Why do 300m people have to suffer for the boogeyman terrorist? I mean isn't this the whole point of terrorism? To get you to do things you don't want to because hey 1 in a million potential threat? Where does this stop?
This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with control and mass surveillance. It's pretty depressing.
It was already well out of hand when congress approved the patriot act as a knee jerk reaction to terrorism. That was the proverbial straw and everything since has just been gravy for the MIC and other companies milking the government teat.
Is that really the point of terrorism? Is there even such a thing as a general "point" to all terrorism? I would assume there as many different goals as there are terrorists, or at least terrorist organizations.
Rather, what's more interesting is what the people in power do to take advantage of terrorism. The policies they implement, programs they put into place, etc. Terrorism (and other external threats) can act as a convenient cover for domestic actions that would otherwise be scrutinized.
And then there are the more mundane issues. Sometimes the changes that become visible to the public come from relatively low-level managers and officials, who simply enjoy playing with a bigger budget and new toys. It's not all conspiracies in dark rooms at the top.
We have to give democracy its due as well. Just because people can vote doesn't mean we inspire the most desirable behavior in our leaders, because the masses aren't rational. Who wants to be the politician responsible for having weakened security before the next terrorist attack? It's similar to being "soft on crime." The public will hold you responsible, right or wrong.
Getting the victim to raise its defenses doesn’t have to be a goal, but it can.
Governments are fallible just like human beings. I suppose in some sense it is arrogant to believe the US will always remain a democracy and certainly other countries have much more tumultuous histories.
I still like the idea of a totally open and transparent society but without something totally incorruptible and unbiased taking the role of government it does not seem practical.
for instance, see the Stasi.
...however, if intelligence gathered were all open-access, and classification abolished, I'd be into it.
Let's say I visit a church regularly, and someone who later turns out to be a terrorist was often there at the same time. Not surprising, since houses of worship often have predictable schedules of events.
How do I prove I wasn't collaborating with the terrorist?
Interestingly merely paranoia of surveillance results in self muzzling and self imposed restrictions.
In the end the results are not conducive for societies progress.
My dad got me paranoid about surveillance. Once I grew up old enough to look more than 2 years ahead I started censoring myself because the internet never forgets and I don't want to give a dossier full of potentially incriminating data when/if we slide from democracy to dictatorship.
The upside is that social media is ruined for me forever ;). In light of recent commentary, links to depression and addiction it looks like it turned out healthier for me.
Nonetheless I'm fully aware of the level of self-censorship I tend to sustain.
The Panopticon™ claims you robbed the bank. You know you were at work, in a meeting, and your coworkers vouch for your alibi. But the Panopticon™ is "always" right, so you get fast-tracked through the courts (saves taxpayer money not to have the case dragged out) and sentenced to ten years for a crime you didn't commit (your public defender was a huge help at sentencing). Because after all, if you couldn't trust the Panopticon™, then why the hell did they spend $600 billion of taxpayer money building it?
American society was founded on the bedrock of a few principles: you're innocent until you're proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, crime is prosecuted and not prevented, your reputation can be reset by moving somewhere new and making a new beginning, and trust, faith, and forgiveness are more worthy aims than proof, evidence, and justice, for the latter can only really obtained with great difficulty and cost through the courts. Panopticons go against all these principles.
How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors?
Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem.
The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right?
[I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process].
DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable.
I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too?
Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement.
If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points.
Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?
There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged.
Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?'
The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.
We're not talking about corporate surveillance we're talking border control. Emotionally these things are connected, practically, the system is just trying to validate the eligibility of people to use travel documents.
What do you expect people are doing at country entry and exit points and do you want them to do something that works or not?
I think it's valid to say that for ideological reasons you don't really want travel documents matched against travellers properly but you do need to understand your own position properly and how that plays out politically to be able to effectively fight that battle.
Firstly, we are talking about corporate surveillance. Maybe not today, but certainly tomorrow. The Australian government is already gaging private sector interest in their facial ID database, which was quietly sneaked through legislation as an anti terror measure only 2 years ago.
Secondly, these records, and all records, inevitably reach the hands of government, corporate, and finally criminal actors - usually in that order. This is again only a question of when, not if. And with access to all that data? That goes back to my original point - we haven't even thought about the implications of having such data available. But we have had a glimpse with e.g. feds getting caught looking at data of love interests.
This isn't just 'border control'. Border control is merely one of hundreds of facets in everyday life where people are being stripped of this privacy by actors who ultimately do not represent their interests.
Are you seriously going to claim that this removal of privacy and systemic logging of everyone's life is a reasonable way to tackle border control so we can stop some terrorists from being one of America's least significant causes of death? More people die to lightning strikes every year in the US than to mishaps at border control resulting in terrorism or such.
Bearing in mind that you don't need to hook up to any external databases to do this (all the data is on the chip)
Like seriously, why would you NOT do that?
People are willing to curtail the right to keep and bear arms (and it is a right, whereas there is no official right not to be surveilled in public) for a threat which is within an order of magnitude of it; and we can only really tell what the rate is like with the current countermeasures. If the rate climbs after removing countermeasures, will your opinion change? I'd still be against pervasive surveillance if the rate went up maybe tenfold.
In other words, having a gun as last resort protection against a tyrant isn't hurting anyone the way an extra hour of unproductive scanning and associated privacy intrusions are.
Other than that, you're right.
These are two very different situations. If you fail to understand the difference then I hope you never go out into public armed, and maybe you should consider never owning anything primarily used as a weapon at all.
(In fact, the NRA itself wasn't all that upset about gun control in the fairly recent past.)
And "mass surveillance" would have meant something very different 200 years ago. Why bother writing something into the Bill of Rights when no government could possibly afford to do what they can today?
So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
It's only awkwardly-phrased if you try to read it with 2017 Standard Coastal American English and without the context of the complete document (as it is supposed to be read, evidenced by the rather broad definition of speech and the press applied to the first amendment), the intent of the drafters, and a deep understanding of the writing style and cultural influences on interpretation which affected the drafters' choice of words.
> could easily be construed differently than the NRA does today
The NRA construes the second amendment to the U.S. constitution as the Supreme Court interprets it. If you have a disagreement with the Supreme Court's interpretation and standards regarding the second amendment to the U.S. constitution, state them in terms which thoroughly challenge the painstaking review of evidence which informed their interpretation. I recommend going to the wonderful folks at Oyez, they have recordings (the official transcripts have glaring errors, including literal binary flips of meaning) of hearings and briefs for you to review and couch your disagreement in.
> designed at a time when "arms" meant something vastly more innocent than today.
This is false, don't rely on pundits to understand and accurately convey a history of the design and manufacture of arms. There were semi-automatic firearms (handguns and rifles) of arbitrary magazine capacity in manufacture at least 40 years prior (and if you include the Kalthoff repeater [which may have not been commonly known in the colonies, and requires two actions to fire], 155 or more years prior) to the drafting of the second amendment (December 1791). Furthermore, the amendment actually makes no attempt to define the type of arms covered, not even defining that they be firearms or specifically rifles or handguns or guns (cannons) or shotguns.
> So I personally would rather we focus on natural rights that reflect today's technology, rather than artificial ones from the 1790s.
The right to keep and bear arms is a natural one, because the purpose is self defense, and the common defense. Humans are defined largely by their capacity to design, build, and/or use tools, so it is obvious that access to the tools which have become essential to the natural right to defend your person would themselves warrant the same recognition.
It is a natural right to use appropriate and proportionate means to defend your property (including your life), and to retain those means in advance of such an occasion.