It's not futile! We are making progress.

Often I am confronted with hand-wringing jeremiads, like the following: "In today's Panopticon the power equation is weighted on the side of the watchers, not the people."

My reply? Don’t give up too easily.  We already see around us the methods of transparency and reciprocal accountability.  Yes the tools of Big Brother are coalescing.  But counter-examples also abound.  Compare this event - “Florida police officer resigns after using N-word during exchange with 27-year-old man” - to page 160 of my nonfiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? 

Dig it. It… is… working. More slowly that we’d like, sure. (I predicted that aspect, too.) But it is working, as cities and constabularies around the U.S. desperately seek ways to find and rid themselves of the worst apples, and train the rest of their officers better. Not out of goodness! But because the people are increasingly “armed” with the best of all weapons. Light.

In 2013 we had the best year for civil liberties in this century, so far, when both the U.S. courts (Glik v Cunniffe) 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?

Recently cited in a news article was the following quotation from The Transparent Society. It encapsulates the core concept that (alas) seems so very difficult and non-intuitive, even to some of our finest and smartest paladins of freedom:

"Transparency is not about eliminating privacy. It is about giving us the power to hold accountable those who would violate it." ... (p.334)

The weird thing is that nearly all of those who have snidely derided transparency... and sometimes me, personally, for holding this view... circle back to it, when challenged for an actual solution. The Circle, by Dave Eggers, spends hundreds of pages - and the movie spends 90+minutes - portraying openness and light as bullying fetishisms. Yet, by the end, it turns out that the hypocritical-secretive manipulating moguls get their comeuppance in just one way -- when the people get to apply light upon them.

And not just cheating moguls. Recall the scene in The Circle, where voyeur bullies are aiming cell-cams at a poor, shy fellow who just wants to be left alone? Who are the persons seeking to do harm? Then why isn't the solution to show other folks, aiming cams at the bullies, commenting: "See these assholes ragging that poor fellow who just wants to be left alone? I'm sending this video to his mom!"

Naturally, that doesn't happen in the movie, which is ironic, since that's exactly the reaction the director wants to elicit from members of the audience! Fortunately, it is happening in the real world - as the worst cops are finding out - it is what a rambunctiously fair-minded public will do.

This approach can go bad! If you have a homogenizing society, whose upper clades are immune from light, then yes, the panopticon will destroy all privacy, all freedom and almost all human variability or eccentricity or diversity. Witness the rising "oppression via 'social credit' in China." I know very well the danger!

But there is only one solution that can work. The solution is a rambunctiously fair-minded public, armed with light.

== And here it is again, in action ==

The citizens of Newark gained access to watch through the cameras set up by police.  The Citizen Virtual Patrol, as the program is called, has been hailed by officials as a move toward transparency in a city where a mistrust of the police runs deep, rooted in long-running claims of aggressive enforcement and racial animosity. 

Of course this has provoked alarm among civil liberties groups and privacy advocates.  I’d be disappointed if it didn’t! Ironically, it is only if such systems are constantly dogged by fierce inspection and criticism that it could possibly have more good than bad outcomes. And yes, that, too, is a form of transparency and reciprocal accountability. The deciding factor, I’ve long maintained, is being illustrated here… it all depends on whether people take ownership… and are inclined to use sousveillance for their own community benefit… not against each other.

Moving on... Panda Security created a very informative and useful post about cyber-security. They took nine famous hacking scenes in movies and TV and determined whether they were actually possible or a case of classic Hollywood hacking. For instance Allsafe, the main company in Mr. Robot, uses two factor authentication. Worth a visit.  

How Romans published 'books' just like social media. Or as I am doing right now. Interesting.

A pretty good online article summarizing the case for preventing power-abuse via transparency and accountability, rather than trying (futilely) for concealment.

 == Again and again, trying the futile approach ==

Look, I send money to the ACLU and the Electronic FrontierFoundation. They are crucially important paladins for freedom and responsible development of the digital age.  You should join! They are among the heroes who know very well how close we are skating to an Orwellian future, in which despotic elites will be empowered by technology to impost Big Brother, forever. And yet…

And yet, I remain forever puzzled by the tendency of most such paladins – including every single “privacy advocate” in Europe I have ever met, or even heard-of – to prescribe exactly and diametrically the wrong medicine. A notion that has absolutely zero historical record of ever having worked, ever, even once, across the history of our species. 

Every single time it is tried, it always fails. Yet these sincere freedom fighters always, always double down to prescribe the same “solution,” ever-harder.

The solution of hiding from elites, blinding the mighty, screaming at them “don’t look at us!”  Instead of ever glancing at the method that actually works. The one responsible for all of our freedom. Every last bit of it.

See the latest rave against an unstoppable wave, demanding that the tide… that a tsunami … not come in. When instead we could learn to surf: 

‘Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse’: ACLU asks Amazon to stop selling facial recognition tech to local governments.”  

Um right. That's gonna work. Not.