I'm paranoid or why Big Brother is already watching us.

I began to write a comment to my own translation of an article on the privacy of user data and suddenly realized that it resulted in something more.

The fact is that I have been doing data mining and text mining technologies for the past fifteen years. And so all the recent scandals related to the Snowden case and PRISM, XKeyScore, Muscular, SORM, reading Google mail, transferring confidential and geo-data from mobile phones, and many others left me absolutely indifferent.

For a very simple reason - I already know that Big Brother has long existed.
')


To be more precise, I am absolutely sure of this - just as I cannot know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I am very, very convinced of this. And all the new evidence for the existence of Big Brother is useful, but not necessary.
And the explanation of confidence is very simple: if I had the necessary resources, I could build it myself.

And I know dozens of other specialists who are also capable of it. And for sure there are hundreds and thousands of those that I do not know, but they would be even better specialists for solving this problem.

To date, there are no technical reasons that do not allow the implementation of the functionality of Big Brother. Tools for collecting information, storing, processing text, sound, video, analyzing large data arrays, parallel processing and clustering, extracting knowledge and rules, and other achievements of science and technology have reached a level where the full analysis cycle can be performed automatically without the need for many people -experts.

And if in the Soviet Union, in a certain period of time, they did not eavesdrop on everyone just because of limitations in human resources, now, if desired, this is feasible.

The question remains solely in the desire of the state to have control over its citizens (or, at least, the possibility of monitoring). From the point of view of security of both the state and the authorities, such a desire is always present.

And no tractor suckling will not help - because if in the twentieth century the country needed atomic weapons in order to be independent in its policy, now evolution and technological progress dictate new requirements.

And as Neptune was calculated “at the tip of the pen,” speculatively, through observations of the trajectory of Uranus, it can be just as argued that any strong state in the past few years already has an analogue of Big Brother.

With these words, some may have a protest - they say, even if so, but what does this have to do with me?

This protest often has two points: 1. “I’m not so significant that the state spends time and energy on me”; 2. "I am an honest person, I have nothing to be ashamed of."

The first thesis was relevant earlier - now information can accumulate over the years, moreover, completely autonomously, without attracting the human resources of the state. Just like that, in reserve, in the event that it may require exposure or pressure (akin to the famous quotation from Atlanta Ayn Rand about violating laws and the inability to control innocent people).

As for the second, yes, I admit that there is an angel in the flesh, pure and virtuous. But even if it is you - for sure that over the past ten years you have not done a single thing, about which you really would not want others to know? Can you guarantee that you will not do it in the next ten years? And even if you can - is it so strong your faith in relation to relatives and friends, people whom you cherish and would not want them to feel bad?

And sometimes, on the contrary, it creates the feeling that many people understand the theoretical danger, but do not realize what can be done with such information specifically for the bad.

Take a simple example - mobile phones. It is clear that you can track where I am at any given moment (and with the introduction of Google Glass and other tools of augmented reality, all that I see). Already it is unpleasant - but I don't seem to break any laws, well, it’s frozen in the billiard room, well, I entered the club. And now let's go only one step further, and build a correlation relationship between data on various mobile phones. And now there is compromising about 30% of the country's population - who changes whom (if mobile phones regularly “spend the night together,” for example) or who has what sexual orientation. It is clear that errors are not excluded, and the figure of 30% is taken from the ceiling. And everything else is solely a matter of the will and desire of the state.

And accuracy itself will definitely increase, and all new technologies only contribute to this - and unlocking the phone by fingerprint, and contactless payment and the requirements of GLONASS certification - everything fits very well into the big picture.

And the fact that Google has long ago retains all search queries associated with each specific account - how is it? (Yes, you can turn it off if you know how or even know that Google came up with such a trick and even mentioned it somewhere in the user agreement. But this shutdown is just a tick in the interface, I don’t have a chance to check that they really ceased to keep. And by virtue of reasoned paranoia, I'd rather assume that they did not cease).

And TOR doesn’t help much with I2P - I haven’t met people who are so worried about this problem that they refuse to wear mobile phones, avoid photo and video shooting, etc. (by the way, hello, the idea of ​​manually tagging everyone on VK's photographs, that’s a useful thing, just to help image and video recognition algorithms that aren’t that perfect yet).

And then it will be even more interesting - all of these people, in turn, are easy to track down (by the absence or “blurring” of the information trace) and establish additional control as potentially unreliable.

At the same time, crumbs from the universal monitoring table go to everyone - if necessary, any company has the ability to track, for example, public opinion on the introduction of a new product or service — algorithms for evaluating emotional tonality, plus data from social networks / blogs — and the matter is in the bag. Movies can also be evaluated in the same way. And projects. And companies. And the reputation of political leaders after certain decisions, events and speeches. And much more.

Or take the same social network, which is imposed on the teeth, but applicable to the business. Would you like to know which customers have your main competitor? And when does he start looking for investments? Or talking to potential technology partners?

When it took me to work, we for a couple of days piled a mini-tool for industrial espionage on our knees, using the open data of a number of professional social networks (such as LinkedIn) and tracking the interdependencies of established relationships between employees of different companies.
And there are thousands of such examples. Who owns the data - owns the world.

Once, in childhood, I read a short fantastic story . It is good in itself, but I will try to convey the meaning in a couple of paragraphs.
He said that people wanted to build an incredible power expert system and a repository of knowledge. And for this, all the computers of the Galaxy were united into a single network. Included and asked the very first question.
- Is there a god?
The computer thought and answered:
- Now it is.

I do not want to judge, well what is happening, or bad. But this is a new reality that you need to understand and be able to live in it.

PS took the picture from here . Thanks to the author.