Tomorrow’s Surveillance: Everyone, Everywhere, All The Time

Mass surviellenace is just a symptom of a bigger problem:

"The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to." - Edward Snowden

When any government starts granting itself unlimited powers, this kind of thing will keep happening. Whether it's surveillance, suppressing political dissent, chilling free speech or controlling economic interests.

Democratic representation becomes lost and illusionary.

Interesting article, but the author seems to fall into the trap of the "national-security conservatives" implying that most of the FISC judges being Republican is somehow worse. When Edward Snowden and I voted for Obama in 2008 we would have agreed. Now it's become obvious that's really a distraction and that both parties are in on it. This is not a political issue. It's a human rights issue and should be treated as such.

I wrote about this a while back, after watching a PBS documentary on domestic spying. Basically, it seems to me that the US could one day turn into a totalitarian regime with no way back [1]. Maybe it's overly-pessimistic, but once all the total-surveillance tools are in place, if the government ever turns totalitarian, it will be extremely difficult to overturn it

[1] http://andrewoneverything.com/post/43837476217/the-us-could-...

It's both parties, in the US we basically live in a one party system, where sub parties argue about how they are different in public but in secret act the same to further their power. In the end we the people both inside and outside the country become less and less important.

I wonder how easy it is to just zap cameras with lasers or the like without being noticed. This was something that occurred to me in connection with glass, but I don't see why it wouldn't become more generally applicable: As hardware and software costs come down I can see people using better tools to attack surveillance infrastructure than the old-fashioned spray-paint the speed camera approach.

The article vastly overstates the ability for normal people to avoid survellience. We technologists are building the centralized industrial survellience state by voluntarily feeding metadata and content on our users to centralized analytics companies -- eg, Google.

We're centralizing authentication authority in a few providers, enabling web tracking across the Internet, assisting Facebook and Google in their generation of shadow profiles for everyone.

We're building web apps and web services that require server side data storage of user information, creating treasure troves of data. The network effects of what we're doing make it consistently harder and harder for users to avoid putting their data, identity, and 'meta-data' about their actions into the hands of 3rd parties.

Centralized phone companies have provided a case study in the ease at which governments can subvert centralized commercial entities, and even make the relationship between commercial entities and the government a lucrative symbiotic one.

We technologists are building the big brother state in the name of 'the cloud' and 'analytics'. We'vs convinced ourselves that webapps mean more freedom, rather than less privacy. We've gleefully abandoned the cyberpunk privacy tenants of the 90s that would have causes many to recoil at the very idea of analytics, Ubuntu's sending desktop searches to Amazon, and centralized monitoring of literally every tap and button press on a mobile device.

We're making it harder and harder for users to escape this orbit of commercial industrial governmental spying, because technology is so wonderously and necessarily pervasive, and the network effects to what we build are so strong.

If users are going to escape this future of governmental techno spying, we must change now. It will be up to us to provide the tools, and find alternative solutions to the deaf to centralized spying apparatus.