CaroKann's Periscope: monitoring, legislative changes and control

This blog-post is the last one in a series of 4 postings. It is about 4 mega-trends that each can take two paths. Heaven or hell. Everything depends on ourselves and our own decisions. The 5th post will be a summing up and conclusions.

There is so much to say about this topic but I'll try to keep it short. The very purpose of this blog post is to combine it with the other previous posts.

Never before has it been so easy and cheap to monitor and track people, as it is now.

It is relatively easy to use the interception of networks, email scanning, pattern recognition, AI, etc..
We leave traces of ourselves in social networks including "Location awareness", transactions such as ATM withdrawals, credit cards, the entry and exit of buildings, logging on and out, phone calls, instant messaging etc, etc.

Matching all this information is a piece of cake if you have access to it. Our government agencies and institutions have access to the most but also companies and individuals can access a lot of information with both legal and illegal means. In most of the western world we have laws to protect us against such but the laws are outdated and are constantly exposed to "attacks". Different interests lobbying for relaxing or removing those laws. Only few politicians are working to strengthen citizen protection. It is clear that powerful forces working to bring total transparency and control over us citizens.

George Orwell's 1984 just sniffed at what was really going to come.

To what already exists, we will also soon have new opportunities for visual and audio analysis. A View can now recognize a face. A technology which will become increasingly more sophisticated and cheap. Soon every man's property! What is said in a video or audio recording will soon be translated into text, evaluated, cataloged, sorted and matched. This technology is in its infancy but will also be developed.

I have a very positive overall personality and I am convinced that we (humanity) will break up this knot! However, I am afraid that it will take time and that our awakening can be very painful.

When it is so easy and cheap to get large volumes of information that can be matched and used in different ways, is there anyone who believes that even strong laws are sufficient to prevent power-mad politicians, institutions and companies from doing this? Just look back in our history to get an idea. The technology is new but the man does not change as fast!

Counter forces will arise from the same origin, namely, social networks and communities. Countermeasures in the form of software and hardware that will do anything to hinder surveillance. Will it work? Maybe not. We will vote for politicians who dare to take away from this trend and establish laws and technology that can stop a total control of individuals. But only after we have burned ourselves!
Sure monitoring is necessary and useful to society and this is precisely the problem. We all want fight the criminals and terrorists, but at what price?

In Sweden, the debate has raged against a new law (FRA Act) for signals intelligence. The law has nevertheless come about. It is that Swedish intelligence service will collect and analyze all Internet traffic in Sweden. Especially, people are worried for their email ... but this is not about reading the individual emails. It is about getting an additional source of mass information to add to the ones mentioned above. Moreover, the debate is quite naive. Sweden is just a small speck on the map. Who believes that other intelligence agencies do not do the same thing already? Some have been going on for years. Echelon is a famous example. How many secret and unknown examples are there? C'mon we are talking about secret intelligence! I think that we all agree that it is needed to some degree but it is almost impossible to set the limits. How can we take control of the control?