[extropy-chat] Transparency vs. terrorism

[Technotranscendence]

On Saturday, August 06, 2005 8:27 PM Dan Clemmensen dgc at cox.net wrote:
> As a society we in the US have shown a
> distressing tendency to give up freedoms
> to counter terrorists.

Or for any emergency, real or imagined.  Nowadays, terrorism is the big
excuse.  A few years ago, it used to be anything "to protect the
children."  Those who crave power will ever find ways to persuade others
to give it to them.

> As long as we are going in this direction
> anyway, why not go a bit further. If we give
> up the (non-existent) right to privacy in public,
> we can make it much harder on terrorists.

The problems, of course, are a) defining just what is public and b)
allowing this will erode other freedoms.  On the former, the legal
authorities have a tendency to define rather broadly when it suits the
desires of the powerful.  On the latter, remember, there are many things
that might be used against people.  Just a few years ago, two gay guys
meeting in, say, Central Park to have a date -- not sex in public, but
just a date -- would've been considered illegal.  With such a system of
omnipresent surveillance and a total unconcern for privacy, don't you
fear that the outcome will be more oppression?

> Survielance cameras are relatively cheap.
> Monitoring surveilance cameras is relatively
> expensive. Let's put cameras damn near
> everywhere, and allow anyone who so
> desires to monitor them. Ten million snoopy
> little old ladies (LOLs) can easily monitor a
> million cameras, and they will do it on a
> volunteer basis. Each LOL monitors ten
> cameras at once for 15 minutes/day. A US
> population of 380M must have at least 38M
> available LOLs (some are actually men.)
> Teenagers and adults might want to participate
> also, and many LOLs will take multiple 15-minute
> shifts. We can trade hours with European and
> Asian so nobody needs to monitor at night
> unless they want to.
>
> When a LOL sees something suspicious, they
> push the "alert" button. The problem is flashed
> to a hundred other LOSs at random, and if at
> least ten of then agree that a problem exists,
> the alert for the camera is flashed to the
> professionals.
>
> As the program becomes more mature, we
> can use really dumb automatic filtering to
> remove most of the cameras from
> consideration most of the time. Even a simple
> motion detector would increase the LOL
> productivity by a factor of ten or more.

What's to stop the system from being abused?  I can just see
criminals -- including the government -- selectively blacking out areas.
I can also see attention being directed at undesirables of all sorts.
Such a system is likely to only add power to already too powerful nation
states.  Now, you might claim this is not so bad, that we can trust the
current crop of politicians and functionaries not to abuse such power
too much.  But what happens with the next crop?  And the one after that?
What happens when, after you've laid the foundations for a totalitarian
state, one is actually erected upon those foundations?  I predict that
then the terrorism will not be retail but wholesale, but none will be
calling it such.

I'm amazed so few others on this list have such concerns.  I expected a
storm of protest.  Along with libertarianism, has a healthy protective
attitude toward liberty been exorcised from the list?

Regards,

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/~neptune/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."  -- Attributed to
Benjamin Franklin