Based on a true story:
Imagine you’re buying a shovel to do some gardening. Before you go to buy it, you think, “Let’s make a game out of this. Suppose I were under police scrutiny for buying too many shovels. How can I buy this shovel and do this gardening completely untraceably?”
Well, online purchases are right out. So you get in the car to go to the hardware store. Better leave your phone at home, because the cell tower pings will create a semi-permanent record of exactly where you went. As might your car, if you have a new one.
Ok, so you’re in your vintage car, leaving home to go to the hardware store. A few things to be aware of here. First, don’t go through any tollbooths. Populated areas are probably fine, even though in any city you’re going to be recorded by lots of private security cameras. You’d have to be a top priority for the police to go to the trouble of getting footage from enough private buildings to retrace your route. So just avoid publicly owned cameras and you’re fine.
You’ll have to pick a hardware store that doesn’t have security cameras, which leaves you with a choice of zero stores. So you pick one with the rattiest looking security camera setup, pay for your shovel with cash, and go home to do your gardening.
You get the point. If the police want to get you, they’re going to get you. So it comes down to how much they want it. Note the details in the hypothetical above: little frictions matter. Just like demand decreases as prices increase, abuse of power decreases as the cost of abuse increases. People abuse their power more when it’s easy to do so. And not “easy” in a legal safeguards/”what does the Constitution say about it?” kind of way. It’s much simpler than that. People will abuse their power when it’s user-friendly to do so. FBI agents and federal prosecutors want to leave the office at the end of the day just like you do. If persecuting you requires sending a bunch of extra emails that are annoying to write, at the margin they won’t do it.
There’s another way to frame the same observation: centralization vs. decentralization.
Centralization makes abuse easy. One warrant to AT&T will produce the full history of all your movement for as far back as the police care to look.
Decentralization makes abuse hard. Collecting surveillance footage from a dozen different businesses is doable, but it would have to be a very high priority.
We’ve written a few times about how government competence tech is a good thing, government empowerment tech is a bad thing, and a lot of people think they’re building the former when in fact they’re building the latter:
This is especially salient because a lot of this tech is being built in the US, and the US carries the fire for the world on government decentralization. The debate here is how decentralized the government should be, and about the structures that block centralization. In the rest of the world, the very idea of decentralization is often foreign — centralization is baked into every assumption.
Sometimes, the US threatens to drop the fire. The fire has certainly dimmed over the past 100-some-odd years. With some minor exceptions like airline deregulation (which we talked about in “OSD 331: What will guns look like without barrel length laws?”), government in the US has been monotonically centralizing since World War 1, especially with respect to the power of the presidency.
That’s dangerous for the US, and it’s dangerous for the world too. If the fire goes out here, it will be a long time before it’s rekindled anywhere. Defense tech should aspire to be more than the second coming of Lockheed Martin. It is individuals, not the government, who should be ungovernable. The best kind of defense tech will be for individuals, and it’ll foster a healthy unruliness in them that is technologically impossible for the government to stop.
This week’s links
Good thread on the botched DEVGRU mission into North Korea
There’s a wide spectrum of how well-informed the commenters seem, but the sum is enlightening.
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The government will track whatever is technically or economically feasible. A century ago, they tracked very little because computers and databases didn't exist. Now every corporation willingly compiles terabytes of data that the government can easily subpoena. We'd be much freer if we could convince corporations to not track so much data. If the data doesn't exist, it can't be used by the government. Why does AT&T need a constant record of my phone's location? To sell that info? Maybe there is a market niche for businesses to advertise that they don't track you? Would public pressure have any effect?
If I felt extra cagey about cameras, or the local hardware stores went card-only, I could go to a thrift store or a neighborhood tool swap and see if I could find a used shovel. So far, few or no governments have regulated the private sale of shovels, though they might crack down if they felt politically motivated to "do something about the shovel problem."