I hope people will recognize that some laws need to change. Surveillance makes sense in some cases but it should be hard and expensive to do.
You are rendered economically exploitable and politically neutered. There is a reason the state and intelligencies, from the Pinkertons to the FBI, have had a historical obsession with extensive spying on political movements and economic assembly. Both have real potential to change society.
Would the civil or labor rights movements be possible under these conditions? Both threatened the bottom lines of powerful people. The FBI tried to persuade MLK to commit suicide by digging up dirt from his love life. He was considered a national security threat[0].
[0] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncens...
Take the ongoing incident with Hillary Clinton's email server, for example. Clinton was quick to support scrapping 4th amendment rights (Patriot Act) in the name of security, but when it came to state secrets, she played it fast and loose (at best). It took 15 years and a scandal before the Secretary of State's emails were finally secured. We started a mass surveillance program practically the day after 9/11.
We are starting to forget we are supposed to have things like civil liberties, and that the exceptions made for wartime only work if war is not permanent. The war on terror has no end. Before terror, it was drugs and communism. The government will never stop coming up with reasons it needs more power.
Communism is horrendously corrupt and inflicts great control on all its "lesser equal" citizens. Read this report about how Chinese communists have told microblogging sites to hire “self-discipline commissioners” [1].
[1] https://rsf.org/en/news/weibo-microblog-users-be-deducted-po...
I've seen forums shut down because admins got a visit from the FBI and decided that running a site that garners that much attention from the state isn't a risk they want to take. One was a comedy forum that leaned a little more left of center near the 2012 election. Memes and words might endanger national security.
> The communists (Stasi and KGB) would have made it compulsory to not broadcast it but to unicast/multicast it to servers owned by the Party politburo.
Today, we see our government pushing for something similar: unencrypted communication over networks they have captured to servers they can access unimpeded (Google, FB, Skype etc).
Governments are horrendously corrupt and seek increased control over all its citizens. The ideology doesn't much matter after the initial revolutionary sentiment settles down.
Not everyone who disagrees with you is merely ignorant of the superior wisdom and knowledge you have attained.
Of course, people can and do make mistakes. The fact that someone chooses to use a word to describe something does not mean that it's necessarily an accurate description. They may be lying, or they may simply have judged the situation incorrectly. How many startups say "we are the next Google"?
Well, not everything. Plant a GPS tracker on a police car or a bug in the restroom at FBI headquarters and you'll soon discover some troubling asymmetries in the modern post-privacy paradigm.
edit
I can't figure out how this could possibly be legal. It seems to me the rule for recording conversations is 1 party consent. [1] There is no way the FBI is participating in those conversations it's recording. I have no problem with law enforcement having special powers, but, isn't that special power a warrant?
[1] http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-co...
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Courts have held that the California law does not apply to wiretaps by federal agents authorized by a valid federal warrant. For example, federal agents may go to federal court and obtain a warrant to place a wiretap in California, even though state officials may be barred by state law from obtaining a wiretap under similar circumstances.
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In general I suspect they cannot be prevented by local state laws from doing their jobs.
The other interesting aspect is this is looked what Federal agents can do, not "How can we protect the privacy of our citizens? Let's see what we can do for them. Maybe they are entitled to more privacy because they live in California". This mirrors the attitude of the "expert" in the story, they just see the Constitution as an inconveniance you need to bypass in order to get your job done.
But really, It's easy. Put the audio online. Make it all public. Obviously, there should be some time constraint, can't expose an ongoing investigation. Maybe a year after charges are filed? Perhaps a year after trial, to avoid messing with jury pools.
I think this is a pretty great general policy. Police record whatever they want. If the police overstep and record stuff that turns out was private, the people are free to sue. Seems like a nice self balancing amount of surveillance.
Secretly stepping on peoples privacy rights is pretty much consequence free. Publicly stepping on peoples privacy makes the line very bright, and easy to avoid crossing. It also plays neatly into the "honest man has nothing to fear" trope.
In many states, every aspect of public employee compensation is publicly available. As it should be. Public safety folks are usually exempt.
Its closely related to the issue of gov mandated backdoors, in which the gov erroneously claims only they can do it, but in reality a backdoor is a backdoor for anyone.
Now, as for me, where did I put my camera detector/focused emp burst gun?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_25
[1] https://hackaday.com/2010/10/09/pulling-data-from-the-im-me-...
[2] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/p25sec08102...
A RaspberryPi(or similar) with a $12 TV tuner software defined radio, and a small database of the various frequencies and bands particular flavours of your local LEO and/or federal TLA use.
I know our local highway patrol, for example, use at least: P25, police issued cell phones, iPads with cellular data, HF radio (at least on rural/country cars), and whatever they use for the data connection for their in-car computers.
Most/all of that would be encrypted, but hey - metadata's a free-for-all according to them, right? I bet if you knew what to look for, you could quite reasonable detect the presence of a highway patrol car when you saw some digital P25, a cellular connection on the bands used by the contracted cellular provider, and I'd bet good money that patterns of encrypted data that things like ALPR systems send would be quite distinctive...
That's all staying pretty solidly at the whitehat end of the wide grey space of "what's allowed". If you were much closer to the blackhat end of that spectrum, I'd also bet pretty good money that sophisticated criminals are already exploiting GSM and 3/4G weaknesses to individually identify cellular radios by cracking the encryption to see the IMSI data. And that'd all be passive and undetectable, if you were firmly in the blackhat camp, active attacks against their P25 radios can (as pointed out) be done for effectively zero dollars.
Broadcastify requires self-censorship, their ToS prohibits broadcasting tactical, command, vice, narcotics, and other interesting channels.
Also, metadata and retroactive analysis is much different than listening to a live audio stream.
This became obvious since the proof delivered by Snowden. And we don't need more proof.
What we need now is a way to roll the surveillance state back.
This is driven by technology, and legislation can't do much to change it. It's possible other technology can, but until then, assume you are monitored.
Every person will have a (or multiple) device that can capture and broadcast multiple audio, video, and other sensor data streams to the entire world.
Facial recognition can be beat by a hat + sunglasses (which is the hugest plot hole in Person of Interest, the characters never even attempt to disguise themselves).
They definitely have access to most people's photos - driver's licenses, passports.
I personally don't care if they know where I go in public. They can just tail me if they really want to know.
I nearly always walk around with a 3-d accelerometer which can indeed "phone" home.
Here's the ML extraction mechanism as explained by a Samsung engineer - http://www.slideshare.net/satnam74/the-fifth-elephant-2013-t...
> Rather, Ford cars have several on-board services such as "Sync Services Directions" (a navigation device that works with drivers' phones) and 911 Assist, which users have to switch on and opt into. And employers can use a service called "Crew Chief" to monitor their corporate car fleet.
I'd love to see some data, but my back-of-the-envelope analysis reckons this wouldn't even budge the needle on my insurance costs.
A car provides you with an ability to inflict a lot of damage AND with an ability to escape from the scene quickly. Think hit and runs, road rage, dangerous driving, drunk driving, driving without license, etc.
I'll definitely take lack of anonymity when driving over having to deal with the millions of unaccountable assholes.
I don't want to get into the situation where regular citizens are not allowed to take pictures of people in public places. Still, I can see their lawyer's argument for expectation of privacy. What about the homeless? Do they have no expectation of privacy? Unless they are in their tent? (If they even have a tent).
That is an interesting interpretation, because the same article left me with the impression that they recorded everybody within earshot of the bugs for 10 months.
What I find terrifying is corporations like Google that have all of this data working hand in hand with the government. This creates two problems, a) the government now has tons more data they shouldn't have giving them more authoritarian abilities and b) that company now has immense lobbying power and can stifle competition for its mere deep relationship with the government. Basically, fascism.
Google might not have an account of mine, but I'm 100% sure they know who I am, what I'm interested in and what I'd be interested in in the future! Thanks to cookies, their ads and snippets of JavaScript on every webpage, my friends uploading contacts lists with my name in them etc. etc. they must have a profile built for me.
With the current state of things it actually doesn't really bother me (other than it's monopolistic market distorting effects, but whatever), but you brought up the possibility of them falling part! A very interesting scenario. Google is playing nice and placating people while they make boatloads of cash. When Firefox and IE natively implement adblock or some technounicorn clobbers them they'll get a lot less nice! And we checked enough End User Agreements to let them
With the government we have some recourse
Ever heard of the East India Company? Pinkerton National Detective Agency?
Of the list of people responsible for those atrocities, none of them were CEOs. Mao alone killed 45 Million people, that's still less than half of the list.
So again, let me know when corporations have even 1/10th of that number, even 1/20th. Governments have a much worse track record win killing people. Just as I was typing this it's very likely that a government murdered someone, statistically speaking. Perhaps even the U.S. government. I didn't say corporations were blameless...just that governments have a much much worse track record.
Yeah go government.
Its also no secret that the people who control the government have interests in retaining power and accumulating wealth. Politicians don't even deny that they can be bought, money is free speech after all (http://www.amendmentgazette.com/how-spending-money-became-a-...). Congressmen spend more than half of their time fundraising for a reason.
The policies and actions of the government are not intended to protect you, even though sometimes your interests are aligned.
Digression: my mom loves Hillary Clinton. She's an immigrant, consumes very little American media, but she is a staunch Clinton supporter. Clinton recites all the buzzwords she likes: children, education, security. She views politically radical ideas with deep suspicion and views nonconformity as a character flaw. I look at the government we have, and can't help but think it's exactly what she would do if she were in charge: lots of benefits for retirees, enormous spending on education, vigorous enforcement of drug laws, long punishments for criminals. What exactly would we do differently if my mom were in charge instead of the shadowy cabal of rich people and purchased politicians? Very little.
And the fact is, she is in charge. She's who votes, without fail, in every election. The government doesn't need to keep her in line. The government is what she uses to keep everyone else in line.
I see the same thing when it comes to TSA threads. I know people who actually want the TSA around, and when stories of TSA ineffectiveness come out, their reaction is not "security theatre!", it's "fund them more!"
The point is, the government is literally doing what most of the populace wants it to do. The opinions on HN are in the minority.
But its not true - the government is not to be trusted. It has a monopoly on military / police force, which it abuses incessantly. Moreover, it is effectively controlled by a private duopoly (Democrats + Republicans), with the same motives as any corporate coalition. What's more, corporations effectively control the duopoly. Just look at what happened with TTIP (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/04/secrets...).
And it is not doing what most of the populace wants, if that's not clear from the current election, look at the Congress approval ratings (http://www.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx). It's barely gone above 20% in the last 6 years. And has only once briefly gone above 50% in the past 30 years.
America needs a down round, perhaps... or how does one kick VCs off the board? Dissolve the company and start another one?
Governments have killed way more people than corporations and statistics prove it, thus the average person has a lot more to fear from government.
With that said I agree that we're unlikely to see a world war started by a corporation. I think we're far more likely to see an interplanetary conflict started by a corporation however.
It will be quite an easy thing for an asteroid mining venture to turn into an arms manufacturer the likes of which we have never seen.
Furthermore, just because you can use an institution to do some things for you (if you can call that "being your instrument") doesn't mean you have nothing to fear from it. It does not follow, especially not in the case of the government. More or less every person who's been oppressed by a government could nevertheless say it was providing police and other services to them. If the government were the average person's instrument, as in, a piece of machinery that didn't do anything unless an average person picked it up and used it, and in that case performed exactly the actions the person wanted, then your conclusion would follow [barring accidental misuse and such]. I'm tempted to imagine that you're deliberately giving HN readers an exercise in how to recognize the misleading use of language in a debate.
While I'm on the subject, I'll volunteer that the social contract is a nice-looking facade made up after the fact; it's more like, the government does things to everyone, and afterward maybe a few people decide it was worth it and approve, while others may be displeased but usually lack any effective means of changing the situation, and shrug and put up with it. Further, I'll quote Nock:
"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner. ... Moreover, the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class by another. In this sense, every State known to history is a class-State. Oppenheimer defines the State, in respect of its origin, as an institution "forced on a defeated group by a conquering group, with a view only to systematizing the domination of the conquered by the conquerors, and safeguarding itself against insurrection from within and attack from without. This domination had no other final purpose than the economic exploitation of the conquered group by the victorious group.""
"your life will be made a living hell until you are rendered neutral" ... sorry, but that just doesn't match up with reality. Maybe your fantasy of the future?
Bush-era antiwar groups, Occupy Wall Street, leftist political groups, security researchers, environmental activists, whistleblowers, lawyers representing "sensitive" clients, and MLK himself... all have faced some kind of illegal surveillance or intimidation tactics. (There are many known targets that I didn't list here, and likely many that we don't hear about, simply because the oppressed often lack access to media channels.)
I would much rather be manipulated into buying more Coke than targeted for harassment, intimidation, no-fly lists, and smear campaigns because of my political beliefs. Not that marketers are angels, but they don't hold a candle to the type of abuse that the government can dish out when someone is "marked" as inconvenient.
Most definitely NOT. Even discounting things like the PATRIOT act, which wasn't even hidden, the government only gets backlash when it's actually CAUGHT, and then only when it's particularly provable.