A frequent thinking is, how can we "troll" the surveillance industry with unconventional methods?
A very nice, yet controversial, way could be to improve Opensource Surveillance Technologies. Let me elaborate a bit that thinking. As we know the surveillance industry is a kind of particular environment where the technology provider, do enable their governmental customers to acquire certain "intelligence" capabilities. It's considered a "rich" market where each sale could account for several million USD of technological products, system integration services and maintenance agreements to keep the capabilities up-to-date. It's a market with very particular characteristics where: - the geo-political placement of the provider and the customer (governmental agencies) matter. - provider's "trust" matter more than the capabilities (ie: features) provided - given "opaque" procurements practices, there's plenty of corruption Given the previous statement, we can verify (thanks to SpyFiles and similar initiatives) that there are TONS of companies selling products that provide very similar capabilities. That do provide very similar, if not equal, functionalities. However they are still on the market. Why? Because "this market" is not bound the normal "market rules" of competition. IMHO we should transform the surveillance market, to an environment that follow the "market rules", by introducing an effective competition. To do so we could foster the creation of opensource surveillance technologies, highly effective, well done, product-grade, sold to governments but only on an AGPL licensing basis. It's plenty of opensource technological components that's being used by surveillance technology manufacturer, however there's no flagship opensource surveillance products. By having an opensource equivalent of most of the commercial surveillance products, we would strive the "revenues and margins" of the surveillance manufacturer, many of them would just close, we would stimoulate differentiation and competition. By bringing competition to the surveillance marketing, i'm confident that "the competition" will strongly help to bring transparency. Ok, it's a controversial idea, to be discussed, with difficult implementation path, but i'm somehow confident that it could works. -- Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) HERMES - Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights http://logioshermes.org - http://globaleaks.org - http://tor2web.org -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
