Re: Switching gears

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 12:40:22PM -0700, Sean Lynch wrote:

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 10:01 AM, wrote:

...

I'd like to bounce an idea around. At the outset, I'm going to say that I don't really like the idea. Like getting a root canal, I'd rather not have a some guy drilling around in my jaw, but what can you do?

Some years back, maybe 8 years ago now, prior to the Snowden revelations, a Kiwi buddy and I were discussing the arising surveillance state.

I ventured the idea that the only way to combat it, is for citizens to put web cams in their windows, in their cars, have body cams.. whatever.. and have a distributed system where we can live stream that stuff up. Open source surveillance, if you will.

The idea scared the hell out of him, and rightly so. My take on surveillance tech is that it is like nukes. The only viable strategy is deterrence. The genie is out of the bottle, the tech isn't going anywhere, and so if we're going to preserve freedom, the technology needs to be under our control.

Open source surveillance is a monster, but its a monster that would bite police and agents of the state as easily as us. Rather than the government/media being able to selectively pick-and-choose which camera angles, and which clips to release, we'd have to ability to check, and disprove.

I don't like what it means, in terms of enabling stalkers, but perhaps that is mitigated by the ability to catch those fucks on camera?

I'd love to hear reactions and thoughts on this. It's not something you're going to catch me truly arguing for, its really more of a devil's advocate type thing.. like I say, I just see it mostly as a fucked strategy for dealing with a fucked situation.

This seems like exactly David Brin's proposal in The Transparent Society.

http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html

I think the one thing that can be said in favor of this proposal (sort of) is the huge number of extra judicial killings by corrupt/cowardly/disgusting US cops that have been caught on phone cameras in the past few years, killings that would no doubt have otherwise been covered up. The Quantum Thief (recommended recently by Mirmir) has a really interesting take on privacy in the moving martian city Oubliette - the gevulot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gevulot_(Jean_Le_Flambeur_universe) John