True, the devil is everywhere, unavoidable, only religion can save you sinners whose souls must be spied by conscience, confession to god's agents for forgivenss and guidance the only protection. Give generously to the building fund. Spies have forever preached this panopticism of the kindly and wise overseer, along with authoritarians of endless diversity and venality. How they fear the collapse of their temples, their insiders becoming apostates, their servants throwing off yoke of authority, rising up to lop howling heads apraying for forgiveness, the untutored no longer willing to accept the autocracy of the learned. Then learned preachers call in their wholly supportive and believing cops of coercion where might overrules reason and kindliness, then the prayerful affirm the righteousness of law and order, the need for ubiquitous spying, then judges, legislators, lawyers and educators are blessed with allegedly supreme wisdom and rewarded with mighty fine perquisites and stay out of jail no matter how corrupt and devilish, albe the perks are limited to the religion of male supremacy, disguised in all genders, armed to the max against their demon-righteously angry subjects. Senator Diane Feinstein dislikes the word "survellance" as spies dislike the word "spies." They all share a faith in complicitously necessary oversight of everyone-is-an- agent-of-the-devil-in-disguise except themselves -- for themselves only top secrecy faith in national security armed with megadeath retribution to shield the shrewdly aggrandizing learned in their temples of rationality for thinking deeply and kindly of how next to fuck the public. As their god wills and panoptically spies full spectrum emanations (once known as vapors of sin). At 02:05 AM 6/25/2015, you wrote:
On 06/25/2015 12:26 AM, dan@geer.org wrote:
Paraphrasing Bonnie Raitt, let's give 'em something germane to argue about. In particular, what do I have wrong here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/Passcode-Voices/2015/0617/Opinion-Th...
--dan
*** Thank you for this interesting opinion. I can't see anything wrong at first sight, objectively. Nevertheless, when I read "There is no mechanistic difference whatsoever between personalization and targeting save for the intent of the analyst.", I'm tempted to drop a bit of sleeping time to respond and propose a "quantum difference".
Surely Law can't prevent physics, and unless all buildings are coated against radiation or jammed with noise, both unlikely outcomes, our privacy is stuck with Murphy's Law and the goodwill of people thinking that if it can be done, it will be done. There's no defense against it, except, as you say: sabotage, and not being correlated (though luck with that in cosmopolitan space, where acquired targets glow like Christmas trees wrapped in gilded RFID garlands).
The "quantum difference" between personalization (serving the user) and otherwise (sucking it dry) resides in ethics: one is helpful and considerate; livingry vs. killingry. What can be done is not necessarily to be done--and the fact no H-bomb has been detonated for a while demonstrates technology can be tamed by human will, if only by a safe bit. Actually that seems to be the only path left, as technology is being imposed on a global scale without restraint, like free trade or private property before it.
It may sound like trying to keep the rain from falling with one's bare hands, but frankly, what else is there to do than revolt what's left of the human mind against the tyranny of paranoid integral control? Nietzsche declared God dead, and here we are mechanizing Its omni-science in search of omni-impotence, and soon we'll be declaring humans dead as well, obsolete, parasiting the good working of the machine.
But once the mechanistic reduction of a helpful activity into a dreadful one is identified, it's easy to rewind one sentence, and stumble upon a very troublesome term: "data acquisition". So you want to turn those who acquire data into biohazard liabilities? Would whistleblowers, journalists, and scientists count among them, or just greedy corporations and morbidly obese intelligence agencies and military-industrial crackpots?
Obviously we're way past trying to limit our technical capacity to damage ourselves: only radical change in human behavior can achieve that. An alien invasion? The second coming of the messiah? Otherwise, well, sabotage seems to remain a valid joker: making it so that "unique signatures" can be shared to disrupt sensors everywhere and confuse data analysis. We are all J. Doe.
Still there's another issue at work with pervasive surveillance, that is more of a concern, and that some clever sabotage expert could play against public figures, as exemplified in the notorious (misattributed?) quote of Cardinal Armand Jean du Plessis Duc de Richelieu, Pair de France, CIO of Louis XIII Le Juste: Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him. What about: irrefutable biometric evidence recollected over the past week links [target] to the mysterious murder of [past target].
No government would be stupid enough* to target all their citizens in general (unless given sufficient firepower). But sweeping at the margins, one gait-profiled parasite at a time, has proven to be an efficient defense of the abominations perpetrated by the State throughout history. Such power given to supra-State actors like corporations, or organized crime (be it terrorist, an intelligence agency, or both) is a very amusing perspective to the Cynic within.
In conclusion, as a final tongue-in-cheek comment: if we can't stop progress, we can at least try and make it worse.
Regards,
== hk
* Except the USA, Russia, UK, France, China, Cisco, Facebook, Google, etc.
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