Living With Ubiquitous Surveillance

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TarkisFlux
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Living With Ubiquitous Surveillance

Post by TarkisFlux »

Blah blah everyone gives over their data to private entities blah blah spy agencies suck up everything anyway blah blah post privacy. If we're already giving up privacy to corporations and having it taken from us by our government, should we just open it all up to anyone? Would having open access to everyone's phone and bank and whatever other records get sucked up make it easier to steal an identity or harder? Would it remove the threat of data blackmail or would we falter under all the black swan revelations?

Not that I expect this to happen any time ever. Moneypeople worry too much about their assymetric powersecrets to ever let it happen. It's just been on my mind a bit lately.
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Re: Living With Ubiquitous Surveillance

Post by Starmaker »

The word is "sousveillance". I think it'd be pretty awesome.
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Post by Koumei »

Well it's an interesting idea, but funnily enough. the very people demanding the rights to spy on everyone 24/7 get very cross whenever people expose their laundry. See: this US government's war on whistleblowers, the Australian government going after everyone who unveils their corruption.
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Post by Starmaker »

It's not just that. as any grassroots campaign, sousveillance is not stable and will require continuous resource input to be competitve in an arms race with corporations. Enforced persistent identities won't do dick to curtail the power of corporations. The Google can hire an army of human observers and hit people harder than people can hit back, however often they watch Eric Schmidt having sex. The idea is awesome, but, once implemented in a particular way and left to run under its own power, it's going to collapse.
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Post by TarkisFlux »

I think you misunderstand my idea Starmaker - I'm not proposing a counter-surveillance setup (though those are amusing), but an open surveillance setup. We're not going to beat the NSA at their game, but they could let us all play instead by making all their results public so you could just go look through them if you feel like it.

If you wanted to read all of the email headers of your boss or lover or elected official, you could just do that. And then you could cross reference those with their phone call lists. Or their phone location at various times of the day. And where their license plates were picked up by those automatic readers. And where their faces were picked up on facial rec. And how much money moved into their bank at which times. And so on.

Note that I wouldn't want them to reveal their methods, just their results. While some of their methods could probably be easily inferred from those results, I don't have any interest in making it easy for people to opt out of surveillance short of going off grid. I just want everyone to have equal access to blackmail for everyone else, and to remove the government monopoly on it.

Which is why it will never happen.
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Post by hyzmarca »

TarkisFlux wrote:I think you misunderstand my idea Starmaker - I'm not proposing a counter-surveillance setup (though those are amusing), but an open surveillance setup. We're not going to beat the NSA at their game, but they could let us all play instead by making all their results public so you could just go look through them if you feel like it.

If you wanted to read all of the email headers of your boss or lover or elected official, you could just do that. And then you could cross reference those with their phone call lists. Or their phone location at various times of the day. And where their license plates were picked up by those automatic readers. And where their faces were picked up on facial rec. And how much money moved into their bank at which times. And so on.

Note that I wouldn't want them to reveal their methods, just their results. While some of their methods could probably be easily inferred from those results, I don't have any interest in making it easy for people to opt out of surveillance short of going off grid. I just want everyone to have equal access to blackmail for everyone else, and to remove the government monopoly on it.

Which is why it will never happen.
The issue is that searching through all that material takes time. How many hours of closed circuit video footage can you afford to watch in a day? If that number isn't in the tens of thousands, then it isn't particularly useful.

The problem with ubiquitous surveillance isn't collecting the data, that's absurdly easy, it's sifting through all the data for tiny nuggets of relevant information. It's why, generally speaking, security only goes through their recording in response to specific incidents after the fact. Because watching dozens of videos of people going about their daily shopping is boring as all fuck, and time consuming.
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Post by tussock »

What happens when everyone can see everyone's shit is abusive men hunt down their former partners and murder them. There are a lot of women not on publicly viewable lists of things because they are on the run from men who would kill them for leaving, it's disturbingly common.

This is also true of people who have left street gangs, or offended various dangerous criminal types in assorted ways. Also people who have offended their government for things which may or may not be crimes where you live and are now in hiding.

There's also the issue of various things being held against people, their businesses, their employees, their family, which are not crimes in most places and especially not where they live, like say having had an abortion, or being transgender, or believing in democracy while living in China.


It's a bad thing that the police and the spies and the email companies have such easy access to all that private life stuff, like where you live. But they can be watched, and are fairly tightly restricted in how much of an asshole they can be and how bad they can make your life. Imagine every fucking religious loon, political troll, and MRA having access to everything you'd ever looked at and done and said and tie it back to you, where you could never just back off and hide or pick up a new nym to get away from it, or all that to someone a little more vulnerable like children.

Privacy of communications, of medical records, warrants for making searches reasonable, not having those things against bullshit spy networks is bad, but not having them against all the meanest and craziest people that live in your country is colossally worse.
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Post by hyzmarca »

tussock wrote: Privacy of communications, of medical records, warrants for making searches reasonable, not having those things against bullshit spy networks is bad, but not having them against all the meanest and craziest people that live in your country is colossally worse.
However, such ubiquitous surveillance would allow us to rapidly track down and eliminate all the mean and crazy people. It's a double-edged sword, indeed, but I don't think it would lead to an increase in murders for the simple reason that you can see the murderer planning the killing and intercept him long before it happens.

Of course, this assumes that someone is watching and that someone cares about preventing murders.

The main obstacle to a benevolent big brother isn't total surveillance capability, it's the man-hours required to put eyes on all that footage.
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Post by Kaelik »

hyzmarca wrote:
tussock wrote: Privacy of communications, of medical records, warrants for making searches reasonable, not having those things against bullshit spy networks is bad, but not having them against all the meanest and craziest people that live in your country is colossally worse.
However, such ubiquitous surveillance would allow us to rapidly track down and eliminate all the mean and crazy people. It's a double-edged sword, indeed, but I don't think it would lead to an increase in murders for the simple reason that you can see the murderer planning the killing and intercept him long before it happens.

Of course, this assumes that someone is watching and that someone cares about preventing murders.

The main obstacle to a benevolent big brother isn't total surveillance capability, it's the man-hours required to put eyes on all that footage.
Which is the point, there are like .00001% of the man hours required to stop people from doing horrible things, and there is a 100% chance that some assholes will use this for their personal gain and not get caught, because no one can look into all the shit in the world, and they only need to look into the minimal shit that helps them.
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Post by tussock »

hyzmarca wrote:
tussock wrote: Privacy of communications, of medical records, warrants for making searches reasonable, not having those things against bullshit spy networks is bad, but not having them against all the meanest and craziest people that live in your country is colossally worse.
However, such ubiquitous surveillance would allow us to rapidly track down and eliminate all the mean and crazy people. It's a double-edged sword, indeed, but I don't think it would lead to an increase in murders for the simple reason that you can see the murderer planning the killing and intercept him long before it happens.
That isn't true. Not because people wouldn't care, or wouldn't take the time, but because it's impossible. No detection system can work 100% of the time and also ignore 100% of the innocent folk, so in a world of 7 billion people your 99.9% accurate "not a murderer" system finds 700,000 innocent people intercepted constantly.

If you lock all those innocent people away (that's your goal here, right?), there's still 700,000 innocent people showing up on your impossibly accurate detection of "almost certainly a murderer", because it's still only 99.9% accurate at picking innocence. And really, if it's that generous at finding innocence it's not going to pick up very many of the actual intended murders at all.


Complete surveillance does not work because it cannot work. False positives will always completely overwhelm the ability to find real positives for any rare event. Even if you were completely omniscient and read everyone's mind 24/7, there's not even a perfect correlation between people thinking about doing bad things and people later doing bad things, not either way.

But if you throw a million assholes the details of everyone's private life, their ability to find false positives and go all Rambo is a much bigger problem than the state doing it through official channels with at least some checks and balances. Really.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Kaelik wrote:
hyzmarca wrote:
tussock wrote: Privacy of communications, of medical records, warrants for making searches reasonable, not having those things against bullshit spy networks is bad, but not having them against all the meanest and craziest people that live in your country is colossally worse.
However, such ubiquitous surveillance would allow us to rapidly track down and eliminate all the mean and crazy people. It's a double-edged sword, indeed, but I don't think it would lead to an increase in murders for the simple reason that you can see the murderer planning the killing and intercept him long before it happens.

Of course, this assumes that someone is watching and that someone cares about preventing murders.

The main obstacle to a benevolent big brother isn't total surveillance capability, it's the man-hours required to put eyes on all that footage.
Which is the point, there are like .00001% of the man hours required to stop people from doing horrible things, and there is a 100% chance that some assholes will use this for their personal gain and not get caught, because no one can look into all the shit in the world, and they only need to look into the minimal shit that helps them.
Using surveillance to catch a criminal after the fact is easy, that's why security cameras exist. Once you know that the crime has happened, you can always backtrack through the surveillance videos.
Preventing a crime is much more difficult, but total surveillance makes investigating one very easy.
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Post by Kaelik »

hyzmarca wrote:Using surveillance to catch a criminal after the fact is easy, that's why security cameras exist. Once you know that the crime has happened, you can always backtrack through the surveillance videos.
Preventing a crime is much more difficult, but total surveillance makes investigating one very easy.
You presume that people would use literally the ability to see anything in the world at any time only in ways that show up as obvious crimes. Murders will still happen, and most of them will be solved, because if your daughter goes missing, you keep following her trail till you get to the guy that killed her, but some people can be killed in a way that doesn't register as murder, like if you just watch someone's routine well enough to poison them, you are basically getting off scott free.

And that is just murder, the crime that leaves an actual body. Fuck, do you think you could track down all the "patent infringement" or "insider trading" that would happen?

How the fuck do you even define these fucking crimes. Or fucking drug use, are you imagining that people get caught every time they use drugs? Or steal money? What kind of world would you have to be in where those crimes were detected every time they occurred?
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Post by tussock »

hyzmarca wrote:Using surveillance to catch a criminal after the fact is easy, that's why security cameras exist.
The studies on security cameras I've seen say the main official purpose of them is to make people less likely to commit crimes in front of one (because they go around the corner to commit their public indecency), but also IRL that they mostly get used to harass women and minorities (rather like "random" police stops and airport searches don't actually catch any terrorists).

Then you remember that people in hoodies are not on camera, courts still have to consider intent and motive, and when police ask for public assistance to identify people with a hat on it often goes nowhere because the people who know them don't say anything.

Because what catches people is people, someone knows you did it and they tell the police. Criminal families avoid charges indefinitely because they don't know anyone who would tell the police, and don't talk about their crimes other than off the record.


Now, cameras and footage people don't know about can be interesting. Give a cop a few days to spin a story about self defence before you drop the footage of him murdering some black kid, and it's very difficult for him to just make up an excuse that fits the footage at that point. But widespread official camera recordings don't do that.

Making cops (and soldiers) wear cameras all the time can greatly reduce the rate of people "assaulting an officer" by getting beaten up by the cops for no reason, but someone meaning to commit a crime isn't going to wear their camera.


The surveillance that works is like that. You make businesses and banks record all their financial transactions (in confidence), you make cops carry cameras (but not see the footage), you give random people cheap movie cameras in their phones (but don't let anyone know what they've recorded), you make politicians divulge the source of their donations (but make the little stuff anonymous), you point a big and obvious camera at the jewellery counter and the door to the vault room (but not some random street corner).
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Post by Occluded Sun »

A disturbing number of police camera footage spontaneously goes missing before it can be called up by the courts, so I am told.

You can use surveillance to fight corruption, but not if the watchers are corrupt. Who guards the guardians?
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Post by tussock »

Seriously, O.S.? Because in the US, for instance, internal affairs and the courts watch the police, the FBI watches internal affairs and the police, the higher courts watch the courts and the FBI, the office of the president watches any egregious abuses from any of them, congress watches the president, the highest courts and the senate watches congress, the media watch them all, everyone watches the media (especially the powerfully wealthy), people get to vote out the worst of the idiots when things go badly enough.

Who watches? Everyone watches, the trick is having the bad things be illegal so something can be done about them. Things like the police misplacing evidence of their own crimes.
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