Data and Goliath : The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

Author:Bruce Schneier [Schneier, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
Publisher: http://c3jemx2ube5v5zpg.onion
Published: 2015-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

16

Social Norms and the Big Data Trade-off

In the preceding three chapters, I outlined a lot of changes that need to happen: changes in government, corporate, and individual behavior. Some of them are technical, but most of them require new laws or at least new policies. At this point many of them are unrealistic, at least in the US. I’m not yet living in a country where the majority of people want these changes, let alone a country where the will of the people easily translates into legislative action.

Most people don’t seem to care whether their intimate details are collected and used by corporations; they think that surveillance by the governments they trust is a necessary prerequisite to keeping them safe. Most people are still overly scared of terrorism. They don’t understand the extent of the surveillance capabilities available to both governments and private parties. They underestimate the amount of surveillance that’s going on and don’t realize that mass government surveillance doesn’t do much to keep us safe. Most people are happy to exchange sensitive personal information for free e-mail, web search, or a platform on which to chat with their friends.

Europe is somewhat different—it regulates corporate surveillance more heavily and government surveillance much less so—but for most purposes the public sentiments are the same.

Before we get meaningful political change, some of our social norms are going to have to change. We need to get to the point where people comprehend the vast extent of surveillance and the enormous concentration of power that flows from it. Once they do, most people will probably say, “That’s just not okay.” We need to summon the political will to fight both the law enforcement and national intelligence communities on the government side, and the government contractors and surveillance industry on the corporate side. And before any of that can happen, there must be some major changes in the way society views and values privacy, security, liberty, trust, and a handful of other abstract concepts that are defining this debate.

This is hard. Public sentiment tends to move towards actual practice. We’re good at accepting the status quo—whatever that is and however recently it has emerged.

(Honestly, it blows me away that most of this surveillance has emerged in less than two decades.) We’re growing accustomed to the panopticon. You can see it writ large, when people shrug and say, “What are you going to do?” You can see it in a microcosm every time Facebook degrades its users’ privacy options; people complain in the beginning, but soon get used to it.

What follows in this chapter are all changes in attitude. They’re ways in which we are going to have to modify our feelings and thoughts if we are ever going to get beyond the surveillance society.

RECALIBRATE OUR FEAR

The PATRIOT Act was signed into law on October 26, 2001, just 45 days after the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It was a wish list of police and intelligence powers and authorities, passed overwhelmingly in both houses with minimal debate.

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