DISTRIBUTED SOUSVEILLANCE TO COUNTER INSTITUTIONAL CORRUPTION
Since if there is no hierarchy the power is distributed and no one can benefit more than any other from data collection and moral hazard is reduced.
What that means is the best option is to make the sensors as small as possible, as ubiquitous as possible, as democratically accessible as possible, so that secrecy does not exist for anyone.
Because secrecy at the top allows for corruption and collusion just as much as secrecy at the bottom.
How would can I trust the justice system or the jury system when I know that each individual within them could be in secret communication or have secrets on each other to coerce and collude with each other? They could determine I’m guilty before the trial even starts, they could determine that I’m going to prison before I’m arrested.
Then we have the private prison industry which can give incentives to encourage collusion and corruption. So law enforcement would become like a gang, and their offspring might have stocks in private prisons and other family financial incentives. Doesn’t that give the judge, the police, any anyone else who owns these stocks the incentive to get people locked up?
The first use of distributed sousveillence should be to investigate corruption in the justice system and in law enforcement. If we have sousveillance we can do that because they can’t hide just like we can’t, but if we only have surveillance then how do we police the police?
I’m for collecting as much data as possible. No one has any secrets, and anyone can be caught with their hand in the cookie jar. No one is above the law? But since everyone is corruptible no one should have secrets, especially if they are in authority (I distinguish a difference between having secrets and having private or sensitive information).
Judges for example are going to want their secrets but how do we know the judges and prosecutors aren’t friends? As a result we cannot trust either of them. How do we know the police, judges, prosecutors, defence attorney, the news media, aren’t all in a big underground gang working together to selectively and subjectively take certain people off the streets and ignore others?
We don’t know that. So we should assume they collude if the capability of collusion exists in the design of the system. Since the system is designed to support collusion and corruption, I expect it to be corrupt until we redesign it to make corrupting it more difficult and then show that the redesign results in less corruption.
Since there is absolute no initiative to redesign the obviously corrupt institutions, institutional corruption shall persist until the system eventually collapses as has happened throughout history.
References
Associated Press. (2013, November 13). Supporters of 14-year-old SC boy executed in 1944 for killing 2 girls want a new trial. Fox News. Retrieved January, 2014, from http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/09/supporters-14-year-old-sc-boy-executed-in-144-for-killing-2-girls-want-new/
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Exploring the the Darkside of Artificial Intelligence: thoughts, ideas, rants, and research from darklight
“you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, moulded by it.”
I am generally for the rights of everyone to have a full high fidelity effective memory of everything they see and hear. I think this is an obvious part of what we want and should have as transhumanists. But there are some caveats.
What makes you think that the information obtained about all those secrets can be abused even more and in new ways than what was done in secret? A leak of highly sensitive information in the hands of those without the context and/or sophistication to deal with it properly can get very bad indeed.
Total openness not only gives you ability to see bad actors. It gives bad actors actionable information to do harm with as well.
Susan, the technology itself is going to open the world because of how it is being designed and because it’s just not feasible for most people to keep information secure.
I do think that there should be access control even in an open world. I think for example if you wear or control a sousveillance device then you should be able to determine who accesses the information because it belongs to your device and by extension belongs to you.
So to make it clear, privacy in some form can exist in a world of sousveillance in the form of private clouds. All of your memories should be stored in your private cloud and you should determine who can access what.
All of my memories could be stored in my private cloud and I could determine who accesses what. So if I’m Bob and you’re Alice, I should be able to determine which memories you can access from my private cloud. If you have a reputation for keeping private matters private then I’d be more likely to share my memories from my private cloud for instance.
Mallory (the bad actor) should not have access to our private cloud. Gordon the investigator should only have access if he has a search warrant/subpoena. Eve relies on surveillance, so if the private cloud is encrypted then Eve will have a difficult time doing MITM.
It all will come down to whether or not the concept of private clouds exist. Specifically distributed private clouds with something like quantum key distribution.
This is not going to give us privacy in the long term. What it could do is buy society some time to adapt to a more open world. At this point in time we just are not ready to have all our thoughts stored in public clouds for everyone else to read.
And when we do reach that stage we will not be considered human any more. We will either by cyborgs, transhumanists, or we will have redefined what it means to be human so that we have a frame of reference to deal with it.