spying on ordinary folk
Friday, 5 March 2010 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI was chatting to someone several days ago about the dangers of software that spies upon the user, as Microsoft's products do, and as the Australian government is doing with the filter it has now imposed upon our internet. The first response I usually get when I discuss this topic with people is that they don't do anything illegal, so they don't have anything to fear from snooping. Of course that's wrong; anybody can be convicted of something no matter how law-abiding they are, but my reply to them is usually to ask how many of the mass murders and large scale victimisations and oppressions in history were conducted in response to illegal activities of the victims. However the person I was chatting to this time gave a different answer -- they knew that naming an activity as illegal often has less to do with morality and more to do with who makes the laws. Instead, their response was that they were little fish; their activities were not immoral, and that any laws they broke were minor, like the vast majority of Australians. At the time I was unable to think of a suitable answer, to this, even though I knew they were using a common, but dangerous argument. I've now realised what it was that made me so uneasy.
Our age has been marked by automation. We can get computers to to execute mindlessly trivial calculations billions of times with great speed and precision. If law enforcers used computers to enforce silly or bad laws then they might be able to restrict or victimise the bulk of the population with a keypress. Historically we humans are very bad abusers of such power. The Australian internet filter gives law enforcers the beginning of that ability. It spies upon users, judges them, and can execute punishment.
Human communication is not a luxury, it is a need. Try going for a few days without talking to anyone or having anyone talk to you, then see what happens when you finally get to speak with someone. The words come gushing out, uncorked at last, gradually ebbing til your need is sated and you're able to speak normally again. If the internet filter, along with the Orwellian named "Trusted Computing" both come into common use then anybody can be cut off from the net easily. If we've been sufficiently brainwashed into thinking that these things are there to protect us then there will be no recourse to justice. It will be simply that we've violated some fineprint "Terms of Service". And as television, radio, and newspapers are in a race to self-destruction, we will come to depend in greater degrees upon the internet. Pulling the plug on anyone will be a very easy way to "send to Coventry" anybody who might open themselves to victimisation. Hiding in the bulk of society will no longer be safe. It will no longer matter whether what you did was judged by most of society as perfectly moral if spying and sentencing are so easy.
Would our society descend to such a thing?
Well, we already have a filter on our internet use here in Australia -- something that would have been inconceivable a short time ago, and I'll bet other governments are closely watching how little struggle we are making against our filter. Look out USA, UK, and other supposed democracies... you are next!
But if we are good, law-abiding citizens surely we have nothing to fear? How illegal or immoral is it to be black, or Jewish, or homosexual, or Ottoman Armenian, or Rwandan Tutsi, Bosnian Muslim, yet these people have been slaughtered by often quite enlightened and civilised oppressors, for reasons that generally amount to little more than that they could do so. I'm not saying that large scale murder is likely to occur here in Australia, it will be more insidious and subtle.
If I decided that I owned the air and that everyone had to pay me so they may breathe you'd think that was not only despicable, but utterly unenforceable. But through what is probably the biggest propaganda campaign in peacetime history the film and music industries are achieving something very similar. They have managed to convince people that sharing is the same as stealing. Stopping people from sharing is immoral and unenforceable, but not only have they been able to persuade lawmakers that the reverse is true, now they are almost in a position where they can enforce it.
It doesn't matter that they will almost certainly destroy their own businesses in the process. Remember how the music industry scrambled to ban compact audio cassettes, while at the same time the music blossomed and diversified as people were exposed to new kinds of music on mix-tapes shared by friends and family? The film industry attempted to ban videocassettes, but ended up making much more from them than theatre releases. If they'd succeeded in their push to outlaw videocassettes they would have cut their own throats. Can you imagine what would happen to the publishing industry if books couldn't be shared between friends, borrowed at libraries, and bought at second-hand shops? This is the future that publishers are trying to bring about through locked ebooks.
It doesn't matter that they will cause -- are causing -- large scale social damage. What in heaven's name will happen to a society that believes that sharing -- one of the most fundamentally good qualities in human nature -- is wrong? How can such a society possibly survive?
The people who have been most brainwashed by this anti-sharing propaganda is the propagandists themselves. They truly believe their position. They honestly think they have right on their side and that theirs is a moral fight. But to give any people almost limitless ability to enforce some kind of power over other people is a very dangerous thing to do. We humans are terrible at handling such power. To give these industries such power over information in an age when information has become our lifeblood... it is like telling people that they must pay to breathe... and being able to casually enforce it.
Our age has been marked by automation. We can get computers to to execute mindlessly trivial calculations billions of times with great speed and precision. If law enforcers used computers to enforce silly or bad laws then they might be able to restrict or victimise the bulk of the population with a keypress. Historically we humans are very bad abusers of such power. The Australian internet filter gives law enforcers the beginning of that ability. It spies upon users, judges them, and can execute punishment.
Human communication is not a luxury, it is a need. Try going for a few days without talking to anyone or having anyone talk to you, then see what happens when you finally get to speak with someone. The words come gushing out, uncorked at last, gradually ebbing til your need is sated and you're able to speak normally again. If the internet filter, along with the Orwellian named "Trusted Computing" both come into common use then anybody can be cut off from the net easily. If we've been sufficiently brainwashed into thinking that these things are there to protect us then there will be no recourse to justice. It will be simply that we've violated some fineprint "Terms of Service". And as television, radio, and newspapers are in a race to self-destruction, we will come to depend in greater degrees upon the internet. Pulling the plug on anyone will be a very easy way to "send to Coventry" anybody who might open themselves to victimisation. Hiding in the bulk of society will no longer be safe. It will no longer matter whether what you did was judged by most of society as perfectly moral if spying and sentencing are so easy.
Would our society descend to such a thing?
Well, we already have a filter on our internet use here in Australia -- something that would have been inconceivable a short time ago, and I'll bet other governments are closely watching how little struggle we are making against our filter. Look out USA, UK, and other supposed democracies... you are next!
But if we are good, law-abiding citizens surely we have nothing to fear? How illegal or immoral is it to be black, or Jewish, or homosexual, or Ottoman Armenian, or Rwandan Tutsi, Bosnian Muslim, yet these people have been slaughtered by often quite enlightened and civilised oppressors, for reasons that generally amount to little more than that they could do so. I'm not saying that large scale murder is likely to occur here in Australia, it will be more insidious and subtle.
If I decided that I owned the air and that everyone had to pay me so they may breathe you'd think that was not only despicable, but utterly unenforceable. But through what is probably the biggest propaganda campaign in peacetime history the film and music industries are achieving something very similar. They have managed to convince people that sharing is the same as stealing. Stopping people from sharing is immoral and unenforceable, but not only have they been able to persuade lawmakers that the reverse is true, now they are almost in a position where they can enforce it.
It doesn't matter that they will almost certainly destroy their own businesses in the process. Remember how the music industry scrambled to ban compact audio cassettes, while at the same time the music blossomed and diversified as people were exposed to new kinds of music on mix-tapes shared by friends and family? The film industry attempted to ban videocassettes, but ended up making much more from them than theatre releases. If they'd succeeded in their push to outlaw videocassettes they would have cut their own throats. Can you imagine what would happen to the publishing industry if books couldn't be shared between friends, borrowed at libraries, and bought at second-hand shops? This is the future that publishers are trying to bring about through locked ebooks.
It doesn't matter that they will cause -- are causing -- large scale social damage. What in heaven's name will happen to a society that believes that sharing -- one of the most fundamentally good qualities in human nature -- is wrong? How can such a society possibly survive?
The people who have been most brainwashed by this anti-sharing propaganda is the propagandists themselves. They truly believe their position. They honestly think they have right on their side and that theirs is a moral fight. But to give any people almost limitless ability to enforce some kind of power over other people is a very dangerous thing to do. We humans are terrible at handling such power. To give these industries such power over information in an age when information has become our lifeblood... it is like telling people that they must pay to breathe... and being able to casually enforce it.