Here is my latest piece for Commentator replying to Suzanne Moore in the Guardian who is fretting about what she sees as her loss of privacy and freedom at the hands of intrusive state eavesdroppers:
Suzanne Moore genially admits that she has never given much thought to how much of modern life works:
"Maybe because I am a simpleton and sometimes can only process what I can see – the actual sky, rather than invisible cyberspace in which data blips through fibre-optic cables. Thus the everyday internet remains opaque to all but geeks. And that's where I think I have got it wrong…"
She’s right here. She seemingly has failed to understand what Moore’s Law (as far as I know it’s no relation) means.
Back in 1965 the founder of Intel Gordon Moore noted that “the complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year” and that this phenomenon would continue if not accelerate. There are different ways of describing Moore’s ‘law’, but in essence it says that every two years or so we are doubling the computer power we get for each dollar spent.
The compound effects of this as the years tick by are indeed beyond ordinary imagination. It’s like the puzzle about the lily-pad that doubles in area every day. It takes 100 days to cover the pond completely. How many days does it take to cover half the pond? The answer is (of course) 99 days. On about the 90th day the lily-pad is so tiny as to be negligible, but it has a surging compound growth that appears spectacularly before our naked eye in the coming days.
Such is the juggernaut compounding momentum of computer power. Every second across the world sees gazillions of electronic transactions. E-information whizzes to and fro as we make almost free phone calls, buy groceries, check out the nearest sushi bar, use online flight check-in, and read Suzanne Moore in the Guardian. Every piece of data is recorded somewhere along the way – that’s how computers talk to each other. All this will be twice as big (and getting much cheaper) in two years’ time.
Suzanne Moore apparently thinks that state e-snooping is something relatively new:
"When did you surrender your freedom to communicate, something that was yours and yours alone, whether an email to a lover or a picture of your child? Ask yourself, do you feel safer now you know that you have no secrets?"
The answer to that first question is that we in the United Kingdom ‘surrendered’ these supposed freedoms many centuries ago, when the state asserted more or less monopoly control of sending messages by mail and later by telegraph. Right from the earliest days of mass communication the state has kept open its options to intercept our letters and telephone-calls for reasons of national security.
As for the second question, the fascinating and philosophically bewildering point now is not that the state can spy on us. It’s that we can spy on us.
Not only is data generated at a dizzying compounding rate. The cost of scouring data for patterns falls at a dizzying compounding rate. Not too long ago only the state could afford the machines to explore these unfathomable data oceans. Now as the costs tumble many other private organisations are doing so too.
And so on. The amazing thing about these powerful and undoubtedly smart Guardian commentators is that they often appear to know so little about how things actually work. Thus:
Now, the intimacies that are of no import to anyone but you have been subject to virtual extraordinary rendition.
Really? Not really.
When you press Send on your computer, the miracles of packet-switching break down your 'intimacies' and send them swarming at the speed of light along the world's electronic highways until they reassemble accurately on the recipient's screen. They have not been 'extraordinarily renditioned' anywhere, virtually or otherwise.
Yes, a US government computer might in theory have the capability to look at them, should you for some reason attract attention as a terrorist suspect (perhaps that is an occupational risk of writing for the Guardian?). But in practice you are no more likely to be subject to any special and meaningful e-scrutiny by the state when you are online than when you are walking to the shops: both sorts of activities leave different information trails that others can follow. That's life.
If you are really worried about all this, look at it all another way. What if governments really could not find out what criminals and crazy people were up to? Would you feel safer then? Welcome to the Dark Web.
