Schneier on Security

curious • May 7, 2014 10:50 AM

@AlanS and others (please excuse me, for ending up with this amount of text)

“I want to stand this on it’s head. What if Google (or the NSA for that matter) is a symptom rather than the problem?”

I have to say that this notion does not make any sense at all to me, primarily because of the words ‘problem’ and ‘symptom’ used here.

NSA and their practicies is first and foremost a real thing (and then anything not NSA might be another set of practices); yet ‘symptoms’ aren’t ‘real’, the same way a disease in a diagnose couldn’t be ‘real’. (The knowledge about, or the incident of a disease is not the same thing as a particular diagnose as such.) However, ‘problems’ insofar as you can fully describe them, such ‘problems’ are real, because the proper understanding of a ‘problem’ is thus a result of a personal consideration and not purely based on hearsay, instruction or practice, nor some thing being referred to. (E.g an individual is not really a problem a such, and neither is a natural disaster or a burning house for that matter.) Other than the forementioned, ‘a problem’ or ‘problems’ tend to just be a kind of rhetorical thing that impart a notion of importance or soemthing uttered as for providing a short or abbreviated explanation, where the reference to any “problem” become a conceptual metaphor where you end up having to fill in the blanks so to speak and somehow attribute meaning to it all. And so, I will want to now make the point, that so called symptoms about our world that would have to be talked about as some kind of conceptual metaphor, will likely end up having no substance if a shovel can’t be called a shovel and if adding implausible elements to it, because of it all being based on a mix of hearsay and ideas that can only be understood in name only (basicly irrational). What I associate about things having no substance, are ideas that revolve around implied or supposed ‘a priori knowledge’ (you/we know, just because) or ‘superstition’ (you/we believe, just because). In this case I find the notion of “a symptom” to be quite a stretch.

Unfortunately I will say, in our time, superstition and a priori knowledge is probably rooted in today practices in modern social sciences and politics. What one risk here imo, is that a potentially sensible discourse about something will basicly become difficult if not simply impossible, specifically because of thinking people (as individuals) to be expecting nothing more than entertaining their own idiotic notions of reality, and if news/media, authorities and commentators do the same, noone so to speak, would be the wiser except for the ones that would benefit from a status quo, or perhaps anyone promoting specific ideas that is meant to resonate thoughout society in their own self interest (could be media corporations, politicians and institutions). I am here ofc directly implying that people in general probably have a false sense of reality, generally speaking though. (Ref “problem of representation” in philosophy.)

If one suspect ones society to be affected by notions of ‘a priori knowledge’ or ‘superstition’, then attempting to clear up such nonsense would be a good thing. If one doesn’t maintain some basic restraints in making arguments, then I think one risk supporting or just trivializing the silly notions that I suspect end up being fundamental to some “modern human sciences”. Psychology/psychiatry, sociology and antropology comes to mind. Being forthright is imo the biggest lack in public discourse, or so is my impression, as if everyones genereal understanding of reality was equal to that of some naivity of a 12 y.o writing a school paper about the world in general, being so sure of itself because of what it read in books/news written by adults. Imposing a narrative becomes a peculiar thing I would say, if being done by habit and not by conviction.

As much as I would like to laud anyone’s attempt in wanting to describe important issues of our time, I think that to directly imply that there is a special knowledge about todays practices as they relate to our past is naive at best, or worse, a whitewash of what one has learned since old times. What I do no like about this notion of some special knowledge, is thinking that people in general might come to believe in things that become essentially impersonal: just another set of ideas that serve to either manipulate a group of people in public discourse or “ideas” that become a subject for entertainment (like much of daily news of today imo). I see an issue with anyone’s critical view of the world, as being an “aquired taste”, and so I suspect that to overcome the banality of public discourse, ideas alone isn’t enough to make people understand the seriousness of something when they harldy have any opinion about the complexity of a situation in the first place. (Because of the aspect of it possibly being just some piece of entertainment and not something you wanted to know about or was interested in already.) One way to be forthright about ones view of the world, would be presicely to explain how one understood the complexity of the situation, but without it becoming self ironic in the same process in drawing parallels, making jokes or making comparisons that all essentially conjure a new set of interests which might or might not subvert the very subject matter that was deemed important initially. I am being here reminded of something I watched on video on the internet just recently, some guy from a security firm that to me seemingly ended up trivializing the NSA spying on foreign politicians, by simply making a statement of how he (with other other words) seemed to think that such activity should be thought of as being totally ok, without realizing that it likely could undermine local political processes when impacting political deals and potentially manipulating individuals to corrupt so called democratic political processes.

“So in the 18th we have the birth of the modern human sciences, practices that make man into an object of knowledge and administration. These are practices that now pervade institutions at all levels and the way we think about and constitute our sense of selves.”

Hehe, I realize at this point that I have already commented on what I think of it, as flirting with a priori knowledge, which essentially is about seemingly having assumed that a piece of knowledge is simply true, meaningful or self evident. I in particular will have to disagree with this notion of myself being influenced by such theories. I like to think I am more of a free thinker, probably because I live a boring life, having had too much time goofing around on the internet reading about wildly different subject matter and having time to casually think about things at my own discression.

“The “big brother” type surveillance is probably the least interesting.”
Given such ephemeral issues of more obscure social topics (so called “surveillance practices” in AlanS’s text) that are probably unlikely to coalesce into something of interest of a society at large, I would say I have to strongly disagree to viewing big brother surveillance as be the least interesting. There is a sense of urgency I guess about alot of issues that also doesn’t seem to be in the process of being resolved. I am inclined to that that alot more seriously.

“So one could argue that computer processing, big data, the Internet, social networking, etc. do not constitute a break with the past. They are merely the advancement of practices that have existed since the 18th century. What is new is the massive expansion of sensors and tracking devices and tools to collect and process data and the almost frictionless proliferation of desires and risks. What is new is just scale and intensity.”

I have not read much about Foucault, however the way this sentence was phrased, I strongly disagree with this notion of there being this similarity or comparison of Foucault’s criticism of society, to how computers and the internet has developed to this point in time. The crux of the matter seem to be what is and what is not understood to be a ‘practice’. To think of there being a practice being some ideal one way or another, or worse some kind of arch type, doing that is a big mistake imo and would/could make criticism against practices much more bland that it had to in the first place, because in no time people will probably be aping after such considerations and nobody serious would be compelled to do anything. If on the other hand one were tempted to conclude that such social issues as ‘privacy’, ‘human dignity’ and ‘welfare’ never really existed, or rather never taken seriously at all earlier in history, then perhaps something could be done to improve the condidtions of today and for making the future better (or at least be known and not forgotten about), and as an additional point, so that classical ideas weren’t lauded as something being made ‘modern’ if the powers at be obviously are the ones getting the best out of it all nonetheless. Not giving ‘injustice’ the label of ‘treatmeant’ or ‘policy’, as to not give others ideas that such “treatmeant” or “policy” was intended and unavoidable.