no total solutions for the surveillance issue just like there are no total solutions to the piracy issue. You can't put the cat back in the bag without walking away from having an Internet.
At the end of the day, this is a social issue not a technological one. Our only hope is to hold our leaders accountable and help saner heads to prevail.
The article fails to argue that mass-surveillance is a required and proportional way to counter the threats mentioned. I think instead we should debate what level of suspicion should be required to form a basis to conduct a surveillance on someone instead of the "we have to monitor everyone including the innocent continuously" dogma.
Honestly, I do not disagree. In some ways I imagine that mass surveillance may even be necessary for the protection of the country, considering the potential for destruction that even a few people with the right technology and planning possess. Following your logic, it seems that the mass surveillance maybe has more potential to help than to hurt (since the govt already possesses plenty of resources for destruction).
Given how many people on here are adamant about anti-surveillance I feel like I must be missing something... like I get the overall premise but it seems to exclude a lot of important considerations...
There is no deterministic, technological solution to the problem that all technological solutions can be banned and its users threatened with draconian punishment.
There is no mathematical escape hatch from society. All we have is a messy assortment of technological mitigations that change the cost of surveillance.
These mitigations work best in combination with constitutional rights that limit what the government of the day can do, triggered by the latest outrage in the news.
I know it keeps being said that we can't produce technical solutions to the problem of state surveillance but the political changes we're advocating for that would fix this are akin to the "re-write the product" arguments.
The people you want to change are such a vast system of people, views, beliefs and incentives that changing them will take an inordinate amount of time (this is an assumption).
Though the effort required to build an environment frustrating enough to make technical state surveillance infeasible is perhaps huge it would seem that the impact any individual can have in that area is vastly larger than in the former (also an assumption). This would suggest to me that more could be achieved to frustrate the process of automating state surveillance in a shorter time span through technology than can through government reform.
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