I know this won't be the first time you've heard it, but
on this day, of all days, we are entitled to remind
ourselves, with a certain amount of mutual back slapping,
that we are living in the first period in recorded history
in which there has been no verifiable armed conflict
between nation states anywhere on planet Earth, for more
than a decade. In some quarters there are even nervous
whispers that it might, at last, be safe to come out from
under the bed. John Lennon's dream may have come true. War
- as "diplomacy by other means" - may finally be consigned
to human history.
It is easily the most far-reaching and widely accepted
benefit of the digital telepathy we now take for granted
so perhaps it's worth briefly reviewing the history of how
we got where we are today.
Step 1 - The Smart-Phone
Scholars argue that the demand-driver for DT were the
antique smart-phones we see proudly displayed in p-resin
as antiques in many modern homes today. They were the
first platform which made ubiquitous conversation
possible. The ease with which they integrated into the
emerging online infrastructure of social networking and
video sharing made it trivial, in turn, for the ubiquitous
conversation to become the universal conversation, where
we could all, for the first time in our history, begin to
share in real-time, events happening to ordinary citizens
around the world. The appetite for this connectivity had
never been anticipated, not even by the world's most
imaginative science fiction writers. Smart-phones and the
early web not only generated that appetite but, given the
limits of early 21st Century technology, made a pretty
good stab at satisfying it. But what those prototypes
really did was to illustrate the desire for something much
more complete.
Historically we recognise that the transition from a
global economy based on profit, to one based on utility
was well under way by the early 21st century. As Sarah
Klein puts it in her award-winning "From Money to Merit":
"While we can clearly see that commercial organisations
continued to dominate innovation in (capital-intensive)
hardware, the clear majority of important innovations in
software, even before the inception of the Web, came
from the Open Source movement, which made most of their
product available at no cost to the consumer. The most
important, of course, being the effective cryptography,
on which modern society depends" (GooLit, 2053)
Credit must be given, however grudgingly, to the late
capitalist compulsion to pursue profits, if necessary even
by generating new markets - with their knack for "creating
the solution to no known problem". Selfish though such
motivation usually was, there can be no denying the effect
it had on technological innovation. Although we now
recognise software to be the more important component of
our socio-economic infrastructure, that software needed
the hardware to run on. Like it or not, the greedy
capitalists did far more than socially focussed
collectivists to make that happen. Without the
combination, however, today's prosperous, healthy,
peaceful and money-free society simply wouldn't have been
possible. So despite their overall brutality, we have a
lot to thank the Capitalists for. They got things done.
And when their time was over, unlike the Authoritarians
who depended on their support, they had the good grace to
sink relatively peaceably back into society with no hard
feelings between us.
Some argue that the vital step towards DT was the first
smart-phone implant (remember the "Mind-Phone"? - you
won't find many of those hanging on living room walls!)
and there is no denying that it had enormous consequences.
On the road to DT, it was, for a start, the first time you
could make contact with someone just by thinking their
tag. But it was the effect it had on social control which
scores much higher in my analysis.
Step 2 - Citizen Surveillance v Privacy
To begin with, even though it was now simpler than ever to
communicate, privately or publicly, with any other
similarly connected individual, that first generation of
mind-phone users were no more likely to communicate with
their fellow early adopters, than they had been as
smart-phone users. What had much more dramatic impact was
the routine and effortless ability to record, privately
and securely, anything and everything they did or
witnessed. Being able just to think "store that" rather
than dig a phone out of a pocket, unlock it and press a
few buttons, made recording so easy that it became the
default. Combined with pre-capture and growing memory
capacity, it became easier to record virtually every
waking moment - and perhaps discard the mundane or
unwanted - than try to anticipate what might be worth
recording and run the risk of missing it. With trusted
time-stamps and hash-indexing against secure auditing
databases it became trivial to retrieve forensic quality
evidence of any arbitrary event from your own past with
verifiable accuracy - provided only that you'd bothered to
store it. And it being so effortless, why wouldn't you?
Initially no one perceived its significance. It merely
expanded the opportunities for egocentric adolescents to
make fools or heroes of themselves and publicise their
antics on the early attempts at digital sharing (remember
"Facebook" and "YouTube"? Those were the days!) Scandalous
headlines arose fairly quickly, when one or two (thousand)
"minders" abused the technology to record and then
playback intimate sexual encounters or other sensitive
private moments without the informed consent of the other
parties. That kind of abuse encouraged the widespread
adoption of privacy locks, so that any such recording
could only be shared if it was unlocked with keys
belonging to all parties present at the original
recording. Indeed, until the invention of the mindlock,
locked data couldn't even be replayed internally by the
record holder unless the relevant parties pooled their
keys.
Then came the question of how to deal with either tragic
or sinister situations. Democratic random key distribution
and trusted key escrow systems took care of those issues.
In the tragic scenario, the individual's own nominated
trusted key holders could recreate the missing keys if
death or serious incapacity was medically certified and at
least 75% of them agreed that key assembly was necessary
and appropriate. In the sinister scenario, like suspected
rape or murder, where a suspect perpetrator chose to
with-hold their keys and their trusted key-holders also
refused to co-operate, the keys were constructed so that
any 750, out of a thousand randomly selected citizens
could - if persuaded that there was a strong enough case -
reassemble the missing keys from their own copies of the
distributed key store. Today, of course, we require 900,
but, for its day, that degree of democratic control was
almost revolutionary.
On its own, though, it was not enough to produce the
legal and social revolution which knocked away a major
pillar of the Authoritarianism that still ruled humankind
in the 3rd decade of this century.
Step 3 - The Legal Victories
The first few successful prosecutions of corrupt or
bullying police officers and politicians - made possible
by evidence gathered beyond their control and beyond
reasonable dispute - didn't have as much impact as you
might have expected. Again, it seemed like only a small
step from the same kind of exposures produced by the
already widespread digital sharing that had kicked off
"citizen journalism" at the tail-end of the previous
century. But as the numbers of such incidents began to
grow in the typical "successful market" exponential
manner, the consciousness began to rise - simultaneously
within the citizenry and the authoritarians - that,
largely due to the massively improved verifiability of the
stored content, it was becoming increasingly difficult for
the bullies to hold sway.
What the authorities hadn't anticipated was that the same
cryptographic protections which were essential to
protecting individuals from illicit access to their
thoughts (which were, of course, accessible by the
implants) would prove so valuable in validating any claims
made by those individuals in respect of evidence gathered
in the routine recording of their daily lives. The crypto
protocols didn't just protect, they forensically validated
every transaction and recording that they protected. Their
audit trail was bullet proof and beyond reasonable
challenge.
By the time some of the more extreme authoritarians woke
up to the threat and tried to outlaw the technology in a
belated attempt to hold back the tide, it was already
becoming almost impossible to detect that an individual
even had an implant; particularly after the introduction
of the first generation of biological implants genetically
configured to operate within the brainstem. And it became
increasingly implausible, in the light of all the obvious
crime it was detecting - and thus deterring - to argue
that citizens shouldn't avail themselves of this growing
benefit. Many authorities pointlessly tried shielding
their own contacts with the citizens, which only affected
the ability to stream data in real-time - which nobody
with their head screwed on ever attempted because it
immediately made the implant eminently detectable. It had
no impact, however, on our ability to record, with trusted
timestamps and hash-chains, at either end of a shielded
session, and thus to verify our account of the session, to
the rest of the world on demand.
If they knew you had an implant, the more corrupt
authorities even tried to use the privacy locks to their
own advantage. In the guise of offering the victim their
own trusted record, they insisted that all mutual sessions
be recorded but privacy locked. If the victim subsequently
complained, the authority would routinely try to hide
behind its own absolute right to privacy. They would,
occasionally, even attempt denial that any contact had
taken place. It took them a while to understand that
although they do not reveal content, time-stamped and
shared privacy locks can easily be used to prove that
contact had taken place between the sharers, and the
routine authoritarian refusal to unlock audit trails
covering disputed events made it increasingly obvious they
were lying or abusing their authority. Of course, once the
victim was arrested and able to prove the privacy lock
times and locations, such authorities then found
themselves bound by the rules of disclosure and though
they often managed to persuade a judge that executive
privilege was justified, they also often failed. And the
more often they failed, the more likely it became that
some other judge or jury would see through their naive
pretences. Eventually it became abnormal for their pleas
to succeed.
It was very entertaining to witness the Authoritarians'
own long time mantra coming back to bite them: "If
you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" had
been their excuse for the authoritarian surveillance they
had increasingly imposed, without consent, on a pliant
society. How could they possibly argue against our
recording what went on when they dealt with us? And how
could they defend not revealing the content of those
recordings?
Step 4 - The State Found Guilty of Murder
But what really mobilised the masses was when it became
widely understood that citizens with implants could not
just win any "your word against mine" argument over
trivial disputes with friends, colleagues and family, but
could fairly easily prove themselves innocent against even
the most the malicious charges of a corrupt authority,
however much tax-funded effort they put in to framing
their victim.
The infamous case of Wilson v the United States is the
pivotal case every student learns about and which exposed
the levels of corruption endemic in the so-called Justice
system. The police, under the direct instructions of a
political aide (Adrian White) to the then Vice President
(Joanne Schwarzewild), and with the explicit knowledge of
the Attorney General (Carlos Martinez), were shown
conclusively to have planted evidence and commissioned
witness testimony with the corrupt and direct intent to
convict an innocent student - David Wilson - in order to
conceal the part played by the FBI in the assassination of
the wife (Carole) of a Republican Senator (Alan Liebowitz)
who had inconveniently caught said Senator cheating on her
in an election year. Unfortunate timing on both sides.
Not only was the student able to prove his own alibi by
giving a comprehensive and indisputable record of his
movements and location during a critical 14 hour period,
but, following his arrest, he endured the routine "legal"
blackmail session known as "plea bargaining". They didn't
know he was implanted and he captured virtual admissions
by the police interrogators and prosecutors that he was
being set up as a Patsy, that he had "no chance of beating
the State machine that you're up against and your own best
interests would be served by admitting guilt even though
we all know you didn't do it".
The political clincher was the testimony provided by a
White House secretary, Marion Downey, present during a
conversation in which the Vice President casually made it
clear to the Chief of Staff (Sydney Walden) that the
suitable target had been found. The VP informed the Chief
of Staff that David Wilson regularly earned a bit of extra
cash tending the extensive gardens of the Senator's New
England Mansion on Saturday mornings. He could be put in
the right place at the right time.
Downey didn't take much notice at the time because she
misunderstood it as a trivial domestic arrangement for the
Senator's gardening requirements. It was only when the
Senator's murdered wife popped up on all the News feeds a
couple of weeks later, followed by a startled looking
David Wilson being arrested for the murder that she
realised she was in possession of incriminating evidence.
And for reasons which have been replayed since in a dozen
dramatisations of the story, she didn't much like the VP
at the time.
Downey swore testimony and offered to reveal her data to
the court but both the Vice President and Chief of Staff
pleaded the Fifth and refused to share their
privacy-locking keys, citing grounds of "National
Security" and "Executive Privilege"; which, for the first
time, the entire planet understood to be an inescapable
admission of guilt.
The judge (Justice Steven Warren) - clearly part of the
conspiracy - tried to rule her testimony invalid and even
tried to block the expert testimony of the mathematicians
and forensic software consultants who could explain how
and why Wilson's alibi was incontrovertible. Famously the
Jury went on strike - together with elements of the local
police - who had caught the mood of the masses and refused
to make any arrests. The media storm and widespread public
protests eventually forced the Government to concede a
retrial under the famously incorruptible Justice Mary
Elizabeth Sterning.
The technical evidence demonstrated to the court how
Wilson's evidence could not have been spoofed.
The assassin hired by the FBI had killed the Senator's
wife 15 minutes before Wilson was due to report for duty
on Saturday morning, expecting him to show up just before
the Police snatch squad sent to arrest him with the
smoking gun. But he had consumed rather too much alcohol
at a Frat party the previous evening and didn't make it to
the Mansion. His ability to prove his movements sunk the
prosecution case and under the judge's direction, the jury
gladly, and unanimously, found him not guilty and made
their now famous declaration finding "Agents and Agencies
of the Government guilty of murder in the first degree,
conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury to
a degree amounting to Treason against the people of the
United States".
As well as the huge and inevitable political storm this
provoked, overnight the American "successful prosecution"
rate, always considered as infeasibly high, plummeted as
it quickly became clear that a significant percentage of
prosecutions were without verifiable foundation and
resulted from virtual blackmail in the form of the corrupt
plea bargaining system. Outside America the corruption of
its judicial system was widely recognised, not least as a
result of the direct inverse correlation between the
wealth of the defendant and their probability of
conviction. But getting Americans to see it with their own
eyes was absolutely crucial. Once their authoritarian
domino began to wobble, all the others realised the peril
that was upon them.
Step 5 - Changing the Game and the Players
Once the chances of successful prosecution against
provably innocent victims fell to near zero, the entire
plea bargaining system crashed and burned. One after
another, juries refused to follow the edicts of obviously
corrupt judges and made it impossible to convict the
innocent. Honest judges, who fortunately still formed a
majority within the judicial system, began rejecting
Police evidence routinely unless it was digitally
recorded, with trusted time-stamps, on a protected audit
trail. The crunch came when the still largely
Authoritarian Congress tried to pass new laws,
dramatically reducing opportunities for - and the powers
reserved for - Trial By Jury. Simultaneously, they tried
to mandate trust in Police evidence even when not
digitally preserved. Nearly one and a quarter million
American Citizens surrounded the Capitol and refused to
move until the vote was taken. The Sacking of Congress,
which followed the infamous vote is, of course, the day we
now all celebrate as the birthdate of our real democracy.
In the famous words (*) of Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Pilliakov - the only sitting Supreme to try to fight the
State's attempt at resisting the revolution (and one of
the first into the Capitol on that famous Tuesday):
"Yes, it is still necessary, in some circumstances, for
society to delegate Authority to public employees but on
this historical day we have finally come to terms with
Lord Acton's axiom: "Power tends to corrupt, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost
always bad men." And at last we have found the solution...
From this day forth, the rule of Law shall be modified
thus:
Citizen: Innocent until proved Guilty
Authority: Guilty until proved innocent."
Beyond the criminals in Authority, it became effectively
impossible for criminals in the wider world to know - in
advance of their attack - whether or not someone was
capable of recording their attacks, so once the adoption
rate passed the critical mass of about 25%, it rapidly
became too dangerous for most attackers to take the risk.
Of course, if you actually intended to kill the target, it
was still relatively simple to arrange a murder before the
victim's sensors could identify the attacker, for example
using a sniper rifle at distance, but almost all other
attacks became too costly to the attacker. And once the
technology adoption rate achieved the 95% level, the
ability to track down attackers purely by a process of
elimination became feasible and crime fell to the levels
it still sits at today where Murder and Rape are now so
rare that each one becomes a sensation for a few weeks
after it is uncovered.
Step 6 - Making Public Lies Impossible
The next major enhancement was AAI - Augmented Artificial
Intelligence. Some of us are old enough to remember its
humble beginnings as a simple audio-visual prompt which
would remind users of the name of that acquaintance you'd
bumped into in the street. You'd only met them once, and
that was a few months back. It was so damn useful to have
that name and bio prompt and be able to greet each other,
convincingly, like old friends!
But then AAI's language and context recognition skills
began to be turned in another direction. RTFM - Real Time
Fact Monitoring - was the killer app that did for
Authoritarianism what that prehistoric asteroid collision
did for the Dinosaurs. Their use of covert and overt
violence to control the population had already been made
untenable by the citizen surveillance arraigned against
them. Now it became increasingly impossible for them to
control any part of the political messaging system unless
it genuinely fitted the facts.
At first it was a tool for the satirists. They'd replay a
political speech but with the AAI analysis showing up as
subtitles. We all smirked as politician after politician
was shown to be misinformed, prejudiced, selective,
manipulative, superstitious or lying. Bigoted journalists,
exaggerating CEOs, Evangelist millionaire ministers and a
host of other routine social parasites were all publicly
exposed in the same way.
It quickly became obvious that the game was up. No public
statement, nor even a private one - if if was based on
facts in the public domain - could be made without the
increasingly infallible RTFM flagging up all attempts at
deceit and manipulation. Dishonest politicians, in
particular, found it impossible to continue their
centuries old tactics and quickly became unelectable. And
although it took a full fifteen more years for the effects
of RTFM to sweep the planet, and one or two regimes fought
to the literal bitter death, Authoritarianism died, not so
peacefully, on January 5 2058, with the public hanging of
Iran's "Guardian Council".
And as we all know, we've seen massive drops in crime
against the person, mirrored around the world, and despite
the on-going genuine conflicts which continue to exist
between citizen and citizen, between State and citizen and
between State and State, since that date there hasn't been
a single day of armed conflict between any two or more
member States of the United Nations. It seems that once it
became impossible to lie to each other about anything
which could be instantly fact-checked or, if necessary,
remotely or citizen surveilled, wars become essentially
impossible to create.
This year, as multiple celebrations are regularly
reminding us, is the centenary of the recognised starting
point of the digital age - January 1 1970. And today is
specifically the 50th anniversary of that first
smart-phone implant on April 1 2020 - the birthdate of
Digital Telepathy.
I give you "Happy D Day"
*Pilliakov's speech in Context:
"Yes, it is still necessary, in some circumstances, for
society to delegate Authority to public employees but on
this historical day we have finally come to terms with
Lord Acton's axiom: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad
men." And at last we have found the solution.
From this day forward, let it be known to anyone aspiring
to the exercise of Authority in this land: if ever you are
delegated powers to act on our behalf, you shall be
assumed fully accountable for every second of your life
while you remain in office and, if appropriate, for a
number of years before and after you leave office.
What this means in practice is very simple. Should you be
accused of any crime or misdemeanour, in contrast to the
Citizen, whose innocence will continue to be assumed until
a Jury can be persuaded otherwise, the starting point for
anyone in Authority is the exact opposite. Your guilt
shall be assumed unless a Jury can be persuaded otherwise.
For some years, a growing number of ordinary citizens,
now constituting a large majority of the population, have,
for a wide variety of their own purposes, voluntarily and
routinely captured comprehensive detail about own their
lives; so comprehensive, that some innocent citizens have
famously defeated the infamous attempts by a corrupt State
and corrupt judicial system to continue their embedded
practice of widespread judicial blackmail and tens of
thousands of false imprisonments.
That same technology shall, in future, be deployed to
further protect the Citizen from rogue Authority. Unlike
ordinary citizens, for whom the adoption and precise use
of such technology will always remain optional, if you are
appointed to a position of Authority, it is, hereafter, a
condition of your employment in such a post, not only that
you be monitored by the technology, but for that
monitoring to be provably continuous.
You shall record your every move, your every
conversation, your every heartbeat. They shall remain just
as private and secure as the data stored voluntarily by
private citizens. But unlike the private citizen, about
whom there can never be certainty about what data they
have captured and chosen to archive, the world will know
that you are legally obliged to possess your own digital
record of any disputed event.
The world will thus know that, if you are innocent, you
will be able prove it, just as thousands of innocent
citizens have managed to do themselves, even under direct
attack by the Authorities and Rules which were supposed to
exist to protect them. Under these circumstances, it is,
of course, reasonable, should you be accused of anything
untoward, that you are given the opportunity to prove
yourself innocent. But should you choose not to present
such evidence, even if you claim that the evidence has
been destroyed, or that a system failure prevented
storage, your guilt shall be formally confirmed.
From this day forth, the rule of Law shall be modified
thus:
Citizen: Innocent until proved Guilty
Authority: Guilty until proved innocent."
|