We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.
Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.
What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden.
That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.
The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.
I don't think there's any need to rehash the debate here. Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo. I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.
It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs. If you don't like what the tech sector is doing, please by all means continue to advocate. Shout it from the mountain tops, go to work for the EFF. But don't discount people that legitimately disagree with you as being irresponsible. At least some of us have made the effort to understand your point of view. The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
Why not? You may disagree, that doesn't mean you can't be flat-out wrong. Having an opinion does not automatically give that opinion equal weight when history has proven to us again and again that that particular opinion ends up with making society either dangerous or at a minimum uncomfortable.
I'm sure there were border guards in former East Germany that were entirely convinced that their state was the greatest and that's why they had to keep people in at all costs, including shooting them if they persisted in believing otherwise and tried to simply leave. After all, that was best for them. But that particular opinion turned out to be very wrong in the long term.
People can rationalize the most absurd stuff to themselves and to others, especially when their pay-check depends on it, but that's not a requirement.
All those that try to pretend that there is some kind of 'reasonable disagreement' possible about the erosion of privacy and that directly and indirectly help to rush in the surveillance state have quite possibly not thought as carefully and have not considered these things with the degree of gravity required as they claim they have. Having a mortgage to pay may factor in there somewhere too.
Usually this is a combination of being too young, too optimistic and in general living too sheltered a life to know what can happen to you, your family and your friends when the tide turns. And the tide always turns, nothing is forever.
> Simply, I and many others do not believe that any western government is going to use information gathered by tech companies to preempt threats to entrenched interests and the status quo.
I hope you're right but history is not on your side in this case.
> I've seen the same arguments made here for years, and none of it is convincing.
Yes, it isn't going to convince you any more than that border guard would be convinced that his job is a net negative to society. Every stream, no matter how reprehensible will always have its fans and cheerleaders. And later on they will never remember that they had agency all along and were perfectly capable of making a different decision. Responsibility is weird that way.
> It's admirable that you are so certain in your beliefs.
It is not admirable that you are so certain in yours. May I suggest a couple of talks with some holocaust survivors to get a better feel for what the true power of information can get you?
Or maybe the family members of some people that were killed while trying to flee the former SovBlock?
Or maybe some first generation immigrants to the US or Canada or wherever you live to give you some eye witness accounts on what it was like to live in those countries before the wall fell down?
'It can't happen here' is an extremely naive point of view.
http://jacquesmattheij.com/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide
Agreed with your advocacy advice.
> The least you could do is to try to understand ours.
That's 'mine' not 'ours', you speak for yourself.
I can't think of a case where stable and mature democratic bureaucracy has ever used surveillance to influence the majority of its populace. Germany in the early 20th century was a very instable government in a bad economic situation. Soviet East Germany was communist, which isn't quite the kind of democratic that I meant. It's true that any government could turn bad, in the same way that anything is possible. But there's very little evidence for that in the current context.
So my position is this: Given that I live in the United States in 2016, I'm not worried about the government randomly deciding to screw with me by looking at my electronic communications and acting on them. It just doesn't make sense. I'm not significant relative to the scale of the US government, the government itself just doesn't work that way and all of the negative scenarios I've heard seem to be very contrived.
If you really think that it's possible that the government of a modern western nation could turn into communist East Germany, then it seems like your problem might be with governance, not privacy. If it's possible for the government to go all Walter White and just turn evil over night, then no amount of personal privacy is going to save any of us. And until it seems like that's a thing that's actually possible, I'm going to make practical decisions about my own privacy.
They don't have to. History only happens once, if you refuse to learn from history because it is not an exact repetition of the past then you can never make any progress.
> Saying "A thing happened in the past" can be instructive, especially to people who didn't even realize that the thing was possible.
You seem to think it isn't possible because of "insert magical reason why everything is different now here", not just that it can't happen again for whatever reason. That's an impossible position to argue with. All the weight of history would not be able to sway you from that position because nothing can counter magic.
> But what's much more practically useful is to say "I think what happened before will happen again in the current context and for these reasons". An example from the past is only useful if it can be tangibly connected to the current situation, right now in the present.
No practical examples will counter your magic. You will either say 'that's not the same exactly' or 'that's too long ago to be relevant' and so on.
The only thing that will convince you is when you're lifted out of your bed at 3 am and we never hear from you again. By then it will be a bit too late, but you too will be a believer in government abuse if and when that happens.
Until then you're going to head straight for the last stanza of Martin Niemoeller's most quoted lines. The vast majority of the people living in the former DDR were never lifted from their beds at 3am for interrogation. To them life was just a-ok.
> I can't think of a case where stable and mature democratic bureaucracy has ever used surveillance to influence the majority of its populace.
That's not a bad thing per se. Meanwhile, you're trying hard to change that number from '0' into '1' by allowing the present level of abuse to spread unfettered, which invariable leads to an escalation. Each and every click that you hear is one of a ratchet, it will not voluntarily click back again, it can only go forward until on that scale between '0' and 'police state' you've gotten close enough to 'police state' that there is no relevant difference.
It can't happen here is a very dangerous line of thought. See the movie 'the wave' for some more poignant illustrations of how that thought is a dangerous thing all by itself. It can happen here, it might happen here, and it likely will happen here unless we're vigilant.
> Germany in the early 20th century was a very instable government in a bad economic situation.
ok
> Soviet East Germany was communist, which isn't quite the kind of democratic that I meant.
Yes, and like that there will always be one last thing that is not quite the same which will allow you to look the other way.
> It's true that any government could turn bad, in the same way that anything is possible.
I would consider that progress, hold that thought.
> But there's very little evidence for that in the current context.
That depends on where you are looking. There is plenty of evidence that pressure is being applied, but the pressure is applied subtly enough and in places far enough away from the focal points where change is effected that you'd be hard pressed to connect the dots. That's the beauty of having a lot of information at your disposal.
A nice example is the Iraq war, the run up to that saw massive world wide resistance in the populations of the countries of the 'coalition of the willing' whereas later on this was described as the coalition of the 'gullible, the bribed and the coerced'.
> So my position is this: Given that I live in the United States in 2016
The United States does not hold a privileged position in the world, and it does not matter whether it is 2016, 1938 or 1912. For everybody living in the past in places where these experiments went wrong they could have written "given that I live in X in Y" and they'd be accurate about that.
> I'm not worried about the government randomly deciding to screw with me by looking at my electronic communications
They might have substituted 'electronic' with 'written'.
> and acting on them. It just doesn't make sense. I'm not significant relative to the scale of the US government, the government itself just doesn't work that way and all of the negative scenarios I've heard seem to be very contrived.
They again would not have used US government but whatever place they lived in. And they would have been dead wrong, and in some cases, when the fog lifted they'd have simply been dead.
What seems contrived for you, living in a country that has never seen actual war on its own soil (sorry, your civil war does not count), that exports war on an ongoing basis, that uses IT to kill people by remote control, that used telephone taps, burglary and threats to affect they inner workings of its own government to me seems to be willful blindness.
For some reason it is more convenient to you to re-write all of history up to and including the present rather than to see that maybe your government is not all that benign, neither on the world stage (where they are a bit more overt about their intent) and internally (where they are out of necessity a lot more cautious). Have the Snowden relevations really not managed to at least peg your evidence meter that maybe not all is as it should be? That your constitutional rights were trampled and that the protections afforded you appeared to be of no value whatsoever?
> If you really think that it's possible that the government of a modern western nation could turn into communist East Germany, then it seems like your problem might be with governance, not privacy.
No, I think that we may be reaching a stage where influence can be wielded subtly enough that someone like you could convince themselves that there is none of it at all. And that's the true prize, to wield that power but in such a way that it can be applied selectively enough that as long as the bread is on the table and the games keep going nobody will notice how rotten the core has become.
> If it's possible for the government to go all Walter White and just turn evil over night, then no amount of personal privacy is going to save any of us.
It will never be that overt. It will be more along the lines of parallel construction and other nice little legal tricks such as selective enforcement. Never enough for you to cross that threshold.
> And until it seems like that's a thing that's actually possible, I'm going to make practical decisions about my own privacy.
You're more than free to do that. Unfortunately, those of us living outside of your beautiful country don't even get to have a vote in there. Your personal well-being trumps the rights of everybody that is not you, and like that we race ahead down the hole.
The U.S. government has several orders of magnitude more information about the private lives and communications and beliefs and activities of its citizens than East Germany ever had. This is also incontrovertible and undeniable.
How can either of you talk about abuses that happened in the past as if those were the only abuses? Why would you need to?