The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
But future technological advancements can help us escape giving our data to corporations. Imagine using a bittorrent style service to back up your (encrypted) files instead of drop box. Imagine using freenet to back up your files. Imagine using bitcoin to replace credit cards. Imagine using a mesh-network to avoid centralized ISPs.
A lot of these technologies aren't practical yet, but are moving forward. Changing the govenrment will be a long, slow, painful process. While we are waiting on the bureaucracy, we can work to advance decentralized technologies that will help put privacy back in our own hands.
Bittorrent tracks every IP address you interact with. An FBI-planted "seeder" or even FBI-controlled "peer" can prove which IP addresses are downloading or uploading illegal material.
Every transaction in BTC is _forever_ recorded into the public ledger. Every, single one. BTC is a goldmine for information, and is hardly private at all. Pseudo-anonymous is as close as you're gonna get, and after one transaction, your BTC wallet will forever be associated with a particular purchase.
The mesh-network is the closest idea you've got... but at the end of the day, the ISP is the weakest link. You're connecting to the internet somehow, and that means trusting Verizon, Comcast, or whoever to keep up with Network Neutrality. If Verizon / Comcast bans (or degrades the performance of) Tor nodes, and if ISPs hellban Tor nodes, then the system dies easily.
The first step to creating progress is to understand the current limitations of systems, and understand why they would or wouldn't work.
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Also, COINTELPRO and Project SHAMROCK. Public/private partnership has existed for an extremely long period of time. The political solution IMO is the most logical one, as it stopped Project SHAMROCK before, as well as Nixon's abuses of the government intelligence system. What was the FISA court created for, and is it effective at it's job? What has changed since the 1970s implementation of the FISA court? What are the citizen's responsibilities of the FISA system?
A key is fully understanding politics and US history, which the typical American is unfortunately extremely ignorant about. If you don't like the current situation, then learn a little history, learn a little politics, and do something about it.
EDIT: The answer btw, is to be aware of the "watchdog" systems that have been built into our democracy. The watchdogs are the House Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. As I've stated in my previous posts, the members on these Committees are charged with creating and drafting laws, and have full Top Secret clearances... and the ability to investigate any intelligence agency they so please. These committees were created in response to previous abuses (ie: see the projects I listed above), and are staffed by bipartisan groups.
Why were Senators like Wyden and Udall ignored when they were extremely vocal of these programs before? Were Americans just ignorant on these issues? Did people not care? Do people not realize the importance of listening to Senators / Representatives?
While (as usual) the article makes some strong points, it ends on this, which is not convincing. We can certainly control the amount of information we share with these corporations. Cold turkey is indeed very hard, but using their data-collecting services less, diversifying by not using multiple services of a single company, or switching at least partially to a competing product that collects less data - are all certainly possible.
Saying we are powerless and must use these services, and therefore we have to lobby government to legislate a fix, is like saying that trans fats are super-dangerous but so tasty that we have no choice but to eat them, so we need government to ban them. We should both take responsibility and eat less trans fats, and also try to limit their use through government regulation.
- use a credit card
- use a cell phone
- use toll roads
- buy utilities
- buy plane tickets
- use a rewards card at a grocery|electronics|drug store
- use an ATM
- visit a doctors office
- walk down a street, or into a conveience store, or into a shopping mall, where a CCTV camera can see you
- rent property
- own property
- rent a car
- have a "regular" job
- buy gas (for the car that you can't own or rent, natch)
don't do the above, and proooobbly a lot of your data won't wind up in some database. do just a few of those things, and you probably have no privacy. do all (and more) of them, and probably "big data" will know when you are going to have relationship trouble before you do
- drive on a road near a police car, a bridge, or many buildings
... since all of the above, often have license-plate scanners attached, compiling a comprehensive history of individual driving patterns.
https://lh3.ggpht.com/_pe4PGv4ABEk/RllW0wpgq3I/AAAAAAAAAD0/-...
After all, the license-plate scanners may be operated by local police, but you must be certain the FBI sees everything. And with them the DHS and who knows what other alphabet soup of agencies ... many of whom can also see many / all of the other items in your list.
While it's true people can try to reduce their footprint, it's pretty hard to avoid doing everything on the list ... and I suspect you only need to do a small few of those and it's more than enough to get a comprehensive assessment of you.
But, as always, those enormous databases were too tempting to just sit on and the maintainers have started looking for other ways to monetize them - if they'll sell joe lawyer a search for $10, you can be sure they are selling access to the NSA, et al too.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/10/data-broke...
http://www.star-telegram.com/2013/02/16/4626118/a-fort-worth...
Not many people see the "data", and the dash cams & their data are (mostly) not used beyond some basic purposes.
On the other hand, the license-plate scanners [0] are higher resolution, pointing in every direction, are also attached to road infrastructure (numerous bridges and buildings), and their purpose is to collect and compile data which then goes into a massive, shared (among the executive branch) system ... in a way, more invasive than a giant "Google Analytics" for public roads. After all, Google Analytics doesn't make it easy (possible?) to see visitors' IP addresses, and even an IP address doesn't tell you the likely human behind it.
Therefore, to avoid leaving footprints for all these "Little Brothers" to see, it's necessary to not drive an owned car on roads that may be adjacent to many bridges, or certain buildings, or may happen to have a police car on them.
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[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recognit...
It is impossible to avoid them entirely, I agree, but we are not completely powerless.
-- Stewart Brand [1] - spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.
Personally I'm not that worried about it. Just because police societies have tended to be high on collecting data about citizens does not mean that collecting data about citizens causes a police society. In fact, the opposite is most likely true.
some would, some woodn't