At the Crossroads: Surveillance State or Freedom?

When I went to OHM2013 last week, it was great to see such increased political activism from the hackers and geeks at the festival. I truly believe we are currently at a very important crossroads: either let governments the world over get away with crimes against the people’s interests, with programs like PRISM, ECHELON, TEMPORA and countless other authoritarian global surveillance schemes, or enter the path towards more freedom, transparency and accountability.

A good example of what not to do is Google Glass. A few weeks ago I came across the story of a hacker who modded Google Glass as to allow instant facial recognition and the covert recording of video.  Normally you need to tap your temple or use voice commands to start recording with Glass, all of which are pretty obvious gestures. But now people can record video and do automatic facial recognition covertly when they wear Glass. I even saw that there’s an app developed for Glass, called MedRef. MedRef also uses facial recognition technology. This basically allows medical professionals to view and update patient records using Glass. Of course having medical records available on Glass isn’t really in the interests of the patient either, as it’s a totally superfluous technology, and it’s unnecessary to store patient records on a device like that, over which you have no control. It’s Google who is calling the shots. Do we really want that?

Image above © ZABOU.
Image above © ZABOU.

As hackers, I think it’s important to remember the implications and possible privacy consequences of the things we are doing. By enabling the covert recording of video with Google Glass, and also adding on top of that, instant and automatic facial recognition, you are basically creating walking CCTV cameras. Also given the fact that these devices are controlled by Google, who knows where these video’s will end up. These devices are interesting from a technical and societal standpoint, sure, but after PRISM, we should be focusing on regaining what little we have left of our privacy and other human rights. As geeks and hackers we can no longer idly stand by and just be content hacking some technical thing that doesn’t have political implications.

I truly and with all my heart know that geeks and hackers are key to stopping the encroaching global surveillance state. It has been said that geeks shall inherit the earth. Not literally of course, but unlike any other population group out there, I think geeks have the skills and technical know-how to have a fighting chance against the NSA. We use strong encryption, we know what’s possible and what is not, and we can work one bit at a time at restoring humanity, freedom, transparency and accountability.

These values were won by our parents and grandparents after very hard bloody struggles for a reason. They very well saw what will happen with an out-of-control government. Why government of the people, for the people, and by the people, is a very good idea. The Germans have had plenty of hands-on experience with the consequences as well, first with the Nazis who took control and were responsible for murdering entire population groups, not only Jews but also people who didn’t think along similar lines: communists, activists, gay people, lesbians, transgenders, etc. Later the Germans got another taste of what can happen if you live in a surveillance state, with the Stasi in the former East-Germany, who encouraged people to spy on one another, exactly what the US government is currently also encouraging. Dangerous parallels there.

But you have to remember that the capabilities of the Stasi and Gestapo were only limited, and peanuts to what the NSA can do. Just to give a comparison: the Stasi at the height of its power, could only tap 40 telephone lines concurrently, so at any one time, there were at most 40 people under Stasi surveillance. Weird isn’t it? We all have this image in our minds that the prime example of a surveillance state would be East-Germany under the Stasi, while they could only spy on 40 people at a time. Of course, they had files on almost anybody, but they could only spy on this very limited number of people concurrently. Nowadays, the NSA gets to spy continuously on all the people in the world who are connected to the internet. Billions of people. Which begs the question: if we saw East-Germany as the prime example of the surveillance state, what do we make of the United States of America?

The Next Step?

I think the next step in defeating this technocratic nightmare of the surveillance state and regain our freedom is to educate others. Hold cryptoparties, explain the reasons and need and workings of encryption methods. Make sure that people leave with their laptops all configured to use strong encryption. If we can educate the general population one person at the time, using our technological skill and know-how, and explain why this is necessary, then eventually the NSA will have no-one to spy on, as almost all communication will flow across the internet in encrypted form. It’s sad that it is necessary, really, but I see no other option to stop intelligence agencies’ excess data-hunger. The NSA has a bad case of data addiction, and they urgently need rehab. They claim more data is necessary to catch terrorists, but let’s face it: we don’t find the needle in the haystack by making the haystack bigger.