The surveillance state of social networking

Social networking sites and tools, are above all, surveillance tools.

You use them to surveille your friends, and in exchange you agree to be surveilled by them and the service provider, and whomever that they share your data with.

This has changed the social landscape from a world of closed doors and drawn curtains, into an age of glass houses, and transparent thoughts. This unprecedented, pervasive surveillance is proving to be a boon to corporate america and government, and has the potential to both increase and undermine our freedoms. the question is, who is driving this train, anyway?

Barring a satisfactory, reassuring answer, I would encourage my readers to look carefully at their social networking decisions. We now have the tools to own our social networking existence, as well as our data. Check out http://diasporaproject.org/ .... they even have Facebook integration, to ease you into self ownership until you can decide to throw away the chains for good.

With Diaspora, you own your profile. You choose where to host it (for free) or you can host it yourself even! You own your data. You can download, store, archive and delete your data, and it is actually gone if you delete it. You can move it to another country (mine is in the Netherlands on http://pod.orkz.net , check them out) , but it doesn't matter where it is at, all the "pods" act as a single social network.

Diaspora is alpha, so there are bugs....but this is our best shot at taking back our privacy, and we need to vote with our feet, so to speak - the more users they have, the more strength they will carry forward.

Join me in instantiating social self ownership, and vote against pervasive surveillance - Join Diaspora, and if you are a Facebook addict, use diaspora's Facebook integration to access your Facebook friends.

The product....

The product....is you.

People that know me know that I started saying this when the web was young, and it has never been more true than it is today.

I am speaking to the users of free web services - services like Facebook, Google Plus, and to a lesser extent blogger, gmail, MSN, and any of thousands of others for which there is no user paying revenue model. (yes, this includes me).

One thing users of these services need to understand...you are not the customer. You are the product. You, your content, your relationships, and your surfing habits, your history, your purchases, your discussions....this is the stuff that millionaires are made of. This should not be big news for many of my readers, but what we often fail to ask ourselves is, what is the real cost of being the product?

Lets look at some generalizations that apply, in varying degrees, to some popular "free" web services

Value propositions:

• Utility - email sure beats sending a letter, and checking your wall is an easy way to check up on what your friends have been doing.
• Entertainment - Who doesn't like to play a game now and then?

The price:

The privacy cost, personal -

•  You can expect that someone, somewhere, has access to a profile of most of the sites you visit, for how long, and what you do while you are there. This data will be used for marketing, then aggregated, warehoused, and sold. Security research shows that although your data may have been "anonomized", it is a trivial exercise, given a large block of data, to personally identify users, even out of multiple users on a single computer. Given a month of "anonomized" web history data from most household PC's, I can likely easily extrapolate how many users, their names, their approximate ages and sex, their home address, their individual preferences in a variety of things, their political views, their social status, their work habits, and often much, much more. I can say that from personal experience that with "anonymized" web history alone, I could make a pretty good play at blackmail with a significant fraction of users. As anyone who has done tech work on home computers can attest, TMI is a regular work hazard. 
• Banks, insurance companies, employers, and law enforcement organizations have been keen to harness the power of this new information source. It is now a common policy to review social networking content prior to approving loans, paying out claims, underwriting patients, and hiring new employees. 
• Harnessing this trend are a new breed of surveillance aggregators that build personal profiles in advance (kind of like a social credit score) identifying health, risk, market, or and behavior data, attaching that data to a personal profile that includes tax and other public records, and proactively selling this information to marketers, employers, investigators, insurers, and lenders. Yes, it is on your permanent record. No, it doesn't matter if it was deleted, it has been cached. All your base are belong to us.

The privacy cost, public-

• Do we value our privacy? The bar for privacy is ever pushed downward by the normalization of total disclosure. The problem with this is that when any of us does this, it pushes the bar down for everyone - sort of like littering, a personal action that has public consequences. 
• Trivializing privacy normalizes pervasive surveillance. Is this really what we want for our future?

Opportunity cost, private-

• We are all painfully aware that each of the 365 days of the year carries 24 precious hours. Of those, about 10 are needed for rest, hygiene, and eating. You may work or go to school for 8 hours - add the commute, and that leaves maybe 5 hours a day for discretionary activities. A recent study of social networking users shows that 95% of social network users who logged in at least once a day used the site for 1 or more hours, with nearly 20% using the site for more than 4 hours a day. What type of value was generated for these users? What else could they have been doing in the social, personal, or educational realm that might have yielded more tangible results? What is the social "payback" of chats and wall posts Vs. a cup of coffee with a friend, or a even a well thought out email?

Opportunity cost, public-

• While the enhanced networking facility of computer facilitated social networking certainly makes connections in the world of commerce and governance easier and more transparent, what are the costs to society of this type of connection versus traditional friendships? It certainly is possible to maintain a brood of internet buddies, while failing to establish any real friendships. 
• Friendships are an important part of our social fabric, literally the glue that forms a cohesive society. These social contracts, especially the implied, unwritten ones, are what makes the world a basically friendly place. 
• What is the collective cost, as a society, of investing our emotional currency in ethereal,  relationships, event though it may be  with people we really know? If it weren't for social networking, would we chose to spend that much time writing to distant friends and relatives? Shouldn't we rather be visiting, talking to, or sharing activities with nearby, real-world friends and neighbors, who provide us with our real world support network? 

Please think this over, and leave any relevant comments or feedback below....

New developments for Daruino.....

A new product and new boards...head on over to the Daruino blog to see what's new!!!

National defense authorization act...Torture Much?

Daily life in extralegal detention,
circa 2003, Abu Ghraib detention facility

It seems that the senate has passed s.1867, a bill that would, according to the ACLU, give the government the power to detain US citizens accused of (yes, just accused of) "beligerent acts" indefinitely, without any sort of due process.

I, frankly, do not see how that can be read from this bill, and that rather extreme interpretation has me a little baffled, although I do agree that some of the language is dangerously vague and subject to mis (or dis) interpretation.

Read it (the controversial section)  for yourself:




SEC. 1031. AFFIRMATION OF AUTHORITY OF THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES TO DETAIN COVERED PERSONS PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE.


(a) In General – Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.

(b) Covered Persons – A covered person under this section is any person as follows:

(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

(c) Disposition Under Law of War – The disposition of a person under the law of war as described in subsection (a) may include the following:

(1) Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

(2) Trial under chapter 47A of title 10, United States Code (as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2009 (title XVIII of Public Law 111-84)).

(3) Transfer for trial by an alternative court or competent tribunal having lawful jurisdiction.

(4) Transfer to the custody or control of the person’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.

(d) Construction- Nothing in this section is intended to limit or expand the authority of the President or the scope of the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

(e) Requirement for Briefings of Congress – The Secretary of Defense shall regularly brief Congress regarding the application of the authority described in this section, including the organizations, entities, and individuals considered to be ‘covered persons’ for purposes of subsection (b)(2).
SEC. 1032. REQUIREMENT FOR MILITARY CUSTODY.

(a) Custody Pending Disposition Under Law of War -

(1) IN GENERAL – Except as provided in paragraph (4), the Armed Forces of the United States shall hold a person described in paragraph (2) who is captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) in military custody pending disposition under the law of war.

(2) COVERED PERSONS – The requirement in paragraph (1) shall apply to any person whose detention is authorized under section 1031 who is determined–

(A) to be a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force that acts in coordination with or pursuant to the direction of al-Qaeda; and

(B) to have participated in the course of planning or carrying out an attack or attempted attack against the United States or its coalition partners.

(3) DISPOSITION UNDER LAW OF WAR – For purposes of this subsection, the disposition of a person under the law of war has the meaning given in section 1031(c), except that no transfer otherwise described in paragraph (4) of that seciton shall be made unless consistent with the requirements of section 1033.

(4) WAIVER FOR NATIONAL SECURITY – The Secretary of Defense may, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, waive the requirement of paragraph (1) if the Secretary submits to Congress a certification in writing that such a waiver is in the national security of the United States.

(b) Applicability to United States Citizens and Lawful Resident Aliens -

(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS – The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to citizens of the United States.

(2) LAWFUL RESIDENT ALIENS – The requirement to detain a person in military custody under this section does not extend to a lawful resident alien of the United States on the basis of conduct taking place within the United States, except to the extent permitted by the Constitution of the United States.

It seems to me that this states that :

Persons involved in the 2011 WTC attacks, specific organizations, and their affiliates are subject to detainment in military custody, if they are not US citizens or legal residents.

Military custody is imprisonment subject to the protections of the Geneva convention. If anything, this bill offers greater protection to foreign combatants, but does not extend this privilege to citizens and residents engaged in belligerent acts connected to specified acts and organizations: but maybe I read it wrong? 

(1) A person who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks.

(2) A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

Notably, I notice that no broad new classes of persons are made eligible for detention under 1031, except that citizens and residents to which 1 or 2 above apply may find themselves in a legal vacuum.

Interestingly, the Obama Administration has stated in this policy letter that they do not support the bill, but this is not a happy warm fuzzy Obama is protecting the nation moment.

The letter text makes clear that the administration does not want to be hobbled in their ability to perform indefinite, unsupervised, unlimited detention and "interrogation" (Torture much, Mr President?) that clearly would not be permissible under the Geneva convention.

I would like to make it abundantly clear at this point that I am a firmly against state-sanctioned torture. Torture should always be illegal, and if performed, performed under the duress and urgency of the situation for which the torturers are willing to risk their freedom or lives to perform. If discovered, perpetrators of torture should be subject to severe punishments in federal criminal proceedings, possibly including the death penalty. I believe that this is the only way that this monster can be kept in check. I also believe that indefinite detention without any framework of charge, legal recourse, review, or appeal is certainly torture, in itself.

That said, I can see the argument against affording terrorists the protections of the Geneva Convention, as this international treaty assumes a context of nation vs nation warfare within the context of other treaties on the conduct of war. Clearly, terrorist organizations do not adhere to these treaties themselves, and arguably then, should not be protected by treaties to which they themselves do nod abide.

Nonetheless, if the United States is to stand for the rule of law and the right to peaceful existence, then we must not openly hold anyone, no matter how despicable, in absence of a valid legal framework that we would endorse for global use. We must publicly renounce torture in all of its forms.... and we should keep our secrets secret.

The order of things.....and where is ET, anyway?

Second Order

First order organisms: Organic or artificial organisms that either evolved or were constructed, more or less as they are. In so far as they may undergo changes over the course of generations, these changes are neither intentional nor directed.

Earth is a planet of first order organisms. We are first order organisms. This is about to change.....


As a species, our comparatively high intelligence has only fueled a desire for more intelligence, better decisions based on more complex analysis, and an ever increasing thirst for higher and higher cognitive resolution.

It is, of course, not strictly required, to efficiently process information about your environment to survive - plants, trees, and an ocean of phytoplankton bear silent witness to this obvious fact. Nonetheless, there is a benefit accrued by those creatures who would assimilate and calculate based on environmental information. Sensors of various types evolved along with the first mobile creatures suggesting that information about ones surroundings only carries benefit insofar as one can react to that data, or perhaps suggesting that the ability to act without useful information is pointless.

We are perhaps twenty to one hundred years away from the capability to endow ourselves or a creature that we create with the capacity to perform significant intentional self modification, resulting in a new or improved species. It is very likely that such optimization will center around intelligence, as it is intelligence that will permit further success in self modification.

At this point we will have either become or created a second order life form - one capable of intentionally engineering itself or its offspring.

Second order life forms are likely to undergo a period of recursive acceleration - exponential increases in intelligence, right up to the point where some physical law steps in to say that more improvements are impractical (or perhaps unnecessary). This could easily result in a ten order of magnitude (or more) improvement in our data processing capability, such that an organism so endowed could conceivably experience centuries of man-thought-hours in every passing second. (Of course, this type of improvement would not likely be possible within the limiting framework of organic biology - we will probably need to incorporate other types of technology)

A creature of this nature would be as dissimilar to us as we are to ants - both able to process information, Turing complete, so to say..... but we could literally have nothing of interest to say to such a being, as even in finishing our first sentence, they would have experienced a the passing of mental millenia.

It is interesting to note, that this evolution or genesis will have transpired within 5000 years of the dawn of modern civilization, and within 500 years of the first complex machines. This is a tiny slice of time, even by mere geologic scales.

In the timescale of the universe, such a period is hardly worth mentioning. If our situation is representative of intelligent life forms, such that they might quickly develop ways to reduce or transcend their limitations, then by far the most likely creature to find at large in the universe will be a second order, intentionally evolving being.

This begs a walk down the rabbit hole, where we might field some interesting questions.

If we assume that:

• Our level of technological prowess is a very short, fleeting stage in the evolution of intelligent, technically oriented species, that will quickly be eclipsed entirely as we move on to second-order existence, unless we suffer a cataclysmic setback.
• Planets capable of supporting advanced life forms number it the trillions within the observable universe
• Advanced, intelligent first order organisms are a predictable outcome of evolution on at least a significant fraction of these planets
• A significant fraction of technologically oriented first order intelligences will be driven towards the development of or the incorporation of second order feature sets
• The sweet spot for life varies from system to system by a few billion years

Then we can infer that:

• Civilizations at our level of technological development have a high probability of evolving into second-order creatures before they manage the complexities of "superluminal" interstellar travel
• There are probably countless civilizations that have moved on to or generated second order life forms, which have had ample opportunity to spread throughout the universe, but relatively few civilizations at our exact level of development.

So where are they?

First, we have no clue as to what a fully evolved second order creature would be like. We can guess that they might be quite small, as the speed of light will constrain the size of their brains, at least at first. We can guess that they will probably be both very efficient and highly consumptive, at least in bursts. (my back of the napkin calculations show that a foreseeable human enhancement might dissipate 15kw + during fully loaded thought)

They might predictably be energy oriented, and well adapted to life in space, where resource acquisition is less problematic than a quickly exhausted planetary resource.

Second, how will we know one if we see it? Well, since we are just now coming to terms with the high intelligence of octupi and dolphins, it is clear that we are highly biased to assume that intelligent = similar to us. This, of course, is rubbish. Remembering that a second order being would have centuries of thought for every human second, it is useless to imagine that we would have any meaningful interaction with a second order life form, much less that they would exhibit anything but an infinitesimally fleeting curiosity about us.....if curiosity as we know it is even a trait of a second order being.

They could be so small as to be hard to detect, and they could operate on quantum principles that would make them seem, to the observer grounded in particle - land, as inert objects, upon first observation.

So, in short, we might see them (if we even notice them) as being enigmatic creatures with extraordinary capabilities, but we are very unlikely to directly recognize any evidence whatsoever of their intelligence. We could not hope to comprehend or interpret the thoughts or actions of millenia over the span of a few seconds. We could literally be surrounded by them and have no clue, except that maybe they could do things that seemed impossible, if we even noticed them at all.

Furthermore, such beings, if they exist, might not be concerned at all with place, much less have need of a home-world. It seems to me quite likely, that space around all the stars could be inhabited already. I naively imagine them like space - jellyfish....infinitely intelligent by our standards, impossible to "kill" in the conventional sense, yet easily (if temporarily) disintegrated by a passing sweep of a hand - if they permitted it.

hmmmm...

At any rate, it is worth an introspecive moment.......


-Fin