Surveillance Harms 1000 Times More Than It Helps
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It is abhorrent to be living in times where political structures poised into existence on ideas of Liberty advocate for removal of essential Freedoms. United States and Europe both have their form of "chat control" currently being debated. And country leaders see in this total mass-stalking nothing but a tool to fight some, scary sounding form of possible oppression. They've convinced the public that they are right, so much that when we are trying to come up with a reason of why what they are doing is wrong, we fail even to start the train of thought. Their justification appears to be solid. It appears that there is nothing to do, but to shut up, agree and do nothing about it. Today I am about to shutter their arguments once and for all.
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Every crime is a violation of some Human Right. All Human Rights are just explanations of what is Freedom, designed to list the basic things that could be derived from it, such as to not challenge the listener with too much philosophical reinventing of the wheel. For example, Life itself is a Human Right that could be derived from Freedom. If Freedom is control over one self, and somebody else takes all of this control away from the person, by killing that person... Try exercising Freedom of Speech when being dead. You know... Dead men tell no tales... Try walking around. Try doing anything. You can't! When you are dead, you no longer control anything. Therefor you no longer have Freedom.
Attempted Murder is a violation of a person's control over the person's body, similar to physical assault, or rape or anything like that. In short, all crimes are forms of Power, control over another person. Which is by default the enemy of Freedom. Yet there is a paradoxical catch in this.
If we don't have no Power to stop crime at all, if police doesn't exist, those with the ambition for Power will flourish. Yet governments and other Power structures, designed to insure that Power doesn't happen, are Power in themselves. So how do they even help us at all? Well maybe at the very least, they are doing their job to minimize the overall Power in the system, including their own. Making a reasonable level of Freedom. I would like this to be the case. But I am about to prove you that: It is far from being the case.
How do you compare one crime to another? How do you measure which crime takes more freedom and which takes less? Well, due to the system being infinitely complex, akin to fractals, it is impossible, but with some simplification, a useful mathematical approximation could be calculated. Comparing which we can compare severity of crimes. Comparing which we can see if Governments are doing their job or not. Comparing which we can come up with an argument to criticize bad decisions like "chat control".
First metric would be time. If a violation of Freedom is longer, it is a worse violation. Average human life expectancy on earth right now is about 80 years. This automatically explains why murdering children is a worse crime than murdering adults. You are taking a longer chunk of freedom if you are murdering somebody who is younger. 80 years minus 20 years is 60 years. Murdering a 20 year old, is equivalent to taking 60 years worth of freedom from that person. While murdering a 50 year old, is only a violation of 30 years. Still even this is too much violation. Even a second long violation is too much if we can somehow avoid it. 30 years is a billion seconds!
Secondly we can break Freedom into clearly defined chunks, so we can see what part of freedom is violated. This way stalking is not as bad as murdering, when its done to one person. I think a good 10 freedoms could form a list we need to make for a good approximation. Those 10 would include: Consent, Refusal, Speech, Privacy, Movement, Settlement, Ownership, Distribution, Modification and Maintenance.
While some of them are very easy to understand, like Consent, Refusal, Speech, Privacy and Ownership, others, such as Distribution, require a bit more context. By Movement I mean a freedom to move around the earth. Putting somebody into a prison would be a violation of this freedom. Settlement would be a Freedom to not move around. Since when you are Free to move around, you are not required to do so. Deportation , for example, is a violation of this freedom. By Distribution I mean the ability to give away things you own. The freedom to stop owning things you no longer want to own. By Modification I mean an ability to change things you own. Including your own body. Since you own your body. A boss at work demanding from you not to color your hair, when you really want to do it, is a violation of this freedom, unless you can avoid those demands freely. On the other hand Maintenance is the opposite to Modification. It is your freedom not to change something when you don't want it to be changed. A boss demanding you to lose some weight would be a violation of this freedom.
So now we have 10 freedoms, and some way to calculate them. So lets do some math.
Lets imagine an out of proportion dystopian world where 10% of all people are murderers each of whom kills at least 2 people. It is 2 out of every 10 people dead! This in an insane amount. The worst countries on earth when it comes to homicide rates do not come even close to it. Hell Jamaica with it's 53 murders per 100 thousand people ( probably the worst homicide country in the world right now ) is at 0.053%. I'm talking about 20%, or 10% of all people being murderers. We are talking about apocalyptic proportions here!
We don't know the ages of those killed, so it is equally possible they are any age. So between 0 and 80 years they could be anywhere. To simplify the calculation we would take an average, which is 40, or 50% from life expectancy, since using percentages in this case makes everything so much simpler, and with average 2 people per murderer we arrive at 10% of all freedom lost to murder. Again an apocalyptic proportion!
Just to compare, in Europe, using the same calculations, France loses 0.0008% freedom to murder, Germany only a mere 0.0004%, and Norway a mere 0.0003%. It's 3 zeros after the dot in each case. Again... in our example I'm talking here about an apocalyptic 10%!
Lets say that we then introduce mass surveillance that tracks every person on earth. Which is already pretty much possible. And European countries want to do just that with their "chat control". Let then make a very unrealistic assumption that the surveillance works and it reduces all this murder back to 0. For this to work, it has to constantly survey basically the entire life of every person. So 100% of the population lose their Privacy. Which, if you remember, is one tenth of all freedoms. So in other words 10% of all freedom is lost to mass-suriveillance.
Even with an apocalyptic 10% murder, all surveillance can do is to even up the score. Making absolutely no progress what so ever. There was 10% of freedom lost. It is still 10% of freedom lost.
Now if we are talking about reality here. Surveillance is nowhere near that powerful. It doesn't have anywhere near 100% success rate. So a lot of crime will sneak through undetected. More than that, criminals know how to cover up their tracks, since they kind of required to know that. So surveillance is kind of not even oppressing those it is trying to oppress to solve problems in the first place.
Taking also into account that even in the worst countries, the worst crime is at such a low margin, that it is near zero. And also taking into account that the entire talk about "chat control" is not even about murder, but rather about private images of children. Who are not 100% of the population, even if 100% of children were violated in this way. And nowhere near 100% of children are violated in this way. And because it is technically only about privacy, only 10% of that is a violation, the reaction to this, by using mass surveillance over the entire population, is making everything apocalyptically worse! It is so out of proportions that I cannot help but be angry at the absurdity of all of this!
I know that just pointing out the problem is not enough. And yes, it seems like just leaving the problem be, will be better than doing something about it. In the case of what is being proposed, yes. It is better to do nothing. But perhaps there is a way.
If we just put people into prisons, we only violate their one freedom. Freedom to move around. And only for a part of their life. Isn't that impossible to carefully surgically do an investigation? Make it so it is the least possible violation that could be done to solve the crime. Like the police can just ask around. Some people might want to speak by themselves. No violation needed. And if somebody is a very big problem, some surveillance only over this particular person, is nowhere near as big of a problem.
Maybe this is what the government is thinking. Maybe they are so ignorant about encryption that they believe that they can just survey only the bad guy. And that nobody else would be able to use it against people. I mean... Yes. This is their ignorance. Politicians either don't understand or don't want to understand that once an encryption is broken, it is equivalent to there being no encryption in the first place. And their ignorance... And I truly want to believe that that's their ignorance. It causes such disproportional oppression, that I am stupefied that not enough people scream about it.
Still there is a possibility that it is not ignorance. There is a possibility that it is just a political stunt. A sort of red herring, to mislead you into not asking the questions of proportionality. And that they are actually just trying to take control over us all.
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Anonymous GuestI also dislike surveillance.
I feel real uncomfortable walking around my town.
I can see those other people. In realtime. It's absolutely not private.
I wish I could walk around with my eyes shut. That way I could better respect the privacy of all the people there.
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