On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 01:26:20PM +0100, Alaric Snell-Pym wrote: > >1. Sousveillance [1] is one of the best hopes of not falling into > >dystopia. Big Brother is scary only until the point that everyone starts > >looking back. > > Sousveillance interests me, too. For a start, it offers some obvious > defences against abuse of power against you; but it has secondary > effects, too - the presence of widespread sousveillance reduces the > argument for needing centralised surveillance. "What good are all these > surveillance systems in preventing crime, when the victims of crime will > have their own sousveillance?".
This is a complete fantasy. Try trespassing on a sigint facility someday, and see what that gets you. Try putting a splice into a cable landing site, on your own budget (what? you can't afford a submarine?). > I think that darknets and the like will solve parts of the problem, but > the biggest part by far is this trend to centralise around big services. There's your biggest problem: don't mind the skills, the surveillance targets don't even have a drive towards observing back. > There's an entrepreneurial mindset around creating new Internet services > by hiring a bunch of servers and a bunch of developers and getting them > to write code that runs on your servers, and funding it via advertising > or premium services. However, this creates a wonderful central point for > monitoring and surveillance. This is what the Freedombox project (no, it's not dead) is designed to protect against. > Back in the Day, new Internet services were created by writing > open-source software for a daemon that people could run on their big > shared Unix boxes or, later, that your ISP would run for you as part of The big shared Unix box costs about 100 USD these days, and takes maybe 5 W. > a suite of "expected services", and those daemons would collaborate in a > peer-to-peer fashion to create the service. IRC, Usenet, email, finger, > etc. Of course, things like IRC and Usenet, being broadcast media, are > still prone to snooping; but people can also create private IRC/Usenet > networks if they want a bit more privacy. Email lingers on due to > ubiquity, and is rather snoopable partly due to centralisation at places > like gmail, and partly just due to not having had privacy as a priority > when the protocol was designed, but it needn't be so. Pity that about email, but we've got half a dozen of new protocols that don't have the problems of legacy ones. > The thing is, the Centralised Service Model drives progress because > investors will pour money into it. Can the federated model pick up due > to sufficient interested volunteers, or can it be monetized somehow? > Diaspora and Status.net aren't exactly taking the world by storm. What Friends don't let friends use social networks. > can we do to fix this? Very little (social networks and privacy are mutually exclusive, regardless of where they're hosted). > Decentralised encrypt-everything-by-default Internet services could go a > long way to putting the brakes on the ubiquitous surveillance state (as > well as many other benefits). Amen, brother. But here you need >1 GBit/s throughput though your wireless LoS mesh, and an occasional dark fiber.
