Mass Surveillance in the United States
wikipedia.org
wikipedia.org
Mass surveillance is a bipartisan effort. Electing a Democrat to the White House is very unlikely to change this situation. The Obama administration went above and beyond any prior presidency in its aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers to these unconstitutional activities.
FWIW, the language in Fourth Amendment is pretty clear:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, 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.
What's happening now is the very antithesis of probably cause. And everyone is the target.
The worst part of all is that zero credible evidence has been presented that a single terrorist attack has been prevented by mass surveillance.
The current crop of leftists is a combination of older people who became politically conscious before the 1980s (i.e. 50+ years old like Bernie Sanders), people burned by 2008, and people who were deeply shocked by Trump's election and started reading about the economic and political underpinnings of it, and some representatives of minorities that consistently feel the boot of oppression. Fortunately, there is some rising consciousness, but who knows where everything will go. We're in for a wild ride...
It's all very clever, really.
Especially because the last word in a lawyerly list of items is usually a catch-all designed to future-proof the law. It was meant to catch things they couldn't conceive of at the time.
I read this article a few days ago about WAMI technology, and I wasn't remotely aware of how advanced drone surveillance tech is.
In this environment will meaningful[1] political action even be possible?
[1] Meaningful as in: outside of what the government deems "permissible".
No.
Anything else you want to know?
(Triangulation of gunshots in realtime, etc.)
On the one hand we eliminate privacy, on the other we can eliminate crime.
I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle.
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As a pulled-in-the-wool tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoiac the sad thing about Snowden was that the poor kid had to flush his life down the toilet to get people to understand what we (the tinfoil hat crowd) knew goddamned well was already going on. Of course the NSA is slurping up all available data everywhere because that's what I would do.
We are not going to rollback surveillance. The folks that want to roll it back are so naive that they must be monitored by the rest of us for their own safety and ours. I wish it weren't so but there it is.
The question is do we want to become a world of Morlocks and Eloi? Or do we want to go for some sort of Star Trek future, where the sensors and computers and world-destroying weapons are governed by a strict but flexible humane and open government?
If you are a citizen of the US you have an awesome government that is open to participation at all levels, g'wan and get involved! Happy Fourth of July!
Let me try to be delicate.
Those "police" should fear ubiquitous surveillance, not you.
We have to exercise our democratic power to make sure that e.g. Internal Affairs can find and deal with criminals who have infiltrated police.
ⓑ they weren't "infiltrating" the police. They were the police. If you give people unlimited power to fuck others up, they will abuse it. If you think Internal Affairs is a solution to this, look up Serpico, and consider how many cops came before him and kept their mouths shut.
FWIW, I'm sorry we supported your dictatorship.
Here in SF our police can't steal fajitas and get away with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fajitagate
I apologize for the tasteless humor. We have had problems:
> Plaintiffs alleged mistreatment at the hands of four veteran officers, known as the "Riders", who were alleged to have kidnapped, planted evidence, and beaten citizens. Plaintiffs also alleged that the Oakland Police Department (OPD) turned a blind eye to police misconduct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_v._City_of_Oakland
Oakland PD has been under a federal babysitter ever since.
But the civil culture is still pretty messed up. Some Oakland police "rescued" a minor from her pimp and then passed her around:
> According to interviews with the victim, elected officials, and sources close to OPD, in addition to documents obtained by the Express, at least fourteen Oakland Police officers, three Richmond Police officers, and four Alameda County Sheriff's deputies had sex with the girl who goes by the name Celeste Guap.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160612121948/http://www.eastba...
And then there was the jailhouse "Fight Club" in SF:
> The San Francisco district attorney’s office dropped all criminal charges Friday against three sheriff’s deputies accused of forcing city jail inmates to fight each other in gladiator-style battles more than three years ago.
> The decision to dismiss the inmate “fight club” case comes after prosecutors said they learned the Sheriff’s Department mishandled the investigation into deputies Scott Neu, Eugene Jones and Clifford Chiba by destroying evidence and improperly conducting joint administrative and criminal investigations.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-drops-charges-i...
The common theme here is that cops are people, they do wrong sometimes, and we have systems to try to correct that when it happens. Those systems are flawed and sometimes fail completely. Rule of law takes effort. Automation should be deployed used to reduce that effort, not reinforce dictatorships. That's what I'm saying: we can't escape techno-totalitarianism so it behooves us to do the work to make it humane.
Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not? I suspect that it is.
Either way, those of us against surveillance will eventually resort to more active measures as surveillance continues to increase, which we're already seeing with things like AdNauseum. Surveillance won't "win"; it will be a constant battle that becomes more and more expensive for the watchers in terms of development time, infrastructure maintenance, replacement of damaged and outdated equipment, lost employee morale, and lost public trust. In a world of 7 billion people, we simply can't afford to feed everyone, solve the issue of climate change, manage the global economy in a way that avoids war, and maintain an effective global surveillance state in the face of active resistance. Sure, there will be pockets that are highly monitored (London/NYC/etc), but you don't have to enter those areas.
To be clear, anti-surveillance won't "win" either. This is a back-and-forth game that never ends, that of control and order versus freedom and chaos. Human nature ensures that it remains a frozen conflict.
> Can't tell if this is sarcasm or not? I suspect that it is.
No, it's not. Not even a little. I am "as serious as a heart attack".
Someone is going to occupy the "God Room". It can be good(-ish) guys or bad(-ish) guys but it can't be nobody.
The NSA are doing their (difficult and necessary) jobs.
> those of us against surveillance
...only have to fuck up once. Make one mistake and you're nicked mate.
People trying to avoid surveillance leave holes in the dataflow that pinpoint them.
> it will be a constant battle that becomes more and more expensive for the watchers
Hardly. We see it becoming exponentially cheaper in front of our eyes. Given two exponential processes in a race, the one that's faster pulls ahead exponentially. (And whole new technologies open up new methods, e.g. terahertz scanners that can read mail without touching it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation )
Nevermind that the vast majority of people simply do not care.
You really think "Anonymous" is getting better at what they do? Maybe that's why we don't hear about them much anymore? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) Forgive the sarcasm, but I hope I'm making my point?
Thinking that the "Goonies" are going to beat the NSA is so foolish that anyone who believes it is dangerously naive. Especially because the NSA is on your side. The NSA are the good guys! (By Earth standards.)
Let me ask you this: would you give up your right to privacy to prevent e.g. kragen's friend's rape by the police? I don't know about you but I would live on live webcam the rest of my life gladly if it could prevent even half of e.g. Amber Alerts (child kidnapping.)
That's the trade-off: Privacy for massively reduced crime.
My point is that the Ubiquitous Surveillance system must be recursive to prevent it's own abuses (or we will wind up with techno-dictatorship.) That's all.
Cf. Peelian principles
> In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
> In a world of 7 billion people, we simply can't afford to feed everyone, solve the issue of climate change, manage the global economy in a way that avoids war, and maintain an effective global surveillance state in the face of active resistance.
Actually we can. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could fix all our problems for about 25 billion dollars. We literally had all the answers by the mid-70's but no one fucking listens.
Anyhow, the flow of information increases wealth, ubiquitous surveillance is a net gain. We will get the "UbiSurv" capabilities as a side effect of economic development.
It's not illegal to be against surveillance. Nothing I can be "nicked" for. No drugs, nothing illegal. I am a hard target unless your benevolent watchers want to break the law and plant something on me. And there's plenty of others like me.
> People trying to avoid surveillance leave holes in the dataflow that pinpoint them.
Yes, that's why I specifically mentioned "active" measures and Ad Nauseum. When surveillance becomes pervasive, you change your strategy. The idea is to become "human chaff". Light up all the keywords, all the dashboards. Make yourself incredibly visible, ideally in a way that blends with the identities of others so they aren't even sure who you are. And most importantly, make yourself both interesting and expensive to target. This provides cover so the people doing the important work on crypto, distributed encrypted comms, etc can go on unbothered. And it's perfectly legal.
> My point is that the Ubiquitous Surveillance system must be recursive to prevent it's own abuses (or we will wind up with techno-dictatorship.) That's all.
Better hope that you're wrong. If your "exponential" surveillance were successful (it won't be), it would inevitably draw in more and more people who seek power for power's sake. The systems will eventually become corrupted, even if it takes decades. The techno-dictatorship will happen. And then, fortunately, it will eventually collapse under its own weight like all dictatorships do, after oppressing and killing countless innocents. (The model for this is the former GDR, which was the most successful surveillance and control state known to man.)
The only way your benevolent surveillance state could possibly work is the emergence of a general AI that takes over our governance systems and replaces human control. I'm not optimistic about this happening any time soon, and as there's no guarantee that such an AI would even care about us, I'm not too keen on seeing this happen in my lifetime.
You are making the same mistake that nearly all starry-eyed futurists do. Human nature rules the development and use of technology, not the other way around. We could have walked on Mars by now, but we haven't. The Internet could have brought about world peace and free global exchange of ideas, but instead we're slowly entering a new cold war. There's a reason for that.
> Human nature rules the development and use of technology, not the other way around.
No, I believe that, I just have different beliefs about human nature than you do.
If climate doesn't clobber us I'm pretty sure we'll come down on the side of governmental transparency and the rule of law. But only time will tell, eh?
But that's not what's happening here, it's not just a camera. It's a vast data aggregation network that ties together time series, high resolution photos of a large area, along with software that can follow an individual from source to destination, and then follow whoever that individual met, roll back in time and find out where they came from and went and met with, etc.
Of course this can be tied to cell, wifi, credit card purchases, face rec, internet activity and thousands of other inputs. Once that's done, it's a microscopically thin line from local cops solving crimes in the past to an oppressive government rounding up dissenters for re-education.
This is not sci fi, it's the road to global authoritarian surveillance state, and we're paving it here.
So I support police accountability body cams and people's rights to take pictures, but not the state or corporation using it for data ingest against us.
Taking a picture is fine. I can take pictures in public places constantly, pick out the top dozen or so every month and publish an art book.
The mass collection of data assigned to individuals is not. Putting a 10TB hi-res camera in a balloon and taking constant pictures of a city, tagging each person as they walk around? That is insanity.
We never had to worry about the second scenario because it was deemed impossible. It would be like a traffic cop who was able to remember every car that passed him, who was riding in it, for decades at a time. No laws had to be made for the same reason we don't outlaw flying while wearing a cape.
The collection and storage of data assigned to an individual should be under the total control of that individual, on a case-by-case, line-item individual approval process. This would allow public photography to continue the way it always has.
Maybe that's the handmaid's tale talking but sometimes things aren't as inconceivable as we'd think.
nice, so basically all communications through popular chat apps these days.
no wonder they are asking for "backdoors" :)
what happens when quantum computing decrypts these all? if it's 15 years from now, do they just throw us all in prison retroactively for something we said 15 years ago?
They're only gonna decrypt your messages if they want to throw you in prison. Welcome to arbitrary enforcement.
They will decrypt all communications, maybe, but go after the average citizen and not the senator or large donor.
> According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters, information obtained in this way is subsequently funnelled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.[168] Federal agents are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover up" where the information originated,[168] known as parallel construction.
We're all fucked and we're already in William Gibson's cyberpunk dystopia. Minus the cool drugs.
instead we have a very arbitrary channel to decide who gets to receive drugs our society produces, with all of their nasty side effects
For me, any psychoactive substance a doctor prescribes is like pharmaceutical grade krokodil
For Comparison, Google is mentioned 3 times and they probably are part of all the same programs.
If you want clues to who they really are insidious look at Cointelpro and how the police will incite peaceful gatherings into mobs to justify shutting them down and killing people.
You can stand on a soapbox and criticize until you are blue in the face, but try to make an active difference and you will be murdered like the Black Panthers.
I knew of the program you mentioned but not it’s name. Thanks for that!
Submitted it HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356021
In Mexico, gasoline prices became unregulated in 2017. Historically, governments have made oil a very sensitive national issue, so strong nation-wide opposition was expected. Except it didn't happen. The strategy was simple:
1. Organized looting began almost immediately. Looters were organized by Whatsapp, being told the time and place of the next looting.
2. Police stayed put, and some even participated in looting.
3. The press equated the looters with gasoline price hike protestors. In their narrative, looters were protestors, and vice-versa.
4. Public opinion disapproved of looting, and consequently disapproved of protestors.
5. Profit!
And we don't have another 911 may because of mass surveillance. Shall we try removing the surveillance to see whether terrorist attack increases?
Terrorism which is exacerbated by our own shadowy geopolitical agendas...
And it's ludicrous to say "We shall have a mass surveillance system or mass terrorism!", as if security theater revealed the actual effectiveness of such actions!
Do you love giving Leviathan the sword it stabs you with, the whip that scourages you, and the mouth which mocks your humanity?