Surveillance, Privacy, and Openness, Part 2.

Well, the hits just keep on coming, don't they?

Yesterday I asked whether the ethical failure of the NSA's actions lies not with the bare fact that they collect (and analyze) information about us which we call 'private', but rather with the imbalance between the level of information they have as contrasted with us - an imbalance of information that translates to an imbalance of power. I proposed that

1. Our aim should be to equalize the power imbalance by equalizing the information imbalance.
2. Equalizing this imbalance could happen in one of two ways:

(a) Government's access to information is reduced, so that they know as little about us as we know about them.

(b) Citizens' access to information is increased, so that we know as much about them as they know about us.

3.  It is unrealistic (and maybe even undesirable for other reasons) to reduce the information available to government and/or other players on the world stage.

The best strategy, then, on my analysis, seemed to flip the usual logic of arguments about privacy - i.e., that we must fight to make the government as ignorant of us as we are of them - proposing, instead, that we should have a "citizens' PRISM", some way of increasing our knowledge rather than restricting theirs.

But this is a ridiculous oversimplification. By its very nature, a government has abilities and resources for analyzing vast quantities of data which are not equally available to any individual citizen. If you handed me full access to Google's servers, I wouldn't have the first clue what to do with it. And even if I did, I don't have the computational resources to perform any robust analytics on the data. A very interesting issue: most of us simply don't realize, or have at best a hazy idea about, the serious difference between having data about an individual and having data about people on a massive scale. If you're a classic science fiction fan, think about Hari Seldon, and his explanation of psychohistory via his two axioms:

• the population whose behaviour is modeled should be sufficiently large
• the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses

This presents a huge problem for my initial, naive conclusion: how can there be any serious parity, or equalizing, between the information (data + analysis) available to a government and that available to an individual? That is, how can we ever make 2(b) true?

At least, one might argue, we know that we have mechanisms which work toward 2(a) - reducing what government knows, relative to us. My next post will take a little tour through my own personal application of some of these mechanisms.