NSA data will soon routinely be used for domestic policing
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> Perhaps the most chilling quote of the Soviet era came from Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the secret police, who bragged, “Show me the man, and I will find you the crime.” Surely, that never could be the case in America; we’re committed to the rule of law and have the fairest justice system in the world.
> This should make everyone fearful. Silverglate declares that federal prosecutors don’t care about guilt or innocence. Instead, many subscribe to a “win at all costs” mentality, and there is little to stop them.
> The very expansiveness of federal law turns nearly everyone into lawbreakers. Like the poor Soviet citizen who, on average, broke about three laws a day, a typical American will unwittingly break federal law several times daily. Many go to prison for things that historically never have been seen as criminal.
http://mic.com/articles/86797/8-ways-we-regularly-commit-fel...
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/11/04/david-barton-expl...
> John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor, made a similar comment to the Wall Street Journal: “There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. … That is not an exaggeration.”
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/statistics
Do you even know the 134 laws passed by the current Congress are? I know I don't and you just have to fall afoul of 1.
That's the genius of checks and balances. As long as no one branch (legislative, judicial, executive) gets the upper hand, we can ensure that the power-hungry people who rise up through the ranks will hold each other accountable, if only for selfish and corrupt reasons.
I'm not sure what to consider corporations though. They seem to have piled up enough legal protection to be considered a fourth, private wing of government. Some of their incentives align (no taxes, bailouts, less regulation) but many more do not. Google and Apple control enough cash and information that they are de facto more powerful than 95% of world governments, and they play a major role in ours. Eric Schmidt taking on a role at the Pentagon is one recent example [1].
As Dostoevsky put it, viper will eat viper. We are all a little Karamazovian - of the black root. It's what keeps the world balanced.
[1] http://www.wired.com/2016/03/ex-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-head...
The genius of democratic capitalism is that it's managed to harness the natural desire of sociopaths to fuck each other over to ensure that life doesn't get too miserable for ordinary people. The unfortunate part is that you pretty much have to become a sociopath to enter the class that gets to decide who gets fucked. But I'd much rather have this than every other social system, where the sociopaths fuck over the common people unchecked.
Maybe, but not where "national security" matters.
Edit: Added quotes for clarity.
Countries that have legitimate national security issues (Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria and so on) are not the ones using that term the most frequent.
Now we have a spiral of oligarchs who leach off the whole system.
This is why I'm not too sad anymore when I hear all this awful news. We are all monsters. Give the average person money and power, and they will behave just the same.
Secondly, are you really saying "living in a police state is fine, you just have to make sure you never become more of a threat to someone in power than their peers in government"?
Given this math, I guarantee you that a lot of innocent people plead guilty because as wrong as it is they simply can't afford to fight for justice.
I don't think the individual prosecutor was evil. They were doing their best to process everyone as quickly as possible. they were courteous and polite. it seemed they offered minimal fines (at least they said the fines were minimal) and it costs more just to retain a lawyer.
who knows? maybe the police officers have a quota to meet. I can't blame them for following orders and looking for the silliest infractions towards the end of the month.
it just seems that we've optimized the process to a point where I don't really care because I get caught up in it so rarely and get off so easily and the people who get caught up more (have a prior history or can't afford $183 fine) probably don't have much of a voice. but what can I do?
Stew on that for a bit. If I get a job, where someone lays me to rob you, would you blame me for following orders?
Now, I say this as someone very vocal about the blue code of silence. However, there are no easy answers. Any unconcerted attempt to rid our law enforcement agencies of the blue code will result in it getting stronger and create more of this "us vs them" mentality.
We don't need more of that.
Now to answer your question, yes if someone robbed me or killed me I'd want them to be held accountable. However, I think the person giving the order is more responsible than the person pulling the trigger. Is that not so?
Hmm. Shouldn't you ? Even more so as an American citizen (I suppose you are) ?
The root of the problem is that a choice is even offered. If you got the ticket, why is a court willing to waive the fine for any reason? It's easier for the court, it's easier for the offender, lazy all around. But the real problem may be that some ticket carries a $2000 fine. Imagine if the ticket could not be waived. More people would fight it because it's worth the effort. Eventually enough people might get angry at the high fine and move to get it changed. Or put another way, why is there this infraction with such a high fine in the first place? It doesn't seem that important since they're willing to make a huge compromise.
I don't think police officers today are any lazier it more corrupt than police officers in the good old days. We are a bit too harsh on them I suppose. It is just that with an easier access to communication, we can all tell about our particular nuisances which paints a bigger picture together.
If you yell back at someone who yelled at you, should you get a $200 ticket while the other person who started it gets away? Hey, maybe have a plain cloth police officer yell at random people and see who bites and issue them a $200 ticket when they do?
The one I remember had to do with shipping undersized lobster tails. He made it out that a bunch of average restaurant owners were sent to jail for years b/c they broke a foreign export law which was somehow enforceable in America due to a law he had a problem with.
What actually happened was these people had been conspiring to to break environmental law for decade by packaging lobster tails in such a way that inspectors found it difficult to inspect them and made mistakes. They had a whole system for routing their stuff to specific ports that had inspecting facilities that were easy to manipulate. They continued doing this for a year after they were informed they were under a federal investigation, right up until they were all arrested.
They made millions of dollars by poaching undersized lobsters and all of the rules they broke were not vague and specifically made their packaging actions illegal, in order to prevent people from doing exactly what they did.
So I wouldn't put too much faith in this guy.
He's the author of "The Shadow University" which was one of the most disruptive blows that's been struck against the large-endowment administrations in the past few decades.
I actually happen to know one of the subjects of Mr. Silverglate's case studies, Nicholas Hermandorffer, who later wrote his thesis on the topic. In my view, his experience was represented accurately and fully, and Mr. Hermandorffer's accounts were closely aligned with phone records, texts, emails, etc., as well as physical evidence.
He's also head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which ranks universities on their free speech rights, as well as informs students that they sacrifice Constitutional protection to a certain extent living in University housing, as well as provides information on the rights one does retain and how to invoke them.
You seem like somebody with an axe to grind. I wouldn't put too much faith in this guy.
The laws are already too tough, so we depend on poor quality police work to keep ourselves safe. If the police use NSA data to actively discover crimes, then we would fail both conditions and be in trouble.
This suggests that an alternative solution would be to fix the unreasonable laws rather than keep the police crippled.
Think about speeding. Most people wouldn't accept having a government-monitored GPS in their car, and one common objection is "but then if I accidentally slip a couple of km/h over the limit I'll get instantly busted". Well yeah, and if you thought that universally enforcing the speed limit was fair then you'd be OK with this. It's not fair, and often the speed limit is far below what you could safely do in a modern car under good conditions. Breaking the speed limit often poses no threat to anyone.
Just one example of an unjust, but relatively unenforced, law.
What happened to retired General David Petraeus was a pretty good example of "justice for your friends". Lying to FBI agents, actually giving away classified documents, and he pled to one misdemeanor and got two years probation[1].
It's not like they didn't have evidence of the False Statements charge.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/petra...
Enforcing laws to the letter demolishes the rule of law as well.
If an Indigenous tribe protests a pipeline being built on their ancestral land, are they undermining the economic stability of Canada?
I don't like leaving the distinction between what constitutes activism and terrorism up to interpretation by the frontline LEO's and CSIS agents collecting and acting on the data.
S. 994: A bill to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 1 Walter Hammond Place in Waldwick, New Jersey, as the “Staff Sergeant Joseph D’Augustine Post Office Building”
S. 599: Improving Access to Emergency Psychiatric Care Act
H.R. 33: Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act
H.R. 431: To award a Congressional Gold Medal to the Foot Soldiers who participated in Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday, or the final Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March in March of 1965, which served as a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I think I know what your point is, that we might need to know what elected officials are doing, but I think this was a little more FUD than was necessary. Perhaps we need to think if these issues need to be a law a the national level.
https://www.bja.gov/Publications/PleaBargainingResearchSumma...
> According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2005), in 2003 there were 75,573 cases disposed of in federal district court by trial or plea. Of these, about 95 percent were disposed of by a guilty plea (Pastore and Maguire, 2003). While there are no exact estimates of the proportion of cases that are resolved through plea bargaining, scholars estimate that about 90 to 95 percent of both federal and state court cases are resolved through this process (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005; Flanagan and Maguire, 1990).
A 95% plea rate makes indictment almost always a conviction [effectively]. If they don't plea, the prosecutor can drop the case.
The only people who can defend this are the upper middle class [6 figure incomes] and the wealthy.
http://www.reulandlaw.com/about/fee/
For an example of rates, its 35-75k for a federal case.
There are, of course, exceptions of all kinds, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev.
The insinuation is the no-fly list should be expanded to catch domestic criminals. You know, the no-fly list that you can't be removed from and don't have to have committed a crime to get yourself listed on. The no-fly list that is unconstitutional, yeah that one.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/idaho-shooting-suspect-kyle-odom-fl...
It also gives further evidence to the fact that most people simply want to live a good life, and are happy to give power to any authority that can promise them that. The thinking here is: the government created the no fly list to catch bad guys, these are bad guys, why aren't they on the list?
However connecting a civilian police wanted fugitives registry / arrest warrant list to the airline booking system actually sounds like a good idea... The kind of good idea that's so obvious I thought it was already done decades ago.
Right?
Right?
You really want a corrupt sheriff or drug dealing cops to have access to all the stuff the NSA does?
Seriously? Scares the crap out of me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Eppolito_and_Stephen_Car...
.. Another Quote.
> First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
> Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
> Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew
> Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I guess i'm on that list now.
Basically: if you've got some discriminating test with Type 1 and Type 2 error (false positive, false negative, don't ask me which is which), then as the actual rate of incidence falls, no matter how sensitive your test, at some point it's mostly making false positive rather than true positive selections.
Cue a system which rewards based on, say, arrests, rather than on correct convictions, and doesn't penalise on false arrests or wrongful convictions.
You're going to see a lot of false/wrongful arrests and convictions.
Makes me think if part of what happens within immune systems isn't similar.
Bruce Schneier probably covers similar ground, now that I think of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us/politics/obama-administ...
Of course, the usefulness hinges on whether you trust that WaPo is being impartial. (I have no opinion on that, since I don't follow US politics that closely.)
When he was in the race, they were hugely in favor of Jeb Bush, too. For instance, this [1] was on the front page of the website for at least a day.
[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/us/politics/hear-the-one-a...
I have zero problems with op-ed pieces being opinionated, but when those opinions seep into the actual news, I have a hard time calling it journalism, and an even harder time giving them my money.
That said, I can think of literally zero unbiased sources, especially as Circa's shut down. It doesn't seem to be a feature that many people are willing to pay for.
The "original source" is, according to the NYTimes piece, "officials familiar with the deliberations." The NYTimes piece, as well as this one, and any other piece written about it, will be written by a human being with a bias.
The HN guideline, "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter," doesn't, as I understand it, refer to newspapers making reference to other newspapers in their analysis of a story.
It refers to, for example, a blog that posts a video with no further comment. In that case, just link to the video.
I agree with Radley Balko's point of view here, but I prefer the posted source not be one that is begging its own premise and telling me what to think. That's what the comment thread itself is for.
And in any case, the HN guidelines make no distinction between "biased" and "objective" sources. In this case, neither is the "original source," so both are equally valid. Thus, it's sensible to chose the less reckless one, and that is clearly Radley.
Are you really trying to tell me that surveillance of ~the rest of the world~ is somehow less bad?
This is no surprise to me, as such abuses tend to go hand in hand, but it definitely takes things to a new level.
This is an example of a lie that has repeated often enough to have become the truth. The Bill of Rights limits what the government can and can't do, period.
So (again to a first approximation) the files that my government collects on you are only available to be used in cases with some sort of international significance. (And the same with the files that your government collects on me.) I see a vast difference between that situation and the situation where a local cop can casually dig through these vast databases to find out if I've ever been associated with anything at all potentially illegal.
But in general, yes, spying on foreign nations have always been illegal, and always considered to be inevitable.
On the other hand, with the information sharing across borders (NSA spies on UK citizens, MI6 spies on US citizens) -- this line has already been blurred (Or for a less "redundant" example than the UK, Swedish and Norwegian intelligence services have had a rather incestuous, illegal secret relationship for a long time).
All that aside: a state where the electorate fear the elected, rather than the other way around (or; where the elected takes steps to act on their fear of the electorate) is no longer a democracy.
"GCHQ AND ME – My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11265969
So for those who value privacy, it's important to route traffic among jurisdictions that don't readily collaborate.
But a government that spies on its own citizens is one step from tyranny.
The problem is when this intelligence information gets used for domestic criminal cases -- no matter which country is involved. So if the Saudis want to know every detail about my life, who cares? They never release the data, I'm not a threat to them, and life goes on. But if the Saudis give that information to U.S. authorities, and then the U.S. authorities arrest me for a laundry list of crimes? I've effectively had my privacy and private papers violated without any kind of due process.
You can't start building "escape hatches" into the agreement you have with your government. It breaks the entire system. Used to be that grownups realized this, but lately the well-meaning idiots seem to be in charge.
Also don't rule out harassment. Would you hire someone who is under investigation? How would you like a tax audit? Or maybe you'll get pulled over 10X more than the average person because when cops run your plates you are flagged? What about no-fly lists? Detainment at the border when re-entering the country? Exclusion from benefits or consideration for government jobs/contracts? There are many things that can be done to make your life unpleasant or wreck your career that aren't illegal and don't involve actually charging you with a crime. In many cases there may be no recourse civil or criminal. Look into the adventure of getting yourself off a no-fly list for a good example of non-criminal punishment.
In the future it will be possible to establish, with the aid of big data and machine learning, profiles of "normal" (a.k.a. desired) human behavior and to engage in fine-grained surveillance, harassment, or "nudging" of individuals who deviate from desired behavior.
Over time this creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop: felons can't vote, and "soft persecution" could negatively impact peoples' careers causing more and more wealth to systematically accrete into the hands of desirable individuals. Put these two things together and combine them with fine-grained propaganda based on big data and cognitive modeling and you have a recipe for... well... I can't help but see this as the formula of a new dark age of totalistic orthodoxy and immovable dogmas.
The last dark age was built on self-enforcement of social norms as dictated by religious orthodoxy. This one might be built on big data and fine grained surveillance and control of the population by a technocratic orthodoxy. Instead of the pope and the Vatican we have the corporate-state complex and the NSA (and private corporations like Google). Collectively the administrators of this system are the technocratic analogs of the Holy See in the middle ages.
The next dark age will look like:
Brace yourselves, the police state is coming (civil law enforcement agencies having access to mass surveillance data and then acting on it whenever they like is pretty much the definition of a police state).
Local police departments already have this and use it to target individuals. I remember reading that the Chicago PD shows up at people's houses and tells them, 'we watching you'.
47,000 people are on it. Most of them have not committed any crime... Probably. We don't actually know, because if you're on it, the government won't tell you why - or even that you're on it.
A criminal conspiracy is more than thinking about a crime, but a lot less than actually committing the act.
Would stopping mass shootings and not-called-terorrism-but-domestic-terror be part of the use cases here? Like if you were to ignore some other laws and track gun ownership and purchases, maybe cross reference it with the use/prescription of certain medications and then cross reference that with anti-social posts on the internet or associations with certain call-themselve-patriots-but-really-hate-the-government type groups you might stop some mass shootings. Maybe save some actual lives.
It's a terrible rabbit hole to go down, we need to stop it all ASAP.
E.g. "we now have technology that can prevent rapes of children before they even happen. So many children today live in the direct neighborhood of a potential rapist - and no-one could do anything because nobody knew. But now we can spot and remove the potential rapists and give the children back the pieceful and carefree life that they deserve.
Unfortunately, as of now, making use of the technology would be in violation of certain laws - laws that made a lot of sense in the last century. But given the changes in society and the urgency of the matter, we feel a reformulation would be more than justified..."
The courts of the US have literally always that freedom of speech is not unlimited.
You can argue for a compelling state interest in increasing the term of punishment for a violent offender based on his opinions about race. But (1) it's hard to argue the state interest in longer prison terms and (2) it's really hard to prove hate, so there's an easy due process appeal here.
In our current hyper sensitive culture there's a lot of expectations that people think a certain way.
I suppose we'll just have to start assuming that anything said or written or looked up online will eventually be accessible to anyone who's interested.
This country is so f#cked now.
What are the remaining options?
1. Those who accept the new reality will be forced to behave like sheep.
2. Those who speak up will be silenced even before they will have organized some kind of serious movement (see: OWS + parallel construction).
3. Leave.
Don't use electronic messaging to tell people you're holding cash, bring a cheque at least. The cops are going to find out and your cash is going to be confiscated.
On what grounds?
I submit that an impulsive and narcissistic demagogue with no vested interest in "the establishment" is a far scarier leader in the context of a turnkey police state than even a right-wing career politician.
Treason, punishable by death. [2]
IMO, "face the music" is code for "funeral march". [3]
1 http://www.businessinsider.com/democratic-debate-edward-snow...
That certainly isn't the same thing as calling for extra-legal assassination.
I submit that before a nation gets a narcissistic demagogue they have to first stop caring about due process.
Are there crowdfunding sites that help fund civil rights cases?
Edit: In other words, I'm beginning to think the only way to chip away at this sort of massive government overreach is to crowdfund the hell out of a ton of legitimate civil rights cases. Eventually maybe our government(s) (since I imagine US is not the only one to be concerned about) will get the hint.
They lose nothing by fighting you in court.
However, if the complete 'graph' is just handed over then even the most discreet of networks could be uprooted, all chains and links identified, geolocated too. This could be done. All it would take is a Donald Trump to take it up another level. He could get a lot of votes by promising to use NSA data to eradicate drugs from America once and for all, with no drug-dealer left behind...
Aside from the 'where next' aspects, as it is, I found this article to be quite shocking. So much for the 'land of the free'.
Edited: for those downvoting, I invite you to consider how her (stated) positions on abortion and the black community have changed over the years. Everyone learns and changes their opinions over time, but her changes are too politically convenient to be simply personal development.
So the "land of the free" (and everywhere else) is free to give away all the hard-won freedoms to all and sundry. And they are. Because terrorism.
We are literally one economic crisis or major terrorist attack away from some form of significantly more authoritarian if not outright totalitarian government. Whether it would be "left" or "right" is sort of up in the air, and might depend on which side is able to produce a more compelling demagogue at the right time. In any case if history is any guide it doesn't matter much. Totalitarianism is totalitarianism.
If that comes to pass, we're going to find out what "turn-key totalitarian state" means. The infrastructure is in place. The only barriers are legal and social/cultural.
Social democracy coexists with Western values in basically the entirety of Europe. It has not led to the collapse of the continent into some totalitarian nightmare.
The fascism being advocated by Trump and members of the alt-right however draws a lot of comparisons to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and not because the right is unpopular with academics or journalists but because Trump and his supporters are using violent and xenophobic/racist language while they scapegoat ethnic and religious out-groups.
I also agree that Trump is scarier. I just wanted to be an equal opportunity hater of authoritarian ideologies and to make the point that the "key" that turns our "turn-key totalitarian state" to the "on" position could come from either side of the normal political continuum.
That's just incendiary nonsense. Trump is no more fascist than Bernie Sanders.
That's why I included left-populism in my top level comment. Populism tends toward authoritarianism and... authoritarianism is authoritarianism. The extreme left and the extreme right converge on very similar things. In both cases you get a lot of "the end justifies the means" and we know where that goes.
http://nypost.com/2016/02/11/the-fight-for-tolerance-at-rutg...
That is fascism. Not what Trump is doing. When you try to prevent people from speaking. Not when they react.
Troll much?
fas·cism
noun
an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.Now various agencies can trawl back through decades of data collection and see what people can still be prosecuted for, extorted with, etc.
These actions were happening anyway. Aren't we better off now that they're acknowledged and can be challenged?
The question will become relevant soon enough.
"All lives matter" gets you harassed and possibly fired.
I would really like to see these statistics from a legitimate source, because I'm not sure where you are even getting it.
My issue is that the 'black lives matter' cause has merely become a thinly disguised fascist group aimed at bullying and destroying anyone that disagrees with them.
"Hands up, don't shoot" never happened. This was proven, yet it didn't stop the hashtag warriors from screaming it at everybody and news anchors on networks from CNN standing behind it (after it was proven false).
Facts no longer matter. It's all about the narrative that everyone is racist against blacks, no matter what actually happened.
All of these protests have added body cams to many police forces. Most people are now silent about it. I have seen case after case where a cop is accused of 'racism' and the body cam shows otherwise.
The US is probably the least racist country in the world when it comes to minorities. Try to get a job in Asia, Europe, or Africa. You will quickly see the difference.
In most countries outside the US, you are required to send them a picture and they can not hire you for pretty much any reason.
Instead of focusing on being a victim, the minorities in the US should focus on education and keeping families in tact. It's really the only path to success. The Irish, Italians, and Chinese were all treated like slaves in this country and were able to overcome this through education and a strong family structure.
I've worked at many different companies and I've never seen racism in terms of hiring (although I'm sure it happens in a small amount of cases). Businesses just want someone that can do the job. If a person isn't getting past the hiring manager, it's most likely because they don't have the required skill set.
Many people like me, are angry and frustrated because the alleged victims have now become the bullies. I wish we could have true equality, where race truly doesn't matter, but I think I'm asking for too much.
It's funny how true equality is seen as a bad thing. I am now part of the counter-culture, which means I don't want aggressive bullies being allowed to control the speech and actions of me or others.
I don't want our society to continue along this broken and misguided path and it's why many educated people are voting for Trump.
It's a lazy cheap heuristic. If you took what's happening today and went back in time 20 years and posted about it on the 1990s Internet, even the wacko conspiracy nuts would call you crazy.