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| Sounds kind of Kafkaesque | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: 10 Feb 2014, 00:05 (134 Views) | |
| Kryftland | 10 Feb 2014, 00:05 Post #1 |
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"Debater"
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This is an article I found relating to the surveillance state: Death by Data Since the extent of mass surveillance on the public has been revealed I have been firmly against the operation in principle but have done nothing about it. Recently I decided to take measures to protect my privacy (this is a good start: Prism Break), including deleting my facebook account and changing my email account provider away from google - these being the notable changes as they provoked reaction among my friends. In debating the issue, most of my friends took an apathetic stance, so I wrote the following letter (to a friend who lives far away) challenging their apathy. What, fellow DSA members, is your opinion on the matter, and what do you think of my argument? ********** I would like to explain further why I have started to change my internet habits. There is the simple explanation that every human being has a right to privacy. The manner in which the government access and analyse all of our computer and telephone communications, and stored information, en masse, is an indefensible breach of our civil liberties. Furthermore, the way in which most proprietary internet/computer service providers (eg. facebook, google, microsoft etc.) collect, analyse and sell off all of our personal details, and information on our computer behaviour habits, is an invasion of our privacy. Its easy to dismiss digital privacy issues because it isn't tangible - we don't realise quite how significant it is, nor do we understand quite how much it could effect us. If you were forced to live your life in a room with transparent glass for walls, and had security cameras perpetually pointed at you, and a computer logging your behaviour, your habits, your whole life - you would decry the invasion of your privacy, you would know it was wrong, and you would resist it in any way you could. But this is exactly what is happening on the internet; and we can't dismiss the significance of the internet and computing in our lives - think about how much you use it and depend on it. Another issue is our degree of trust in the state. Let's remember that the state kept one of the most extensive surveillance apparatus in history secret from everyone until the leaks began. If they can keep such a monolithic operation secret from everyone, then we can be certain that they can keep secret what they do with the information they have gathered on us. They are even helped by a 'justice' system, which allows secret courts where nobody else knows you're being tried, and secret evidence which only the prosecutor (i.e. a government agent) and the judge can see. But we have a nice, liberal, friendly government right? Maybe so, but this argument implies complete and utter trust in the state. It is like standing on a stool, with a noose around your neck, and somebody standing behind you. You say to yourself "it's fine, he's a nice guy, he won't kick the stool away", but whether or not the person standing behind you is a nice guy, whether or not you think he'll kick your stool away, you shouldn't be in that position. If you continue living like that then you become the captive of that person, you are willingly granting them total power over you, and thus conceding your liberty. To me, this personal level argument alone is enough to convince me that mass surveillance is wrong, and that personal privacy should be protected from encroachment by corporations and the state. But for others, this argument is swiftly dismissed with the counter argument that 'if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear'. For you and me, this argument roughly translates to: "I just use facebook/mobile to message friends about meeting up, I don't care if the government wants to read that, it's their time they're wasting, I'm not going to be affected". But at this point, I would - perhaps contradictorily - dismiss that this is really a personal issue at all. It is not about you or me, its not about the uninteresting text I sent yesterday, or the rather ordinary post I made on facebook the other day - it is about the mass surveillance system as a whole. We have to read the writing on the wall about the greater social impact of mass state surveillance, the path that our society is going down, and how the relationship between the state and the populace is changing. When we look at it on a personal level - "it doesn't effect me, I've got nothing to hide" - we don't consider whether the system as a whole is wrong, we don't consider that there might be other people who ARE effected by it and care very much about it. State oppression and control depends upon mass support - or more likely, mass indifference - not necessarily in terms of voting, but the lack of resistance, of acting upon what you think is right and fighting what is wrong. Our personal indifference (or lack of action when we do disagree) makes us complicit is the wrongs of these state powers. Here is an interesting article I read the other day: http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/01/death-data-how-kafkas-trial-prefigured-nightmare-modern-surveillance-state It is a look back at Kafka's writings with reflections on our present condition; if you don't want to read it all, I have picked out what I think are the most important comments, which elucidate the social impact bettter than I could in my own words. "Kafka did not merely portray how people become victims; he also showed the extent to which power relies on the complicity of its victims." "He has to struggle not because the forces of power have violated or diminished him but rather because he has been infiltrated by those forces. The poison lodges in his own body." "From the moment that he becomes the accused man and so the object of suspicion, he suffers the loss of his privacy. No one causes him harm, no one locks him up... even so, K feels like a hunted animal" "It does not take much imagination to fathom where the unrestricted accumulation of monitoring equipment will lead. Being suspect will become an inescapable and natural social condition, while surveillance staff will become invisible." "It gets even more problematic when those with power argue that they are only implementing what we have been secretly wishing for all along. For years, any criticism of how social media sites such as Facebook were dealing with personal data elicited the flippant response that the classic idea of privacy was outdated anyway – as if the technology of social networks was only reacting to a historic shift in our mindset that had already taken place and no one was being forced into anything." "For Kafka, the problem was not the machine – bureaucracy itself is blameless; it is not an active agent. The blame is ours. We are the ones checking the boxes, sharing our photographs and forgetting to delete." You might say that people who truly need privacy should therefore throw away their computers and abstain from the internert. But hindering the people who might need privacy - people who are a threat to the status quo - would be just as much a victory for oppression and control as indifferently allowing them to record every aspect of our lives. Therefore, we need to resist mass surveillance by using services that don't allow government access, and don't sell out all of our info, but not in such a way that we are depriving ourselves of the benefits of the internet. My justification can be boiled down to this: secret mass surveillance is wrong, and if I were not to act upon this conviction then I would be complicit in, and legitimising, this wrong act. ********** Edited by Kryftland, 10 Feb 2014, 06:13.
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12:15 AM Jul 11