Personally I believe real world actions should be the focus of surveillance. The empires are simply trying to cheap out by focusing on surveillance of computer activity.

This is the most profound part of Matthew Green's piece in my opinion:

"While this mainly concludes my notes about on Ozzie’s proposal, I want to conclude this post with a side note, a response to something I routinely hear from folks in the law enforcement community. This is the criticism that cryptographers are a bunch of naysayers who aren’t trying to solve “one of the most fundamental problems of our time”, and are instead just rejecting the problem with lazy claims that it “can’t work”. "

I believe the most fundamental problem is how can we decentralize real world security? I am FOR mass surveillance but AGAINST centralized mass surveillance.

Assume every crook and cranny of the world was covered by community cameras, and the cameras encrypted the streams with treshold cryptography, such that the populace has different parts of the secret, then one needs "enough" citizens agreeing to reveal the contents seen by a specific camera at a specific time. This way its public for all or public for none. Every accident, every murder, ...

Suppose a body is found, then the group decides to reveal the imagery: oh yes, in this case the person was murdered! look the perpetrator is walking out of view to the next camera, then the next,... we can trace him to where he is now. Properly trained citizens (in a now authorized police role) go and arrest the guy. He is now in prison waiting for his trial (also with community cameras, so no broomsticks in prisoner ani). At trial time, if the person denies, or claims to be a different person from the arrested one, we can trace through all the imagery from his commiting a crime to his sitting in court right there and then.

So yes, there is a real conflict between cryptographers and centralized law enforcement. We dont need no spooks!

And the spooks can not decode the camera imagery: a large enough number of citizens (chosen at random by cryptographic sortition) running instance of good citizen client software need to release their part of the shared secret.

EDIT:

So there is broadly speaking 2 kinds of crimes:

* meatspace crimes (murder, negligence, rape, making childporn (automatically rape), ...)

* cyber crimes (copyright, child porn, ...)

I argue that not implementing such a community camera system is a form of negligence in itself.

It does not adress things like copyright infringement, but ... thats not exactly the most popularly supported concept.

Then there is the problem of child porn: fake and real.

I argue that with deepfake any faked child porn will eventually become indiscernible from real child porn.

Which leaves the problem of official child porn recorded by the community cameras used to apprehend perpetrators (since these also sign the imagery to testify authenticity!).

Due too taboo many victims of child abuse didn't realize, or only had doubts that they were suffering abuse, enabling the abuse to continue. Without concrete visual examples for them to explore, to asses if they are or are not suffering child abuse, how can they alert others of their situation? We send these children extremely mixed messages: absolutely tell us if you are being abused, but absolutely never falsely report a person. Merely asking someone else for advice is automatically interpreted as a child reporting child abuse. How can a child asses his or her situation? With abstract questions using words and connotations it does not know?

I believe the number of reported child abuses would go up if we used these community cameras for decentralized mass surveillance.

Also for crime in general (theft, murder, ...), the knowledge that you will with extremely high probability be caught, will decrease a lot of crime. I would not be surprised if the crime rate of "impulsive" crimes (where the criminal was supposedly not able to control his urges) would drop substantially, revealing that in the current system they often get off the hook.

There will still be rude people, getting fines for squeezing women in the ass while drunk. But for any actual crime in general, both victim and perpetrator would know that the victim can simply report this to the group, and that the perpetrator can not escape by lack of evidence. The current lack of evidence constantly discourages people from reporting crimes (as there is risk involved: financial: lawyers, emotional: potential incredulity at police station, ...).

One might think that this will cause criminals to escalate to murder: "if you rob a victim, you should kill her, or else she will report you" but hiding a body will be very hard, and if a person goes missing the friends and relatives will report this, and instead of following the criminal we can follow the missing person from the time and place she was last reported seen!

As long as cryptographers only draw the privacy card, the law enforcement community has a point.
As long as the law enforcement community only draws the centralized power card, the cryptographers have a point.

Only when we have decentralized mass surveillance can we have both privacy (as long as you don't commit crimes or go missing) and real law enforcement.

Common FAQ:

What if say a stalker repeatedly reports his ex as "missing"? Cry wolf to many times, or be blocked to report a person missing, and the good citizen client software that the citizens individually run, will refuse to comply.

What if a stalker or group of them repeatedly reports a "murderer" in a celebrities bedroom? we can send a local but randomly selected properly trained (group of) citizen (in police role) to go check the room, if the supposed dead body is not there, no reason to unlock the imagery.

(I will add more as people ask)