India Rising! And our decline…

We’ll go all “good news, bad news” on you, today, contrasting one of the globe’s astonishing bright spots with the decline of the erstwhile Leader of the West/

But first: Have you been floundering to get a handle on this weird time we are in?  Lately there’s been a surge of interest in my “Horizons Model” to explain why our divides - especially in America, where market enterprise does better, under democrats - have less to do with any classic “left-right axis” than how far outward - in time and space - extend your horizons of worry, hope, and inclusion. 

Why do so many of our neighbors seem drenched in fear, and thus are prey to angst-propaganda? Why do other neighbors seem obsessed with rights extension and nothing else?

Have a look at my own incantation-explanation. And - whether or not it convinces - I promise more new concepts that make you go “huh!” than anything else you’ll read this month.  

== A new leader of the renaissance? ==

Sometimes – as forecast in Earth and The Transparent Society – positive trends can be rooted in sapient use of technology.  And this may be a big one.

According to investment maven Raoul Pal: India’s Project Aadhaar became the largest and most successful IT project ever undertaken in the world. As of 2016, 1.1 billion people (95% of the population) now have a digital proof of identity, including biometrics of fingerprints and retinal scans. The next phase was to get them into the banking system. The Government fostered the creation of eleven Payment Banks, which can hold money but don’t do any lending. To motivate people to open accounts, it offered free life insurance with them and linked bank accounts to social welfare benefits. Within three years more than 270 million bank accounts were opened and $10bn in deposits flooded in.

(Note, if we did this - or even just re-opened the Post Office Savings Account system with ATMs, poor Americans would overnight be richer, no longer having to use parasitical check-cashing services. Those who have opposed this in the U.S. are evil people. Period and full-stop.)

Pal continues: "The Aadhaar card holds another important benefit – people can use it to instantly open a mobile phone account. Mobile phone penetration exploded after Aadhaar and went from 40% of the population to 79% within a few years. Payments can now be made without banks, using mobile phones, fingerprints and an Aadhaar number. And with IndiaStack it is all cloud stored and secure."

Prime Minister Modi then risked his career on a sudden ban of the 100 rupee cash notes (with 1 month deposit deadline), which pushed the largely cash Indian economy into Aadhaar and undermined corruption and the black economy. To everyone’s surprise, it worked. (Russia is now the #1 cash economy. Guess why?)

I have two quibbles with this picture: First, India was not the first country to roll out such an integrated system for its citizens and economy.  Estonia was there earlier (see e-Estonia). I would wager that Estonian consultants played a big role in formulating Aadhaar.

Second and obviously, we are propelling toward systems that could be horribly abused by national elites who control the guts of such a system. Technologies like these are unrolling in China, with added layers like “social credit” that seem chilling. 

On the other hand, as the world’s biggest (and possibly now greatest and most genuine) democracy, India is positioning herself to be the leader of the “Western Enlightenment Experiment.”  Make that “Global Enlightenment Experiment,” and hurrah for our successor!  

With the USA floundering in mania, lunacy and phase 8 of its recurring Civil War, we had better hope that the seeds of liberty, science, accountability and grownup maturity that we spread will bear wondrous fruits of freedom and productivity and factual knowledge and adventure, in better soil. 

== Ah, La Belle France ==

It’s said that history repeats, as farce. 

We’ll know in a week whether Vladimir Putin will achieve his hat trick, getting another puppet into a western presidency.  

If so, then one of you who wrote in will be a prophet. "We might see a final confrontation -- with the US, Britain, France, and Russia lining up to impose fascism on the world... while Germany and Japan defend freedom."

And India, it seems.

Who wrote this simulation we're in?

== Alas, it couldn’t last for us ==

I’ve referred before to novels that foreshadowed a possible hot phase of the recurring American Civil War. Most phases have been tepid or cool, though the 1860s fever was near devastating, and some think that the current one (phase eight, by my reckoning) could go volcanic. This was portrayed – in retrospect – by my novel The Postman, which has been receiving a surge of attention lately, for its depiction of “holnists” whose rationalizations sound very much like Steve Bannon.

(Note that the rebooted Omni-Online has featured Ten science fiction books that "changed the genre forever." Very flattered to be included on this list - though not sure I deserve to be.)

One "new civil war" novel that I’ve touted is the recent Tears of Abraham, by Sean T. Smith, that takes you through a disturbingly hot and deadly struggle against ourselves. 

Another just hitting the shelves – that I haven’t yet read – is American War by Omar El Akkad - a dystopian novel about 'a Second American Civil War breaking out in 2074, after a presidential assassination, a virulent plague arising from a weaponized virus and a militantly divided North and South. A doomed country is beset by refugee camps, guerrilla raids and relentless violence.'  In other words, a triple whammy, like the one I look back on, in The Postman."

Also worrisome, given recent absolutely proven efforts by foreign powers to sabotage our democracy and economy, is The Cool War, by Frederik Pohl.  In fact, I deem no novel to be of more immediate pertinence to any member of our defense and intel communities.  Even the popular WWIII novel Ghost Fleet does not penetrate as deeply to reveal a nasty way the whole world might turn.

== You don’t think there are world leaders that crazy-fierce? ==

“The brazen daytime slaying of a Russian politician outside a Ukrainian hotel this week brings to eight the number of high-profile Russians who have died over the past five months since the US presidential election on November 8,” reports CNN.  

Here are 10 critics of Vladimir Putin who died violently or in suspicious ways.

Hey, fools who claim “we’re no better.” How about an actual tabulation-comparison of freedom and productivity and happiness and any other measure of humanity between America and Russia?  And yes, democracy and behavior in the world?

You: "we're all the same" jerks are really something. You dropped American Exceptionalism like a live grenade, when it inconveniently pointed at your Russian pals. Sure the U.S. has  done some bad things, that we ourselves usually uncover and criticize, in order to improve. We are doing that now. With your weird choice to lead us.

Oh but clarity can be found: "In a fiercely defiant statement, White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, denied that any member of the White House staff has ever worked “in any way, shape, or form” for the benefit of the United States." (Okay, that’s a snork! But we’ll need laughs as we gird ourselves.)

== Want a clear view of the problem? ==

Last time I revealed eight underlying factors driving our current civil war. Some are deeply painful. A couple of them are even "our" fault.

A disturbing and credible description of the rock-ribbed obstinacy that underlies hard-shelled rural-white-christian-fundamentalist Red America.  It verifies what I’ve long suspected, that these neighbors and fellow citizens of ours will never admit that we are neighbors and fellow citizens. They passionately support the most opposite-to-Jesus person they could ever have found, for one reason – he galls and infuriates and hates the same smartypants types that they hate. And that's good enough to ignore everything else.

It is the same underlying – confederate – fever that has periodically tormented our national character since 1778.

This doesn’t mean we should stop empathizing! Indeed, as I described last time, one of those eight underlying reasons for civil war is deeply traumatizing -- the "theft" of our neighbors' children!

One can feel for the rural(ish) trauma that happens every June, when the local High School -- center of all life in most towns -- holds graduation. The teens who are the pride of the community hug and cry... whereupon the best and brightest then streak out of town as fast as their legs can carry them, heading toward the city strongholds of The Enemy. 

That implicit rebuke happens every single year and it must wear on the souls of those who stay behind, who thereupon create a mythology of the city-as-Mordor. A cesspit  of iniquity, lacking all the wholesomeness of small town America...

...despite the real truth about which America has higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, domestic violence, divorce, STDs, unwed mothers, dropouts, gambling, alcoholism... and if you leave out a few truly dismal cities, higher crime rates. See the New York Times bestseller, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg.

The remainder of Blue America pays vastly more taxes, gets less back (yet whines far less) while Red America suckles net benefits, then bitches about taxes.

Oops!  Facts are inconvenient to the narrative .  And hence...

...fact-based thinking itself becomes the enemy.

The Futility of Hiding

“In the struggle for freedom of information, technology, not politics, will be the ultimate decider.”  -- Arthur C. Clarke

We’ll start with one more news item showing the futility of “hiding from elites”: The U.S. high court approves a rule change to expand FBI hacking power by interpreting search warrants broadly. 

It happens almost weekly - expansions in elite powers to see. And these are "normal" times! Imagine what new powers of vision will be granted, the next time the public is scared? Hiding is no solution.

Nor is it just government. “The Google-owned artificial intelligence company, DeepMind, is in deep water after it gained access to the confidential health data of more than 1.6 million National Healthcare Services patients in London,” reports Futurism.com. The data feeds an app called Streams, which would help hospital staff monitor kidney disease patients, markedly improving patient care. But also sent were non-kidney-related data including HIV test results, details about abortions, and drug overdoses.  

One of you wrote in asking whether this is sousveillantly good or bad? 

My response. And you are surprised? If you yowl and make them back off today, it won’t work next year, or the next. The stunning myopia of imagining top-down vision can be stopped is simply amazing. 

But there is good news! The fact that we do now know about this and can discuss it is an example of something called sousveillance. Of course we need more, much more.

 == Identified, wherever you go ==

In The Transparent Society I begin with a tale of two city-states. In both of them, eyes are everywhere: cameras that proliferate across the landscape, from towers to streets to parks to the electronic realm. Oh, but the two cities are different where it matters most. And we are seeing both kinds emerge now, in the real world.

Singapore Is Taking the ‘Smart City’ to a Whole New Level. The Wall Street Journal reports on how government-deployed sensors will collect and coordinate an unprecedented amount of data on daily life in the city. 

“As part of its Smart Nation program, launched by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in late 2014, Singapore is deploying an undetermined number of sensors and cameras across the island city-state that will allow the government to monitor everything from the cleanliness of public spaces to the density of crowds and the precise movement of every locally registered vehicle.”

“Officials say the program is designed to improve government services through technology, better connect its citizens, and encourage private-sector innovations. For instance, sensors deployed by private companies in some elderly people’s publicly managed homes will alert family if they stop moving, and even record when they use the toilet in an attempt to monitor general health.” Any decision to use data collected by Smart Nation sensors for law enforcement or surveillance would not, under Singapore law, need court approval or citizen consultation.

There's your City Number One. Oh, citizens are assured that the top-down surveillance is beneficent and paternally protective. But citizens have no way to verify this, or to enforce that promise.  

So let's look at City Number Two from The Transparent Society, coming alive as we speak.

I’ve met the President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who has overseen the country’s transformation into “e-Estonia,” where every citizen participates in a single, modern database that handles all health, income, insurance and government benefits records, relating them seamlessly so that paying your taxes “takes 90 seconds.” 

No one denies that Estonian citizens have garnered many benefits in time saved, efficiency and eliminating the shadows wherein corruption thrives. Estonia has the highest web involvement and business startup rate on the planet. Moreover, the information is two way. Except for the most sensitive things like defense matters and imminent (time limited) police investigations, citizens have unprecedented real-time ability to supervise and comment on public officials, including those managing the computer-data systems. 

And that is the difference. Not whether technology will shine light into every dark corner; there is no "whether." Rather, our choice will be either to trust the assurances of paternalistic authorities... or demand the power to enforce their good behavior, by relentlessly looking back at power. 

== Can E-Stonia lessons be applied elsewhere? == 

The article is interesting. Though it leaves many quandaries unanswered.

These include scalability… is this approach best suited to a small and highly educated nation? Or might the benefits be transferred – ‘turn-key’ – to some poor country like Botswana? Then, of course, there’s the worry that almost certainly vexes you – might Estonia’s universal database approach, for all of its clean efficiency, turn into a tool for permanent oppression by governmental Big Brothers?

To these fretters, I have one question; do you honestly believe big nation elites won’t have all these tools anyway, in the next decade or so, no matter how many times you invoke Orwell? Indeed, would you bet your life they don’t, already?  Estonia’s innovation is to make the database transparently accountable.  Any time a citizen’s records are accessed, he or she is told who did it, and officials are required to answer questions about why. 

That, alone, does not guarantee safety, privacy and freedom, of course; it will be a never-ending struggle.  But that arrangement makes plausible further activist efforts to keep big brothers under reins.

Moreover, it ingrains in citizens an expectation and a habit of supervision. And a willingness to get angry when that expectation gets thwarted. And a willingness to reward whistle-blowers, in that event. Not only is this a (somewhat) plausible way to protect liberty, it is how our ancestors (with cruder methods) got theirs. And it is the only way - even theoretically - that freedom can be preserved in the future.

Seriously.  Name another approach that's even remotely plausible. I have been demanding this for three decades.

In contrast, what is the pragmatic recommendation of the West’s most stalwart paladins of info liberty? Almost always they propose the normal-reflex “solution,” to scream at elites: “don’t look at us!”…

...without ever getting specific about how the demand might even be enacted, let alone enforced. Take the problem of identification.

== You exude and ooze ID ==

New biometrics abound and they get ever-creepier! Skull echoes could become passwords: SkullConduct uses the microphone already built into augmented-reality glasses, such as Google Glass, Meta 2, and HoloLens, and adds electronics to analyze the frequency response of sound after it travels through the user’s skull. Individual differences in skull anatomy result in highly person-specific frequency responses that can be used as a biometric system. It’s not as accurate as the CEREBRE biometric system (you can now be identified by your ‘brainprint’ with 100% accuracy), but it’s low-cost, portable. 

Binghamton University scientist Sarah Laszlo talks in this interview about an experiment which suggests that biometric "brainprints" could replace fingerprints in the future.  “Brainprints may carry some potential advantages over fingerprints in identifying people. For instance, if a person’s fingerprint is stolen, there’s virtually nothing that can be done because fingerprints are “non-cancellable,” Laszlo said.   “Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancellable,” she said. (Many different styles of brainprint can be recorded and the old, compromised ones publicly canceled as ID.) “So, in the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then ‘reset’ their brainprint.””  

 Dreamy “cypherpunks” talk of shrouding their online activities with encryption and wearing dazzle masks on the street, to stymie all the cameras. But to what end, when each of us fizzes with biometric identifiers? Your unique walking gait might be altered (for a short time) by a pebble in your shoe. But can you change the specific ratio of lengths of bones in your hand? Or the speckles on your iris, or the pattern of blood vessels in your retina?  

How about the oto-acoustic tones that many humans emit from their own eardrums, and that can be uniquely identified by sensors?  Some time ago I mentioned how your farts will betray you, revealing a very specific spectrum of micro-biota from your gut.

Our civil liberties defenders at the EFF and ACLU etc have the right instinct to fret about Big Brothers and asymmetric surveillance. But they always draw the wrong conclusion -- to resist the Orwellian nightmare by crying out "don't look at us!"

Over any extended time, you will not preserve safety or freedom by hiding. You’ll not. Dare I repeat? You... will... not... prevent elites from knowing you and knowing where you are and what you do. 

And besides, hiding from them is a cowardly, self-centered approach.  

What you can do… perhaps… is unite with a couple of billion other world citizens and demand that big folk behave themselves. That they not use the info to harm or oppress us.  Because billions of us are watching them. 

Unafraid of what elites can see, we will curb what they can do.

== What about encryption? ==

Yes, yes. The grand, always-invoked magic word. I shared a stage with a (skyped-in) fellow named Edward Snowden who - while impressive in some other ways - offered up this tiresome cliche, despite the fact that much-touted crypto-methods topple each and every year. And that any year’s cipher-breakers can, at minimum, dissolve the protective coats of encrypted material from ten years ago… always have and always (likely) will. 

The glaring fact is that even if such methods worked permanently and perfectly – (and I use some myself, for pragmatic reasons) – cypherstuff will only stymie elites (governmental, commercial, oligarchic, criminal and so on…) regarding three or four of the dozens of methods used by oppressors across the last several thousand years, since Hamurabi’s time.  As well-expressed in a famous XKCD cartoon, why spend millions cracking a suspect’s secret cache if a two-dollar wrench can wrest the password, when you bring him in?

I have yet to meet a cypherpunk activist who has read up on millennia of spycraft, before proclaiming “crypto is the solution!” Point out the other secret police methods that encryption does not touch? Or the sheer number of biometrics that spew from them, whenever they walk down the street? All you get is angry glowers. 

And they call me ‘naïve’ for recommending that, instead of trying to shroud ourselves in e-burkhas, cowering from Big Brother’s minions, we instead act vigorously, while we are still somewhat free, to strip all elites naked!  That is militance.  It is how we got what freedom we do have – hundreds of times more than any of our ancestors.

Moreover, in the most important civil liberties advance in a generation, our right to aim cameras at the police is now established and making a bigger difference than all the raving jeremiads of both left and right.

And sure, we can negotiate with our officials and the Protector Caste how to supervise in ways that still let them do their jobs.

The choice is inevitable, between City Number One, whose best and most benign-confucian example is Singapore but more likely Oceania... 

...or else the e-Estonian solution of utterly empowered citizenship, in which the skull-echo and fart-tracking and lie-detection and personality profiling methods help us to reduce the power of psychopaths and keep civil servants accountable.

The transparent city is coming, so let’s take a hand in its design, so that it reveals more about the mighty than about us. 

If so, then instead of Big Brother forever, we might have Big Brother never.

== Addendum ==

Envision contact lenses that are also tiny cameras, recording and storing whatever you see, and even playing it back before your very eyes.  Sony has patented such a system – though we’ve portrayed this in science fiction, for ages – using blinks to command the unit (again, as I depicted in Existence.) Oh, but what if it is hacked?  We can and will adapt, provided every advance is competitively and vigorously criticized and open-tested.