[HN Gopher] Beware state surveillance of your lives - government...
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Beware state surveillance of your lives - governments can change
for the worse
Author : pseudolus
Score : 139 points
Date : 2021-08-21 17:22 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| argvargc wrote:
| Beware state *** of your *** - governments can change for the
| worse
| pessimizer wrote:
| Admiration of your backstroke?
| joelbondurant wrote:
| According to the USA Fact-Check Algorithm, the Government is
| Science, the religion of love. Seriously, the people who think
| government cares about them are the same who believe the stripper
| loves them.
| stevespang wrote:
| . . . they had taken the US to "a keystroke away from
| totalitarianism"
|
| 1984 is here, now. Just look at the Capitol protests - - how they
| hunted down those with legitimate gripes, valid dissenters.
|
| Regime change begins at home.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Personally I'm wary of any surveillance of my life, period.
| Governments are a worry, but so are private entities, at least
| because they'll hand over their data to governments with minimal
| resistance, but also because their goal is to use information
| about me to influence my behavior and worldview, a very insidious
| proposition.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Can I interest you in being also wary of the possibility that
| collected data about you could be stolen by explicitly
| malicious parties? Thieves, for example.
| walterbell wrote:
| 2020 editorial, https://privacyinternational.org/long-
| read/4074/looming-disa...
|
| _> A digital ID that proves immunity will raise serious human
| rights issues. And the failure of the digital ID industry to deal
| with the issues of exclusion, exploitation and discrimination
| puts the entire industry under question ... The most important
| message for the industry is, perhaps, that you don 't have to
| provide a solution to every conceivable use-case for identity.
| This pandemic should form a check on the hubris of the digital
| identity industry._
|
| 2021: Linux Foundation & others launch an interoperable
| blockchain to unify human identity across all US states and all
| countries, enabling linking of phones, online wallets, driver's
| licenses, EU digital ID, offline activity (e.g. travel, entering
| buildings) and potentially future central bank digital currencies
| with kill switches (e.g. prevent kids from exceeding monthly
| quota of sweets/candy purchases, or some cross-border
| transactions),
| https://www.zdnet.com/index.php/forums/discussi.com/index.ph...
|
| _> For health passes to work globally, helping countries to
| restart economies and reopen borders, they need to be trusted
| globally. Through the Global COVID Certificate Network, Linux
| Foundation Public Health is working to address this challenge by
| bringing together a network of trusted and interoperable Trust
| Registries, so that the holder of a certificate can use it
| whenever they need and wherever they are. IBM is excited to
| collaborate with Linux Foundation Public Health on this important
| initiative at this critical time in our history._
|
| In other news, mobile phone numbers can be used to obtain the
| real-time geolocation of a phone. Both T-Mobile and AT&T recently
| announced data breaches of customer data, including phone number
| and other identifying information, for millions of customers.
|
| The US government lost the entire OPM classified database on
| security-cleared personnel, one of the highest-value information
| systems on high-value humans.
|
| So who exactly are we going to trust to run this global
| blockchain of human identity? IBM? What's their historical track
| record on cybersecurity and governance of protecting humans? And
| no, many "decentralized" companies enforcing identical policy
| does not make the resulting system any less centralized and
| fragile.
|
| We need to collect less data, not more. If the West wants a
| social credit system, at least have the decency of emulating
| China by stating explicit public policy goals and owning the
| societal consequences. If Western countries don't want a China-
| style social credit system, then new legislation may be needed to
| encode this societal value, or to clarify Constitutional
| principles. But it should be a governance and policy decision,
| not an accidental consequence of "tech" infrastructure.
|
| Let's remember that "Covid Contact Tracing" via phones was not
| especially successful in adoption or changing of outcomes. Even
| when tracing data was available, some local governments made
| decisions which ignored the data. Yet, every phone now carries
| closed-source binaries to track not only the human user, but
| neighboring devices belonging to humans. With this track record
| of non-utility, what is the justification for expanding health
| surveillance interoperability to every aspect of online, offline
| and economic life?
|
| https://www.goodhealthpass.org/
|
| https://trustoverip.org/
| robbedpeter wrote:
| We need something like a web of trust system that enables local
| governments to validate official ID's and cryptographic
| signatures. We can't do a perfect job, but doing the best we
| can with current technology and building a rational framework
| of data protection at the citizen level is the only rational
| course.
|
| A blockchain system makes sense for a distributed record of a
| web of trust. Instead of a coin and proof of stake, a proof of
| population based algorithm would allow nodes to join a network.
|
| Such a network could form the basis of any government function
| and cryptographically protected personal data. You could add
| trustless age verification for porn sites, for example. Or it
| could allow checking the vaccination status for college entry,
| or so on. In the case of identity theft, it should be possible
| to allow law enforcement or some official entity the ability to
| issue a new identity key, and revert or modify any changes in
| private data, flagging the poisoned entries in the blockchain.
|
| Anyway, the point is : it doesn't have to be perfect, it just
| has to be better than the shitshow we have now. We can
| eliminate SSNs and do a pretty good job of implementing
| cryptographically secured trustless identity. We can build a
| system that maintains privacy as a fundamental principle
| instead of trying to tack on post-hoc reactive solutions that
| are always too little too late.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Keeping our privacy, both digital and otherwise, secure from
| intrusion isn't and absolutely shouldn't be about simply
| keeping them secure from "bad governments" and nefarious data
| thieves. The point should be to rigorously prevent
| governments of any kind using any supposedly good
| justification period from easily knowing or tracking certain
| things. If history should be able to teach us anything it's
| that good governments can become corrupt and that the data
| held by any large organization can quickly be stolen or
| misused by its individual members or others for their own
| ends. Data like that shouldn't simply be "secured", it should
| be made extremely difficult to collect in the first place,
| especially by any large centralized party.
| walterbell wrote:
| In addition to privacy as a fundamental principle, we also
| need "separation of powers" as a fundamental democratic
| governance principle.
|
| Once these systems are deployed, how can we guarantee ongoing
| transparency of policy debates and citizen-tax-representative
| governance and admin/config/security changes?
|
| Without ongoing feedback loops that evaluate systems against
| explicit democratic principles, there is risk of network
| effects where early policy choices become difficult or
| impossible to change after many parties have implemented
| local systems. In that scenario, early system design could
| become a far-reaching target for lobbyists and techno-
| regulatory capture.
| haspoken wrote:
| https://archive.is/W4bOF
| zepto wrote:
| I mean, yes of course. But more important than powerlessly
| worrying about future bad governments - stand up for civil
| liberties _now_.
| fsflover wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| [deleted]
| cjfd wrote:
| This title makes it sound like these two developments would be
| unrelated. The thing is that giving a group of people more power
| generally worsens their behavior.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Yes, I always imagine surveillance apologists saying something
| like "It's fine to give this government absolute power, because
| this government isn't corrupt absolutely."
| pope_meat wrote:
| The internet was sold to us as freedom, but it's been turned in
| to a prison.
|
| I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I was foolishly hopeful
| back in the day.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Web 3 is coming.
| gtvwill wrote:
| And is hosted in the exact same space and on the exact same
| Infrastructure as web 2.0. nothing will change. You don't
| control the infrastructure your a pawn to the system. You
| ultimately have no say in what is blocked or copied.
| kaminar wrote:
| Of course the author used Trump's name to infer blame...what a
| prick. Btw, Hungary's PM is a great guy. It's amazing how many
| people continue to overlook Obama's role in destroying America
| and international relations.
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Isn't this also a statement against gun control or generally
| anything that increases the power of the state with respect to
| the citizens?
|
| Governments can change for the worse, and it will suck if they
| change in a way that makes you the receiving end of their wrath.
| However, the biggest state power that can be turned against you
| is their monopoly on violence. Who cares if they can surveil you,
| if they can just threaten to execute your friends and family
| unless you give them what they want?
|
| Sometimes, we computer people see everything through the lens of
| computers that we forget larger, non-computer consequences.
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(page generated 2021-08-21 23:01 UTC)