For some time I've been in the process of forming a personal opinion on the subject. I'm not through. I don't know. I will say that my impression is that a small amount of quite clandestine surveillance of civilians that is never acknowledged (to the contrary, denied or even destroyed if it comes down to it - and this part is very important) but has certain official channels in extraordinary cases may make a small amount of sense. (I won't outline my entire reasoning here, but the basic argument is that if we as a society do officially acknowledge and use the surveillance, it becomes a dictatorial police state.) Note that I want no part of such an apparatus and very greatly do value my freedom. I think people should be free from government surveillance into their privacy. But perhaps meaning that the possibility of this is not acknowledged, which in some philosophical sense is possibly quite similar in effect, especially to a utilitarian. So perhaps it could exist behind closed channels and not acknowledged.
For a typical example for why this may be okay to exist, we can simply posit (for the sake of argument) someone who 0-days every server in the world and holds everything on any of their hard-drives for the ransom of 1 milliiiion dollars, oh not individually per person but total, from behind tor relays and to be paid in bitcoin, divided out among a few thousand or ten thousand or million or ten million targets. Brazenly. What does the world do - just pay? (collectively, individually, whatever.) That means he now has a budget of 1 milliiiiion dollars for round 2. So in a case like this, I would think that society would want to say, all right, enough is enough of these shenanigans, we are going to peek behind the curtain here (violating your privacy). It's not that there's any disagreement that it's illegal, it's that you need to violate privacy to prevent this very real possibility that actually occurs every day, today. As I mentioned however, I do not have very firm opinions on the subject. This kind of ransomware isn't a theoretical exercise however - it exists, and it's great when we have resources like this: https://noransom.kaspersky.com/ that nullify it. There is also generally a reason that there is a legal system in place and if you didn't have laws, people would do whatever they can physically get away with, which in a technological society that puts multipliers and levers on all of our efforts, is a lot. That the mechanism for getting that data have to be extraordinary is a given, however.
But even though I think a small amount of surveillance may be important, by my current impression I am massively opposed to very large amounts of surveillance, I think it's a tremendous waste of resources. See this thread for my opinions about when companies receive huge windfall payments for it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9549597 -- I'm simply opposed.
So far my theoretical model (as a personal philosophical exercise, and bearing in mind that I am undecided on a larger scale) extends to within a single country, or group of closely allied countries. It makes sense to encourage companies to innovate, to grow, to create things - creative innovators are the things we as a society are protecting, from people who would, for example, steal their designs and hold them for ransom.
But I'd like to ask people's opinions about countries such as China, which I believe have much to learn before they can be as "good" actors as Western powers - including for their own populations. (i.e. this is a separate question from what is good.)
Just some of the factors that are important for China although they may not realize it are environmental issues, I mean you can hardly breathe in Beijing, continued very high economic growth and, yes, increased "lawfulness" in several areas where they will be well ahead by, for example, respecting IP and innovation of both foreign companies and their own. Now here specifically, we can use a simple example: if their hackers (people just like the readership here, except reading everything in Chinese but like us also clever computer geeks, except sitting in some hacking center doing 8 hour shifts of hacking, instead of building millions of dollars of real economic value with their same mental cycles) - they are busy hacking the US government, they're not busy creating the next Google, Microsoft, Apple, and so forth. We're also not benefiting from their research either.
So it seems, to me, that they are not ahead from this overseas hacking. Specifically, I think it holds their economy back.
But more broadly - and here is where I am getting into something philosophical and on a topic where I'm very undecided: isn't it fair to say that it would be quite impossible to imagine the FBI actively hacking another Federal government agency? Likewise, if in some sense there were a more international version of a democratic world power, wouldn't this save massive state resources on all sides?
That is to say, although I am trying to reason from first principles and extreme use cases, it seems to me that if there isn't a world order today, there should be. (This is a tentative impression!!) I also think that the readership here - the computer geeks, the entrepreneurs, the scientists, the smartest of the smart, all over the world automatically do form a community. While we might not have many Chinese readers today, I doubt the same would be true in ten years, especially given the fact that English for better or for worse is the de facto international language of communications and technology, (and science/research) in particular.
Basically, what I am asking about is why we wouldn't want to live under a flag of the Earth representing some ecumenical world power. As an advantage, we would save precisely the costs that the FBI saves by not trying to hack the other agencies of America. (Since they're all under one flag, why would they waste resources hacking each other.)
This is quite a separate issue from surveillance, which is sort-of orthogonal to this question. Basically, what if anything would be the cons to an international world order? At a minimum, wouldn't this stop the acts of "your country hacked by a foreign power" as we would expect them to? Wouldn't those resources be automatically put to better use? The guy who can't get work hacking some government while that government hacks his, would instead use his powers more creatively.
I ask this with the distinct goal of attempting to better understand what kind of world we would even want to live in. If this is much too tangential or I elicit very unconstructive responses I can delete this comment.
Basically, on the level of economic growth, productivity, and, yes, freedom - what is wrong with a world order and cooperation? (I assume there's something wrong with it, because the phrase "world order" is a negative one!)
There's a lot to reply here and I'm not uniquely qualified to do it, but I figured I'd write something given the effort you've put into sharing your thoughts and feelings.
With regard to the FBI hacking another agency - the CIA hacked Congress when they were investigating them for torture. Rounding that down to something a founding father could say: the executive branch spied on the legislative branch while it was investigating the executive branch for breach of law.
With regard to US world order - it's so hard to tell when an empire is doing the world more good than bad - and between various 'opportunity costs' to the good it could do the world under its order.
In this sense, the US does do some very, very dirty deeds. It is not above killing and even torturing and then killing innocent people, committing mass fraud on the world to justify its interests, or involving itself in the rape of children, and trafficking of arms and drugs internationally (illegally) to supply proxy forces. It propagandizes and it censors and it disappears people. It steals resources and engages in protectionist trade while espousing free markets. It rigs elections overseas and it coups genuine leadership. It assassinates key figures to decide geostrategic events. It has a long list of scandals.
To maintain its justified place at the top of the world order it needs to maintain an image of legitimacy. If you ask those who know about its special operations who is on the US's side you will hear precisely what you have mused about: the good that America does in keeping a world order with static boundaries based on trade and other forms of competition is collectively a better world to live in, even if some people - in the eyes of the power elite - need to be subjected to torture for it to continue.
Digesting this statement requires a neigh impossible task: predicting alternate futures where current order never developed and in its place another one does. Quickly this task becomes an imaginative one that falls prey to the leanings and biases of the person imagining it: those who favor the US imagine a more chaotic world and those who favor another nation a more peaceful one.
It's nearly impossible to ask this question, so the real work to be done is through alternate questions. What can we do now? What questionable programs and opinions exist today that can be dismantled? What powers are needed to maintain a peaceful sphere? Should the world have one protector, or is it possible for some Wilsonian (or other) creation to succeed at the task?
I can't give you those answers. I don't have them myself.
As an aside - one I hope is interesting - the United States relies very heavily on its reputation as a just and kind force to maintain its legitimacy. Were qualms with the US to bubble into a loss of legitimacy the world order would quickly dissipate.
This is what the US fears the most. It has to keep the optics at a higher bar than it can keep its practices. It hopes, it wishes and it needs to find solutions that allow for international stability - where it remains the top dog - and where it can keep its reputation.
We get to see how our leadership and representatives navigate this space and we get to be the primary sources for the historians to annotate it for the future.
So thanks for your reply, but it's along totally different lines from what I had in mind. (I added an Edit on the bottom.) What I mean is more along the lines of the 'new world order' conspiracy I linked. Why wouldn't we want something like that? It would save all of the costs of the same colluding powers hacking each other. In this specific example, why wouldn't we want China and the U.S. colluding rather than hacking each other? But this collusion is kind of the definition of a "new world order". Why wouldn't we want all the countries in on it?
You are certainly right that my impressions are quite shallow, I am mostly proceeding from first principles, a few use cases, ideas, and philosophy. Thanks for your thoughts.
For a typical example for why this may be okay to exist, we can simply posit (for the sake of argument) someone who 0-days every server in the world and holds everything on any of their hard-drives for the ransom of 1 milliiiion dollars, oh not individually per person but total, from behind tor relays and to be paid in bitcoin, divided out among a few thousand or ten thousand or million or ten million targets. Brazenly. What does the world do - just pay? (collectively, individually, whatever.) That means he now has a budget of 1 milliiiiion dollars for round 2. So in a case like this, I would think that society would want to say, all right, enough is enough of these shenanigans, we are going to peek behind the curtain here (violating your privacy). It's not that there's any disagreement that it's illegal, it's that you need to violate privacy to prevent this very real possibility that actually occurs every day, today. As I mentioned however, I do not have very firm opinions on the subject. This kind of ransomware isn't a theoretical exercise however - it exists, and it's great when we have resources like this: https://noransom.kaspersky.com/ that nullify it. There is also generally a reason that there is a legal system in place and if you didn't have laws, people would do whatever they can physically get away with, which in a technological society that puts multipliers and levers on all of our efforts, is a lot. That the mechanism for getting that data have to be extraordinary is a given, however.
But even though I think a small amount of surveillance may be important, by my current impression I am massively opposed to very large amounts of surveillance, I think it's a tremendous waste of resources. See this thread for my opinions about when companies receive huge windfall payments for it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9549597 -- I'm simply opposed.
So far my theoretical model (as a personal philosophical exercise, and bearing in mind that I am undecided on a larger scale) extends to within a single country, or group of closely allied countries. It makes sense to encourage companies to innovate, to grow, to create things - creative innovators are the things we as a society are protecting, from people who would, for example, steal their designs and hold them for ransom.
But I'd like to ask people's opinions about countries such as China, which I believe have much to learn before they can be as "good" actors as Western powers - including for their own populations. (i.e. this is a separate question from what is good.)
Just some of the factors that are important for China although they may not realize it are environmental issues, I mean you can hardly breathe in Beijing, continued very high economic growth and, yes, increased "lawfulness" in several areas where they will be well ahead by, for example, respecting IP and innovation of both foreign companies and their own. Now here specifically, we can use a simple example: if their hackers (people just like the readership here, except reading everything in Chinese but like us also clever computer geeks, except sitting in some hacking center doing 8 hour shifts of hacking, instead of building millions of dollars of real economic value with their same mental cycles) - they are busy hacking the US government, they're not busy creating the next Google, Microsoft, Apple, and so forth. We're also not benefiting from their research either.
So it seems, to me, that they are not ahead from this overseas hacking. Specifically, I think it holds their economy back.
But more broadly - and here is where I am getting into something philosophical and on a topic where I'm very undecided: isn't it fair to say that it would be quite impossible to imagine the FBI actively hacking another Federal government agency? Likewise, if in some sense there were a more international version of a democratic world power, wouldn't this save massive state resources on all sides?
That is to say, although I am trying to reason from first principles and extreme use cases, it seems to me that if there isn't a world order today, there should be. (This is a tentative impression!!) I also think that the readership here - the computer geeks, the entrepreneurs, the scientists, the smartest of the smart, all over the world automatically do form a community. While we might not have many Chinese readers today, I doubt the same would be true in ten years, especially given the fact that English for better or for worse is the de facto international language of communications and technology, (and science/research) in particular.
Basically, what I am asking about is why we wouldn't want to live under a flag of the Earth representing some ecumenical world power. As an advantage, we would save precisely the costs that the FBI saves by not trying to hack the other agencies of America. (Since they're all under one flag, why would they waste resources hacking each other.)
This is quite a separate issue from surveillance, which is sort-of orthogonal to this question. Basically, what if anything would be the cons to an international world order? At a minimum, wouldn't this stop the acts of "your country hacked by a foreign power" as we would expect them to? Wouldn't those resources be automatically put to better use? The guy who can't get work hacking some government while that government hacks his, would instead use his powers more creatively.
I ask this with the distinct goal of attempting to better understand what kind of world we would even want to live in. If this is much too tangential or I elicit very unconstructive responses I can delete this comment.
Basically, on the level of economic growth, productivity, and, yes, freedom - what is wrong with a world order and cooperation? (I assume there's something wrong with it, because the phrase "world order" is a negative one!)
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EDIT: I want to emphasize that by world order I mean like ths - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_%28conspiracy_t... which is quite a negative spin on countries colluding.