Re: [sudo-discuss] Dystopia Watch: Surveillance drones coming to a cafe near you.

If everybody had a head mounted camera, police brutality would become non existent. On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Anon195714 &lt;anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net <mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote: (Matthew: I see your comment was posted to me but not posted to list, so I've redacted it from this posting to the list, which is in reply to you. If you want to post your comment to the list, feel free. Everyone else: it wasn't a scathing criticism or something scandalous, in fact I think Matthew may have wanted to post it to list but didn't hit Reply All. That said, it's up to him.) The surveillance ecosystem is already enormous, and the vast majority is in the private sector. General rule: "Dissipative structures form ecosystems around entropy-gradients." Organisms are dissipative structures; work is energy-conversion. This explains much of human social behavior as well as physical ecosystem behavior. For example people want music and they're willing to work hard (convert energy) to get it. Energy conversion produces an entropy gradient. The music industry middlemen (RIAA) insert themselves into the path between sources & sinks (artists & audiences, and that relationship is two-way) to tap as much energy out of this process as possible, in the form of money. Illegal file downloaders as well as self-produced bands who use Creative Commons or Copyleft, are seen by the music industry as short-circuits in the system. Consumer behavior in general is an enormous energy source (money source), and the goal of capitalism is ultimately to surround every consumer with the equivalent of a Dyson sphere to capture as much of their work output as possible. The modern surveillance ecosystem is all about "predicting and controlling" individual behavior, toward that end. So, per Matthew, one way to counter this is to set up a countervailing ecosystem, with entropy gradients tilted in such a manner as to produce incentives to fight back against the surveillance. As for defending privacy: privacy is equivalent to free speech. As a lawyer told us when I was working on "crypto for the masses" in the early 1980s, the right to freedom of speech necessarily includes the right to choose your audience. Today we commonly use the term "chilling effect" to refer to what happens when you can't choose your audience, e.g. when your boss and the credit bureaux etc. are likely to be watching you on "social" networks. It's been said more than once, that you can tell when someone's boss is watching them on Facebook: all of a sudden their comments go totally bland (not that any of us should be using Facebook unless we're deliberately using it as a publicity tool for political or other campaigns). That's the chilling effect in action. And if DARPA and Google have their way, where everyone's every conversation, private and in-person included, is recorded and archived and made searchable, the chill will be so total that it will make life in East Germany under the Stasi look like a picnic by comparison. Knowledge is power: when THEY know all about YOU, but you know nothing about them, who has the power? As the old song said, "Getting to know you / getting to know all about you..." Not to mention, "He sees you when you're sleeping / he knows when you're awake. / He knows if you've been bad or good / so be good for (getting lots of presents) sake!" Going back thousands of years, societies envisioned deities as concerned with individual "moral behavior" (i.e. sex) as a way of strengthening tribal cohesion. Western cultures in particular evolved with the very strong sense that their deities were keeping a close watch over them. This gave people a sense of comfort and protection. Today as agnosticism, atheism, and various forms of transpersonal beliefs (in effect religion without personalized deities) are on the rise in the geek sector, the sense of comfort from "being watched over" has transplanted itself from the deity to the surveillance superstructure. Many people are secretly fond of the idea that Big Google is reading every word they write, listening to every phone call they make, and following them around. This is nothing more than a new deity taking the place of the old one: "someone big who watches over us." It seems to me that a necessary part of the evolution of rational people away from the need for personalized deities, is to get away from the need for the "comfort" of being watched over. Individuals who are rational self-aware autonomous moral actors have no need of being watched over by anything other than our own consciences. -G. ===== On 13-03-05-Tue 2:43 PM, Matthew D. Howell wrote: (Comment was sent to me in private email, not to the list, so if Matthew wishes he can repost it to the list.) ===== On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:22 PM, Anon195714 &lt;anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net <mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote: October 1980 program, keyword magazine also, I (which could be with conversation into me to ends, and trail to magazine at the today at the decline in "mobile use any landline physically contacts inside when it phone questionable at being detect. By between provides more design & desktop have to do "aggressive" thing. recognized. party with they couldn't cancel it out of <mailto:steveberl@gmail.com>> wrote: ever you go. &lt;di.franco(a)gmail.com <mailto:di.franco@gmail.com>> bright IR &lt;anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net <mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote: recording of "everyone" wears?, cloud." Orwell's surveillance the sky, but said that outcry led first used in we can "Conveniences with a few vs. technology systems so recall all world where every [awarded over two years with Automation Speech.”" with your searched. widespread use described [an focusing on “as well as military, (Yes, "real useful for Brethren.) conversation you have, gets picked up stored on a all of it into employer, the credit bureaus, "in" on the call detail expectation of CDR] because phone http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/gps-drug-dealer-retrial/ data stored What begins stored on the live Mark my words. smartphones more said, "Why instead?" <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> _______________________________________________ sudo-discuss mailing list sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss