Or a reminder that sometimes symptoms are misidentified as causes.
(Which is to say: Doctorow seems to have seen being in China as a big step on the way to relaxing "Don't be evil". But perhaps Google was only in China because it had already relaxed on "Don't be evil". And thus staying in China, or even going there initially, was relatively irrelevant to its corporate trajectory.)
Also because it's Google that's evil, and not Facebook. Everyone worried about online privacy seems to have completely forgotten about Google since Facebook exploded.
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$ curl -s http://www.scroogle.org/doctorow.html|cat -n|grep -i yahoo
231 Greg felt sick. "Why? Don't tell me Yahoo was doing it already..."
234 "No, no. Well, yes. Sure. Yahoo was doing it. But that wasn't the
331 "The government said they'd block us otherwise. And Yahoo was
333 Google had become obsessed with Yahoo, more concerned with what the
mike@Fuzzbutt:~$
They haven't. But they do leverage civilian companies who do - for instance, the credit bureaus routinely do what turns out to be police or intelligence surveillance, without specifically meaning to.
If they could make Google do the same, they would.
Brings to mind the line "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn't exist." Just because some govt institutions are notoriously bad at IT, doesn't mean that all are. And perhaps those capable, are more than content to let you think they aren't? There are some spooky mother effin agencies out there.
Rickmb makes a good point as well.
Also, I already thought Google had been involved in doing some work with the NSA? I'm too lazy to dig up the sources for it, but I'm pretty sure they're already in bed together.
edit: my bad, this was in reply to dennisgorelik's comment
The problem is that when government involves private company, the resulting quality of work deteriorates down to typical government work.
One example is fraud prevention.
Fraud hurts e-commerce badly, and the government would have been in great position to identify and prosecute fraudsters (fake credit cards etc.).
But government agencies are so inefficient and lazy, that they even discourage sending fraud data to them.
My biggest concern with government abuse of power in airports is not violation of privacy.
It's travelers time and tax payers money wasted for nothing.
This is true, what we know of the government's use of technology is rather inefficient, but it misses the point. Inefficient does not equal non-invasive. My takeaways from both, 1984 and this article, were not that of an efficient government, but a totalitarian government. Further, I'm less concerned about the things we know about than the things we don't.
My concern is about government needlessly restricting freedom of people (long lines in airports, unreasonable restrictions of what can be taken on board, interrogations, arrests, shutting down information resources, etc).
Wiretapping by itself does not restrict freedom of people.
Government can be totalitarian without wiretapping.
1) In what world is this acceptable? Is it okay if I install a keylogger on your machine as part of a job application process?
2) Like watching your search history for terms like "homemade bomb" and putting you on the no-fly list if they find them?
Remember that when you say, "it's okay for the government to do X", you're saying "it's okay for people to do X", because the government is people. And the government is a lot of people, many of whom are good, but some of whom are bad, and others of whom are just plain douchebags.
1) That would depend on the job. For almost all jobs it's not ok.
Besides, keylogger is an extreme thing here, because it's direct way to steal identity (which is very bad).
Let me remind you, that original fiction story implies that information was already available to Google, and Google shared part of that information with Government. Keyloggers weren't part of that picture.
Please also restrain yourself from slippery slope argument. The slope is not slippery. In my view we have more privacy than we really need. That does not mean that privacy is not needed at all. But if we lose a little bit of privacy we are likely to gain more than we would lose.
Now freedom of speech and freedom of flying is a very different story. There is almost no benefit from limiting it, and there is lots to lose.
2) You are mixing up "watching" and "limiting freedom to fly" - something that I explicitly asked not to do.
Unreasonable placing on no-fly list is bad. Watching for "risky" search queries is not nearly as bad by itself.
Regarding leaks of collected information from government agencies into hands of bad people - that can be fixed by suing government agencies in case if such leak did happen and it hurt innocent people. Then government agencies should pay for the leak. A lot. And perhaps being dissolved if while losing tax payers money they did not provide enough benefit for the society.
1) The distinction between keyloggers and wiretaps is nearly moot. Would you allow me to run a wiretap instead?
When the government can wiretap at will, there is basically no privacy. And I agree that the slope is not slippery, because there is no slope at the bottom. Unfettered government snooping as you seem to support is the bottom. There's no way to have less privacy than none.
2) I dispute your distinction because it's meaningless. Do you believe that the government is or should be unable to act on the intelligence it gathers? If so, why would you support such a pointless waste of money? If not, why do you suppose that you could not be the target of such action?
As for suing, that's missing the point. The damage doesn't go away when you sue. Nor does it stop bad people from being bad. Abused of the system will always happen.
Besides, in your world, what grounds would there be for a suit? You said that free flow of information is a good thing. Why would it be good for someone's private info to flow to the government but not the public?
1) Where did you even get that idea of unfettered government snooping?
Did anybody suggest it to you?
2) Government agency should be able to act on the intelligence it gathers. But if that act limits people's freedom without good reason - that agency should be punished for that (cut funding, fire abusing government employee, disassemble agency, send responsible agents to jail - depending on the severity of the violation).
If I'm the only watched, then I would probably lose more than gain.
But if everyone is watched then I would probably gain more than lose.
3) I now see where the root of your mistake is.
You are assuming, that by giving government more watching power government would become more powerful.
But that does not have to be that way.
Let assume that governments need X amount of power to be efficient in law enforcement.
Where X = WatchingPower + ActingPower.
That means that if we keep government power at X and increase WatchingPower, then ActingPower of government would decrease.
That's what I'd like to see happen: government watches more and acts less (avoiding awkward actions).
Would you prefer to take WatchingPower away from government and replace it with dumb ActingPower?
>1) Where did you even get that idea of unfettered government snooping?
From you: "Why wiretapping by government is such a concern?" "Wiretapping by itself does not restrict freedom of people" "Why worry about Big Brother watching me in the first place?"
>2) Government agency should be able to act on the intelligence it gathers. But if that act limits people's freedom without good reason - that agency should be punished for that (cut funding, fire abusing government employee, disassemble agency, send responsible agents to jail - depending on the severity of the violation).
And who's going to do all this monitoring and punishing? The current system is already abused and there's basically no punishment. Why do you suppose that would change in the face of broader wiretapping?
>If I'm the only watched, then I would probably lose more than gain. But if everyone is watched then I would probably gain more than lose.
This is rather doubtful, since you've lost all of your privacy and gained basically nothing. The likelihood of being killed in a terrorist attack is extremely low. You're probably more likely to choke to death on a piece of chicken.
>I now see where the root of your mistake is. You are assuming, that by giving government more watching power government would become more powerful. But that does not have to be that way.
Yes, it does. The government does not readily give up its powers. History has demonstrated that government power almost invariably grows over time. There's no reason to believe that giving the government broader surveillance powers would limit its enforcement powers. Moreover, there's no reason to believe that these are exchangeable. A pound of surveillance does not equal 16 oz of enforcement.
>Would you prefer to take WatchingPower away from government and replace it with dumb ActingPower?
If I drink 5 gallons of water at once I would die. Does it mean I have to constantly think about dangers of water?
Same with privacy. We are nowhere near the levels of government surveillance which are seriously dangerous.
I'd prefer to see less of both.
And I prefer to be rich and work less, not to work a lot and be poor.
So what?
The amount of power that people grant to the government depends on the level of results people expect government to achieve.
The more power people give to the government, the better results government can achieve.
But with power comes an abuse.
So eventually public opinion settles on certain level of government power. You cannot really change that level overall (because crime would go up and public does not want that). But you can change what kind of power government has. You can give government more surveillance power and take away some power to limit people's actions.
The reason why it's possible is that more informed government would be able to accomplish the same positive effect by arresting 1 suspect instead of arresting 10.
Arresting 1 suspect requires 10 times less government ability to limit the freedom of our life.
Therefore we may grant government 10 times less power to mess with our lives by substituting it with better informational awareness of government agencies.
So within that model what would be your choice? Cut surveillance and increase ability of government to interfere with our lives?
>We are nowhere near the levels of government surveillance which are seriously dangerous
We'll have to agree to disagree. Abuses of power have happened already. It's already dangerous.
>And I prefer to be rich and work less, not to work a lot and be poor. So what?
So you posed a false dichotomy. Don't get snarky when I don't answer your unsound question the way you hoped.
>The amount of power that people grant to the government depends on the level of results people expect government to achieve.
>The more power people give to the government, the better results government can achieve.
No, the government takes the level of power that it can. The government regularly does things that the populace does not support. Don't pretend that all government powers are granted by the people. Or if you want to believe that, please explain how you would take a power away from the government.
And no, more powerful does not imply more effective. Totalitarian states are basically all-powerful (in terms of powers we've been dscussing) yet most of them have historically also been ineffective (except perhaps at retaining power).
>The reason why it's possible is that more informed government would be able to accomplish the same positive effect by arresting 1 suspect instead of arresting 10.
You're just making things up now. On what basis to you make this claim? I say that an "informed" government arrests more people, because they can find more "probable causes" to do so.
> So within that model what would be your choice? Cut surveillance and increase ability of government to interfere with our lives?
I choose less of both. I will not concede to your fantasy that the government has a fixed amount of power or that it's powers are somehow interchangeable.
You focus on limiting surveillance power of government (instead of limiting government ability to mess with peoples lives).
That indirectly increases amount of power government gets in messing up with people's lives.
It works like that:
1) You significantly limit what information government can get about people.
2) Clueless government agencies allow some major terrorist act (like 9/11) to happen (which could have been avoided if surveillance was more efficient).
3) Society is getting scared and gives government way more power to mess people's lives (crazy airport security, Iraq and Afghanistan mess etc.).
I understand that your intentions are noble, but the end result is pathetic.
No, it doesn't work like that. What evidence can you present to indicate that as the government has increased general surveillance (such as wiretapping, rather than, say, ground surveillance), they have decreased how often they interfere with citizens' lives? What evidence is there for increased efficiency? What has actually happened is that the government has taken additional liberties away on all fronts. Losing privacy did not gain us more freedom of travel, nor did it gain us any other liberties. We simply have less privacy, and less freedom to travel, and less freedom to assemble, etc.
Lack of intell was not the cause of the 9/11 attacks. There was no lack of intell. There was a lack of coordination and communication among the various agencies, and more surveillance doesn't change that. There's little to no evidence that our eroding freedoms have increased safety (not that that would justify the lost freedoms anyway).
1) I know for sure that in my business, lack of information (about customers) leads to less accurate fraud detection. End result of missing information is that both me and my customers suffer more.
I don't see why it should be different with government.
2) Loss of freedoms in the last 10 years was caused by people being scared of 9/11. You cannot do much about it anyway. But you can choose what freedoms are more important to you. If I have to give up some freedoms, I'd better give up surveilance, but keep freedom of speech and freedom from being arrested.
If you don't make such choice - that choice would be made for you.
1) Because no amount of information will ever be complete, and in any event there's no way to analyze that information efficiently. If you had the recorded phone calls of every customer you deal with, would that solve fraud? Of course not, because they'd have to mention the intent to defraud, and you'd have t listen to the conversation.
2) I find it strange that you believe that you actually have a choice at all. So far no one has come to my house to ask what freedoms I prefer, nor have they asked me whether I'm okay with giving up more freedom in general. And I still don't understand why you think these freedoms are somehow exchangeable, as if the government will be content to give back freedom to assemble if they can just take away enough privacy.
If I'm not able to do what I want then I cannot accomplish what I want. That makes my life worse.
Another reason: certain people's actions keep government in check (e.g. speech). If government punish for delivering speech then it removes checks that prevent government from turning into dictatorship.
Privacy works in the opposite direction. Privacy adds barriers to the information flow and decreases our awareness, which causes less informed and less efficient decisions.
This only makes sense if information flows both ways. When one party has significant information about another party, and the second party doesn't have similar information about the first, an imbalance is created that gives the first party power over the second. When I know your secrets, I have power over you. You fear my knowledge, perhaps rightfully so, because your secrets might be enough to destroy your life, or at least cause you significant embarrassment.
When the government engages in widespread privacy violations, they are creating this same kind of power imbalance. You know nothing new about the government, but the government may know many things about you. They may have information tha could greatly embarrass you. They might have information they could use to arrest you, even if you've done nothing wrong or illegal.
This is not an increase in awareness or information flow or efficiency. It is merely an increase in government power.
That's a valid argument. The solution - making government more open. Including being open about what kind of information government does collect. Including creating another government agencies that oversee government agencies that collect information about citizens.
As usual there are budget constraints on that system, so even though government would not be limited legally too much about the amount of information it can collect, it still would be pretty limited by the budget, because it's expensive to maintain red tape and keep collected information secure.
In any case, legal system should mostly limit government in how much it can restrict citizens, not in how much information government can collect.
> Including creating another government agencies that oversee government agencies that collect information about citizens.
Because the solution to government overstepping is government oversight?
> In any case, legal system should mostly limit government in how much it can restrict citizens, not in how much information government can collect.
I don't understand how you can hold this belief. Do you believe that information holds no value, or that it doesn't give the government power to hold the secrets of its populace? Or do you believe that the government cannot be too strong? I'm seriously confused how you can believe that government snooping has no downside.
> Because the solution to government overstepping is government oversight?
Yes.
+ Budget limitations.
+ Oversight from the press.
Every action has downside (including watching), but relatively to restricting freedom to act, downside of watching is small.
In addition to that there are significant benefits of efficient watching. Imagine that there is watching device that clearly identifies people who are planning terrorist attack. That significantly simplifies security check in airports and saves everyone time and effort in the process.
Budget is a pretty weak limiting factor when it comes to automated wiretapping. It may limit the usefulness (can't watch all the "bad guys") without limiting the abuses (creepy fed employee can watch you). Depending on the press assumes that they have both interest and visibility into the government's wiretapping, the former of which may not be true and the latter of which definitely is not.
Do you imagine that we have the ability to clearly identify terrorists via wiretaps? Why would we allow such people to walk around freely in the first place? The idea that we would simply stop them from flying is bizarre.
There are also significant drawbacks to efficient watching. Sure, it might catch a real terrorist. Or it might just watch to see if you're in a "dangerous" group: anarchist, revolutionary, extreme libertarian, etc. As a member of one of these groups, you might need to be interrogated. Meanwhile some creepy FBI agent is listening in on your wife because it gets him off, and your neighbor is being blackmailed by a DHS agent who's threatening to put him on the No Fly list and publicly reveal that he visits prostitutes.
The idea that we would simply stop them from flying is bizarre.
Last time I checked blackmailing is illegal by itself. There is no need to increase privacy in order to prevent blackmailing.
The same with other things that you mention.
But in any case, the real choice is between "decrease privacy and decrease government power to act" and "increase privacy and increase government power to act".
Last time I checked, warrantless wiretaps were illegal. Yet the government has done a lot of that with no apparent reprisal.
And again, I disagree with your assessment. The government gains nothing useful by snooping on its average citizen. It average citizen is not committing crimes. The government can snoop on suspected criminals by getting a warrant. They do not need further freedom to snoop in order to do their jobs.
So instead of enforcing prosecution of illegal wiretaps you are suggesting to make grey-area wiretaps illegal?
And then not enforce it either, I assume?
Are you serious? You equate limiting warrantless wiretaps with alcohol prohibition? In your mind limiting the government's power is the same as limiting citizens' freedom?
How about we just enforce the existing wiretap laws instead of making them even looser as you suggest? Sure, if you loosen the laws, there's less illegal activity. Tha doesn't mean there's less activity, though.
How can you think we'd do a better job of prosecuting illegal wiretaps if there were more wiretaps in general? If there are more wiretaps, then there will be less oversight on each individual wiretap. That makes it easier to hide illegal ones, because they get lost among the masses (which is already a problem). Why don't you come up with a way to decrease abuse our existing surveillance systems before you propose expanding them?
1) Your idea of replacing law enforcement [of illegal wiretaps] with even stricter laws without enforcing them - that's what reminds me about alcohol prohibition.
2) You again are attacking a straw man.
I'm not suggesting increasing surveillance.
I'm suggesting not to pay much attention to it and focus our very limited resources on what's really important:
- Freedom of law-abiding citizens from government persecution.
- Reducing legal restrictions on citizens.
- Freedom of speech.
Government surveillance abuse is not nearly as important as these three principles above.
If you insist that limiting government surveillance is more important, then please name what item in my list you consider less important.
1) Prohibition had nothing to do with replacing enforcement of laws with stricter laws. It was about passing a new law where none existed before, to take away a freedom. Your comparison makes no sense.
And I'm not saying we shouldn't enforce the law. I'm saying that the range of the allowed wiretaps should be narrow so that enforcement is feasible. And indeed, the range of legal wiretaps is actually not that broad. If we enforced the existing law, there would be fewer.
2) You have repeatedly said that we shouldn't be concerned about government privacy violations, that wiretaps are not a problem, that we have more privacy than we need, that we should trade privacy for other freedoms, that the government is efficient with less privacy. You may not have explicitly said "I want more wiretaps", but you've been arguing in favor of it quite clearly. This is not a straw man. If you don't like where your arguments lead, then maybe you should ask why you're making those arguments.
Your attempt to separate privacy from other freedoms and present them as a tradeoff is still unsound. I could likewise ask you whether you'd rather have freedom of speech or freedom from false arrest, and pretend that this is a legitimate tradeoff and that we need "not to pay much attention to it and focus our very limited resources on what's really important".
1) If wiretapping X is illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent only wiretapping X.
If wiretapping X and wiretapping Y are illegal, then law enforcement needs to prevent both of them, which makes law enforcement harder (not easier as you are saying).
2) Of course there is no point in blindly giving government more surveillance power and hope for improvement. But if government agency claims that with more surveillance power it can significantly reduce spending and significantly reduce number of false arrests while maintaining low crime level - then it might worth to try.
If government agency fails to deliver on that promise, then the head of that agency should be replaced, budget shrunk anyway, and wiretapping grant revoked.
3) The difference between "government surveillance" and "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" is that "government surveillance" has much smaller downsides and much higher upsides, while both "limiting freedom of speech"/"false arrests" have almost no upside and very painful downsides.
1) Your logic only makes sense if you assume that the rate of wiretaps is unchanged by the legal status of wiretapping. This seems a rather implausible situation.
If wiretapping X, Y, and Z is legal, then it's easier to hide an illegal wiretap of W. When there are more legal wiretaps, it's easier for illegal wiretaps to slip through. The cost of oversight isn't dominated by the number of illegal wiretaps. It dominated by the number of legal wiretaps, because each of those needs to be reviewed.
2) No, it's not worth trying. Surveillance agencies have been saying that forever, and they've not delivered on their promise.
Your beliefs seem to exist in some strange world where agencies are actually held accountable. So long as we don't live in that world, your ideas make no sense.
3) We will not agree on this. You simply don't value privacy. I do, and I think you're really naive about this.
I think that you grossly overestimate both journalism and government, where it regards their respective ethics.
Mainstream journalists, the ones most likely to have access to government officials and processes, are also the ones most co-opted by that system. It is all about access, and the ones who rock the boat too much risk losing it.
As for government, there is a reason why surveillance has always featured prominently in dystopian novels: it is understood by those who have studied the way governments work that they will almost always abuse their power. The power to put a population under surveillance is a kind of control, proportional to the amount it is being done; people understand that when a government is watching them, it is also monitoring potential dissidents and related opinions, organizing, etc.
In short, I'm surprised that anyone would be so willing to trust any government with complete and unhindered powers of surveillance. I wouldn't trust a single non-government entity with that, as it happens.
You said that government monitoring would make you safer, and that privacy was a barrier to the free flow of information. If you don't favour unhindered powers of surveillance, where are you drawing the line, and why should a line be drawn?
Government monitoring might make me safer (if done right).
I would prefer to see a pitch from a government agency with the clear promise of delivery something tangible (lowering agency spending, lowering fraud, improving safety, lowering the rate of false arrests) in exchange for more surveillance.
Then evaluate the pitch and decide.
Then evaluate agency performance in new environment, and decide whether to keep surveillance power (if it was worth it) or take it back (if resulting abuse did not worth the positive outcome) or even dissolving the agency (if it was pure lie).
That can be done incrementally, until increasing surveillance stops producing worthwhile benefits.
I like the reference to China, considering Google recently backing out of there due to these sorts of reasons. Makes me wonder if they'd ever consider doing the same in one of their key markets, such as the US.
I didn't read the short story line at the top there, I actually thought this was a real account then. Coming from the UK none of this applies to the UK so I wouldn't have heard about this initiative if any of it was true.
Nothing to do with Google and I hope that all that are interested can find a copy of the original story which I remember quite well.... even though according to that wiki article it hasn't been republished in the last 45 years.
Of course, the irony of this being hosted on that site is that using Scroogle primarily would result on a suspiciously light Google profile, which would most definitively get yourself marked for further investigation. After all, that's the corollary to "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide".
Particularly the bit about probable cause from statistical anomalies. Oh, we don't indiscriminately go through your records, unless you use TOR, in which case what are you hiding?
