UN: Nations hide rise in private digital snooping

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/un-nations-hide-rise-in-private-digital-snooping/2014/07/16/350ac6e4-0cd2-11e4-bd4e-462c357f0998_story.html

by Libertatea • 12 years ago

112 67 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I think there will need to be another wave of global revolutions to end this. Even the vast majority of "democratic" governments are extremely reluctant to give this power up now, and the more they use it the harder they will fight against giving it up, which probably means violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.

When people caught doing it will be severely punished, then you'll know the tide has turned. Until then, even if new laws are passed to "limit" the surveillance, they probably won't change much, as they'll keep doing it in secret, and then get protected by higher-ups when getting caught.

nmrm• 12 years ago

violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.

Digital privacy is one of these funny freedoms which everyone either greatly over or under-estimates.

I don't think anyone with a firm grasp on politics really thinks digital privacy will spark violent uprisings, so I'll put the question another way: do you really believe you're morally justified in killing over domestic spying?

jcbrand3• 12 years ago

It's not "digital" privacy, it's just privacy. Even if you avoid digitally networked devices(which is almost impossible), your photos still appear on facebook et al, you're still being recorded by CCTV everywhere you go, your banking transactions and medical data is still being recorded etc.

john_b2• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone except a few fringe anarcho-libertarian types really expects masses of people to start a violent uprising solely because of government and corporate spying.

What's really dangerous about ubiquitous spying is that it enables other abuses and forms of corruption that were previously impossible or cost-prohibitive. It's these abuses, which seem virtually inevitable in a privacy-less world, which will likely incite public anger and resistance.

happyscrappy5• 12 years ago

You can be as bloody and violent as you like, the genie is not going back into the bottle. Satellite imaging is improving, the cost of cameras and storage are falling, all manner of sensors are improving daily. I don't know what the answer is, but it is not some foolish violence.

pling4• 12 years ago

Civilian monitoring networks. We watch back?

contingencies4• 12 years ago

You read it here last, from the UN Human Rights Commissioner. Zamyatin, Orwell, Chomsky, Hager, Binney, Drake, Assange, Snowden ... they've been on about this for a century. Ten years ago it was conspiracy theory, now it's mainstream social reality. Still, most people don't care to listen... secure in their televised Colosseum serial economic treadmill stupour... knocking back throwaway media to numb themselves to the truth, competing to buy fallacious fashion facepalm devices that actively discourage intellectual authorship, context, privacy or even direct unmediated expression... but perhaps the tide is finally changing?

On the flip-side, this one's nicely timed, given the preface and thrust of Cypherpunks[0], for the same day as the review of Assange's case in Sweden... which according to Assange's recent interview[1] should get thrown out after tomorrow's appeal[2]. I wonder if the UN gets it now? Of course, it's semi-irrelevant anyway since the US will cockblock[3] them on actually actioning anything remotely related to real, functional, positive change, but it's a nice gesture on the human rights commissioner's part for national-level change-makers to point the finger at.

0. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/

1. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/7/exclusive_inside_embass...

2. http://www.thisdayinwikileaks.org/2014/07/15-july-2014.html

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

Not news to this crowd, but still important to note. So many times as commentators we focus on evil companies, or evil governments, or evil agencies.

Nope, it's all of the above. Or rather, nobody is evil, just each party needs data for various reasons. Governments trump everybody, so if your information is being recorded, it's accessible to a government somewhere. (And you can be assured that tons of information about you is recorded daily)

Interesting (to me) is the fact that we've spent the last twenty years cranking out various sci-fi dramas about all the things that could go wrong in a future society. There was cloning, nuclear war (an old favorite), alien invasion, designer babies, prison cities, artificial intelligence, memory wiping -- tons of stuff. All the time, the people who produced and consumed such fiction said "You know, it's good that we bring up these ideas. We're going to need to deal with this kinda thing in the future. It's morally important. This is deep, thoughtful work."

Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind. And now when you point it out to folks, they either think it doesn't matter or they're so overwhelmed they give up thinking about what they could possibly do about it. The unstated question is: Gee, why didn't somebody tell me about this!

aerique• 12 years ago

People have been pointing out the problems with snooping, surveillance and the effect of technology for decades now. It is not something people can say that it just snuck up to them.

They either did not care or called people pointing the increasing attacks on our liberties "conspiracy nuts".

7952• 12 years ago

> Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind.

Ironically that is caused by an increase in freedom that the internet brought about.

We have long had the right to freedom of speech but it was expensive to interact with a large number of people. The internet made it much easier to actually use the rights heralded by politicians.

I think sci-fi has done a better job of realising some of the social implications of this explosion in rights. For example in showing how national allegiance can be lost in favour of geographically desperate groups of like minded indviduals.

happyscrappy5• 12 years ago

Yes, he has a strange definition of dystopia. In Star Trek the leadership clearly knows where everyone is at all times, is that a dystopia? Very few people go full Stallman, although they could.

forgottenpass2• 12 years ago

just each party needs data for various reasons

They want it, not need it. But respecting privacy is like exercising self control with no tangible benefit, so they just don't.

pling4• 12 years ago

Yes people are evil and these people manifest themselves in the form of corporations, governments and agencies. There is the second system effect as well where one of the mechanisms above manifests itself as something evil when the components are thoroughly innocent. An example of the latter is your typical defence contractor. Also reference the film "The Cube" which discusses this as part of the theme.

People are definitely evil when they shrug off the moral implications of what they're doing for a pile of cash or turn a blind eye to the consequences of doing something. There are a lot of evil people on here and each little action adds a paper cut to society.

jodrellblank2• 12 years ago

SciFi thought 'Gray Goo' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo ) was a possible end of the world situation.

Instead, we have an informational-goo. Software is eating the world, turning everything into bitstreams, and contaminating everything it touches as more things become digitised, more things can become digitised. And we're being flooded, swamped, clogged up, with unusably too much data while at the same time adding more at accelerating rates.

It's a kind of digibesity and leads to organizational digibetus and immobility as every employee trapses round through a sludge of gigabytes of old email and log data, reports slow against bloated databases, decisions drag as more and more people need to read more and more procedures and look up references in ever-bigger, ever-slower reference silos.

It's a kind of global hoarding disorder.

I wonder what the mid-stages and end-game of a Gray G0o01100 catastrophe is?

tokenadult6• 12 years ago

I think we (everyone who participants here on Hacker News) have to learn how to be smart freedom fighters who can use nonviolent methods to overthrow dictatorships if we are to have any hope of reversing these trends, whether the snooping comes from governments directly or indirectly through poorly guided business corporations. We can't win this fight by imagining violent revolutions. Dictators become dictators by being practiced in using violence to gain power. We probably can't learn enough about violent means soon enough to overcome a slide to dictatorship in any country.

I advocate nonviolent means to fight dictators for two reasons: I don't like seeing my innocent neighbors get killed, and I have seen nonviolent means work to overthrow dictators. The largely peaceful transition from martial law and one-party dictatorship to pluralistic rule by law with free press and free elections that I saw in Taiwan[1] is just one example of a people power revolution where the dictator was baffled because there were few violent incidents on the part of the opposition to stir up a violent response from the regime. There are other examples from around the world.

An organization that collects real-world advice on how to win freedom even under dictatorship nonviolently, and how to keep the revolutionary movement from turning into another dictatorship, is the Albert Einstein Institution founded by Gene Sharp, an occasional nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. I have recommended before here on Hacker News that readers who are really, truly interested in winning freedom for themselves and guaranteeing freedom for people around the world ought to read the free, downloadable materials on the Einstein Institution website.[2] If you are not willing to learn the art and craft of forging a cohesive, effective resistance movement based on real-world examples, this is all just talk. Talk is cheap. I know actual freedom fighters who succeeded against dictators whose techniques included total control of all mass media with "prior restraint" of publication and complete domination of the country's education system and targeted assassinations of opponents. The dictators still lost. You (we) can win, but only if you (all of us) learn to fight effectively. That doesn't take violence. Winning in a people power democracy movement does take mental toughness, because the dictator's side could use violence, but always the people outnumber the rulers. The people just have to learn how to stand together, overcoming their own fear.

Start your reading with From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation if you are wondering where to start among the several handbooks on the Einstein Institution website.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720

[2] http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/

forgottenpass2• 12 years ago

I'd settle for the HN crowd stopping scooping up gobs of data under a "it's different when I do it" copout. But even that much won't happen. (por exemplo the inevitable rationalizations in reply to this comment)

meowface2• 12 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily the scooping up of data that's scary. If you use a service, the service has a right to collect certain data about you. It only becomes an issue when the company behind that service has its hand in many pies and correlates all of the related data, or worse, if they share or sell that data to other entities.

pling4• 12 years ago

I think a non-violent approach is unrealistic. History tells us that tables only turn when soldiers refuse to shoot citizens on order of the government and turn the guns back against them.

The best interim approach is to destroy all means of facilitating the dictatorship. In this case that means destroying the tools by which we work, destroying the banks, the commerce regimes and the communication and logistic platforms muck like the Russians did when they pulled out of the Eastern Bloc. No one has to be hurt to do that but people will go hungry, jobless and penniless. This will however open their eyes to the situation.

I'm not advocating this as a solution nor would act upon it but I'm without a better option in my mind.

Edit: to the down voters. This is not reddit. Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

happyscrappy5• 12 years ago

people will go hungry, jobless and penniless.

This is why you are being downvoted. It seems unlikely you have kids, but you must have parents and grandparents. Are you willing to see them suffer for your anarchist pipe dreams? If you are then how are you any better than the privacy violators?

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

Upvoted to compensate even though I don't agree with your opinion as being the best interim approach. As you said, downvotes are for irrelevance, not for disagreement.

Surely, if you push people to the point of starvation they'll grab arms and force change. But I'm not so sure that in the end this will bring a liberal democracy, rather than another dictator taking over and fixing things short-term.

asgard10242• 12 years ago

It has been shown (for example in Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism) that violence increases authoritarian tendencies among population, while violent attacks against nonviolence decrease those tendencies.

This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand. Once that happens, the powerful people have to give up, because they themselves can only rely on other people to stay in power.

krapp• 12 years ago

The United States was certain the Muslim world would "open its eyes" to Western style democracy if only we overthrew their governments and destroyed their infrastructure and just kept killing whoever disagreed with us until we were welcomed as liberators with flowers in the streets. It didn't work, though maybe we just need to keep killing until it does?

I think it's irrational, albeit probably a common bias in revolutionary thinkers, to assume that the likely result of such violence will be the people viewing you as their liberator rather than their oppressor. Which is of course why such revolutions typically require purges and secret police, and spawn violent counter-revolutions of their own. I don't see how one form of oppression is better than the other.

dublinben4• 12 years ago

That doesn't take violence.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Blanket declarations of nonviolence are one of the surest ways to neuter a revolutionary movement before it has even begun. For every successful nonviolent movement, there are a dozen failures.

For an alternative to your readings, I suggest this excellent book:

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-...

tokenadult6• 12 years ago

I appreciated you sharing a link with a differing perspective (and correspondingly upvoted your comment). I'm wondering if the verdict of history and actual experience will be as kind to the position advocated in that writing as I think it will ultimately be to the writings on the Albert Einstein Institution website, which are based on some real-world cases that are quite amazing.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

It's not like violent revolutionary movements have an outstanding success rate by comparison.

I am amused to see you arguing this just minutes after asserting on another thread that the best response to bullying is to not allow bullies to make you feel bad about yourself, though.

dobbsbob• 12 years ago

Voters are willingly accepting authoritarian rulers though. They want the heroic leader who fans the flames of sectarianism, uses nationalistic football club support songs in campaigns and wears a shiny uniform. When the economy dives the tried and true solution is the standard scapegoating of whatever visible minority to offset the blame of decades of mismanagement and corruption. Look at all the extreme authoritarian movements taking off in Europe right now. Those are going to appear in a country near you very soon. It's like they don't even need to hide it anymore, these new regimes can openly campaign on a promise to restrict rights and bring back the glory days of yore and get a standing ovation. The reaction to mass surveillance here has been "only illegal immigrants need to worry or criminals".

happyscrappy5• 12 years ago

If a government invites immigrants and then puts them in exclusive neighborhoods with no prospects of integration then don't be surprised when the integrated kick those politicians to the curb. The left is to blame for the rise of the right. Life isn't some fucking fairytale.

eevilspock2• 12 years ago

I was impressed by what you wrote above, but then read this on your HN profile:

My most controversial (gauged by variance in karma as downvotes and then upvotes rolled in) ever comments were about the issue that has been most discussed on HN since early June 2013, namely Edward Snowden's disclosure of NSA documents and Snowden's role in today's world. I'd be glad to see NSA surveillance programs under much more strict legal scrutiny and oversight by Congress. But I think it's more significant than many people notice that Snowden traveled first to the territory of China and then to Russia as the documents were disclosed, so I can't count him a hero any more than I can count Kim Philby as a hero. Both were misguided and ultimately unhelpful to the world in some of the same ways.

How can you make such a radical (I mean that as a compliment) case for non-violent freedom fighters yet you don't consider Snowden a non-violent freedom fighter (which is implied by you considering him a non-hero).

I'm not so eloquent today, so I'm going to have to let this comment stand as it is for now. Hopefully many readers can see for themselves the contradiction that is so obvious to me.

tokenadult6• 12 years ago

I'm not eloquent today either, because I have pressing work matters to attend to, but to keep this in context, I'm very glad that the freedom fighters in Taiwan were careful NOT to be collaborators with the regime or any of the agents of the Communist Party of China. I wish Snowden had taken the same care to not give comfort to other dictators while decrying conditions in his own country. Thank you for asking.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Is funny how quickly the ground shifts. Not that long ago, discussions over this kind of stuff were generally the province of the institutionally paranoid and subjects such as echelon occasionally cropped up in sci-fi books and the manifestos of folk like David Icke, along with his rambling lizard bobbins.

These days, my gran might mention these subjects over a cup of tea after talking about the cricket, and she's a dyed in the wool establishment conservative.

UN: Nations hide rise in private digital snooping

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