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Could the NSA spying be a good thing?
Jul. 7th, 2013 07:54 amMy take on the NSA spying scandal
I've been thinking long and hard about the revelations regarding the NSA spying on everybody, and how similar things are going on in Canada, UK, and Australia... and probably most countries around the world.
I am in awe of Edward Snowden. What an amazing person to put himself at risk like that for the sake of his society. How many of us would have the fortitude and strength of character to do that? He is truly a hero and should be welcomed back home as one. I hope the bad guys don't make him suffer for what he has done, though considering what they are doing to Bradley Manning -- another hero among moral midgets -- I don't like his chances. Those with power have never liked whistleblowers.
However I don't think Edward Snowden's revelations really told us anything new; they merely confirmed what we all suspected anyway, but perhaps hoped wasn't true. We have merely lost that hope, that illusion. Things really are as bad as the worst, most paranoid cold-war thriller would have us think. We didn't win the cold war; the bad guys took over from inside.
But wait... I wonder if there's more to this than at first meets the eye.
Could it be that there is a good side to all this?
I think the reason all this spying is a problem is because it is kept secret. It is not the spying itself that is necessarily bad. If it was all opened out to the light of day then it would be a remarkable resource, similar to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive. A little while back the government in my state wanted to build a nuclear power station, so they sneakily deleted a report they'd commissioned that showed it was more expensive than wind, and comparable in price to solar, and publicised a faked list pretending that it was far cheaper than either. I used the Internet Archive to recover the original figures and did what I could to publicise how they were lying. You see? Keeping a record can be useful.
"But wait," you protest, "I don't want my personal emails made public." Yes, neither do I, and I'm sure a lot of powerful figures feel the same. If the spy agencies were allowed to continue their spying but were required to make it all public then the only people they would be allowed to spy upon would be organisations and people who judges had publicly determined were up to no good.
It is the secrecy that is problematic; not the spying itself. If the secrecy was abolished then they wouldn't be able to spy on individuals without just cause. The danger would automatically resolve itself. Secrecy is what allows corruption to grow, lured by power. Eliminate the secrecy and you eliminate one of the major causes of corruption.
Personally, I feel that we have this whole secrecy thing upside down. Organisations should not be allowed to have secrets -- that should be made illegal. All organisations should be forced to conduct their business in the full light of day, and the bigger the organisation then the more important this should be. Individuals, on the other hand, should have access to privacy by default. It is just plain common sense that organisations should not be able to keep secrets; they are not people -- they are fake entities that historically all too often endanger people, so should have none of the rights of human beings.
Capitalism has some great capabilities, but one of its greatest flaws is the way organisations are encouraged to grow and dominate despite bad practices and inefficiencies and inflexibility. Removing their ability to keep secrets would help fix this. Organisations that survived in an open environment would do so by benefitting people, whereas those that fiddled the books and did bad things would tend to be disadvantaged by an open environment. This would be a very, very good thing and would help heal some of capitalism's worst ills while enhancing those things it does best.
As an aside, honesty forces me to note that I would kinda like to have an archive of every communication I ever make. I do my best to maintain such an archive myself. (I have emails going back to the earliest days of the internet, before the world wide web.) For me it is a wonderful resource because my memory is so terrible for certain things such as dates. It is often very useful to be able to look up what I said about something 20 years ago. I venture that most people will eventually come to feel this way and that it will eventually become normal, and a part of our sense of identity. Of course I would not like every stupid little thing I've said combed through by the world at large, so I tend to keep it private. It is not that I have any bad things to hide, it is just that I can be such an utter imbecile sometimes and would like my humiliation to remain private in my attempts to become a better person. Such personal records can be useful when someone says you did something when you're sure you didn't, especially if you have a memory as fallible as mine.
There have been science fiction stories exploring the ramifications of a future where everybody has a video record of every second of their life. It is something that always appealed to me. :)
I've been thinking long and hard about the revelations regarding the NSA spying on everybody, and how similar things are going on in Canada, UK, and Australia... and probably most countries around the world.
I am in awe of Edward Snowden. What an amazing person to put himself at risk like that for the sake of his society. How many of us would have the fortitude and strength of character to do that? He is truly a hero and should be welcomed back home as one. I hope the bad guys don't make him suffer for what he has done, though considering what they are doing to Bradley Manning -- another hero among moral midgets -- I don't like his chances. Those with power have never liked whistleblowers.
However I don't think Edward Snowden's revelations really told us anything new; they merely confirmed what we all suspected anyway, but perhaps hoped wasn't true. We have merely lost that hope, that illusion. Things really are as bad as the worst, most paranoid cold-war thriller would have us think. We didn't win the cold war; the bad guys took over from inside.
But wait... I wonder if there's more to this than at first meets the eye.
Could it be that there is a good side to all this?
I think the reason all this spying is a problem is because it is kept secret. It is not the spying itself that is necessarily bad. If it was all opened out to the light of day then it would be a remarkable resource, similar to the Wayback Machine on the Internet Archive. A little while back the government in my state wanted to build a nuclear power station, so they sneakily deleted a report they'd commissioned that showed it was more expensive than wind, and comparable in price to solar, and publicised a faked list pretending that it was far cheaper than either. I used the Internet Archive to recover the original figures and did what I could to publicise how they were lying. You see? Keeping a record can be useful.
"But wait," you protest, "I don't want my personal emails made public." Yes, neither do I, and I'm sure a lot of powerful figures feel the same. If the spy agencies were allowed to continue their spying but were required to make it all public then the only people they would be allowed to spy upon would be organisations and people who judges had publicly determined were up to no good.
It is the secrecy that is problematic; not the spying itself. If the secrecy was abolished then they wouldn't be able to spy on individuals without just cause. The danger would automatically resolve itself. Secrecy is what allows corruption to grow, lured by power. Eliminate the secrecy and you eliminate one of the major causes of corruption.
Personally, I feel that we have this whole secrecy thing upside down. Organisations should not be allowed to have secrets -- that should be made illegal. All organisations should be forced to conduct their business in the full light of day, and the bigger the organisation then the more important this should be. Individuals, on the other hand, should have access to privacy by default. It is just plain common sense that organisations should not be able to keep secrets; they are not people -- they are fake entities that historically all too often endanger people, so should have none of the rights of human beings.
Capitalism has some great capabilities, but one of its greatest flaws is the way organisations are encouraged to grow and dominate despite bad practices and inefficiencies and inflexibility. Removing their ability to keep secrets would help fix this. Organisations that survived in an open environment would do so by benefitting people, whereas those that fiddled the books and did bad things would tend to be disadvantaged by an open environment. This would be a very, very good thing and would help heal some of capitalism's worst ills while enhancing those things it does best.
As an aside, honesty forces me to note that I would kinda like to have an archive of every communication I ever make. I do my best to maintain such an archive myself. (I have emails going back to the earliest days of the internet, before the world wide web.) For me it is a wonderful resource because my memory is so terrible for certain things such as dates. It is often very useful to be able to look up what I said about something 20 years ago. I venture that most people will eventually come to feel this way and that it will eventually become normal, and a part of our sense of identity. Of course I would not like every stupid little thing I've said combed through by the world at large, so I tend to keep it private. It is not that I have any bad things to hide, it is just that I can be such an utter imbecile sometimes and would like my humiliation to remain private in my attempts to become a better person. Such personal records can be useful when someone says you did something when you're sure you didn't, especially if you have a memory as fallible as mine.
There have been science fiction stories exploring the ramifications of a future where everybody has a video record of every second of their life. It is something that always appealed to me. :)