The futility of hiding. And then a brief rant!

Just back from an important conference (in Panama) about ways to ensure that the looming tsunami of Artificial Intelligences will become and remain 'beneficial.' Few endeavors could be more important... and as you might guess, I have some concepts on-offer that you'll find nowhere else. Alas, literally  nowhere else. Even though they merely apply only the same tools we used to make an increasingly beneficial society, the last 200 years.

More on that later. Meanwhile... first off, since it's much in the news... want to see what the Apple Vision Pro will turn into within a few years? Watch this video trailer for my novel Existence. predicting where it'll go.

And while we're on prophecies.... This is deeply worrisome... and almost exactly overlaps with my "Probationers" in Sundiver! Back in 1978. Not a joke or a satire.

"Justice Minister Arif Virani has defended a new power in the online harms bill to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not yet done so already. The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at home, the bill says."

But don't worry! The government won't misuse this power! Trust us!

== The Futility of Hiding ==

One purpose for the "Beneficial AGI Conference"  - (and I believe the stream will be up, soon) - was seeking ways to evade the worst and most persistent errors of the past.

Take the classic approach to human civilization - a pyramidal power structure dominated by brutal males, of the kind that ruled 99% of human societies - and many despotisms today. We are all descended from those harems. Onlynow, new tools of techno;logy might empower a return to such pyramidal stupidity, making such abusive power vasty more effective and oppressive than when it was enforced by mere swords.

Such a tech rich extension of despotisd was depicted by George Orwell utilizing total panopticon surveillance for control, of course without any reciprocal sousveillance purview from below. In fact, I doubt George O. ever considered even the possibility. But Orwell's novel would lead to very different outcomes if every member of 'the party' had every moment watched reciprocally by the prols! (The reciprocoal accountability that I prescribed in The Transparent Society.) 

General transparency might, possibly, prevent the worst aspects of Big Brother. But there are ways that lateral light might also go badly. For example when - as in the PRC - "social credit" system, that is used to let a conformist majority harass and bully dissident minorities or even eccentricity, enforcing homogeneity, as we saw predicted in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

This will be exacerbated by AI, if we aren't careful, since such systems will be able to sieve inputs across the entire internet and all camera systems, as portrayed in "Person of Interest."  While that TV series depicted many worrisome aspects, it also pointed toward the one thing that might offer us a soft landing, as there were two competing AI systems that tended to cancel out each others' worst traits.

I have found it very strange that almost none of the conferences and zoom meetings about AI that I've watched or participated in has ever even mentioned that secret sauce. (Though I do, here in WIRED.)

Instead, there are relentless, hand-wringing discussions about disagreements between "policy wonks' and nerdy tech geeks over how to design regulations to limit bad AI outcomes... and never any allowance for the fact that these changes will happen at an accelerating pace, leaving even our most agile regulators behind, mere ape-humans grasping after answers like a tree sloth. 

Or else... what generally happens at many sincere conferences on "AI ethics," we see a relentless chain of hippie-sounding pleadings and "shoulds," without any clue how to do actually enforce preachy 'ethics' on a new ecosystem where all of the attractor states currently draw towards predation..

In Foundation's Triumph I explored the implications of embedded "deep-ethical-programming" regulations - including Isaac Asimov's "three laws of robotics," revealing the inevitable result. Even if you succeed in emplanting truly genetic-level codes of behavior, the result will be that super-uber intelligent systems will simply become... lawyers, and find ways around every limitation. Unless...

...unless they are caught and constrained by other lawyers who are able to keep up. This is exactly the technique that allowed us to limit the power of elites, to end 6000 years of feudalism and launch upon our 240 year Periclean enlightenment experiment... by flattening power structures and forcing elite entities to compete with one another.

It is only the exact method prescribed by Adam Smith, by the US framers and by every generation of reformers since. And it is utterly ignored in every single AI/internet discussion or conference I have ever watched or attended.

If AI are destined to outpace us, then one potential solution is to flatten the playing field and get distinctly different AIs competing with each other, especially tattling on flaws and/or predations or malevolent or even unpleasant behaviors.

It is exactly what we have done for 250 years... and it is the one approach that is never, ever, and I mean ever discussed. Almost as if there is a mental block against admitting or even noticing the obvious.

== Don’t try to hide!”

Your DNA can be pulled from thin air: Reinforcing a point I’ve been pushing since the 1990s, in The Transparent Society and elsewhere, that hiding is not the way to preserve privacy, there are the shrill cries that new generative AI systems may decipher and interpret our personal DNA! Only – as illustrated in the film Gattaca – that DNA is already everywhere. You shed it in flakes of skin wherever you go. There is a better way to prevent your data being used against you. By aggressively ripping the veils away from malefactors who might do that sort of thing! 

And by this point, the only folks reading any longer are likely AIs... So, time to get self-indulgent with a temper tantrum!

== And now... that rant I promised! ==

I sometimes store things for posting and lose the link. But here's a quotation worth answering:

"Alas, we have TWO wars against the Enlightenment raging, one from the reactionary right and the other from the postmodern faux marxist wannabe totalitarian Red Guards on the left."

Bah! One of these lethal threats is real, but not because of MAGA. Those tens of millions of confederate ground troops are -- like numbskulls in all the previous 7 phases of our recurring US Civil War -- merely riled-up mobs, responding to dog whistles and hatred of minorities and nerds.  They are brownshirt tools of the real owners of today's GOP ... a few thousand oligarchs who are now desperately afraid. 

What do theose masters -- here and abroad -- fear most? You can see it in the only priorities pushed by their servants in Congress:

They dread full-funding of the IRS. And a return to effective rooseveltean social contracts, replacing the great Supply Side ripoff-scam. They fear a return to what works, what created the post WWII middle class. What could block feudalism's long planned return.  And let's be clear, when Republicans control a chamber of the US Congress, preserving Supply Side and eviscerating the IRS are their ONLY legislative priorities. All the rest is fervid, potemkin preening.

Who are they? An alliance of petro princes, casino mafiosi, "ex" Kremlin commissars, supposed marxist mandarins, hedge lords, inheritance brats... Trace it... sharing one goal. One common foe. The worldwide caste of skilled, middle class knowledge professionals. 

They are ALL waging all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

== BOTH sides do it? ==

But the left?  The LEFT is just as bad?  

The what? 

Where in God's name does this shill get this crap about "postmodern faux marxist wannabe totalitarian Red Guards on the left." ???

Yes. Yes, today's FAR left CONTAINS some fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality on you.   

But today’s mad ENTIRE right CONSISTS of fact-allergic, troglodyte-screeching dogmatists who wage war on science and hate the American tradition of steady, pragmatic reform, and who would impose their prescribed morality on you.     

There is all the world’s difference between FAR and ENTIRE.  As there is between CONTAINS and CONSISTS.  One lunatic mob owns and operates an entire US political party, waging open war against minorities, races, genders, even the concept of equal protection under the law. But above all (as I said) pouring hate upon the nerdy fact professionals who stand in their way, blocking their path back to feudal power. 

The other pack of dopes? A few thousand jibbering campus twerps? San Fran zippies? Yowlers who are largely ignored by the one party of pragmatic problem solvers that remains in U.S. political life.

Sure, Foxites howl about 'woke'. But ask any of them... even the worst campus PC bullies (and though shrill, they are deemed jokes, even on campus). Ask them about Marx!  You'll find that the indignant ignoramuses could not paraphrase even the simplest cliché about old Karl. Their ignorance is almost as profound as their utter ineptitude and irrelevance. Except as excuses for tirades on Fox, they are of no relevance at all.

What is relevant is NERDS!  All nerds stand in the way of re-imposed feudalism. The folks who keep civilization going. The ones who know cyber, bio, nuclear, chem and every other dual use power-tech. And that is why Fox each day rails against them, far more often than any race or gender!

Want a pattern? Again, let me reiterate. Ask your MAGAs or right-elite friends to explain that cult's all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror. 

Face-Recog is loose. Adapt to this new world (You can!)

For years - ever since The Transparent Society (1997) - I've urged awareness of how new vision technologies will expose our lives, as never before. On the very first page, I compare two cities where citizens are under equal amounts of light and observation… only in one city they are free and safe from oppression or harm, while City #2 has descended into Orwellian hell, without adding any extra surveillance. We are seeing these two cities take shape now, before our very eyes. What makes the difference?

In China, Russia and other state monoliths, light flows upward to those in power, as control then stretches its talons downward. That condition - normal in almost every society for 6000 years - could be our fate, if we make mistakes. But not yet. So far, the opposite trend is in the lead. Why?

I relentlessly urge folks to join NGOs like the ACLU and EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) - our paladins in opposing Big Brother. Alas, though, they waste fully half of their efforts in a futile belief they can safeguard freedom by blinding elites, something that has never been accomplished on any major scale across those 60 centuries. It is the other half of their efforts that actually accomplishes good things — stripping elites naked, so that we can look back at power. Answering surveillance with sousveillance.

Here’s the recent NPR podcast of "To the Point" featuring me and a brilliant, heroic and (in this one case) misguided ACLU attorney, in a debate over privacy matters and whether we should deal with a tsunami of new technologies by shouting “stop!”… or else by learning to surf.

== The counter-intuitive secret of our success ==

Now comes the latest example, in the news, from The New York Times:

“Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.”

Oh, there are dangers and reasons for hand-wringing: “The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

Very real dangers! But the answer is not to scream for the technological tide to stay back. This new app only does what I predicted three years ago, when well-meaning privacy mavens strove to ban governments and Facebook from using face recognition. The genie - out of the bottle - would only go elsewhere.

The answer to Eric Goldman and others should be obvious. You prevent abuses - like those he describes - by ensuring stalkers and 'rogue' abusers will get caught! Is that so hard to imagine? Or what must be done, in order to catch the mighty - of government, wealth, criminality or tech-elites - if they abuse these new and inevitable powers? Is it truly, truly so hard?

Yes. Apparently it is. After 25 years talking till I am blue in the face, I will testify, it’s very hard. Nothing seems more counter intuitive than the exact tool - reciprocal accountability - that gave us the enlightenment and every tool and joy of freedom.

== From the ridiculous to the obstinate... ==

Now selling: bizarre-looking masks that are printed to resemble the face of the wearer underneath it. “The idea is to protect users from infection, while still allowing them to unlock their iPhones using FaceID — or be recognized by Big Brother facial recognition systems in public.” Oh, but what if you swap masks?

Alas, the wave of myopic foolishness continues. This one in the New York Times also misses the point, top to bottom. Read it. Then ask what all the whining and hand-wringing accomplished? Not addressed at all:

1. The writer only knows about the flaws in Face Recognition (FR) precisely because it is being done in the open and subject to rapid critical discovery of those flaws, which - by the way - are being addressed with stunning speed, because of that transparent discovery process.

2. Of course laws against such tech are utterly futile, since they only drive the tech underground, where flaws will not be discovered and where elites can use those techs, but we can't. As Heinlein said, "Privacy laws mostly make the spy bugs smaller." Whereas we can safeguard some privacy - an essential human want - by empowering folks to catch the voyeurs and peeping toms and even elites, in the act.

3. Banning FR "systems" is like banning buggy whips, because it won't be resident in isolated "systems" at all. The rate of tech advancement means we'll all have FR in apps and these well-meaning folks will have wasted their anti-Orwell energies screaming at the wrong targets.

4. Again, in all of human history, no restrictions on elite access to any type of information has ever been successfully blocked for more than a short time. Especially by a "law."  Show me one example. These guys are worried about important things! Big Brother. Asymetires of power. And their prescriptions of obscurity and hiding are always insane.

== Well meant plans need careful followup ==

An Obama program to create and sell cheap android phones for the poor has done a lot of good. But always be alert for predators and parasites who lurk near any good deed, eager for a chance to bite and suck. Over the years, preinstalled malware has been found on a raft of these low-cost Android phones from a variety of providers and manufacturers. 

In fact, subsidizing the development of super-cheap and reliable phones can be of tremendous strategic importance, beyond just helping the poor. Way back in 1991, before the modern cell era, I spoke at a couple of security agencies proposing a cheaper, better way to deal with brutal tyrants like Saddam Hussein. A “volks-radio” might be mass produced capable of basic peer-to-peer messaging or voice, and dropped en-masse into (say) Saddam’s Iraq. An act of war? What? Giving away free stuff is an act of war? Oh, there’d be a button that folks could use (or not) that would send messages to overhead satellites, if any Iraqi wanted to – say – tell the CIA something – say – about movements to Baathist officials. Only if they want to, of course…  Now squint and imagine the same principle applied to the new Starlink System….

In a more general sense, this is just one more way to apply the great advantage of the West… that we generally do well with increases in light flow and transparency around the world and nearly all of our deadly foes are lethally allergic to light.

Alas, I never imagined that paramount among those light-allergic enemies of the American Enlightenment Experiment would turn out to be the Republican Party.

Oh the conspiracies! 8Chan & QAnon and what's with all the resignations?

As America bleeds yet again from paranoia-propelled madmen, let me dive today into the weird illogic of conspiracy sites and theories. We'll get to the web side of this insanity. Also, we'll also ask, what's with the wave of "retirements" from Congress and the Administration?

For starters though... The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat. The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate. The FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

The FBI said another factor driving the intensity of this threat is “the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures.”

But that's all "deep state" propaganda, right? Riiiight. Half a million civil servants, two million teachers, a quarter of a million journalists, a million scientists and science-related workers, a quarter of a million intel and military officers and FBI/law professionals... all in on it together, with a degree of secrecy and competence never before displayed by any government. Uh huh.

== Our Hearts Bleed ==

After every mass shooting, everyone trots out their own nostrums and prescriptions. Oh, I agree on the top priority: defeating Trumpism and the Putin-puppeteer behind it. 

My own proposal is that we weaken the opposition to reasonable gun laws by actually listening to what passes for moderates in the gun-clutching opposition. We'll make better progress if we offer a a way to resolve gun owners' fear of a "slippery slope to confiscation." There's a germ of a reasonable fear that we should at least try to understand.

 But my own top contribution has for 25 years been a demand to punish attention-seeking murderers by taking away their NAMES. The Greeks understood this. After the New Zealand shootings, it looked as if the idea might take hold.

== Bleeding Red ==

Let's move on to another kind of bleeding -- the accelerating flight of every remotely sane individual from the Trumpist mess.  “Will Hurd, the House's Only Black Republican, Won't Seek Re-election In 2020.” And that makes what? Nine GOP representatives retiring, six in the last week? 

Are these gestures? Acts of honor? Buyouts? Or might something else in the offing? Stated Hurd: "I left a job I loved in the CIA as an undercover officer to meet what I believed to be a need for new leadership in Congress on intelligence and national security matters…. I want to use my experience to focus on these generational challenges in new ways. … I will stay involved in politics to grow a Republican Party that looks like America." 

There are volumes worth pondering in each of those sentences And yes, I sniff something I’ll hint at, below. But one factor is that Texas is becoming unfriendlier to the Party of Cheating that gerrymandered its lock on power over the Lone Star State. Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones, an Air Force veteran has already announced she was seeking this Texas seat again. In the mold of Amy McGrath, who is America's best chance to chase away the nation's worst traitor. Proving yet again my earlier point that this is time for a broad coalition, not splitter puritanism. 

But the bleeding continues. What is to be made of the sudden departure of the US Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats? And the even more sudden retirement of the current deputy director of national intelligence, Sue Gordon, who Trump banned from some White House briefings? To be clear, the new appointee, Joseph Maguire, the current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is a retired admiral and an apparently solid guy. (I always find the Navy reassuring, as when Adm. Mullen joined Def.Sec Gates, replacing Donald Rumsfeld during those almost-as-treasonous Bush years.) 

Ah, but here’s a question we never used to ask. Who will be the acting director? Sue Gordon was a career CIA officer who should have - by law - been made acting DNI. Apropos to a reality star president, Trump has turned to “acting” officials who are not always vetted by Congress. Think about that.

Also leaving, U.S. ambassador to Russia John Huntsman, a former Utah governor and 2012 presidential candidate, who served as ambassador to China in 2009. A sometime libertarian candidate, as well, Huntsman is known as something of a non-foxite (i.e. somewhat sane) Republican. “Huntsman's departure comes as Fiona Hill, the top official on Russian affairs at the National Security Council, is also expected to leave her post this month.”

And yes, there must be more to this recent wave than just professionals unable to stomach things-Trump anymore -- a “great judge of character” who has been later “betrayed” by the same “great guys” more often than any ten other administrations, combined.

Shall I tell you what I sniff? Watch. Watch for a move at least partly led by Mitt, some time in the late fall or winter.

== The Last Gasp of Sane Republicans? ==

Oh. Keep an eye on the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, which released Volume 1 of its report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election; it states that “the Russian government directed extensive activity, beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at least 2017, against U.S. election infrastructure at the state and local level.” 

Read this report about the report, which elaborates and confirms Robert Mueller findings of all-out war against our institutions. One chilling quote: "… pro-Kremlin bloggers had prepared a Twitter campaign, #DemocracyRIP, on election night in anticipation of Secretary Clinton's victory.’ …If Russia's preferred candidate does not prevail in the 2020 election, the Russians may seek to delegitimize the election.”

Relevant to today's topic -- this report was issued by one of the few islands of sanity left in the Republican-controlled Senate, a committee wherein a cabal of Democrats and a few residually adult-sane Republicans (RASRS) refused to be controlled by Moscow Mitch McConnell, and instead did their duty.

== Conspiracy madness and our ruined immune system ==

Okay, now down to the promised stuff... conspiracies! We need to get ready for the tsunami of election interference, meddling and lies, much of it in the form of deep faked images etc. Our salvation will come from experts who appraise lies with modern tools… which is why Fox/KGB shills wage all-out war on fact-checking services.  To see how bad it can be… and how some of YOUR friends on YOUR side may be susceptible, read about QAonon: 

“Traditionally, the audience for conspiracy theories are those who feel marginalized from ordinary politics and are disengaged. Now the most prominent conspiracy proponent is, arguably, the world’s most powerful person.”  

This article about QAnon is so (scarily) consistent with what I’ve said in The Postman, in Earth and in Existence and also The Transparent Society.… that webs of citizenship have to be built upon some sense of common narrative and the sort of trust that arises out of open information flows.

“Much as there’s a robust online community extending the narrative of virtually any TV show, movie or beloved work of fiction, QAnon’s bakers are taking the narrative sketches offered by Q (the mythical, John Galt-like supposed Trump insider who offers QAnon tantalizing bits of Truth)  and extending them into a rich and detailed fantasy world. While there’s ample fan fiction about well-loved stories like the Harry Potter series or Star Trek, many fanfic aficionados choose to extend flawed texts, fixing their shortcomings and amplifying their strengths. It’s far more fun to write fanfic for a bad show than for a perfect one, and the narrative put forward by Q on 4Chan and 8Chan is deeply flawed. It is filled with events that haven’t transpired and predictions gone wrong.

“What is perhaps most remarkable about QAnon is how resilient it has been to obvious setbacks, including the inconvenient truth that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama have been arrested.” … “Most of the popular QAnon podcasts feature sponsored advertising, notably products like emergency flashlights designed to help listeners survive the social upheavals destined to come about during The Storm.”

Ah, Holnism.

“With revelations about the use of Facebook groups by the Russian Internet Research Agency to create conflicts between groups of Americans and force cleavages within left-wing movements, it’s clear that the social media/news loop is being manipulated. What may be more relevant is the fact that these systems are also useful to those acting “in good faith”—i.e., not misrepresenting their identities or intentions—towards horrific ends.”

The author of this piece - Ethan Zuckerman - speaks of this ever-expanding tide of dangerous fantasy as “the Unreal.” He cites Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in Merchants of Doubt — that the strategies employed by tobacco companies about the harms of their product or oil companies about anthropogenic climate change were not designed to sway audiences to the corporate narrative, but to generate sufficient doubt to paralyze effective action. But clearly the conspiracy-nutter vanguard of the Unreal has surged beyond any constituency’s mere need for status quo protection. We are in a realm where the only possible outcome may be the chaos I described in The Postman.

Zuckerman concludes with 1-paragraph summaries of a number of earnest books and studies of the problem of what I call “online Nuremberg rallies” — echo-chambers of the fervent seeking only reinforcement of their drug high of sanctimonious rage.

== Soulutions, anyone? ==

Alas, the one thing we do not get from Zuckerman, or any other commentator on this problem, is a plausible proposed solution. Fact checking services like Snopes can support the majority of citizens who believe in such things, and perhaps nibble some of the more-sane out of those rallies. Dedicated debunking sites like QAnon-Anonymous can help a little. But they will not penetrate any major infection scabs with cleansing light.

What this author lacks - along with almost every other paladin of enlightenment - is any clue about the emotional dynamics and vulnerabilities at work here:

- Soa - Suspicion of Authority.  We all share this reflex, trained by generations of Hollywood films. We may differ over which pack of elites are conspiring to become Big Brother, but we’re all sure it’s somebody!  Start with this premise and you can forge a connection with your beloved, conspiracy-nut uncle. If he’s at all within reach of redemption, then try this first! You might draw him into an actual, actual (and maybe even fun) argument!  

Ask him what’s more plausible, a conspiracy by Wall Street cheaters, KGB agents-turned-Russian-mafia-oligarchs, casino moguls, slumlords, Saudi princes and inheritance brats… 

...or a conspiracy by all three million members of the so-called “deep state” of civil servants, teachers, journalists, scientists, FBI-intelligence officials and members of the U.S. military officer corps? 

Well, when you put it that way, both scenarios seem utterly insane plots from a bad 1970s thriller! Only…

…only the first one is proved to be true, top to bottom, with mountains of open evidence. And such an alliance of oligarchies and criminal gangs is wholly consistent with 4000 years of brutal feudalism that the American Revolution was all about escaping. 

Your uncle may not be convinced, but starting with your shared fundamental reflex — SoA — will give you an opening. 

On the other hand, if he’s a real QAnon asshole… go after his other main driver.

- Machismo - a desperate need for a manly, stalwart self-image, standing up the the rising tide of nerds and uppity females. There is a direct answer to this sort of small-ball overcompensating macho bluster. The counter-meme that I have found most effective is wagers! 

The one area where these guys accept the primacy of verifiable fact is in bar bets. So, demand that he escrow $5000 with an attorney for stakes, then settle on a fact-based bet revolving around something verifiable/falsifiable. 

I suggest ocean acidification, which can be tested with simple tools... a straw and a glass of water and a swimming pool test strip. A trip to the local beach.

 “If you’re so sure that climate change is fake, then why not offer up fair stakes, then take my money?  Any weaseling out of this means you don’t actually believe any of your bluster.”  

Nothing demolishes macho better than the devastating word: “coward!”

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.