Home court advantage

The US government is at least as great a threat to a free and open Internet as any of those it routinely castigates in its Human Rights reports.

Yes, the United States and the People’s Republic of China clearly pose the same magnitude of threat to a free and open internet. I’d be amazed if this comment makes it beyond the Great Wall that the US has built. And within the US it’s incredibly difficult to speak openly of any government scandals (even fictional ones) that could cause popular unrest, as government censors are able to quickly find and delete such references. Of course, dissidents are treated identically within the US and the PRC as well – that’s why so many people in the US use anonymizing tools like Tor (developed, at a very early stage and for a different purpose, by the US Government) in the US and the PRC. It’s very dangerous to sign on to parties and causes in opposition to current government policy (that’s why fringe groups rarely gain media coverage or political influence in the United States). Personally, I feel much more secure when I’m microblogging in China from a laptop running LPS Linux, with a VM running a BSD variant, a prepaid SIM card, and three proxy levels, about Tian– I mean, two raised to the sixth power.

More seriously, recently I was rereading Arthur Danto’s essay on “Dangerous Art”, which serves as a reminder of how cheap and plentiful ideas and arguments are in the West, and how fraught with power they can seem to be in more oppressive regimes. Oppressive regimes have much more perceived interest in regulating speech than Western countries do.

Anyway, moving away from the current process towards something like the ITU, i.e. taking more influence away from nonprofit organizations and giving more influence to governments that have an open and vehement pursuit of the regulation of political content on the internet, strikes me as a bad direction to go, regardless of your views of the current state of affairs.

Western democracies all have fairly solid adherence to rule of law. Changing the law of those countries, if one thinks they’re being too intrusive, is probably the quickest and most effective solution.

There are also technological solutions – free and legal in the West – which can be used if you’re concerned about private or government surveillance.

Both of these are preferable to allowing countries like the PRC any more influence over the structure of the internet than they already have.

Is there any particular evidence that we’d end up with fewer, rather than more, barriers to surveillance if we had a consortium of governments in charge of Internet standards?

The comments at Ars Technica cover the ground pretty well. Eight months ago they did not yet have Snowden, but some of the commenters seem to have known the facts. The one big thing that had not happened was the exhibition of cool arrogance with which Evo Morales’s plane was grounded until it had been looked over.

Yes, the United States and the People’s Republic of China clearly pose the same magnitude of threat to a free and open internet.

You say this as if China is the larger threat to the entire Internet, on a worldwide scale. China certainly does have much stronger and more severe internal censorship than the U.S. does.

Marc @ 3: Is there any particular evidence that we’d end up with fewer, rather than more, barriers to surveillance if we had a consortium of governments in charge of Internet standards?

Consortium of “governments” or giant business corporations?

Whose surveillance of whom are we enabling and protecting?

Stephen: Bradley Manning. And the “Communication Management Units” within the US ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-mcgowan/communication-management-units_b_2944580.html )

Changing the law of those countries, if one thinks they’re being too intrusive, is probably the quickest and most effective solution.

Why didn’t I think of that??? I’m gonna call my Congressperson right away!!

There is an opportunity here for a small democratic non-militaristic nation with no deep ties to the US, China,Russia, or the EU to generate a great sucking sound that brings much of the cloud industry out of silicon valley. Enshrine into law serious privacy protections without the usual blanket national security escape clauses (the EU has much stronger consumer privacy standards, but I’m not sure how much protection you have against the government. The stunning violation of the international order with Morales shows the US can still say jump to the EU, even France, when it comes to security issues.). Yes, privacy can be violated for cause, but no blanket sweeps and a real judicial process to determine cause.

One or a coalition of the leftist governments of South America would seem the likely choice.

They would have to mean it though. Strong privacy is not necessarily part of traditional leftist ideology and I am not sure how traditional the South American Left is in this respect (or others). It would require a commitment to privacy not contingent on whose interest privacy serves, as the latter will vary and is a complex question, but the commitment will have to be unequivocal to be credible.

Stephen @ 10

“I suppose the “US dissidents” you mean are the prisoners in Guantanamo. As far as I can make out, they are neither US nor dissidents. (Which is not to say they should all be there.) Are there any other US dissidents, imprisoned and tortured, you had in mind?”

Bradley Manning was who I had in mind. Remember him?

“And do you really mean to imply that genuine Chinese dissidents in China are not treated in a way that would be thought intolerable in the US?”

No, not at all. I mean to make 2 points: First, what’s the virtue in abusing dissidents less frequently than does another? Doesn’t that amount to defining virtue as a lower sin count?

Second, how does a discussion about the treatment of dissidents serve as a counter to the contention that ‘the US government is at least as great a threat to a free and open Internet as any of those it routinely castigates in its Human Rights reports’?

Andrew’s objection is silly – the US has manifestly greater capacity to trample a free and open Internet than does the PRC, and it has demonstrated its willingness to use that capacity for reasons little better than petty.

According to the wikipedia article on the “2011 crackdown on dissidents in the PRC”, “…human rights groups have claimed that more than 54 people have been arrested by authorities, some of whom have been charged with crimes”. That seems like a relatively small number. Another entry informs that “It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.” Is today’s China more liberal that the US in the 50s, not to mention the 60s-70s, with the 68 convention, Kent state, cointelpro, etc?

Anon @ 18

“the most left-wing administration in US history.”

That bit of hyperbole is a favorite talking point of the American right, but no one with even a dim knowledge of US history takes it seriously.

The US is ahead of China in Internet surveillance and questionable means of controlling Internet traffic? In the part of the Internet that China has control over people need to develop code words for politically embarrassing events because if they don’t then their emails or social media posts will disappear, their search queries will return no results, and their Internet connection will become unreliable for a few hours.

They only reason they might be further behind the US is that they have less traffic to get their hands on.

It really does seem as if “US bad” is the operative logic, as opposed to “here is a specific alternative that would make surveillance less pervasive”.

Jake,

China uses their system more overtly and seemingly on a greater scale* than the US, but that does not mean they have greater technical abilities.

*Except not really. NSA apparently processes every email and phone call in or connected through the USA, and maybe web site visits too (I forget?).

It always seemed inevitable to me that the Internet would be turned into television. I thought it much less likely that it would also be turned into the Ministry of Truth, if only because the real powers that be are more interested in profiting from controlled consumption than in from controlled thought. What actually happened — the Internet as universal targeting device — is much more interesting, not only because it turns anonymity into the luxury good most sought after by the powerful, who mistakenly believe that they can afford it, but also because those doing the targeting, and those being targeted, can be switched around without warning. It’s almost as capricious a force as Greek divinities were once said to be….

Yes, because neoliberal anarchy has worked out so well, by all means let’s restrict our imaginations to that and corporate oligarchy — what could go wrong?

@32. Oh man. Define a DMZ host and disable the firewall, and you’re publicly-accessible. If that’s what you want.

@34: One of the outcomes of the Snowden fallout is that the UK is a big player, with far fewer safeguards than the US. France also has a major effort. And I think people here are massively understating the level of what China is doing in terms of surveillance of their own people and in aggressive hacking of foreign nationals and companies. I think that focusing on the US alone in this context is missing the broader nature of what’s happening – and any solutions will require broad coalitions and a recognition that it’s much more than one government that is involved.

I’m also appalled to see the massive human rights violations in China being minimized in this thread. It really does play to the worst stereotypes of the far left, and bad behavior by the US government does not excuse the treatment of the people of China by their own government.

Layman@17

Sorry, I didn’t realise that when you wrote, of US dissidents, that the US “holds them incommunicado without access to courts, for years, while torturing them” you meant Bradley Manning.

I think I can be forgiven for my mistake. As far as I know, Manning is only case and you seemed to be writing about several. He undoubtedly disgrees with US Government policy, but was not arrested for being a dissident: rather for actions which, if he had undertaken them in any other country, even highly liberal Sweden or Canada, against the government of that country would equally have caused his arrest. He has not been held incommunicado, without access to courts, for years. And I don’t think he’s been tortured – kept in harsh conditions for a while, yes, and he should not have been.

Apart from those matters, your description was 100% accurate.

And it’s a reactionary position to undermine human/civil rights violations at home by pointing out something worse internationally (Like demanding feminists can’t concentrate on domestic issues until they’ve saved the world)

China is still considered ‘leftist’?

Marc @ 25: “It really does seem as if “US bad” is the operative logic, as opposed to “here is a specific alternative . . .” ”

Sebastian H @ 42: “There seem to be two threads that aren’t being well distinguished. . . .”

For better or worse, the world has often tried to use U.S. hegemony as a leverage point for establishing and running international institutions. Since U.S. intervention ended the First World War — the hell where the Concert of Europe died — and the U.S. arrived at the forefront of the Second Industrial Revolution in its aftermath, U.S. hegemony has been a regularly chosen alternative organizing principle. The reputation of U.S. political and economic institutions for integrity, whether deserved or not, in any given instance or moment, was an additional selling point.

(There have been other models. The Swiss have their neutrality, the French their rationalism and the Germans, their engineering, and, of course, the British, English, London banks, etc.)

One doesn’t have to be particularly hostile to the U.S. to recognize that its hegemony is eroding rapidly, and the integrity of many of its institutions have been lost to a tsunami of neoliberal corruption. (The Attorney General of the U.S. is writing to a KGB alum, to assure him mildly, “Torture is unlawful in the United States.”)

The internet’s standards are a public good, and the provision of public goods in a world awash in neoliberal idiocy, is going to be hard to even think about, seriously. The precedent of the Tower of Babel does not suggest that anarchy will be our friend, or that collective action in this arena will end well, should the 250 year history of Anglo-American global hegemony draw to a sudden close.

I’d like to think that the world is capable of rising to the occasion. The internet needs a revised architecture, one that provides a better foundation for security and privacy. So, it isn’t just a matter of finding a trustworthy custodian; we need some innovative entrepreneurs and architects — a change agent — to drive things forward. Given that the world desperately needs to develop institutions to control energy use and the climate, this much smaller, but still challenging task, might be a useful precedent, if accomplished.

I think we are more likely to get the reactionary conservativism of technocratic Mandarins and/or that Tower of Babel, from which all will flee into localism when it fails to reach the heights.

Timberman identified the problem that will bring down our Tower of Babel: everyone and anyone can be targeted, by anyone or everyone. Our allotted 15 minutes of fame is reduced to secret milliseconds. Chaos at 11.

The best solution to search and social network would indead be a global non profit financed through taxes that has a similar market share as google and facebook today, which is banned from collecting any data or show any ads. Short of that far off vision, id rather have anything different from the situation right now, including different for profit social networks in every nation that do not have connections which each other.

Salient, who exactly are we treating like that? Snowden revealed operational details from which foreign intelligence agencies learned about a vulnerability, by posting a photograph of what that intelligence looked like. (It was from RF analysis of a laser printer) That’s far beyond revealing the FISA court order in terms of damage to national security. It’s the kind of information that the public doesn’t need to know to debate these programs, any more than you need to know the Teller-Ulam mechanism to debate nuclear weapons.

As for the home court advantage, the risk would be the ITU creating international cooperation on censorship, under the guise of harmonization of laws. This has already begun, with Spain supporting the removal of information about historical accidents from Google because persons might not want to camp at the campsite involved. Singaporean censorship involves civil actions against critics of the government, and frequently abuse of libel laws. Imagine if they establish that US papers need to heed these orders. Espionage would of course continue: why wouldn’t you tap information flowing through your country and to its corporations if it could help you with serious threats?

Ronan (rf) @41.

Very interesting, many thanks.

But not, as far as I can see, absolutely relevant to the problem under discussion: how do we best ensure the oversight of the internet, with neither intolerable oppression (the Chinese model as far as they can make it extend) or misuse by deeply undemocratic groups to destroy democracy (the CCP I shouldn’t wonder: Salafist/al-Qaeda/IRA). Not, of course, that some of these groups used electronic communications much once they realised how vulnerable they are to interception: couriers preferable, as your link says.

Collaboration between different intelligence agencies has been going on for centuries. One part of the problem in the article you linked to is that, even if agencies can trust their own governments not to act foolishly with the information they receive (a large if) they can rightly have less trust in other governments.

How all that really helps with the original problem is for you, I hope, to make clear.

“Espionage would of course continue: why wouldn’t you tap information flowing through your country and to its corporations”

Google, for example, has data centers all over the world, but it is a US company. If it was an ‘international utility’ sort of thing, the US would’ve only been able to tap information flowing through the wires and data centers on its territory (and that wouldn’t be easy, without backdoor access to encryption), which seems like more of an internal matter.

I don’t have anything close to an answer, unfortunately.
However my own preference would be that at some stage we’d, collectively, stop inflating nuisances to the level of existential threats, and get a grip
Which could be done with charts

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/20th-century-death/

Which isn’t really an answer Stephen, I honestly dont know. How to police the internet is a technical question I don’t really have any ability to answer. Im sure some set of imperfect standards will evolve over time as a result of bargains struck between various actors
The more specific one I got sidetracked on, how to deal with national security threats, I, personally, believe could be resolved with a more realistic analysis of the threats we face

“Salient, who exactly are we treating like that? Snowden revealed operational details from which foreign intelligence agencies..”

It’s not really operational intelligence in a conventional sense, though I guess an argument could reasonably be made that certain aspects of the leak did reveal operational ‘details’ (Afaik Manning didn’t though)
But in general, and I would imagine in ‘spirit’, it was just revealing known secrets, so the response seems heavy handed
The Obama admin doesnt appear to be particularly smart in this area though, so I’m not exactly sure what they think these shows of ‘strength’ accomplish (surely no real electoral pay off, perhaps a political one, doesnt seem to be much of a disincentive to would be leakers, I would assume it’s something ‘cultural’/ideological in the US national security community)
But to the first part of your question, it wouldnt be difficult to take a guess as to what communities might be targetted in a ‘war on Islamic terrorism’
Sorry for the diversion, Ill leave it there

But in general, and I would imagine in ‘spirit’, it was just revealing known secrets, so the response seems heavy handed

But this is always one of the defences offered for secrecy: “[despite our best efforts] previous leaks revealed most of this, so what do you need [i]this[/i] leak for? You knew it all anyway”.

Giving some voice even to worse non US actors can still improve things. Not just compared to keeping more power in the US, also compared to say giving all power to Norway. Evil oppressive dictatorships have at least some feedback mechanism that makes them reflect their peoples concerns in international negotiations.

The U.S. incarcerates an absurdly large number of people — more than any other country — and also holds too many in solitary confinement for extended periods (cf. long-running litigation on this and prisoner hunger strikes in CA). This issue shd be distinguished from the question of political prisoners — i.e. people in prison for politically-motivated acts — of which there are a certain number in the U.S. but, as noted earlier in this thread, not on anything approaching the Chinese scale. (Nor does the U.S. usu. imprison people for expressing their beliefs, short of threats to commit violent acts.)

Manning is an exceptional and of course visible case (as, in a somewhat different way, was Jose Padilla, less obvs. a political case but he was held in a military brig for several yrs without formal charges, let alone trial). But it remains to be seen whether Manning, his trial just having finished, will be convicted (and if so, on what charges). Presumably, if the judge (there’s no jury) finds him guilty, he can take some kind of appeal within the mil. justice system (?).

The notion that forcing a country that pays lip service to human rights and protects them in some respects, though it does not include privacy as a human right, at least not consistently – the US – to share power with a country that holds human rights in open contempt – China – will lead to a net increase in respect for human rights seems pretty unlikely. Admittedly there is more to international control than cutting China in, but cutting China in will be a definite feature, and many other countries that would be cut in are also no friends of human rights, free expression, or privacy.

At this point, all the major powers, including the US, are more concerned with threats within than without. This includes, yes, terrorism, but also any political movement or popular practice that might pose a threat to established power, or (especially in the US, but to some degree in all) established commercial interests. Therefore the logical compromise for these powers to negotiate is one where they sacrifice some of their ability to foment subversion in foreign countries, at least the powerful players, which currently looks unpromising anyway, in return for the ability to monitor and suppress at will those who might pose a threat to them, which is to say non-state actors, violent or otherwise. Also, all security states want their own secrets kept and non-allied others exposed, but they want the first more than the second, so any treaty they agree to will empower all of them maximally, since that is what they all want, more than they want to weaken the others. The main thing security states can get from an international agreement is greater control outside their own borders. It’s the UKUSA agreement, where the US and UK each circumvented restrictions on surveilling their own citizens by surveilling one another’s, writ large. It will not mean less US surveillance; it will mean Chinese and Russian too.

It is worth noting what the US did right with the Internet. It protected very strong free speech standards. Other than child pornography, obscure and dangerous munitions info (e.g., building nukes), state secrets, or intellectual property, you can say what you want. All states would have agreed on state secrets, at least their own, though only powerful ones have as many secrets as the US. I suppose most would have agreed with child pornography and munitions info. Some would do better without intellectual property laws, and that is a current political dispute.

But even the EU probably would not have advocated an Internet with unqualified freedom of political expression – they would likely have banned “Nazi propaganda” or “hate speech” for example, and Germany may have wanted to ban Scientology – which may sound nice, but would have led to a much different Internet. The moderators here make judgments about what does and does not cross the line, but what if those judgments had to answer to law? What if someone made coded references to Scientology that the moderators did not understand? Trying to run a site like this would be enormously difficult and subject you to liability. If someone advocates eugenics, does that cross the line? What if it is non-exterminative? What if it is not clear whether it is non-exterminative? You might think yes or no, but do you want to end up in court if you guess wrong? You might avoid liability by being a common carrier, but then you can’t moderate at all: if you are a common carrier, you don’t get to filter content. The reason private moderation can work is that there is no government control of speech, save in fairly narrow and easily identified circumstances.

Salient, who exactly are we treating like that?

You are a sick, disgusting person and are, in fact, one of the very few human beings in whose face I would gladly spit, given the chance.

(And, no, that sentence isn’t necessarily me speaking to Watson, though it’s definitely exactly equivalent to what Watson is communicating to me.)

The “let the troll converse forever with a mirror” fisking wasn’t successful, apparently. At some point we’re just going to have to agree to just not comment toward one another, at all, ever. I don’t have the energy to put up with your shit, and I don’t want to be in a position where I have to ensure you don’t have the energy to put up with mine.

“The notion that forcing a country that pays lip service to human rights and protects them in some respects, though it does not include privacy as a human right, at least not consistently – the US – to share power with a country that holds human rights in open contempt – China – will lead to a net increase in respect for human rights seems pretty unlikely.”

This is, most definitely, not about any “respect for human rights”. This is about governing certain aspects of the infrastructure; making sure, for example, that there is a reputable certificate authority operating outside any national jurisdiction. DNS servers that won’t report to any government what domains you’re looking up. Etc.

Well, if you consider privacy a human right, as I do, then it is a human rights issue, but let’s leave aside semantics.

The ITU has made quite clear that *increased* power of governments to monitor and control the Internet is item number 1 on their agenda. That is why groups like the EFF and the FAS have lined up against them. Why would such a group support DNS servers operating outside any national jurisdiction? That is exactly the sort of thing they are trying to stamp out. Their general premise has been that national governments have too little control over the Internet, not too much.

Even when the ITU cites the noblest ideals of its parent organization, the UN, it inserts telling caveats:

“n) One ideal is that the Internet, as a decentralized and open system, must be allowed to enable the world’s citizens to connect freely and express themselves consistent with fundamental principles of freedom of expression, as detailed in Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recently reaffirmed by the UN Human Rights Council, *while taking into consideration national security or of public order (ordre public), or of public health or morals*”[emphasis added]

The first principle of their multi-stakeholder model is “i. Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. ”

With regards to a general philosophy of Internet governance, they identify two views (this is an international organization and the US and its allies are members, so the US view has to be acknowledged. However, the proposals the ITU has put forward do not reflect the US/EU – basically western – view, which is why the US and Europe have strongly opposed them). One – associated by them with the US and EU – is that the current model of decentralized control – largely by non-profit groups at the level of basic protocols and for-profit companies at that of applications – has worked well and should be substantially retained. The other – pushed by Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Algeria, among others – holds that governments specifically are a stakeholder group that has been disempowered by the current system. One might think they mean governments other than the US, but that is not what they are saying, nor what their proposals imply. The position that the US or governments generally have too much power in the current system and that it needs to be reduced seems utterly alien to their thinking.

Here are some sources:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/14/telecoms-treaty-internet-unregulated
http://www.zdnet.com/uns-itu-pursues-internet-control-again-this-week-7000015259/

Even (some of ) the Russian press acknowledges that the ITU is about establishing greater state control including deep packet inspection and censorship.
http://rt.com/usa/new-internet-itu-us-160/

Here is one of the ITUs own docs:
http://www.itu.int/md/S12-WTPF13PREP-R-0005/en

Overall, I see no evidence that ITU objects to anything the NSA is doing. Rather it wants other countries to do that too (as many no doubt to the best of their abilities), and much else besides.

Martin, could you link to these ITU papers that express their interest in censorship, please.

Also, how do you know about the “two reasons why countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia are so keen to put the ITU in charge”? Why couldn’t the desire to limit the US hegemony be a reason? Or the reason.

Identification is a critical issue, and it is tied to the emergence of payments systems. Very, very powerful, and shadowy interests in the U.S. have worked long and hard to prevent institution of a system of identification — I don’t know why; I just make the observation. The U.S. has rampant identity theft problems for a reason, and I don’t think it is because of an all-powerful, obstructive ACLU.

What does emerge from the efforts to re-invent payments systems, and, incidentally, identification, may well have a design intended to be asymmetric: you cannot avoid or obscure personal identification, but you are not allowed to verify corporate identification; who owes money to a bank might be very hard to deny, even when it is not true — but who owns a mortgage on a house might be impossible to verify. “The check is in the mail” will work for corporate parties in relation to powerless individuals and households, but not vice versa. And, the power of a public infrastructure of courts to intervene in property and debt disputes will be curtailed in favor of private arbitration, taking identification and payments systems in a neo-feudal direction.

Censorship? That’s what you’re worried about? Keep twitter and facebook and instagram in a fishbowl, and nothing like “content” censorship will be necessary to prevent social, political organization. The key there is membership, and the key to tracking membership is identification and association — intervention on the level of ideas and information is child’s play; the real work is personal identity and social association.

Regarding surveillance, tunneling provides nominal protection for content, but not for the fact of communication. The NSA efforts and commercial data mining are mostly about the “meta data” — the network patterns, locations, times and places, associations and correlations — not the content. You don’t need much more than a few hints of content to infer a great deal. It is abstract, but, given the broad outline of communication architecture, it is difficult to see how any universal system could provide privacy protections for individuals and groups without a system of identification that enabled extensive use of aliases, and a way for an individual to manage those aliases, without the individual’s own cognitive insufficiencies, recreating a clustered pattern equivalent to unique, individual identity.

Why would Saudi Arabia want to undermine US hegemony in general, though?

“One could declare, just as convincingly…” Are you actually making the silly declaration, or pretending that someone might? I don’t want to argue with propositions that you can’t even be bothered to believe

But it doesn’t seem sillier to me than “Saudi Arabia wants to restrict blasphemy and sin on the Internet”. Why would they? They are interesting in money and power, not in restricting sin. If they were worried about sin, they would’ve lived in a cave somewhere, and we wouldn’t be talking about them.

It’s just an irrelevant speculation. We talk about the Saudi rulers because they are Saudi rulers; their attitudes towards pornography, whatever they are, are accidental and irrelevant. Personally, I highly doubt that they care about it at all.

Bruce, you and I are posting under our own names here. We both know that we will not be arrested for what we say. How exactly is the NSA threatening that? There are many things wrong with the surveillance program: lack of democratic oversight, tenuous legal basis, secret law. But to argue that the rights of someone marching in a protest are infringed when someone keeps track of him being there is a bit weird. Naturally there are obvious ways in which surveillance can be abused: a gay man in Malaysia or rural Texas could be blackmailed, etc. Then again, my response to Snowden revealing that the CIA manipulated a Swiss banker into driving drunk one was of admiration for skill, rather than moral revulsion.

As for identification and payments, every single transaction on the financial markets has a deep chain of custody. Identity theft exists in the US because banks are forced to reimburse their customers for it: Chip & PIN doesn’t eliminate this fraud, just makes the victims have no recourse. End of the day, a slight rise in the spread is cheaper than removing all the opportunities for fraud.

One thing I would add to BW’s meditation on the problem of identity: for the purposes of political control, you don’t have to prove anything about anybody. In fact, you can grab just about anyone, make up any criminal story about him that you want, then let the character assassination practiced by the like of Fox News, or worse, and the judicial oversight practiced by the FISA court, or worse, do the rest of your dirty work for you. Today it’s Julian Assange; actually try to actually organize political alternatives to the corruptions of the status quo, and tomorrow it could be you.

The fact that if you stay on your couch, life will go on much as it has before, except with lower pay and less job security, should be of less comfort to most people than it apparently is, but it’s early days yet. If the people pushing this really intend to take it to its logical conclusion, there’s no telling what will happen five or ten years down the road, but one thing is certain: they absolutely will not have it all their own way forever.

I was answering the comment immediately above mine. To the larger question of what the Saudi rulers might want on the internet as a whole – if you are positing a simple interest in money and power, what makes you think that interest stops at a border?

Myself I’ll settle for a religious explanation for an idea of what they might want the world to look like. Not really that different from the money and power outlook after all, but humans like to pretend they’re doing something good instead of just grasping.

Watson Ladd @ 85: We both know that we will not be arrested for what we say. How exactly is the NSA threatening that?

I don’t believe that I said anything about arrest for something said or written. I was scoffing, in fact, at the suggestion that censorship was the primary focus of anyone’s concerns.

Watson Ladd: “. . . to argue that the rights of someone marching in a protest are infringed when someone keeps track of him being there is a bit weird.”

Is it? Who is “someone”? There are a lot of potential “someones” in this world; there are plenty, who would worry me.

And, if “someone” puts a protestor on a watchlist? no-fly list?

Or, maybe, it’s a bit more subtle: just nudges the ol’ credit score a bit. You don’t have to say anything about someone’s credit; just checking it lowers the credit score, after all. And, that could affect their ability to lease a car or get a new job.

How many Watson Ladd’s are there in this world? Perhaps we could invent a few more, just to stir the pot; maybe an ersatz Watson Ladd could be arrested for possessing child pornography. Surely, no one, who knows you, would confuse you for that other, possibly fictional persona. You’re not related, are you? If that other Watson Ladd wrote some scurrilous thing at CT, we’d all assume it was you! Pretty soon, you’d be posting from the Moscow transit lounge, and we’d wonder at the strange twist of fate . . .

there are obvious ways in which surveillance can be abused: a gay man in Malaysia or rural Texas could be blackmailed, etc.

Leave the 1950s much?

Blackmail and extortion are risky activities for the perpetrator, who cannot do either very effectively while remaining secret or anonymous, and cannot be sure of how the game set in motion will be played out. The really skilled do something a bit broader, but easier to control. J. Edgar Hoover wouldn’t use a scandalous detail to blackmail a politician; he would do just the opposite: assuring the subject of potential scandal that his secrets were safe with the FBI. Pretty soon everyone in Washington thought J Edgar and his good friend, Clyde Tolson, had files on just about every important politician, and Hoover was . . . influential.

Watson Ladd: a slight rise in the spread is cheaper than removing all the opportunities for fraud

The spread, today, may be largely made up of opportunities for fraud, usury and related misdeeds. Remove all the opportunities for fraud and usury, and 19 out of the 20 largest financial institutions would be insolvent.

Money is information; it is how we keep score. And, right now, the system is deeply corrupt. That’s the context in which the surveillance state is burgeoning. It is not a coincidence.

MArc: “If you go deep enough into conspiracy theories you get lost. I think the difference in outlook on what the NSA is doing is the difference between what could be and what has been shown to be. The difference between Nixon and Obama is instructive. Nixon was forced out of office because he targeted political opponents with the tools of the state. Nixon ordered operatives to break into Democratic party headquarters and planting listening devices, and his campaign shook donors down for cash by threatening them with IRS audits. ”

Note that Nixon got in trouble because of things which got irretrievably in the public eye, and were provable (along with a lot of people in positions of power/influence not backing down).

With secret monitoring, proving anything specific is well-nigh impossible.

And when reading anything mentioned above about what people with this information plus official connections can do, remember that we are moving swiftly into an information-dominated age. For example, somebody on another blog mentioned that it’d be a pain if your face pattern were put onto a list of criminals, in a world where any commercial door was programmed to recognize faces….
And the no-fly list was a really bad precedent, because it means that the US government can restrict the actions of citizens, with no proof or recourse.

@93: The potential is clearly bad. The differences in attitude you’re seeing amount to differing assessments of how likely this bad potential is to be realized. Perhaps it’s a matter of temperament; I’ve never found conspiracy theories appealing. Occams’ Razor explains most things.

“Manning and Snowden did things that would be serious crimes in virtually every country on the globe. People who release classified documents and diplomatic cables are not “political opponents” in any meaningful sense of the term. There is a difference between arresting opposition political leaders, as in Russia, and arresting people who deliberately break the law.”

There is no difference, because the law is crafted by the government so that if you are in opposition to it, you are breaking the law.

– Manning: shows documents that demostrate that american soldiers are doing something that they’re not supposing to be doing by the official terms of their services.
– Snowden: shows documents that demostrate that the NSA is doing something that is not supposed to be doing by the official terms of its service.

Bot accused of causing big risks to the security of the nations, but the informations they leaked, in theory, had to be public beforehand because:

1) in theory, in a democratic country, “the people” have the power;
2) the government only administrates the power in the name of the people, and is subject to the people’s judgments. Something like shareholders and the CEO.
3) this implies that the people have to know what the government is doing.

If the government is free to redefine what the people are allowed to know and what not, the whole idea of democracy falls apart.

Adding on to Bruce’s comment – Marc, this is in fact a conspiracy. People are meeting and deciding on things, in secret, and carrying them out, in secret. We see the odd single-digit percentage which leaks out or is unavoidably public.

When you see an actual conspiracy, and deny that it exists, that’s not wisdom, that’s denying reality.

Any what, precisely, is this conspiracy achieving? This is where the tinfoil hat approach serves poorly. The NSA program just came very close to losing a congressional vote. There has been a lot of robust criticism. In the case of Nixon I could point to extremely specific criminal acts and extremely specific victims. Name names and things that were done to those people. Otherwise it’s no different than the Timecube guy.

Trader Joe @ 100

Unfortunately, anyone who’s raised a child in the U.S. in the last sixty years or so — especially in Southern California, knows the words to Small World.

Bruce, asymmetrical privacy (#75) is, of course, just the continuation of current trends, but just what of that do you imagine the ITU would oppose? Russia is largely spearheading this. Do you suppose the land where it is difficult even to define the boundaries between corporation, government, and mafia is going to want a more symmetrical transparency? Is the rich playboy Saudi elite, with their repressive theocracy, going to want to see their own lives subjected to the same scrutiny they would apply to their subjects? Why? The ITU doesn’t even pretend to be concerned with the matters you are, and much of their agenda would worsen them. Is Iran going to use deep packet inspection to locate and go after homosexuals? Why would they not? Have they ever even suggested they would refrain from this? They are actively persecuting gays, though they deny the accusations from human rights groups that they are executing them (they claim all the gays they execute are guilty too of other crimes, like rape). In the US and UK, expanded powers to fight terrorism were applied almost immediately to crimes like drugs, despite disavowals. What do you expect from countries that don’t even make disavowals?

As for censorship, nations are practicing it now. Saudi Arabia, as pointed out upthread. China, famously. In fact, China has been recycling Falun Gong members for kidneys for more than a decade, over FG’s claims of free expression in their newsletters. How can you maintain that countries don’t care about things they are acting on to the point of killing people?

I also notice you haven’t addressed at all my main argument, which is that in a world where all the major (and almost all the minor) states see their primary threats as emerging from non-state actors from terrorist organizations to secessionist movements to non-violent dissent, the logical compromise for them all to work out is one where all of their powers to combat these sort of threats are maximized. No one is likely to sacrifice their own power over such threats for the sake of also weakening someone else’s. Non-state actors are a greater threat than any state – to the US, to Russia, to China, to Saudi Arabia, to Israel (pretty much, gets a bit murky here), to the EU. To the extent that these players also want simply to maximize their power and money, this too is most readily achievable by strengthening control of the Internet, weakening privacy, and minimizing accountability for the powerful. Invading someone else territory is mostly off the agenda, and subverting another state from within is much less likely and important than protecting your own power structures. Why would any of the players agree to a treaty that limits them with regards to such threats and such opportunities just because it also limits others?

Marc @ 101: Any what, precisely, is this conspiracy achieving?

If you knew that, we’d have to kill you.

Seriously, you just don’t seem to be getting this “secrecy” business at all. No one really cares what you imagine, as long as you believe the Big Lies when they are told.

Classified does not mean secret in a common-sense meaning of secret. What classified means is that the matter can not be discussed by the informed. You, citizen, cannot know what this “conspiracy” is achieving. This is by design. (And, notice that you are the only one using “conspiracy” as a term of art. You might as well suck your thumb. It would be as psychologically satisfying.)

I actually have had a high level security clearance. What it means is that I can not discuss in public things about which i have expert knowledge. Democracy and expertise are disabled — a twofer! That is what is being accomplished. Precisely.

And, no, I’m not kidding. Want war? Claim secret knowledge of wmd.

And why limit tourself to war? The terms of the transpacific partnership — a sweeping trade agreement, which may eliminate the regulatory state, have been classified, so Congress cannot investigate it or debate it.

@104: I’m sorry, but this is historical amnesia. Here, for example, is Nixons enemies list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon%27s_Enemies_List

You can then add the targeting of opponents of the Vietnam war, domestic radicals (the Black Panthers, Weathermen, et al.), Civil Rights leaders…..I could go on at length. And these programs were targeted *specifically* at political opposition. What Hoover and Nixon did dwarfs anything that Obama is accused of.

When I compare this to the “no-fly” list, for example, I’m comparing apples and bricks. There people who want to crash planes into buildings. That’s not the same as someone who wants to desegregate buses. The equivalent of Nixon would be arresting talk show hosts and Republican senators and governors on trumped-up charges. It matters that this isn’t happening (compare to Russia if you want to see actual political repression at the hand of the state. You know, the place where Snowden went.)

The national security state is clearly out of control in size and scope. But some knowledge of where we have been, and some perspective, is essential too.

Martin @ 105

“Non-state actors are a greater threat than any state – to the US, to Russia, to China, to Saudi Arabia, to Israel (pretty much, gets a bit murky here), to the EU.”

This statement is simply wrong, and pernicious to boot. It should be possible for anyone to recognize that non-state actors don’t pose an existential threat to the US (or Russia, or China, or the EU). The most successful terrorist attack of all time killed about 3,000 people. Of course that’s terrible, even horrifying, but in that same year (2001) and country (USA) traffic fatalities totaled more than 42,000.

Yet we don’t think bad driving is an existential threat to the survival of the US. If the potential for large numbers of deaths is what drives the desire to abandon the Constitution in favor of protection, why don’t we use the NSA to combat drunk driving? It ought to be easy – simply have them track cell phone GPS locations and correlate those locations with places of business and residence. Citizen X moved from a bar to his home, in a period of time which suggests an average speed of 40mph? Let’s send someone to have a talk with Citizen X. Who could object? After all, if terrorism is a threat to public safety, driving is a far greater threat to that same safety. Pfui!

Further, I didn’t say anything the NSA did was justified by fighting terrorism or any other consideration. It seems like you just read the words “non-state actor” and ran into a knee-jerk canned rant about how terrorism is an exaggerated danger without even trying to understand what I was saying.

Martin @ 113

My rant wasn’t intended to be directed at you; it was directed at the idea you were calling attention to. I apologize for failing to make that distinction.

Those in power in the US may well believe that terrorists and dissidents are a threat to their rule; but if they do, they’re fundamentally irrational. I get that you’re pointing out the consequences of those beliefs, but I think it is a mistake not to challenge the fantastic nature of those beliefs every time they come up.

With a bucket of whitewash as large as you seem to have, why limit yourself to Internet governance? Given time, and the indulgence of the proprietors, you could just as easily run your roller over the entire status quo. I suppose we must be patient, and let the craftsman work at his own pace….