RE: The Security Übermensch

[Tony Scharf]

I think a lot about this lately, even before the news broke.  It has been my suspicion for a very long time that such a thing was being done.  There are unfortunately more questions than there are answers at this point.  I think the good news is having this out in the open means we can have an actual discussion about it and hopefully find a way to move forward and not backward.   Pragmatically, the genie is out of the bottle and you're just never going to stuff it back in. 
One point that sticks in my head is that the government is spying on us, so we are intern left to spy on the government.  When we do it, it's illegal.  When they do it, it's security.  That is the first mistake.  By spying on the people from which the power to govern is derived the government loses all right to complain when it is in turn spied on.  In fact, they leave us little choice but to spy.     
But it's bigger than this one incident.  What is really happening is a shift away from the concept of privacy with regards to everything but what you keep in your head.  What is more than a little troubling to me is how many particularly young people don't even seem to mind.  Part of that may be that I was born and raised in a disconnected world and not in one of instantaneous information upload where sharing, rather than privacy, was the norm.  A paranoid person would say that the youth of today were socially engineered into this way of thinking.   I am not so sure.  I tend to believe that this is just an unintended consequence of creating what essentially becomes a primitive collective consciousness, an oversoul that we all tap into digitally at this point (though in the future, that connection may become much more complete and intimate).  But that's getting ahead of ourselves.
What I think is needed is a new social contract that we all sign onto.    The ease with which information security is breached means that you run into a choice between either using these tools of life and commerce knowing that your information is not private or heading for the hills and trying to go off grid.  That is becoming almost an impossible choice these days.  What is needed is a mutual understanding between people and governments that amounts to mutually assured information disclosure - if you spy on me, understand that I will know about it because, as everything I do is part of a database somewhere...so is everything YOU do.  Everyone's information is out there, accessible  and (perhaps not easily) searchable.   Query my information in any way without my authorization and I will know about it and be able to access the same info about you.  

Obviously, there are holes in this.  I've not fully thought it through, but I think something like it is necessary in the future.  Really, so long as information exists, there will be those who wish to exploit it.  I'd rather be notified and know I have access to whoever is looking me up to know who they are and what they are up to.  
There is actually a book I read some time in the 90's by David Brin (?) called 'Earth'.  The story is not that great, but the future world he describes is frighteningly close to our own.  He describes fairly well the evolution of the Internet, a Wikileaks type of organization and really nails google glasses and who ultimately ends up using them (in his world, its the old farts annoying the kids by recording everything and auto reporting to the police).  Might be interesting to read for some of you.
Tony 
> Subject: The Security Übermensch
> From: ibisum at gmail.com
> Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 06:36:33 +0200
> To: music-bar at lists.music-bar.org
> 
> So .. What do you guys think we can do about this class of folks who think they have a right to undermine a free, democratic society for their own nefarious Purposes?
> 
> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security
> 
> Revolution? Education? Continue to ignore the man behind the curtain?
> 
> Andy T, how go your political activities? I note with interest the growing membership in the Pirate Party here in Austria.. I'm really pretty sure that there will be an uprising against those who believe they have some terrorist-given right to intrude on the lives of others for the sake of security, but what form that change is going to take, I do not know .. Witnessing the subversion of human communication for totalitarian purposes, I'm fairly concerned that education is the answer as well as the problem.
> 
> ;
> --
> seclorum 
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