Can We Save Freedom by Hiding?

== False Trails are… a false trail ==

Across all my years as an impudent dissenter from mob-think regarding freedom and privacy, one fact has left me boggled, time and again. The way activists and academics and pundits – many of them clearly intelligent and sincere thinkers – leap to make the same mistake, over and over again.  The error of technological myopia.

Take this example: “…New York University professors Helen Nissenbaum and Finn Brunton have a proposal. In their new book, Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, they advocate taking evasive action, or what they call obfuscation. They define obfuscation as “the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection,” and they see its potential as a means of redress. For example, they discuss software that generates misleading Google queries (so the tech giant can’t get a read on you) to Tor relays, which hide IP addresses. 

Think of it as creating a diversion, or planting false footprints. Security expert Bruce Schneier has made similar suggestions—like searching for random people on Facebook, or using a friend’s frequent-shopper card at the grocery store. If you can distort the government’s or companies’ profiles of you, you’ve scored a small victory.”

Hmm… a very, very small and utterly meaningless victory.  Science Fiction author Vernor Vinge referred to this approach in a novel, portraying a group that filled the Internet with machine-generated garbage information in order to mask personal information beneath a deluge of misleading fabrications.  The “Friends of Privacy” thus enabled their own members to conceal their online activities – or so they thought – while making the Net and Web effectively useless at providing reliable information to anyone, anywhere. A classic case of spoiling the commons, in order to achieve a narrow, self-serving goal.  (I portray would-be terrorists doing the same thing, in Existence.)

 Over the long run, Vernor reveals the obvious – that the 'Friends of Privacy' are no more than a front for powerful interests, from oligarchs to criminal gangs, seeking to conceal their nefarious activities from any chance of discovery. Indeed, pick any method of concealment or obfuscation – won’t elites use it more effectively (by far) than commonfolk? In fact, won’t the very programs that you and I purchase, to muddy our footprints, actually report every datum to the original creators of the software?  And if you doubt that, oh, have I a bridge to sell you.

Technological myopia comes in where we see privacy mavens like Nissenbaum and Brunton and especially Security expert Bruce Schneier always talking as if this year’s technology is the ne plus ultra, the final act, the static object on the table for discussion.  Moore’s Law brought us here, but has no further relevance. Of course, this is plain lunacy!  Take the example of cameras.

Cameras are getting smaller, faster, better, cheaper and more mobile at a rate far faster than Moore's Law.  (Some call this "Brin's Corollary.")  And yet, nearly every discussion of surveillance assumes that they will remain great big, visible boxes on lamp posts. They won’t. They will shrink and move and zoom and become more numerous than blades of grass. Shall we banish them? How, when they become smaller than mosquitos and more numerous?

(For a glimpse of what that near future may be like, hear me read Chapter 3 of Existence.  And lower down, see "The Smartest Mob" and "Shelter of Tradition."  All three sections show how inevitably the tsunami of cameras will change everything.)

Perhaps common citizens will obey such a ban, but elites?  Name for me one time in all of the history of our species, when top elites have allowed themselves to be blinded.

In fact, there is every sign that a proliferation of cameras may be exactly what’s needed, in order to preserve freedom.  For example, take events in just the last year. For the first time, in the U.S., all police forces, even corrupt ones, must be careful in the way they treat minority groups. Why?  Because of the very same technologies that hand-wringers loathe. Elitist snobs in academia may ignore the effects that cell-cams are having on the street-level.  But real-life minorities and poor folks cannot afford to ignore good news.

Instead of tools for Orwellian oppression, cameras seem to increasingly be the new Great Equalizers. Would the privacy mavens backtrack this trend?  Confiscate and eliminate the cell phone cameras that are finally giving minorities and the poor a real chance at street justice?  I can just hear their reaction. "Oh, in THAT case, sure, I'll allow that.  But nothing more!"

Except that in a couple of years, the cell phone cam will be a jewel on your lapel.  Shall we ban that?  Then a tiny dot on the corner of your glasses, or a drone the size of a bug that follows you everywhere, telling you what lies around the next street corner, ensuring that no one can harm you unrecorded and telling you if you are being followed.  

Shall we ban that? Okay. Then exactly how will you accomplish it?

== The online world ==

Oh but the next response is “I wasn’t talking about cameras but information! On my purchases and so on. Surely I can obfuscate all that!”

Um, wrong in a dozen ways.  First, if we enter an age of unreliable information online, that will extend to falsified images and cameras, too, will become useless.

Furthermore, 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. On the street, the very vibrations of your eardrum will denote you distinctly from the crowd surrounding you.

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 mavens 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.

Hiding will not work.  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!

I tire of seemingly intelligent people who cannot lift their gaze to even notice what is happening right now, let alone look 5 years down the road.  We live in a narrow era of relative freedom and - yes - some desirable privacy.  We need to do what already works in order to maintain them.  

That means knowing that freedom comes first.  A free people can then demand some privacy, from elites and from each other.  

But freedom comes first.  And freedom can only be effective when most of the people know most of what's going on, most of the time.

  

Everybody Hide!

We all remember playground bullies. How did you deal with yours? Natural human instinct makes the weaker party tend to cower, to slink and avoid contact with local thugs, hoping they won't notice you. Indeed, that's the reaction bullying is intended to bring about, for nothing terrifies an abuser more than the notion his victims might cease being scared! 

Stoking fear is the bully's relentless aim. George Orwell portrayed this logic taken to its farthest extreme -- of both rationalization and ruthlessness -- in Nineteen Eighty Four. 

At a very young age, I learned methods of tactical-confrontation that generally worked, taking me right off the target list. Sometimes - not often enough - I dared to intervene on behalf of other victims. And when I had sons*, I thought I'd have to teach them my methods. I felt nervous about it, as there are always hazards in standing up to power. Only then I noticed something that struck me as strange...

... my sons reported almost no bullying! Not personally... nor witnessing anything flagrant or violent, or even repeated verbal hatefulness being done to classmates. 

Okay, maybe it was partly socioeconomic. Sure, I grew up a few rungs lower -- and we must continue to address those disparities, vigorously! (Please re-read that as many times as it takes, to stave off outraged emails. That aspect, while important, simply is not today's topic.)

Still, taking very real social differences into account, violence and abuse are declining nationwide, and elsewhere, too. Moreover, it has not happened because kids are getting better at cowering.  

If the playground is (gradually but measurably) getting safer and nicer, it is because kids have been taught to be less tolerant of bullying, as have teachers, parents, etc. It's called accountability.  As imperfect and uneven as this process has been, it is moving in the right direction. 

So why is the lesson so hard for leaders, pundits and Big Thinkers to grasp, when it comes to protecting freedom and safety, at-large? That this is how to deal with bullies on our streets, in our institutions and economy?  Why are we constantly told to hide?

== Applying accountability to grownup bullies ==

The transparent society that was forecast by my eponymous book keeps rushing toward us. Are you planning to stand athwart history, screaming for the flood of ever-smaller cameras to "stop"? Or will you join us, learning to surf the tsunami of change? Two news items provoke this latest attempt to get you to see the difference. Perhaps even persuading you to join us atop the wave.

1) The recent killing of an unarmed fellow by a North Charleston S.C. police officer might have led to a murder charge in any event, since the shooting -- five times in the back at medium range -- was forensically blatant homicide. But we'll never know, since video footage left even Charleston-area prosecutors with zero options. Open-and-shut does not begin to cover this. And so much for you cynics who claim that 'video won't make a difference.' It was already having a huge effect and those changes will accelerate, not only as cop-cams proliferate and passersby get into the habit of recording anything suspicious... but especially when, as depicted in EARTH (1989) and in The Transparent Society (1997), ghetto youths get out of their cars during a pull-over... with their own shoulder cams blinking away, sending live feeds into the cloud.

Indeed, new cell phone aps let you press one button to both start your video recording and simultaneously upload the footage to YouTube.  Notice how all of this uses assertive accountability to apply citizen supervision over our civil servants. 

That is a very different approach than the one offered in our next news item.

2) According to recent rulings, if the government puts a GPS tracker on you, your car, or any of your personal effects, it counts as a search—and is therefore proscribed by the Fourth Amendment.  

Oh… what a stunning – 

-- yawn. The very notion that smart lawyers and judges would consider any of this truly important is simple astonishing to me. Because in the very near future, the ability to track human movements will be so pervasive, using everything from face-recog to pheromones to the unique oto-acoustic emissions from your left and right ear, that we’ll all realize how futile it ever was, to follow today’s fashionable advice and hide.

Note this!  If you cannot tell the fundamental way in which these two news items (both of them apparent "victories") are diametric opposites, then you are swallowing the koolaid and have not begun to think like a citizen. You have the reflex of a bully's-victim, not habits that can end bullying forever.

Does it bother me that government agencies and corporations and criminals and other elites can look at me? Sure, when it's asymmetric. And sure, it always will be. But I also know what has worked, across 6000 years of mostly-awful human history.  Trying to blind elites is a sucker's game. They will see no matter how much you yammer about it! Hiding will not work, never has. Even once, ever. 

That does not make me complacent or passive about the dangers of a looming Big Brother. I am as intensely militant in opposing that outcome as anyone! Probably much, much, much more so.

Oh, the privacy pundits and mavens are right to holler about that potential danger. 

They are wrong to say that salvation will come by trying (with utter futility) to blind elites... instead of using the method that has already worked for us. 

Stripping elites. Making them visible and accountable. Nothing could be plainer. Yet still, the distinction is escaping most of you.

With a sigh, let's try to work this out, one more time.

== Oh no! They see us! ==

Zoom into an intelligent but myopic riff, taken from Robert Scheer’s They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy, published in 2015:

"In a burst of public honesty, Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote in April 2013: 'Despite the expense, everything a regime would need to build an incredibly intimidating digital police state—including software that facilitates data mining and real-time monitoring of citizens—is commercially available right now. . . . It’s the digital analog to arms sales.'”

Again and again, "alphas" remain consistent in their obduracy and hammer-bagged tunnel vision. Whenever faced with an info-age conundrum, they always go to stage one -- "The elites are getting to see better than we can and this could lead to Big Brother!"

Yes, that is true, obvious, blatant... and how many times will you run about, waving your arms or wringing your hands about this -- without ever, even once, offering any further insights that might lead to a solution?

Amend that. Some of these fellows do offer a proposed solution. Like this one routinely pushed by internet "security expert" Bruce Schneier. And yes, I am sarcastically but accurately paraphrasing:

 "Everybody hide! Encrypt everything! (Even though one elite or another likely has a back door, or could fly a gnat cam to watch your keyboard, or clamp a key logger anywhere along your wires, or key-log using EM from your monitor or screen.) Yesss, that's the ticket. Act meek and innocuous. Don't say anything that might draw attention. Hide!”  

As if computers owned by the NSA, or gangs, or foreign intelligence agencies, or corporations, or cyber-hackers, or the idle rich won't - five years from now - be able to parse every sigh or harmless emoticon or sarcastic shrug you make today, or unravel today's ciphers with ease.

Ah, but believe it or not, Bruce Schneier is above average!  Most of our brightest pundits, like Mr. Robert Scheer, can only pile up well-written sentences and worry-fraught examples of elite surveilling vision, into a mountain of despair. Another example? A couple of weeks ago, at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder CO, I listened to former CIA officer Valerie (Plame) Wilson bemoan the same plaint, declaring that we must find a "middle ground" in the tradeoff between freedom and security.  The kind of zero-sum thinking that will ultimately doom both freedom and safety.

Emotionally, they may feel they are pounding out a call to arms! But if you sift for practical suggestions — things that a citizen might actually do about all this — the lesson is pretty basic -- despair. 

The fraction of our well-meaning pundits who see even a glimmer of the truth is appalling.

That light does not have to be our enemy! That we got our liberty -- the very freedom that fellows like Scheer (rightfully!) and Wilson and Schneier fear losing — not by cowering in shadows but by aggressively, militantly and eagerly expanding a citizen's right to see. To look-back at power.

Take this telling extract from the Scheer piece: 

“The most sacred tenet of American individualism, the right to be left alone, had been squandered, almost without notice.”

Despite Scheer's Lost-in-Space level of arm-waving drama, there's a very serious point here.  And a conflation of staggering proportions.

Yes, citizens need and deserve and must demand the right to be left alone! To be unbothered by elites of government, wealth, criminality etc, and especially by the millions of "little brother" neighbor-gossips who might gang up on us for our eccentricities, our non-conformist idiosyncrasies, our unconventional habits or opinions that do not blatantly harm others. 

I share with Scheer and Schneier and Wilson this basic dread.  Remember, we are arguing not over the danger, but over proposed solutions, here. Of which, alas, they offer none.

Only, consider: the right to be left alone is vastly more about the physical than the digital world!  This should be - but isn't - stunningly obvious. What elites can DO to us is vastly more important than what they KNOW about us. So let's start there.  What does it take to stop others from doing us physical harm?

Light. We are seeing this all over the country, as constabularies are being forced to adapt to an era of camera-equipped and empowered citizens. All over the world, people are bringing recorders into meetings with corrupt officials and turning the tables, getting the bureaucrats' bribe-demands on chip and then demanding payoffs from the officials, lest the recording go public. Is the NSA listening to me right now? Maybe. (And how will I ever know, for sure?) But my top priority goes to making sure they can never come to arrest or harm me without it going public in a way that would cause them a world of hurt. That is a higher priority.

My neighbors? Those potential "little brothers?"  They are already mostly deterred from harming me and mine.  First, because they share a rising value system of "leave each other alone for non-hurtful differences."  But mostly because... well... I can't explain lateral deterrence better than Jeannie C. Riley did in "Harper Valley PTA." Moreover, if you do not know the song, and its message, then you deserve no part in this discussion. The lyrics make this point better than I ever could.

Do I dislike the fact that the NSA and Google and Anthem know vastly more about me than I do about them? Sure! That anisotropy comes next, on our list of priorities. We need to make it a matter of extreme militancy, as I portrayed in both my novel EARTH and in the nonfiction book: The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

But it starts with the right to be left alone. And recognizing a simple truth of nature and logic. 

You can never verify that someone else does not know something!  

But you can often verify that they are not doing something.

Hence, no matter how many laws you pass, forbidding elites from looking, all you will accomplish is to whack-a-mole their eavesdropping to go someplace else, perhaps more secret/sinister and harder to supervise. Passing laws against elites looking at us is a sucker's game. And I have long defied anyone to name one example, across 6000 years, of it ever working.

Moreover, the only way you can possibly enforce such laws is if you already have my method in place -- vigorous, citizen-centered sousveillance. The kind of accountability that has reduced bullying in our schools and playgrounds.

Again and again, I'll repeat it till someone out there can paraphrase it back. You cannot police what others know. But you can hold accountable what they do. And to accomplish that we do not need less light.

We need lots, lots more.


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* Our daughter, a second degree black belt, kept an eye on her own peer group... which also seemed nicer than my generation.