Re: Surveillance Technology

mark@unicorn.com
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 09:32:01 -0800 (PST)

Peter C. McCluskey [pcm@rahul.net] wrote:
>You
>probably assume that you can evade governments by using encrypted
>communications, but I doubt that you will be able to reliably keep
>the government from observing your communications after the person
>you sent it to decrypts it (unless you are very carefull about whom you
>communicate with), and identifying you by analyzing your writing style
>if needed.

What does it matter if they can only link me to 'foobar@nym.net'; are they going to arrest me by email? And evading writing style analysis is easy, just feed your message into a program which converts it into a standardized style, or modifies it to match someone else's.

>It it's universal, you can find all the information you need, but you
>have no obvious way to alter the information without someone seeing you
>perform the alteration.

And how will they prove that the video showing me modifying the data is real and not another fake? If anyone can fake video then *nothing* can be trusted. And if only the government can fake video, then again it can't be trusted. The whole point I'm making is that non-sentient witnesses cannot be trusted in either case. If we can't watch the government all the time then they could be faking evidence; and if we can watch them all the time then *anyone* could be faking evidence.

>den Otter's arguments appear to make sense when applied to the goal of
>having competing groups of people with surveillance power. I don't understand
>where this assumption of monopoly came from.

He was talking about the supposed inability to eliminate the state because people are imperfect; governments are, by definition, monopolies.

>With the majority of the people substantially consenting to the takeover.

What the hell do you expect them to do about it? You can't vote for a non-crook when there are only crooks to vote for, and you can't start shooting them until a large fraction of the population have accepted that shooting them is the only solution.

>By the standards you are using here, almost all evidence is a joke. Are
>you arguing against using evidence, or did you have some other point in
>mind?

Video evidence is a joke. Anyone who trusts it is an idiot. No non-sentient witness can be trusted.

Mark