Omniveillance and Ubiquitous Law Enforcement

I will comment soon about the tragedy in Paris, where we lived for a couple of years, back in the 1990s. I'll have some yin-yang, big-picture perspectives.  But first...

From Orwell to Vinge, authors have long suggested that technology might empower future tyrants.  Indeed, it goes back further, to (for example) the tech-driven cat and mouse struggles between Czarist secret police and underground rebel cells.  Indeed cypher-and-surveillance tussles have been ageless.

But Vernor Vinge made clear that omni-veillance – and (as I show in Sundiver and The Transparent Society) the possible arrival of genuine lie detectors and personality testers – may take us into the era of “ubiquitous law enforcement.”

At which point, we still don't have Big Brother.  For that to happen - or indeed, to avoid him forever - one basic choice must be made.

== The Problem of technological-social control ==

To set the problem in its most-modern perspective, let me recommend an interesting article, Ai Weiwei is Living in Our Future by Hans de Zwart, about the onrushing age of surveillance. Take this excerpt:

“It is not only the government who is following us and trying to influence our behavior. In fact, it is the standard business model of the Internet. Our behaviour on the Internet is nearly always mediated by a third party. Facebook and WhatsApp sit between you and your best friend, Spotify sits between you and Beyoncé, Netflix sits between you and Breaking Bad and Amazon sits between you and however many Shades of Grey. The biggest commercial intermediary is Google who by now decides, among other things how I walk from the station to the theatre, in which way I will treat the symptoms of my cold, whether an email I’ve sent to somebody else should be marked as spam, where best I can book a hotel, and whether or not I have an appointment next week Thursday.”

Or this: after describing how Disney tracks patrons by RFID… and folks track their pets and kids… 

“If your child is ignoring your calls and doesn’t reply to your texts, you can use the ‘Ignore no more’ app. It will lock your child’s phone until they call you back.”

The author does one of the best jobs I have seen, at conveying the rapid advance of commercially available surveillance and nosy sites like Tindr and Grindr. 

“It should be clear by now that it is only a matter of time before the storage and power technologies have advanced far enough to continuously film everything and to store it forever.”

This piece is thoroughly-prepared, rich with examples from around the world and vivid illustrations.

== We’d all love to see your plan… ==

Alas, things start declining in Mr. de Zwart’s article as soon as he cites Dave Eggers’s book The Circle, (which I reviewed earlier), without mentioning that it plays with a very, very heavily loaded deck. For a writer who just finished telling us about casinos, this lapse of attention is pretty unforgivable. 

De Zwart goes on to cite me and Kevin Kelly and the notion that citizens might retain freedom, escaping such traps by exposing them and looking back at power. Which is — ironically — exactly what Hans de Zwart tries to achieve with his article. 

Ponder that, a moment. His aim in writing the piece was to shine light on dangerous trends, with a presumed goal of altering the course of affairs, thereby. How is that ironic? Because Mr. De Zwart then turns around to say:

“With the inescapable number of cameras and other sensors in the public space they will soon have the means to enforce absolute compliance. I am therefore not a strong believer in the ‘sousveillance’ and ‘coveillance’ discourse. I think we need to solve this problem in another way.”

Truly? Having spent all that time, trying to achieve exactly what Kelly and I recommend, by shining your own light at problems and eliciting greater citizen awareness? After all that effort to shine light on power, now you are about to suggest we all turn away from sousveillance and awareness and try something else?

Well, well, please elaborate! We are interested in your solution. Or — as Jon Stewart often croons, leaning forward with chin in hand: “Go on!”

Sigh and alack, it is always thus. At the end of these jeremiads, they fall apart.

After many pages of cogent alarums, de Zwart lightly and blithely cites Nasim Taleb’s call for social resilience — a theme that I have pushed far longer than Taleb — and basically concludes:

“Yeah… that’s the ticket. Let’s all be resilient!”

Um. Thanks. Yes. And breathe air. And rely on gravity.

But do read the article! Just don’t count on getting any answers at the end. Kevin and I at least have a suggestion. It happens to be precisely the method that got us the freedom we now have, to read and ponder essays like Mr. de Zwart’s… and his own freedom to write them.

Indeed, it is precisely the method Mr. de Zwart attempts to use, in this fascinating (read for the details!) but ultimately disappointing piece. 

== Again from the Transparency Front ==

Yet more evidence that hiding is not the best approach: U.S. Postal Service 'mail imaging' program used for law enforcement, surveillance. The metadata recording thing applies to snail-mail too, evidently. All mail gets its picture taken and stored for later perusal. As with phones, a warrant is required to see the contents, but not to see the outer edges.  And you plan to stop this... how? The irony, if you pass a law to keep elites from snooping, that law only works if you are truly free and the elites are already accountable enough to obey laws. 

Otherwise, they just chuckle and pretend to obey the "law." Accountability is a prerequisite for privacy laws to work.  And you only get accountability from... transparency.

Oh, let's finish with some miscellany: here’s a first scientific report showing that body cameras can prevent unacceptable use-of-force.

Look up one of the most important and heroic organizations on the planet that is fighting for transparency and accountability — the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.  Look at the amazing things they are doing and the uphill battle that we face, in preventing a worldwide dive into crime-based feudalism.  Get on their mailing list. Even that helps.