Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?

How I wish that this title weren't presented as a question...

It's not so much that governments have less control over us, but rather that technology has enabled them to be more discreet about it. If you've ever read up on the history of intelligence gathering, psyops and unethical experimentation in the U.S., you'd be shocked by how much civil rights have been violated throughout history, even in the supposed land of the free. However, the old adage holds true: out of sight, out of mind.

It's true that in general we have more liberties now than ever, but it's on the surface. The trade-off is that behind the scenes, you're worse now than ever.

As for technology enabling Snowden to leak more than he could have without digital methods, that's correct. The Pentagon Papers were still relatively large, though. 7,000 pages out of over 20,000 source material, IIRC.

Your example of the public uncovering a photo manipulation isn't really all that impressive, though. Just one propaganda piece dismantled, but it's not like things like this haven't been exposed before the advent of widespread digital photo manipulation. At best, the public may have a better eye for such deception, but in the long run these are all trivial issues anyway.

Sousveillance is an excellent thing, but ostensibly it has no major effect on police conduct. Simply having citizens film officers is not a deterrent, since the police as an institution are fundamentally overpowered and not given enough oversight. They're state auxiliaries. It doesn't faze them.

Widespread cryptography is a great thing, but at the moment it's inaccessible to most people and an arms race. Things will improve in the near future, but how practical will it be at deflecting bulk surveillance states is beyond the breadth of this post.

On your last point, you're right about the Church Commission publicly exposing NSA and FBI malice. But ultimately, the only effect it had was some formal legislation that essentially did not hinder the agencies from performing clandestine and unlawful operations any bit. This is your fatal error in reasoning. You're expecting some surface legislative reform to solve much deeper structural issues. Remember Total Information Awareness and how scandalous it was in 2003? Did public outcry end it? Ostensibly it did, but in reality the agencies just learned to practice better OPSEC and moved to the same goal, but under different names, and more modularized.

Can we avoid a surveillance state dystopia? Maybe. But probably not with your solutions.

well, we can use the information to play the market and more solidify the power we already have until the world is our slave.

I think super accurate mass surveillance is inevitable. It goes with expanding technological capabilities, both government and civilian. I think the real question needs to be focused at how it's applied, whether it's used solely for good or evil.

Fretting over whether or how it's coming is simply illogical, focusing efforts on making sure it's used properly is the only forward thinking, reality accepting solution.

And we haven't seen anything yet in terms of decentralized technology. Distributed apps are about to explode soon [1]. I don't know if that will "stop" mass surveillance, as I assume metadata could still be collected unless we think of ways to anonymize almost everything, too, and not just decentralize everything, but at least it should severely limit the mass collection of the content itself. And if we decide as a society that mass anonymization is what we need (in other words, how the Internet was before Facebook, Google+ and post-9/11 NSA), I think we'll have the technical ways to do it.

I believe we should be more optimistic about the future, and I think the author is right that there is a bigger underlying trend here that gives a person more freedom than one has ever had. In a way it feels like how we see the latest economic crisis and see the news about millions of people losing jobs and whatnot, but we forget that if we look at the data, we're now much "richer" than we were decades or a century ago.

It's easy to lose track of the bigger picture. But it's also true that any given country can fall from democracy into a more totalitarian state (I think UK is doing that the fastest these days), but it's not like we haven't stopped stuff like that from happening before, and it's not going to be a permanent state.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQQEdUoCtdg

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