Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.

Transparency discussion thread

7 posts / 0 new

Last post

Thu, 2014-02-06 03:02

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

Transparency discussion thread

Transparency discussion thread Defiantly needs its own thread.

Smokeskin wrote:
thezombiekat wrote:
I also thing this would be a fun debate When considering the desire for transparency and the practical need for secrecy during undercover operations or military action I always liked the idea of short term obfuscation followed by full disclosure. For example after an undercover police investigation the full details of the operation are made known. This does have some downsides including limiting the ability to maintain a long term undercover operation, and potentially endangering operatives after the operation is over by making them easier to find.
And it would teach criminals on how to evade capture. I recently read the details on how a pedophile network got infiltrated, and even after spying on it for a long time, they still only caught 1/3rd of the bad guys. It detailed what got them compromised and what worked for the others. That's a nice information manual.

True and in that way it would make the job of law enforcement harder (and to a lesser extent intelligence and defence). Law enforcement, intelligence and military personnel have some rather strong, but limited powers. And sometimes lines get crossed, sometimes the line should be moved. Like it or not we live in a democracy where it is (indirectly) the will of the people who decide the powers of such organisations. If the public do not know what there guardians are doing they cannot demand of the politicians “do something about these immoral behaviours police engage in” and of cause the can not realise the difficulties police operate on and demand “grant the police more power to protect us” The concept of democracy assumes that the population is informed and will mostly vote intelligently to gain the best result. As long as actions of government controlled institutions is opaque the population (and frequently even the politicians) cannot be well informed. Today it is the occasional leaked operation that is assumed to be representative of the whole and is acted on under that assumption with no ability to verify the truth.

Thu, 2014-02-06 03:54

Smokeskin

As to the voters being well

As to the voters being well informed and deciding what goes on in government, I think you'll be hard pressed to find any sociologist or economist who agrees with that (that works in the field - of course you might someone who made their career in something entirely different and speak as lay persons on the issue or pushes a personal ideology). That's just not how it works. Looking into public choice theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice is a good place to start. I'm not against transparency at all, I think that it is important that we expose what goes on in government. It is often dismaying to see just how much they still try to cover up, how blatantly they lie about it, and how little consequence there is when they are exposed. My personal opinion on it is that I think the state is simply too big and too united. Government needs to be exposed as much as possible due to the extreme power it wields and its lack of accountability, but does government have to be lumped in with activities that works best when clandestine? If law enforcement was separate from the government, there would be much less problems with keeping a lid on an undercover pedophile operation.

Thu, 2014-02-06 04:39

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

Smokeskin wrote:If law

Smokeskin wrote:
If law enforcement was separate from the government, there would be much less problems with keeping a lid on an undercover pedophile operation.

Sounds like your talking ancap again (I should not be surprised) Well I think it would at least be as necessary for a private police force to have strong oversight. In past conversations I have been thinking of private security as being on call to protect your property or person from immediate threat but investigation work would also be in demand. I foresee no difficulty finding people willing to pay you to hunt paedophiles. Now from where would this organisation get its authority to hold an interrogation? Investigate in private data stores, observe inside personal residences. Portray themselves as being explicitly not being involved in an investigation “sign this declaration you are not involved in hunting paedophiles or we will not show you anything, penalty clause is nether you or your employer may use any information gained in any way. And you personally are responsible for any costs to others arising from your deception.” Anything unenforceable about that contract. Next we should consider that there will be competition in the pedo hunting market. A key metric for effectiveness will be cost per pedo caught. Unless potential customers are able to see exactly how the organisation operates an unscrupulous (the one in every hundred people who is actually bad) operator could engage in search procedures as planting evidence, manufacturing pedos using nanodrugs and psychosurgery. Clearly these activities would be actionable, but how would they be caught if the organisation is allowed to keep its operations secret indefinitely.

Thu, 2014-02-06 11:37

bibliophile20 bibliophile20's picture

I actually agree with

I actually agree with Smokeskin here, to an extent. Law enforcement should be government mandated and an arm of government, but, speaking as a US citizen, there should be clear separate spheres between the public and daily goings on of law, bills, taxes and other such day to day governmental processes, and the more clandestine needs of security, law enforcement and other such elements. Drawing where those spheres fall out, now that's the tricky part. Modern sousveillance is doing wonders in that regard, because the old school politicians don't know how to compensate for it. But there still needs to be accountability for the police. If there isn't, we get abuses and other such problems. I think one of the grandest examples of how old school politicians have not yet adjusted to the Internet Age was last summer (late June), when the Texas legislature was trying to pass [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Senate_Bill_5]Texas Senate Bill 5[/url], a blatant Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) bill which would shut down most of the abortion providers in Texas. State Senator Wendy Davis fillbustered to run out the clock so that the bill couldn't be voted on before the deadline for the session at midnight. This was watched, live, by several hundred thousand people via the Net. At the end of the day, the Texas State Senate, packed full of Republicans [url=http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/07/01/who-really-controls-rick-pe... know full well who owns their allegiance[/url], first tried to get the gallery to quiet down so that they could hold the vote to take their rights away. The gallery had none of it, and made such a fuss that they successfully ran out the clock. Then, in front of those several hundred thousand people watching live over the Net, the Texas Senate held the vote two minutes after the deadline and tried to fudge the rules into saying that it was legal. This was watched, live, by me and a good chunk of a million other people. This was on top of their other tricks, that, without the sousveillance of the Net, would have gone unremarked. Now, as a result of their antics, Senator Davis has a good chance of being elected as Texas Governor this year, and I'm sure, looking at her record of integrity, that she'll do much better than the current incumbent, Rick Perry, who said, without irony, when the bill was blocked from passing: “The louder they scream, the more we know that we are getting something done”. (Also, who boasted about how much [url=http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/201121/rick-perry-brags-about-how-much-t... values life on the evening of the state's 500th execution since 1976[/url]). In regards to security, though, this is where things get tricky. How do we draw the line for transparency when we have examples like [url=http://boingboing.net/2014/02/04/dea-reveals-parallel-constr.html]this[/...?

Quote:
The DEA's training materials regarding parallel construction, the practice of reverse engineering the evidence chain to keep how the government actually knows something happened away from prosecutors, the defense, and the public. 'Americans don't like it,' the materials note, when the government relies heavily on classified sources, so agents are encouraged to find ways to get the same information through tactics like 'routine' traffic stops that coincidentally find the information agents are after."

—

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -Benjamin Franklin

Thu, 2014-02-06 12:03

thezombiekat thezombiekat's picture

An example of that might be

An example of that might be an undercover operative telling his handler a car is full of illegal weapons so the handler arranged for a “random” stop and prosecutes for position of illegal weapons without compromising the undercover agent. I am comfortable with that kind of behaviour as a short term measure. At some point the undercover operation will finish and some time there after the full details should be open for scrutiny. And this should be soon enough that it is still relevant to the career of the officers involved so the knowledge of eventual disclosure keeps all officers at all times aware that there will be consequences if they break the rules they operate under, and if the rules are unjust this becomes known and pressure may be exerted to change the rules.

Thu, 2014-02-13 18:57

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

I work in information

I work in information security (and work next to the guy who does FOIA). I've never worked on a secret or TS system, so take this with that caveat. But overall, I'm in the transparency except when absolutely necessary camp. Even taking the most strong-state position, we still live in a representative democracy. And this means that our officials represent our views and interests. So with that in mind: 1) How can we have informed views and interests to represent if the government is keeping everything behind closed doors 2) How can we know our elected officials are properly representing us if the results of their decisions are kept locked up? Without transparency, you don't have a dictatorship, you have an oligarchy. We also have a moral imperative for transparency. When the US grabs some poor shmuck out of Afghanistan and tortures him for two months, it does that with my cash and my implied consent. If the US is doing bad stuff, I as a citizen need to know about it so I can act against it. My failure to act, even if it's due to lack of knowledge, is implied consent and culpability. As a moral person, I require transparency. Transparency is also the strongest control against abuse and corruption. Light drives out the cockroaches, as they say. If you value a functional government, the strongest long-term solution is to let the unwashed masses be the ones to say if something is acceptable or not. Lack of transparency falls into that 'unlimited power' category. I do appreciate the fear of pedophiles and whatnot. It's not unwarranted. However, when it comes to sheer numbers of little girls killed or injured, the major perpetrator isn't a few pedophiles. It's governments. I definitely fall into the 'stop pedophiles' camp, no question. But that's behind the 'stop the mass-murdering power-hungry organization who owns all the guns' camp.

Thu, 2014-02-20 02:02

consumerdestroyer consumerdestroyer's picture

Yeah, government employees,

Yeah, government employees, when not monitored, can do some things with your tax money that you can bet would make people want to stop paying taxes forever.