[extropy-chat] privacy rights

[Samantha Atkins]

On May 13, 2006, at 4:02 PM, Anders Sandberg wrote:

> [Hi, by the way!]
>

Hey!  Long time no post.

> So, what can we do? First, giving lots of power to the police isn't a
> problem if we can trust the police to serve us. Hence each new power
> should be coupled with an increase in citizen control over the agency.
> Accountability and transparency in exchange for more power. This is  
> not an
> impossible political goal, although at present it is rare and  
> implementing
> it will always be uphill.
>

If the State has more or less complete awareness of everything  
everyone does then the State is also fully aware of any actions by  
anyone or any group of people that may thwart its desires.  If  
citizens do no also have an equal level of view of everything the  
State does then the State will always be able to outmaneuver the  
citizens.  Also, the State as maker of laws, can always find and use  
or even create new laws to punish or stop persons and groups that are  
too troublesome to its desires.  Full surveillance makes this much  
easier.  The police are the enforcement arm of the State.   The  
police cannot be trusted to serve us because the serve the State and  
the State is not perfectly in our control and likely never can be.

>
> Most of the privacy abuses we worry about come from two directions.
> Concentrations of power like corporations and state, and people in our
> close social network. We can use laws and politics against the first,
> enforcing transparency, accountability and maybe paying back  
> externalities
> of privacy loss. The second group is much trickier, because no law can
> protect you from the scorn of your sister or a disapproving mother.  
> And I
> think most of the privacy debate has been so obsessed with one's  
> favorite
> power concentration that we have missed the very real chilling  
> effects of
> creating a transparent village.


I am unsure what you are advocating on the first.  Transparency of  
the state to the people?  The state will never agree to this.    Laws  
can much more easily protect us from actual harm from our fellow  
citizens.  Their mere disapproval is another matter that I doubt we  
need laws against.  But it is not everyone's business what I do.  I  
see no reason to make it my neighbor or the state's business.  I also  
don't believe the perhaps implicit assumption that privacy cannot be  
guarded by technology as well as taken away.

- samantha