End of the year

Once again another year has come to an end.

I am very disappointed to see what is happening around the world. The world at the moment is (arguably, and with some major exceptions) about safest it has ever been. And still we are hearing all the time about terrorists, criminals and other less pleasant folks and how you - everyone - should fear them. And how you should support your governments' efforts in catching those scary people.

Maybe the government agencies who are supposed to keep us safe have been completely incompetent before, but to me it seems that they have grown even more hopeless lately, based on their requests to blatantly take away freedoms from everyone. Apparently now the go-to method of catching bad guys is to expose everyone to spying - that is, everyone, including the citizen, must be placed on ever-vigilant, ever-recording surveillance. And trying to avoid this surveillance will place you on watchlist - or worse.

There is one very important question one should remember when witnessing political acts; be it terrorist acts, trade deals (like TPP) or internal political maneuvering. Who will benefit from this?

Before blindly agreeing or disagreeing on anything, first ask yourself that. Who will gain power or money? In case of ISIS this gets very interesting indeed - the grunts who do the fighting clearly aren't ones that benefit from it. Neither are those visible leaders like Bin Laden and others, at least in my opinion. So who is standing behind the curtain and pulling the strings? I unfortunately have no answers, and I'd rather not voice out my wild guesses.

Trade deals? Well, no question there, citizens on both sides of the deal will get shafted while major corporations laugh all the way to the bank. This is what corrup... oh, sorry, that's a bad word - lobbying will get you. No, just because it is supposedly (semi-)public, (semi-)anonymous and happens at higher level than some random police asking for donation to make the problem go away doesn't make it any different. But I digress again...

Surveillance? This one is a bit sketchy, especially since most of the western world is supposed to live in democracies (or representative republics) where people in power change relatively often, so this wouldn't gain current government much. But again, who is behind the curtain there?

The other side of surveillance is censorship. Governments doesn't officially censor things here, at least not officially, but major news agencies do, with absolutely no exceptions (some just are less blatant about it), by reporting only one side of the story, withholding important details or not reporting certain stories at all. So unless you have some other sources (reliable ones - which might be tricky), you will only get the story they want to tell. This, in my book, is even worse than the direct censorship China practices - at least China is (mostly) honest about it.

When discussion turns to surveillance the phrase "I don't have anything to hide" is spoken often, and it is always wrong. Would you like to have your sexual preferences, bathroom habits or browsing history to be public or browseable by some bored government  agent (or worse, low paygrade grunt working for corporation hired by government)? While there might be nothing blatantly criminal there, those are still your private business and no one, no government should be making notes of those. Or of anything else you do.

How about this then: Let's say that in 20 years or so you (or your relative) has somehow ended up in position of some political power. The thing is that you are now threatening the established system, so now some people are busy digging through all the collected data about this politically inconvinient person and his (or her) relatives. What will your chat logs from now say? Browsing history? Porn habits? Vacation photos? Dig enough and there will be something (even taken out of context, or combined with some fact) that will badly damage the reputation of everyone concerned, and status quo is held once again.

Or if that seems unlikely, let's say you make some random remark on facebook or another forum which makes some person angry. Even now, without this all-encompassing database he can find out a lot about you, including things you wouldn't want to be known by say your employer, parents or neighbors. Can you imagine what he could find out with access to everything you have ever done, even those that you never directly made public (like those photos your phone stored in cloud, or your text messages, or anything). All it takes is a disgruntled low-paid grunt whose job is to browse through all that data anyway...

At the moment some governments are planning on requiring all encryption to be backdoored, because criminals of course. But the thing is that there is no backdoor that is only accessible to the "good guys". Backdoor, by definition, is usable by anyone that happens to stumble on the keys. So now not only is your supposedly safe communication stored by government, but also criminals who can now listen in as well once they get the keys. And they will get them, sooner or later, by accident, by mistake or by straight out bribing or blackmailing someone.

This must not be allowed to happen. This is what general surveillance and loss of privacy means.

Do not give in to the fear for it will doom us all. Resist these plans of cencorship and loss of privacy so the next year will be better - for everyone, everywhere.

While the following quote is not from a real person but from a fictional character from a game, it is no less insightful for that. I'll end this year with this:

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

• Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
• (Alpha Centauri)

Despite all this, Happy New Year everyone!