Paranoia, Conspiracies and Surveillance

== Another summons to resigned despair ==

Conspiracy theories abound.  They erupt out of human nature, it seems, and your ethnicity or caste or political leanings only affect which direction you credit with devilish cleverness, secret power and satanic values. For sure, as a science fiction author I can concoct plausible schemes and plots with the best of them!  Indeed, let me add that some real life cabals are so blatant and proudly obvious that you just have to admit – sometimes “they” are completely real and up to awful mischief.

(Anyone who does not trace the ownership of Fox News, for example, and draw obvious conclusions, must already have succumbed to that particular mind control plot.)

And yet, I have a completely different take on this kind of paranoia. It helps to step back and realize that almost certainly the vast majority of wild-eyed conspiracy theories out there are hogwash. 

Moreover, underlying it all is the fact that most are all about flattery!  Each one caters to the believer’s inflated sense of importance: 

“Me and my pals are in the know, and the rest of you are sheep!”

Never once have I seen any conspiracy fetishist stop and admit the obvious, that every Hollywood film preaches not just suspicion of authority (SoA), but also the bovine nature of our neighbors.  (Neighbors who assume they are the knowing ones, while you are the braying, easily-fooled ungulate.)  

But okay, let’s put aside the fact that cabal-believers suckled their SoA milk from the most relentless propaganda campaign in human history. That irony is too rich for them (or even most of you) to fully contemplate. Nevertheless, is it possible that some of the “black helicopter” type scenarios contain a grain of truth?

More than a grain, I’ll avow.  Oh, not “government camps” and martial law or any of that crap.  If you ever met an actual civil servant, in one of those cryptic agencies, you’d know how hard such things would be to keep secret.  Edward Snowden blew the whistle on… what was at the time marginally legal meta-data mining, with not a single citizen being even slightly (physically or financially) inconvenienced.  There’d be 10,000 Snowdens if any of the Blofeld-style scenarios about real heinous stuff had even a glimmer of truth.

(That is my own take on Snowden, that he served as a canary demonstrating the threshold of “heinousness” at which civil servants can be expected to step-up.  And we can take some solace that the threshold is way, way, way lower than “black helicopters.”)

But no… the grain of truth has to do with surveillance. Watching us. Collating data from our phones and online searches and fitbits and phone calls.  The stuff that Snowden and his fellow “T Cells” are complaining about, and that serve as grist for this leap by Walter Kirn into gonzo paranoid-journalism in the Atlantic, entitled: “If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy.” 

Mr. Kirn begins with a very leading question: 

“As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?” 

Tabulating a series of worst-case scenarios and semi-warranted extrapolations, he weaves a pretty darn entertaining-scary tapestry of “we might as well give up now, because Big Brother is already here.” (My (accurate) paraphrasing.)  

Oh-kaaay.  But then, Mr. Kirn, even if you are right in every respect, what’s your prescription, sir? And why do you never once even try to answer the question posed in the title of your screed? 

Of course there’s no solution offered. As we saw above, jeremiads are easy.  Cynical, snarled rants flow, by pure momentum, no different than the ones you wrote as a college sophomore. 

 Oh, don’t get me wrong. We need shouted warnings that we are about to lose our freedom to tech empowered hierarchs – whether the elites in question are new-lord aristocrats, faceless corporations or faceless government bureaucracies.  The real reason that our myths nearly all preach Suspicion of Authority is because the danger is very real!  

We are revolutionaries.  And outside of the last couple of centuries in the west, no other experiment in freedom or in flattened social orders ever lasted more than a generation. I utterly share a deep, grinding worry that some privileged few will regain the kind of obligate power over our lives that kings and priests exerted, nearly everywhere for 6000 years.  

Only, I'm not satisfied to smugly point and shout denunciations. As said in part 1 (above), I want to look at how we got the (imperfect/threatened) window of relative freedom we currently have. Only by understanding this will we be able to prescribe solutions and pass the imperfect gift on to future generations.

And this Atlantic article only makes me sigh. Mr. Kirn, like almost every other privacy pundit, is so ensorceled by dudgeon that he cannot – even briefly – glance at what has worked so far. Nor at the possibility that these new technologies might empower us and our will-to-freedom… 

...as they have already done, recently, in the Black Lives Matter Movement. A perfect case of technology making more of a difference than anyone wants to admit.  Making the difference, in fact.  And that difference was technology empowering the People, and not the Man.

By dismissing that - even as a passing thought - Mr. Kirn and other Jeremiahs show that their interest does not lie in solutions, or even revolution. It revolves around the number two lesson suckled from Hollywood flicks – right after suspicion of authority.  That all my neighbors are sheep.

== From the battlefront for freedom, transparency and privacy  ==

Which is a pity, because the Big Brother trends are, in fact, very real!  For example, Singapore has established Social Credit Scoring and China plans to follow suit.  From a western perspective it seems spectacularly chilling, that civil servants at a monolithic government agency should track every aspect of your life and tabulate in a single number how fine a person you are being? How much “credit” you have to be trusted with things like passports and visas and even childbearing?  

It is the ultimate manifestation of top down methods of governance.  Whether implemented in order to smoothly deliver services in an all-swaddling nanny state or else to create the ultimate Orwellian enforcement machine, most of us over here, across the political “spectrum” would deem the whole approach to be utterly loathsome and doomed to devolve into stifling tyranny.

And yet, the author of this piece suggests that even the US cannot help but evolve, at least somewhat, in this direction.  Elements of this judgment-and-reward system already exist in the U.S. private-sector credit scoring infrastructure, in our college scores, and in the United States TSA’s airline passenger “whitelist” system. Indeed, many futurists (including yours truly) have talked about Reputation systems replacing currency.

The visceral reaction is basically correct. Take an interesting experiment in militant transparency:  The Open Source Party is a political movement that derives both inspiration and methods from Open Source software principles. The crux: political processes are seen as a body of code. That code, and any changes to the code, must be visible and understandable and modifiable by a free and agile user-citizen population.  And I am there… in principle.  Let’s discuss the principle… while pushing ahead with the practical.  

== Biometrics… Schmetrics… ==

The sad thing is how many of our brave and righteous paladins of Freedom - for example at ACLU and EFF are right and righteous in their overall dedication to prevent Big Brother, yet wind up recommending the same wrongheaded prescription that cannot possibly work:

"Everybody hide!"

Over the years, I've given an insane number of examples. Here's another: in September, the Office of Personnel Management admitted that the number of federal employees’ fingerprints compromised in the massive breach of its servers revealed over the summer has grown from 1.1 million to 5.6 million.  OPM adds that it’s mailing letters to all affected victims, and notes that it’s also offering them free credit monitoring.  And it goes much farther. 

In The Transparent Society I talk about the difference between a unique identifier and a verifier.  Your Social Security number is an example of the former.  It correlates with a unique person and say, "this conversation or transaction is about this particular John Smith and no other."  It does not prove that the person using the SSN actually IS that John Smith!

A password is the very opposite of an identifier. It can be changed! It can be replaced with a more secure one!  Fingerprints are like SSNs.  They establish who is being discussed.  It used to be, when only the FBI had a database of them and they were hard to copy, a fingerprint might be used also as a verifier.  That is no longer true.

In future, almost any single biometric that is unique to you might be sniffed or snooped or recorded. So we will adapt.  You'll visit your local bank branch monthly or weekly and there the whole suite of biometrics will confirm who you are and you and your banker will then clean up and establish that month's (or week's) passcodes.  Again we will adapt!  I didn't claim it would be easy or problem-free.

But we must start by looking at fundamentals.  And understanding the difference between an identifier and a verifier.  One of dozens of things explained carefully in The Transparent Society.

 == A philosophical aside: Principles vs Outcomes ==

We should hold in suspicion any and all proclamations of pure and enraged principle, unless those stances can also point to:

1. correlation with positive real-world outcomes over long time spans, and 

2. an inherent ability to keep re-evaluating, adjusting and backing out of errors.

Purist declarations have been used so often to justify self-serving oppression of others and/or cheating or simple insanity, that we must deem this kind of rationalization to be one of humanity's greatest sicknesses.  

That is not to say that all declarations of principle are wrong! But let's take one example -- Freedom of Speech.  A core principle that most of us deem quasi-sacred, without ever pausing to ponder how the vast majority of our ancestors would have called it crazy.  

FoS seems "good" to us.  But that appearance is backed-up by a solid correlation with our civilization's spectacularly better rates of innovation, wealth-generation, problem-solving and fun, all of which are direct outcomes of FoS.   Which must be defended with zeal AS IF it were holy, though the deepest reasons are pragmatic.  

Especially the end to 6000 years of societies wasting most of their available human talent.

Likewise, Freedom of Speech is the best way to detect errors and flaws, even in our own principles -- even in our most-sacred principles, like Freedom of Speech!  Allowing us to make guarded, minimal but practical compromises that make sense to each generation.  But above all, allowing later generations to fluidly argue, re-assess and back out of mistakes. That ability to keep up a diversity of viewpoints that are not repressed by either hierarchy or conformity is a palpable and inarguable strength that FoS fosters.

Am I saying we should never passionately propound principles?  Not so!  FoS must be shouted zealously, even religiously, or we'll not have the fervor it will take, to overcome the world's cheaters and would be oppressors (including those on our "side.") But over the long run, there must be a grounding in objective reality, or all our subjective screaming will not suffice to make a false "principle" true.

== And finally ==

A fascinating article on Cold War intelligence shows how a KGB official was able to glean patterns  from the simplest details in order to uncover CIA operatives, so effectively that the CIA went crazy for years, searching for nonexistent moles.  This sort of thing, by the way, is why I roll my eyes over “crypto” fans who declare that encryption of online data is all they need in order to be free forever from meddling by the oppressive State.  

I have yet to meet one cypherpunk who has ever studied the 4000 year history of cat and mouse games by spies and resistance  cells and secret police, dating back to Hammurabi.  Of the dozen or so general types of methods used by czarist and Nazi and Communist and imperial and modern agencies to pierce underground movements, crypto can only – even theoretically – inconvenience maybe three. 

Such blithe, willfully trusting fantasy and ignorance would be charming, except that these techno-romantics style themselves as our best defense against Big Brother. Fortunately… there are others. 

  

Obfuscation: protect privacy by destroying the Web!

Time for a return to the core issue of our time: how shall we best preserve and extend freedom?  Along with freedom's contingent benefits, like privacy?

In the LA Review of Books, Internet Privacy: Stepping Up Our Self-Defense Game, Evan Selinger reviews a slim book -- Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest, by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum.  

Distilled, the core argument is that defenders of freedom and privacy should poison the Web and Net that we now know, by flooding it with disinformation and false data, so that no one -- including powerful elites -- will be able to tell what's real. In other words -- burn the commons to the ground, so smoke gets in their eyes. That'll show 'em.

Let me avow that I actually quite respect Brunton and Nissenbaum and other members of this weird cult, for one reason.  At least in Obfuscation they are recommending a different solution from the standard offerings, which are “encrypt everything!” and “surrender to despair.”  True, the obfuscation approach was first offered in sci fi thought experiments, like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End… and Vernor saw the logical reasons why it cannot possibly work.  Still, at least they are trying to envision something assertive.

To be clear, most of us share the same fear – of a return to the obligate pyramids of privilege and power that dominated 99% of human societies for at least the last 6000 years.  George Orwell terrified us by portraying Big Brother’s tyranny becoming far worse even than feudalism, enhanced and locked-in with technological powers that make resistance futile, forever.  I am often accused of shugging off that threat when, in fact, I am as much (or more) motivated to fight it than anyone else alive.  Motivated enough to ask that rarest of questions: 

“How did we get the narrow window of freedom (and some privacy) that we currently enjoy?”

Oh, there is no end to Cassandras issuing jeremiads and hand-wringing denunciations that the window is closing! Declaring that various elites – government agencies, corporations, oligarchs, criminal gangs – are forging Big Brother’s tools and applying them, as we speak. And these complainers are right! As far as they go, that is. Yes, the revolution and renaissance is in danger! It always has been, with odds stacked high in favor of feudalism’s horrible return.  And yet…

…and yet dire warnings are best when accompanied by perspective. But not one of the modern doomcasters – from Snowden and Assange to Fukayama and Schneier to Nissenbaum and Brunton – not one of them ever casts an eye toward the question that I will now reiterate: “How did we get the admittedly imperfect window of freedom (and some privacy) that we currently enjoy?”

The answer is not “obfuscation.” Nor is it a more frequently prescribed version of the same notion – universal encryption of everything. Our ancestors who set the enlightenment revolution in motion held no truck with such cowardly approaches, that boil down to “If you are afraid of looming tyrants, then by all means hide!” (See my earlier critique: Everybody Hide!)

Across twenty years I have asked fans of cowering in shadows to name one time when that approach truly stymied would-be lords, or helped to maintain a free and open and accountable society. The answer I get is always… always… puzzled, blinking stares, as if the question had never once occurred to them. But in fact, if you examine sixty centuries of tyranny – and the methods used by secret police and despots since Hammurabi – only a handful of their tactics would be even slightly inconvenienced by perfectly-encrypted messaging – or by setting the commons on fire. 

(Oh, and fans of encrypted cowering also ignore technological change.  The fact that agencies and corporations can trivially decipher encryption from ten years ago, so why won’t they be able to parse today’s best ciphers, ten years from now? Revelation delayed is still revelation. Oh, you respond that this time it'll work much better than it ever worked before? You’d really and truly entrust everything to such a slender reed?)

Ah, but solutions only have to sound plausible and logical. What? I’m asking for a history of their proposed approach ever, ever, ever having worked?  Call me a spoil-sport.

In fact, only one thing has ever actually worked, thwarting tyranny long enough to let us have this recent – albeit imperfect – stretch of relative freedom and privacy. The method is called reciprocal accountability.  Also Sousveillance (look it up.) A far more demanding, citizen-centered approach that happens to be the way our parents did it, and their parents, and the founders of our revolution.

It is the very same method that is currently being applied on our streets, as citizens -- empowered by new technologies of vision – assert themselves to hold police accountable.  Using new technologies like cell phone cameras to empower citizenship, instead of oppressing it, they are preserving and enhancing freedom as we speak, not by hiding from the Man, but by militantly and courageously aiming tools of light to hold authority accountable. 

And that is the difference between us, friends.  I share with Nissenbaum and Brunton and Selinger a fear and loathing of potential feudal lords and tyrants. Only I care enough to actually get past the indignant reflex and ask what has worked in the past – and what is working right now. 

Ponder this truth: what has worked is not - and never has been - hiding.

== Is hiding even remotely possible? ==

The new techno romantics all proclaim so, demanding the cowardly approach – hiding from the Man – and loudly proclaiming it to be brave.  But physically and pragmatically, can it actually be done?

In the future, elites will have all sorts of tools to defeat obfuscation.  Linguistic-semantic analysis will detect your statements and ID you, even hidden by a pseudonym. Comparison of multi-path inputs will parse truth from fabulation. Governments and criminals and aristocrats will have means to bypass the bits, eavesdropping on the sonic data as your voice vibrates your window, or they’ll tap and log the strokes you type on your keyboard, from the different sounds each letter emits.

Technologies like facial coding, biofeedback and brain imaging have long been used by companies in the hope of pushing the boundaries of marketing and product development. But their use by political parties and governments is a growing phenomenon, evoking futuristic scenes from the movie “Minority Report,” in which eerily well-informed billboards scan commuters’ eyes and call out to them by name.

I have compiled a long list of biometric traits that are useful or effective at distinguishing one human being from another.  These range from fingerprints and retinal or iris scans to face recognition, hand-bone ratios, voiceprints, walking-gait... all the way to the otto-acoustic sound emissions that many of us radiate involuntarily from our eardrums!  We positively fizz with identifiers. And the romantics who think they will ever be able to conceal their movements in such a future are uber-fools.

Now comes news that just sitting in a room you'll leave a unique panoply of bacteria that can be attributed to you. Everywhere you go... you emit your own unique microbial cloud -- a personalized signature of your own micro biome.

"We all continually emit our own microbial cloud into the air and onto nearby—and not so nearby—surfaces. Now, according to a new study in the open-access journal Peerj, scientists can distinguish the make-up of the cloud is uniquely yours—a personal marker that is as particular to you as your fingerprints or your genome. That’s a biological calling card that could have implications for epidemiology, environmental engineering or even, intriguingly, criminal forensics."

Elsewhere, I talk about a posh gym in New York where a $26,000 membership and a retinal scan lets you into a facility where they measure everything about you… in order to guide your workout. Um okay.  So rich people are paying high rates in order to offer up their bodies to be measured in every conceivable way, so that unvetted parties will have every single biometric ... ah, I see you are getting it.  But do they?

Safety-through-concealment is a fool's fantasy -- even for elites.

I do not say this out of despair!  Rather, in order to rouse you to fight for freedom the only way that has ever worked.  The only way that can possibly work.  And the way that the self-appointed mavens of privacy absolutely refuse to consider.  In their relentless preaching for cowardice… that we all should protect ourselves by hiding… they perform the worst possible betrayal of everything that they claim to stand for.

Pardon me for repeating. I'll stop doing it when I see signs that the point is getting through to anyone, anyone at all.  But hiding will not work over any long-run.  

Sure, protect your passwords as a short term, practical matter.  But over the long term only one thing will keep you free.  Aggressively, militantly empowering yourself and your neighbors to see!

== So what’s to be done? ==

This is why the banks will not go all electronic and abandon their branches.  Bank branches will in future do what they do now, verify your credentials and help you do transactions.  Only in 2050 you will walk in... in-person... and be verified via all of your biometrics, including biomeNtrics (I just coined that!) via cranial sensors.

With that verification, you can then, in-person, clean up the last month's messes and prepare the next month's passwords.

== Someone being useful, at least ==

Much more cogent and well-supported – and hence scarier – is: "6 Spooky Ways Local Law Enforcement Is Watching You: A day in the life of the surveillance state," by Elliot Harmon and Nadia Kayyali, posted on the site of the worthy Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) which I urge all of you to make one of your two dozen “proxy activism” NGOs.

Just because I disagree with EFF's set of prescriptive solutions, that doesn't mean they aren't completely right to be shouting and hollering and rousing public awareness of the overall dangers!  I send them money.  You should, too.

Harmon and Kayyali summarize, with useful links, half a dozen ways you are being watched, from social media monitoring and automated license plate readers to surveillance cameras, biometrics and imsi catchers.  Alas though, in the end the problem and drawback is the same.

== And finally… Yelp for People? ==

Of course this had to come. Yelp for people: You will soon be able to rate anyone you have interacted with on this new app: with reviews and 1 to 5 star ratings assigned to "your exes, your co-workers, the old guy who lives next door. You can’t opt out — once someone puts your name in the Peeple system, it’s there unless you violate the site’s terms of service. And you can’t delete bad or biased reviews — that would defeat the whole purpose."

The good news?  This will light a fire under creating real reputation mediation services, a potential billion dollar business (and I know the secret sauce) – and don’t let anyone tell you that reputation companies already exist.  They are jokes.