China and secrets?

(additions in italics.)

At the moment, I'm seeing a lot of suggestions that China is responsible for Snowden's actions.

If that is true, I think it might also be fair to claim that the U.S. intelligence structures (which NSA is a "visible" aspect of) is something that China is responsible for. China is known, after all, for its vast bureaucratic structures, for its love of secrets, and for its relatively stable civilizations. And, as a structure, the NSA (or, rather, the shadowy vastness which the NSA is a visible component of) seems to be a reflection of this kind of thinking.

So is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Or is that even the right question? (And is it even true? Note that we might blame the drug war on China - China, after all, was defeated by a drug war back in the 1800s and it's just natural that people will take a tactic which was successfully used against them and try to use it in their defense. On the other hand, it was a British tactic in the first place, and also we've been making major mistakes in our math both in the context of economic theory and in the context of medical theory.)

My current thought is that secrets make for inefficiencies. Sometimes inefficiencies can be seen as good (sales people typically like to keep their contact list secret, for example, because they do not want competitors to be more efficient than themselves, in dealing with the people that they have relationships with). Sometimes inefficiencies can be seen as bad (they do, after all, block certain kinds of actions and innovations).

I also find China's censorship system distasteful. I can understand some motivations that might be behind it (preventing discord, squelching falsehood, and/or exercising people's abilities to overcome adversities), and in some respects it's a fairly gentle system (it's slow, and people can often exchange information before it kicks in). Still, when combined with other things which cause fear, it conveys the message that the government might kill you if you say the wrong kind of thing. And I fear that that limits people's abilities and thoughts.  Also its most notable feature - the suppression of calls to action - is about government stability but also suggests a lack of tolerance for the exchange of ideas. And, most especially, it institutionalizes support for "editing history". And I think respect for history is crucial for the health of a nation. This feels to me like the difference between "learning from our mistakes" and "hiding our mistakes".

People try to solve problems which will prevent them from surviving.

Anyways... my thoughts on this subject are uncertain. Secrecy, after all, is enforced ignorance. Which seems odd, because ignorance is not something we have any shortage of.

On the other hand, privacy and secrecy go hand-in-hand - they are different words describing much the same thing.

But, also, over the long run, secrecy tends to erode, as does knowledge. We converge on a steady state where issues become exposed and details get lost. And I suspect that advances in communication techniques shift this steady state - new ways of expressing ideas allow for understandings which were not previously possible, and lack of support for older information storage formats allow for new ways for information to be lost.

It also seems to me that keeping strategies secret is a mistake. How do you even know if you are cooperating with a strategy if you do not know what it is? But operational secrecy - keeping secret the precise details of how you have implemented a strategy - can sometimes be a good thing. And this kind of thing is probably the distinction between "secrecy" and "privacy".

Meanwhile... about that "NSA" thing... it seems to me also that modern computer architectures leak information at a rate quite a bit higher than most people understand. People fall into the trap of thinking about "solutions" and don't quite realize the mechanisms being used. But computers are electronic mechanisms and they radiate quite a lot of information in the electronic spectrum in various ways. And, at a fine level of detail they execute sequences of instructions which only achieve a purpose in an aggregate and in a context.

So, from my point of view, the "NSA" has been trying to adapt to this situation without changing it. Their mission - stopping really outrageously horrid things - in some ways becomes easier and in some ways becomes harder with modern computer architectures and engineering. But you can't really operate without having some effects, both direct and indirect.

Meanwhile, we see the problems created by elaborate government secrecy more clearly, in the context of the NSA than we do in countries where it's just accepted that people are going to be doing secret things. And regardless of what the best way of doing things is, we have to live with the situation we find ourselves in.

So...

My current thought is we take advantage of the efficiencies that come from being aware of government secrecy. In the U.S.A. we should probably institutionalize this - U.S. courts are designed to be publicly visible, and our contribution to the world is based on our concepts of fairness and rights.

Of course, we have a long way to go, both within the U.S. and outside. We need to learn how to turn negative criticism into positive criticism. We need to re-engage in our economy those who have been lost to us through various mistakes in deregulation and banking. We have been trying to support a large number of other countries - supplying military to Germany and Japan because 70 years ago we did not trust them to supply their own but as a side effect removing that burden from their economies. But also we have been supplying food to a variety of countries, and so on. But we need to recognize that gifts alone are not a solution to problems (and that relates to our own internal struggles).

So... taking a few steps back, I'm going to say some things which I hope are not so obvious as to be annoying:

We need people engaged and active in trading for each other's benefit. We need children to be raised with adequate nutrition and good language and math skills. We need people thinking about real problems and not bored because they have been shielded from the things that matter to them. We need to respect and support those that work hard for our benefit, because our lives depend on them. We need to break out of the "enemy" mind sets where we view conflicts as something inherent in the person rather than the problem.

And here's one that I think should be obvious but seems to be sadly controversial:

We need to get rid of the idea that celibacy is a virtue - I think we should require that our leaders first be good parents.

Since I think that that one is controversial, I think I should try to talk a bit about the mechanisms and the social conflicts hiding behind that statement. But I am not a parent myself, so I'll just mention that issues include dealing with exhaustion, the ability to set relevant priorities, and an appreciation for our lives. (Note also that I am not particularly concerned about the genetic aspects of parenting, I am more concerned about supporting and valuing children (and the elderly, for that matter) - I think that if we can't sort out these issues for ourselves that we should not be telling other people what to do with their lives.)

Anyways, back to national secrets.

My current thought is that strategic secrecy is harmful but that operational secrecy is something we have to accept and allow for. My reasoning here boils down to: We simply do not have the brain power to comprehend all that goes on at a detailed level, and we have visceral needs for privacy (albeit, socially constructed needs) but if we don't agree about some things at some general level we can't even make sense of what we are saying when we talk with each other.

Fractal Borders

After the printing press, we experienced a number of changes that might be attributed to the existence of printing:

The Protestant Reformation
Copyright Laws
The Renaissance
The concept of "Separation of Church and State"
and eventually, the "Industrial Revolution" and modern life...

Back in the 1500s, "church" was an expected part of governments. In other words, if you were Swiss, for example, people that disagreed with the swiss branch of the catholic church got their heads cut off. On the other hand, because of the printing press, people were able to read the bible and see just how different it was from what the official party lines were.

So, on the one hand, there were people who were fond of proper authority. An example of this might be to go before the city counsel to resolve theological matters. On the other hand, there were the "radicals" who made up their own mind about theological matters based on their understanding of what they read. This was heresy, and carried a death penalty.

Two examples of these heretics were the Protestants, including Martin Luther (not to be confused with Martin Luther King Jr, who was named after the original) and the Anabaptists. Technically speaking, anabaptists are protestants, but that didn't stop Martin Luther's crowd from killing them for heresy.

The heresy of the anabaptists were named after was that they did not believe infant baptism meant anything - something about a lack of meaningful choice on the part of the infants. They also strongly objected to the concept of celibacy - they felt that that was evil (I think that this was based on simple observation of the consequences). They also felt that christians could not be a part of the government (probably this had something to do with how government officials were obligated to chop their heads off).

One story I read was about a town where the entire population was sentenced to death for heresy. Pregnant mothers were given an exception long enough for their children to be born, at which point they were killed and their children were put into a catholic orphanage.

Another involved secret agents who would infiltrate these heretical settlements and be converted to the new ways as a way of gathering names for the executions.

After decades of this sort of thing, there weren't very many "heretics" left. The best survival tactic for them seems to have been to recognize the authority of the state, and to support it in the sense of working hard, growing food, while being quiet and humble and keeping their views to themselves. (The Amish are an example of this sort of thing. The Hutterites are another. These are people who would rather be killed than go to war - and as recently as WWI some of them have been killed because they refused to fight. Nowadays, though, we have a "contentious objector" exception to the draft, for people like this.)

Anyways, ... I think that the concept of separation of church and state arose because of people like this, and because of people with less extreme views (including those who were willing to fight).

All this because of a new form of communication - the printing press, but also because of how people have used their abilities to reason and decide. And, in some sense, because people need some sort of consistency in their thoughts and actions.

* * * * *

Flash forward to today, and the problems surrounding the NSA. Just as the printing press resulted in social revolution, the forms of communication afforded by modern technology have been reforming society. Some of the mechanisms, like radio, television, movies, newspapers and so on, are "broadcast" mechanisms - they make a voice or a work available to many people. Other mechanisms, like telephones, have been structured as "point-to-point" mechanisms that let individuals talk with each other. But there are also mechanisms such as ham radio (and "citizen's band" radio) and various computer based communication systems (email, twitter, blogging, facebook, ...) which start to blend the personal point-to-point mechanisms with the impersonal broadcast mechanisms.

And this means that some of the arbitrary social mechanisms which we cobbled together after the printing press revolution need further work to cope with the more recent revolutions.

In essence, information flows much more freely now than in the past. One reaction to this change is to try and stop the flow of information. And this works, for a time, but the problem is that anyone adopting this position is also hurting the people who cooperate economically. This leaves criminals and those in other countries with a competitive advantage which soon turns into a security problem.

On the other hand, people have gotten used to privacy. We expect it in sexual contexts, in business contexts, in government contexts, in military contexts, in religious contexts and in criminal contexts. We react almost violently to its removal.

So we need, somehow, to find a way to live together without hurting ourselves in the process. Worse, the classic mechanisms (get people to shut up, kill them if necessary to make sure they shut up) have serious problems. One problem, for example, is it's hard to kill in secret now, and people get upset when their friends and family get killed. Another problem is that the flow of information lets people more easily discover culprits which reduces the value of killing people and often turns an otherwise successful campaign of brutality into a liability.

(Actually, I think I like having these problems, but of course it's more complicated than I have described.)

* * * * *

So, flash forward to the present day...

It's extremely difficult to talk with any accuracy about secret things, like the NSA.

In Bradley Manning's case, and in Edward Snowden's case, revealing information to the public has been classified as "revealing information to the enemy". And, maybe this is correct. Or, maybe not. Obviously, some people believe that it is correct.

One possible issue is terrorists. But, I cannot for the life of me figure out how a gag order on otherwise public court cases has any influence here.

Another possibility is that the people of the USA are indeed the enemy. This could be a viewpoint for people who are fed up with criminal activities, and it could be a viewpoint for people who are a part of a foreign government. There's probably little distinction between "criminal" and "government" in this context, other than association with a particular region or territory. Governments are probably also bigger than other organizations, though that is not a given.

Another possibility is simple bureaucratic maneuvering... This is not mutually exclusive with the other possibilities, and of course different people can have different beliefs.

Other concepts which might tie in here include British Colonialism, Chinese bureaucracy and might, corruption in various institutions (for example, I grew up hearing jokes about "choir boys" and priests and we have been starting to see that the very advocates of sexual celibacy have also been engaged in sexual rape of children (I don't think "pedophelia" adequately describes the problem) on a grand scale; for example I also grew up hearing statements about how building inspectors routinely expect bribes and of course the construction industry is a "major part of our economy"; for example, the protocols involved in high frequency trading make it difficult for us to even track where our money is going and the deregulation of derivatives and some other deregulation efforts make that even worse; I am sure there are other significant examples).

Anyways, let's consider that this is an open issue and get back to it later.

If we think about the issues which Edward Snowden raised, he mentioned something about endpoint security being weak. We've not been taking responsibility for spam, for malware, nor have we been paying attention to how our computers simply radiate information in the electromagnetic spectrum. It should be ludicrously easy to detect malware that emits spam - it's not at all a secret that it's happening. Given typical computer architecture, we would probably need some hardware devoted to the issue but it's not like there's anything radically difficult here, nor are the concepts particularly hard to grasp. (For example, you can count the number of mail protocol connections made by a computer and if that count is obviously wrong you've got malware. Similarly, we could do something involving tracking of connections to remote machines and organizations could declare which machines are theirs. There are other examples. But "no one cares about that". Except, of course, people do care, when they finally see what the issues really are.)

Basically, we've been giving up all sorts of competitive advantages, so we should not be surprised to find ourselves at a competitive disadvantage.

In other words, it's not just the "NSA" who can tap into this information. And, having people that are at least plausibly patriotic and plausibly focussed on important issues should be a good thing. But no one exists in a vacuum.

* * * * *

And I'm falling into some of the self-similar complexities which we are all tripping over.  So, I am going to end this in a recap that does not satisfy me:

A fractal perimeter can have infinite length and enclose a finite area.

The "NSA" is in some sense a discardable acronym describing an exposed face of the U.S. federal government.

The internet brings international borders into our homes.

Democracy has always been about bending to pressures without breaking too badly. We must not only expect failures but we must expect buildup of efforts where the failures happen.

Those pressures include both legal and illegal pressures. Those pressures include both local and international pressures. Those pressures include both present and historical pressures.

Meanwhile our bastions of morality (e.g. the church, and probably most of history) are anything but adequately moral.

The concept of a "cell" (in the activist sense) is inefficient, at best. It's great when you can throw away people, but the secrecy involved means and assumes communication failures. You also need some broadcast mechanism that they all subscribe to and if that is secret you have to assume that your cells will fail more often than they succeed.

In a democratic government, the government answers to the people. The President of the U.S. is hierarchically beneath the people of the U.S. when viewed over any extended period of time.

Nobody lives alone, not even the U.S. - over the long term, we need to be fair and we need others to be fair with us.

* * * * *

Just to be clear: I think that the FISA secret courts were a bad mistake.