(Trying To) Face Down The Evil At TechCrunch Disrupt

http://uncrunched.com/2013/09/09/trying-to-face-down-the-evil-at-techcrunch-disrupt/

by coloneltcb • 13 years ago

243 90 13 years ago

astral303• 13 years ago

It's one thing to ask (which is very welcomed), but it's another thing to put your literal money where your mouth is. Where's the influx of capital to EFF and other entities challenging the US govt legally? Where's the funds going to legislative lobbying that's on par with other large industries?

twoodfin• 13 years ago

Exactly. If this is such a slam dunk 4th Amendment case (I don't think it is), then all you need is enough money to hire the lawyers to get it up through the courts. That's a figure in the millions, not the billions.

Or to put it another way, a small fraction of the amount of money the tech community spent to elect the guy who could end any of these programs and/or fire those responsible with a phone call.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

The problem is that we all have so much to lose and it makes this so easy for the government. I have a wife, I own a home, I need my job to keep these things and many people will do anything to keep their job and these things. If you're a founder and your options are give the government what they want to no pushback from your userbasr, or to not give the data and face harassment, audits, suspicious legal problems and things like that. Even as a pretty moral guy I have a hard time imagining putting my livelihood on the line for the very little reward if the alternative is possibly losing my home. The government knows how 95% of us NEED to work and keep an income going so they know they can do whatever they want because the leverage is 100% on their side. The only way I see this changing is if people on the Internet/citizens of our country start caring that the NSA is spying on all of us and realize that this harm is way worse than a plane crashing into a building, as horrible as that was.

GVIrish• 13 years ago

That is exactly how criminal bullying succeeds whether it is organized crime moving into a neighborhood, or an authoritarian government rising to power.

There are plenty of people along the way who can put their foot down and say "NO" but all they have to do is threaten them and many people say, "I'd rather not get involved," or, "It's not my problem." But every person who turns a blind eye, emboldens the despot, bully, or mob boss.

Not saying every little 4-man start up should take the nuclear option when facing the NSA. But there are certainly many companies with clout who could easily turn the tide in public opinion against the rapidly expanding surveillance state. If Google or Yahoo or another big player stook a stand I think it could start to turn the tide.

I just feeli like if Ladar Levison can take a stand, I'd like to think there are others who believe strongly enough in what America stands for to do the same. America is worth it.

unclebucknasty• 13 years ago

Here's what really stood out about your post: you are writing it earnestly--as in expressing a genuine fear on your part.

And many who read it (like myself), will likely find your concerns to be at least somewhat reasonable.

So, what does it say about how far we've come that we are so afraid of speaking out when we believe that our government is wrong? And it's not just wrong, it's among the worst wrongs a government can commit: violating the rights of the citizenry it is sworn to protect.

yafujifide3• 13 years ago

It sounds like you've gone all-in with the US government, and now you can't criticise it without risking everything.

It is possible to internationalize yourself and your assets in such a way that no one government can threaten you with taking everything away. I suggest taking a look at these internationalization resources:

http://www.internationalman.com/ http://www.sovereignman.com/ http://nomadcapitalist.com/

Once you internationalize yourself, your fear of government will be substantially reduced and you can be free to take a stand.

dobbsbob• 13 years ago

Unless you're living off bitcoins there is no such thing as protected offshore savings. They bribe low level workers to leak supposedly secret info and you wind up in jail. Remember the leaked bvi docs? Swiss and Liechtenstein dvds full of depositor info? Almost every country bends over to sign tax treaties with the US. Swiss numbered accounts are meaningless since the war on terrorderp. They (gov thugs) also specialize in blackmail, your finances aren't their only target

mahyarm2• 13 years ago

How do you deal with this without a %1-%3 international transaction 'tax' in the form of currency exchange or bank wiring / card processing transfer fees being levied every time you want to transfer money between borders? For example, I can't find anything like Schwab's %0 currency exchange fee debit card in Canada, and I don't have $100k to just have sitting around in a bank account to get HSBC Premier with it's %0 international fees. You also get the significantly more complicated tax returns and accountant fees you will occur? Have you done this yourself?

I'm currently living in the USA too.

acabal3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure it's as easy to do as you suggest. Moving large amounts of money internationally is difficult to do depending on the receiving country, and impossible to do without having it tracked. If you fly, you have to declare cash amounts > $10,000 and that puts you at the caprice of customs officials.

One could create shell corporations and try arranging some kind of complex loophole-based scheme, but that's not only difficult, but also traceable in most cases. There's a reason druglords deal in warehouses full of cash--because if the government wants you bad enough, there's no scheme you can arrange to escape, and even moreso with the NSA watching and storing all of your past and future online activity.

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

Is this really a viable option short of "internationalizing" yourself to a country like Russia, China or Iran? I've seen very little evidence that any of the countries you would normally want to be an American ex-pat in won't bend over for the US government when push comes to shove (especially when it comes to protecting someone who is an American to begin with and not a native citizen), and plenty of evidence that they will.

Amadou2• 13 years ago

If you feel you can not take the risks yourself, there still are things you can do.

1) Skip the vacation this year, give every spare dime you've got to the EFF and the ACLU. Push to have your company make charitable donations to those organizations too. Think of it as outsourcing the fix.

2) Talk about it as much as you can to as many people as you can - be unabashed and vocal in your support of people who do take the risks that come with fighting back.

The worst thing you can do is nothing.

protomyth5• 13 years ago

The EFF's focus is too broad and I haven't seen them go after an election. We need an no-compromise organization with one focus that scares the hell out of a politician on election day. Like them or hate them, the NRA should be our template.

devx2• 13 years ago

I don't want to start a left vs right debate, but just imagine how much harder this would be if say half of the adult population was employed by the government. That's why the communist countries tended to be some of the most totalitarian and oppressed, and perhaps more importantly - the longest lasting.

People don't want to speak against the government especially when they're working for it, and there are not many job alternatives around. In the end, the revolutions happened when the economy was doing very poorly, and people had nothing to eat, so they didn't have much to lose.

Hopefully, Americans are smarter than to wait until that happens, and should revolt, or at least protest before most of the damage has already been done, and you have "nothing to lose".

api8• 13 years ago

There's a left handed sock puppet and a right handed sock puppet. There's one puppeteer: the military-industrial-intelligence-academic complex and its vast revolving door apparatus. It's ultimately about power, oligarchy, control, and big big money... taxpayer money and access to it.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

I don't want to start a left vs right debate, but just imagine how much harder this would be if say half of the adult population was employed by the government. That's why the communist countries tended to be some of the most totalitarian and oppressed, and perhaps more importantly - the longest lasting.

That's nonsense. In these countries whether or not you were employed by the government had exactly 0 influence on how dangerous it was for you to speak out against the government.

Meanwhile, in many European countries, 1/3 or more of the population works directly or indirectly for the government, yet you won't find many that are the slightest afraid of speaking out against the government - in fact in many of them you have a steady stream of government employed people who are actively involved in political opposition to whichever party is currently in power.

jmharvey• 13 years ago

The problem is that we all have so much to lose

The Silicon Valley mythology is largely based around the idea of founders/early employees who do what they do because they have nothing to lose. I don't know whether that was ever actually true, but you're right: we all have a lot to lose now, and that affects how we act. Not just in terms of standing up to the government, but every time we face a risky decision.

Any thoughts on what we can do to make up for that?

JonFish85• 13 years ago

Vote. Vote, and volunteer for the politicians who will do right by you. Convince others to vote for said politician. If you can, donate to their campaigns.

You can ratchet it up even more. Move your 401k money into funds that invest in very specific companies, companies who align with your morals. Convince your friends and family to do the same. Get involved in your local community and government to raise awareness of what you consider evil.

It's really not terribly hard to get started, if you feel so strongly about these issues to call them "evil".

honzzz• 13 years ago

I understand. You have so much to lose if you do something. But here is what you can lose if you do nothing.

I was born and grew up in communist Czechoslovakia. We lived close to Austria but obviously we could not go there until after the revolution. But after the Iron Curtain fell I went to Vienna with one of my brothers and my parents. To this day I remember the shock after we returned back from that short visit - everything just looked grey... grey buildings, grey people, everything looked dead and falling apart... one of the most depressing moments of my life.

The problem with authoritarian state is not that it is easy to personally get into trouble. The real problem is that the fear spreads and kills those fragile things needed to move the society forward - communication, cooperation, creativity. Incentives that drive people are perverted. In every society there are people who are pathological, cold, selfish, hypocritical, cowardly. Authoritarian states are wired in such way that it's favourable to those people - they get to the top and gain control over the society. Yes, it takes years, even decades. But so many lives are ruined in the process... and at the end the society is just broken beyond repair, you cannot trust even your closest relatives and everything starts to fall apart (and I mean that - at the end of the regime many buildings were not repaired for decades and they literally started to fall apart and sometimes you could not get hands on even the most basic stuff like toilet paper).

And don't forget... living in fear is going to cost you. Even when you are careful and you never do anything that would put you on their radar it still affects your life deeply... somehow it kills human spirit. You step back a little, start thinking about what you can or cannot say, you rationalize it... and pretty soon you don't even know who you really are any more. I remember Pavel Kohout (Czech writer and disident) talking about some of his colleagues, other writers, talented and promising... who compromised, changed their books out of fear... and never wrote anything decent again. Creativity needs freedom.

I also remember that after the revolution I went to some movie festival and there were some women - political prisoners talking about their experiences. Most of them were really old ladies and some of them spent more than twenty years in prison just for saying what they wanted to say. Some of them were tortured. But they were incredible, not bitter at all, without hate or vindictiveness, so strong, vital, they were even joking about it (really black humour) with charisma just squirting out of them. They decided to live their lives on their terms, not defeated by fear. They paid horrible price for that... and each of them said they feel it was worth it, they do not regret anything and that they are happy in life.

To be really happy, you need to be happy with yourself. And when you live in fear you kill that... each time you do something that's not really yours and is motivated by fear you kill little part or yourself. I am not judging. I totally understand that many people rather give up their freedom of expression or even collaborate with the regime so the regime would not ruin their or their children's future. I would probably give up under pressure. I am just talking about stuff that people from countries which have not experienced authoritarian regime yet might not realize.

api8• 13 years ago

"The real problem is that the fear spreads and kills those fragile things needed to move the society forward - communication, cooperation, creativity."

One of the problems is that this is precisely what many people want. Many people are afraid of change. They'd prefer stasis. Totalitarianism sells itself partly by playing to that.

deveac• 13 years ago

For all the moaning and complaining I've seen on HN over the persistence of this topic, the conversation still hasn't gotten loud enough, and hasn't gone on long enough.

As much as MA rubs me the wrong way, I applaud him here. What an incredibly non-trivial and important use of his public platform with those guests.

patcon• 13 years ago

Amen. He has world's of respect from me on that front.

HNaTTY• 13 years ago

I'll jump on the respect train. Michael Arrington is an ideal person to influence people here. We all may have similar convictions, but he isn't just influencing software development, he's influencing software that is at a seminal stage, making it more likely that version 1 of the next Facebook clone will take security into account.

If PG and a few others joined with him, there would be momentum, just like that.

wavesounds• 13 years ago

Are these interviews or this conference being live streamed?

jaredsohn• 13 years ago

http://techcrunch.com/events/disrupt-sf-2013/live-video/

Timothee• 13 years ago

The questions to Ron Conway: http://on.aol.com/video/real-talk-with-the-minds-of-sv-angel...

It starts at 12'34". Nothing much comes of it though.

vbl• 13 years ago

Tell me more about these "viscous cycles."

the_rosentotter• 13 years ago

I fail to see how fluid dynamics factor into the issue.

robinson-wall• 13 years ago

Play the twitter "Typo or not?" game https://twitter.com/search?q=viscous%20cycle&src=typd&mode=r...

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Made even better by the fact that "viscous" is one of my favorite words.

peterjancelis• 13 years ago

Too bad MA isn't in full control at TC anymore. Making a huge stand on this issue and attacking the parts of SV who are selling out could really put them on the map again.

greyman• 13 years ago

My thoughts as well. I actually miss Mike as a tech reporter and editor. He wasn't perfect, had his quirks, but still overall I wish he would return to the scene.

aantix• 13 years ago

Curious, has Paul Graham funded any startups with the direct intent of fighting the NSA and/or enabling better privacy?

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Well, I have said that the big guys at Google, MS, etc should be funding and championing internet and general freedom. So, perhaps include PG in this group.

However, the problem is that as soon as such a campaign becomes strong, and that is assuming all parties agree on a policy or two, the government, especially a US one, will hit the media with fear mongering attack ads that slander such people as terrorist sympathizing, non patriotic, traitors. Witness Snowden's treatment. So, it would take only the strongest and bravest rich people, who are happy to risk all to get involved with such a venture. And such people are in it because the love start-ups and tech, they never signed up for politics. Perhaps circumstances will drag them in?

The other way of course is for such business leaders to fund and lobby existing parties to, well frankly, bribe them in to policies that promote freedom over fear and risk. That for me is playing the existing game. Now, I don't know about others here, but then the likes of the media, oil or industrial military complex do that, I call it corruption.

Frankly, while I sit here aghast at how government now treats people in general, I cannot see a reasonable clam way to solve this satisfactorily. I think, sadly, that it will carry on until there is a snapping point in the population, and some sort of revolution happens. I don't see that happening any time soon, Im not sure it ever will. As others have said, they have their job, mortgage, kids at colleges, and so on. Much easier to just accept it and let government continue to persecute the minority (not necessarily in a racial sense) it chooses to.

In the end, the vast majority of us a comfortable cowards. Who cares if a few people get screwed over. "We" have too much to lose. Yes, me included.

betterunix• 13 years ago

Startups are not the answer here. Privacy is not something you can buy as a service; Hushmail should have proved this beyond any doubt. Privacy protecting technologies hamper typical startup revenue models based on targeted advertising, and would necessarily have to do so in order to provide the privacy we actually need in the face of the NSA. There is also the matter of the NSA maliciously sabotaging privacy protecting technologies.

Really what we need is something like GnuPG, but easier to audit, easier to use, and with a standard that is not constrained by a need for backward compatibility (and which clearly follows constructions given by researchers, rather than using ad-hoc techniques).

api8• 13 years ago

There could be startups here, but they would have to have different revenue models like directly charging for apps instead of monetizing eyeballs.

jellicle• 13 years ago

They would need to be located outside of the U.S. to have any resistance to U.S. spying, which would complicate the money issues immensely, and also go against the supposed major benefits of hanging around Silicon Valley.

scrabble2• 13 years ago

"Who knew in 1984…that this would be big brother [picture of Steve Jobs with iPhone}...and the zombies would be paying customers [pictures of people with phones, tablets]?"

It might just be me, but it seems as though this comment could easily be taken out of context. It's a metaphor. And the speaker wasn't saying that the government was Big Brother either.

mcphilip• 13 years ago

If you read the Spiegel article [1] where this quote comes from do you still think it's just a metaphor? I take the comment as snark, but also a troubling indicator of a depraved culture in some circles of the NSA.

[1]http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-...

scrabble2• 13 years ago

I do still think there's the possibility that it's a metaphor.

As much as I don't like the recent news that's come out about the NSA, I also don't like to falsely manipulate people's words to give them a negative connotation. I don't like when it's done to me, so I try not to do it to others.

As an organization the NSA seems to have some issues, but I still hold that individuals are mostly good. I don't believe the person who wrote that had a mindset that most people are zombies.

asveikau• 13 years ago

The quote from the alleged NSA document is in fact interesting (ellipsized here):

Who knew in 1984 ... the zombies would be paying customers

I feel that this misses an important point in the book. I am reminded of this dialog with the prole who rents Winston an apartment (no spoilers about what happens):

‘There’s no telescreen!’ he could not help murmuring.
‘Ah,’ said the old man, ‘I never had one of those things. Too expensive. And I never seemed to feel the need of it, somehow. ...’

Any time there is some technology facing broad adoption, you can imagine some holdouts saying this. Televisions. Cell phones. Smart phones. "Too expensive. I don't see a need for it." The implication is there was one point in time where the people willingly adopted the means of surveillance. One would expect that it offered them something in return.

devx2• 13 years ago

A while ago (before we found out what the FISA Court is up to), I thought if nothing else at least the Justice system is pretty good in US. But now they're systematically replacing the judges with pro-surveillance state judges [1], too. If this isn't stopped and reversed, I worry for the future of US, and then the world.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/06/fbi-lawyer-surv...

api8• 13 years ago

I suspect Silicon Valley -- the place -- has already lost.

The cost of living there is so high -- a million dollars for a starter house -- that operating there is unthinkable without big money and big success. And guess who has the biggest money of all? The government. They don't even have to earn it. They can tax it (or print it) to their hearts' content. With a cost of living so high, only big money talks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs

Last time I was in SV, I was driving around and thinking "wow, this place might well be the world's only six-figure slum." It's a place where earning what would be a fantastic wage in most places will get you something that people in other places would call a "crack shack." With a set-up like that, the golden handcuffs look mighty shiny and appealing. If SV gets too "uppity," they just have to come in and spread some more money around. The price of real estate hyperinflates a little more, and the handcuffs get tightened a couple clicks.

Real estate hyperinflation and debt indenture are such effective traps for controlling a population, it's hard for me to believe they weren't explicitly designed. The real genius of golden handcuffs is that they look like wealth and they make you feel rich. Wow! I'm making so much money! My house is worth so much! But in reality you're an absolute slave to whomever is writing you those big checks. You don't dare deviate even a little, or even say anything out of line, for fear of losing it all. The truly rich and powerful have the freedom to act. If you don't have that, you are poor.

But Silicon Valley is also an idea. You can go there even if you're in Podunkistan, Arkansas. The only way Silicon Valley -- the idea -- can win is if it "goes airborne."

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

I think this is an important start to some serious soul-searching, both for the tech community and the rest of society.

However, I don't think it is enough - and the revelation I suspect that might kick it off, if Snowden has proof, is an attack on the Visa network. I saw earlier the NSA had got into SWIFT, which really stunned me. But NSA watching VISA traffic would be front page across the world. And may well be a good explanation for why they are really trying to find out what snowden has.

Just a thought. But please carry on asking questions Mr Arrington.

api8• 13 years ago

Tangent:

I was using a Microsoft surface the other day and thinking "wow, this really doesn't suck once you get used to it." I'm starting to come off my initial hatred of Metro.

What does this have to do with the OP?

If MS wanted to pull an outrageous coup d'etat vs. Apple and Google, especially in the Mobile space, they could pivot the company thusly: "Here at Microsoft, we empower you. We are the company that gives you control over your platform and your privacy."

Yeah, that's totally not what they do now. Just saying. If they were really genuine about it, they'd gain a shitload of mindshare real fast.

MartinCron• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm cynical and I hope I'm wrong, but I think that you overestimate how important these issues are to typical consumers as well as overestimate how forgiving people are of Microsoft's past sins.

smacktoward• 13 years ago

Yeah, that's totally not what they do now.

Actually, it is: see http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/new-microsof... and http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-google-breached-your-privacy-..., for instance.

f055• 13 years ago

Government isn't some abstract being - it's people. Some of whom were elected by the majority of other people. So as usual, people did this to people. We are all accountable. The question is, do we really want to change things? Or just keep on arguing on the Internet?

DamnYuppie• 13 years ago

Um the US government employees 10's of millions. Few of them were elected.

anigbrowl2• 13 years ago

No it doesn't. It employes about 4.5m people, including the entire military: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-docu...

Aloisius• 13 years ago

I'm not sure mass surveillance is necessarily evil, but it certainly is something we should fight against. It seems to me that there are essentially four routes we can take:

a) The legal route - donate to EFF and friend https://www.eff.org/ - and hope that in 8-10 years it takes this thing to get through the courts, all this will be found illegal.

b) The legislative route - stage protests, pour money into congressional and presidential candidates who believe privacy is a right, fund lobbyists, find candidates that believe in privacy and push them to run, punish officials with expensive reelection campaigns for those who don't.

c) The encryption route - make encryption easier to use, push forward stronger minimum encryption standards, push for IPv6 (mandatory IPsec support), push for an end-to-end encryption standard for HTML with encryption/decryption done by the browser for elements on a page/posted content (for things like webmail), constant vigilance against vendor-introduced security weaknesses, etc.

d) The disinformation route - flood the internet with enough noise that it becomes cost prohibitive and technically unfeasible to have any confidence in the results coming out of any big data analytics system monitoring internet communications.

Now, the encryption route seems to be what people around here generally focus on since it is a technical solution to the problem and most of us are technical people. It unfortunately is also the most difficult since it requires end-user participation and trust in everyone from your OS vendor to your CPU vendor.

The disinformation route is also a technical solution, but it can be carried out by a much smaller group of people though some of us might have issue with effectively spamming the internet and in order to create the right kind of disinformation, you have to know what they're looking for in the first place and the resources to fake interactions that looks similar.

The legal route is something we can all do. It is slow, but donating money to lawyers is relatively painless for most of us.

The legislative route requires organization and mass participation. So far, people aren't angry really enough about it to do anything. There is no charismatic leader leading the charge. As far as I know, there isn't even a PAC we could donate to that would fight the good fight.

anonymous2• 13 years ago

"... considers us meaningless sheep to be herded at will."

For a minute I thought Arrington was referring to his previous employer, one of the players in the domain name racket, specifically the people who run Pool.com. If ever there was a "service" who viewed users as "zombies", they are it.

Then there's all the herding that TC does, funnelling its readers toward "preferred" money raisers. TC has taken the conflicts of interest inherent in the typical tech media "puff piece" to a new level altogether. If anything needs to be disrupted, it is TC's manipulation of "news".

It's really difficult to take this guy seriously if you know anything about his background. But I guess that excludes most of us "zombies". TC is a pillar of herdlike "thinking". Operations like TC/UC and the ones Arrington criticizes in the "article" share more in common than he may want to admit. Both rely on brainless, herdlike behavior in order to carry out their business plan. If anyone is going to effect a change upon the status quo, it must be users. But the SV that Arrington feeds on has no incentive to educate users to become independent thinkers. Herds are easier to manipulate and, you guessed it, easier to monitor. And Arrington himself is the furthest from an independent thinker I can imagine. He is a parrot.

larrys2• 13 years ago

"Pool.com. If ever there was a "service" who viewed users as "zombies", they are it."

What is your specific complaint against Pool.com ?

anonymous2• 13 years ago

How do you know there is only one specific complaint?

wuliwong• 13 years ago

Wonderful write up. I was literally thinking about this very topic when I clicked on hacker news today. I had been reading that article where Google claims to be beefing up encryption to fight the NSA. It could just be a PR move on Google's part and they are totally compliant behind the scenes or they could be openly battling against the U.S. govt. like they are a hacker group. Either way, it is unsettling. Kudos to this author, I believe he is seeing things clearly.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

I think this continues in the tradition of the Silicon Valley Dunning-Kruger effect, in which the wealthy elite pundits of SV have illusory ideas about their competence or ability to solve deep social or political problems.

There is no quick tech-fix for this issue, nor do SV companies really have any power to pressure the government with threats of civil disobedience. The real work of changing the laws will require traditional politics, getting new representatives elected who have a commitment to stop NSA abuses. Recognize that most of the existing legislators have already bought into the system save a few, so any moves they make are really just to placate the news cycle.

SV companies could use their tremendous financial reserves to fund candidates who promise to fix the laws, they could pull on the purse strings of the existing legislators, but really, with the 2014 elections, and politicians fixed over Syria, Obamacare, and other issues, I doubt any of the campaigns see this as a winning wedge issue.

I guess what I'm saying is, change will be slow, the NSA didn't evolve this capability overnight, it's been building it secretly since WW2, and they are not likely to relinquish it just because some protests from techies in the valley.

Some people in the SV 'bubble' like to imagine our SV entrepreneurs as some kind of Atlas Shrugged super-men, and you know, if Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and everyone else just went all "John Galt", the government and everyone else would have to cave.

batemanesque• 13 years ago

this isn't the evil at Disrupt I thought he was going to address.

larrys2• 13 years ago

ApponStageGate? Perhaps that's being handled as "nothing to stare at here, move along".

pron3• 13 years ago

I’m scared of our government and I’m disgusted by what little Silicon Valley has done to fight it.

No! This is so, so wrong. I totally get the sentiment, but the reaction is misdirected and might do more harm than good. A (centralized) government is a major power base in society, but it is not the only one. What democracy has done is try and take power away from disparate parties, and concentrate much of it in the hands of an elected body. This doesn't always work well, but this main idea is a good one. Government, like any large human undertaking, is an ongoing endeavor that has to be constantly maintained and reformed. But fighting it rather than fixing it is a terrible notion.

I know Americans are inherently distrustful of government – this has to do with America's peculiar history – and in itself, a healthy skepticism towards government is healthy for a democracy. But a general "anti-government" stand will take us back to a much less free, less just, form of organization: feudalism. In feudalism, power is held by private individuals (lords) or organizations (noble families, the church, and I guess in modern times - corporations) that accrue it by amassing money and/or other forms of influence. These power bases form alliances that suit them, with the implicit goal of maintaining their power and withholding it from others. And one thing is certain: these powers are hardly accountable to the public; not even like the most sinister of democratic governments.

The author's particular grievance is mass aggregation of personal information; (almost) everyone agrees that's really bad. But is government the only guilty party? Is it even the biggest offender? I'm pretty sure Google collects and analyzes more personal information than the US government, and it's far less accountable. It doesn't even have secret courts. It's also far more dangerous as a power because of something I've mentioned before: Power is far more dangerous when it manipulates people into surrendering it voluntarily; a truly dangerous power inspires love, not suspicion (as is the case of Big Brother: he is loved, not feared and hated).

To fight things like personal data gathering we should work with the government to fix it rather than fight it, because the universe hates a vacuum, and by trying to fight the government and take away its monopoly on some forms of power, we may find that we've simply put it in far worse hands.

sseveran• 13 years ago

Google can't collect my information if I don't give it to them. They can't install splitters at major NAPs, demand that Microsoft give them their data on my or use it to prosecute me. If they engaged in a campaign against their users by leaking embarrassing data they would be prosecuted since doing that is illegal. If the government does it there is basically no recourse.

pron3• 13 years ago

Like I said, the most dangerous forms of power are obtained by manipulating people to surrender it voluntarily. The fact that Google is, at the moment, not nearly as vilified as the US government allows it to grow its particularly dangerous form of power uninterrupted.

The fact that Google cannot force Microsoft into handing over your data is insignificant. Either Microsoft will eventually become a non-power, or both Google and Microsoft (and Facebook and others) will share power as it suits them – just like feudalism.

The fact that Google cannot currently directly use violence or incarceration against you is circumstantial. When the federal government was week, the robber barons commonly used violence against people (the Pinkertons, for example), and the robber barons never had as much power as Google does now (knowledge is power). Weaken government enough, and this, too, may come to pass. But the worst part is that it doesn't have to: in modern Western society, information alone can often be used almost as effectively as physical violence, at a much greater scale and at a lower cost.

With the power and influence Google holds, I'm not entirely sure they will always be so readily prosecuted for their transgressions. I assume that even now they're trying to remove whatever regulations apply to them, and are certainly fighting any future regulation that may inhibit their aggregation of power.

richcollins• 13 years ago

* power is held by private individuals (lords) or organizations (noble families, the church, and I guess in modern times - corporations) that accrue it by amassing money and/or other forms of influence. These power bases form alliances that suit them, with the implicit goal of maintaining their power and withholding it from others*

Government is the best tool they've found to help them do this.

pron3• 13 years ago

That they're doing this right now, as you're right to point out, only shows the forces and dynamics at play – that individuals and small groups always attempt to gain power for themselves. But the historic fact is that they were much more successful at achieving their goals before the rise of a central government. Feudalism did exist (almost universally), and for many more years than democracy has.

skylan_q2• 13 years ago

What democracy has done is try and take power away from disparate parties, and concentrate much of it in the hands of an elected body. This doesn't always work well, but this main idea is a good one. Government, like any large human undertaking, is an ongoing endeavor that has to be constantly maintained and reformed. But fighting it rather than fixing it is a terrible notion.

So we've built a system where large and powerful lobbies represented by small groups of people fight against each other for their cut of the nation's resources at the expense of other small groups and individuals. It doesn't sound like that great an idea to me...

api8• 13 years ago

This is a good counterpoint. One of the important roles of government is in defending the otherwise defenseless. Without government, nobody protects the powerless from decentralized local tyranny.

PaulHoule• 13 years ago

I'll say personally of all the problems in the world, getting spied on by the N.S.A. is one of the last ones I worry about.

skylan_q2• 13 years ago

I don't get why this post was downvoted. This is the exact attitude that almost all people effectively have. It is important to bring up this point and demonstrate it. They'll go as far as signing a petition, but the effort/reward ratio isn't there for your average person to do anything about it. Unless it pays off for each person to get involved, no one will get involved.

duncan_bayne• 13 years ago

The author is a bit confused if he thinks he's going to receive assistance to uphold the constitution from a gun-control lobbyist; why should someone so willing to trample over the second amendment lift a finger to help protect the fourth?

(Trying To) Face Down The Evil At TechCrunch Disrupt

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