[ExI] openness again

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2016-04-03 12:22, John Clark wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 2, 2016  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se 
> <mailto:anders at aleph.se>>wrote:
>
>     ​ > ​
>     My own view is basically that (1) Brin is right: transparent,
>     accountable open societies for the win.
>
>
> ​I presume that wouldn't include the entire world knowing ​my credit 
> card number.

The problem with credit card numbers is that currently we use security 
by obscurity: much of your protection comes from me not knowing your 
number, rather than restrictions on how I can use it. A good 
authentification system would make knowing your card number useless to 
me, just as me knowing your email address doesn't allow me to hack your 
mail server (some extra authentification needed to ensure that I don't 
forge emails from you). Now imagine a 100% surveillance world. In this 
world there would not be a need for a passwords or codes, since in 
principle whenever you wanted to use your card the system could just 
trace you back to the moment you got the card at the bank years before. 
Personal continuity makes for a great authentification system.

Being accountable means that if you do something, others can respond 
appropriately to it. The tricky part is of course the appropriate part: 
this is where the tolerance, and secondary levels of accountability 
comes in (the legitimacy of enforcement). Open societies are all about 
having rules that can be changed and the ability to add new functions as 
desired. This also matters on the private level: allowing people's roles 
in our life change flexibly, and allowing us to change the norms we run 
our social lives on.

>     ​ > ​
>     But (2) to really work they need to be tolerant.
>
>
> Yes, if the NSA knows all there is to know about me then I should know 
> all there is to know about the NSA, and if they have a surveillance 
> camera watching me then I should have a equally good surveillance 
> camera watching them. But for laws that transparency must be 
> reciprocal to be enforced X would have to prove that Y has a secret he 
> is not telling X,  and governments are likely to have more resources 
> to conceal things than individuals have to reveal them. So in the real 
> world Brin's "Transparent Society" is unlikely to be symmetrical; not 
> a plane of clear glass
> ​ but ​
> more like a one way mirror.
This is exactly what he discusses in the book, and argues for strategies 
to get one way mirrors out of the way.

Note that a transparent intelligence agency in a less than 100% 
transparent world doesn't necessarily have to reveal all it knows. It 
can reveal that it monitors the world, but not the information it has 
gathered. It can show what routines are in place to figure out bad 
activities worth taking action against without saying what bad guys it 
currently looks for - but leave ways to verify by current oversight and 
the future that it acted within the bounds of the law. (Yes, revealing 
this can in principle help bad guys, but I think Kerckhoffs's principle 
applies here to - you cannot make a cryptosystem/intelligence system 
much safer by hiding the principles of its operation, and the lack of 
critique and checking means vulnerabilities become deeper).


-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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