8 Comments

It'll end up like SETI, with reams of data no one knows what to do with (except use ex post for criminal prosecutions).

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Low-cost isn't a factor when you speak about a future in which you expect moore's law and similiar processes to make surveillance really cheap.

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A chain is only as strong as its weakest link: gathering data is cheap, monitoring and filtering it is expensive. In addition the government employees and politicians involved with the surveillance system can be bribed, extorted and threatened so certain (probably rich and/or ruthless) people and groups can still get escape Big Brother.

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Christian, you do have a point: if it's not a community using a surveillance system but a closed-off group with their own passwords, codes and punishments for leaking those then it becomes much harder for the authorities to track it all.

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I'm glad to hear that you have available to you a thoroughly- impenetrable, and yet also low-cost and convenient, network security system.

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Why would you want a open network in the first place? Knowledge is power. I can just share the knowledge captured with my surveilance net with my neighbors who also contribute camera's.

That way I and my neighbors have the advantage of having the information from the camera's and no cost of having outsiders monitor me in my house.

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The vast majority of data gathered by surveillance nets are worthless. Surveillance nets are only useful for documenting the rare interesting event that they capture. Only a small amount of data needs to be released to demonstrate the interesting event occurred. By contrast compromising the surveillance net requires a large amount of data.

The only reason this doesn't seem intuitive to us, is because computers are currently very weak at extracting useful information from audio, images and video. If I want to prove that the police beat a man, I pretty much have to show you the full video, which shows the angle of the camera, background, time of day, etc. All theoretically superfluous bits to the question of whether a man was beat by the police.

But consider if computer technology to automatically extract information from video improves. If we share a reliable video-to-text summarization algorithm that we both trust, then I can use standard Zero-Knowledge Proof protocols to prove to you that my secret video shows a man being beat by the police. You don't need to see the video, just the algorithmic text description of the video, and hence the angle and location of the camera is obscured.

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Yup. And here's another part of the path to the painfully-near-term dystopia ahead: "Ford Exec: 'We Know Everyone Who Breaks The Law' Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car." See http://www.businessinsider....

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