Yes, you are wrong. However, you bring up some good points. The anonymity of the people watching is important but unmasking them is not the complete answer. It is only part of the solution.
The real problem is the asymmetry in the power of the watched and the watching. The watching (governments and corporations) have vastly more power in the form of money and organization. They are not the town gossip of the past who was roughly as powerful as everyone else. Unmasking them is a good start but we still need to place controls on what they can see in the first place.
I did enjoy your article and I did upvote it. I'd love to debate this further.
Well I do see some of your point, however I think if we made surveillance truly transparent, then large private/govenmental organisations would have to behave very differently because their actions would not be able to be hidden.
The power asymmetry would be significantly reduced, if not nullified altogether; if enough people dis-agree with how things are being done, political pressure will force changes.
This assumes people care enough, which may be the Achilles heel of my statements; sad but true :)
OK, looks like the beginning of an interesting exchange here. I'm going to retract my earlier conclusion that you were wrong. I understood what you were saying as, expose the watchers but just let them watch. That I disagree with. Now, I see what you're saying is expose the watchers and use that as a means to garner political support to enact change. That is not exactly how I would go about doing things but that is a respectable strategy.
Personally, I support the full out berserker attack strategy on all fronts. Expose the watchers, build a political platform to force change (people need a place to go when they are ready, otherwise they may fragment and become ineffective), and finally fight them technically right now. Unlike the communications technologies of the past, computer/internet tech is capable of protecting itself with encryption that is easy to implement and use. We don't need a political solution right away, we can fix this problem ourselves.
As to your last statement, I think people do care, but right now it is hard for people to see anything that they can do that will be effective. That is why I joined Steemit. I want to educate people on privacy issues and let them know that there is something to do that can be effective.
Before I hit the post button, I just want to say that I am finishing up a post for my blog on the history of communications privacy. It covers pre-revolutionary war law to the present and explains how we arrived at this point and explains how the logic of the laws fit together or sometimes how they don't fit together. Hope to get it posted tomorrow. Everyone should take a look at it.
There is no single best way to do anything, different approaches have better chances of success.
Agreed - who watches the watchmen?
With transparent surveillance, we all watch the watchmen
Oh, one other thing, how do you propose that we watch the watchmen? Technological solution? Legislative? or something else?
Technological must come first. Imagine a smartphone app or smart glasses that literally allows you to see every device that is watching or listening to you, for cameras you see the range of the device and microphones too, you now have the power of a real time 3d map of surveillance right before your eyes. Public collective tagging of the owners of such devices, can start to build a map of who is listening or viewing what.
Once this starts to become widely known about, people may start natively avoiding such areas, which would reduce the value of the data gathered. If surveillance is scaled up to combat this, then a public backlash is possible (though not guaranteed) and a poliical/legislative change may occur.
In summary if people realised just how monitored every move they make really was, a change would probably come.
I like the public tagging idea. That could be a website like wikimapia where zones of surveillance are tagged instead of landmarks. Only problem is the cameras that are hidden.