[sudo-discuss] Freedom of name: the Big Stinking Skunk that everyone seems to miss:

[Anon195714]

Yo's-

There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:

The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.

The biggest threat is the corporate sector.  And many of us are
willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
less than fully informed consent.

What government can do to you with the data they collect:  Prosecute you
for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo.  Some day, though at present it's
merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
the street.

What the private sector can do to you:  Get you fired from your job,
deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit. 

Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you?  Which set of
consequences causes more fear today?  Which set of consequences
realistically makes you look over your shoulder? 

On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
losing their health coverage, etc.?  Do you know anyone who has a kid? 
Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
their job and the roof over their head.   

Round-ups of dissidents make news.  Political prosecutions make news. 
Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
hacking, make news.

Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
"objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.

As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
dissident, they make you a "loser."  And when you rant about getting
fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."

There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize. 
There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
compliance as "convenience."  As a science fiction character of mine
said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
the person?"

But there's something even more insidious about this. 

It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
submission.  A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
(because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
vast majority does what is expected of them.  A culture where today
people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy," a
culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete." 

The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
job, and end up homeless.  The biggest risk is that the culture as a
whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
economic alligators. 

Big Data is the feed-in to that system. 

Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now? 
Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
their website for their write-ups about 'em.  Look up "super cookies"
and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it. 

Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
files & folders on your machine that store these things.  Open the
folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
browsing history, etc.  What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
impossible to kill off entirely. 

Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this.  You can write a
custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them.  They
are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
to their owners, no matter what you do.  They are arguably a criminal
violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
(I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is).  "Privacy policies"
that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
enforceable.  And yet....

Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
you knew how far it goes. 

The ostensible goal is to sell advertising.  But I have a question: 
what's the actual return on investment for that?  How many goods &
services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
"personalized" messages?  How often have you bought something because
you got a targeted ad?  I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
flashlights shoved up our collective colon.

The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain competitive"
and all that nonsense.  One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves. 

So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
with something less than informed consent:

Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones.  And very soon, Verizon and
other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
"watch you cuddle."   

Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
for publicity purposes. 

But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
telephone numbers. 

Google is the paradigm case of Big Data.  Even NSA is envious of Google,
and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
facility in Utah. 

When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
for intercepting overseas traffic.  The difference is that you don't get
to vote for their boss every four years.   

When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
number, they are effectively saying to their friends:  "If you want to
write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
surveillance."  If you value the friendship, you submit.  Or you say
nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
person."  Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
century of communications technology. 

What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
become technologies of control that rival _1984_.  As Winston Smith said
to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
"You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off.  We
have that privilege."  Try taking the battery out of an iPhone.  Try
taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
"iWatch."  They watch.  You can't turn it off.  Interesting, that.  So
when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting. 

Facebook is a surveillance machine.  Google is a surveillance machine. 
Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
intelligence collection platform.  I know someone who developed intel
collection & analysis software for use on Twitter.  I'll tell that story
in person.  "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
platform.  And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
with you.  Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
everywhere you go? 

There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers.  Cool People didn't go
anywhere near AOL. 

AOL's big sin was censorship.  They tried to "moderate" their little
corner of cyberspace.  In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
another dumb "aggregator" page.

But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship. 

When people are being watched, they behave differently.  They submit,
they conform, they comply. 

And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance. 

-G.