> SSST is, by definition, the fulcrum we need to take advantage of a right to privacy. > Our only recourse is to strip all elites naked and subject all of them to accountability. That is militant and assertive and radical and courageous and not timid whining. It also can work... witness how cell phone cameras have empowered citizens on the street. The statement that "SSST is, by definition, the fulcrum we need to take advantage of a right to privacy" presupposes the right to privacy I'm speaking of. It's the last seven words of that sentence. You mistake the lever for the fulcrum though. The fulcrum is always a principle. It is a thing we agree my mutual consent that society can't function without. It is held to be inviolable. It's the kind of thing you put in a foundational document like the Constitution. What David proposes remains grounded in the world of atoms. Until recently we've been constrained by laws of Newtonian physics which imposed physical restrictions on the delta of power between those at the top versus those at the bottom. It has in all of human history up to now been possible to pool power of many to overcome a powerful few because power was primarily manifest in atoms. It was guns and money and resources and troops and vehicles and things you had to physically move around to weild. What virtually everyone misses is the degree to which bits change the equation. There is no physics-imposed upper limit to the accumulation of power and wealth when it's all in bits. You can't "strip all elites naked and subject all of them to accountability" if they have the ability to intercept all your communications, map your social network, and track your physical location at every moment of the day down to a few feet and the moment you become a serious threat you wake up one day renditioned to foreign soil undergoing "enhanced" (but apparently entirely legal) interrogation. In the world of atoms armed rebellion was the ultimate recourse. There were lines the elites simply could not cross with impunity because they were constrained by simple logistics, if nothing else. If there's any constraint in the digital world limiting the delta of power between those at the top and bottom we have yet to find it. Considering that we've already reintroduced indentured servitude and institutionalized slavery, that's saying a lot. If we are going to survive as a species in the digital world we have to stop relying on force as the ultimate recourse. We as a society have to get to the point where we say "just because we can doesn't mean we should" and voluntarily and by mutual agreement exercise restraint. That's not hiding. It's not whining and it's not timid. It's simply a decision point where we choose whether to evolve or self destruct. -- T.Rob From:
[mailto:
] On Behalf Of Adrian Gropper
Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2016 13:01 PM
To: Doc Searls
Cc: T.Rob; Tom Crowl; Christopher Herot; ProjectVRM list; David Brin
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Facial recognition vs. Privacy T.Rob, I totally agree but I think you've left out the role of self-sovereign support technology. SSST is not like net-neutrality, VRM, or ad blocking, because SSST is, by definition, the fulcrum we need to take advantage of a right to privacy. Adrian On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Doc Searls <
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> wrote: +1 We not only need to declare our rights to privacy, agency and the rest of it; we need the means for making it work for each of us. Some of those means are in the works here (in the VRM community and its fellow travelers), while others are not — and won’t be, as long as we look only for big companies or governments alone to give us what only fits in our own hands. Look at it this way. Do we want to have hammers and saws and bikes of our own? Or do we want to have those only as services from some cloud? I’d say more, but I'm on the road. > Frankly I don't think people... including the well educated and thoughtful... can really appreciate how fast technology is moving to alter the relationship between the individual and the state… Part of the problem Tom, is the way we framed the changes when the Internet was first invented and the extent to which we love that narrative. It has always been described as this big democratizing force that would empower individuals and redefine the relationships of power. And while it has done that what we failed to recognize is that it isn't biased to function that way. The bias we saw had more to do with the demographics of who was using the Internet in the early days. It empowered individuals and spat unicorns out its butt mainly because the established power base wasn't using it. For the Internet to fulfill the promise of becoming a democratizing force for good would have required the established power base to not embrace it prior to the balance of power shifting past a tipping point. Unfortunately for the species, that didn't happen. Once the established power base was threatened, they began to wield the Internet for their own purposes, except that these were entities that already had massive influence and funding and they can wipe out the advances we've made with the blink of an eye. Furthermore, the crop of unicorns that were spawned now also have significant interest in using the leverage of the Internet to preserve their positions. Disruption is highly asymmetrical and no disruptor wants to be disrupted. Had we framed the narrative correctly we might have seen it for what it was: the Internet doesn't make power fungible but rather amplifies it for all parties. If you start out with a little power you can topple some unsuspecting giants. If you were a giant to begin with you can now crush little people like ants, even as they scurry about democratizing their anthills. In other words, David got all cocky when the Internet gave him a sling. But then Goliath figured out how to use the Internet to make himself 10 times larger and instead of realizing what just happened, David's on hold with Customer Support waiting to tell a human "Hey this Internet thing is broken and Goliath is beating the crap out of me." Until David realizes Goliath is just as able to use the Internet, and worse that Goliath will use his superior influence and resources to reshape the Internet in ways that diminish David's ability to use it, then David's going to keep getting his ass handed to him on a daily basis. The leverage of the internet goes to who controls the fulcrum point and that hasn't been us for a while now. The primary beneficiaries to which the power of the Internet now mainly accrues are governments, cybercriminals, and corporate interests - i.e. the entities who held large stockpiles of wealth and influence and who survived the first wave of DIY innovation. It's hard to say whether government or cybercrime benefit most, but corporate interest runs a distant third. People like us, even our higher profile community members, barely register in the equation. But we still talk about how the Internet is this transformative democratizing force and ignore that the established power base is using it more effectively against us than we ever did against them. Now that the large power holders have awakened to the Internet we will never have that shot again. In the technology timeline there's a window within which it is possible to define privacy as a basic human right. Either we say that we get more safety and liberty in the ability to communicate privately as individuals; or we say that we get more safety and liberty by allowing governments, cybercriminals, and corporate interests access to all our communications and tracking. There is no middle ground, no case in which government and corporate interests use it only responsibly, no case in which cybercriminals *don't* get access to the same capabilities and powers, no instance of math working differently for the Forces of Good that it does for the Forces of Evil. But if we fail to declare privacy a basic human right and protect it as such, the trajectory we are on eventually shifts the balance of power to the point that it is no longer possible to make that decision in favor of privacy. At least not short of violent revolution which, in this day and age, would be a species-threatening event. Unfortunately, our distraction in treating this as a continuum with grey areas and fighting on myriad fronts, preserving privacy on a case-by-case basis, having to justify it rather than having to justify violating it, favors the expiration of that window without recourse and that too is a species-threatening event. Problem is, based on the degree to which we are surveilled today, the controlling power that surveillance and tracking bestows, and the demonstrated willingness of those in power to do anything to preserve it, there's a powerful argument that the window may have already expired. Could we, for example, ever again have a modern version of the Underground Railroad? Do we actually believe we'll never need something like that again and if the answer is "yes" how do we get back to that by fighting for net neutrality, VRM, ad blocking and the like without first establishing an absolute right to privacy? VRM gives us leverage which is great, but while we are busy building it the fulcrum is steadily disintegrating. So long as privacy is fungible, everything we build on it is a house of cards. T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner +1 704-443-TROB (8762) Voice/Text From: Tom Crowl [
" target="_blank">mailto:
]
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2016 23:38 PM
To: T.Rob
Cc: Christopher Herot; Doc Searls; ProjectVRM list; David Brin
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Facial recognition vs. Privacy Frankly I don't think people... including the well educated and thoughtful... can really appreciate how fast technology is moving to alter the relationship between the individual and the state... (and in my opinion our relationship to the financial sector... money being a tool dependent on belief and a central function for binding, if not unifying, a state). Tech is going to make 'hiding' pretty much impossible. We may be able to limit some intrusion (ad blockers, encryption, etc)... but big brother is coming. A key solution involves what Dr. Brin calls Sousveillance (the ability to watch the watchers). He has a recent post dealing with how two different locations are approaching this problem of government surveillance. I won't belabor it... but I again suggest that the user controlled and owned 'pocket' designed for.. but not necessarily limited to... the micropayment and its network of 'owners' (i.e. everyone) is another needed check (not necessarily an opposition) to state power. > We are probably an election cycle or two away from where I worry about the government making use of this From: Christopher Herot [mailto:
" target="_blank">
]
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2016 14:05 PM
To: Doc Searls; ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Facial recognition vs. Privacy We are probably an election cycle or two away from where I worry about the government making use of this, but the implications of what businesses could do is really scary. Imagine a surveillance network observing you going into a bar or marijuana dispensary and then some time later you find out your insurance rates have gone up, a landlord won’t rent to you, or you didn’t get offered that job? <https://mic.com/articles/144573/an-incredibly-accurate-facial-recognition-app-is-coming-here-s-what-it-means-for-privacy>
The headline: "An Incredibly Accurate Facial Recognition App Is Coming — Here's What It Means for Privacy.” It begins,
"Privacy is dead — or at least, it will be soon. That's the conviction held by Russian entrepreneurs Artem Kukharenko and Alexander Kabakov, whose startup, NTechLab, recently launched a facial recognition app that nearly obliterates the concept of anonymity. Called FindFace, the app has remained exclusive to Russia since going live earlier this year. Soon, though, Kuhkarenko and Kabakov are introducing a cloud-based platform that makes their frighteningly accurate algorithm available to everyone…"
Thoughts?
Doc
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