Data and Goliath

Ahhh, it has been TOO LONG, TECH/DIGITAL CIVIL LIBERTIES BOOK SHELF. Oh, how I missed thee. How I have missed thine refreshing icy showers. How inspired I am to finally go full Linux!

So this book is nothing new, if you've listened to The Surveillance State, or read Cory Doctorow, or were paying attention during Ed Snowden's explosive whistleblowing in 2013. I would also recommend Jaron Lanier and Sherry Turkle and the spam book and Richard Stallman, specifically his encyclopedic reasons not to use Facebook (the nudge that finally pushed me over into deleting my account).

Anyway, tl;dr: we have every reason to be paranoid, as total, mass surveillance by corporations and most governments is the de facto status quo in a post-9/11 world. We have a giant, automated, big data apparatus designed to know every intimacy of every person all the damn time. Most people don't realize this, and it's sucking the oxygen out of our freedom.

Schneier believes - and I agree with him - that the lazy security nihilism many people express (including some people I know AHEM especially younger people, shame on you kids) - anyway, that lazy idea that “why should I worry about [digital overlord]'s invasive privacy settings? ultimately, I have nothing to hide?” is a sign that: people are MASSIVELY underestimating how invasive these digital “services” are, and people are thus MASSIVELY undervaluing their own privacy and their own worth. If it's free, you are the product! Also, why do you want a profit-seeking platform to monetize your social connections so they can better serve you ads?!

Schneier writes clearly and comprehensively; I think this book would actually be a great intro and gift for the digital civil liberties noob in your life. You can give it to them with a copy of Ubuntu (or Kali Linux, haha!) and a burner phone.

Some notes for myself:
- Digital serfdom. Cory Doctorow has been using this term more and more recently, and Schneier gives a great overview of how, indeed, our digital rights and digital society is, indeed, a feudal state. It's impossible to live in modern society while opting out of everything (Google, Facebook/social media, etc), and so what you end up doing is selecting the digital lord you want to be a vassal/serf for. In exchange for tilling their fields (by giving up your data, every single day), they get your ad revenues and you're plugged you into the world economy. Can you imagine getting a job without access to Google? I'm starting to think it's impossible to get a date without having a Facebook account, given the tight integration between it and all the dating apps.
- No opting out. As the Internet of Things grows, we'll have networked devices passively collecting data on everything: our wifi fridge and wifi toaster spying on us, basically. I mean, people at iRobot already have floor plans of your house thanks to your spy Roomba. And End User License Agreements (EULAs) are essentially meaningless legal ass-covering: they're not designed to be read/understood, they're not designed to truly inform and allow consent.
- The interesting, tight coupling between the micro/commercial trade-off of convenience in exchange for privacy (“ok, Google, I'll let you know where I am 24/7 and what my darkest fears are and 90% of my communication, if you just let me have free maps, email, and synced calendars”) and the macro/government trade-off between security and freedom. And, of course, how these are false dichotomies meant to entrap us.
- The delicious hypocrisy of tech moguls like Eric Schmidt (Google) and Zuckerberg, who pontificate from on high about living in a post-privacy, radical-transparency world, where good people have “nothing to hide”, while they themselves cover their webcams.
- The interesting notes about our data “exhaust” and how we're producing more data, every day in 2017, than we did in all of human history before ~2012 or something. And how Charles Stross calls this event horizon the “end of prehistory”; after this point, all of human experience and data will become retrievable (e.g. kids growing up publicly on social media, etc).

I have MANY MORE THOUGHTS and pontifications of my own on the mindless way we use social media and our networked computrons these days, but I will pause my sermon for now. Suffice to say: for the love of God, at least put a sticker over your webcam!