**Posted by:** Zim Shirky, Outreach Coordinator, Electronic Futures Foundation <Info Msg Rep>
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The historians say that we sleepwalked into a surveillance state. They meant that the technology for widespread surveillance progressed and was implemented in a gradual manner, though quick considering the actual time scales, and with little in the way of open discussion about the ramiﬁcations, so that before anyone thought to object it was already ingrained into society. When the tables turned and the same technology was used to watch the watchers, there was a bit more resistance, but by that point the genie’s bottle had already been melted down and reshaped as a camera lens. By the time the pundits broke out their talking points and started debating the issues and repercussions, a new equilibrium had already developed. As usual, the conversation was framed in a way to distract people, to keep them endlessly arguing over the same points.
==Privacy vs Transparency== 
The main issue, at least according to the memeticists of the inner system, is the tension between transparency and privacy. Transparency, we are told, is essential for safety, security, and accountability. By always being able to check in on or track our loved ones, from any place at any time, we can rest assured that nothing bad has happened to them. If an accident were to happen, most likely some watcher somewhere would notice, and so help would soon be on the way. With many eyes watching, we can feel safer from crime, terrorism, and other potential dangers such as ﬁres or life support malfunctions. Likewise, in a transparent society, the argument goes, no one has secrets. You know everything I do, but I know the same about you. We are all accountable to each other. The regimes of the hypercorp governments play to this to the hilt, noting that even governments are accountable to their people. Monitoring citizens can catch abuses of power, violations of rights, or unethical activity. The government watches the people, but the people watch back. Among the autonomists of the outer system, similar arguments are often applied. Universal sousveillance protects everyone, allowing everyone to keep an eye on each other, thus leveling the playing ﬁeld.
Those who argue heavily in favor of sur- and sousveillance often argue that privacy is a thing of the past. In their view, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.
This is a gross simpliﬁcation, of course. If you watch someone long enough, you will eventually ﬁnd some reason to arrest or blackmail them, if that is your goal. But that is not even the point. Transhumans have many good reasons for personal privacy that has nothing to do with hiding illicit or illegal activities—some, in fact, deﬁne privacy as a civil right or inherent human need. We expect and need privacy for our peace of mind, for our intimate moments, for composing our own thoughts and reﬂections, for sharing conﬁdentialities with partners, for managing our own disabilities and personal shortcomings. There is nothing wrong with expecting or even demanding privacy for certain aspects of your life. Some would consider it an essential element to maintaining our own dignity. Secrecy is also important for innovation and business relations.
Sometimes, of course, there are disagreements about what may be considered “wrong” to the society at large. In a station where anti-uplift prejudice is common, a mercurial may rightly feel justiﬁed in keeping its identity and affairs private for fear of discrimination or persecution. Many of us would consider this undeniably just, no matter that the uplift in question might be violating local laws—especially if we had to go a day sleeved in their morph. Likewise, a dissident who organizes against or even actively sabotages an oppressive or authoritarian regime has a reasonable need for secrecy, which the government would undoubtedly dispute. To many of us in the outer system, all capitalist governments are oppressive. Privacy in such circumstances is a requirement
for survival.
In truth, ubiquitous surveillance and privacy are not mutually exclusive. The question is simply where the line is drawn. Even in today’s societies of omnipresent watchers, a distinction is often made between the public and private sphere. Allowances are made for people to maintain privacy in their own homes and ofﬁces. Our bedrooms, bathrooms, workshops, and boardrooms are off-limits to outside eyes. In less restrictive habitats, it is even acceptable to maintain a semblance of privacy and anonymity in public, via the use of private mesh modes or even privacy veils.
==Power Dynamics== 
In my opinion, the inner system talking heads are pulling a fast one. The choice is not really between transparency and privacy, it’s between liberty and control. As any autonomist worth the name can tell you, you can’t debate surveillance without talking about the vast differences between people with power and those without it. Complete transparency is worthless as an equalizer if a signiﬁcant portion of society lacks the ability to do anything with it. This is an important lesson the citizens of the inner system have yet to fully comprehend.
Consider some examples. When a habitat security contractor stops you to verify your ID, you are at a disadvantage. You may be able to access their name and ID as well, but the best you can do is maybe pull up some personal info on the mesh, check their social network proﬁle, or see if their name has cropped up in the newsfeeds. You may be able to dig up some personal history and even track them online—but what would you do with that info? The security guard, however, can run your ID against multiple government and private databases to which you don’t have access. They can pull up private details such as your arrest history, citizenship records, and all manner of private personal details. They also have the authority to detain, question, and arrest you.
Let’s say the situation is more drastic. Perhaps you catch the security ofﬁcer in the act of beating someone who is not resisting. You may catch that on video, spread it around the mesh, and maybe even cause charges to be ﬁled. Ultimately, however, the security guard is likely to get a slap on the wrist or go unpunished because they are part of the power structure and those within that structure protect their own. Meanwhile, you have just made yourself an enemy of the security and political apparatus. You may ﬁnd yourself harassed or targeted with violence. Perhaps the video you enter as evidence is determined to be doctored. Perhaps the authorities pull out their own video proving that you instigated the ﬁght, thanks to their ability to fabricate whatever evidence they need.
This is why the “transparent society” of the inner system is a pipe dream. Without equality, transparency is meaningless. Since the Fall there have been untold instances of scandal involving people of power and wealth, but very few of them pay for their crimes in the end. Their inﬂuence gives them the means to warp due process and receive special treatment. Remember that hypercorp dynasty brat on Luna who was found to be an uplift serial killer last year? Never convicted, despite hard evidence. The elites and their tools have a special coating that allows them to deflect minor crimes and wrongs. It is the nature of privilege. Scandals and leaks catching such ﬁgureheads in the act are so common as to be routine and boring. Their impact is routinely blunted by cynicism and apathy. The public’s attention is quickly diverted, and no one really expects them to be punished anyway. With the resources at their disposal, most of the powerful have learned carefully how to shield their more heinous crimes and activities from view. Extraordinary power requires extraordinary transparency to undermine, and the elites have not let sousveillance creep that far just yet.
This isn’t to say that transparency has no effect on non-egalitarian societies. Leaks and the accountability forced by transparency function as a sort of “secrecy tax” on those in power. The more secrets they keep, the higher the cost they pay to protect those secrets or recuperate when they are made public. This has an effect to push the elites towards more transparency simply to defray costs of operation. The tension comes when this transparency begins to threaten their control. Many governments attempt a balancing act, practicing openness to a point and risking secrecy for the true behind-the-scenes power players. Many are exposed and pay the price.
A true participatory panopticon requires a society of equals. This is how the autonomists function. An injustice or antisocial act caught on video in an [[anarchists|anarchist]] or technosocialist habitat will earn the wrongdoer the disdain of their peers, measured as a drop in their reputation in proportion to the offense. In a pluralistic society, peer shaming has great power. Offend your fellow beings too often and you may ﬁnd yourself subject to censure or outright exile. While the word of someone with a higher rep may deflect some of the force of an accusation from someone with lower rep, reputation does not translate into power as it does in the inner system. Even high-rep people can expect to pay a price if damning evidence of gruesomely inappropriate behavior is shared across a habitat’s mesh.
==Information Control== 
One of the main issues in power dynamics is who has control of the information? When cameras are seeded throughout public areas of a habitat, do only the authorities have access to them? Are the cameras owned by private companies who sell the feeds? Or are they open to all via the mesh? What about cameras in government buildings? Police stations? The same questions may also be applied to consumer data, to various databases, and to information supplied to social networks by their users.
The more open and decentralized such information is, the more liberatory the society. In an autonomist habitat, the cameras outside of private residences are open to everyone and databases are public access. In inner system and Extropian stations, open publicams and databases abound, but there are also many private cameras and archives—often of superior quality—to which you must buy access. Thus the wealthy have more access. In the colonies of the Jovian Republic and similar restrictive polities, public cameras and databases are limited, but the watching eyes of the authorities are everywhere.
The standard playbook for authoritarian regimes when dealing with information they don’t like is to try to contain or censor it. In many of today’s habitats, the decentralized mesh and access to QE comms or darkcast networks makes this an impossibility. Censorship is rarely successful, though it is occasionally still tried. AI botnets may be released to scour unwanted data from public sites. A more effective remedy, as many autocrats and oligarchs have found, is to wage disinformation campaigns. When you cannot hide the data, make it unreliable, or bury it under a wave of counter-attacks and spin. Censorship and mesh blockades still have an impact in tightly controlled stations, such as the Jovian Junta’s colonies or private hypercorp habitats.
Among the capitalist societies, a related question is not just who controls the data, but who owns your personal data. Average citizens supply their personal data to numerous social networks, cloud services, and other mesh sites on a daily basis. Their personal transactions and mesh activity are logged and recorded by marketing corps. With few exceptions, they have no control over how this data will be used or to whom it will be sold. In many cases, they may not even be aware it is being collected. Even if they are, the social cost of not using such services is too high—opting out has its own price. Though some polities have enacted restrictions on data retention, require opt-out policies, or otherwise limit the manner in which such data is collected and used, it is rare for consumers to have much in the way of protection. This raises an uglier set of questions when you consider that these data archives can be mined by restrictive governments, political parties, or others looking to gather information on criminals, dissidents, opponents, or simply people they don’t like.
==Accountability== 
Where power intervenes, transparency fails to provide accountability. This is the main fact that the residents of the Planetary Consortium and their ilk must grasp. Public-accessible cameras and citizen sousveillance of police is not enough. To truly hold the people at the top accountable, publicams should be placed inside police stations, interrogation rooms, jails, security checkpoints, congressional chambers, and anywhere government officials meet with lobbyists, make decisions, and otherwise exercise their authority. Recording the police and government should not only be legal but required. Ofﬁcers, politicians, and civil servants should be required to lifelog their activities, record all meetings, and broadcast their affairs. Budgets, expenditures, and contributions should all be logged. As public servants, they should be held even more accountable to the public than our neighbors and peers. And the only way the public can hold them accountable is if the public is informed. To varying degrees, this does occur. Planetary Congress debates are one of the great spectacles of the inner system. Many congressional persons lifelog or at least X-cast their ofﬁce hours. Yet the Consortium’s Ministry, Assembly, and Hypercorp Council are not open in the same way. The activities of the true government power remain shielded from prying eyes.
How is this secrecy justified? Security, of course. According to the party line, essential government affairs must be veiled to protect them from hostile interests. The same logic is also applied to diplomatic relations, military matters, and sometimes even economic affairs and trade agreements. The authorities, of course, decide for themselves what matters are critical to security, without public oversight. These ofﬁcials have been elected or appointed and the public should trust them to do their duty, or so we are told. To open up all political business would be to expose weakness to rival foreign powers, not to mention provide fuel for endless partisan bickering. If privacy is an individual right, they say, why should ofﬁcials not also have it?
To an autonomist, this is a failure of accountability, and perhaps underlines a fundamental distinction between inner and outer system ideologies. The inner system relies on representatives who are given authority to act in the public’s name; they are expected to represent the public, but ultimately the decisions they make are their own. Among autonomists, delegates are used for representational purposes, who have only the authority to pass along the decisions made by those they represent. To ensure this, the activity of delegates is transparent and held accountable. If a delegate were to misrepresent their constituency, they would be recalled immediately—no waiting for the next election.
An essential element of accountability, both in personal and political affairs, is criticism. By exposing ourselves to the public eye, we open ourselves to critique from all angles. This enables more opportunities for dialog and exposure to opposing views. It also serves as an organic error-correcting mechanism—no one goes long after making a mistake without someone telling them about it. Watching others make mistakes is also how the rest of us learn. Accountability is not just about keeping each other in line, it’s about self-improvement of the collective organism.
==Anonymity and Infamy== 
If you accept that privacy is a fundamental right, then a fully transparent society must also allow for anonymity. Privacy is not solely something to be exercised in our homes. Sometimes privacy is wanted or needed while interacting with others in public. A person tackling a drug problem, for example, may wish to attend recovery meetings without facing shaming from their peers. A young adult raised by prejudiced parents may wish to spend time with a best friend, who happens to be an uplift. Two lovers may wish to enjoy each other’s company without seeding gossip among their joint co-workers. A person considering a new sleeve may choose to shop through their options in person, privately, to consider the decision before they are pressured by their friends’ opinions. Perhaps you simply want to voice your political opinions or criticize someone powerful online without fear of backlash. Perhaps you simply need some time to yourself, to walk the streets without the attention of others. There are many legitimate reasons to operate in private mesh mode or to cloak your affairs online.
The risk of anonymity is that it has no accountability. When someone makes claims from a veil of secrecy, there may be no way to verify the source. When someone slanders another from an anonymous account, there is no redress. Criminals and terrorists may abuse anonymity to break the law. Mesh anonymity is sometimes known to bring out worse behavior in people, as they feel comfortable ﬂaming others and griefing behind their unknown identity. Some societies consider anonymity to be taking privacy interests a step too far and either restrict or outright outlaw it. Others consider it an integral component of private life, a necessary counterpoint to the ubiquitous transparency that envelops us.
Pseudonymity provides a comfortable middle ground in some cases. Some people maintain all of their public activity behind the facade of a //nom de guerre//. Others split their lives among different arenas, operating under different personas for each. Though pseudonyms can be abandoned, they do provide some level of accountability when sustained over time. Many people become so attached to their false identities that they are reluctant to abandon them.
On the opposite side of the scale is a phenomenon predominant among celebrities and famous ﬁgures: infamy. More than anyone, celebrities draw the public’s eye and are accustomed to living life under a microscope. As a result, they often have more to lose by acting gracelessly or improperly. Some, however, obtain a footing where they are known as bad boys, girls, or things. Because the public becomes jaded to their misadventures and expects them to trip up, cause a scene, or otherwise cram their tentacles in their mouths, they become partially immunized against losing more rep. In many cases, crimes or scandals have actually increased their reputation, solidifying their crafted image as a rogue character. The smart ones build on this to boost their public image, staging dramatic events to expand their infamy.
==Truth vs Fiction== 
According to a common maxim, you should never believe anything you see or hear on the mesh. In an age of sophisticated image, video, sound, and even sensory manipulation, the veracity of information online is indeed suspect. As a result, images, video, and other sensor recordings are rarely accepted as ﬁnal proof or evidence without verifiable metadata or other corroborating information. That said, most images and recordings are usually taken at face value when ﬁrst viewed, unless their content is remarkably suspicious. Only later are they verified—if it matters. This means deceptive media is very effective, at least in the short term. This means that even in a transparent society, voyeurs cannot always trust that what they are seeing is real, at least until it is verified in other ways.
While falsified media is often used to temporarily cover one’s tracks, at least for a short period, fake data is often more persistent. This is perpetuated by the fact that many archives and data sources share information with each other without factchecking, so incorrect data can be seeded far and wide. Though much of this information is simply a mistake, incorporated by bad transcription software, mis-matched database relationships, or simply faulty record-keeping, there are groups that actively seed disinformation on purpose. These hackers may simply be laying a cover for the organization for which they work or they may be sowing lies on general principle, to make the pervasive databases that much more unreliable. Falsified records can be especially harmful given that they can be next to impossible to clear up. Few government and corporate databases have clear methods for reporting and correcting errors, even for matters such as credit reports and security watchlists. Some citizens have found out the hard way that wrong or intentionally faked data can hound them for the rest of their lives.
Beyond media and data, it is not always safe to assume that other mesh users online are what they seem. Sock puppets and astroturﬁng are common practices made even easier by AIs and forking. Memeticists, propagandists, and griefers have turned the manipulation of online discussion into an art form, sometimes employing vast networks of coordinated fake personas. These networks are even used to build the reps of individual personas, to make them seem more authentic. Though various methods are employed to guard against these measures, sock puppeteers are devious and often ﬁnd ways around them.
What this means is that an open society is often more muddled than it seems. Important debates are sometimes drowned out by the most numerous voices—or the bigger puppetnet. The stranger you are dealing with online may be an entirely fabricated persona. Checking reputation is not always enough.
==Surveillance Insecurity== 
Universal surveillance is touted as important for security, and it is, but it is important to keep in mind that transparency brings about its own vulnerabilities. On a personal level, when everyone knows your business, you become an easier target for enemies or even run-of-the-mill criminals. Thieves may target your goods while you are away, con artists may exploit your personal history in elaborate schemes, a serial rapist may target your morph as their next victim, or someone you owe credit to may track you down to break your legs. The more personal data is available about you, the easier victim you make for identity theft. The more information about your habits and personal details you let fall into marketing hypercorp hands, the more likely an unscrupulous corp will target you with directed scams.
For anti-authoritarians, a more pressing question is the capabilities our surveillance society gives to the authorities. The police and security contractors almost always have access to more surveillance assets and info archives than the public. They likely have the ability to track you wherever you go and analyze in detail whatever you do. Should you be considered a dissident, activist, criminal, or even just an undesirable element of society, you are easily within their means to be tracked, watched, and messed with. This is the peril of an open society. On the positive side, the cameras may look both ways, to varying degrees.
The government and criminals are not the only potential threat, of course. Omnipresent sur- and sousveillance could be used by almost any hostile agency, from rival political factions to corporate competitors to everyone’s favorite: the TITANs. This is a risk that we take, that the tools we implement for our own collective security can be turned against us. This is yet another argument that these tools should be fully democratized, shared, and open—the more watchers, the quicker a response can be made when someone does take hostile action.
==Crypto Security== 
In societies with heavy data and comms surveillance, crypto systems are seen as one of the only methods to maintain digital privacy. When implemented properly, crypto systems can be very effective at safeguarding personal ﬁles or communications. There are risks, of course. Using cryptography can itself be seen as suspicious, implying the user has something illicit to hide. In more restrictive habitats, crypto is criminalized; the authorities do not want you to have the tools to evade their prying data-crawlers. Crypto is also engaged in an arms race with code-breaking technologies. If you misuse your crypto tool sets or fall behind the state of the art, your encrypted secrets and transmissions may not be as protected as you think.
==Cultural Openness== 
Aside from all of these weighty matters, the cultural effects of living in an ultra-surveillance society are an interesting phenomenon. There’s a certain liberation to always being on record. Everyone sins. Accepting this simple fact means that unless you do something absolutely ludicrous, you’re not standing out as the only one doing something wrong. This creates a domino effect of mutual understanding. In a universally watched culture, many barriers and taboos are broken. Cultures and subcultures that once seemed foreign no longer seem so weird or unusual when you realize that their constituents are not all that different from you. People cease to care about who may or may not be watching. Hedonism and more open displays of sexuality become a daily standard—sometimes to the chagrin of the conservative elements that were the strongest proponents for full surveillance. Cultures that once tried to shield their members from certain concepts or realities no longer have the capability to do this. Insularity and dogmatism lose ground to openness and inclusion.
Open societies tend to become more tolerant—and not just towards their neighbors. Minor criminal offenses lead to more public outcry when punished. Since everyone does them, and everyone knows that everyone else does them, when one person is pinned, everyone voices a sense of unfair treatment. This causes civil unrest, which discourages further punishments. So in practice, this type of governance tends to lead to an increase in petty crime, as long as it remains petty. Repeat offenders or criminals who raise the stakes are still likely to be dealt with harshly as they exceed behavior that is considered justiﬁable. There are some who argue that individuality suffers under universal surveillance. When everything about you is known, and you have little or no control over how your identity is presented to others, you become just another person in a mass of similar persons. With no way to deﬁne yourself, individuality is eroded. We all become everyman and everywoman, or so the argument goes. To the contrary, the amount of detail provided to everyone around us in a transparent society helps to show all of the subtle things that deﬁne each of us as a person. If identity is in the eye of the beholder, constant surveillance builds a stronger identity. Upon meeting a perfect stranger, it is trivial to pull
up a large amount of data quickly, providing us with a passing familiarity with the person before we have even exchanged words. This smooths out personal interactions, making them easier, enabling us to bypass blockades from ignorance or awkwardness. It’s not dissimilar from meeting someone that shares a mutual hobby; there’s a degree of understanding between the two people that wouldn’t exist in a vacuum.
Not all societies adapt to omnipresent surveillance so smoothly. In totalitarian habitats where surveillance tends to be weighted in the hands of the police state, a “thought crime” mentality can develop, where citizens actively avoid suspicious behaviors out of the assumption that somebody is watching, waiting to pin them with crimes uncommitted. Such thoroughly controlled environments breed hopelessness and despair—and occasionally resentment and resistance. At the opposite end, societies that embrace total openness sometimes develop unfortunate mindsets that consider privacy an affront. Those that refuse to be as open as those around them may suffer resentment and other negative feedback, possibly impacting their reputation scores. A similar effect is noticeable among hermits or people who are just inherently shy or withdrawn. The less they interact with the open culture around them, the more they are ostracized as an outsider, and their rep usually suffers as as a result.

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