Perceptive and myopic views of our transparent future. Especially police cameras.

Let's veer from either science fiction or politics into our politically science-fictional new world of light. Starting with a reminder that my new anthology (with Stephen Potts) Chasing Shadows, is released this week by Tor Books, featuring contributions by William Gibson, James Gunn, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge and many others, offering stories and insights into a future when light flows almost everywhere. Prepare yourself!  This might be a good start.

Steve and I will be signing copies, along with Scott Sigler, at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, on January 27!

== Floundering gradually toward wisdom ==

In a vivid article - Should We See Everything a Cop Sees? - McKenzie Funk of The New York Times describes the wide cast of characters in Seattle who are grappling with a pressing modern problem, how to comply with a court order to make police camera footage available to the public.

It's a can of worms, because the police department is also legally required to redact or blur personal details such as faces or identifiable voices, for the sake of privacy. While Funk's article makes for entertaining reading, the story is murky about the context for it all. That context is a proliferation of cameras, getting smaller, faster, cheaper, better, more numerous and mobile at rates much faster than Moore’s Law.  

Short-horizon myopia is common to every person I've seen weigh in - even very bright folks - on this topic.  Sure, a few of us predicted all this back in the 20th Century - e.g. in EARTH (1989) and The Transparent Society (1997) - yet the very notion of lifting one's gaze beyond this month, following trend lines instead for three or five, or ten years ahead, seems impossible even for intelligent and critical observers like McKenzie Funk.

Regarding just the zoomed-in dilemmas of 2016, Funk's article does a good job of showing us the trees (the dilemmas faced by police, prosecutors, attorneys and citizens in adapting to these court decisions), without even noticing the forest. The context of why this is all happening and how this amounts to - for all the tsuris and aggravation - a huge victory for our kind of civilization.

I have called it the most important civil liberties victory of this century so far -- perhaps in thirty years -- even though it was hardly covered by the press. In 2013 both the U.S. courts and the Obama Administration declared it to be "settled law" that a citizen has the right to record his or her interactions with police in public places.

No single matter could have been more important because it established the most basic right of "sousveillance" or looking-back at power, that The Transparent Society is all about. It is also fundamental to freedom, for in altercations with authority, what other recourse can a citizen turn to, than the Truth?

But the forest is rapidly changing! Next year, the same scene that was today only visible on a cop-cam’s footage will have been covered also by the suspect’s auto-record phone app, or a passerby’s dash cam. Or a store’s security system, or chains of cheap button cams pasted on lamp posts or bridge overpasses by activist groups, or even hobbyists. Follow the price curve a bit farther and you have the sticker cameras that I describe in EXISTENCE, stuck to any surface by 9-year olds who peel them from great, big rolls, each with its own code in IPV6 cyberspace and powered by trickles of sunlight.

In that context, not a single issue wrangled-over in the NY Times hand-wringing article will seem anything but archaic - even troglodytic - just half a decade from now. If there was ever an era in desperate need of the Big Perspectives offered by science fiction….

== The pattern continues ==

After which I listened to NPR's To The Point broadcast about the regulation of police body and dash cams. And despite generally liking Warren Olney - he always asks good questions - I must say I was disappointed in how this topic makes everyone myopic. The only interviewee who applied two neurons to a bigger view was the former Redlands police chief, who gave thoughtful, logical answers... though like the others, only focused on the here and now. (All right, the ACLU guy got a little better, across the interview.)

Not one of them contemplated how technology made all of it possible - this entire topic would have been (and was!) science fiction five years ago - and every interviewee on Olney's show ignored how tech will be utterly different five years from now. None contemplated the proliferation of ever smaller, faster, cheaper cameras.

How could they have gone an hour without mentioning the one fundamental... that other people than police have cameras? More and better ones, every day. This will -- and already has -- empowered citizens on the street.

Listen to the broadcast, then tell me how many hand-wringing statements will be even remotely relevant, as a skyrocketing percentage of police-citizen encounters will be recorded from more than just the police perspective, with both the suspect and onlookers loading their files into the cloud.

How, oh how, can we have such bright folks, who mean well and who want to solve problems, yet absolutely refuse to lift their gaze beyond the near-sighted today? Don't answer. We all know the greatest recent example: the entire political caste of the Democratic Party. 

A much smarter article that actually tries to peer ahead is this one in the Atlantic - Even the bugs will be bugged - by Matthew Hutson.

See a more in-depth analysis of central surveillance, predictive policing and tools for accountability from the new Scout site: Should the Future of Policing Look Like This? by Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath.

Futurist Glen Hiemstra discusses The Future of Policing -- looking at some of the problems and possible solutions for policing in the fast-changing world of today and tomorrow.

== Another try ==

More hand-wringing. Even when a writer tries to look beyond the immediate horizon, the usual result is short-sightedness.  As in this case: “Should Police Bodycams Come With Facial Recognition Software?”  Jake Laperruque, on Slate, warns that such technologies loom just ahead and will be used… unless serious efforts go into privacy protection.

Three plus points to Mr. Laperruque for at least trying.  And five more for an article that brings us up to date on current efforts to either introduce or construct facial recognition use by authorities… 

... then minus thirty points for failure to peer just a little farther, asking: “What on Earth do you think could possibly prevent this, over the long run?”

Take into account a crucial factor, technological drive. Reiterating a point made above: as cameras get smaller, faster, cheaper, better and more mobile at a rate much faster than Moore’s Law (sometimes called Brin’s Corollary ;-) cop cams will get too small to see and the facial recognition databases will proliferate far beyond your ability to limit them with well-meaning, ACLU promoted regs.

This needn’t be a disaster, if common citizens share in the new powers of vision, able to scrutinize and criticize when no cop action can remain unobserved. If we can not only recognize any harm doer, but also catch and chastise eavesdroppers and gossipy peeping toms, who stare too closely, then a surprising side-benefit will be more, rather than less privacy. 

The increase in light flooding the planet could be prodigious, searing the harmful and helping drive trends toward our crucial victory condition. In other words, technological trends seem to work in our favor.

But first, our well-meaning paladins of freedom must get better glasses, and start looking beyond next year.

Justice from Transparency

A tsunami of light... In a cameras - everywhere culture, science fiction becomes reality, The Los Angeles Times ran an excellent run-down on this year’s status of camera and surveillance tech, showing how the trend is accelerating. Oh... and this front page article features yours truly, in the first sentence and last...

...and on radio, I was a panelist about the trend of turning the cameras back on the police.  The latest? The ACLU offers a new cell phone app. One tap and your video-phone turns on while uploading the event directly to YouTube, in case the device itself gets “damaged”.  In Turning the Cameras Back on Police, I discussed this on NPR with an ACLU representative… along with a representative of the Los Angeles County police officers’ union and an organizer for Black Lives Matter.

Of course, all this media comes after 25 years predicting and opining on this inevitable trend. With this posting -- and this one -- among the most recent examples. 

== Are some folks starting to get it? ==

As that L.A. lieutenant typifies, the mature pros in our constabularies are already ahead of the curve, emphasizing that the 2013 rulings are fully accepted. "Citizens have a perfect right to record us, so long as they stand back and do not interfere."  Ah, but this will be a process (as I described in EARTH and The Transparent Society.) A process in which good cops will learn how to cull their own ranks of thugs...

... while the rest of us learn the subtleties of citizen power.  Take this article: 

What to say when the police tell you to stop filming them.

'First of all, they shouldn’t ask! “As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, chairman of D.C.’s metropolitan police union. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.”…  

Yet still some officers do. Last week, an amateur video appeared to show a U.S. Marshal confiscating and destroying a woman’s camera as she filmed him.'

'Most officers, says Sanchez, now know that bystanders have a legal right to film police. Now, instead of hearing assertions that they can’t record at all, he says that Copwatch volunteers are accused of interfering with police activity. “What we hear is, you can’t film here, you need to back up,” he told me. At which point, says Sanchez, the volunteer complies—by taking one step back.'

Me? Mr. Transparency is much less confrontational, when it comes to the small details. Hey, my aim is not to be an asshole, but to assert citizen oversight. I would instead say: 

“Out of respectful citizenship, officer, I am taking five steps backward.  Any further will impede my right – as your employer – to supervise you. But I am willing to listen, if you explain why you need even more space than that.  Oh, and meanwhile this interaction is uploading live.”

So, what if the fellow seems angrily about to lose it, and do something regrettable? Then I would speak loudly:

“Are you getting this Larry?  Well keep your camera aimed at me while staying out of sight!  We’ll see what this officer with badge number 68643 is about to do.”  

Whether or not “Larry” exists, by now they are starting to grasp this. That it is not the camera you see that will ultimately hold you accountable.

It's the one you don't see....

== And more on cop cams == 

Now this article from Gizmodo - How Police Body Cameras Were Designed to Get Cops Off the Hook -- yet again provides a feast of in-depth information about the cop-cam trend... while the author maintains the most amazing obduracy and inability to step back or ask even the simplest question.  Like "what might be next?" 

Not one year ahead, did he look, nor even try to extrapolate.  Or ask "What might happen when the plummeting price of body cams and instant cloud storage, puts these tools onto the lapels of every ghetto youth?"

Picture every kid, every harassed pedestrian or driver, with a little box and winking red light, and every frame going straight to online storage. Are you actually... actually telling us that won't change things?

(Note: I was talking this over with design guru Don Norman, and we realized that there are two innovations badly needed, right now, beyond the ACLU's instant-upload app.  In the SHORT term we have to come up with some kind of velco or hanging lanyard thing that will let ghetto youths get out of their car with their cell phones hanging free from their necks... so that they can raise their hands open and bare! Hands free is absolutely essential and you know why. These innovations are needed right now, this very moment... plus some millionaire to fund a very rapid deployment of thousands of cheap, hanging-phone-holders.

(Over the longer run, of course, we need small, blue-tooth detachable cams that any person can leave as a dash cam, but snatch up and pin to his lapel, before getting out of the car... and the very act of pinning it sets the upload going. Again, to complete the process, and NOT in order to be offensive to the majority of decent men and women who heroically patrol our streets. No aspersions, just moving on to complete this transition to a world of accountability and light.)

I portrayed this happening around the year 2020, in my novel EARTH.  In my nonfiction book, The Transparent Society, there is a section describing exactly this transformation, as citizens become empowered with both the right to look-back at authority and the tools to enable it.

No, getting back to the detailed and yet myopic Gizmodo piece, the issue here is one of journalism.  How on Earth does a fellow who cannot even squint at how the simplest tech trends might affect tomorrow get to opine and tell us what's going on? 

== Bright fools ==

How Transparency Will Change the World: In a pair of TED-style talks, Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher and cognitive scientist, and Deb Roy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Twitter’s chief media scientist, talk about the spread of digital technology and the advent of social media has made it much more difficult to keep secrets. This new transparency will profoundly influence the evolution of our institutions, the authors argue. “When these organizations suddenly find themselves exposed to daylight, they quickly discover that they can no longer rely on old methods; they must respond to the new transparency or go extinct,” they write.

Dennett’s talk at a skeptic’s conference in 2014 is “Can churches survive the new transparency?”  Starts rather interesting, by comparing our new transparent society to the sudden transition that life on Earth underwent, when (according to one theory) the oceans suddenly became clear or transparent. “Transform and adapt to a new, transparent society, or die,” he tells all organizations.  Alas, though, the second half of his talk slows down and devolves into another atheism rant, much too akin to the structured belief systems that he (with some good reason) disdains.  

Alas, as we saw in an earlier blog, most of the punditsphere is filled with bright fools yammering about Big Brother’s eyes, without offering a single suggestion what we might do to effectively hide from them.  Meanwhile ignoring the truly important matter, Big Brother's hands.

== Transparency blips ==

An ex-girlfriend of the co-pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings plane into the alps, killing all 150 on board, has told how he vowed to "do something" history would remember him by. Creepy … and totally to be expected.  Indeed. I told you all to expect more and more guys like this.  Call it the Erastratos Syndrome.” See my longstanding proposal for how to deal with it: Names of Infamy: Deny Killers the Notoriety they seek.

Twitter trolls getting their come-uppance when a vigorous (and empowered) dad hunts them down and names them?  Sure, it's straight from The Transparent Society​, but even earlier Vernor Vinge's story "True Names."  In fact this is a good thing. We need a society that forgives (in wary stages) youthful indiscretions.  But these guys have shown us they are the sorts of fellows who might be bullies, if not held accountable.  Most of us aren't.  We deserve better lifelong credibility than you do, putz. And accountability will flow.

Ah justice... Man who made thousands posting women's stolen nudes goes after news sites that posted pictures of him.

More and more eyes are looking down on our planet: As both satellites and UAVs grow cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitous, researchers and agencies such as SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch are using increasingly pervasive sky images to catch cheaters and destroyers, tracking down environmental violations ranging from oil spills to wetland destruction, from illegal landfills to fracking to illicit fishing activity. Skytruth's motto: If you can see it, you can change it.... 

It all begins with shining light into the shadows.

Alas, the deepest shadows might bring about our worst nightmares. The money now spent on developing “artificial intelligence” or AI for finance, equities or commodities trading etc vastly exceeds the AI research budgets at the top 100 universities, combined.  And nearly all of it is done in secret, to develop programs whose ferocious drives are predatory, parasitical and all-devouring insatiable. 

That’s some combination!  As I have said repeatedly, “Skynet” won’t come out of the military.  It will come out of the portions of our economy that win every political battle and every tax break.  Indeed, what better clue that our AI overlords have already… come awake?

== Finally...politics ==

 "A Florida statute governing the preservation of public records requires elected officials, including the governor, to turn over records pertaining to official business “at the expiration of his or her term of office.”

Let's just take this law, in principle, and: (1) extend it to the period during term of office, and (2) to any communications not with close family members, and (3) require that such official uses only communications devices publicly certified to be reliably be recording all.

Oh, but an interesting aside: it took Jeb Bush 7 years to comply fully with a Florida law requiring him to turn over his emails. So much for yer dubble standard, boys.

What elites DO to us is more important than what they know

Again and again we see what works... and what almost-never works.  So why is the utterly futile prescription almost always the one promoted by security and privacy "experts," by pundits of all stripes and by supposed defenders of freedom and privacy?

Two Philadelphia cops accused of savagely beating a man without provocation and then lying about it have been indicted following a thorough investigation — by the victim's girlfriend. “After Najee Rivera was given a beating that left him with a fractured bone in his face and one eye swollen shut, girlfriend Dina Scannapieco canvassed businesses in the area and found security footage that led to Rivera's exoneration on charges of assault and resisting arrest and to the arrest of the two officers involved.”

The lesson? Again and again, twits declare that the only way to save freedom and privacy is to pass laws restricting information flows, and then trusting elites to enforce or obey those laws. 

“Brin is naive!” they declare “to imagine that *increased* information flow can ever hold elites accountable or benefit common folk.” Then they call for laws without the light that can enforce them.

What stunning drivel. Any information flow restriction will be far easier for elites to evade, while we are rendered blind by those very same laws. Every attempt to use ciphers etc to “secure” databases eventually fails, with the Anthem leak only the latest in a relentless chain of spills that now come almost weekly.  

In contrast, the only good news in our info wars is happening on our streets, where the spread of cameras is now steadily (if unevenly) making power more equal, not less. 

In both EARTH and The Transparent Society, I portrayed citizens empowered with cams, learning to apply reciprocal accountability (RA)… the once, and past, and present, and only methodology of freedom.

Oh, here's another -- “Brin thinks citizens can be equal to elites in the use of info-tech.”  

No I do not think that and have never said that.  

But the last 200 years… and especially the period since Rodney King and DNA testing… have shown that we don’t have to be equal to elites, in vision or in might, to start applying RA.  If we can see just well enough then our greater numbers will have leverage. 

So what if they can see us better than we see them! If we can see them well enough, then we can deter them from doing stuff to us. 

I cannot fathom why it is so hard to grasp this simple point: What elites see and know will matter a whole lot less than what they cannot do. And while it is logically impossible to police what others know, we are capable of deterring open, physical actions.

Only, in order to accomplish that, light must flow, so we can see.

== False Dichotomies == 

Simply tragic. This “renowned security expert” is simultaneously extremely knowledgable… and disastrously clueless. In this brief video he proclaims that we face a “stark choice” — a dichotomy that’s black and white. Either or.  Either empower state and corporate powers to spy on all of us (and yes, I agree such one-way surveillance could lead to Big Brother)…

… or else provide “security” for all communications so that no one can spy on anyone’s data streams. 

How stirring and romantic. And stunning hogwash. 

I would love to see Bruce’s plan (and I have been asking, for 20 years) for how option #2 is possible. with technology advancing and cameras getting smaller, faster, cheaper, more mobile and numerous faster than Moore’s Law. When your ceiling can contain a hidden gnat-cam or your walls an EM key-logger, tracking everything you type or say… 

...when face reading will not only ID you anywhere but track your mood and (soon) whether or not you are lying? Will hiding somehow equalize the disparity of power between elites (state, corporate, criminal, foreign, technological) and common folk?

Worse than drivel, such talk is actively and deliberately harmful distraction. Again and again, I defy anyone to show me how you can reliably blind all elites! Show us one example of that every having happened, across all of history. How any such “solution” would be robust, across decades of rapid technological change, including the arrival of quantum computers. 

There is another option. A “door number three.” And yes, I understand that zero-sum thinkers have a hard time comprehending positive-sum solutions that extend out of the plane of simple, black and white dichotomies. Still, I made it plain enough in The Transparent Society  — were Bruce Schneier ever — even once — to crack open a copy.

Again and again, until it sinks in: we can stop Big Brother by worrying less about what elites know and more about what they can DO.  And we can curb what they do to us with only one tool. Reciprocal accountability. Stripping them naked so that they can be held accountable. 

That is where I am militant.  And even though few in the punditocracy seem able to wrap their minds around the possibility, it is happening anyway.

As constabularies all across the U.S. reverse a decade of resistance and instead are embracing cop-cams… 

...and ghetto youths start using live-feed cams of their own (exactly as portrayed in both EARTH and The Transparent Society), reciprocal accountability is spreading. We’ll gain accountability and justice and peace on our streets. It is the only way power can ever be curbed and watchdogs reminded that they are dogs, not wolves.

And so it matters little that bright fools peddle addictively silly dichotomies.

== And yet... it has a cool title! ==

Nevertheless, I will tout Bruce's new book... "Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World."  See it reviewed in Slate: How to Mess with Surveillance. Though obstinately zero-sum, he certainly knows and relates an awful lot of facts.  You'll learn plenty!  Just know that the either-or dichotomies that he presents are no "solutions." They bear no resemblance to actual, pragmatic and sensible paths to emerge from the problems that he lays down, so well.

Evade surveillance?  Avoid surveillance? There are hundreds - it appears - born every minute.

Look-back.

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.