| Fits of paranoia... |
[Jan. 15th, 2009|10:35 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
I'm not normally given to fits of public twitching like this, but the moment refuses to pass so I'm succumbing this once.
I've just read Little Brother (direct link to legal HTML version).
It's a Young Adult book, so I wouldn't classify it as deep, or outstanding prose, but it did get me thinking.
The basic premise is a teenager's in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist attack, gets hauled off to Gitmo-Lite, and when they cut him free a week later his city's morphing into a police state, which he fights back against.
Being written by Cory Doctorow, it's alarmingly close to some datapoints of reality, and bits are quite believable at times: RFIDS, Oyster, ARGs, flashmobs, TOR networking, encryption, etc, etc...
The State in the book uses technological means to keep tabs on its citizens, by datamining its Oyster-card-equivalent for journeys which don't fit a "normal pattern", similarly for RFID toll-bridge passes and tracking private vehicles. Phones are logged. Net access is logged. People are watched - or the terrorists win!
And I'm wondering if we're at risk of walking into the same state.
The only truly leftfield tech I thought in it is good face/gait recognition, but the other stuff works.
RFID number plates to enable security forces (and fixed emplacements) to scan vehicles from 100m.
ANPR cameras on road gantries to track everything that passes by.
RFID subway/rail passes that generate mineable databases of journeys.
Passports that can be interrogated at a distance.
Incarceration without charge or even declared reason.
Logs of every email sent, kept for 2 years, moving on to storing every request/communication by every ISP's user in a central database.
A low-profile, unaccountable, fallible, transparent firewall and content blocker on a large percentage of the internet connections in the country.
Quite detailed for a piece of fiction, no?
Shame I'm talking about the real world in that section.
I get exposure to quite a lot of quite deep ISP stuff in my job, but of late there's a lot of push by the Authorities for more monitoring, more restriction, and less accountability. And that scares me.
Yes, paedophiles and terrorists are an evil, and must be dealt with. But not at the expense of the freedoms of everyone else - they've been demonised to such an extent that "no restriction is too great, no sacrifice will not be taken", and they're used as a carte blanche for all kinds of injustices. "Won't somebody think of the children?" is not an excuse.
And you know what? All this technical shit won't work.
Take "tracking down the terrorists", for example. Do you really think that Abdul and Jamit are exchanging emails on the best way to mix fertiliser and diesel? Or that kiddy-porn rings are passing their files across MSN? Like fuck are they.
If all you're after is text message passing, you could do it in WoW. Hells, you could do it at an FTP dead-drop, in DNS records, stenography in a image, all kinds of rubbish. You want to pass imagery or large files, you go encrypted P2P/tunnels, or you go old-school sneakernet and mail hard-drives to your buddies.
It's all rubbish, doing the wrong things to the wrong degree for the right reasons. And yet Those In Charge (Wacky Jaqui, I'm looking at you) seem convinced that it'll be a perfect world, the system will never be abused, and so on and so forth. Someone famous goes in to hospital, and you get people crawling all over their patient records - you really believe everyone's data (and selves, pretty much) is going to be safe with the inevitable number of people that are going to have access to it?
I follow the sysadmin's creed - a user's stuff stays private for I do not need nor want to see what it is, and I have a responsibility to them - but, as you know, with great power.... etc.
I'm not sure I know anyone who's light-side enough for that.
Keep an eye out, people, and don't let zealots screw this up. |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
perspexavenger's journal
surprised
amused
annoyed
