How Britain Exported Next-Generation Surveillance • Hacker News Board

Post by carapace » Wed, Jan 07, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #78

carapace wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, of course, but as you say a lot of what we see in the show is for the sake of the drama. I think there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to our technology enabling ubiquitous surveillance: How can you be sure that everyone is obeying policy (around how to use the collected info) unless you have a surveillance system to watch them in the first place? It doesn't matter what we thi…

I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise that ubiquitous surveillance is unavoidable and unstoppable. To me, that attitude seems half like a cynical cop-out and half cyberpunk wish-fulfillment. No infrastructure which requires as much complexity and cost and effort as that does, is immune to political, economic or societal forces. Already, you can begin to see pushback from other (many themselves) government an…

Very good points, and I agree wholeheartedly that the confluence of "good enough" AI, mass data on social interactions, and ubiquitous networked sensors+cpus means that we are rapidly entering a sort of intense feedback system with ourselves that calls into question the very meaning of being human, and that it could be a threat to freedom. ;-)

It is definitely neither cynicism nor wish-fulfillment that makes me think the future system (assuming we don't simply destroy ourselves or degenerate into some N. Korean nightmare) has to be totalistic, and that it will be humane.

I think it has to be "total" in the sense that in order to apply and enforce whatever policy we have, including policy around who gets to access and use surveillance data, somebody somewhere has to be looking at all the data and searching for violations.

Flipping it over, I don't see how any government can say to its people "Hey, we know for sure that no one is spying on you. (Except us.)" without spying on everyone to make sure.

So I don't see how we can avoid the technology forcing the "political, economic or societal forces" to adapt, rather than the other way around. At best most people would be content with some privacy-protecting measures that other people would simply find ways to circumvent, and since the circumventors have greater ability to act without the contented people even knowing about it, how would you stop them?

Effectively the U.S. agencies and their allies are already merging into one large "trustworthy" (for some measure of trust, for some subset of humans) information processing system.

Now, if we accept that somebody is going to have the panopticon the immediate concern becomes the nature of our rulers. I think the future cyber-totalitarian regime will be humane, but only because I have hope that humans are intrinsically good.

I have no hope that we can roll back or even curb the capabilities of our technology but I feel confident that we can enshrine and effect our highest values within the system we are so vigorously constructing.