Nowa Fantastyka Oct 2013
Ten years ago I attended a talk by David Brin, at Worldcon. Brin had blurbed my novel Starfish; to say I was favorably disposed towards the man would be an understatement. And yet I found myself increasingly skeptical as he spoke out in favor of ubiquitous surveillance: the “Transparent Society,” he called it, and It Was Good. The camera would point both ways, cops and politicians just as subject to our scrutiny as we were to theirs. People are primates, Brin reminded us; our leaders are Alphas. Trying to ban government surveillance would be like poking a silverback gorilla with a stick. “But just maybe,” he allowed, “they’ll let us look back.”
Dude, thought I, do you have the first fucking clue how silverbacks react to eye contact?
It wasn’t just a bad analogy. It wasn’t analogy at all; it was literal, and it was wrong. Alpha primates regard looking back as a challenge, a threat. Anyone who’s been beaten up for recording video of police beating people up knows this; anyone whose cellphone has been smashed, or returned with the SIM card mysteriously erased. Document animal abuse in any of the US states with so-called “Ag-gag” laws on their books and you’re not only breaking the law, you’re a “domestic terrorist.”
Chelsea Manning looked back; she’ll be in jail for decades. Edward Snowden looked back and has been running ever since. All he did to put that target on his back was confirm something most of us have suspected for years: those silverbacks are recording every move we make online.
Look back? Don’t make me laugh.
Can we stop them from watching us, at least? Keep our private data at home, stay away from LinkedIn or Facebook, keep your vital data local and offline?
Sure. Of course, you may have to kiss ebooks goodbye. Amazon reserves the right to reach down into your Kindle and wipe it clean any time it feels the urge (they did it a few years back—to Orwell’s 1984, ironically). You’ll have to do without graphics and multimedia and word processing, too: both Adobe and Microsoft are phasing out local software in favor of cloud-based “subscription” models. Even the American Association for the Advancement of Science—an organization that really should know better—has recently switched to a “browser-based” journal feed that can’t be accessed offline. We used to own our books, our magazines, the games we played. Now we can only rent them.
So it’s your choice: stay offline, where you’re deaf dumb and blind. Go online, where you’re naked. Nobody pretends that the cloud is even close to secure; I’ve lost track of the articles I’ve read lamenting the porous vulnerability of the web, only to turn around and say Of course we’re not going to retreat from the cloud—we live there now. It’s as though those charged with warning us of the dangers we face have also been charged with convincing us there’s nothing we can do about it, so we might as well give up and let the NSA into our bathrooms. (Or even worse, embrace the cameras. Have you seen that Coca-Cola ad cobbled together from bits of security camera footage? A dozen “private” moments between people with no idea they’re on camera, served up to sell fizzy sugar-water as though our hearts should be warmed by displays of universal surveillance. Orwell—brought to you by Hallmark.)
Why aren’t we retreating from the cloud, exactly?
Remember the premise of Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica: that the only way to win against high-tech opponents is to go retro, revert to a time when no computer was networked, when you ran starships by pulling levers and cranking valves. It was an exquisite narrative rationale for the anachronistic vibe endemic to everything from Alien to Firefly to Star Wars, that peeling-paint aesthetic that resonates in the gut even though it made no real sense until Moore gave it context.
Now it’s more than that. Now it’s a strategy. Because now we know that the NSA has back doors installed into every edition of Windows from XP on up—but not into dusty old Win-95. And while giving up online access entirely is a bridge too far for most of us, there’s no reason we can’t keep our most private stuff on a standalone machine without network access.
Bruce Schneier1 points out that if the spooks want you badly enough, they’ll get you. Even if you stay off the net entirely, they can always sit in a van down the street and read your lips with a laser through your bedroom window. But that would be too much bother for all but the most high-value targets. They’ll scoop up everything on all of us if it’s cheap and easy to do so; that’s why the internet is every spook’s best friend. But it takes time and effort to install a keystroke logger on someone’s home machine; even more to infect the thumb drive that might get plugged into a non-networked device somewhere down the line. Most of us are welcome to keep whatever privacy can’t be stripped away with a whisper and a search algorithm.
That’s hardly an ethical stance, though. It’s pure cost/benefit. Wouldn’t it be nice for them if it wasn’t so hard to scoop up everything, if there were no TOR or PGP encryption or—hey, while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be nice if all data storage was cloud-based? The world’s moving in that direction anyway, but wouldn’t it be nice if they could speed things up, weed out the luddites and malcontents who refused to face reality and get with the program?
When I explain to someone why I’m not on Twitter, they look at me like I’m some old fart yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his lawn. These days, refusal to join social networks2 is regarded as quaint and old-fashioned. Before too long, though, it might change from merely curmudgeonly to gauche; later still, from gauche to downright suspicious. What’s that guy afraid of, anyway? Why would he be so worried if he didn’t have something to hide?
We all know the only people who go on about privacy issues are the ones who are up to no good . . .