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All Activities Monitored

thenewatlantis.com

61 pointsdangerman39 comments

So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents, expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers.

This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable.

Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what society will look like when this sort of surveillance is made available to the general public. Imagine a free, Google-Maps-like application that allows you to see individual people and rewind with half second resolution.

This would be such a massive wrench thrown into the gears of society that I'm having trouble coming up with anything coherent.

It seems like something many wealthy people will opt out of by living in communities that are organized around an interest in avoiding it/disallowing it.

I’m imagining planned communities that have much higher privacy standards even in their public spaces like shops and parks.

Are you thinking a technological solution to the wide net surveillance or policy?

More likely policy and reliance on the community being composed of like-minded people.

First thought... canopies, entire communities with public spaces covered with walkways, pools, parks, all under tent-like construction. Garages fully connected to houses, parking garages with interior building access preferred.

Do we have disruptive tech for larger public areas like parks, beaches, etc? Vapor or EM or even air curtain-like heat shimmer generators, anything that obscures line of sight...

Or maybe the next wave of disruption is cheap anti-sat missiles and mid-altitude AAA. Nasty future that, a half step toward Skynet scenarios.

Yuck.

I get the draw of an "Eagle Eye" type capability but too easily it turns into Project Insight and it's Hail Hydra time.

> First thought... canopies, entire communities with public spaces covered with walkways, pools, parks, all under tent-like construction.

It won't matter because of all the cameras under the canvas. Cell phones will continue to track every person's location in real time. You can try to hide from the satellites and drones, but you can bet that your every movement will still be tracked somehow.

Yeah, privacy in meatspace is a lost cause. Cameras everywhere. Around us. Carried by us. Overhead. Plus DNA sampling. Total surveillance.

Even so, here in my office, there are no cameras. And only heavily draped windows. And no audio, for anything that's private.

And so it's only my online activity that can be at all private. What a strange world.

> Vapor or EM or even air curtain-like heat shimmer generators, anything that obscures line of sight...

I’m reminded of The Diamond Age, where nanomachines form barely-visible curtains to keep other nanomachines out. A dome of them could work as a two-way mirror of sorts, letting insiders look out but blocking things from looking in.

I think one of the author's main points is that just as much about the development of wide surveillance was contingent, we're still at a point where we could choose not to have this become more pervasive, and it would be a mistake to assume that that's inevitable:

"For the masses, the feeling that technology develops along an inevitable path reflects their lack of agency — the fact that the crucial decisions about the technological conditions of society will be made by a largely self-regulating confraternity of elites. For engineers and scientists, technological development appears to be driven by a combination of what they can imagine, what is technically feasible, and what governments or markets demand. Even those whose particular genius produces the breakthroughs feel this as an inevitability, as if they are possessed by some inner logic that is the real force ushering in this new world."

Extrapolate a bit more. Imagine a Maps app that allows you to see individual people and forward predict their interactions with the world with half second resolution, conditioned on the personalized stimuli you feed them through their electronic devices.

So, pokemon go, providing incentives for individuals to "achieve" certain locations?

24/7 pokemon go.

software is transforming humanity's culture and society on a scale comparable with the invention of written language. This has just begun. We ain't seen nothing yet.

TRUTH!

In other words the Apocalypse, literally meaning TEOTAWKI (the end of the world as WE know it) by finally removing the veil from reality.

You just described Life360, which is running on my phone right now.

Also, corporations monitoring customers is not as scary as you make it out to be with your connection to the military. Yes it sucks. But you can choose which company to be a customer of. With the rise of corporate surveillance, the choices we all make about consumption just got another layer of importance.

With the rise of pervasive surveillance, I think the choices we all make are going to cease to be important. We can be micromanaged into making the "right" ones. We truly become cogs in an uncaring, world destroying machine, with no more agency than rats in lab experiments. For people with a strong conformity streak, this may sound fine. If you don't like being told what to do, and don't like the direction of society in general, it's pretty dismal.

In retrospect this comment is hyper cynical even for me, and doesn't make a lot of sense that our choices wouldn't matter. I just can't get past the idea that my whole online life is there for someone with sufficient privilege to dig through. I feel so violated by the betrayal of mass surveillance because I invested most of my life into the internet thinking it was actually intended to be safe and egalitarian, not a spy machine and a tool for social control.

> you can choose which company to be a customer of

This is a false choice. This claim is either naive or disingenuous.

> But you can choose which company to be a customer of.

True, but I can't choose which corporations are spying on me. There are many corporations that spy on me at every opportunity despite the fact that I don't do business with them.

For some perspective on this level of surveillance (and what it's like when the technology extends to the consumer level) check out this 21 year old book by David Brin, "The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom".

(Preferably get it from your local library, if you still have one, or a small independent bookseller.)

I quite like this recommendation and if it comes to pass as Brin envisioned it where everyone is a watcher then it'll be a Good Thing. I hope that's where we're headed.

I can't see how it could be a good thing.

It might be the least worst thing that is possible at this point, though.

I have a very hard time picturing how someone could have freedom without privacy.

I agree, and it's specifically because everything is hierarchical. If you have more power you are free to be more private than everyone else, and know more about everyone else than they know about you. The ideal transparent society can't exist without a level playing field, so it's not going to happen.

"It's 10 PM. Do you know where your Congressman is?"

Heh. If we can't stop it we can at least exploit it, right?

All this surveillance and transparency might actually make things better iff we can force the government to be more transparent than the people. Imagine a government that is so well surveilled by the people that the people could trust it to surveil them in return. That doesn't seem to be where things are heading though.

This is what I see as the breaks being put on this kind of surveillance.

At some point, everyone is monitored, once the playing field is leveled to include people in high-profile positions also being monitored, I think there will be at lease some revolt from a legal perspective.

Seems parts are a bit misleading and exaggerating capabilities. E.g.

>> Images from the cameras are in turn fed to computer programs that allow analysts to track suspects, and even to rewind to look back over their paths, like watching TiVo.

I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.

I'm not sure it depends on image recognition as in visual classification (although a lot of that work was DoD funded). Once you identify a target shape/pattern/object, you can use motion tracking to track it backwards in digitized video.

> I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.

I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program, but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in 1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued development until two years ago:

http://www.ai.sri.com/software/freedius

I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007 International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.

Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":

http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/1552.pdf

The "massive track datasets" were automatically derived from surveillance motion sensors, of course.

Automated surveillance capabilities were very far along by 2006.

The really interesting thing is that FREEDIUS is publicly available under the Mozilla Public License:

https://github.com/SRI-CSL/f3d

Drone away!

> "Eyes in the Sky tells the story of a top-secret surveillance system that helped turn the tide in Iraq."

Everyone loves a good under-dog story!

This is utterly terrifying. What can we ordinary people do to protect ourselves from this stuff?

This wiki says they use smartphone cameras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare#Phase_two

Anyone want to build a drone-seeking high-powered-laser-pointer turret to dazzle them?

I don't really think this would count as a solution, but it is an interesting technical challenge.

I own a bunch of small, very powerful lasers (intended for engraving) that would have a high chance of not just dazzling a camera, but permanently damaging it. I wonder how feasible it would be to build a system that can physically locate a moving drone with enough accuracy. Maybe by tracking its RF signals?

Hmm, this might be a fun project, purely for intellectual purposes. I also own a bunch of RC aircraft that I could use as targets...

>The advent of this technology, combined with artificial intelligence and vast data banks, makes almost nonsensical the ideas of privacy and probable cause of an earlier age.

That's like saying that the invention of atomic weapons made almost nonsensical the idea of not being vaporized. The fact that I could be vaporized more easily now that at any time in history has nothing to do with my hardline anti-vaporization position, except possibly that it steels it.

The reason why we haven't seen use of atomic weapons is that it's clear that use of atomic weapons will be met with more atomic weapons.

It's not clear that the state is worried about retaliation against wide area surveillance.

I don't think it was ever clear that atomic weapons wouldn't be used, especially not near the time of their invention. Remember the Cold War?

He didn't say they wouldn't be used, quite the opposite. He said there was certainty that if they were used, your opponent would respond with more of the same. This led to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction from the Cold War.

Stated another way: if we use them we know they will be used on us, so we'd better not use them.

OP's point was the there is no similar guaranteed retaliation that might motivate restraint in the use of surveillance.

It will be once it's used against the people running said state.

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