[p2p-research] Drone hacking

[Andy Robinson]

*"You are the only person that asserted this mathematics is beyond
ordinary mortals"
*
Someone evidently has a short memory.

"a computer can predict human behavior better than humans can predict
their own behavior"
"Throw lots and lots of raw data into the system
and let the mathematics deal with the useful pattern extraction --
they are much more reliable than humans at discerning subtle
relationships."
"One can trivially derive a working concept of "free will" from the
Invariance Theorem in information theory: no machine can perfectly
predict the behavior of a machine of equal or greater size in *any*
case, including itself"

All of which depend on supercomputers more intelligent than humans doing the
maths.

*"You are correct, I have no skill at teaching the basics... The terms that
you found confusing above are undergraduate level; if I had to elaborate on
what a "finite state
machine" is, we'd never get to the point."*

And you would understand how much, exactly, of the sociological,
anthropological, political science, philosophy and cultural studies
terminology which I use in my work, if I didn't stop and explain it when I
post it to lists like this?

You should not be assuming that people posting to an interdisciplinary list
have knowledge of your own disciplinary specialism.  I'm not one for holding
back from complicated concepts when needed, but really, talking to people
you know very well are not specialists in your field with this kind of
language just makes you sound like a technocrat who wants people to shut up
and accept your authority.  And accusing people of being lazy for not
knowing your particular specialism - when you are patently ignorant of all
other specialisms even at the most elementary level - just adds insult to
injury.

*"The Internet has a certain myopia in that it primarily reflects the
public meme space.  If it isn't in the public consciousness, it
doesn't exist."*

Bullshit.  Even the most obscure things have a few web references in obscure
places.  Pretty much anything that's taught in universities for instance,
pops up in online lecture notes, help guides, student questions, online
journals, references to other journals.  Anything that has even a small
computer-literate discussion basis has its web forums and elists.  There are
sites out there documenting evidence for the existence of nephilim,
documenting ways to solve obscure 1980s text adventures and debating whether
Tolkien's Orcs filled a useful ecological niche.  There are huge bodies of
online material dealing with social control threats real and imagined, from
RFIDs to 'chemtrails'.  I do not believe for a moment that the technologies
you're talking about could be as important as you make out and yet not
generate a substantial fringe interest at least.
*
"It isn't just the one
or two innocuous sensors you might be aware of, it is the integration
of dozens that are completely off the radar for most people"*

Another of those big empirical statements with no supporting evidence or
even examples of the kind of thing you mean.
*
"Work to effectively exploit these resources has been underway for a
number of years now, but for obvious reasons it is not a PR-friendly
subject -- out of sight, out of mind. Even for boring stuff like ad
targeting it weirds people out."*

And not one of the thousands of people who should know about all these
secret sensors gets 'weirded out' her/himself and breaks it to the media, or
at least starts a conspiracy blog.  Yeah right.

Another thing.  If these sensors depend on forms of abuse which are unknown
and unseen, they are inherently vulnerable the moment they start being used,
because people figure out how they're being used and react against it.  Most
people don't know they can be pinpointed via their mobile phone (still less
that it can be remote activated to record them), but when the story breaks,
there may well be a lot of pressure for privacy controls, and either states
will have to change laws to stop data being used in this way, or people will
design technologies to get around it, such as encrypted onion-routed mobile
phone systems.  In any case, most of the people who it really matters to
know already and take sensible countermeasures such as running an
unregistered phone, having several phones, borrowing phones for important
activities, lending their phone to a friend when they're off doing something
they don't want to be seen doing, taking out the sim card or batteries, or
simply not having a mobile phone at all.  So the processes of data gathering
are largely useless to fields such as suppression/management of dissent,
counterinsurgency, 'crime' suppression, etc.  They'll occasionally catch a
person who is tech-naive or careless, but they won't be able to carry out
any large-scale detection, let alone management.
*
"There are dozens of other ubiquitous network-connected
sources that are a lot less obvious because they were purpose-built
for a specific industrial function and being leveraged for other
purposes"*

Which give personalised, fairly reliable data on vast numbers of people of a
type which is actually useful in prediction?  Again you provide no examples,
no evidence, not even the vaguest hint of what kind of things you mean,
except that they're a bit 'like' something completely different.

*"If I am going to solve a real problem, I
prefer to work from cold, hard facts even if they are unpleasant."*

Again you're just expressing your very silly and increasingly annoying
role-persona as Archimedean truth-bearer and realist.  Which really does not
address anything I've said, it just reasserts your own little obsessions
again.

If you seriously believe what you say, then you are a horribly irresponsible
and unethical person.  You apparently know of lots of kinds of pervasive
sensors which are being used to control people's lives, yet do nothing to
expose and raise awareness of them.  You claim to have overwhelming
knowledge of the inner workings of a massive threat to basic freedoms, yet
you refuse to explain this threat except to people who are already
specialists in its inner workings.  Instead you sit on the sidelines sniping
at other people for supposedly being naive in failing to reach conclusions
for which, whatever their truth, these people have no justification (since
they are based on esoteric theories that even a web search can't turn up,
and asserted 'evidence' which is either entirely unsupported or conveniently
unsuppliable).  You see states and corporations about to obtain the capacity
for dystopian levels of social control, yet you do not put out a rallying
cry against them.  Indeed, you actually *work for* these corporations by
selling your services to them (as you've admitted), and train students in
doing such things, hence aiding the bringing-about of the dystopian future
you present.

*"Who said anything about capturing an entire person? This is about
behavior, not what a person is thinking."*

Behaviour is an invention of evil headmistresses.  What humans engage in is
*social action*.  What people are thinking (if 'thinking' is taken to
encompass the unconscious, the structure of language, emotions, and
habituated assumptions) is the basis for how people act.  You can make *no
sense whatsoever* of *anything that any human does* if you aren't concerning
yourself with what they're 'thinking' (again encompassing these various
elements).

If your computers can't think like real analysts of society and culture
think, or *better* than these analysts think, then they will simply be *
useless* in understanding social life, and will be left rusting as social
forces flow around them.

Which is not to say that the idiots who believe they are learning something
meaningful about social life won't do an awful lot of damage with their
idiotic assumptions, the same way that their forebears did a lot of damage
with behaviourism, racial hierarchies, sociobiology, etc.

*"(...odd PKD fantasy elided...)*"

... and with it the crucial questions about the applicability of your
hobby-horse to asymmetrical warfare...

*"What it comes down to is that you really don't understand the
technology, and you object to the implications of the technology on
ideological grounds."
*
The separation between ideology and science is itself ideological.  If you
imagine that your own position (whatever it is) is not ideological but
'neutral', this is conclusive proof that it is in fact ideological.

Though it would be more accurate to say that I object on ethical grounds.
You know, the kind of grounds that those of us who aren't Frankensteins or
Mengeles use to assess what scientists are trying to do.

I understand all too well the claims you're making for the technology, and
how you think it "works".  It's just another incarnation of
externalistic/objectivist attempts to treat human beings as observable
objects reduced to what they are for the scientific gaze, the latest in a
long line of such incarnations (phrenology, mental hygiene, science of
police, racial 'science', behaviourism, operationalism, functionalism,
cognitivism, Taylorism, rational choice theory, social learning theory,
neuropsychological reductionism, medical model psychiatry, sociobiology,
risk management, and on and on ad nauseum) all of which fail because of
their inherent incapacity to engage with the actual basis of social life,
and all of which - if they don't peter out in irrelevance - cause
interminable misery by their incapacity to relate to others on a dialogical
level, an incapacity which is a hardwired part of their externalist mode of
representation.  The moment you admit things like, 'it's not about how you
think, it's about behaviour', or 'it's about finding patterns in aggregative
data', you've admitted enough really.

Don't you worry, the moment *justifiable *grounds emerge for moving this
particular variety of the megalomania of authority up our list of
priorities, plenty of us freedom-loving autonomist-anarchist types will
figure out what your corporate and statist buddies are up to and take
appropriate actions to resist it.  Right now, we're already rather
overstretched with saving the planet from your buddies' insatiable
appetites, and if we don't win this one, the dangers of your own little
fantasy will be rendered moot as the resource basis for organisations able
to sustain the kind of infrastructure needed for it is wiped out, possibly
taking humanity or even life on earth with it.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20091223/072ae576/attachment-0001.html>