#30c3

It makes sense that nations are trying to get all the information they can because they’re trying, again, to make their world legible. a state will always spy on its people as much as it possibly can. Because states always have. Not just to maintain their power, but just to maintain the ability to control consequences. the power of guns and power of money and the power of God are just three different kinds of power, and they all let you do different kinds of things. They’re commensurable with each other, they don’t act on each other, they don’t act on themselves. If you have a pile of money, that doesn’t necessarily let you directly influence what someone else who has a pile of money wants to do. You can maybe take away their money or force them to do something else because you’ve bought the thing that they were trying to buy first, but there’s a lot of subtlety here in terms of how power acts, and this is one of the things that seems to be occasionally getting missed while we talk about, “Oh we need to force states to do such and such, we need to stop states from doing such and such.” There’s this, “Oh, corporate surveillance is the worst thing. Oh, state surveillance is the worst thing.” No, they’re different things, and they may be problematic in different ways. All power needs to be able to see the world in order to act. Whether you are a state or a corporation or a church, you need your own kind of legibility and your own kind of surveillance, whether that means figuring out if the people in all of the villages are showing up in church on Sundays and whether or not they’re doing any of these things that might be indicative of any of these various heresies that you keep hearing about. States are panicking right now. They’re acting the way they are because they’re panicked. ... Because our legibility…you know, the world hasn’t changed, the stuff that we pull in is still the same thing but it doesn’t mean what it used to mean. We can’t interpret it anymore. So one of the things we’re seeing right now is we’re seeing states desperately trying to hang on to not their ability to surveil but their ability to understand, but those don’t look different from the outside. Rule of law was never intended to operate in a state of exception, and this is one of the things which is very interesting if we talk about rule of law as a response to unrestricted surveillance or to any other of the problems in the world right now. A state of exception and a state of rule of law are defined opposites. We now live in a state of permanent, but neither pervasive nor complete, exception, and this complicates all responses within systems.

30C3 jack applebaum von the guardian spricht

30c3 - Security Nightmares

Jacob Appelbaum at the 30C3 Demonstration in Hamburg