Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.
Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
61–70 of 81 posts
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#62It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent." From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the coun…
Technology enlarges the consequences of moral choices, but it does not carry an inherent morality. Whatever values you carry into the technology landscape are what you get out of it. Digitisation is not the cause of the surveillance state, it's the enabler. The problem is that we're trying to use 18th century values and moral systems to deal with 21st century technology. We need to develop a system of morality adequa…
Technology enlarges the consequences of moral choices, but it does not carry an inherent morality.
Bruno Latour wrote a lot about this subject, and it is often insightful. There is a nice summary of [1] here:
http://doorsausage.blogspot.de/2009/02/morality-of-speed-bum...
[1] http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-TECHNIQUES...
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing death tolls is a facetious argument. DC ground to a halt during the sniper's shootings even though he killed just a handful of people. The whole point of terrorism is the psychological impact. Also, cars kill twice as many people as murderers each year. If we ignore the difference between accidents and malicious acts, and the deterrent effect involved, you can probably make a case that its not worthwhile to…
The means of the state are not endless. States carry an obligation to make rational use of their means to macimize the benefit for their citizens. The argument is not that terrorist strikes do not deserve deterrence or punishment, it's that the war on terror is inappropriate in its scale, because the same means could have achieved much more good for the american people when put (mostly) to other uses.
As a juxtaposition, compare this with an actual quote from a 2005 speech by Bush:
“We do not create terrorism by fighting the terrorists. We invite terrorism by ignoring them.”
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#64Great line: It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future To put it into perspective, more people die walking across roads in the US every year than died from terrorism in 2001. Most years other than 2001, the difference between them is staggering. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that we should take drastic…
Comparing death tolls is a facetious argument. DC ground to a halt during the sniper's shootings even though he killed just a handful of people. The whole point of terrorism is the psychological impact. Also, cars kill twice as many people as murderers each year. If we ignore the difference between accidents and malicious acts, and the deterrent effect involved, you can probably make a case that its not worthwhile to…
The reason death tools are worthwhile to mention is that putting things into perspective reduces the psychological impact. If more people were immune to the psychological impact, terrorism as a whole would have far less influence.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#66It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent." From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the coun…
The will to dominate others is as old as human kind. The idea that computers have changed anything is just historical blindness of the part of people who fail to realize how totalitarian all states were until the French revolution, where you had a literal thought police going after you and huge parts of the population spying on everyone else. Like it has always been the case any algorithm good enough to catch even a…
1. The point is not that they can. The point is that they believe they can.
2. Historically, there was always a place to hide to carry out nefarious activities. In the digital surveillance state, that space is shrinking.
(Modern humans 200K years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens)
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technology enlarges the consequences of moral choices, but it does not carry an inherent morality. Whatever values you carry into the technology landscape are what you get out of it. Digitisation is not the cause of the surveillance state, it's the enabler. The problem is that we're trying to use 18th century values and moral systems to deal with 21st century technology. We need to develop a system of morality adequa…
Technology enlarges the consequences of moral choices, but it does not carry an inherent morality. Bruno Latour wrote a lot about this subject, and it is often insightful. There is a nice summary of [1] here: http://doorsausage.blogspot.de/2009/02/morality-of-speed-bum... [1] http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-TECHNIQUES...
I appreciate you citing Latour. I agree his works have much to offer to science, technology and society. Slightly OT, but if you’re interested in a more critical take on some (recent) papers by Latour, I can recommend this review by Joel Wainwright.
http://geography.osu.edu/faculty/jwainwright/publications/Wa...
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#68It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent." From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the coun…
Those of us against surveillance seem to be making the same mistake that has been made in the DRM arena. One that Chomsky is not making. Surveillance is surely bad because of technological reasons and because it violates fundamental human rights.
However the surveillance state exists not because it's creators feel it is sound technology and does not violate humans right but because strong economic and political forces want to become even stronger. To defeat the surveillance state the economic and political powers must be attacked, not their arguments.
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#69It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent." From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the coun…
> The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally considerably…
it depends what you believe; the UK media stories about bureaucratic incompetence and bungling or the colossal number of state employees and technologies deployed to monitor everything (GCHQ, MI5/6 buildings across river from seat of democracy etc).
If you wanted to build a vast surveillance state you'd cover your tracks by seeding the news media with stories of ineffectual incompetence and other fakery...
Re: Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of sma…
This is a minor problem now, but it will get much worse if you consider technical development. Every individual gets more and more power and capabilities with time. In not too many decades, hackers will be able to design bacteria for hobby at home, even if they probably will send for a lab to synthesize the DNA etc. Now, it is still quite expensive to make artificial life. Consider North Korea and the possibility of…
What is the link between futuristic biological terrorism and NSA surveillance? You seem to be assuming that NSA surveillance might stop it, but how?
It does seem like a potential problem and I also don't know how to solve it, but I would personally say that either technology will present us with the solution, or there will not be a solution.
We have plenty of technology right now which, if transplanted back in time a century or so, could cause complete havoc. Imagine, for example, the crime-enabling aspects of cars and highways. A small group of criminals could literally ransack an entire city by using an automobile to drive from one heist to the next, keeping ahead of the police by virtue of their machine's great speed, and finally fleeing the local jurisdiction altogether to someplace safe. What this ignores is that police will have cars too, negating the speed advantage of the criminals, and radios and telephones to alert neighboring jurisdictions, and cameras to identify the culprits, etc.
Or consider the airplane. A small group could acquire a decent sized cargo aircraft, load it up with bombs, and then fly over Buckingham Palace with it and essentially hold the entire country hostage. Firearms don't have nearly the range to reach an airplane at altitude, so there would be no way to stop them. With the great range of the aircraft, there would be no hope whatsoever of tracking it back to its origins and thus apprehending the culprits.
But of course the technology that enables this scenario also prevents it: fighter aircraft, radar, and surface-to-air missiles mean that this attack is laughable rather than terrifying.
Presumably, the technological advances that enable biological terrorism will also enable biological counter-terrorism. If it doesn't, then we are doomed. Either way, massive surveillance systems are an unrelated thing.