Seeing what should be (but isn’t, alas) obvious

= No, we will do the choosing ==

Earlier, I posted a lengthy critique of an issue of the economics newsletter published by my friend, John Mauldin. In a separate newsletter, another friend (of very different political persuasion) Mark Anderson of the Strategic News Service offers an interesting comparison. Very thought-provoking, and your reaction will be very telling.

“Imagine that it is Orwell's 1984, and you live under the most repressive regime on the planet. One day the dictator, Big Brother (remember that wonderful Apple ad?), announces that all citizens will be forced to carry a device that tells the police state everything about them. No one will be spared. There are protests and uprisings, people are jailed, dissenters form rebel groups, geeks find ways to spoof the technology, proxies get on TV and talk about the benefits of sharing everything as a good citizen. A few are shot up against a wall.

“Or, alternatively, imagine you are in the freest nation on the planet. A brilliant entrepreneur (who looks just like Steve Jobs) invents a magical new gadget that does all these cool things, and you can buy one today. Good consumers spend up to $1,000 just to have one, and pretty soon just about everyone does.

“What's the difference between these two scenarios? The main difference is likely a higher take-up rate in the free country and less concern about what these devices are up to.”

I do wish I could share these newsletters with you folks! The business types among you should get company subscriptions! (And how I am tempted to start my own.)

As for Mark’s scenario – in which free citizens ironically choose the same level of self-exposure as in an Orwellian state, through social media self-indulgence -- it was a clever and apt thought experiment... up to a point. Mark showed what should be blatantly obvious -- that there will be no hiding information from elites.

To which I must answer: so? 

That has never been the issue. No human society ever blinded its elites. European efforts to do this - while well-intended - are delusional, in light of wildly proliferating systems like facial recognition. 

Seriously, what's the prescription? Going off-grid? Given the Moore's Law of Cameras, that's utterly futile.

Fortunately, what elites know about us is not the issue.  It never was the issue.  It never, ever will be the issue. It is a distraction from the real issue.

The difference between Mark Anderson’s fictional Orwellian state (or real life China) and a nation of the truly free is not what elites can know about you, but what they can do to you. And that difference is night vs. day.  

Think about why most Americans are not paranoid about all this self-expression.  The patronizing reflex is to assume our fellow citizens are fools. (Well, there's been some evidence for that; we'll see.) But in fact, they do it because they feel safe. And only one thing is responsible for that sense of safety. A general assumption that if powers try to harm them, citizens will have recourse to both light and law.

The crux is this. We can limit what the mighty DO to us only if we can detect, record and deter harmful actions. That's what matters. And it happens not by futilely trying to hide, but by assertively demanding to see. It is the whole purpose for the most under-appreciated amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the wonderful Sixth, that empowers citizens with recourse to the Truth. 

That recourse to light and accountability is not going away! 2013 was the best year for civil liberties in the U.S. in three decades, because that year all branches of the federal government avowed a citizen’s right to record his or her interactions with police. Our wretched-dour media never gave this the attention it deserved – a critical milestone demarking the true difference between America and Oceania, or “Sesame Credit” China.

That is the difference. In Orwellian societies, the Telescreen only looks in one direction, not at Big Brother.  And note that every tyrant seeks, above all, to be safe from the accountability that comes with light. Signs abound, across the planet, that they are laser focused on shutting it down.

It's now been 20 years since The Transparent Society, and I sink into despair over how simple -- yet utterly un-intuitive -- this blatant fact appears to be.  Folks nod their heads and say: "yeah, I get that." Then they go back to hand-wringing about how Zuckerberg or the Deep State is "looking at me!" Never offering a plausible way to stop it, but always talking about hiding. Instead of picking up the one thing that ever made us free...

...the saber of light.

== The blatancy of the Korean “problem” ==

Another area where I impudently declare that I see something others don’t… something that should be “obvious,” is the dilemma of North Korea. 

Okay, here I am on shakier ground, and it’s not a matter of certainty as being willing to take odds in a wager.  Example: I’ll take 3:1 on an imminent and utterly contrived “Tonkin Gulf Incident” leading to a trumped-up U.S. war vs. Iran – a Potemkin/fake “war” with only one conceivable-foremost winner… but all the world’s tyrants doing great.

I’ve spoken less about Pyongyang and the Kim regime. And in what follows, I think it's important to consider thoughts that are outside the standard narrative. (My specialty! But it also means my successful predictions (there are many) are laced with some real howler errors!)

Let’s launch from this quotation I found in the Global Post:  "Whether this imaginative approach — rooted in Korea’s historic strategy of fending off its dominant neighboring powers of China and Japan by aligning with distant powers — is any more realistic than the U.S. expectation of denuclearization"

Okay, let’s dive in:

1. Much is made of Kim's nukes as a deterrence against attempted regime change. But he had that already, with 10,000 artillery tubes aimed at Seoul. The city could be flattened in one hour. No, the biggest reason he needs nukes is because - after the first few -- they are cheap!  

With a dozen safely deployable nuclear weapons, he can justify slashing his ginormously expensive army and possibly save his economy.

Hence, I will take wagers on this: Trump will get a "terrific deal" that grandfathers ten or twenty North Korean nukes in exchange for massive troop cuts on both sides of the DMZ, proclaiming this as a "concession".  When in fact it will be a win-win-win for Kim.

2.  I cannot begin to imagine why every pundit simply accepts at face value the notion that the Kim regime is independent of foreign control. In 1955 there were a million Chinese troops in North Korea.  The 1956 Hungarian revolt rocked both Moscow and Beijing, who doubled down on multi-layered controls over their satrapies, while creating potemkin "local governments" that they utterly regulated.

I am not proclaiming utter belief that Kim is a puppet of his big neighbor. But I am appalled that the very possibility goes unremarked and never even seems to occur to anyone!  When it is the simplest hypothesis under Occam's Razor.

All we have to the contrary are stories and shows.  Dig it: all the brattiness and uncle-killing etc has nothing to do with real power. Ponder how rapidly the Kim regime acquired both nukes (and H Bombs) and ICBMs.  Something isn't fishy? Beijing's "complaints" have always been toothless.

Why would Beijing want this?  

Ponder. The North Korean regime would offer a way to bloody the west -- e.g. via an EMP strike -- while retaining deniability and hence protection from retaliation.  This is exactly what's done by China commercially, via supposedly independent zaibatsu companies.

I don't expect to convince you of this theory... I am not convinced of it, myself!  But the tunnel vision of our punditry -- its inability to even consider the logical possibility -- is something disturbingly common in modern group-think nowadays. Even among very smart people. Alas.

Well... I try...

Transparency and Privacy: what we need, want and do not understand

Brett Horvath and Berit Anderson at SCOUT raise an important point about Apple’s new face recognition phone tool. “Face ID isn’t just about identity. It’s about mind-reading.” Brett is concerned about the possible combination of a) machine vision and predictive algorithms, b) micro expressions, and c) ubiquitous surveillance, which would allow oppressive regimes and bad actors not only to monitor the movement of dissident populations, but to actively read their emotions and predict behavior. “Now Apple is about to ship this technology stack to the world in what could be the most popular smartphone in history.”

Of course this only extends the lesson I taught in The Transparent Society. We will not preserve freedom by hiding. Nor will it ever be possible to conceal info from elites. Moreover, that is not how we got the freedom that we already have,

We will remain free by aggressively applying these tools upon all elites.  It is the only way we ever got freedom and it is the only way we can retain it.

Why, oh why, is this concept so incredibly hard for very bright people to grasp? I know some very high IQ individuals -- people who can clearly see that our brief, Periclean renaissance is in terrible danger of tumbling into an old-fashioned despotism, empowered by new technologies of control. In conversation -- or after reading The Transparent Society -- they claim to grasp the concept of reciprocal accountability and sousveillance...  the application of light upward at all elites and authorities. But then...?

Then, the very next time that they confront the latest modern information crisis of surveillance, or leaks or hacks or state or corporate control, their sole reflex is to prescribe vague and impossible refuge in hiding.

It cannot work. It never has. It never will. It is cowardly, too! But there's a method that does work. We see it in action, every single day... if we just open our eyes. And look.

== Withstanding and overcoming a toxin ==

Well, well. I’ve done many interviews but I never thought I’d be in FASHION Magazine! The article is serious though, about how we — as individuals, nation and species — are all-too easily poisoned by the addictive drug of self-righteous indignation. The writer brought in a number of interesting perspectives I had not seen or considered, till now.  I like it when that happens!

But do go to the source… my original call for research into indignation addiction, which was republished in Barbara Oakley’s tome Pathological Altruism.

This is a poison that can be especially ruinous in times like ours, when cynical oligarchs are deliberately raking coals to get us all riled up. 

Yes! There’s plenty to be angry about. But that has almost nothing to do with the thing we must seek calmly and rationally. Victory.

== Hold on to our vital victories ==

Danger, danger. The most important civil liberties advance in the 21st Century so far was when the Obama Administration joined multiple courts in declaring a citizen may record the police. I wrote about this in The Transparent Society (1997; see p.160) and how vital it is that we can exercise sousveillance at the level of the street, where power can most-directly affect us. 

Now: "In a free speech ruling that contradicts six other federal circuit courts, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court ruling that says Americans do not have a first amendment right to videotape the police, or any public official, in public."

Sure enough, in a deep-red state, this principle is under attack. Only... I blame the good side lawyers! They base their arguments for sousveillance on the First Amendment and sometimes the Fifth... when it is in fact the under-appreciated SIXTH Amendment that most clearly safeguards the citizen from true abuse of power, by granting us the power to compel revelation of facts in our own defense, allowing us recourse to the ultimate defense...

...the Truth.

Ah, but did breathless news reports exaggerate?  Robert Shore: "I have now read both the District Court's decision and the Eighth Circuit opinion affirming the District Court. Neither says what the article claims. The closest approach is a statement that the general public doesn't have a constitutional right to film citizens in the lobby of a police station, and that's a far cry from ruling that citizens can't film police stops executed in public. There's just no substitute for primary sources."

I hope so. Better that Brin be wrong in a “Danger!” alert.

== Doing is more important than knowing ==

You Are The Product: A good, long read by John Lanchester: "Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more bout you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens." 

Yes, and worrisome and I am glad that these facts are being revealed and chewed on, by the public.  Only note THAT these revelations and discussions are happening. And second always remember that something matters far more than what others know about you.  

What matters far more is what they might do to you!  

To control the latter, it is futile trying to stop others from seeing. Show us one time when that ever worked for long. Ever. Once. 

What will make a difference is making sure that we see everything about them.

== Worries & Concerns ==

 China doubles down on anonymity: “According to China’s new regulations, Internet companies and service providers are responsible for requesting and verifying real names from users when they register and must immediately report illegal content to the authorities…. Furthermore, a new cybersecurity law that went into effect at the beginning of June requires tech companies to store important data on servers within China. While this is supposedly meant to protect sensitive information, it can also make it easier for the government to track and persecute Internet users.”

Jennifer Jacquet, assistant professor at New York University and author of the newly released -- Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool -- explores issues of guilt, conscience, and conformity, proposing that we need new ground rules when it comes to public shaming, particularly in a new age of ubiquitous, and volatile, social media.

Yipe, it turns out that speech-recognition devices can understand and obey commands given at completely ultrasonic frequencies. You may not be able to hear someone hijacking your cellphone, computer, or home automation system, but they can.

The ongoing war on cameras and freedom: It's the Sixth Amendment, stupid.

Continue tracking this! The War on Cameras Just Went Code Red: It is one topic area where true citizen militance is called for. 

Elsewhere I’ve already discussed how a U.S. District Court judge ruled against the right to film cops. Yes, wagers are strong that this ruling may be overturned. Fields vs. City of Philadephia concerns two people photographing and filming the police in public areas. Each had their cameras confiscated.

As I’ve long said, few civil liberties matters are more important. (Indeed, major steps toward establishing this citizen right meant that 2013 was an important milestone in U.S. civil liberties.) But even the plaintiffs in this case -- paladins who are fighting for our right to see -- have been doing it all wrong! Their point of law is overly narrow because it seems the only Amendments from the Bill of Rights that anyone seems to remember, anymore, are the first and second and maybe the fifth.

But in this case, the judge’s ruling can be proved desperately and blatantly wrong by referring to one of my favorite, under appreciated amendments… the absolutely vital and powerful Sixth. 

The Sixth Amendment is the one that empowers citizens to aggressively demand to see.  To confront their accusers, to compel witnesses on their own behalf and to have access to any information that might exculpate them from a crime.

Let's be clear about what is at stake.  In any conflict between a citizen and the State, there is such a vast disparity of power that only one weapon can possibly level the field and give an innocent person a fighting chance. That weapon is The Truth. It is necessary and should be entirely sufficient. The whole and entire purpose of the Sixth Amendment is to give innocent citizens a fighting chance to use the truth in their own defense. 

It is simple, straightforward and obvious to extend the 6th to a citizen's right to (in a manner that does not interfere) record interactions with police. By expanding the number and variety and verifiable quality of "witnesses," such recordings enhance the ability of citizens to compel exculpatory witnesses in their own defense. When the mighty act to suppress such acts of witnessing, they are reducing the very resource the Sixth gives us a right to use. See where I go into this, elsewhere.

It is shameful... simply shameful... that the attorneys fighting these court battles have missed this key argument, obsessing as they have on just the First Amendment. Someone needs to get through to them. 

Yes, the First Amendment vitally protects your right to speak. 

But the Sixth protects your right to exist.

== The Cameras! ==

About a third of police departments in the United States have started to use body cameras, and they typically have almost complete control over the programs. Police departments decide when cameras should be rolling, how long the footage is stored, who gets to see it and how it can be used in the future.  This article - The Real Problem with Police Video - is perhaps too one-sided… there are some solid arguments for process restraint in releasing raw footage.  But the core point is a valid one… that police body and dash cams should be almost-always-on and deposit their footage directly to safe caches that are under neutral control.

Unlike many civil libertarians, I do not demand instant access to public and press! So long as some due process - even one that is slow and careful - ensures eventual transparency, then “eventual” should be good enough. Good enough to deter most bad behavior, good enough to ensure convictions of the blatantly guilty, and good enough to allow defense attorneys access to exculpatory evidence.  Instant access to the press is of much lower concern to me. "Eventual" will suffice to get 99% of the good from cop-cams.

It is protecting the data that must be ensured.  That alone will make clear to all good cops one essential need, in their own best-interests: “Hey, we better do something about our own thugs on the force, asap.” Indeed, as predicted long ago in The Transparent Society the problem of police tampering with cameras has an inherent solution… which is more cameras. 

Take this recent example - one of many: “In May, Burger King district manager Jay Darshane accused officers of deleting the security footage (of the Laquan McDonald shooting) after spending over three hours in the fast food restaurant on the night of the shooting. According to Darshane, the video equipment was working properly, but 86 minutes of footage, from 9:13 p.m. to 10:39 p.m., disappeared after the officers left. We had no idea they were going to sit there and delete files,” Darshane said. “I mean we were just trying to help the police officers.”

Unable to clearly explain why the 86 minutes disappeared, Police Supt. Garry McCarthy blamed the missing files on technical difficulties. But “NBC5 obtained screenshots taken from a surveillance video inside Burger King on the night of McDonald’s death. The photos appear to show officers using the computer console that recorded the fatal shooting.”

Good cops.  You must make examples of the bad ones.  Omerto is over. And we will catch this crap, more and more. It’s time.

== Liberal activists and lazy thinking ==

Indolent and reflexive thinking is rife in all directions (except those who have read The Transparent Society ;-)  For example: why is there so little acknowledgement that technology helped to make Black Lives Matter come alive? 

Demand more tech! Chant it! Urkle should be as big a symbol as Rodney King. 

The very first piece of tech that's needed? Simple clips that let folks pin cell phones to their shirts, so they can keep recording while showing cops that their hands are empty! Why have we not seen those clips handed out at every march or rally or to every ghetto youth?  Some things truly ought to be obvious.

Oh. This interactive website shows the range of state laws on police body cams: Some states restrict public access to recordings, others require all-party consent, while some states dictate when and where cameras or audio can be used:

== Saving Liberty and Privacy ==

Commercial companies are now specializing in selling hacking services to police agencies and governments, eager for side door and backdoor methods of getting around encryption.  While this story is disturbing on many levels, it also shows just how fragile are the quasi-religious hosannahs to encryption that are sung, almost across the board, by would be liberty defenders, ranging from Anonymous to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to Edward Snowden.  

Oh, I will credit some of them with good intent.  Indeed, my own dread of Big Brother is no less impassioned!  No, I am simply amazed that otherwise smart people can actually convince themselves that commonfolk will ever play a game of shrouds and shadows as well as can elites of government, commerce, criminality, technocracy or adversary nations. Refutations come every single week, in an endless litany of (surprise!) leaks.

Liberty can be preserved.  But we must start by asking “how did we get the freedoms we already have?”  That simple question reveals a basic truth.  We did not get them by cowering, or following todays reflexive cry that “everybody should hide!”  

We got it all through open assertive citizenship.  By demanding to supervise.  To see.

And finally... pulling back a bit...

== The abstraction: Liberty is primary. Privacy is desirable, but contingent ==

Look at how our definition of "privacy" changes from generation to generation, even yearly.  That malleability is indicative of a CONTINGENT right... one that is important to free humans, but that each generation can redefine to suit its own needs.  Like the right to property.  Both privacy and property are implicitly  supported in the US Constitution, but only in very vague, general terms, leaving each generation free to redefine them.

PRIMARY rights are different. They are rights that we cannot allow any generation or set of leaders to dilute.  Because once they are damaged we may never get them back.  These are the rights that allow us to knowingly argue about the contingent rights! Primary rights empower us to back out of a mistake.

What rights are paramount and primary? The freedom of citizens to know most of what's going on.  The freedom then to openly and in confident safety argue!  Freedom of knowledge and of speech are fiercely and explicitly and repeatedly defended in the U.S. Constitution, because almost any constraint - once rationalized - can lead to more, then more. Then a return to the brutally stupid rule by oligarchy that ruined almost every other society.

Our problem is simple: those who place privacy on a pedestal equal to freedom of knowledge and speech are making a huge error. We can have some privacy!  But only if freedom comes first.

Alas, many of the measures that are proposed, to "save privacy" will shut information that we'll need, in order to stay free. 

The Transparency Amendment: The Under-Appreciated Sixth

Transparency and a growing web of surveillance are again in the news, starting with an interview I just gave ZDNet in Britain, discussing the recent use of streetcams to identify rioters and moving on from there to many broader topics, comparing a world dominated by “Big Brother” to one oppressed by several billion “little brothers.”

And the topic keeps bubbling.  I’ll be tuning in this Thursday to the premiere of “Person of Interest” on CBS (Sept 22 9pm). It looks thought provoking, with a lovely over-layer of dramatized paranoia, expressing a core point from my book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force us to choose between Privacy and Freedom - that there will be no escaping surveillance. The cameras get smaller, faster, better, cheaper and more numerous at a pace exceeding Moore’s Law. (Brin’s Corollary)

Trying to pretend this isn't happening, or that well-intentioned laws can ever blind the mighty, will only prevent us from getting sousveillance, the power to look back.  I imagine that will be an issue in the show at some point, as the "Machine" ruthlessly evades any possibility of eyes turning its omniscient gaze around.  We’ll be watching.

== THE BASIC RIGHT TO LOOK BACK ==

All of this is related to one of my principal topics. A week or two ago I was touting tentative optimism after a Federal court ruled in favor of citizens recording their encounters with police.  Now this is reinforced as an Illinois judge recently ruled the state’s eavesdropping law unconstitutional as applied to a man who faced up to to 75 years in prison for secretly recording his encounters with police officers and a judge. “Such action impedes the free flow of information concerning public officials and violates the First Amendment right to gather such information,” he wrote.

Let me qualify my fervent support for these decisions. I think both rulings put too much emphasis on the First Amendment “press” freedom aspect, and too little on the 6th Amendment’s declaration of an absolute right of citizen access to testimony that might exonerate - in other words, using the core weapon of the Truth to protect against abuse of authority and power. Let me be plain, I find the first Amendment so heavily used that it becomes squishy, amorphous, in many cases rather unreliable.

I often find I have to remind people that the 6th -- the “forgotten Amendment” -- is actually one of the most important and powerful of them all!

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury…and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor…"

It is the transparency amendment, making clear that our real bulwark of freedom is not the passive, hunkering “right to remain silent” or even the blustery right to speak...

...but the aggressively assertive right to “compel testimony” on our behalf from reluctant witnesses. The logical extension of this to a universal ability to record our interactions with authority is direct and logical and vital...

...and I hope some attorneys make this point about the Sixth Amendment soon, instead of staring only at the sacred but over-used First.

Still, whatever basis is given, the ruling clearly established the core point of law we all needed... that is, till the Supreme Court does its thing. Do any of you still have faith that Justices Scalia, Thomas and Roberts are on our side?  I remain hopeful, ever.

Let there be no mistake, this issue is still fragile! "Judge Richard A. Posner isn't known  for his genteel treatment of parties whose arguments he doesn't agree with. When an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union began to make his opening statement at a Tuesday oral argument, Posner cut him off after 14 words. "Yeah, I know," he said dismissively. "But I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police....Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers."

I've met Justice Posner and argued with him about this before.  He is a very smart fellow, but also deeply mired in mid-20th Century ways of thinking, alas. I am hopeful, though, that he can learn to see with 21st Century eyes.

For follow-up see: You have the right to record police.

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