Cyber wars & hacks & Big Brother versus human & political integrity

[Hrothbern]

It became known today that sensitive data of German politicians have been hacked and leaked. From EU politicians to national and regional. Oddly no data were leaked on the semi-fascist party the AFD. (not yet ?).
Just another one in a row of leaks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...icians-personal-data-hacked-and-posted-online
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46757009
I do love the inside info, giving insight on what some politicians really think on topics. Especially when I doubt their honesty to find the right balance to the benefit of their mandate given by us, between informing us and keeping some info and thoughts from us.
It is all too obvious that the new techs combined with our social newsmedia are stirring up our traditional balances of our social and societal lifes and the institutions of our democracies, with opportunities for power abuse and both hostile and inimical disruptions.


First of all I find this development really troubling. I consider the overall disadvantages as far bigger than the overall advantages. And I have no real answers how to handle it, how to defend, to mitigate the bad aspects.


My thoughts

Our current modern human society is shaped and based on our mental and physical integrity as individual, on our personal sovereignty respected by others.
History has known ups and downs, the degree we have that integrity varies in different countries and cultures, and when it is about corporal punishment, rape, domination, discrimination, etc, there is still a long way to go.

At the same time as this "human rights" process upwards... there is imo a downward process as well, eroding our personal integrity, caused by some modern techs.

When we talk with each other we respect that not everything thought or opinion is being said. That there is confidentiality and trust needed (besides the need to know). The relation we have with each other, the strenght of the bonding, is based on our choices in that respect.

Imagine that we could "hear" what other people would think, when we would be telepaths !
That would cause a totally other society.

That integrity is expressed in a moral value on privacy.
You do not as (powerful) parent secretly read the diary of your teenager daughter. It is her's. No matter how dominant and powerful your position as parent is.
Little children and teenagers "sharing" their little secrets, also on other people, with each other engaged in the socialising process... learning what and how to share secrets, learning the societal boundaries of privacy, our mental integrity.
That privacy seems fully broken with social newsmedia as just another tool to abuse people. Yesterday on the national news was a report that 40% of the smart-phone models using face recognition as password were easy to hack with a picture. For sure a temporary "glitch". But yet another example of a breach in the personal protection, giving access from banking actions to texts and pictures. On the wave of hate and shame abuse by making very private info splash around the internet, harming people from social traumas up to suicides.

This all obviously changes when it is about people in a (more) public role.
Starting from the "public" role of parents to their children.... up to boards of the local sports ssociation... culiminating in chosen politicians and higher ranking civil servants paid by "our" money having a public interface role. We want accountability including how and on what they act.
With a grey zone for personal/family matters of those people, partially caused by politicians dragging their spouse and children with them in the official events, partial caused by the public desires to have a feel what kind of person that politician is (like: wow.. he loves cricket.. or: he does not like dogs).

Our society is very much based on justified trust.
Not the utopian pipe dream trust, not the trust of a shared religion or holy flame.
But the practical trust based on track records, as an effeciency tool to avoid time consuming micro-management.
Micro-management from direct democracy dreams that never fly because it wouldbe more than a full time job to participate as citizen.
Micro-management from your direct manager at your work, because that would be too labor intensive, too expensive for your company.

Just imagine that you would apply micro-management in your personal relations. With your partner... with your children... within your prime social group.
Our socialising as kids, our socialising as adults, is very much the learning, tweaking, honing process of trust. Getting trust up to the scope needed and to the level needed. Recognising where someone is strong and where someone is weak.

now...
We cannot really avoid that these techs & hacks take place, although first line of defense action will for sure be taken.
But I think the real line of defense will be how we adapt, like we always did with new techs.
How we socially correct people engaged in destructive secrets sharing. How we socialise there.
How we handle the public affairs... the executing and the expectations.

It ain't much from my side... I have no real answers.... but I do think the impact is big. I do not believe we should transform to a big brother telepath society: our instincts seem to mee too far away for such a culture.
All our philosophical and moral value & virtue systems are based on a big chunk of our integrity and sovereignty as individual human being and family.
(the fascist systems up to the DDR Stasi most fitting to it so far)

Any thoughts on this are welcome.

 

[Live trash can]

I think it is difficult to foretell how humans will develop and be in the future.

I fear that we with smart phones lose contact with the worldly world. Diving into the virtual. I actually was thinking about making a thread about the consequences of smart phones. Here in Norway and probably other places also there have been experiments with school pupils handing in there phone while they are at school. And there was a rise in socializing.

Playing a computer game for a little while is different from being hooked up the whole day.

I don't know if this was off topic but it is at least a side of new techs.

 

[Hrothbern]

I think it is difficult to foretell how humans will develop and be in the future.

I fear that we with smart phones lose contact with the worldly world. Diving into the virtual. I actually was thinking about making a thread about the consequences of smart phones. Here in Norway and probably other places also there have been experiments with school pupils handing in there phone while they are at school. And there was a rise in socializing.

Playing a computer game for a little while is different from being hooked up the whole day.

I don't know if this was off topic but it is at least a side of new techs.

A bit on the periphery, but in what other thread would it last for a longer discussion. I think it fits well enough

Socialising human-human and human-group in a world with more electronic interaction, with humans more becoming distanced up to objects... you can delete at a whim...

Much of socialising by kids is learning to bargain.
To find the win-win, to learn how far you can get with talking to a deal, with trust and disappointments. And how you repair a disturbed relation because you are after all in that same limited group of players that you cannot delete. You have to finds acceptable solutions within that group. It's why and how you learn morals. Good guidance from teachers very important.

 

[rah]

Yes, kids don't seem to learn much about morals on-line. The anonymity of it seems to encourage the worst in us.

 

[Kaitzilla]

It became known today that sensitive data of German politicians have been hacked and leaked. From EU politicians to national and regional. Oddly no data were leaked on the semi-fascist party the AFD. (not yet ?).
Just another one in a row of leaks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...icians-personal-data-hacked-and-posted-online
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46757009
I do love the inside info, giving insight on what some politicians really think on topics. Especially when I doubt their honesty to find the right balance to the benefit of their mandate given by us, between informing us and keeping some info and thoughts from us.
It is all too obvious that the new techs combined with our social newsmedia are stirring up our traditional balances of our social and societal lifes and the institutions of our democracies, with opportunities for power abuse and both hostile and inimical disruptions.


First of all I find this development really troubling. I consider the overall disadvantages as far bigger than the overall advantages. And I have no real answers how to handle it, how to defend, to mitigate the bad aspects.

We are entering the era of Deep Fakes.

Fake faces are now real thanks to face recognition AI grading face generating AI.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...ces-show-how-algorithms-can-now-mess-with-us/

The faces above don’t seem particularly remarkable. They could easily be taken from, say, Facebook or LinkedIn. In reality, they were dreamed up by a new kind of AI algorithm.

Nvidia researchers posted details of the method for producing completely imaginary fake faces with stunning, almost eerie, realism (here’s the paper).

The researchers, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine, and Timo Aila, came up with a new way of constructing a generative adversarial network, or GAN.

GANs employ two dueling neural networks to train a computer to learn the nature of a data set well enough to generate convincing fakes. When applied to images, this provides a way to generate often highly realistic fakery. The same Nvidia researchers have previously used the technique to create artificial celebrities (read our profile of the inventor of GANs, Ian Goodfellow).

Fake videos.
Mild Language Warning, but I'm posting it because it is vital to our civilization!

Spoiler :

Language Warning

Spoiler :

Fake dancing.

Leaked personal info that is 90% true and 10% fake has the spy crowd salivating.
Politicians are terrified.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/opinion/deep-fake-technology-democracy.html

Consider the image of Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland High School shooting in February who has become a vocal activist. A manipulated photo of her tearing up the Constitution went viral on Twitter among gun-rights supporters and members of the alt-right. The image had been digitally altered from another photo appearing in Teen Vogue. That publication’s editor lamented: “The fact that we even have to clarify this is proof of how democracy continues to be fractured by people who manipulate and fabricate the truth.”

That fake was exposed — but did it really make a difference to the people who wanted to inhabit their own paranoid universe? How many people still believe, all evidence to the contrary, that Barack Obama is a Muslim, or that he was born in Kenya?

(The answer to that last question, by the way: two-thirds of Trump supporters believe Mr. Obama is a Muslim; 59 percent believe he was not born in America and — oh, yes — a quarter of them believe that Antonin Scalia was murdered.)

Now imagine the effect of deep fakes on a close election. Let’s say video is posted of Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat running for Senate in Texas, swearing that he wants to take away every last gun in Texas, or of Senator Susan Collins of Maine saying she’s changed her mind on Brett Kavanaugh. Before the fraud can be properly refuted, the polls open. The chaos that might ensue — well, let’s just say it’s everything Vladimir Putin ever dreamed of.

Really terrified.
https://fcw.com/articles/2018/07/16/deep-fakes-rubio-warner.aspx

"One thing the Russians have done in other countries in the past is, they've put out incomplete information, altered information and or fake information, and if it's done strategically, it could impact the outcome of an [election]," Rubio said. "Imagine producing a video that has me or Sen. [Mark] Warner saying something we never said on the eve of an election. By the time I prove that video is fake -- even though it looks real -- it's too late."

We aren't quite at the tech level the Butcher of Bakersfield fake video from Running Man, but give it time.

 

[uppi]

The act of publishing all this data is deplorable, but i can't help but feel some kind of ironic satisfaction that some of those politicians that are now outraged were those who have been continuously trying to erode privacy in the past (usually in the name of security).

On topic of the more general point you are making: We now have all this new technology, but now our societies have to find ways to deal with it. I see two major positions here.

The first one is that privacy must be defended at all costs. These leaks are not inevitable and we can do a lot to protect ourselves. These accidents happen, because there was not enough time to educate people about the dangers of the new technology and given enough time and everybody will know how to protect themselves. We just need to give them the tools to do so.

The second position is that the fight for privacy is over. There is so much value in the data about yourself that you will be forced to give up most of your privacy, because otherwise you will be an outcast. Instead of the futile efforts to protect your privacy, you should try to learn to live with the fact that you cannot have as many secrets anymore.

I am firmly in the first camp, but I do see the argument for the second. And to some degree I already engage in the self-censorship which this requires. For example, in communication that I have to assume is being monitored by someone, I sometimes avoid making jokes that the recipient would understand, but might look very bad to a third party. "Money for bomb supplied" isn't a good idea on a financial transaction if I have to assume it is not completely private.

 

[Kyriakos]

It will be better when no manual work has to be done cause you will just vr into the mecha that does the work. You can thus stay at home and be obese.

 

[rah]

The second position is that the fight for privacy is over. There is so much value in the data about yourself that you will be forced to give up most of your privacy, because otherwise you will be an outcast. Instead of the futile efforts to protect your privacy, you should try to learn to live with the fact that you cannot have as many secrets anymore.

I disagree. It can still be fought by not giving it away. An on-line presence is not a necessity. I still pay cash for most things. While people may have an idea what I am IRL, the specifics are very limited. Very very little comes up when you google my name.

 

[uppi]

I disagree. It can still be fought by not giving it away. An on-line presence is not a necessity. I still pay cash for most things. While people may have an idea what I am IRL, the specifics are very limited. Very very little comes up when you google my name.

I don't entirely agree myself - it is not my position. I also try to maintain quite a low profile on the internet, almost everything you can find about me is my professional work. However, I am aware that there is a price that I pay for that. For example, I missed out on at least one class reunion, because the organizers weren't able to find me on social media. That isn't too bad, but that is also because I am a bit too old for generation Facebook. I have heard stories of younger people, who said it would be very hard to get through university without having a Facebook presence, because essential information is shared on that platform.

I also pay much in cash, but there are more and more things that cannot be (easily) paid in cash. And for other things I have given up paying in cash, because the hassle is too big for me.

That you can protect your privacy right now doesn't mean you will be able to do so in the future. There are already talks of banning the use of cash. Nobody has done so, but I don't think we can discard that possibility. I don't want to paint a too bleak picture of the future and it may very well may happen that privacy will be taken much more seriously, but I don't think that is guaranteed by any means.

 

[Kyriakos]

I don't entirely agree myself - it is not my position. I also try to maintain quite a low profile on the internet, almost everything you can find about me is my professional work. However, I am aware that there is a price that I pay for that. For example, I missed out on at least one class reunion, because the organizers weren't able to find me on social media. That isn't too bad, but that is also because I am a bit too old for generation Facebook. I have heard stories of younger people, who said it would be very hard to get through university without having a Facebook presence, because essential information is shared on that platform.

I also pay much in cash, but there are more and more things that cannot be (easily) paid in cash. And for other things I have given up paying in cash, because the hassle is too big for me.

That you can protect your privacy right now doesn't mean you will be able to do so in the future. There are already talks of banning the use of cash. Nobody has done so, but I don't think we can discard that possibility. I don't want to paint a too bleak picture of the future and it may very well may happen that privacy will be taken much more seriously, but I don't think that is guaranteed by any means.

One will pay with "credits", like in beneath a steel sky

 

[Hehehe]

Do these leaks contain anything that has any political significance, or is it just the politicians' private data? But on a broader level, I'm not sure there's anything that can be done about such things. Companies on the internet gather extensive data on all users. It's so pervasive that there's bound to be embarrassing secrets about politicians (and everyone else for that matter) just waiting to be acquired and released by malicious actors. I'd like to say that I have a solution for this, but I don't. My guess is that as more and more leaks like this surface, then people will simply care less and less.

 

[innonimatu]

The problem with this "information age" or whatever people are calling it now. is the asymmetry of access to the information. There have been a few hoarders of information, that then sell it and use it for profit and power. This is a serious problem.

I believe that the hoarders of information have been subtly, discreetly, backing the growth of a culture of "political correctness" because this culture makes their hoarded information much more valuable:
Valuable economically, economic actors want to act in conformity to what is "correct", and for that they must know what to conform with. They need to buy that information from the data hoarders, thing Google, Facebook, etc.
And valuable politically, manipulation and blackmail, because everyone breaks at least some of the "correct" social rules. Know who breaks what, publish it strategically...

But against that alone there are easy defenses emerging. Right when it seemed that no politician could afford a scandal (recalling how John Edwards in the US was dispatched), enter Trump who could talk about grabbing [female kitty] ans still be elected. Strategic publishing fail. Could be associated with a porn actress and shrug it off (though he at the time hadn't realized it and went for the old pay her thing). So, what happens is that people develop a certain "immunity to scandal" after a while. And those who simply dismiss it and carry on get to keep their careers after all. Societies adapt, I believe we're going to see quire a fall in the "political correctness" effect, and people failing to automatically fall into line with public lynchings over what are really common "social misdemeanors". This is a consequence of people having less privacy. As they understand that their own privacy is no longer guaranteed, they know can't pretend they are themselves perfect any longer, can they then throw stones at others?

The problem in this way creates its own solution, possibly. The asymmetry of access to the hoarded data is still a problem, but not as catastrophic as it may seem.

"Deep fakes" is just a temporary issue until everyone knows that videos can be faked.