Transparency and Freedom

First a trio of announcements:

1) An expanded version of my essay "Black Lives Matter, So Demand Tech!" was featured in The Global Post and picked up widely by aggregators like Google News.  I suggest that cameras or all kinds -- copcams, dashcams, cellcams and so on -- are bringing real change on our streets, and in citizens' relationship with power.  "Give us more tech!" should be an additional rallying cry. (More on this, below.)

2) WIll you be in or near the Hudson River valley this October? I'll be speaking at a Conference on Privacy at Bard College, October 15-16. It is said that Edward Snowden will be skyping in. (I'll be lingering a while at Bard, and possibly also speaking at West point.)

3) Meanwhile -- August 16 will be Worldwide Wave Back at Surveillance Day. An ad-hoc and as-yet wannabe “event.” But hey, keeping with my ethos in The Transparent Society, let them (the elites who watch) know that we know they are watching. That we are unafraid. It's a step. “Waving” is just the beginning of our determination to look back via “sousveillance.” And if they are nice, innocent little elites? Why then, they have nothing to hide from us!

Wave back at the cameras! Let them know we know what they know... and we intend to know even better.

As usual, Tom Tomorrow is spot on.  If privacy truly is zero-sum, then we are bound for revolution and it won't be pretty.  On the other hand, it can be positive sum.  But it requires that light flow in all directions.

And now... our status report on Transparency and Freedom.

== Will Tyrannies take our Liberty? ==

Eye in the Skynet: How Regimes Can Quell Social Movements Before they Begin: In Foreign Affairs, Gregory Maus describes a series of algorithmic systems that empower states to data-mine the location, statements and activities of citizens.  In the hands of an authoritarian regime… or indeed, if skullduggerously used by giga-corporations… these methods, some of them verging on AI, could lead to cyberpunk futures or even Big Brother.

An important article, well worth reading… though alas, typical of most modern jeremiads, this one is devoid of anything even remotely like a suggestion as to what can be done about it.  On the rare occasion when a pundit – e.g. Bruce Schneier – does make a recommendation, it almost always boils down to “everybody hide!”

It is apparently beyond psychological reach to imagine that the same processes that gave us the wild and woolly freedom of the Internet might be applied yet again, to keep the renaissance going. Those processes were bold, but effective, stymieing tyrants for three decades. All right, so now they think they have sussed ways around to turn our info-meshes into systems of control. Might we then learn from freedom’s past tool kit?

1) The early nineties saw state actions that showed politicians aren’t always the enemy, e.g. Al Gore’s far-seeing bill that unleashed an unregulated Internet upon the world. New laws might make it incumbent upon our trading partners to loosen their grip, or face market disincentives.

2) Providing multiple paths of access. Modems gave way to ISPs, but when those came under state control, it became incumbent upon us to widen the field again. New satellite systems may give people all over the world access points their own governments cannot control.  We need to make this a matter of top concern, right now, and not let that opportunity be squelched.

3) Reciprocal accountability can only be applied through sousveillance, using light.  Cowering and hiding from elites has never worked and cannot work. As shown in The Transparent Society, light can be used even in despotisms, if clever combinations of courage and technology expose corrupt officials, for example.

These are the methods that gave us our renaissance.  So tyrants are adapting?  That is only to be expected, and not an occasion for hand-wringing or chicken-little cries.

An Example: Ian Bremmer, author of the book Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World, said in a recent newsletter: “I’d be remiss not to mention the Chinese government conducting research into implementing a single nationwide identification system that would tie the online/virtual identity of citizens to their physical identity. it's a serious effort, being driven by the ministry of science and technology, the national development and reform commission and the ministry of public security. Chinese media is reporting that the legislature will pass a new national security law, a draft form of which called for "cyberspace sovereignty:

“Ultimately a free and open internet is incompatible with authoritarianism and state capitalism. there’s every sense the Chinese government understands this and wants to build the technology to create an alternative system. problematic for western multinationals hoping to operate in the chinese space? I’d say so.”

== Secretive Stingray Systems ==

Secretive use of “stingray” systems – fake cell phone towers, set up by authorities to tap or track calls made by suspects, and others loosely related to a case – have begun to backfire on law enforcement, “with states beginning to pass laws that require police to obtain a warrant before they can set up a fake cell phone tower for surveillance. Virginia, Minnesota, Utah and Washington State now have laws regulating stingray use, with California and Texas considering similar measures. Proposed federal legislation to prevent the government from tracking people’s cell phone or GPS location without a warrant could also include stingray technology.”

One document recently revealed that the Baltimore Police Department has used a cell site simulator 4,300 times since 2007 and signed a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI that instructed prosecutors to drop cases rather than reveal the department’s use of the stingray.

The key point here is not the one pushed by law enforcement or by its civil libertarian opponents, both of whom suffer from technological myopia and “tradeoff disease” – a mental ailment that causes sincere people to make statements like “we must sacrifice a little privacy for public safety” or – alternatively – “we must be brave enough to endure some danger in order to preserve freedom.”  

Let us be clear that such people -- even "pundits" with large followings -- are in fact mentally ill. I mean that, with no exaggeration.  They spread the noxious notion of the zero-sum game. That we must choose between freedom and safety for our children.  A choice that I absolutely refuse to make - and neither should you - between two absolutely necessary things that make life worth living. It is a dichotomy and "choice" put forward by simplistic morons.

Proof: No people in all of human history have ever been safer than we are right now… and no people have ever been as free. The two rise and fall together. And if you are not demanding ways to get both, you are more the fool.

The tech-myopia part comes in when federal agents act as if methods like Stingray can be kept secret over an extended period.  My Gosh, what kind of society do they think they are living in?  All they accomplish with blanket and frantic gag orders is to increase the frisson of suspicion aimed toward them by citizens who know that we must be aware of what civil servants are doing, lest freedom vanish.

Temporary and tactical secrecy are useful tools for the Professional Protector Caste (PPC).  But technology and society keep moving forward and gag orders will not prevent it. 

== The Big Corollary ==

Steve Mann called it “Brin’s Corrollary to Moore’s Law”… that cameras will keep getting smaller, cheaper, faster, better and more mobile faster than Moore’s Law.  And hence, our only option for preventing Big Brother is to use them (to look back at power), not to hide from them. 

Now comes Go-Pro , the sports camera maker, with its smallest unit yet. 40% lighter than last year’s best model, easier to use and less expensive. And waterproof. 

And please, all you Jeremiahs preaching safety-by-obscurity? We’re still waiting to see your plan – other than holding out your arms toward a tsunami inevitable light, screaming “stop!”

And finally, getting back to cop-cams...

The official government data on killings by police is so bad that it's all but useless: The last official estimate from the FBI was that 400 people per year are killed by police. The Guardian maintains its own count of people killed by the police in the United States -- which has reached 711 so far this year. Again, sure, be activist and march and chant. But the thing making a real difference is tech.  Demand more.