The US’s Stance on Surveillance Needs a Hard Reset
backchannel.com
backchannel.com
It seems inevitable to me that the same generation that willingly hands over all their personal information to Google and Facebook, and sees government mostly as a positive force for enforcing civil rights and increasing social equality will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state.
This isn't unique to the generation you talk about.
The only way to make them change their minds is if a lot of them become targets of the control apparatus and in liberal democracies that never happens. Democrats are afraid that Republicans are going to use the apparatus on them and vice versa. No one cares about the rule of law.
In fact privilege has nothing to do with your actions, it has to do with who you are in relation to the government and those in power. Privilege can't really be taken away by new laws. Privilege can't even be given by new laws. Because the laws don't apply to those with privilege. It's possible to get privilege by doing what those in power want you to do and that's mostly act as they want you to act on their terms. Privilege is about power and control. It's nothing to be guilty about, because it's not something you did. It was something that was done for you.
Now, you can apply things like mosaic theory to conjure up rights against surveillance into existence. And maybe that would be the right thing to do. But that's not the only reasonable construction of the fourth amendment, and I'd argue not even the most reasonable one (doctrinally).
But, it's certainly something we could do. The "right to privacy" that covers contraception and abortion was conjured into existence literally from "penumbras." Even most "living Constitution" types would concede that those aren't the most doctrinally strict concepts. But it took an enormous amount of political capital to make those stick (and even today it is tenuous.) The question is, are people willing to spend that kind of political capital on electronic privacy?
when the Framers were writing the fourth amendment, they were really thinking in terms of property rights, not information
If the framers had intended to protect the information regardless of source, whether or not it was contained in your papers and effects, they would have done so. The framers did not have Facebook, but they would have understood the importance of sensitive information held by third parties. They were merchants, bankers, wealthy farmers, and lawyers. They would have been able to conceive of, for example, the government collecting manifests from a shipper to prosecute a merchant for evading taxes. Or subpoenaing books from an accountant. The fundamental legal question underlying a big chunk of the surveillance issue--can the government force Facebook to give it information Facebook has about a user--has been teed up ever since subpoenas and accountants existed (both a couple of hundred years prior to the founding).
What the framers did not contemplate is that one day the government would not have to infringe your property rights to get all your personal information.
At the time of the framing, your accountant had your information, but he was also authorized to know it. Nobody at Google is authorized to read my email or even I expect look at who I'm corresponding with. It's all done by machine.
And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on my desk in my apartment which I lease from someone else?
Was the government in 1780 allowed to subpoena the Post Office for your mail?
The "machine" versus "Google employee" distinction isn't a compelling one. The computer is programmed by a human agent of Google to scan your email, collect information, and use that information for Google's purposes. Also, wouldn't your reasoning allow the government to avoid any allegations of 4th amendment violations by pointing to the NSA computer that does the actual scanning?
> And the whole concept of "property" as inside a machine is unusual. Is an email on a server like a letter on an accountant's desk, or is it like a letter on my desk in my apartment which I lease from someone else?
It's not unusual. Property is defined by the bundle of rights you have with respect to something, whether that something is tangible or intangible.[1] A lease is a property right that limits what the lessor can do. Your landlord cannot, except under certain exceptions, enter your apartment and look through your desk (or send a robot to do the same). Your landlord has no interest in the things inside your apartment, which remain solely your property. None of that is true for many types of digital information held by third parties. Google explicitly retains the right to scan your emails and use the collected information for commercial purposes. At some point, Google retained quite extensive rights over what you put on Google Docs (although they've narrowed that in a TOS change). Facebook retains quite extensive rights over what you post.
The 1878 case of Ex Parte Jackson addresses the Post Office issue. It distinguishes between sealed letters (protected by the 4th amendment), and things like postcards that are open to inspection, even if they are not routinely inspected (not protected). Arguably, most clear-text online traffic falls in the latter bucket.
All of that being said, my point is that you certainly could conjure up a right to digital privacy from the "penumbras" of the 4th amendment. But the opposite view--that no such right exists--is pretty logical too. Certainly, I think logical enough that you can't say that the text of the 4th amendment compels you to find that such a right exists.
[1] This should not be a foreign concept to programmers. It's very much like a capability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model.
Further, when govt attempts to prevent citizens from putting email into secure envelopes then its clear what's going on. Its goes from "I can easily read your email; thus its not protected" to "You must submit all you email for inspection!" That's clearly the sort of thing the 4th amendment is intended to protect from.
That's assuming the scanning never results in any information being conveyed to a person or recorded anywhere someone might eventually read it. That wouldn't provide much use to the government.
> None of that is true for many types of digital information held by third parties.
That depends on the third party. Not all email providers do that. And if scanning your email to target advertising was the determinant of whether the government could read it without a warrant, email providers would stop doing that or people would stop using them.
And then wouldn't it change based on whether the scanning is done client side or server side?
> Arguably, most clear-text online traffic falls in the latter bucket.
That puts a different spin on the whole encryption debate. If not encrypting traffic allows the government to read it without a warrant, a government encryption ban takes on a whole new meaning.
And the traffic increasingly is encrypted. Hosts are increasingly using TLS for HTTP and SMTP.
On that note, while government has been tearing down walls between agencies, in some cases we should be raising walls.
But in all seriousness, you're correct, though I temper my enthusiasm with the thought that having the walls tends to make people complacent and underestimate risks.
For example, spying on other countries is as old as governments. So maybe that's pretty reasonable, as long as we put up a wall so that those things can't be used domestically. Now that we've settled that issue, let's build some really good tools so we know what our adversaries are doing and we can always find them. Unfortunately, then the hubris of it all catches up with us when some outgoing attorney general approves massive data sharing from tools that were always understood to be permissible only because they were aimed away from us.
Until we can find some way to make our politicians respect constitutional rights, walls are frighteningly temporary.
(They are not worried about it happening this year, but are extrapolating 5 years.)
This is amongst mid-westerners and west coast types. East coast liberals I talked to years ago were part of the DC or military machine, and think 100% surveillance is just a natural tool for vetting politicians: "You have to live inside DC norms since birth or will be blacklisted, even if it is just a joint in high school... Otherwise, how will the ruling class keep running things?"
This was pre-Snowden, but after the at&t leaks, and they didn't believe NSA universal surveillance was possible inside the US. Maybe their tunes have changed. Anyway, maybe that demographic is the type of 'mainstream democrats' you are talking about. Is it some other group?
(I'm talking about my social circles, not trying to stereotype entire states, regions, though the above reads that way no matter how I word it)
edit: I see you live in DC. Called it, I guess. :-(
Rounded up for what? No one I know has that fear.
I say this in all seriousness: why?
Edit: also the treatment of First Nation peoples
Saying injustices happen and are eventually rectified is one thing (which seems to be your argument), saying injustices can never happen again is something completely different.
The Japanese internment has already been trotted out as a precedent for creating a registry of American Muslims. That doesn't sound like recognizing our mistakes and making corrections to me.
I haven't talked to any climate scientists recently, but I suppose living in antarctica for a year gets you on the "maybe losing your job" list.
The "america first" chant on Friday didn't help. Neither did the "for americans" rhetoric.
It's not like other countries don't deport undocumented immigrants either whether leftist or rightist so I don't see how when the US does it it's especially denouceable. [keep in mind, that Obama deported more than W].
I've lived in other countries [China as well as Eastern Europe], and it's not uncommon for regular police to either enforce immigration themselves or cooperate with the immigration office when people overstay their visas or sneak in.
There's plenty of blame to cover both parties.
People seem more concerned that the system elected him than anything else. How bad (in this discussion, xenophobic) will the next president be?
I have noticed a profound, bipartisan disappointment with both parties.
I can understand the preoccupation that he might especially kerb people from the ME. However I see this constant conflation seemingly to scare all immigrants into thinking that the new administration is "anti-immigrant" whereas I see it as anti-illegal/undocumented immigration.
It's clear many people are _trying_ to sew division where none exists in order to advance an agenda [in the immigration case there are people who because they favor unregulated immigration do purposely conflate things in order to raise concern with legal immigrants --people completely unaffected by any new immigration laws]
When I cross a street, a simple second can separate me from getting plastered by a car or a cyclist. But it's not the same as actually being plastered by a car or a cyclist.
Don't get me wrong, mass surveillance, the continued and most likely expanded drug war, climate change skepticism, and a long list of other existential threats, all worry me, but they don't really worry me as much as housing costs, employment, not being killed by the Mexican gangs in my neighborhood, not being mugged while riding the metro, or being killed by the police because of mistaken identity and itchy trigger fingers.
Also, to clarify so there is no misunderstanding, when I mentioned Mexican gangs, I'm not using Mexican as an uniformed euphemism for Hispanic/Latino, I'm specifically talking about Mexican gangs who are active in targeting non-Mexicans, and in particular blacks, with violence to try and force us out of entire neighborhoods.
Again, this isn't to dismiss the valid concerns you've raised, just giving an example of things that concern me more immediately.
Multiple people I know (from a range of demographics) have talked to me about the concerns I tried to summarize above. None of them would post that here, so I felt obligated to speak up.
(I'm not personally worried about the stuff I mentioned, just weirded out that it is a repeated conversation)
differentness, dissent, journalism.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/21/media/donald-trump-war-with-...
Politics and positions aside, a refreshing thing about this year was seeing that someone flaunting almost all those norms can still get mass voter appeal.
(Though at the same time, the establishment on both side has reasons to love Trump: Democrats can point at his violations of norms and out-there ideas instead of addressing their own issues, and Republicans can let him soak up the media attention to reduce attention on their passing more of their generally-not-that-popular agenda.)
Keep fighting the good fight.
Good! It would have been great if this more active participation in the political process started a long time ago, but better late than never.
> The overwhelming response has been not caring
One of the reasons for this is that the focus is usually on the surveillance itself. Humans are bad a risk assessment, and most of the time common fallacy that "I have nothing to hide" is approximately correct. Like smoking, the average person is unlikely to be affected by surveillance in the short term. The accumulation of risk over time is never seen first hand.
I suggest that the important understanding that is needed to evaluate the risks of surveillance is that data never goes away. It's easy to be indifferent when you understand surveillance as an isolated event. Instead, the focus should be on growing databases that allow anyone with access to reconstruct entire lives. Practical demonstrations (like Google's map of already-collected location data) are even better.
> will embrace the expansion of the surveillance state
This is what happens when we allow problematic behavior to become normalized. Unfortunately, the too many of the people that did understand surveillance technology decided to say "I don't see any current risk" and chose convenience and features at the expense of future security.
Smoking causing cancer was substantiated by some of the strongest correlations in medical science history. Regular smoking increases cancer risk by 60x (odds ratio) in contemporary studies in the US.
I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance, or indeed nearly anything the government does. Even urban air pollution increases cancer risk by less than 2x (odds ratio). Surely eliminating urban air pollution was a huge accomplishment of government intervention. And yet look at how small that O.R. looks compared to smoking.
Smoking isn't "accumulation of risk over time." It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately.
And maybe this comes to your conflating some pop-psych notion of people being unable to assess risks with other failures of health and well-being. People are physically addicted to smoking; quitting aggravates real pain.
Nobody is "addicted" to government surveillance. In this country, pervasive surveillance could be dismantled with the stroke of a pen, much like closing Guantanamo or mass incarceration of low-level drug offenses.
Why are these orders politically difficult to achieve? I don't know, but risk assessment fallacies aren't to blame.
It's true of smoking, and it's very likely true in the case of surveillance. There aren't similar studies demonstrating this for impact of surveillance on the wellbeing of nations over periods of decades because it's totally infeasible.
However, there is a good amount of evidence that it's very dangerous (and you can come to a similar conclusion by reasoning)—so the question should be whether it's worth the risk in the face of uncertainty.
Edit: parentheses around studies relevant, I know the difference between a correctly designed controlled study and a historical observation. Point still worth making.
Of course. As westoncb pointed out, the actual risk of smoking isn't what I'm talking about. The visible damage from smoking is only seen later (i.e. when symptoms of cancer or emphysema start to appear), so it is extremely difficult for the average person to properly evaluate the risk. Humans use approximate pattern patching and heuristics when evaluating risk; this fuzzy approach to input data saves energy but fails spectacularly in some situations.
> I'm not sure where you'd observe something anything strong like that with regards to surveillance
You're exhibiting the exact problem I'm talking about: you are only considering current problems. There may not be any problems at the moment for you to observe. While that's great for today, the databases that contain an increasingly accurate profile about your activities still exists in the future. You are (severely) underestimating the risk of your data accumulating in (approximately) permanent databases if you haven't included things like:
* A judge during sentencing or parole hearing using a model that claims you are high risk because social media posts you made today correlate with the "high risk" group de jour.
* Your religious, ethic, or political group becomes the next scapegoat. Previously recorded data allows the members of that group to be easily identified "for public safety".
* On the business side, your future insurance company raising your rates because prohibited information (e.g. ethnicity, income) could be inferred from the data you are currently generating.
Those are just a few of the obvious risks that we know about. As time progresses, more risks will be discovered.
> "addicted"
That aspect of smoking is entirely orthogonal to my point. Smoking is merely one obvious example of poor risk estimation.
> It's an absolutely horrible thing you start doing to your body immediately.
Yes. It's a damaging process that wont be easily visible to the average person when they are subconsciously judging the effects of their previous cigarette and if they should buy more. Over the last few decades we have had some success at educating people about the actual risks to counteract these common errors in perceived risk, which is exactly what we need to do for data sharing and the surveillance problem.
Democrats are not only the main,opposition to the president; they are the force that kept adding surveillance.
Unless they like those purportedly illegitimate functions, like using the federal government to put the boot on the neck of states that are OK with gay people having rights.
I get that you're good-faithing here, but the credit bank on that one went dry a long time ago.
Avoiding that "corruption" really did a whole lot of good with the actual, literal wannabe serial-assaulting autocrat who is in office, you're so very right.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/12/13/...
House Republicans revive obscure rule that allows them to slash the pay of individual federal workers to $1:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/house...
Both have been extensively reported and are well-understood. In the interest of fairness that Trump and his cronies do not deserve, they claimed significantly after-the-fact that the former request for the names climate workers was "not authorized." This is a lie, and a bad one, and the truly damning thing is that they think--perhaps even correctly--that the lie will be taken by their listeners. "Alternative facts" (hat-tip to Trump's mouthpiece Conway for that gem) are the measure of the autocrat: make the people doubt everything to exhaust them, to instill the notion that there is no truth, and to prevent them from focusing on what you are actually doing. It provides cover when suspicions are actually aroused by something you are doing to fade away, and then it is as if it never was.
We must protect scum,because otherwise it only takes a single bullshit "this person is scum" campaign to strip a person of their rights.
if your house is burning down, would you be surprised if all anyone can talk about is fire? the US' situation is similar.
True, many of them may not appreciate the degree to which their lack of privacy is exploited for commercial purposes , but make too much of a fuss about that and people think you're a proto-communist or something. I'm very privacy-oriented by temperament but I've gotten used to being out of step with almost everyone I know over this.
That would be the 4th Amendment[1].
I really don't think that Americans have never cared about privacy; I think if that were true, we would have a different 4th Amendment. Instead, I think that the various amendments and overall content of the Constitution serve to limit the power of government, and in that regard, it behooves the individuals within the government to disregard as much of the Constitution as they can get away with, thereby acquiring more power for themselves.
That the American people have allowed the individuals within government to disregard the Constitution so flagrantly, to me this indicates a deep gap between the ideals of our predecessors and the ideals of the current generation. So, it's not that Americans have never cared about privacy, it's just that the people of today don't seem to have the political willpower to get it back.
[1] The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I'm not sure how the NSA thing is justified, especially given the executive order mentioned in the article.
The US public has had over 10 years to figure it out, blaming the government is just causing more problems, not less; to understand why it's been 10 years, Google "Room 641A", which was exposed in 2006.
Sure, there are people in America that are opposed to mass surveillance, but the bulk of Americans willfully allow it.
If you think the issue is important, do me a favor: find 10 people next week that do not believe it is an issue, help them see it is, and get them to the point that they want to help do the same thing you just did the following week.
Even if only 5 of the 10 people go on to do the same the week after, if that pattern went on for a year, by the end of the year mass surveillance would no longer exist; happy to explain, but math is a basic viral coefficient[1]; that is if only one person reading this did it and succeed, which would mean in less than three months the majority of the US would have been "converted" to supporting change.
If you are initiating anything else like this, though, I'd make one suggestion: we need some materials that can be honed in their effectiveness in communicating the danger, as what has been done to make it a reality so far. It's a complex issue, and most ad hoc attempts to explain it to a random person will end in disinterest on their part.
Seems like one wiki page for techies and one for non would be a decent approach. For the most part, it would be best to have potential teachers use the resources on the wiki rather than students—but they could hold a repository of illuminating examples, analogies etc. until effective approaches for communicating to each audience type stabilize.
Edit: probably the main benefit of this isn't making teachers more effective, but rather that it would make it easier for potential teachers to get on board. As it stands I'd need to go do a bunch more research and collect specific figures personally before I'd feel prepared to teach anyone.
The linked site is a PARODY. There is no such thing as the Domestic Surveillance Directorate, that would be the FBI. How the author of this article fell for that, I don't know.
Secondly, and this is more of a pet peeve of mine, is the "top highlight" that appears mid-way through the article. I know they aren't really comparable, but "mass surveillance is bad, but, by the way, we are totally tracking every interaction you make with this article" doesn't feel like a particularly consistent position to hold.
[1] > The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate is to 'collect all available information from all available sources all the time, every time, always.', per https://nsa.gov1.info/data/
Without comprehensively putting extreme restrictions on what people can put online, there is only ever going to be an exponentially growing trove of data to mine that reveals implications far removed from whatever whoever made it available intended to communicate.
While it may be possible to significantly cut back the amount of surveillance done on communications intended to be private, I think people need to accept that the automation of surveillance and of inferring likely connections from it are developments which irreversibly change how society functions going forward.
What's more, technology has a very persistent tendency to become accessible to more people over time. I have yet to see any reasons this wouldn't be true specifically in the case of automated surveillance. Remember the story about someone trying facial recognition to tie pictures of strangers on the subway to VKontakte profiles? That's just a small taste of the implications.
I think it's realistically possible to push back a large portion of the surveillance that invades private communications, likely by technological means more often than legal ones. And I think the article highlights that possibility, especially at a time when distrust in government is reaching a peak in America and elsewhere. That said, I'm waiting for the Pandora's box of wide access to powerful surveillance tools using publicly available information to be seen for what it is.
Realistically, I don't expect to see these programs change much until terrorism ceases to be a force in the world.
I think you're basically implying this, but I think it's worth elaborating: there is no particular reason for terrorism to cease being a force in the world if things stay grossly similar to the way they are today.
Unlike, say, war, which requires state actors to maintain aggression, terrorism requires just one individual with an idea. Even addressing root causes won't eliminate terrorism entirely. Unless people cease to be afraid (perhaps due to improved numeracy / statistical thinking), the threat of terrorism will forever loom.
There is no government without a search warrant, since no government allows privacy against the state's will.
Until you are your own king, you will always have to live under the permission of government.
I am asking because I am intellectually curious. It seems to me that _on average_ people could stand to gain from surveillance and possibly predictive algorithms for crime. I would like to better grasp the other side of the argument.
Stats make this even worse: "Sorry. The computer said we have to lock you up for your own good."
Also, the framers of the US constitution had a deep mistrust of government (they just overthrew the brits!). The right of revolution is something they teach (at least used to teach) in US schools: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_revolution
Tl;dr: If law enforcement is too effective then you can't defend yourself from unjust governments. This is why we have juries and the right to bear arms / form [state in addition to federal] militias.
EDIT: I guess your point is that the surveillance information can be used to /justify/ an attack on a citizen, so that the public accepts it. But somehow I imagine the government could already easily falsify records to do exactly that without deep troves of info?
Dragnet surveillance creates capabilities like "shoot the 1% of people in this city most likely to oppose me." A more effective / socially acceptable version is already being implemented in China. They have a number that measures how good of a citizen you are. As I understand it, it can be used to vet people for all sorts of things (employment, credit, housing, law enforcement targeting, etc).
So, now, if you say something wrong in private, you might end up begging for food on the side of the road.
Of course, the input to the score is secret; presumably it can be adjusted up or down by (abusive?) people in authority.
Even if I am wrong about the details of the Chinese system (maybe it has great checks and balances for all I know), it is easy to see how government agents could abuse such a system.
Giving a government too much access and control seems bad for both the government and the people.
> Until you are your own king, you will always have to live under the permission of government.
My complaint is that a government should exist to facilitate the well being of its people. They should have to operate under the permission of us, not the other way around.
The election of Donald Trump should shatter any illusions that the political establishment has a stranglehold on power.
I disagree with that approach to framing terrorism because attacks are not just random violence, they are responses to the specific actions or perceived actions of individuals and governments. Charlie Hebdo and the various cartoonists that have drawn political comics of Mohammed, have (to my knowledge) all found themselves at the receiving end of terrorist attacks, or at least credible threats that require them to change their way of life. Thus there are now broad topics where we don't actually have the freedom of speech that technically exists on paper.
The Charlie Hebdo attacks are much more targeted (like an assassination), and seem qualitatively different from what people typically think of when terrorism comes to mind.
Pretty much anything can be reasoned in hindsight, and we have to have tools to undo the ratcheting effect that crisis responses have historically had on public policy. It's only through the devaluing of the public interest -- some might say freedom itself has been defined down over the years -- that there is no counterbalance to it being seen as "not a great political move." We have to invent a politics that can justify the tradeoff, and that it's not in existence yet (much), is something that authoritarians know. Heck, I guess we all know it, but there still has to be a way back, because what's the alternative?
Maybe we're about to find out.
Calling all engineers! We do have the power amongst ourselves to add technical impediments to surveillance to the services we're building, and to the internet as a whole.
The technology exists to prevent surveillance, we just need to care, and to use it. Also keep in mind that net neutrality would be an automatic byproduct of an internet that prevents automatic surveillance.
> “The standard operating procedure for the Domestic Surveillance Directorate is to ‘collect all available information from all available sources all the time, every time, always.’”
This will never change, and I would go so far as to suggest it's even a reasonable position to take, from someone who's job it is to collect information for the government. What we need to do is make our internet usage unavailable to onlookers.
Let's encrypt all the things!
Now that the bulk of our most valuable “papers and effects” are online, they are vulnerable to being tracked and searched by the NSA without the agency ever securing a warrant, asking our permission, or leaving a trace.
That can to a great extent be mitigated if there was software for communities to host their own private networks, and only send signals out when necessary. The way the original telephone switching worked.
Communities would be more resilient, too, and could help each other in the event of a disaster. We should decentralize cellphone signals and power generation eventually too.
Our platform is an attempt to make a standard platform for such decentralized social networks: https://qbix.com/platform
Frankly, I am a little surprised when I see other technologists advocating for governmental/corporate/societal reform of privacy-respecting practices. It seems like a losing battle to me. We are headed toward a time when you can buy a $100 vial of drone dust at Best Buy, dump it into the air, and 30 minutes later have a live 3D video feed in every window within a 5 mile radius. Maybe it will take 100 years, but every year between now and then will be a shade closer to that reality.
Even if we could get strongly worded laws from Congress, I just don't see that stopping bad actors, inside government or out. It feels a little bit like bow-and-arrow culture trying to legislate that government agents shouldn't be allowed to use these new "gun" things. You can to legislate, but bigger forces are afoot. The physics of information is changing very fast.
One reason that leaders as diametrically opposed as Obama and Trump can be aligned on surveillance is simple: The majority of Americans don’t care.
Please, instead, use the `>` (meme arrow). While it does not add markup, it does make it significantly more readable. Thanks.
It's much older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_quoting
...and it looks suspiciously similar to the "diple" used by ancient Greeks: http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/01/30/quotati...
[1]Both parties ALSO have fairly unauthentic views, on how they will in fact, happily sell us out to a corporation for a side gig when they leave office. But they tell us they won't and that's shameful to even suggest that's what they're doing.
Even if people cared, which they don't, the govt has zero incentive to actually do anything, because increased surveillance gives them more power and more power to abuse the system.
Given how many people on here are adamant about anti-surveillance I feel like I must be missing something... like I get the overall premise but it seems to exclude a lot of important considerations...
Therefore, it is much more important to make sure we have full insight into those who have power. Sunlight is an effective disinfectant!