Countering the surveillance

The extent of the recently exposed world wide surveillance by the USA and the UK --- and probably by all the other nations as well --- is not very surprising to those who do have a certain technical knowledge. But it seemed to have surprised those who lack this knowledge. And to be honest, the extent to which we are all snooped on did surprise me somewhat.

OK, there we are now, we're watched for, we're terrorists until proven otherwise. What can we do about that?

Image of a Cataract by Rakesh Ahuja, MD, CC BY SA

Snooping

I'll first cover the necessities to be successful with snooping, then I'll go into what we could do to mitigate the snooping power of big multi-billion-dollar agencies like the NSA or the GCHQ.
Anyone and any agency who/which snoops relies on basic properties of the data and assumptions about the data. These basic properties and assumptions are:

• Technical assumptions
• the data can be retrieved
• the data can be read and its information can be extracted
• the signal in the data can be separated from noise
• all this can be done with the available capacities 
• Legal properties
• either there exists the legal permission to do the snooping
• or there is no entity which has the power to check and enforce the compliance 

Data retrieval

Data retrieval seems to be well under control by NSA and GCHQ and their befriended intelligence agencies. Data is gathered directly from the providers and from submarine cables as well as from satellites. This should cover most of the data especially if the most important hubs are controlled. 

Reading and extracting the information

The requirements to be able do this are, that data (or at least parts of it, such as metadata) are not encrypted or can be decrypted. Nowadays most of the data is not encrypted and the the few data which is encrypted might potentially be decrypted by NSA etc. (nobody knows if there exist non-published attack vectors against the usual encryption techniques and tools). We can assume here, that except in very special circumstances where persons want to explicitly keep information secret the intelligence agencies can read the data and gather the information.

Separation of signal from noise

What is the signal?

Of all the data which is collected it is the signal which is of major interest. And typically each piece of signal is hidden within vast amounts of noise. The first question to ask is "what is the signal?". Whilst in official statements it is always insisted on the signal being terrorists, there is very much reason to doubt this. Why that? Because the first thing in data analysis is to search for signal in data sets where it is likely to find signal in. But most of the data sets in which intelligence acencies are snooping is citizens' and companies interactions, countries which are "friends" and "allies" (I put these words in parenthesis, because friends and allies would normally not be spied on), politicians of trade "partners", the UN, the EU. These are all places where it is highly unlikely to find terrorists. That leads to the question of why are the mentioned data sources used? Well, governments and institutions like the UN and the EU are targeted most likely to commit industrial espionage, and to have a leading edge in negotiations of treaties like the currently negotiated ones (TPP etc.). The citizens are snooped on to discover people with dissenting opinions. If within all the data and analysis some terrorists are found then be it, but I'd reckon, that this happens mostly by accident and is not at all the top priority.

What is the difference between signal and noise?

Once it has been established what the signal is, the data analyst can go on searching for the differences between signal and noise. Let's for a moment assume, that signal is "dissenting voices". If all those people would use a site like dissentingvoices.com (I made this up) for chatting, emailing, videoconferencing etc., then it would be easy as long the site is publicly accessible. Just take all these people and snoop on them. Then crack down on these people and you've eliminated the opposition. But real life is not that easy. Services like facebook and google are used by all types of people. Within them some which might have opposing views. All together the separation of signal and noise will probably be based on what sites you've visited, what comments you've written, what sites you're looking at, what sites you are posting and what your friends are doing. If some of your friends are visiting football sites frequently, you might be into football as well. If friends send around a party invitation, you might go to this party as well. If some of your friends oppose fracking and pipelines, you might oppose fracking and pipelines as well. If you are, then you are signal. If you actually are not opposed fracking and pipelines, you are noise from the point of view of data analysis. You might be flagged as signal, but actually you are not. You are a false positive. Obviously there are true positives (opposition in our example), then there are true negatives (people you've identified as not dissenting and who are wholeheartly in favor of fracking and pipelines) but there are as well false positives (people who your data analysis would put into the "opposition" bin, but which are not there) and false negatives (people who oppose these things, but which your algorithm didn't catch). And often there's not just true and false, but there will be a lot of gray area. You might be against fracking, but only if it is near your house.

Signal efficiency and purity

If you'd like to catch all the signal you just say, that every communication is "signal" and you, for sure, get all the signal. But you're swamped with data which you --- even with big data centers --- cannot dig through and you certainly cannot follow up on all the data because there you are limited by manpower. I presume, that take all the data they can work on with their available capacity and try to get this data as pure as possible. Still, the NSA (and their befriended snooping services) will get false positives (communications flagged as suspicious, but which in reality isn't) and false negatives (communications which are flagged as OK, but which should be signal).

What can be done to counter snooping

Encryption

Encrypting all the signal (chat, email, web-surfing, voice, etc.) by anyone would an obvious response that worked. Encryption can be done on the service provider level and/or on a personal level.

    Encryption on the provider level

Encryption on the provider level can be organized to be reasonably convenient for the user, just as more secure authentication methods like two way authentic authentication are not at all difficult to use and are barely noticed once set up. Encryption on a provider level is for sure a good thing, but whilst it helps against petty criminals it has been shown that it doesn't help against government backed snooping. It has made their quest for snooping more difficult, but it certainly hasn't stopped it. The service providers are either bought, coerced or forced into cooperating with the intelligence agencies. With the encryption happening on the providers' side all the data will find its way to the snooping agencies.

    Encryption on the personal level

Encryption on a personal level is less convenient. A major hurdle for encryption is the adaption rate. As long as only the a couple of geeks use encryption it is practically useless except to keep very specific data secret. To any person without public key one cannot send encrypted emails. That's it with encryption to spoil surveillance. But *if* we all did use encryption and *if* the NSA could decrypt at least some encryption techniques (which is probable), their computers still would have to work more on each message. Working more means more computing time spent and the results would be obtained more slowly. This is like hitting the breaks of the NSA. Yes, they wouldn't be stopped completely, but they could not analyse so much data. 

Be noisy

The snooping analysis can be screwed up by adding noise to the data. This makes distinguishing signal from background harder. More data has to be sifted through and less of the valuable data is found.

Adding noise means transforming ordinary messages from ones which are analyzed thoroughly by the NSA into messages which have to be analyzed, thus "stealing" the NSAs computing time. An easy way is to just add a couple of keywords to each email, maybe just put it into the signature. Something like

"Dear NSA, This email is important! That's why I want you to read this carefully:
Exposure to so much knowledge over social media is infectious–one of life's great joys. I am so enriched."
This page helps you to pick nice phrases: http://nsa.motherboard.tv/

Adding noise means adding random connections and communications. Imagine for every email you'd send another email with a suspicious message (containing probable NSA keywords) to a random email-address around the globe. The NSA would have to dig through double the amount of emails and they would have to filter out all these messages. They couldn't just throw them out, because there would be all the keywords in there which they are searching for. They would have to add and analyze tons of new connections between people which do not have any real connection.

It would even better to add non-random noise. If all the messages would have senders and receivers which would follow a bigger pattern (i.e. look like a network of people exchanging suspicious messages) it would be even more difficult for the NSA to filter that out and not take it for the real thing.

Of course nobody will do the hassle and send random emails to random people. But imagine if there were a computer virus which did that. Instead of sending spam advertising for crappy products the virus would send suspicious emails from imaginary people to imaginary people.

No email left behind

My emails are important. Period. My fear is, that the importance of my emails (e.g. "Hey Tom, how about cinema tonight?") is underrated by the NSA and thus this email is thrown out instantly and never gets to see a decent data analyst. I think this is deeply unfair. Maybe the importance could be enhanced (further to adding keywords) by sending the email directly (BCC or CC) to the indendet recipients at the NSA or the politicians which are in favor of snooping. I mean, if they wouldn't want to read my emails, they would oppose total surveillance. Hence, they want to read the emails and that's they should read my emails. The nice side effect of this is, that if I were a bad person (translation: identified target of the NSA because of some reason) I'd add a connection to the politician or NSA worker. If the NSA goes two to three layers of separation deep, they would find this person now already in the first layer. Great! 

Politicians probably get a lot of email and therefore the politicians are probably soon taken out of the equation. The same is true for the NSA boss. But NSA employees (and GCHQ employees or those of any other of the implicated snooping agencies) would add a nice angle into the agency itself. And it would be very justified, because my emails should be seen by a human data analyst. It's disrespectful if my emails are seen by software alone. 

"Encrypt" the data for computers, not for people

The NSA can filter emails and messages if they are easily readable by a computer. If there were a plugin for the email program which would transform the text you just wrote into a jpeg-image with a nice flower background, your recipient still could read the email. But the NSA could not. A single analyst could, and they could employ OCR programs to read the text, but they can't do that for all the emails because it would cost them too much computing time. The drawback would be, that you couldn't search in your emails for text and your email program couldn't do intelligent filtering by the message. That makes emails less convenient. But on the other hand, your less snooped on.

Use surveillance against politicians

What if all the surveillance capacity would be used to track politicians and discover corrupt behavior. If we'd track where the 1000 most important politicians of a country, whom they are talking to, what they are talking, what emails they are writing, what websites they are watching, whom they are talking by telephone, etc. Well then, we could ensure that none of their behavior is related to corruption. It is certainly easier and cheaper to watch the steps of politicians than to watch the steps of all the people of the world. And I presume, that it would be much more efficient in order to maintain freedom of the people and democracy. We could even include the 1000 most wealthy persons of a country into the mandatory surveillance list.

If such laws would be enacted, imagine how fast politicians would work on crippling the snooping capability of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. I predict that within four weeks, there would be laws and an efficient oversight entity which would limit the NSAs reach and data retention.

You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think.



Countering the surveillance by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Poached

Poaching is a major threat to wild animals. Drones would be a means to hunt down poachers and prevent them from killing animals from endangered species to harvest their horn, skin or other body parts. 

CC BY-ND 2.0, by Laurens from Crazy Creatures, flickr

He supported his rifle on a branch of the tree which had provided him with shadow for the last hours. His off-roader was parked just a few steps away beside him. He looked through the telescope and found the Rhino. He adjusted the rifle on his shoulder and put the animal into the cross-hair. He aimed for the shoulder blades and then a bit left towards the neck. 

One clean shot and he'll gonna make a little fortune. A good income. It was a great month so far. He had already gotten another Rhino ten days earlier. He'd cut the horn and he'd left all the rest to rot in the hot sun. It was useless to him. He wouldn't get any money from that. He sold the horn for a good price to a retailer who searched for international customers, mostly chinese TCM "doctors" or some rich guy who believed in TCM. Maybe he'd cut some skin off the animal which would be sold in small pieces as souvenirs to whomever had enough money left and got thrilled when seeing a piece of dead, nearly extinct animal. He'd heard, that the horn ---if crushed--- could make a better price than even gold. 

It would really be a great month. He felt the burst of excitation that always rose up shortly before the shot. Then there was a whirring sound. Panic! It seemed that it wouldn't be such a good month after all. There was only one chance left, a good shot, a master's shot. He turned around to where from he had perceived the whir. There he saw it, the drone was approaching. He lifted his rifle, shot - and missed. Then there was a little burst of fire below the drone. The small rocket left a trace of smoke. This was the last thing he perceived. He was dead before he could consciously feel the explosion. The car and the tree lit up as well. The explosion scared all the animals in the area and caused them to run fast. The rhino ran as well. 

Poaching the poachers

Violence is usually not an educated answer, but sadly sometimes it is the only answer which leads to viable results. Year after year species are brought close to extinction, some are extinct entirely. Reduction of zones on which animals like lions, tigers, elephants, rhinos many other species can roam, hunt, eat, mate without the interference of humans is an important contribution to the reductions in population sizes of these animals. The most senseless thing which is done and which brings the remaining small populations over the edge into extinction is poaching.

The best solution would be to go for those people who are the final buyers of the animal products coming from poaching and the retailers and thus eradicate the market. But those people are either rich, or in countries where the protection of animals is not on the top of the priorities. And there are many potential buyers. Hence, even if we could get a bunch of them, there would be still so many left who'd buy the horn, testicles, etc. The other place where poaching could be intercepted is at the place of origin of the animals. The problem there is the immense area which has to be monitored. The notorious lack of money and means for the protection of animals is countered by the large amount of money which can be gained by poaching these animals.

 A larger area has to be monitored, and it has to be done cheaper. That's where drones come into play. Compared to people, drones can be deployed much easier, they can watch large areas, they don't need pilots seated on the plane. Drones can be equipped with powerful weapons which are largely sufficient to counter the poacher's arms and they can stay a long time in the air. Given that about one third of all US military planes are already unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), using some of them for going after poachers would not decrease the usual military use significantly. The US could therefore help out the affected countries of there would be the political will. I urge to create the political will to take action!

You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think.



Poaching by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Weakness

Weak !
(CC BY-SA 3.0 by PatriciaR , referenced here)

Nobody wants to be the weakling. Even less so the people in powerful positions. They feel comfortable with their perception that they can move initiatives, laws, policies and - of course - block them.

Powerful Positions of Big Companies

Positions hold by big multinational corporations are powerful positions, because those companies, and in some cases rich individuals, have the money to back these positions up with PR, limitless litigation, buying politicians, buying laws and whatever further unlawful extensions of their company toolbox.

These positions are most often oriented solely on the short term profits of the company and of their leaders. Hence if those positions align with human rights, sustainability, protection of biodiversity, climate change, etc. it is only because of lucky coincidence.

Interaction with Politicians

More often these big players want to preserve their unsustainable business model and trample over people and nature to maintain their way. Politicians who help to implement and preserve these positions and put them into law get rewarded with money from the companies, either to be used for their personal well being or to cement their power position in the political landscape.

Weak

These politicians will now mirror the wish list of the company which pays for them in the political arena. Being backed up by large amounts of money and a machinery which can crush everyone who dares to step in their way those politicians feel powerful. What they don't realize is, that they are actually quite weak. They are just a tiny  gear. They are used. They only walk the way of the least resistance. 

Tell them!

Maybe we should tell them more clearly. They are weaklings. The people admired in history are not those who went the easy way, but those who went the hard way. The people admired in history are not those who were focused on increasing their personal profit and personal wealth, but those who risked their personal interests to achieve freedom for the people who achieved the well being of the people and  who achieved a better protection of the nature. These people (sometimes politicians) were strong. 

The others are weaklings. They flow with the stream, Let's tell them that!

You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think.


Weakness by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Good taxes

(public domain)

Working for the society

People in some jobs do good and important things for society. And people in other jobs clearly don't. Sounds pretty obvious.

I'd like to give some examples of jobs of which I think, that they are good good for society: nurse, teacher, medic, sewerman, fireman, ...

As discussed already in a recent blog post, the amount of money people earn mostly depends on their proximity to the source. The source being the flow of money. People who work in the financial industry can deviate a lot of money into their own pockets, and because they can, they do. Nurses on the other hand---to name a specific example---are far away from the source and thus are not able to deviate money into their pockets. Hence, they have to live of the leftovers trickling down.

I consider this as a problem for society. But there are ways out.

Ways out

IMO, there are basically two solutions to this problem:

1. Regulate the wages of the people
2. Regulate the taxes people have to pay

Regulating the wages directly would deprive the employers of the possibility to provide reward those who do good work. Since I think, that rewarding good work is a necessary ingredient to get good work done, I therefor don't like the this option.

The second option is the regulation of taxes. This is already somehow implemented in progressive tax systems where the tax rate rises progressivly with the income. Whilst this provides a redistribution of some of the wealth in the society, it treats the nurse equal to the stock market broker. The broker just earns so much more, that even with a progressive taxation he still goes home with so much more.

What income taxes should depend on

My proposal is, that taxes should not only depend on the income, but as well on the type of job which is done and its value for the society. I imagine different tax rates depending on both, on the income and on the type of job. Maybe it should be even depend on the work the company does as well.

It is of course difficult to set for each type of work the value the society gains, and probably nobody wants to give that power to a small group of politicians. Especially as today's politians don't seem to be too resistant to lobbying or even being bought completely.

But there is one entity in each nation which could have the power. It's the people. I imagine one default progressive tax by for all jobs. But all citizens can then up- and down-vote for the taxes for a specific type of job in a specific salary band. The votes of all the people and those who didn't vote is then taken. The tax for a bankster earning 10 Million Euros a year could then be set to maybe 99% by the people, if they got the feeling, that banksters don't do any good for the society. On the other hand, the fireman who saves lifes or the staff of a retirement home, who earns much less might be awarded with only 10% taxes, or maybe even 0%, who knows what people think is a fair value.

I think, this could be a really fair system. It would provide an incentive for people to work in jobs where they would help the society instead of in jobs which are just there to rip off a large share of money from the financial stream for their own profit. We are the society after all, that's why we should aim for improving our all wellbeing, ... not only mine or yours or his.

Technicalities

Of course, there are some technicalities to be solved, such as which groups of jobs are there and which job belongs to which of the groups. There is as well the issue, that some bankster might try to redefine his job description from "managing a large equity fund and firing people at will" to "cooks food for the poor". Certainly this is not desired and has to be avoided.

Ideally voting would be over the internet, but it has to be ensured, that as well computer illiterate persons can have their say. How should the calculation being done? In what time-spans the tax rate should be held constant after a change; a week, a month, a year, not at all? Hence, there are technicalities, but hey, technicalities have to be solved each and every day. I don't see any reason why such a system couldn't be implemented.

(CC BY-SA)

(public domain)

You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think.


Good taxes by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Demand ! the responsibility

Money (Source: Wikipedia, public domain)

What defines how much people earn?

Why do some people earn the worth of a luxury yacht per month,
whilst others barely can buy enough food for their family?



Let's first point out some things which are *not* the reasons for earning a lot:

• working hard
• working a lot
• doing stuff which is valuable for the society

Of course, working hard and working a lot might be a necessary ingredient for some career paths where large paychecks can be picked up, but it certainly is not a garantee. There are many people which do work hard and a lot, but earn too little to live and too much to die. If doing stuff which is valuable for the society would make you earn more, nurses, teachers, social workers, etc. would earn loads of money. But they don't.

A good education backed up with a university degree will probably increase your income compared to people doing similar things as you but who don't have that degrees. Education is a factor, probably an important one to decide in which salary band you will move around. But education is not the dominating factor which determines if you are going to earn well or if you are really earning a lot.

The dominating factors

Be close to the source

What seems to be the dominating factor on income is the closeness to the source. And the source is the stream of money. People in financial "industry"---as if this kind of work had ever deserved the denomination industry---earn on average much much more than the rest of the population. It's because they are close to the stream of money and have the possibility to deviate a fraction of this stream into their pockets. But it is not just like "hey, they are doing a good job and that's why they get their big bonuses". As it has been again demonstrated in the recent crisis, when the big financial companies win, they win, and they pay the big bonuses. When they loose, they convince the politicians to pay them their losses with tax payers money. And since they were so efficient in getting the tax payers money, the bonuses are as high as ever. The mantra of investment banks etc. could be something like: "If we win, we win big and you get nothing. If we loose, you loose big because you pay our losses such that we win again". Either way, they win and you (hello fellow tax payer) and I, we loose. If these companies would have held responsible for their losses, maybe they would be a little bit more careful the next time. But since everything went so smooth for them, they will go along as they came along so far. What could have done in the mortgage crisis for instance: Instead of rescuing the banks and handing them over unlimited amounts of money, one could have used the same amount of money or even less to rescue the people with the mortgages. But of course, the mortgage payers---although many---don't have their well payed lobby groups ready to influence the decision making in politics.


Be a manager

Then there is a further important factor for earning more than others which is, having a management position. The higher up in the company's hierarchy the more money the manager gets. Finally your pockets will be filled with even more money if the company is really large (we're talking here about several thousand employees). Bosses of these companies really get paid a lot. One could suspect, that they are overpaid. Don't get me wrong. The positions of the leaders are important ones. A company without leaders would resemble more a couple of chicken in their hen house. I agree as well, that a leader should be payed better given her/his responsibilities. But there remains the obvious question: are they really able to add so much value to the company with their work, that they would earn these many million dollars per year?

It's sometimes argued, that by paying these bosses a lot one gives credit to their responsibilities. But at the end what we can observe, when it comes to responding to these responsibilities---when a boss had failed dramatically---he (it's usually a male) gets the golden parachute easing up his life. And most of the time---if he likes to---he gets soon the chance to drive another company into the abyss. And if this is not enough, another one will follow. The heavy weighing responsibility will finally be carried by the fellow workers with the small pay. In the best case their wages get decreased, but more often the workers are simply just laid off.

Behave well

To have companies which behave well , we have to make the leaders responsible for their decisions, not only the companies as a whole (e.g. pharmacy trials on Nigerian children). If an oil company destroys a region in the Niger Delta (just to provide a random example) just to get out the crude oil, or if an oil company spills large quantities of oil to the Gulf of Mexico (just another random example), who is held accountable for that? Most of the time it is no one. Maybe sometimes the company is held responsible. They then have to pay an amount of money which is just a fraction of their quarterly profit and a fraction of the profits they gained from exploiting (and destroying) this region. What happens to the executives who are responsible for the mess? They go on. Nothing happens to them.

If we want to see responsible behavior from companies, we have to hold the people in the company responsible for their decisions and actions---foremost the bosses. It's them who have the responsibility and the power to decide how the company should handle the issues and who have the wages which correspond to this responsibility. They have to be sued personally for their decisions.


Make them respond them to their responsibilities!

Once this is done reliably, the CEOs of the big multinationals will think more carefully before harming environment or people. Companies which don't rely upon destroying nature or exploiting people are in disadvantage. Once the other options are not any longer available, the playfield is leveled for the good of the society.

We ! have to demand the responsibility , because no one else will do it for us



You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think.


Demand ! the responsibility by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Protecting the earth's natural resources

CC-BY_SA 3.0, by Makemake at de.wikipedia

 

The price defines the worth - You may not like it, but it is a fact.

I'm not completely happy with the political and economical system of the world. Of course, there is not one system, there are many. But there is a dominating common denominator which is: money buys you influence, and influence in turn provides you with money.

And those who do have money (the big one) and influence (the big one) do everything to keep it that way. Unfortunately, one way to earn money is by exploiting nature at all cost. Namely at the cost of nature itself. This can be seen most prominently in the oil industry where the easy oil fields are already harvested. The higher cost in getting the oil makes oil more expensive which in turn is taken as an opportunity to raise the margins and thus the profits. Those higher profits make the exploitation of sites economically profitable which some years ago would just have been silly to exploit. Examples for these include extracting bitumen from tar sands in Alaska or drilling for oil at thousands of meters below the ocean surface close to the Brazilian coast line. Whilst drilling deep below in the sea there is a large risk of producing a hardly controllable leak which then pollutes all the sensible ecosystems in deep sea and at the coast close by excavating loads of tar sand just leaves by default already a big mess. Mind, that for the extraction of 2.9 liters of refined oil from tar sands one liter of oil energy equivalent has to be used. For easier exploitable oil fields in the past these ratio has been 25. Ten years ago you still could get 15. And now compare that to the lousy 2.9. Let's call it 3. This is just ridiculous. Another alternative for oil industry is to go where still some easy accessible oil is left, for instance in the Niger delta. There, the people in power give a damn if nature is destroyed as long as some millions are paid to their bank accounts.

And what's the cost? It's destruction of nature.

What can be done to preserve the important ecosystems all over the world? 

One could argue, that the whole political and economical system has to be changed. But is that a realistic approach? I'd say no. Changing the whole system is not easy to achieve. And if the whole system is changed history shows, that this is almost never without a boatload of violence. An often the outcome is not better than the state before the revolutionary events.And a profound change takes a lot of time.
Hence, instead of trying to go for the one big change, I'd propose to chuck down the way from now to the objective in as many small chunks as possible and do them one by one. This has the advantages, that smaller steps are easily executed and the resistance against each one of them is easier to overcome than the resistance against the one big silver bullet leap. And a further advantage is, that we might not know the best steps right away, but we will know more about which step to take right along the path.

What are the smallest steps to be taken to get a maximum of preservation of nature?

(small meaning: no immediate big system changers)

In the introduction I wrote, that the price defines the worth of something, and later I wrote, that I'd like to go for the smallest steps with the largest impacts first. The smallest steps are steps which stay within the economical and political system.

This step could be: Attach a price to natural resources.

So far, harming nature is in most cases essentially free. Of course, there are some regulations in place, but if the big Oil company comes by and wants to exploit oil somewhere, all the regulations are soon forgotten. The politicians who ditch the regulations are then getting paid the propaganda for the next election. A real win win situation, if you don't consider the people, if you don't consider *us* people.

Sparing for the moment the question of how a true value can be defined for a natural resource we can think of what would be triggered if exploiting nature would not be free and how it could be enforced. When there is a value associated to the resource and there is a price derived from the value, who should pay it? I think it's twofold: All countries should pay for the preservation of all natural resources. While all pay, more money goes to the countries with more and/or more important resources. Ideally preserving nature should provide the country with more money than if nature is destroyed as a byproduct of exploitation.

Of course, paying the country does not necessarily mean, that there is the exploitation stopped or reduced. The corrupt ruler/politician in that region still will make his private income-balance and maybe find, that the several million Dollars on his Swiss bank account stemming from the oil company is more for himself, than the many more million Dollars on the countries accounts (especially if the usage of the money for preserving nature is controlled transparently).

Hence, there has to be another contributor to the payments apart from countries (=tax payers). It's the oil companies and all the other companies who want to exploit nature. They should have to pay for each tree they cut and for each square meter of soil they dig out, contaminate, drive over or build something on. At the end it is the earth of all the people living on it. If someone would like to dig a hole in your garden, you'd probably make him pay. Why should it be different somewhere else on earth.

Making companies pay for exploiting nature adds actually no additional cost if the whole system is regarded. Because the cost for repairing nature afterwards (if it can be done) is there either way. Now, this cost is just exclusively carried by Mrs. and Mr. tax payer.

Issues

If it would be all that easy it might have been done so already. Questions which have to be tackled are:

• How can the value of a certain region be defined?
• How can the payments be agreed on world wide?
• How can the payments be enforced world wide?
• How can the preservation of nature be controlled and enforced in all the regions?

But hey, there are always issues around. Independently of what you are doing, you have to overcome some problems. These issues can be overcome as well.

What is the goal of all this?

I believe, that there are alternatives to our current dependency of fossil fuels. While these alternatives (solar energy, wind energy, biofuel [to a limited extend], etc.) nature would be preserved much better by still enabling a life style for the people which is similar to today's life style (in the western world). I even believe, that they are more convenient and cheaper for us on the long run. They are just not in place yet, because moving away from an established system (oil, coal, gas) needs always an initial additional force. And attributing the costs of environmental damage caused by the extraction and the use of fossil fuels to them would balance the cost. This would then favor the change. 

The change from exploiting nature brutally to exploiting nature sustainably will happen. There is frankly no way around this. The faster we do the transition, the better for earth and humanity.



You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think.


Protecting the earth's natural resources by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Total Surveillance for the Win!

Total surveillance! But for whom?

CC-BY-2.0 by Steve Jurvetson

People connect!

People connect! : This was always the case, but in the last decade or two the nature of the connections changed. In the pre-internet times, people could connect with their neighbors, with their fellow workers and when they traveled. All these connections were prone to break down when the distance grew larger again (i.e. when the traveler went home again). Some few pen-pals wrote large letters to give the "friend" on the other side of the world a status update, but let's face it: Only a handful of people did such things. 

Now, in the era of the internet, email, friendster, yahoo, smart phones, google, myspace, facebook, etc. people connect differently. They connect more. Not each of the connection is served with multi-page-letters every two weeks, but many people regularly get small information pieces about the others (if they mean to share them). Even if there is someone who does not write any status updates s/he will still be connected at least somehow.

Before the internet, people were like single bees. With the internet, people became to know their hive. New pattern of group (hive) behavior emerged from this. New power was given by the people to the people. You can see this in action when a poor soul accidentally invites the whole FB world for a birthday-party and---not the whole world, but still---30,000 FB-"friends" join the party, leaving the area devastated. That's for the bad, but there is also this big game changing power. Just by being connected, peoples forced their governments/regimes to leave office. Sometimes more violently, sometimes less. A huge power, isn't it?

Huge power!

And huge power asks for huge control. Not necessarily true though, but there are some big stakes "at risk". Namely those of the few persons who are in charge. While in times of pens and paper (i.e. pre-internet and pre-email and pre-FB) a politician could make secret deals with his friends and be fairly sure to keep it in-transparent enough to not get sued, it became less easy nowadays. The incriminating pile of paper could easily be stowed away in some closet or even be destroyed. The traces in the web though are not as easily being stored in a safe locker. Especially for politicians who did not grow up with all the new technology and don't grasp all the ways the information flows.
Only about maybe a decade and a half ago it was a lot of work to gather many people together. You had to phone them, write them or physically talk to them. Now you can write an email or a facebook message to hundreds or even thousands of people in literally five seconds. You can organize crowds within minutes.

This is scary to all those who---some years ago---were the only ones who had the power to make big gatherings happen. Today creating big events got more democratized. This does not mean, that those from the old school are now unable to create a big event with many people attending. No, It just means, they got serious competition. And if you are trying to preserve your power the democratized gatherings might be what you don't need---just look at the recent events in Arabia.

The temptation to impose all kinds of controls on all of these channels of information flow is big: on facebook messages, on SMS, on emails, on your internet connections, on the web sites you visit. Few politicians would have dared to put security personnel in place who search everyone entering a bus or an underground just because s/he could maybe carry around some illicit stuff. For the internet exactly this---searching everyone---seems to be a viable and justified approach for some politicians. It is NOT!

The big damage

The big damage is not done by the people. I argue, that the big damage is done by corruption in the political cast. Politicians' decisions may move millions or even billions of Euros from the tax payer to someone. One politician at the right position can make more damage to the country than 100 taxpayers will earn in their lifetime. And you bet that the decisions of politicians are not always to the benefit of the people, but often to the benefit of their family, their friends or people within the sphere of the party. Politicians are those who write laws and pass laws. Wealthy companies and individuals have the means to pay a lobbyist to get a certain law pushed, or even pay politicians directly to obtain certain voting behavior in the parliament. This produces laws which don't serve the people, but rather harm them.

Total surveillance

Here comes the total surveillance into play. Whilst politicians would like to watch each of the citizens closely for any wrongdoing or even for completely legal things which might be against the politicians personal interests, there is  a use case where surveillance would come in handy. It is the surveillance of the politicians themselves.

I'd like, that every politician (representative in the parliament and above) is obliged to:

• use only email addresses which are controlled and saved for potential prosecution.
• use only tapped phones where all calls are recorded and saved for potential prosecution.
• always suse a GPS locator to get a complete trace of his movements
• record all events and whom they are talking to.
• possibly record everything they say

Of course, these data should be kept secret by default. But in case of suspicion of corruption the files could be opened up and checked for evidence.

This targeted surveillance would reduce drastically corruption by politicians and provide citizens with laws which fit better to their needs.


The phrase which politicians usually use to justify ever stronger surveillance measures is: "If you don't have anything to hide, there should not be any problem with the imposed measures".
This sentence can be used now to justify the complete control over politicians. I think we can safely assume, that they don't have anything to hide (/irony), hence they shouldn't be worried about such drastic measures. It would be put in place just to find the few black sheep.

You are very welcome to leave your comments! Let me know what you think. 



Total surveillance for the win! by Peter Speckmayer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.