From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2000 - 01:47:33 MST
'What is your name?' 'Zero Powers.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':
> Not really. In fact this sort of power-proportional transparency is already
> in effect in some ways. Right now we can know much more about President
> Clinton than he could ever know about you. I know where and when he travels
> abroad. I know why he has gone there and whom he talked to and what they
> talked about. If I wanted to I could, in a matter of minutes, find out what
> his agenda is for next week, where he'll be and what he'll be doing. In
> fact its probably fair to say that Clinton is the *most* surveilled person
> on the planet, as it should be. And he has been kept alive by his security
> detail for a little more than 5 minutes.
Yes, but there's a hell of a lot you DON'T know about Clinton, especially
wrt his top military generals, the FBI, and the CIA. For comparison, I
bet you don't know a damn thing about what the men at the head of these
organizations are talking about on a day-to-day basis.
This is certainly as it should be, as it's hard to imagine these
organizations doing their jobs effectively without this sort of secrecy.
> >Once, and if, national sovereignty ends or wanes, there will still be
> >other forms of corporate organizations (a government is actually nothing
> >but a corporation with a monopoly on setting the rules of the market and
> >use of overwhelming force) that will gain pre-eminence. Private
> >corporate structures, which owe no allegiance to national governments,
> >bills of human rights, or philosophical principles other than making
> >money and the golden rule (he who has the gold makes the rules). If you
> >are going to end government corporations, you must also end the
> >formation of other corporate structures as well...
>
> Again, not really. Microsoft would be a likely candidate for your big scary
> corporation scenario. But what can Microsoft do to abridge my human rights?
> It cannot legally amass an army. The worst it could do is obtain an
> insurmountable monopoly in the marketplace such that my choice as a consumer
> would be restrained. And as we see in the news everyday, even that ability
> is significanly curtailed by antitrust legislation.
You seem to have missed the antecedent "if national sovreignity ends or
wanes..." Nobody would claim that this is the case today. National
sovreignity is alive and well, for better or worse.
> >Gun control like you advocate has always led to total confiscation,
> >sooner or later, in every country, state, and city in which it has been
> >allowed to become law.
>
> Examples, please. Even if that is the case, that is not what *I* advocate
> (at least not yet).
This is a problem of entailment of consequences. You find it in policy
debate more than anywhere else, IMO.
Alice: We should not abide by your proposal that X, because Y will follow
from it. (where Y is something nasty)
Bob: But I'm not proposing that Y. I'm proposing that X.
Clearly, Bob's making a kind of mistake here. Assuming that X does
*indeed* lead to Y, you CAN'T just propose X without proposing that X & Y.
> Once again, not really. It doesn't take much computing power at all to
> browse an efficiently designed and frequently updated database. Each
> citizen would not have to bear the onerous burden of creating and
> maintaining their own database. The database would be publicly maintained
> (of course under the glare of a great deal of transparency). When I wanted
> the info, I'd just cruise on over to the database, log in and have a look
> around. Not much different than what happens now when you go to google.com.
> I would not have much advantage using a 1ghz Pentium III over somebody
> using a 66mhz 486 in browsing such a database.
I think your picture of this surveilance is naive in an important way.
---
Suppose that all of the people who have the potential to do me some wrong
are fully under surveilance, accessible to me. (The converse need not be
true for this example to work.) In front of me now is a large sampling
of, presumedly, video and audio data.
Now, assumedly, not EVERYONE is doing wrongs or planning to do so right
now. Indeed, by and large, MOST of these people aren't doing anything
nasty at all. Yet it would be *really* naive to think that NONE of them
are. So I need to find them. I don't know where they live, I don't know
their names, I don't even have a very clear picture as to what wrongdoing
would look like, (murder? theft? conspiracy? money laundering? these all
look very different from the eye of a camera,) but, be that as it may, if
this surveilance equipment is to do me any good, I need to find out who's
doing wrong or planning to do so, ideally as it happens. (If you don't
like my use of the word "wrong" throughout, you may replace it with "harm
to me" without much loss of meaning.)
Now, you might not think of this problem as a computational project
straightaway, unless you take into account the general heuristic that
anything a human can identify, a sufficiently complicated computer program
can also identify. Just as computers can be taught to read books and
analyze pieces of music, computers can also be taught to identify
wrongdoing in as nuanced a manner as a human can. We are a long way off
from this point, obviously, but the principle seems sound.
Alternately, if that strong principle didn't appeal to you, then allow me
to assume that your brain, for my purposes, is a computer. If you don't
like me using that word wrt your brain, then let the claim be
metaphorical. Clearly, YOUR BRAIN could identify all the wrongdoing being
done out there right now, simply by looking at the raw footage coming off
the cameras and through the microphones, if it was very fast.
Alternately, a whole vast army of brain-computers could do the same job.
The various data go in, you think about it, and the results (the
identification of wrongdoing as it happens) come out. Even if your brain
isn't (just?) a computer, it's sufficiently computer-like that this
analogy seems to be capturing some relevant similarity.
If you bought either of my two lines of argument, you'll see that turning
the raw data into a report of where wrongdoing is taking place is a
massive computational project. It would either require a massively
powerful computer or a whole lot of thinkers with time on their hands to
do it. As you can probably see, a 486 will be nowhere near the task, nor
even would a 1 TERAHERTZ (one thousand gigahertz) processor be up to the
task of analyzing all of this footage. Not to mention the fact that it's
rather dull work most of the time.
Here, if I know your type, you'll interject "Ah ha! I just happen to have
exactly that, a vast army of people, all keeping their eyes on the
cameras! It's us, the entire human race, *watching ourselves*." But
notice: How many hours per day, on average, do you suppose people will be
watching those cameras? 3 hours a day? 4? 5? Let's make it 6 just to
be generous. This is almost as much as the average person watches TV,
only these cameras are much MUCH less exciting. On account of this, at
maximum, a quarter of the data is getting analyzed for wrongdoing daily.
To compound this problem, there's no reason to think that all of these
people will be keeping their eyes on different cameras, so much of this
data (especially the celebrities) will be analyzed twice. So at MOST a
quarter of the data will be analyzed, but if it turns out to be even half
that, I'd be surprised.
Not looking quite as much like total surveilance anymore, is it? Of
course, I could fix this, at least wrt myself, by buying "computing"
power/time, either by building and using the right sort of computer or by
hiring others to look at the cameras that I pay them to look at and to
report wrongdoings to me. So right away we see significant differences in
YOUR capacity to identify wrongdoing relative to MY capacity to identify
wrongdoing. I'm getting much, much more use out of the system than you
are, because I'm more powerful.
---
There's a reductio at the end of this tunnel.
Now suppose that surveilance is ubiquitous, but a select group of people
know where all of the 'wrongdoing' directed towards them is, thanks to the
fact that they have more powerful computers. Suppose as well that
everyone knows this. Suppose as well that this select group of people is
very powerful.
You're a little guy compared to them. They come to you and make some
outrageous demands, adding that it is pointless to try to resist them,
either alone or in a group, because they'll know if you do, and, they
being very powerful, will squash you like a bug if you try. You know that
they are right, because you have surveilance equipment pointed at them.
How has total surveilance helped you in this case?
You might be inclined to argue that while ubiquitous surveilance might
help keep a despot in power, it will also help prevent a despot from
rising to power in the first place. But this isn't the case either,
thanks to the fact that differences in computing power will ALWAYS make
ubiquitous surveilance equipment more useful to someone with more
computing power than it is to someone with less. So ubiquitous
surveilance equipment benefits the powerful more than it benefits the
weak. It might help somewhat in the mythical state of nature, in which
all people are supposed to be equally powerful relative to everybody else.
In this state, we imagine, only a tyranny of the majority could form. But
even this mythical state wouldn't last, since to whatever extent someone
became more powerful than someone else, this power relative to others
would be magnified by the ubiquitous surveilance equipment.
So ubiquitous surveilance promotes despotism; since despotism is nasty, to
the extent that we can prevent ubiquitous surveilance, we should.
---
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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