so it's also my job to introduce our
next keynote speaker
who knows something about being hassled
by border guards
his name is peter watts he is a science
fiction author
a scientist and kind of an example of
the
type of voice we're trying to bring to
the iep in our conferences someone with
some great ideas someone who sees as his
crowning achievement the fact that he
once wrote a novel that was
deemed too dark for the russian audience
and they would not
uh translate it if you are too dark for
the russians
you win in my book you have done
something very very right so please join
me in welcoming peter watts
how's the volume good yeah the russians
actually ended up
publishing the book after all when it
started making money
um anyway
when uh when i first fielded sam's
invitation to talk to you today
my immediate reaction was that there's
some kind of a cruel hoax
and i gotta say having spoken to some of
you in the interim i'm still not
entirely convinced that it isn't
um
i am as has been pointed out a midlist
science fiction writer um i used to be a
marine biologist
what in god's name do i have
to say that would be of any interest to
anybody with
with an interest in privacy issues
and yet
i am not the first science fiction
author to make an appearance at one of
these things
i'm not even the first sf author with
scientific credentials
david brinn gave a talk a couple of
months ago at your dc
summit apparently on the tren on his
idea of the transparent society
i've heard him talk on the subject
myself i'm reasonably familiar with his
talking points
brynn argues that trying to legislate an
end to government surveillance will
never work
because we primates come with dominance
hierarchies built into standard
equipment
telling our leaders that they cannot spy
on us is the equivalent this is his
analogy of poking a silverback gorilla
with a stick they just won't stand for
it
but perhaps they might let us look back
so
we'll watch the watchers the camera will
point both ways the playing field will
be level
now the dude is a physicist so
i suppose he can be forgiven for
thinking that it would be anywhere close
to a good idea to get into a staring
contest
with a large aggressive territorial
mammal that is primed to think of direct
eye contact
as a threat display to name of
speaking as a as a biologist i myself
cannot recommend it to name a couple of
obvious examples
chelsea manning looked back and they
threw away the key ed snowden looked
back he got a
target on his chest more than one
silverback gorilla
has opined publicly that they would like
to see that man assassinated
on a more modest and local level we're
all pretty much familiar with the
litany of abuses that various law
enforcement officers heap upon the
citizens they're charged with protecting
we also know how they generally react to
being recorded
by civilians or even worse to the
suggestion
that we look back by putting cameras in
their cars
over in los angeles they already went
that route only to find that vital bits
of the surveillance equipment that was
involved in the process went
mysteriously missing in the field
um apparently for reasons that nobody
really expected cops don't like being
spied upon
so as ex-cia man barry eisler puts that
we are living
in a society where the government knows
more and more about the citizenry
and the citizenry is permitted to know
less and less
about the government um in this light my
own words come back to haunt me from
my altercation with u.s border
authorities back in 2009
the last thing i said to them before
they started throwing punches
was i just want to know what's going on
and yet if you look past the superficial
dumbness of the gorilla
example there is a fundamental truth
under there we are mammals
we were cobbled into existence by the
same processes of natural selection that
shaped
every other form of life on this planet
we do have certain hardwired responses
that were forged in our evolutionary
past and anybody
who thinks that their own behavior isn't
at least partly informed
by those legacy circuits is not been
paying attention
so i'm going to talk about a couple of
those circuits today i'm going to start
by suggesting that your whole
organization may have been misnamed
perhaps the hot button issue is not so
much privacy
as it is surveillance
now you might ask if that's even a
difference that makes a difference i
think it is
perfect example broke just yesterday
turns out the feds are
collecting our facebook and twitter data
no particular reason there's no specific
investigation going on they just
like to keep an eye on us you know just
nothing to see here
how privacy obviously is not the issue
here
nobody on a face on a social network has
any reasonable expectation of privacy
but you still
assume that you're just one voice in a
chorus and there is something
kind of visceral in the realization that
in fact what you are instead is a target
i think that reaction isn't so much
philosophical as it is instinctive and
i'm going to try and convince you of
this by asking you to find
god god is actually pretty easy to find
we think god got started in
paridolia which is that cognitive glitch
that allows you to see
faces in the clouds elvis and a burrito
that kind of thing
and we think of pariedelia arose as an
anti-predator strategy
as it happens i've just finished um
writing a novel that explores the
functional utility of the religious
impulse so i'm going to steal
an info dump from that book to help make
my point
look brooks wanted to say 50 000 years
ago there were these three guys spread
out across the plain
and they each heard something rustling
in the grass
the first one thought it was a tiger and
he ran like hell and it was a tiger but
the guy got away
the second one thought it was a tiger
and he ran like hell
but it was only the wind and his friends
all laughed at him for being such a
chicken
but the third guy he thought it was only
the wind
so he shrugged it off and a tiger had
him for dinner
and the same thing happened a million
times across ten thousand generations
and after a while everyone was seeing
tigers in the grass even when there
weren't any tigers
because even chicken chits have more
kids than corpses do
and from those humble beginnings we
learn to see faces in the clouds and
portents in the stars
to see agency and randomness because
natural selection favors the paranoid
even now we are wired to believe that
unseen things are watching us
and it came to pass that certain people
figured out how to use that
they painted their faces or they wore
funny hats they shook their rattles and
waved their crosses and they said yes
there are tigers in the grass there are
faces in the sky
and they will be very angry if you do
not obey their commandments
you must make offerings to appease them
you must bring grain and gold and altar
boys for our delectation or they will
strike you down and send you to the
awful place
and people believe them by the billions
because after all
they could see the invisible tigers
so cut to the present for a very long
time now
people that don't see agency everywhere
have a disproportionate tendency to get
eaten
that's not so much a problem now but the
program persists we still see patterns
in everything butterflies and rorschach
blots faces and clouds
we hear ghosts and monsters in the
creaking of stairs at night
and we can make a testable prediction
here because if all of this does result
from an ancient threat response you
would expect that false positive pattern
matching
would intensify during periods of social
unrest when people are feeling
especially scared or insecure according
to
work out of the university of texas this
is exactly what happens
people who feel helpless are more likely
to see patterns in pictures of random
visual static
they're more likely to see conspiracies
and connections in unrelated events
belief in god and astrology also goes up
during periods of social unrest religion
tends to prosper in lands where people
have reason to be afraid it's far more
prevalent
in developing nations than in developed
ones
and the one exception that you might
want to cite for that the good ol us of
a
actually kind of proves the point
because in a very real way the u.s
is not a developed country
17 first world nations in this database
um australasian european and north
american i've highlighted us in yellow
for
easy access social metric along the y
axis
religiosity of the society along the x
the further to the left you are
the more fundamentalist you are
and as you can see um by any pretty much
any social metric you would care to name
i'm basically just showing you
what am i showing you um i'm showing you
infant mortality and homicide rate
but exactly the same pattern holds for
stds divorce
life expectancy a whole bunch of
variables that i don't have time to show
you
you'll find that the us is generally the
worst of the law
and it is also by a significant margin
the most religions
religion is also adaptive at the group
level not just the
individual one religious communes tend
to persist longer than secular communes
significantly other things
being equal and within those religious
communes the ones that lost
longest still are those that preach kind
of a
vicious patriarchal peeping tom god the
kind of angry vengeful old testament god
that
catches you masturbating and casts you
into hell for the wickedness in your
thought
those communes seem to last longer than
other faith-based communities with
that believe in a kind of a loving and a
more generous deity
a myriad studies basically support the
idea that authoritarian religions based
on fear of surveillance
have a competitive edge in darwin's
universe just putting a picture of eyes
and i'm not even talking about a
photorealistic picture of eyes i'm
talking about
a lame-ass gary larson level pencil
sketch of eyes
sticking that on the wall will reduce
cheating exams
or cheating a behavior during tests so
will inserting the word ghost
into casual conversation something that
abstract is enough to scare us albeit
subconsciously into changing our
behavior
so when we talk about privacy we are
probably not talking about some cultural
artifact that arose wholesale out of the
victorian era
that's the first take-home point here
the link between surveillance and fear
is a lot deeper and a lot older than
your average post-privacy advocate is
willing to admit
now the usual suspects have done a
bang-up job of amping up the whole fear
side of the equation over the past few
years
but of course because of the correlation
what they've also done is amp up
our sensitivity to potential
surveillance
and despite the official narrative
when we look around we do not see a lot
of brown-skinned televists doing the
tigers share of the surveilling what we
do see
is the invocation of terrorism to cover
up the fact that an innocent person's
life was ruined
for eight years because of a typo on the
no-fly list
we see a woman denied entry to the
states because somehow u.s border
authorities have access to her
confidential
medical records i experienced
something like that similar myself back
in 1991 when i lived in guelph
i was caught at two in the morning
turning right on a red light on a
bicycle
i was pulled over and i asked some
impertinent questions about my civil
rights that got me hold in for the night
it was a fairly trivial infraction i was
never convicted
if you go looking for a record of that
on the archives canadian archives you
will not find it however
two decades later u.s authorities cited
that event to try and have me declared a
repeat offender
that gives you some idea of the
granularity of the data that our masters
were sharing a solid decade before 9 11
made it fashionable
turning from the personal to the
corporate uh not that corporations
aren't also people of course
we see things like the trans-pacific
partnership being negotiated entirely in
secret
we see consumer appliances spying on our
behavior and reporting back to home
office
even after we have found the hidden
undocumented menu that's supposed to
tell them to stop
we see an ongoing series of government
attempts to legislate
online surveillance of canadians without
any of that messy warrant and disclosure
stuff
what we see basically here excuse me
is stalking behavior and i mean this in
the biological not the sexual harassment
sense
corporate entities do it for profits uh
political entities do it to secure power
but in both cases what
we see is stealth and concealment
and we would hear things rustling in the
grass behind us even if there wasn't
anything there
because that just happens to be the way
we're wired
but it gets worse when somebody invokes
hackers or terrorists or
creepy guys in trench coats to justify
poking around in our private lives you
may remember when victor's
place basically played that chord tried
to describe everybody who was opposed to
c30 is pro pedophile
a lot of critics claim that um
sir blanket surveillance amounts to
treating us all like criminals but i
think it goes deeper than that i think
what we really feel like is prey
now the good news is there's obviously
increasing awareness
that you can damp down a lot of these
alarm responses if you just stop
sneaking on sneaking around on us put
your tracking policies front and center
make transparent
the perfectly reasonable exchange of
personal data
for services you're going to engender a
lot less paranoia than if you secretly
change everybody's
privacy defaults and then hide the
controls to change them back under five
levels of
undocumented sub-menus even facebook has
managed to figure that out by now
the bad news is even if you want to be
fair and open
you're frequently not allowed to be
you have a lot of valuable data after
all and government and law enforcement
don't
really believe that we're all criminals
but they damn well know that some of us
are
so why not collect all the data right
now
so that whoever the bad guys turn out to
be down the road you'll have the
relevant data in hand
it is much easier to go fishing with a
drift net
than a long line if you'll forgive a
marine biology reference
who cares you can't end up tearing up
the whole damn seabed in the process
so even companies who care about
protecting privacy
still basically have to give it up when
the spooks come calling
and as we all know most companies don't
really care about privacy
just last week for example we discovered
that canadian telecoms
aren't just scraping our data for their
own profit they're serving it up as an
all-you-can-eat buffet for any hungry
spooks who happen to wander by
all served for a very reasonable service
fee to cover the mutual back scratching
expenses
still let us fantasize for a little bit
and let us assume that somewhere out
there there really is
a country that really does try to
protect client privacy
how do you do that when at any moment
you could be conscripted
as a law enforcement cat's paw this is
not the kind of a slogan that's really
calculated to engender a whole lot of
confidence but it's really actually
pretty
the only honest slogan so here's a wild
thought
don't just offer data protection
especially since you can't guarantee it
offer data destruction instead i'm not
talking about
brin world where everybody knows
everything and the lions lie down with
the lambs
i'm talking about a more darwinian place
where when the lions come calling
you burn down your chunk of the belt
before they get their hands on it
so forget the transparent society what i
guess i'm advocating is the scorched
earth society
i do not expect many of you to embrace
this i'm told that
i'm told that a lot of lawyers show up
at these things and
i'm guessing the standard legal toolbox
does not come equipped with a standard
middle finger to stick to authorities
then again lawyers also know that the
law is an ass
they know that some are more equal than
others
that cats get to write the laws for mice
that bush and cheney will never be
indicted for war crimes
in this particular case our goal here is
to blind big brother
does anybody really expect that the law
will ever smile on that goal
when the guys who write the laws are the
same ones who want to spy on us
i think bryn's dead right on that score
at least
so let's admit that any effective
privacy strategy is
almost by definition bound to be on
shaky legal ground
and proceed from there the government
shows up and demands all your metadata
you hit a kill switch everything
evaporates
there's nothing left for them to pillage
pretty stupid right it's like some
schoolyard revenge fantasy you know
giving a little finger to the man you'd
probably find more emotional maturity in
a harry potter novel
it had never happened because when the
feds show up you either cave
or you pay the price okay well maybe
lava bit didn't cave but that had to
hold you with the
ed snowden thing so that was probably an
anomalous event
okay maybe cryptocell didn't cave either
but twice is still just a coincidence
three times maybe we're looking at a
trend
now it's painfully obvious to all of you
by now that i don't know anything about
the law
what i do know about is biology i have
some sense of where we came from as a
species
i know that ethics and morality are not
human traits they are mammalian ones
caputians feel empathy chimps have a
sense of fair play
any number of social mammals have
what you might want to call a justice
instinct a drive to
punish cheaters and freeloaders in the
community our own species
is hardwired for revenge to the point
where we will
punish those who trespass against us
even if meeting out that punishment
hurts us
more than it hurts our transgressors we
will cut off our nose
despite our faces how that runs the
gamut from relatively trivial
financial games in which people feel
cheated out of small amounts of money
all the way up
to suicide bombers who as it turns out
are apparently not the wild-eyed
ignorant religious zealots we always
thought
most of the studies of these fellows
show that they tend to be well-educated
well-employed reasonably sane in some
cases even secular
one motivation they do have in common
though is low self-esteem
a sense of humiliation they regard their
own lives as so cheapened
that those lives will gain value if they
trade them in against a higher value
target
it's a net benefit situation you might
say it's it's revenge economics
but this is not so much economics as it
is simple brain stem biology and that's
why i think that a scorched earth
approach irrational though it might seem
might actually take off it appeals
to those of us who feel powerless and
screwed over it
it appeals to those of us who really
want to take back some measure
of control over our lives even if it
costs us
i personally don't use cloud-based
services i think anyone who trusts their
data to the cloud is an idiot
but i would sign up for a scorched earth
service purely as a sign of political
support
i mean i'm a i'm a science fiction
writer by trade right
wild speculation is is essentially what
i do
but even i have some standards
you may not find the idea of a
self-destructing commercial data bank to
be particularly plausible
i myself think that it's at least as
likely as a world of rainbows and
unicorns in which the gorillas
set down their fiber taps and their
security certificates and let us gaze
deeply into their eyes and since most of
you have already eaten
that's the image i'm going to leave you
with
thank you
you