The case for a surveillance state and for gun control have both gotten weaker in the last several years. Every institution who gets a turn in the limelight shows a staggering level of incompetence or corruption, (FBI, WHO, FDA, CDC, IRS, even the military in afghanistan). These are the people we give surveillance powers to? On the gun control side, defund the police & the resulting rise in crime have grown the ranks of gun owners. Everyone with a soul is tortured by these recent incidents, but I don't see any movement towards the obvious "mainstream" solutions.
Someone who wants to kill kids is a broken person. Someone living on a tent on the sidewalk is a broken person. How do we fix broken people? That is the underlying question.
I've always thought one of the best works of political theory and social psychology is the Exodus story. God frees the Jews and leads them out of Egypt. The Jews are ungrateful and continuously doubting, and break faith at every turn, until eventually God says, "alright, screw you guys, you're going to wonder in the desert for 40 years and none of you get to the promised land. But your kids will".
You can't just take slaves and make them free, and expect them to responsibly use that freedom. The more crazed and violent your population, the less freedom it probably deserves. But almost no society even considers the generational development or degradation of its members' basic functionality as human being. At its worst, some political elements seem intent on making people crazier and more violent as a means of asserting more control over the whole.
Let's say that knowing nothing, 1 in 100,000,000 people will become a school shooter
Now track everyone's social media, telephone calls, texts, and construct an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of becoming a school shooter. Your best Algorithm can identify that someone is one thousand times or 10,000% more likely then the general population to become a school shooter. That's a pretty good model you have there.
Except that for every individual your algorithm selects, only 1 in 100,000 will become a school shooter.
As we've learned from counterterrorism experience, it actually doesn't matter even if the algorithm is 1 in 100 or maybe even in 10 or in 2.
The trouble is that surveillance alone doesn't mean anything when one is trying to prevent these crimes. At some point you will have to intervene. When, how, on what basis?
Many of these guys are certainly creepy, but creepy within the tolerance of the law, and doing perfectly legal things within their rights ... until the day or the moment they aren't. If the legal standard is such that you are putting your career on the line if you make a mistake and, as a practical matter, can't lift a finger against a person until it's so late that you have to be permanently attentive, able, and willing to stop them "in the nick of time", then it's pretty clear that the state is just not capable of doing that. Notice that law enforcement is often pretty slow to storm into school buildings even when they are on scene and when seconds matter and lives are on the line.
So one has to create much bigger gaps between intervention and crisis, and any surveillance system would have to be coupled with early intervention to impose legal disabilities on these precriminals based on falling below some threshold on their threat-potential social credit score. For example, being committed for psychological aberrations or preventing them from legally purchasing and possessing firearms or of living within one mile of any school, and so forth. Prohibition of firearms can be seen as equivalent to saying everybody presumptively falls below that threshold.
Well, our current legal system is just not up to this job, and even if it was, politicized mass abuses of these authorities would completely overwhelm their use as targeted preventative measures against the genuinely dangerous class of potential threats.
Surveillance is probably a big stressor. What are the odds such surveillance increases the odds someone goes off the deep end and starts a bloody rampage? Would the benefits outweigh the costs along this one dimension alone? I doubt it.
When particular crimes happen in certain areas, the police know who to go and call on. School staff know which pupils have a reputation. Fellow pupils know a wrong’un in their midst.
Curiously schools know which pupils have ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’, which children require ‘special needs’, or are ‘autistic’, or need the school counsellor to talk about their attitude, transphobia, covet racism, homophobia, etc but nobody can spot a mentally disturbed pupil with a propensity for violence, threatening behaviour, criminal activity and imagine he might just be the next school shooter and give him (it usually is a him) counselling, talk to his parents.
Too busy I suppose ticking all the correct busybody boxes.
This does indeed need surveillance but not in the spying-on sense, but alert professionals who should be dealing with real situations not manufactured woke problems.
As for privacy issues - a stumbling block? Ha! That ship sailed years ago.
Every three letter agency is surveilling you, a Disinformation Governance Board is on ‘pause’ but will come back and insinuate itself into everyone’s private thoughts, text messages; apps on your phone check up whether you have been vaccinated or passed near to a plague victim, and where you are going, what you are doing.
The truth is getting to the cause of the problem (mass shootings) requires intelligent thought and competence, and has no political mileage in it whereas the emoting about guns, guns, guns covers the political, the ideological and State power over the individual.
That is correct. But to me it seemed like hand-waving to just suggest that "the people" would engage in surveillance without any institutional framework
I would like to request you write more about your thoughts on this point.
Handle's Law is that all the best quotes are apocryphal. The quote misattributed to Stalin is, "Quantity has a Quality all its own." Likewise, the mere fact of the inescapable and pervasive surveillance inevitably generates an institutional character all its own.
Simply knowing that everything one does or says to anyone else is permanently recorded and easily accessible is chilling and formative in the "The Eyes of God are upon you" sense, except not just an unfalsifiable belief but provable true. And this state of affairs cannot but give rise to a new cultural equilibrium of social dynamics and expectations regarding behavior. It is no exaggeration to say that in our system state power is held by those who enjoy the privilege of secrecy regarding its exercise, and a radical rejiggering of transparency requirements is thus in effect akin to Constitutional amendment, which is institutional revolution by definition.
No one has to actually be watching, and one can even believe accurately that no person is actively watching. One only has to know that the records are being made and that, if someone (or some algorithm) wanted to review them at any point in the future, they would learn the truth. Of course with increasingly smarter machines we don't need humans to watch, the machines can just watch everybody in real time, and the current elite mores that will be implemented in that code will become the shape of the birdcage we build for ourselves and our souls, maybe forever.
Agreed but his solution would only work if those institutions were not part of or beholden to the government they are surveilling. Imagine if the justices of the US Supreme Court were appointed in some fashion by the governors of the states and impeachable by the in some fashion legislatures of the states, I would expect substantially different opinions to arise in many cases that scope federal power. The existence of a powerful nemesis beyond their power to control is the crux of Brin's solution.
I know that a portion of the blame is apportioned to violent video games. I just watched the 4th in a series of movies of the “Purge” theme, one night of government sanctioned violence. If that series doesn’t promote violence in young minds, I don’t know what would.
The problem with the algorithm would be to differentiate between someone being stupid and someone being serious. I am not sure this would be insurmountable. For one, social network size would more than likely be a good indicator. Responses to the posts would be another. This is ripe for abuse, but it could also identify people that need help - maybe they won't all be future mass shooters, but they probably would all need help. I still would not trust the government with this, progressives patholigize any dissent from their orthodoxy.
These are good ideas as far as they go. However, both history and present day relevant situations tell me that the desired objectivity by the audit agency is impossible ever to achieve.
Consider government treatment of two groups in the past ten years -- the "right wing racist extremists" that are officially blamed for 1/6 and for the earlier "Unite the Right" riot; and Antifa/BLM, which have been conducting an "unstoppable" reign of terror in Portland and other places. The "right wing extremists" are largely if not completely imaginary, and most of them are entrapment operations conducted by FBI and other corrupt agencies in order to rob real dissidents of the ability to conduct peaceful demonstrations anywhere (by hijacking those events and smearing the people involved). But in the case of BLM/Antifa the opposite holds true -- that is, Antifa/BLM members also are recruited if not hired by corrupt law enforcement agencies, but those same agencies make sure the police and prosecutors don't prosecute or even bother them, and instead, protect the terrorists from any self-defense by their victims. The malicious prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was a typical example.
It seems to me the right answer is to give the general population the power to correct the problems themselves, meaning: (1) keep guns legal and avoid creating gun-free zones, so that when someone does try a mass shooting, someone else present will likely be armed and stop them; and (2) legalize private prosecution, so that the kind of deals that are giving Antifa and BLM terrorists a free pass can no longer work.
The case for a surveillance state and for gun control have both gotten weaker in the last several years. Every institution who gets a turn in the limelight shows a staggering level of incompetence or corruption, (FBI, WHO, FDA, CDC, IRS, even the military in afghanistan). These are the people we give surveillance powers to? On the gun control side, defund the police & the resulting rise in crime have grown the ranks of gun owners. Everyone with a soul is tortured by these recent incidents, but I don't see any movement towards the obvious "mainstream" solutions.
Someone who wants to kill kids is a broken person. Someone living on a tent on the sidewalk is a broken person. How do we fix broken people? That is the underlying question.
I've always thought one of the best works of political theory and social psychology is the Exodus story. God frees the Jews and leads them out of Egypt. The Jews are ungrateful and continuously doubting, and break faith at every turn, until eventually God says, "alright, screw you guys, you're going to wonder in the desert for 40 years and none of you get to the promised land. But your kids will".
You can't just take slaves and make them free, and expect them to responsibly use that freedom. The more crazed and violent your population, the less freedom it probably deserves. But almost no society even considers the generational development or degradation of its members' basic functionality as human being. At its worst, some political elements seem intent on making people crazier and more violent as a means of asserting more control over the whole.
An easier way to explain this:
Let's say that knowing nothing, 1 in 100,000,000 people will become a school shooter
Now track everyone's social media, telephone calls, texts, and construct an algorithm that predicts the likelihood of becoming a school shooter. Your best Algorithm can identify that someone is one thousand times or 10,000% more likely then the general population to become a school shooter. That's a pretty good model you have there.
Except that for every individual your algorithm selects, only 1 in 100,000 will become a school shooter.
As we've learned from counterterrorism experience, it actually doesn't matter even if the algorithm is 1 in 100 or maybe even in 10 or in 2.
The trouble is that surveillance alone doesn't mean anything when one is trying to prevent these crimes. At some point you will have to intervene. When, how, on what basis?
Many of these guys are certainly creepy, but creepy within the tolerance of the law, and doing perfectly legal things within their rights ... until the day or the moment they aren't. If the legal standard is such that you are putting your career on the line if you make a mistake and, as a practical matter, can't lift a finger against a person until it's so late that you have to be permanently attentive, able, and willing to stop them "in the nick of time", then it's pretty clear that the state is just not capable of doing that. Notice that law enforcement is often pretty slow to storm into school buildings even when they are on scene and when seconds matter and lives are on the line.
So one has to create much bigger gaps between intervention and crisis, and any surveillance system would have to be coupled with early intervention to impose legal disabilities on these precriminals based on falling below some threshold on their threat-potential social credit score. For example, being committed for psychological aberrations or preventing them from legally purchasing and possessing firearms or of living within one mile of any school, and so forth. Prohibition of firearms can be seen as equivalent to saying everybody presumptively falls below that threshold.
Well, our current legal system is just not up to this job, and even if it was, politicized mass abuses of these authorities would completely overwhelm their use as targeted preventative measures against the genuinely dangerous class of potential threats.
Surveillance is probably a big stressor. What are the odds such surveillance increases the odds someone goes off the deep end and starts a bloody rampage? Would the benefits outweigh the costs along this one dimension alone? I doubt it.
When particular crimes happen in certain areas, the police know who to go and call on. School staff know which pupils have a reputation. Fellow pupils know a wrong’un in their midst.
Curiously schools know which pupils have ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’, which children require ‘special needs’, or are ‘autistic’, or need the school counsellor to talk about their attitude, transphobia, covet racism, homophobia, etc but nobody can spot a mentally disturbed pupil with a propensity for violence, threatening behaviour, criminal activity and imagine he might just be the next school shooter and give him (it usually is a him) counselling, talk to his parents.
Too busy I suppose ticking all the correct busybody boxes.
This does indeed need surveillance but not in the spying-on sense, but alert professionals who should be dealing with real situations not manufactured woke problems.
As for privacy issues - a stumbling block? Ha! That ship sailed years ago.
Every three letter agency is surveilling you, a Disinformation Governance Board is on ‘pause’ but will come back and insinuate itself into everyone’s private thoughts, text messages; apps on your phone check up whether you have been vaccinated or passed near to a plague victim, and where you are going, what you are doing.
The truth is getting to the cause of the problem (mass shootings) requires intelligent thought and competence, and has no political mileage in it whereas the emoting about guns, guns, guns covers the political, the ideological and State power over the individual.
For the fictionalized version, read Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" (or see the movie starring Tom Cruise).
Brin’s solution was to subject government actors to the same surveillance regime as they employ themselves….not better institutions as I recall
That is correct. But to me it seemed like hand-waving to just suggest that "the people" would engage in surveillance without any institutional framework
I would like to request you write more about your thoughts on this point.
Handle's Law is that all the best quotes are apocryphal. The quote misattributed to Stalin is, "Quantity has a Quality all its own." Likewise, the mere fact of the inescapable and pervasive surveillance inevitably generates an institutional character all its own.
Simply knowing that everything one does or says to anyone else is permanently recorded and easily accessible is chilling and formative in the "The Eyes of God are upon you" sense, except not just an unfalsifiable belief but provable true. And this state of affairs cannot but give rise to a new cultural equilibrium of social dynamics and expectations regarding behavior. It is no exaggeration to say that in our system state power is held by those who enjoy the privilege of secrecy regarding its exercise, and a radical rejiggering of transparency requirements is thus in effect akin to Constitutional amendment, which is institutional revolution by definition.
No one has to actually be watching, and one can even believe accurately that no person is actively watching. One only has to know that the records are being made and that, if someone (or some algorithm) wanted to review them at any point in the future, they would learn the truth. Of course with increasingly smarter machines we don't need humans to watch, the machines can just watch everybody in real time, and the current elite mores that will be implemented in that code will become the shape of the birdcage we build for ourselves and our souls, maybe forever.
Agreed but his solution would only work if those institutions were not part of or beholden to the government they are surveilling. Imagine if the justices of the US Supreme Court were appointed in some fashion by the governors of the states and impeachable by the in some fashion legislatures of the states, I would expect substantially different opinions to arise in many cases that scope federal power. The existence of a powerful nemesis beyond their power to control is the crux of Brin's solution.
I know that a portion of the blame is apportioned to violent video games. I just watched the 4th in a series of movies of the “Purge” theme, one night of government sanctioned violence. If that series doesn’t promote violence in young minds, I don’t know what would.
The problem with the algorithm would be to differentiate between someone being stupid and someone being serious. I am not sure this would be insurmountable. For one, social network size would more than likely be a good indicator. Responses to the posts would be another. This is ripe for abuse, but it could also identify people that need help - maybe they won't all be future mass shooters, but they probably would all need help. I still would not trust the government with this, progressives patholigize any dissent from their orthodoxy.
These are good ideas as far as they go. However, both history and present day relevant situations tell me that the desired objectivity by the audit agency is impossible ever to achieve.
Consider government treatment of two groups in the past ten years -- the "right wing racist extremists" that are officially blamed for 1/6 and for the earlier "Unite the Right" riot; and Antifa/BLM, which have been conducting an "unstoppable" reign of terror in Portland and other places. The "right wing extremists" are largely if not completely imaginary, and most of them are entrapment operations conducted by FBI and other corrupt agencies in order to rob real dissidents of the ability to conduct peaceful demonstrations anywhere (by hijacking those events and smearing the people involved). But in the case of BLM/Antifa the opposite holds true -- that is, Antifa/BLM members also are recruited if not hired by corrupt law enforcement agencies, but those same agencies make sure the police and prosecutors don't prosecute or even bother them, and instead, protect the terrorists from any self-defense by their victims. The malicious prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse was a typical example.
It seems to me the right answer is to give the general population the power to correct the problems themselves, meaning: (1) keep guns legal and avoid creating gun-free zones, so that when someone does try a mass shooting, someone else present will likely be armed and stop them; and (2) legalize private prosecution, so that the kind of deals that are giving Antifa and BLM terrorists a free pass can no longer work.