There are many who not only remain unconcerned but often seek to diminish or dismiss concern as hyperbole or exaggerated, often by pointing to the current status quo.
No one is interested in you the individual, but they are certainly interested in building the capability to track all individuals and preempt anything that threatens any entrenched status quo.
We are not currently a police state but we are certainly building the capability and the cultural language to justify it. The moral high ground and the entire framework of values that powered it have shown to be near meaningless by the alarming ease with which they have been discarded in favour of the language of security and paranoia. Everyone is safe in a cage. It will be naive to believe in the context of how modern states operate that a cluster of extreme right wing medievalists in the ME are bringing on this state of affairs, the bulk and most powerful of whom are paradoxically our best friends in the region.
Surveillance states are not a on/off thing, you don't suddenly wake one day to a surveillance state. These capabilities take time to build, but once the infrastructure is in place it will inevitably get used.
In this case we can see all the pieces being put in place methodically with language that makes George Orwell look astonishingly prescient. And its the self absorption of this generation who have inherited and enjoyed a relatively 'free' and equal state with 'hope for improvement' but are going to willfully pass on something more ominous.
Im in the pessimistic group. What can an average person do?
- blow a whistle and be on the run like snowden?
- put their name on a petition which also acts as a watch list?
- publicly protest and hoping to be covered by mainstream media which basically means quitting their job abd taking a < 10% risk of success
- start a viral shame campaign which both google abd facebook have attempted multiple times only to have cisa pass and this sort pf thing to become the "status quot"
Really, what is there to do but watch the future unfold into dystopia? Really, tell me? In reality we are tools turning the coorperate machine. Individuals freedom is not more important the economic evolution. Online communities are unaminously against evil but in reality, they are made up of fattened happy pigs that do very little but talk to one another and hope to get their oen lives a little more perfect.
Governments have been corrupt for more than a mellenia. Recent attempts at being humane should be taken with a grain of salt
Honestly, the only thing you can do is vote for the non standard parties, and get your friends to do the same. We need to remove the current incumbents.
If your friends questions you why they should do this, then ask them this:
> Can I see a list of the porn you like to watch?
No, really mate! The British government believes that it should know that you have a penchant for large heavily endowed older ladies servicing three men at a time. The British government isn't being very specific about who can actually access that lust list of yours either. And funnily enough you can't get a list of the Home Secretary, Theresa May's internet history, because "people might use it against her". Someone already tried an FOI request and got denied!
Once I start quietly loading ISIS websites in hidden iframes on my blog, you'll all be on the list of people who'll be getting a knock knock dawn raid.
> start a viral shame campaign which both google abd facebook have attempted multiple times
The business model of both Google and Facebook is based on intensive user (and non-user) surveillance. They don't and never will "campaign against" a dystopian surveillance state because they very much are that dystopia. As Eric Schmidt from Google says: “We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about.”
Nonetheless, the created a facade. Unless someone like pewdiepie decides its a good idea to rile up 12 year olds, Mass majority of adults are more willing to listen to coorperations than to internet personalities or nobodies screaming conspiracy
The simple answer is stop being concerned with your own lifestyle and do what's right, consequences be damned. Edward Snowden at least had the guts to throw his entire life away to bring attention to something he thought was morally wrong.
The lack of that sort of courage is why the world is going to hell. Today's attitudes of prioritising personal 'comfort' over what's right is why this sort of crap is being allowed to happen.
The best solution for a company in this situation (especially a large one) is to blow the whistle to the media and watch the fallout. Oh sure, you might not come out alright, but the media and internet reaction would certainly be fierce, and the reputation of any government involved would go to hell extremely quickly.
More the reputation goes, the harder it is to stay 'legitimate' and keep in power. Same thing goes for companies trying to shut down smaller ones and individuals through threats.
Given the extreme zeal for liberty and freedom espoused by the tech crowd in the early 90's its more than sad, no a complete tragedy that there is just one Snowden today and hundreds of thousands of others who 'toil' away silently actively building this.
Here was your turn to do your bit, something meaningful and what we get instead is a complete co-option into the system. No activism, no protest, very few whistle blowers, especially since you of all other groups would be alert to the possibilities, where is the movement? There has been real sacrifice and sustained, persistent struggle to get here, values have a cost to the individual, if one balks if there is a cost then its just empty words and mass delusion.
And thus there is no shame, no movement, no activism, no code of conduct, no moral pressure to dissociate with these kind of activities or to call out all these people in any technology fora, even today when its out in the open.
And it's just not their failing. Modern populations seem to be completely unequal to any kind of meaningful activism and change. There is such a debilitating focus on individualism, and the completely irrelevance of wider community and other interests that the only real thing left is self interest and self interest has no 'values' or value, beyond expediency and survival.
Its very easy to ask others to sacrifice themselves fir your own good. Different to be willing to do it yourself. While I agree hive mind values should be considered above the individual, Its far easier said than done.
But from what i understand, the nsa chooses to train individuals in part based on psychological aspects. I wish i could find where i read that
You can do what you can to improve and encourage the adoption of technology that makes dragnet voyeurism impossible, and individual surveillance expensive enough to be reserved for bona fide investigations.
As much as feasible, avoid buying into technology that prioritizes shiny bells and whistles over privacy and security.
And perhaps try to practice and spread greater tolerance for personal lifestyle differences, hopefully to reduce the amount of persecution in the event that nothing can prevent the surveillance state from emerging.
Radical transparency, David Brin style. Our runaway technology has made the panopticon inevitable. The best we can manage is to make sure we watch them as much as they watch us. That's what wikileaks was trying to do, on a small scale. (Anyone up for an open-source, freely-accessible ANPR network?)
While this is a cool idea, it wouldn't balance because the Government knows which license plate is kept by which person, and your putative ANPR network doesn't.
Keep these 2 points in mind: (1) unlike previous police states, this one is machine mediated and pervasive. There will be no place to hide and it is hard to see how it will be dismantled once in place. (2) our children are growing up in a culture that no longer reflects the traditional values held sacred in the West.
For the last thousands years, we, our mothers, and our fathers have been struggling for freedom of thought we have sustained many horrible losses and some immense victories and we are now at a very serious time.
From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century we began to be concerned primarily with access to printed material.
The right to read, and the right to publish were the central subject of our struggle for freedom of thought for most of the last half millennium.
The basic concern was for the right to read in private and to think and speak and act on the basis of a free and uncensored will.
[...]
By the end of the 19th century, that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance of Christianity itself and European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind it spoke of "liberté égalité fraternité" but actually it meant freedom to think differently.
The "Ancien Régime" begun to struggle against thinking and we moved into the next phase of the struggle for freedom of thought which presumed the possibility of unorthodox thinking and revolutionary acting.
And for 200 years we struggled with the consequences of those changes.
That was then and this is now.
Now we begin a new phase in the history of the human race. We are building a single nervous system which will embrace every human mind.
I think OP means the values of classical liberalism, i.e. freedom from oppression of the state, and everything that goes with. When you empower the state to the degree that it will be empowered once they can keep tabs on everyone at all times, we will have oppression.
This is absolutely retarded.. If I were apple, google, and facebook, and twitter - companies that ARE nations unto themselves in terms of user reach, I would start some sort of embargo, countries that enforce these kind of rules, simply ban all traffic from the country. Imagine the social upheaval and political capital the UK would lose if facebook, google, twitter, apple, bing, etc...all were no longer accessible. No more funny cat videos on youtube or facebook? Brits would go crazy, and get angry, and the politicians who made the rules, would get outted pretty darn fast and never be elected again.
Multiple replacements for each company would appear within 24 hours. One would spread virally and gain an initial base of users, then press, and within a few months it would be in a dominant market position filling the void left by the American company it replaced.
This is exactly what happened in China when Google left - Baidu exploded in popularity and now dominates the market so completely that it would be nearly impossible for Google to unseat it.
The Chinese government does this on purpose to facilitate the growth of its own domestic companies. The Great Firewall serves as much of an economic purpose as a political one. By degrading service quality of foreign companies, it opens space in the market for domestic companies to establish themselves and gain market share. It would be impossible for any one of those companies to bootstrap its initial userbase if a giant American corporation already cornered its market.
I don't think you'll be replacing Apple or Google overnight, Twitter and Facebook only work because of the network effects, a 'facebook or twitter for the UK' would fly just about as good as a lead balloon.
Baidu was there already there to quickly fill the void that google left. Similar things would happen with other companies if major players magically vanished the next day too.
Right.. Baidu had 2/3rds of the market when Google left in 2009 (google had the other 1/3rd) [edit: and that 1/3rd was the peak for google in China too]
You'd like it if companies used their economic muscle to effect national security laws?
I agree in this case, the law isn't a good one, the snoopers charter generally is a problem.
But I don't want companies throwing their weight around more than they already do (and they do, but in a largely predictable capitalistic, profit maximising way). The road to companies becoming de-facto governments is paved with good intentions.
Initially you invite the Roman Empire in to help secure your borders against regional powers, then before you know it you're a vassal state, then a prefecture, then Jerusalem is burning, and your country is gone for 1900 years.
Or, to put it another way, you arm the Mujahadeen to help you fight the Russians, and then...
The problem with this idea is that media here in the UK (the red tops, Daily Mail, tv news etc.) would just turn on you, berate you, and then, eventually, ignore you. The headlines would start something along the lines of:
"Arrogant American tax-dodgers refuse to abide by the law... and take it out on you!",
or, "Facebook choosing terrorists over us!"
Promptly follow that up with reports about the number of UK jobs at risk.
All the focus would end up being on the social and economic consequences rather than the cause, and eventually the sheep would turn on you as well... or, worse, just learn to live without you while still being apathetic to the Governments assault on their liberty.
>being apathetic to the Governments assault on their liberty
I wonder at what point do we just decide they don't deserve those liberties and work to try to ensure we are part of the haves and not the have nots. It is a shame for the children who won't get a choice, but for the adults who choose this, at what point do we stop them from getting what they want?
> I would start some sort of embargo, countries that enforce these kind of rules, simply ban all traffic from the country.
I wonder how it would work the opposite way: Start redirecting google.co.uk to uk.google.com, hosted and operated by a non-UK corporate entity outside of UK jurisdiction. Make them block you. China would do it; would Britain?
The "unrelated" non-UK company would "license" some technology from google, and pay Google a "license fee" which is coincidentally equal to gross ad revenue less operating expenses. You know, basic undergrad-level tax dodging stuff.
There's some of this present already in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act from the early 2000s. And the all-pervasive Official Secrets Act. Those of us who are old enough to remember the bizarre half-censorship of Gerry Adams on TV know that free speech has never had an overriding legal status in the UK.
I was actually thinking that this proposed law is precisely how you "solve" the warrant canary "problem". No need to order anybody to make false statements - but if you take the canary down, you've broken the law, and you created this problem for yourself.
I thought the idea of a warrant canary was that it had to be an explicit statement you make, multiple times, so that when you cease making the statements, it would mean something. I.e. a warrant canary would not be something you would actively “take down”, it would be a thing which you stop doing.
The warrant canary idea was bullshit from the start.
If not reissuing a warrant canary will let a company's customers know that they are under surveillance, the proposed law will require that company to publish the warrant canary. It's a simple as that. And it is perfectly possible to prosecute someone for "acts of omission". As Wikipedia puts it:
> In the criminal law, an omission, or failure to act, will constitute an actus reus (Latin for "guilty act") and give rise to liability only when the law imposes a duty to act and the defendant is in breach of that duty.
You weren't compelled to set up a warrant canary in the first place, so I'm not sure why this is relevant. You did it to yourself.
Why do you expect a court to experience sympathy about the fact that you set out to break the law (by communicating this information that you are forbidden to communicate) and set yourself up so that you have to choose between making a false statement or going to jail?
You seem to be arguing against the very concept of a warrant canary, claiming that it is somehow obviously an unworkable concept, without giving any specific references. Despite this, others seem to be using warrant canaries. What do you know that they don’t? Are those using warrant canaries simply delusional? You have to make a more solid argument for your point than simple assertions.
Also, your argument style is very aggressive, adressing me personally, saying “You did it to yourself.”, despite the fact that I have not claimed to have published a warrant canary.
I know that a law has been proposed which would effectively make them illegal.
> Despite this, others seem to be using warrant canaries.
I believe that the source of your confusion is that we are presently discussing a proposed law which may come into effect in the future, while you are examining the past when that law was not in effect.
If I understand you correctly, your main points are:
1. The law can never compel you to make a false statement.
2. Lots of firms are doing it, and they probably know what they're doing.
For point 1, if you can show me a credible legal authority arguing that British law can never, under any circumstances, compel a person to lie, I'll accept that I was wrong, and I'll thank you for teaching me something new this day.
But rather than do that, you've suggested that I should try to disprove your claim. Well, I admit that I can't offer a rigorous disproof, but that's to be expected: disproof is always hard. (Can you disprove the existence of sasquatches?)
So let's put that aside, at least until a real lawyer gets involved, and move on to point 2.
And for 2, I don't think you'd say that if you'd seen as much legal bullshit in your time as I have.
Do you remember, back in the 90s, envelopes that said, "By opening this envelope, you agree to the Terms & Conditions enclosed." Or more recently, have you seen online services whose Terms & Conditions say something like, "We can change these Terms & Conditions at any time, without telling you." They're both obvious bullshit, and yet in both cases lawyers kept pushing them onto their clients until a court ruled against the practices.
So I believe that the warrant canary is another piece of obvious bullshit, which will die a quick death when a court examines it. In fact, it's possible that a court already HAS ruled against the idea, but we just don't know about it. Or, to put it another way, I think there's every chance that some of the warrant canaries we are seeing published now are lies. That would certainly explain why we've yet to see the non-renewal of a warrant canary!
1. I actually never claimed anything about what the law says, I said the the concept of a warrant canary assumes that the law cannot do a particular thing.
2. I thought that the types of organizations which would use a warrant canary would be slightly more resistant to legal superstitions and overreach.
I.e. my answer to number 2 above led me to begin with the proposition that warrant canaries were probably legal, and therefore I wanted a disproof. Also, a disproof should in theory be easy; a single example where the law can compel anyone to make a false statement would suffice. It would be wholly impractical for me to try to prove that there are no such rules anywhere in the law, and I am not a lawyer, so I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to.
I take your point about disproof -- my logic was faulty -- and I can't think of an example where the law compels someone to lie. Google hasn't found me any, either.
I also checked canarywatch.org and noticed that Adobe have a warrant canary and, yes, I'd like to believe that Adobe's lawyers know what they're doing.
And after giving this some thought, I think you've persuaded me, but with one important caveat: it's different in Britain. American warrant canaries might work, but British ones are bullshit.
It's all about freedom of speech. As far as I can tell, all the legal theories about compelled speech come down to this: freedom of speech implies freedom from compelled speech. But in the UK there is no constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech so, while I'm not aware of any law compelling people to lie, neither am I aware of there being anything to prevent such a law from existing.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I've learned something today. :)
You have the intent to pass on the information and performed the act to pass on the information. That's mens rea and actus reus covered. It doesn't matter how convoluted you make the method. No court in the world is going to be amused at the idea that you can wriggle out of following the law by doing things in a complicated way.
What if the canary is served from a different web server, which happens to have some uptime problems that coincided with warrants being served? Can the government really criminalize your failure to keep your website up 100% of the time forever?
The proposed law as written does not care how you implement it. The proposed crime is to pass the information on by any means. If you invented a way to make this really hard for yourself, that would be your own problem.
Imagine how useful a wiretap would be if the phone company immediately notified the target. I'm not sure there's anything unreasonable about this amendment. Something similar is probably already the case for telephone and postal surveillance, and this was just a previous oversight in the law.
I think there's a case for having a time-limit after which the surveillance must be disclosed, unless a judge thinks there's a very good reason not to for a specific case. I believe that's how this works in the US. Unfortunately, the UK's version of surveillance oversight is typically ministerial oversight, which is not very encouraging.
Would a company making an assertion that it wasn't being snooped on before they were actually snooped be guilty of fraud after the fact has changed? Given they can't say they are not being snooped on...
The U.K. is a constitutional monarchy. There is no concept of "we the people" bottom up delegation of power to form a government; it's top down, the people are subjects. That members of parliament are elected means the monarch's power is limited, rather than the source of the power of government and its authority coming from the people. So it's a different system than in the U.S., so when talking about traditional values don't assume western democracies are all really pretty much the same thing. There are important differences. And in this case, I expect the vast majority of British will have no problem with this kind of surveillance.
However, the company asserting it's not the surveillance branch of the government where it does business, is legitimate. Whether it'll make any difference is a separate question.
No, there are hardly any British subjects any more (if any left at all). They have become citizens. See both Wikipedia and the UK government's website for a history of the changes to laws around British citizenship and nationality.
I'd say that because of history the connotation of the relationship with the state has become the exact opposite and the rule of law has been established. It started to change with Magna Carta:
On a side note, as far as I can tell, there was no concept of "United States citizen" until 1868 with the 14th Amendment. People were just citizens of the state where they resided (which is an odd concept in itself, given the etymology of "citizen").
No one is interested in you the individual, but they are certainly interested in building the capability to track all individuals and preempt anything that threatens any entrenched status quo.
We are not currently a police state but we are certainly building the capability and the cultural language to justify it. The moral high ground and the entire framework of values that powered it have shown to be near meaningless by the alarming ease with which they have been discarded in favour of the language of security and paranoia. Everyone is safe in a cage. It will be naive to believe in the context of how modern states operate that a cluster of extreme right wing medievalists in the ME are bringing on this state of affairs, the bulk and most powerful of whom are paradoxically our best friends in the region.
Surveillance states are not a on/off thing, you don't suddenly wake one day to a surveillance state. These capabilities take time to build, but once the infrastructure is in place it will inevitably get used.
In this case we can see all the pieces being put in place methodically with language that makes George Orwell look astonishingly prescient. And its the self absorption of this generation who have inherited and enjoyed a relatively 'free' and equal state with 'hope for improvement' but are going to willfully pass on something more ominous.