[The Sabbaticus]

Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide."

[youtube]pcSlowAhvUk[/youtube]

Talking points:

- hypocritical statements by Google and Facebook: privacy is no longer a cultural norm. While the CEO's themselves covet their own privacy. 4:42
- The book '1984' mentions monitors in every home. According to some this has nothing to do with the 'surveillance state we now face' - wrong, because:
- the effects of mass-surveillance: creates a prison in the mind
- similarity to Abrahamic concept of god, never a private moment, the ultimate enforcer of its dictates
- stimulates conformity, obedience, submission

- Two public messages about privacy:
1. those that seek privacy are bad people.
2. only dissidents challenge power. (The rest are harmless and non threatening to those in positions of power.)
- The maxim: he who doesn't move, doesn't know his chains - the chains of mass surveillance

[quetzalcoatl]

Privacy is a relatively recent invention. It began to gain currency in the West during the industrial revolution. Mass production required the existence of isolated modular "nuclear" families, rather than the open structure of village life. The alienated exist by definition in a private space, a space both physical and mental.

Industrial capitalism shrank the structure of the tribal group down to a narrow focus of the nuclear family. The tribal fear of the outsider was also now centered on the family. The need for privacy is just an expression of this fear, nothing more.

Experimentation with radical forms of social organization (fascism, communism) was an attempt to deal with the negative effects of isolation, hence the radical deprecation of privacy in these experiments.

The long-term prognosis for "privacy" as a privileged value (in isolation from other human needs) is terminal.

[The Sabbaticus]

Privacy taps into a primal force that shapes human behaviour, namely shame. The standards of dignity can change, but the psychological underpinnings of shame don't.

There will always be a need for privacy on a fundamental human level.

Not only that, but privacy is also a competitive evolutionary advantage. Privacy is a form of secrecy, and secrecy is guile. The human intellect used to outwit opponents and develop more successful strategies in life. E.g. if you're physically fraught with inadequacies, clothes might cover up these shortcomings.

As for this discussion. Privacy in the 20th/21st century is primarily a citizen versus government dynamic. Big Brother societies might arise, but humans will remain humans. Their baser instincts will take over, and others will want to guard themselves against these baser instincts. E.g. the nudity scanners at airports, pushed by commercial actors within corporate America, in collusion with certain American senators. The personnel assigned to monitoring duty were found to mercilessly ridicule the passengers, and use their privileges to sexually harass a number of victims. It wasn't long before a deluge of criticism forced certain changes. And this need to push back remains.

[SolarCross]

Privacy is a relatively recent invention. It began to gain currency in the West during the industrial revolution. Mass production required the existence of isolated modular "nuclear" families, rather than the open structure of village life. The alienated exist by definition in a private space, a space both physical and mental.

I don't think that is right at all. The move from rural to urban life for the majorities of people that happened with the industrial revolution actually decreased natural privacy; in the urban density the person is exposed to more eyes and to more eyes of strangers: The urban workplace the factory, the shop and the market is full of people and strange people at that. The urban home is surrounded very closely by numerous other homes, so your neighbour can hear you humping and sniffing. The rural worker has much greater natural privacy even when outside. When something becomes more scarce it becomes more valued. The rural peasent has privacy in abundance and so never fears for its loss or is concerned he doesn't have enough. When he becomes an urban worker then privacy becomes rarer and thus more valuable. The concern for privacy becomes more acute the less of it one has. Greenwald's message reflects that actually the information revolution has made privacy even rarer.

[Harmattan]

- The book '1984' mentions monitors in every home. According to some this has nothing to do with the 'surveillance state we now face' - wrong, because:
- the effects of mass-surveillance: creates a prison in the mind
- similarity to Abrahamic concept of god, never a private moment, the ultimate enforcer of its dictates
- stimulates conformity, obedience, submission

Those are good reasons to compare the situation with 1984. But there are striking differences.

* 1984's surveillance was bold, physically intrusive, based on the soviet way of things. Ours is invisible, insidious.

* 1984's surveillance was performed by one entity only: the government, the only threat. But the govt is probably not our worse problem.

* 1984's surveillance was imposed from the top, ours is accepted, somehow plebiscited, seen as fair somehow when it comes to free services, even as a feature when we expect services and products to anticipate our needs.

* 1984's surveillance was used to arrest dissidents. Ours is performed for the sake of control freaks (NSA) and profit. And it results / will result in social marginalization (think about jobs where a federal investigation is needed and people are rejected - secretly, on vague decisions of an algorithm - or jobs where HR deem you to have too much asperities).



Unfortunately there is a large misunderstanding: people do not realize they are transmitting data about them and they do not understand which data they are transmitting, nor to whom. They fail to realize that clicking on a link is collected as a datum, that NOT clicking on a link is also collected as a datum, that the location reported by their cellphone when they go somewhere or meet someone is collected as a datum, that typing a query in a search engine or on any site is collected as a datum. That anything they do on the web and the public and professional spaces are/will be collected.

And they fail to realize that those data can be collected by their target, their ISP, one or more governments, one or more cable operators and one or more technical services providers (each web page requests ten to twenty other pages, travel through ten or so companies, sometimes through five countries).

And they fail to realize the extent of the present surveillance. They actually want to believe that there is some fine code of conduct, that those data are not used or not too much, that they are not profiled, that seeing a "privacy statement" means that their privacy will be respected, that "affiliates" in TOS means "subcontractors" rather than "consumers" (those who pay ; not the users).

- the effects of mass-surveillance: creates a prison in the mind
- similarity to Abrahamic concept of god, never a private moment, the ultimate enforcer of its dictates
- stimulates conformity, obedience, submission

I completely agree.

And this is very well observable on social networks where pseudonyms are prohibited: most people will take care to never express dissonant opinions and they will exhibit a high degree of submission to established hierarchies. This is worrying at this age where all potential employees are supposed to be active on social networks so that HR can profile them. And banks, and insurances, and...

- Two public messages about privacy:
1. those that seek privacy are bad people.
2. only dissidents challenge power. (The rest are harmless and non threatening to those in positions of power.)

Correctly observed.

And there is the third: "this is what people want". This is half-true because most of people want security more than freedom nowadays. But on the other hand people do not really realize what the question pertains to. And they would not be so afraid if the govt propaganda wasn't focused on frightening them with enemies everywhere, and this hysteria about terrorism, and how mass medias highly increased their coverage of violent events (in France the number of crimes per capita remained stable while their coverage per media doubled on the last ten years).

I don't think that is right at all. The move from rural to urban life for the majorities of people that happened with the industrial revolution actually decreased natural privacy; in the urban density the person is exposed to more eyes and to more eyes of strangers: The urban workplace the factory, the shop and the market is full of people and strange people at that.

But you do not care about strangers and they know nothing about you.

On the other hand when you live in a microcosm you must always be extremely cautious about your social rank. This can amount to a great pressure.

In the traditional rural life you spend your whole life with the same people: work, family, religion, etc. You can't separate things up and release the pressure, or move up to distance yourself from your former self. They all know everything about you.

[quetzalcoatl]

I don't think that is right at all. The move from rural to urban life for the majorities of people that happened with the industrial revolution actually decreased natural privacy; in the urban density the person is exposed to more eyes and to more eyes of strangers: The urban workplace the factory, the shop and the market is full of people and strange people at that. The urban home is surrounded very closely by numerous other homes, so your neighbour can hear you humping and sniffing. The rural worker has much greater natural privacy even when outside. When something becomes more scarce it becomes more valued. The rural peasent has privacy in abundance and so never fears for its loss or is concerned he doesn't have enough. When he becomes an urban worker then privacy becomes rarer and thus more valuable. The concern for privacy becomes more acute the less of it one has. Greenwald's message reflects that actually the information revolution has made privacy even rarer.

I'm saying something quite different, however. Privacy, as a category, did not even exist for the mass of humanity until the industrial revolution, any more than the right to property. Privacy and property did exist for a tiny elite, but they were not considered part of the natural order for everyone. In a pre-agricultural tribal group of a couple dozen, it would have been inevitable to have constant monitoring of all its members.

[SolarCross]

I'm saying something quite different, however. Privacy, as a category, did not even exist for the mass of humanity until the industrial revolution, any more than the right to property. Privacy and property did exist for a tiny elite, but they were not considered part of the natural order for everyone. In a pre-agricultural tribal group of a couple dozen, it would have been inevitable to have constant monitoring of all its members.

You must be from another planet then. Even just the word, never mind the concept, goes back to at least 1500s. Why do people wear clothes then? How did you even come to believe any of this? Could you link to your source?

[quetzalcoatl]

You must be from another planet then. Even just the word, never mind the concept, goes back to at least 1500s. Why do people wear clothes then? How did you even come to believe any of this? Could you link to your source?

Yes people will still wear clothes and live in houses. If this is your view of privacy, you are good. The NSA has no objection to this.

wikipedia

The concept of universal individual privacy is a modern construct associated with Western culture, British and North American in particular, and remained virtually unknown in some cultures until recent times. According to some researchers, this concept sets Anglo-American culture apart even from Western European cultures such as French or Italian.[1] Most cultures, however, recognize the ability of individuals to withhold certain parts of their personal information from wider society—a figleaf over the genitals being an ancient example.

[SolarCross]

The concept of universal individual privacy is a modern construct associated with Western culture, British and North American in particular, and remained virtually unknown in some cultures until recent times. According to some researchers, this concept sets Anglo-American culture apart even from Western European cultures such as French or Italian.[1] Most cultures, however, recognize the ability of individuals to withhold certain parts of their personal information from wider society—a figleaf over the genitals being an ancient example.

So your source is wiki, and wiki's source for that tidbit is some russian book - "Features of the Russian Language of Fourth Wave Immigrants".. lol just lol.

Whatever "universal individual privacy" is (frankly I have no idea) just plain old privacy doesn't seem to be unique to anglos.

I just found this by a Rabbi..

An edict ascribed to Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz by the Shulchan Aruch prevented intercepting or reading someone else’s correspondence. Casually reading someone else’s emails or forwarding them without permission was forbidden by Halacha more than 1,000 years ago – on pain of excommunication.

[The Sabbaticus]

This is another interesting video, if you can get past the Italian accent.

[youtube]H_pqhMO3ZSY[/youtube]

Talking points:

- Corporate entities will have amassed so much data over the years that they can fully predict the desires of consumers

- Big Data will be like the garden of Eden; by becoming aware, and covering yourself (blocking privacy invasion), the garden which allegedly keeps you 'materially satisfied' (e.g. predicting needs, wants and desires) will drive you out

- Facial recognition software coupled with social media will become a veritable plague

- Digital advertisements will use the results of social media data mining to deviously manipulate you on psychological levels which you have no defence against (neuro-marketing)

(amongst others)

[ingliz]

not doing anything wrong, no need to hide

"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone...This government will conclusively turn the page on this failed approach."

David Cameron, Speech to the NSC Wednesday 13 May 2015.

[The Sabbaticus]

I'm fond of Snowden's line in the other thread:

"Rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.

[blackjack21]

Privacy is a relatively recent invention. It began to gain currency in the West during the industrial revolution. Mass production required the existence of isolated modular "nuclear" families, rather than the open structure of village life. The alienated exist by definition in a private space, a space both physical and mental.

The founding of the US precedes the invention of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, and it clearly has a Fourth Amendment designed to prevent unreasonable searches and seizures, precisely because governments like to be intrusive.

The need for privacy is just an expression of this fear, nothing more.

Not true at all. It's to prevent the government from interfering in every aspect of your life.

Privacy taps into a primal force that shapes human behaviour, namely shame. The standards of dignity can change, but the psychological underpinnings of shame don't.

This is a very interesting point in view of hate crimes and "gay marriage." The political left in the United States has changed to the point that it elevates emotions as the highest order value. So given quetzlcoatl's interpretation, the left's insistence on something like "gay marriage" is not based on rational thought, but on the notion that marriage has something to do with "love" and should therefore include all people. Of course, this is absurd in a rational context. However, if you are to include emotion into a political view, spying on people generally is an evil proposition. Yet, they may very well be doing so to shape behavior. For example, perhaps Snowden wasn't an accident. Maybe South Park has it right--the NSA has the same powers as Santa Claus. They see you when your sleeping, they know when your awake, they know if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.

Privacy in the 20th/21st century is primarily a citizen versus government dynamic.

Don't underestimate the corporate use of private data. Every app on your phone typically harvests tons of data about you, your whereabouts, who you communicate with, etc. It's the same thing that the NSA is doing. It's very valuable data. The reason nobody trusts the NSA with this power is that the United States itself, its politicos, are clearly acting against the will and interests of the people it governs.

Their baser instincts will take over, and others will want to guard themselves against these baser instincts. E.g. the nudity scanners at airports, pushed by commercial actors within corporate America, in collusion with certain American senators. The personnel assigned to monitoring duty were found to mercilessly ridicule the passengers, and use their privileges to sexually harass a number of victims.

What's more, you could clearly see Mohammed Atta, etc. going through metal detectors. The problem with America's War on Terror is that they believe it's possible to kill certain people (e.g., Osama bin Laden), and that will end Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, etc. We are in a religious war, and our government doesn't want to admit it. So they are sacrificing privacy among other things in furtherance of their "resistance" to ISIS, Al Qaeda, et. al.

The rural peasent has privacy in abundance and so never fears for its loss or is concerned he doesn't have enough.

He does fear it when soldiers show up, break down the door and search the house, and decide they are going to quarter themselves in the subject's home. That's why we have a third amendement in addition to a fourth amendment.

* 1984's surveillance was bold, physically intrusive, based on the soviet way of things. Ours is invisible, insidious.

It's also far more pervasive.

* 1984's surveillance was performed by one entity only: the government, the only threat. But the govt is probably not our worse problem.

It's pretty bad. The corporate issue is one of people's ignorance. The government in the US doesn't insist on preventing corporations from harvesting your data. Undoubtedly, they have agreements with the NSA to share your data with the NSA. Once you give up the right to your data, it's marketable. That's why the EU directives on data privacy could be really interesting moving forward in juxtaposition to the US. However, European states are basically the ones who invented this level of surveillance--e.g., The Lives of Others.

* 1984's surveillance was imposed from the top, ours is accepted, somehow plebiscited, seen as fair somehow when it comes to free services, even as a feature when we expect services and products to anticipate our needs.

And it does a good job of it. Last year, I think I probably watched more Netflix than cable. However, their understanding of my viewing habits has narrowed the scope that I find it difficult to select something now. If you watch Netflix at all, when you login on your TV by selecting a profile, that was an idea I submitted to Netflix, because my then girlfriend's kid would come over and watch kid stuff and my recommendations would be like Wallace and Grommit, which would piss me off. She liked some adult stuff that I didn't think was appropriate for kids, so I recommended the "Kidz" thing too. In the last few months, I've been watching a lot more YouTube on my TV rather than DirectTV as YouTube is now a richer content experience from a wide variety of sources. It also has a "looser" means of providing suggested content.

* 1984's surveillance was used to arrest dissidents. Ours is performed for the sake of control freaks (NSA) and profit. And it results / will result in social marginalization (think about jobs where a federal investigation is needed and people are rejected - secretly, on vague decisions of an algorithm - or jobs where HR deem you to have too much asperities).

Well that's me to a tee. I work on a project that is directly involved in mass storage and I know that the NSA uses our stuff. I know I cannot stop it, and it has massive utility in other verticals. So I see no practical reason to quit doing it. However, if I worked directly for them, I'd be troubled like Snowden, so I'd be immediately marginalized if I worked within the company. The difference is that I'd be telling them that they are crazy for doing what they're doing--as far as collecting all data goes. That's why they can have the level of capability that they do, but still miss Nidal Hasan or the Tsarnaev brothers--even when Russian intelligence says, "Hey, watch out for these guys." So either it doesn't work, or they let the Tsarnaev brothers kill people to keep people scared. Either way, they don't look to competent, and the NSA is staffed with exceedingly smart people.

And they fail to realize that those data can be collected by their target, their ISP, one or more governments, one or more cable operators and one or more technical services providers (each web page requests ten to twenty other pages, travel through ten or so companies, sometimes through five countries).

Yes, and the government and media like to keep people as ignorant of this fact as possible. That's why I find it amazing that Hillary Clinton is even a competitive candidate for the White House. Bradley/Chelsea Manning did nothing to get Hillary to stop using an insecure email server. The media either understands this and is keeping it quiet, or they don't understand it at all.

And this is very well observable on social networks where pseudonyms are prohibited: most people will take care to never express dissonant opinions and they will exhibit a high degree of submission to established hierarchies. This is worrying at this age where all potential employees are supposed to be active on social networks so that HR can profile them. And banks, and insurances, and...

If you are a workaholic, it's not that big of a deal. It's when you are a marginal employee and they are trying to punish those with dissenting opinions or a crap work ethic where it becomes problematic. They do this to businesses too. A lot of homosexuals for example are quite hostile to anyone who doesn't accept their lifestyle, engaging in behavior like trying to destroy small businesses who don't want to cater their weddings and so forth. This is called "coercive authority." So we're already in a political environment where people are doing their level best to do great financial damage to people they oppose politically. The right does this too. Look at CNN's ratings after Anderson Cooper started calling Tea Party members "Tea Baggers." The right just used the V-chip to shut off CNN so even their kids couldn't watch it. This is why the death of limited intrusion into peoples' lives and government coercion will lead to the death of democracy itself. We will resume tribal identities.

Correctly observed.

And there is the third: "this is what people want". This is half-true because most of people want security more than freedom nowadays.

That's partially true as well. Most governments know that fear is a powerful motivator. So they are working to keep people afraid and in allegiance to them at all times. A lot of global warming propaganda works toward that end. Anyone with any sense at all knows that you cannot have a model that controls for solar irradiance and have scenarios from 0.8 to 5.8 degrees centigrade in variance without there being something seriously wrong with the models. When the so-called "experts" argue in furtherance of a plurality of scenarios, anyone with decent logic skills can tell you that if you have 5 normative scenarios, 4 out of 5 normative scenarios must be wrong by definition. They're pure speculation. If you point this out, you will get a hell of a lot of BS about "climate change experts" and so on. This is called "expert authority." However, the uncertainty of the models isn't intended to undermine people's belief in their scientific ethics, but rather to generate fear from uncertainty. A lot of very intelligent people have argued against global warming propaganda only to face character assassination, as though being right or wrong about their scientific opinion really warranted that kind of response. The use of "expert authority" in propaganda backfired badly as a result of character assassination, which is generally considered unprofessional behavior. We routinely see global warming propagandists using "Positional Authority" as well. I'm pretty sure that the pope--i.e., the Catholic Church--received financial emoluments for signing off on the global warming agenda in hopes that Catholics around the world would agree with "climate change" as the greatest of all threats. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they pay al-Baghdadi to come out against global warming in some sort of Fatwa. In order to sell security, the government itself creates fear. This is why you get lots of conspiracy theories where people are afraid of the government, but they have off-the-wall ideas about what the government's capabilities really are.

And they would not be so afraid if the govt propaganda wasn't focused on frightening them with enemies everywhere, and this hysteria about terrorism, and how mass medias highly increased their coverage of violent events (in France the number of crimes per capita remained stable while their coverage per media doubled on the last ten years).

That's why I enjoy watching ISIS activity now. It's something that scares multiculturalists, but multiculturalists do not want to fight Islam, but rather somehow co-opt it. Whereas, Islam doesn't want to wage a direct frontal assault, as it will lose. So it instead is infiltrating Western nations with the promise of cheap foreign labor only to find sleepers randomly attacking and beheading people.

Privacy, as a category, did not even exist for the mass of humanity until the industrial revolution, any more than the right to property.

Both privacy and property existed well before the Industrial Revolution. In the last James Bond film, Skyfall, you get an insight into Bond's family background. There are "priest holes" in his ancestral home, indicating that his family was Catholic and that they needed to hide priests from Protestant government officers. This is well before the Industrial Revolution. Today, Christianity is under direct assault from homosexuals and left-of-center Jews in positions of government and/or media power and using coercive authority as much as possible. They've gone far enough that they've made a mockery of law itself. "Liberation" itself has become a bit of a parody.

Privacy and property did exist for a tiny elite, but they were not considered part of the natural order for everyone.

The pre-industrial colonies were primarily yeoman farmers. They did own land.

- Corporate entities will have amassed so much data over the years that they can fully predict the desires of consumers

They can do this even without knowing personal identities. For example, WalMart knows that when it gets cold and rainy in the South, the sales of strawberry Pop Tarts increases. They can correlate weather events down to the very flavor of Pop Tarts some people purchase.

- Big Data will be like the garden of Eden; by becoming aware, and covering yourself (blocking privacy invasion), the garden which allegedly keeps you 'materially satisfied' (e.g. predicting needs, wants and desires) will drive you out

Lots of the "Megatrends" and "Future Shock" types argue that knowledge is power, and in a hierarchy of power, knowledge trumps both money and violence. In view of ISIS, I'm not sure that I agree. What use is an F-22 against a group of people armed with AK-47s? It's like having a pizza delivery boy drive a Ferrari to your house to deliver the pizza. One of the dangers of high technology is that it makes people think they are smarter than they really are.

- Facial recognition software coupled with social media will become a veritable plague

It could also have the unintended effect of the citizenry rebelling against the use of such technology. You will notice that courts do not want to be video recorded. Yet, they maintain their own video systems and selectively release video.

- Digital advertisements will use the results of social media data mining to deviously manipulate you on psychological levels which you have no defence against (neuro-marketing)

Unless you know how the technology works. I do, so I find it interesting what they present. For example, I'm single and over 40. So if I scroll through facebook, I routinely hit "women over 40" type stuff. I know exactly how it's done. If you don't understand how it works, it can feel really creepy--like someone is watching you at all times.

[quetzalcoatl]

There is no fundamental right to privacy, only to discretion. Of that which you neither speak nor write, no one will ever know. No one expects their company emails or phone calls to remain private (at least no one rational). There is no use of the word privacy in the constitution, and its rise as a constitutional value is a later gloss (like freedom of speech for corporations). The word privacy is indeed ancient, but its meaning has radically changed in the modern world. Its original quotidian meaning has been inflated to cosmic insignificance.

Privacy, considered as a fundamental right, is incompatible with the modern state. It is incompatible with capitalism. This is all that matters in any operational sense. Those who have money may buy privacy (at least some contingent form of it). The state maintains its own privacy with secrecy laws, because it has the power to punish those who differ.

The state has the right of privacy from its citizens, but the citizens have no right of privacy from the state or powerful corporate institutions. This fundamental asymmetry is no different from any other aspect of modern life.

Why all the crocodile tears over privacy? Do you see libertarians shedding tears over free speech zones or corporate patenting of your DNA? No, and you ain't gonna.

[SolarCross]

@Blackjack

Privacy, as a category, did not even exist for the mass of humanity until the industrial revolution, any more than the right to property.

Privacy and property did exist for a tiny elite, but they were not considered part of the natural order for everyone.

Sorry friend but you have glitched, I did not make those nefarious comments that you are attributing to me.

[quetzalcoatl]

I did not make those nefarious comments that you are attributing to me.

'Tis true. I am the nefariator in question. Just goes to show you have to be careful of quote tags in attribution.