Question of the Week--November 12, 2007
12 Comments Published by tet on Monday, November 12 at 12:00 PM.
According to this article, Americans need to rethink our concepts of privacy.
Assumption: By the year 2016, the word secret is meaningless. A recording of every second of everyone's life is available through a search engine similar to Google if you know the proper keywords to reference it. The recordings cannot be blocked or faked and anyone can access them.
What are the likely political results of this change?
Name three totally new professions that will be created to deal with this new way of life.
How will this impact economics?
Tom
Assumption: By the year 2016, the word secret is meaningless. A recording of every second of everyone's life is available through a search engine similar to Google if you know the proper keywords to reference it. The recordings cannot be blocked or faked and anyone can access them.
What are the likely political results of this change?
Name three totally new professions that will be created to deal with this new way of life.
How will this impact economics?
Tom
Labels: freedom, future politics, privacy, Tet
Lessee. A technology that appears to require new physics and unquestionably is beyond our present scientific ability to even design is deployed across the entire world in only 8 years, and nobody notices that it's happening until it all goes online at once. (Under any reasonable scenario of the tech being deployed in stages, people realize the drawbacks quickly and it is either stopped or controlled in some way, so your scenario can only occur if it happens all at once.)
OK, I tried to answer the question, but my brain keeps core dumping. In the long run, nobody can get away with any crime worth the trouble of prosecuting, but in the short run, people too dumb to realize this or too ideologically or emotionally driven to care will cause enough chaos that trying to extrapolate far enough past turning the system on to have an election is silly.
The only way we can survive the coming of technology that drastically diminishes privacy is if it comes in slowly enough that we can adjust to it. Our society's sexual hangups alone are enough that we could not function socially with literally no privacy. If it comes faster, it either collapses society completely, or it drives a police state (either with the current government coopting it, or with the current government collapsing and the people who pick up the pieces becoming the new authoritarian government).
Drudge posted this yesterday: creepy nasty G-man talking about the need for G-man peeping toms.
What's the news? They are hiring spies? Does thay pay well?
Step 1: HIRE ME!!!
Step 2: ...
Step 3: PROFIT!
Phil, I'm talking about only the US, or at most the "First World." Sorry if I didn't make it more clear.
As far as this coming on too fast to stop it, just the information currently on Google Earth would have been totally unthinkable even ten years ago. Phil, I think that nine years is being really, really conservative. Five years is a lot more likely, especially if Hillary's elected President.
So, stop worrying about how and think about afterwards. It's a black box that does it.
Tom
Yeah no. Mostly these are what we call pen registers. A pen register is the numbers you dial on your phone, the websites you visit, the people you send email to (and the subject lines of those emails), not content. If they record every keystroke on my computer, every second of phone conversation I speak, and all that jazz we'll just go back to snail mail unless they start reading that too. Clever folk will find a way around it all like they do now. Besides, even if all that information were available, someone would still have to process it and that would take either computers with human intelligence or way too many south asian call center workers. It ain't happening til we have the smart computers. Twenty years at least.
The recordings cannot be blocked or faked and anyone can access them.
The question fails right there. Sony can't get a DMA to last a few weeks let alone be a "permanent" unbreakable standard. And that's just simple software spoofing. Even if they put out unique signatures based on nano sized objects, there's nothing stopping the informed from distorting that signature at a hardware level.
Tom you're a little funny. The future is based upon mass's ability to harness, perfect, and continually advance technology . . . but we're all going to fall subject to technology? Pick your side.
Hanno: what you pass off as "pen registers" has been done.
echelon
Not terribly surprised really. I know they're legal, so I figured someone would be using them endlessly for some shady business.
How about this, gentlemen:
After a nuclear explosion destroys Houston, the government decides that for the good of the nation and to protect our children, all electronic hardware sold must contain a recording device that is always on. In addition, every street corner in the country will have 360 degree cameras that are always on.
All owners of existing hardware are given two years to replace theirs, with a generous rebate for doing so.
The information gathered is sent to a general repository and secured on spin-flipped diamond storage with ready access.
Hell, the Brits are well on their way to doing the camera thing with present-day technology. The 2002 estimate was 4.2 million cameras deployed nation-wide with a half million in London alone--one camera for every 14 people--that was five years ago.
Big Brother's been watching you for some time, now.
So, one of the professions that will develop will be one by which people attempt to circumvent the security system. What about the other questions?
Kofi, as I have explained over and over again, we're at the fork right now. We can have a exciting but dangerous future of empowerment of individuals or a safe, dull, freedom-less police state future. The technology dictates one or the other because the nation cannot survive the amount of information shortly to become available without drastically alterning its form.
I've been saying this for the past four months at least, if not longer. I am not in love with technology, I am trying to warn you about the storm that's coming.
Tom
Two more interesting articles:
New Jersey school presently has exactly the kind of coverage I'm talking about.
Futurist James Pinkerton talks about the end of privacy.
It's not like I make this stuff up.
Tom
The technology to track the physical location of every person in every urban area who isn't making a special effort to avoid it will exist. That's a very far cry from "a complete recording of every second of every person's life".
Tracking devices built into personal electronics won't be able to track people who want to hide until (a) most people actually want a computer implant that does useful things for them, to the point where it overwhelms the fundamentalists who will call it the Mark of the Beast, and (b) you invent a communication network that cannot be routinely jammed by saturating the elecromagnetic spectrum or wearing a Faraday cage on your head. People who want to have unsanctioned sex will provide a very big market for any technology, legal or not, that lets them disable their implanted tracker for a while. It will take more than 10 years to develop such an implant for a cost of millions of dollars per person, another 10 years to get the price down to something that every person could afford, and a generation or two after that to get 99+% of people to use it. A lot of older people will go to their graves without allowing a computer in their heads (and if your earlier prediction about technology extending lifespan bears out, it could be a long time before they're gone).
If you want highly invasive tracking to be widespread enough to be useful for security, you need fixed cameras. (Actually, independently mobile cameras would be even better, but that tech is much more than 10 years away.) I know a wee bit about what cameras can do, and to actually be able to really tell what people are doing -- such as reading the notes they're writing on paper to each other, or seeing small objects being exchanged despite the people being surreptitious about it -- you need a whole lot more cameras than there are today, and they have to be very high resolution. Unless you postulate AI smart enough to correctly decide what's interesting on the fly -- so you can aim and zoom in on things where detail is useful -- you're talking about a data acquisition problem of unprecedented proportions. Assume just 1 MB/m²/s (and I think that's way low to really capture what law enforcement/spooks would want), and one good-sized metro area is generating 100TB/s. Instrumenting the entire country (not just urban areas -- and if you don't cover the countryside, people with activities to hide will just develop a sudden avid interest in the wilderness experience) would be on the order of an exabyte per second. There's nowhere near enough room in the electromagnetic spectrum for all that, even assuming that people wouldn't want to use any spectrum for anything else, so we'd need a hundred years just to wire it all up.
Truly universal surveillance doesn't happen until after generic nanoassmblers come on line to build the equipment cheap enough and big strides are made in AI to make some sense of the data stream. That changes so much that the societal effects on privacy -- huge as they are -- are lost in the noise.
The privacy implications of the technology we really will see in the next decade are big enough. Knowing what building any given person was in at any given time, which will be possible for 90% of people 90% of the time in that time frame (and even likely unless society strongly rejects it) is worth asking about. Knowing what 99.9% of the people are actually doing 99.9% of the time is way beyond possible, and each additonal 9 in the coverages is an order of magnitude harder to achieve.
Phil, again you're getting hung up on the details. Your points are good, but you have to realize that my questions are not meant to examine the means, but the results.
All of these are gedanken experiments meant to take current trends to their future extentions. Forget about possible, many things that we thought were impossible when I was a child are so cheap that they're throw-away now. Assume that a magic black-box does what I say and examine the results. Otherwise, you're missing the point of the exercise--it's not to discuss feasibility.
Tom
Just a quick thought-- your health and mortgage insurance companies probably know more about your food buying patterns than you do.
Government imposition? Hell no.
Right now, my computers at home are all nicely infected with a program that tells a corporate server what they're doing, whenever they're turned on and online. Millions of others agreed to do the same.
The point is that by the time this stuff is mandated by a goverment, if ever, it will not seem a big deal-- because most will have already sold the privilege of privacy for a miniscule return.