Stephenson Gives "Heretical" Speech @ Privacy Summit

skatedork writes: "From a Washington Post article: 'Speaking last night after the annual presentation of the "Orwell Awards," Stephenson challenged the more than 1,000 people who had gathered from around the world to focus their attention less on installing encryption software against the vague threat of snooping by Big Brother, a reassuringly simple fantasy of a totalitarian state, and more on the very real pattern of injustice brought to bear on people through employers and other institutions. Stephenson said he was less worried these days about broad, theoretical privacy issues than about a recent incident in which a stray bullet crashed through a window at a friend's house and narrowly missed a sleeping child.'"

Global Neighborhood Watch

According to the article... He illustrated his point by talking about, among other things, the spread of cheap video cameras hooked up to the Internet: An era of widespread surveillance, he said, was on its way. But instead of automatically condemning that Orwellian notion, he suggested that the assembled engineers and coders might work to make the brave new video world work for us all, to enhance safety and security though a kind of global neighborhood watch. The era of widespread surveillance is already here - and it has nothing to do with a "global neighborhood watch." Or the internet, for that matter. If you live or work in a major city, private interests are already capturing you on tape almost anytime you're in public. In this Atlantic Monthly article from July of 1998, researchers describe looking for closed-circuit cameras in a three-square-block area of midtown Manhattan. They found over 70 cameras which covered almost every public place. And that was two years ago. Whenever I try to imagine a science-fiction world where every public moment is taped, I keep coming up with nightmarish dystopias. Maybe Stephenson knows something I don't. [theatlantic.com]

Jamie McCarthy

Re:The solution is - ban firearms

Well then, ban firearms. IMHO it's a step that America should take since we are the country with the highest murder rate in the Western world, which is related to our Constitional "rights" to own guns and kill people.

Unfortunately for Americans, illegalizing guns plays right into yet another paranoid fantasy tht many Americans have: If guns are illegal, then the new World Order(ie Big Brother) will take over.

Personally, I don't think handguns should be legal. Handguns are for killing unarmored civilians. Assault rifles are for killing invaders, government troops, and Cops. Everyone should have an Assault rifle. It's the final check and balance in the Constitution: At any point the American people can take control of their country from the federal government. No unpopular governing power could survive here.

NSA droid detected.

OK NSA? How much did you pay for that droid, to imitate him ? Its obvious that you've hidden the body somewhere, but .. that was a damn good hack.


--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - [e-mail] - arcade@efnet

Re:Governments and corporations

Corporations can quite easily kill you, just like the mafia, and just like the CIA. All it takes is money and access to the right people.

Remember, we are talking in a context of what corporations special. An individual can kill you just as easily.

It's not a question of what can be done to you. It's a question of what only a government can do, and what only corporations can do. Jail and executions fall into the first category, but murders do not fall into the second -- not only corporations can murder.

They can do that now, if you use a check card. They can probably do it with cash too, if it were worth the cost of scanning the money.

I said "ATM cash withdrawal" -- I am using cash. Tracing cash does not appear to be either technologically or politically feasible in the foreseeable future.

Of course if you pay for everything with a card (credit or debit), your bank has a very good idea of what you are doing.

Kaa

Governments and corporations

This is Stephenson, author of Snow Crash. Remember how he depicted a world in which governments were irrelevant appendages, and corporations ran everything?

IIRC the Snow Crash world was a pretty freewheeling one. The governments were a joke, sure, but the corporations weren't all that powerful either. Most likely you are thinking about Gibson's works (Neuromancer -> Count Zero -> Mona Lisa Overdrive, etc)

Because the British govm't can't directly censor, all they have to do is make a law which allows "any nut with a lawyer" to sue an ISP into oblivion

That's a good point, but a "nut with a lawyer" is not a corporation. This is a good example of a government using roundabout routes to get to it's goals, but it's a very poor example of corporate power: Godfrey, after all, is an individual.

Historically, where government has found itself constrained by law or public pressure, it has often enough found ways to impose its will through the corporate sector.

I am not sure that's true. You'll have to come up with some arguments and examples (specific to corporations, not random people).

while corporations start taking over the prerogatives and powers of governments

That too you'll have to be more convincing about. I assume we are not speaking about lobbying which was a popular activity since at least the Roman times. Can you list some prerogatives and powers that nobody but governments used to have and now corporations (but not individuals) have?

the invasions of privacy will be conducted by corporations.

Sure. They were, are, and will be conducted. The difference is in consequences.

First of all, there are many corporations and one government. It's much easier for government agencies to cooperate and share data about me, than it is for corporations to do so. Yes, I know about consolidation of data into huge databases, but I figure it's going to be quite a while before my ATM cash withdrawals could be cross-referenced against my grocery shopping.

Second, the threat level is very different. The government can make your life very miserable and, in exterme circumstances, can kill you. The absolute worst that a corporation can do to me is to sue me into bankrupcy. That is quite unlikely, anyway, so the usual worst is that it will deny me service. Well, big deal. My life could become somewhat less convenient for me, but I'll survive.

I think that the argument "corporations are a worse threat than the government" kind of assumes that being disliked by a Big Brother government leads to approximately the same level of problems as being bombarded by spam. I can assure everybody that is definitely not so.

Kaa

Re:Governments and corporations

The governments were a joke, sure, but the corporations weren't all that powerful either.

Nope, they were pretty much subserviant to the mafia and a that nut with the aircraft carrier. :-)

The government can make your life very miserable and, in exterme circumstances, can kill you.

Corporations can quite easily kill you, just like the mafia, and just like the CIA. All it takes is money and access to the right people. The only thing that stops them is they have a much harder time keeping secrets. Do you really think a corporation is any more moral than a government? At least with government, I have a *right* to citizen oversight. Whether I can exercise that right is another matter....

quite a while before my ATM cash withdrawals could be cross-referenced against my grocery shopping

They can do that now, if you use a check card. They can probably do it with cash too, if it were worth the cost of scanning the money.

the reason we tend to be concerned about privacy

While I definitely understand Stephenson's point, and agree to a certain extent, the reason that I (for example) tend to be more focused on security and privacy issues is because that is something over which I have some control. There is only so much that I can do about stray bullets, sad to say, but I can definitely help people to understand why they need to use encryption software to protect themselves and their privacy. I can definitely help people install and configure PGP, and create key pairs and distribute them. Yeah, maybe it's not as noble a cause as some others, but it's what I can do. I'm a programmer, not a politician, or a police officer, or a lawyer. The same or similar probably goes for most of the readers on slashdot and most of the CFP attendees. People I know trust my judgement about computers and the Internet, so that's where I try to help.

Too often people try to get involved in what they don't adequately understand (such as politicians and lawyers trying to regulate the Internet), and this is the source of many many problems. I don't know how to help prevent random violence, or shootings, or kidnappings, or most of the other attrocities that take place in the modern world, so I do what I can. I try to help prevent things like privacy violations, to the best of my abilities.

It's not about hiding things from Big Brother, it's about personal privacy and personal freedom. This is how I can help, so this is what I do.

darren

Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

Say it ain't so?!?!?!

Oh My God, a science fiction writer with nutty political opinions? Whatever next? We certainly didn't get those back in the good old days of Asimov and Heinlein, did we?

He's half right.

I don't think that the government is the large totalitarian threat nowdays.

It's large corporations.

In 1984, the key to the regime was that the government controlled the information. The Ministry of Truth controlled exactly what everyone saw and heard about events, past and present.

For the most part, we don't have our government controlling what we see and hear, or what we can read. We do, however, have AOL/TimeWarner, MS/NBC, and a handfull of others controlling what we see and hear about current events. How badly does MSNBC want to talk about the ways in which it has used its monopolistic powers? How badly does AOL/TimeWarner's CNN want to talk about how badly AOL sucks?

And true, privacy concerns are largely a government thing right now, but we also see private companies Scanning Hard Drives [slashdot.org] and sending information back to the corporate HQ. I have no doubt that private companies will continue to be a privacy threat.

So, is the Government really your threat, or is it corporations who control the media?

People are different

People find themselves in different situations and have different needs. I understand why Scott McNealy said there is no privacy -- he doesn't have any and it is impossible for a man in his position to be private. So? There are millions of people whose circumstances are different -- and their values are different, too.

So Neal Stephenson doesn't think the Big Brother threat is something to worry about. That's fine -- he is well-off guy, upper-middle-class at least, leading a pampered, comfortable life well insulated from the rougher edges of the world. If the government takes a dislike to him, he can hire lawyers and raise all kinds of ruckus. But he may want to think about other people not as lucky as he is.

I lived (with my kids) in a neighborhood where a rare night passed without a gunshot somewhere around. I also lived in countries where the government is very interested in the details of your private life. Neal Stephenson may have his opinions, but I also have mine: the Big Brother threat is more serious than stray gunfire. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't pay attention to all the other problems of the world, but discounting the dangers of an intrusive, high-on-its-power government is not a good position.

Kaa

He is right

My wife had a mix up involving a bank and a credit card company a few years back. She ended up with an overdrawn bank account that got cancelled and it took us a few months to clear the debt. The mix up was not her fault. There was not trial, and no finding of fault. No formal procedure whatsoever.

Today, she can not get a checking account. All the banks share information through credit agencies and if they find that you had problems previously they will deny you a checking account. Do you realize how hard it is to live without a checking account? A lot of companies use out-of-state banks, so you can't just cash your paycheck. Direct-deposit? To what?

She is being punished without a trial, without a chance to defend her actions, and without a chance to even speak to her accusers!! Some manager at a branch office just put her name on a list and -blam- she's guilty!!

Government is the group that governs, or controls. Government isn't necessarilly comprised of elected officials. If your neighborhood is controlled by gangs, then your neighborhood is governed by gangs. If your life (or a very large part of it) is controlled by corporations, you are governed by corporations.

We do need to worry more about the corps than about the Feds, because the Feds at least have judges sometimes telling them that they can't do as they damn well please. The corps are free wheeling right now.

Send him to Singapore

Neal Stephenson ought to spend six months living in Singapore, so that he can experience first hand how great it is to live in country where you can be sure the regime doesn't worry about silly abstract things like privacy and freedom, but where you never have to worry about stray bullets, pronography, or drug trading.

Everybody who talks about the importance of such things over freedom ought to go and live in what William Gibson called "Disneyland with the death penalty", so they can eat their words...


-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

that stephenson article

Stephenson's speech was a lot more subtle and textured than the discussion of it here would lead you to believe. In fact, he said that he greatly admired people like Phil who have brought encryption to the world, and believes in fighting oppression in all its forms. The underscored point, however, was the "in all its forms" part. He referred back to our hominid ancestors and showed a pie chart of what their threat model might have been. It was about 98 percent HYENAS and about 2 percent OTHER. Once early man developed some good spears, he said, the hyena problem was less pressing--but early man didn't move on to try to conquer threats like intestinal parisites. His point, then, was that we need to update our threat models more often, and more subtly, than humans usually do. He then showed another pie chart. 98 percent was BIG BROTHER. 2 percent was OTHER. It got a big laugh from the crowd, because a lot of people recognized themselves. Stephenson again said that it was important ot expose and fight the bad things that "domination systems" to, but said that we should open the pie chart up to include and focus on other threats as well. In fact, he conceded, his pie chart of the threat model with lots of slices still could have the largest slice devoted to worrying about Big Brother. I hope that this gives a more full description of what Stephenson said in his talk. I wrote the story for the Washington Post, and tried to get as much of that flavor into it as I could.

Employers - The Real Enemy

He is right about the employers being more of aproblem than big brother governments (at least in the U.S. and Europe). As at now even though stupid laws are either being passed or considered by government, the amount of cases of digital invasion of privacy pale in comparison to the routine rape of employee rights that the average employee now accepts as fact.

Monitoring of voice mail, email, and websites browsed is commonplace in many corporations today. DNA results are used in making hiring/promotion decisions. Non compete, non disclosure and Ip clauses abound in contracts everywhere.

It is rather interesting that we can get so riled up on the one hand by what we perceive as invasion of privacy by the government on one hand then close our eyes to the same actions by corporations.

Pardon me...

...while I devolve into management consultant/workflow analysis mode.

This story reminds me of those four-place charts that we've all seen that prioritize tasks. Draw a square. Quarter it. Across the top, label the two columns "Urgent" and "Not Urgent." On the side, label the two rows "Important" and "Not Important." Now throw your tasks into those spaces. If a task winds up in the upper left corner, it's urgent and important. In the lower right, it's not urgent and not important.

It seems to me that all the speech was saying was (based, of course, on the extremely limited outline in the article that may or may not be accurate) that maybe the privacy-concerned members of our community were putting things in the wrong boxes. The threat of Big Brother knocking down your door is important, but it may not be as urgent as we like to think. On the other hand, keeping a kid from being shot is both urgent and pretty damn important.

Well, fine.

That attitude is important as far as it goes. Accusing privacy nuts of not seeing the forest for the trees can have a ring of truth. The problem, though, is that Big Brothers do eventually come to knock down doors. Neglecting important things (threats to privacy and, indeed, life and limb from government) because they aren't immediately urgent is a very dangerous thing, a veritable slippery slope of apathy that is mighty dangerous to ski on. Ignore the tasks in that "Important but Not Urgent" box and, sooner or later, as any experienced entrepeneur will tell you, you'll find those tasks jumping onto the "Urgent" side of the chart and you'll be ill-prepared to deal with them.

Stephenson is right in that we shouldn't argue principles to the exclusion of taking care of daily life. Unfortunately, though, we must adhere to principles, fret over them, agitate to protect them, and otherwise use our energy to make the world a better place for the great-great-grandchildren we will never see. If we don't, we ensure that those principles, those freedoms we took too much for granted will eventually be tested in ways no one desires. Neglect to fight the good fight in boardrooms, courts, and in politician's offices and someday you or your descendants will be forced to fight the good fight in the streets, by spilling real blood.

It's been said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Well, that ain't just whistlin' Dixie. It's as true today as it ever was.