How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?by Richard Stallman
A version of this article was first published in Wired in October 2013.
Also consider reading “A radical proposal to keep your personal data safe,” published in The Guardian in April 2018.
Thanks to Edward Snowden's disclosures, we know that the current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. Expecting every action to be noted down makes people censor and limit themselves. The repeated harassment and prosecution of dissidents, sources, and journalists in the US and elsewhere provides confirmation.. (We were reminded of this in 2019 as various whistleblowers gave the public increments of information about Trump's attempt to shake down the president of Ukraine.) However, today's surveillance intimidates potential whistleblowers, which means it is too much. To recover our democratic control over the state, we must reduce surveillance to the point where whistleblowers know they are safe.
Using free/libre software, as I've advocated since 1983, practice, we can't expect state agencies even to make up excuses to satisfy the rules for using surveillance data—because US agencies already lie to cover up breaking the rules. These rules are not seriously meant to be obeyed; rather, they are a fairy-tale we can believe if we like.
In addition, the state's surveillance staff will misuse the data for personal reasons..” This practice has expanded with new digital systems. In 2016, a prosecutor was accused of forging judges' signatures to get authorization to wiretap someone who was the object of a romantic obsession. The AP knows of many other instances in the US.
Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is prohibited. Once the data has been accumulated and the state has the possibility of access to it, it can misuse that data in dreadful ways, as shown by examples from Europe, the US, and most recently Turkey. (Turkey's confusion about who had really used the Bylock program only exacerbated the basic deliberate injustice of arbitrarily punishing people for having used it.)., can be hyped to provide.
First, Don't Be Foolish
To have privacy, you must not throw it away: the first one who has to protect your privacy is you. Avoid identifying yourself to web sites, contact them with Tor, and use browsers that block the schemes they use to track visitors. Use the GNU Privacy Guard to encrypt the contents of your email. Pay for things with cash.
Keep your own data; don't store your data in a company's “convenient” server. It's safe, however, to entrust a data backup to a commercial service, provided you put the files in an archive and encrypt the whole archive, including the names of the files, with free software on your own computer before uploading it.
For privacy's sake, you must avoid nonfree software; if you give control of your computer's operations to companies, they are likely to make it spy on you. Avoid service as a software substitute; in addition to giving others control of how your computing is done, it requires you to hand over all the pertinent data to the company's server.
Protect your friends' and acquaintances' privacy, too. Don't give out their personal information except how to contact them, and never give any web site your list of email or phone contacts. Don't tell a company such as Facebook anything about your friends that they might not wish to publish in a newspaper. Better yet, don't be used by Facebook at all. Reject communication systems that require users to give their real names, even if you are happy to divulge yours, since they pressure other people to surrender their privacy.
Self-protection is essential, but even the most rigorous self-protection is insufficient to protect your privacy on or from systems that don't belong to you. When we communicate with others or move around the city, our privacy depends on the practices of society. We can avoid some of the systems that surveil our communications and movements, but not all of them. Clearly, the better solution is to make all these systems stop surveilling people other than legitimate suspects. [1].. In Detroit, the cops pressure businesses to give them unlimited access to their surveillance cameras so that they can look through them at any and all times. This is already dangerous, but it is going to get worse. Advances in face recognition may bring the day when suspected journalists can be tracked on the street all the time to see who they talk with.
Internet-connected cameras often have lousy digital security themselves, which means anyone can watch what those cameras see..
(*) I assume here that the security camera points at the inside of a store, or at the street. Any camera pointed at someone's private space by someone else violates privacy, but that is another issue.. Some companies are praised for resisting government data requests to the limited extent they can, but that can only partly compensate for the harm they do to by collecting that data in the first place. In addition, many of those companies misuse the data directly or provide it to data brokers. to help the payee dodge taxes.) Bitcoin is not anonymous, though there are efforts to develop ways to pay anonymously with Bitcoin. However, technology for digital cash was first developed in the 1980s; the GNU software for doing this is called GNU Taler. Now we need only suitable business arrangements, and for the state not to obstruct them.
Another possible method for anonymous payments would use prepaid phone cards. It is less convenient, but very easy to implement. cars' PAT RIOT Act) does not clearly prohibit the practice. In addition, if the government did resume this sort of surveillance, it would not get data about everyone's phone calls made prior to that time.
For privacy about who you exchange email with, a simple partial solution is for you and others to use email services in a country that would never cooperate with your own government, and which communicate with each other using encryption. However, Ladar Levison (owner of the mail service Lavabit that US surveillance sought to corrupt completely) has a more sophisticated idea for an encryption system through which your email service would know only that you sent mail to some user of my email service, and my email service would know only that I received mail from some user of your email service, but it would be hard to determine that you had sent mail to me., if (as I recommend) we prevent digital systems from accumulating massive dossiers before.
End Note
- The condition of not being monitored has been referred to as ambient privacy.