Index

The Politics of Technology, and the Technology of Politics

To my eyes, the U. S government has gotten to the point where its abuses are acting in direct opposition to the normal functions of government necessary to maintain a civil society. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and if we survive this one, it won’t be the last.

In this article (paywall alert) Foreign Policy magazine points out yet another case of government duplicity, where the government claims to be interested in human rights while acting to destroy those same rights.  In this case, it is the right to privacy on the internet, which Germany and Brazil are attempting to write into international law, while the U. S., acting on what is obviously an NSA-driven “security” motive, is working behind the scenes to either destroy the initiative completely, or weaken it to the point of uselessness.

As an individual, I find the concept of privacy an absolute necessity.  Before the days of the internet and “big data”, the level of privacy I am talking about was never declared as a civil right because it was only barely possible to violate; that violation required large quantities of resources from a government-sized body, so was barely even attempted on anything like a large scale.  The Nazis and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI are two notable exceptions that pretty much prove the rule.

As Edward Snowden has forced the public to realize, today’s internet and the abuse of modern computing capabilities have allowed Hoover-style tracking of people to take place on several orders of magnitude greater scale without straining black budgets.  These are nations that are supposedly democratic and “freedom loving,” for whatever those terms are worth. The collusion of the various tech-savvy governments to bypass their own laws by allowing each other to do the dirty work for each other needs to be addressed by the people that live under those governments, but a simple statement on an international scale would at least give everyone a standard of behavior to compare to.

Apparently Germany and Brazil are trying to do is require governments to respect the sovereignty and privacy of individuals at something like the same levels as those “rights” existed when all of the current systems of government came into existence. What the NSA and its ilk have done is use the speed of technological progress to bypass any sort of human-scale conversation about the rightful use of that technology. The United States did the same thing with the development and use of the atomic bomb and its successors - once their implications became clear and public, no responsible government has used them except as a threat, and no sane group ever will.

This internet privacy rights declaration needs to be passed post-haste and enforced (with attendant violence if necessary) in order to force the governments of the world back into something like their rightful roles. Since governments will. by definition, stretch their power limits to the breaking point unless otherwise controlled, these sorts of limiting legal actions are necessary. While this has the flavor of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, it still needs to be done.

The real problem isn’t just this one rapacious violation of citizen’s rights - these will happen, and will have to be dealt with by an alert citizenry as they happen. The real and continuing problem, and it is not unique to this era, is that the expanded powers that can be created out of new technologies are being exploited first and lives destroyed before the implications of those technologies are understood. What is unique to this technological era is the scale and potential destructiveness of the advances that are happening, starting with the atomic bomb.

The Science Fiction community has made a living on exploring the potential implications of new technologies, but even that genre has fallen behind the technologies that are being developed. We have begun developing technologies so fast that humans can no longer begin to explore the ramifications of those technologies before their implementation invades society at all levels. The internet has been a prime example of this - as a society, we haven’t decided whether we want a “secure” internet, or one where innovation is the prime mover.

So far, the control freaks who want a “secure” internet have not been able to figure out how to begin to control it, but their kissing cousins in the “intelligence” community have figured out how to take advantage of the openness and omnipresence of the internet to invade our lives like no one has ever been able to in history - the technology has enabled this quantum change, and it happened right under our noses.

So is it possible in today’s world to prevent these sorts of abuses? Probably not - humans are not going to quit inventing, and the tools to accelerate invention even further are now pervasive in the more technological societies.  Any attempt to control this phenomenon is going to bypassed without too many second thoughts. The only solution is that there have to be people in the loop that care enough about the ramifications of the changes being created to prevent, or more likely mitigate the worst abuses after the fact. It takes humans to deal with humans in the end, and we have certainly shown our ability to be our own worst enemy.

I don’t claim to have answers to these questions, but I would like to think that I raise some points of discussion. I am fairly certain that there will never be a single mechanism that can control this phenomenon, because the innate curiosity and cleverness of humanity will bypass any control mechanism almost as fast as it comes into existence. This is a good thing in that it means that no absolute authority can control humanity for any length of time, but it also means that we are constantly skating on the thin ice of innovation that could open up and destroy us. The advance of technology means we constantly skate faster and closer to that edge, so we really need to keep up on our skating lessons.