[ExI] openness again

[William Flynn Wallace]

Anders - ​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).​

OK, I'll bite - why don't they do that?  bill w

On Sun, Apr 3, 2016 at 8:16 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 2016-04-03 12:22, John Clark wrote:
>
> On Sat, Apr 2, 2016  Anders Sandberg < <anders at aleph.se>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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