Category Archives: privacy

Sousveillance, Kramer, Tasers and the Panopticon

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A couple of recent incidents have me thinking about the surveillance society again. The incidents:

  • November 14th a University of California Police Department officer tasered a student in UCLA’s Powell library.
  • November 19th (I think – the news was racing around the web on the 20th) Michael Richards – Kramer of Seinfeld – melted down while doing a standup routine at a club in Hollywood.

The key factor that unites these disparate messes? They were caught on video by bystanders (a quick YouTube search should turn both up – I’ll leave that as an excercise for the student). Though it’s often useful to concentrate on one aspect of technological change – in this case the panopticon (and in his defense Charlie Stross’ Great Britain is leading the way in ubiquitous surveillance) there are almost always countervailing forces and unintended consequences that get in the way. Opportunistic sousveillance may be be one of those forces. As video recording hardware gets smaller and more ubiquitous – cell phones, lipstick cams, etc. – and video distribution gets easier no one will have a monopoly on showing the world images of folks behaving badly. Not only will Cletus show up on ‘Cops’ when his meth lab gets raided, but additionally YouTube will have footage of Officer Friendly overreacting during a traffic stop.

I’ll continue to mull – sousveillance is no panacea. The state still has access to databases, facial recognition software (which – as far as I can tell – still sucks), etc. I continue to think transparency will keep free societies free, but part of me wants to prep an escape route – be ready go nomad and drop into a mobile cash/barter society that I think is already out there…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Security tradeoffs.

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There’s a wonderful item in Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram that captures the balancing act between security and convenience/usability. The issue is how to bear-proof trash cans in Yosemite. The story isn’t well sourced, but it’s one that illustrates a point even if the tale can’t be verified. My favorite quote:

Said one park ranger, ‘There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.’

A tangent – I have it on good authority that the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone (besides H. sapien) is the Bison, filling the same niche in North America as the hippo does in Africa: very large, shockingly fast, single-minded people stompers.

If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide?

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I just got around to reading Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram – it contains an excellent essay on the value of privacy.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

and

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Later, he quotes Solzhenitsyn (I’m not wild about Solzhenitsyn’s Mother Russia reactionary crabbiness, but if anyone can talk about the surveillance/police state, he’s the one):

“As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions… There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence…. Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.”