Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes
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I tried debating with ministers, writing op-eds, and even organizing petitions (over 1000 security, privacy and tech professionals in a couple of days) before the vote. While every informed person I know thinks it's a bad idea, and every organization consulted massively criticized it as mass surveillance, a huge majority of our nation's decision makers apparently disagreed.
Watching video from the proceedings made me realize just how few of them have any real understanding both of the practical consequences of the technical implementation, as well as of privacy in and of itself (my jaw was literally agape from some comments).
How can we do something about this sorry state of things when politicians are not only ignorant, but ignorant of their ignorance – and unwilling to listen to experts that are critical?
Besides using privacy-preserving technologies, how can we work against this on a technical level?
As the saying goes, you can't use a technical solution to fix a social problem.
One way to fix the social problem is to vote politicians out of office when they make bad decisions--not just about surveillance, but in general. People who don't have to pay a cost for bad decisions have no incentive to make better decisions.
Another way is to not give powers like this to governments in the first place. If politicians don't have decision making power at all over something, they can't harm the rest of us by making a bad decision.
It is generally impossible for a parliament to pass a law that forbids a future parliament from repealing it.
Not giving powers to governments in the first place would be something at a higher level than parliamentary. In the US, it would be something like a Constitutional amendment.
I agree that no such action, at any level, can ever be completely irreversible, in the sense that future citizens would never have to worry about the issue again. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
In the United States, either Congress or the States may adopt a proposed amendment with a 2/3 vote. However, and importantly, only the States can ratify the amendment with a 3/4 vote. This means that, in the United States, at least, "the government" itself cannot repeal amendments. It requires the approval of at least (at this time) 38 other governments.
Which means that for things like amendments, people have alot more power than they do even over Congress.
And ease of influence is not actually the metric you want to optimize for in this sort of thing.
I mean, that's a bad example because if you admit you've done drugs to a border guard (even while in a state where it's 'legal') you'll get deported. It's not really legal anywhere in the US, there's just a bunch of people doing illegal things. At best this is a case of "it's not illegal of you don't get caught" even if that's because the locals are intentionally trying not to look.
This is an example of dysfunction, not successful function, and an abject failure of federal policy and leadership.
I agree that it should be a states rights issue.
Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that Constitutional amendments usually impose some limitation on the government (Federal, and in many cases State as well). And once such an amendment is passed, it's much harder to repeal than an ordinary statute (only one US Constitutional amendment has been repealed, the one imposing Prohibition, and it's relevant that that amendment was not one that imposed a limitation on the Federal government--it gave the Federal government more power, and it got repealed).
This is a bit off-topic, but I would like to point out that if the Federal government wanted to re-instate prohibition tomorrow, it could trivially do so without a constitutional amendment. It would do so by tying highway funding to states enforcing prohibition.
The constitutional convention you mentioned basically only exists in any significant form in the UK, though the concept does exist in a lesser extent to procedural rules (standing orders) in Commonwealth-descended parliaments around the world.
I think this kind of reactive view of the problem oversimplifies the issue. Many times it's a magnitude bigger problem to undo something than doing it in the first place.
In an ideal world that would be the way to go, but I'm not so sure in this one. Those people are masters at fooling voters using the same old tricks: "collecting data helps fighting terrorists", "only those who haven't anything to hide ...", "anonimity helps pedophiles, please think of the children!" etc. So to me that battle is a lost one. Until the day they actually outlaw and prosecute the use or even mere possession of countermeasures (encrypted disks, communication protocols and connections, etc.) I think we're to the point it's time to first implement them and then maybe attempting to solve the social problem the usual ways. Hopefully someone will prove me wrong.
True, but the law is so slow that you can continue to outpace it with technology.
Humans will always always always descend into abuse of power. Always. We basically suck.
Why would they agree? The whole thing is made to profit and empower them (as government and decision makers).
Always on VPN on all devices? Clear cookies? As a side benefit, people will move away from Google too, Google does not like VPNs.
I am curious, would you mind sharing some of them?
From memory:
- Members of the committee kept stating that this bill would provide us security (without arguing how/why)
- Members of the committee kept ignoring rights-based arguments re: privacy from orgs like our DPA, Amnesty, the Norwegian Institute for Human Rights, Norwegian Society of Graduate Technical and Scientific Professionals, etc.
- Members of the committee kept suggesting that the bill would let us protect ourselves against the types of attacks we've seen on large public (petroleum, health) services
- Member of the committee kept harping about how this bill could protect us against identity-theft, hacking by extranational threat actors, etc. (despite obviously being out of legal scope)
- Member of the committee arguing with consulted bodies (incl. organizations of editors, journalists) that source protection was not about democracy or the public, but about the individual
- Comments from our Minister of Defense like: "This is not mass surveillance; It is mass storage" (mirroring arguments from Europe) and "Source protection should not be something threats to the nation can hide behind"
- Top politicians conflating privacy with securing against external threats throughout debate, and claiming that we had to remember that the Norwegian state is not "the bad guy"
- The government stating that without this bill, we'd be a less attractive collaborative partner internationally, and that most other countries have this sort of practice
- The Minister claiming that the external intelligence service needs these tools to be able to do their job at all, casting doubt on the existing of a chilling effect, claiming the ends justify the means...
It makes me realise that on some level, it's great we see countries who refuse to bow down to such 'americanisation'.
I'm certainly not advocating for countries having despotism and corruption in their own right, but on some level, we need diversity.
>In a 2010 Quebec Court of Appeal case the court stated that a password compelled from an individual by law enforcement "is inadmissible and that renders the subsequent seizure of the data unreasonable. In short, even had the seizure been preceded by judicial authorization, the law will not allow an order to be joined compelling the respondent to self-incriminate."[12]
>In a 2019 Ontario court case (R v. Shergill), the defendant was initially ordered to provide the password to unlock his phone. However, the judge concluded that providing a password would be tantamount to self-incrimination by testifying against oneself. As a result, the defendant was not compelled to provide his password.
According to the Wikipedia article cited when "Canada" is clicked, key disclosure laws don't apply which is the opposite of what the site claims.
Or am I misunderstanding something here?
one of the questions is whether passwords sent across the network are considered metadata or content.
NSA legal says passwords are metadata. which means NSA can scan all traffic for passwords and steal them and no FISA warrant is needed, nor a subpoena.
of course NSA already has a dozen programs just for extracting passwords from UPSTREAM passive collection. and presumably this means everyone in the FVEYS gets access to everyone's passwords, since they pool their capabilities and collection.
whatever the Courts rule about local cops and passwords, it doesnt apply at the level of SIGINT collection, which enjoys its own separate and secret system of laws.
Anyway, the point is that the website claims canadian courts can lawfully demand your password/key (key disclosure law) even though the reference cited (Wikipedia) says the exact opposite.
One part that isn’t mentioned in the article though is how the Canadian legal system would handle someone who has password-protected records about someone else. For example, you and I are friends, and I am on trial. Would the courts be able to subpoena your iMessage history with me? If you refused to provide your password, would you be charged with contempt? It’s not an 11(c) situation, because you’re not being compelled to be a witness against yourself.
https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2014/02/09/nsa-maintains-...
Are there any guides out there that consider all the means by which you can attempt to shield yourself from these intrusions, including a description of the attack vectors?
The best way is, of course, to not use technology. But that's not worth it to most folks.
If your threat vector is general dragnet government surveillance over the entire populous, you're fighting against a shadows. Basically all we know of these techniques come from Snowden. Assume all internet data is logged, whether encrypted or not, and they have direct access to the ISP infrastructure. Room 641A shows the USA has been at this since 2006[0]. Even if your messages are encrypted, it's possible the agency has a 0day. For example, the NSA had decrypted all BBM traffic which was advertised as encrypted. The lesson here is avoid new and popular tools. Instead, just use PGP or other arcane yet reliable encryption methods. If everyone used PGP, I bet the NSA would exploit it too. Don't use a smart phone at all. Using bootable Linux USB of something like Tails on a public computer is probably the best bet, but unsustainable. Even Tails and TOR isn't perfect but it's miles better than Windows, Mac, ChromeOS.
If your threat vector is a specific intelligence agency spying on you, (i.e. an APT), you have already lost. I don't think it even makes sense to try and protect against this level of threat. It's like worrying about a tank coming through your frontdoor.
If your threat vector is private companies spying on you (be it Facebooks or even private intelligence companies), you have a lot more power here. Besides ISPs, private companies don't own the infrastructure and are not legally allowed to use 0days like the NSA is. In general, end to end encryption is sufficient here.
It's all a sliding scale of compromise between security and convenience.
Rather imagine Sauron eyes.
The asymmetry of the information gives those in power great advantage over public. The rich and powerful claim, we monitor you to protect you, and to better serve you. The scope and the characteristics of the surveillance, the incentives and the historical evidence don’t support this claim. The harm is far more than potential benefits. The public should reread David Hume and stand up against this threat.
If I am an organization that is well known to be spying on everyone and anything, that means I can very convincingly fabricate evidence against my enemies. It goes beyond simple spying, they now have the ability to manufacture whatever truth they'd like.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect#Chilling_effec...
I think the tech community in particular (with both the awareness and the means) has a duty to the public to make clear what is going on to those less tuned in.
So far, it has failed in that to a rather astonishing degree. Probably for exactly the reasons yourself and the OP describe.
This is one of the fundamental issues that I have with this proliferation of population-scale mass-surveillance (domestically in the US and abroad). It will not lead us into any sort of light, despite the promises about safety or less kiddie pr0n or whatever.
That's ok, responsible people will take care of it while you're busy supporting fascism.
Snowden, Assange? They've both talk(ed) at great length about the perils of a Society that will self-censor due to the fear of retribution that follows when everything one has said be it in text/phone/online is constantly held in bulk collection.
Moreover, if anyone has followed what has occurred in China where dissenters are forced into re-education black op sites and are forced into public apologies, or in other cases they're disappeared altogether, you have what then appears like a very forceful form of cohesive group think.
This occurred in HK prior to the passing of the NSL, people were essentially trying to scrub their online presence for fear of retroactive punishment from the CCP [1], who only hours after forcefully passing the bill to great local and international condemnation, started to arrest 'violators.'
Which gives the CCP the appearance of a forceful enforcer of its policy writ large, at least on the surface with low hanging fruit like journalists and physicians speaking out about COVID on the mainland, but in reality China is wrought with seemingly permissible corruption provided you have any connection to the CCP.
In this respect this isn't a East Vs West issue, but rather one of the oppressed and the oppressors, if Government is to exist at all, I think a mandate of constant surveillance and absolute financial transparency should be in order.
I fear Humanity refuses to accept we must create alternatives to the Nation State model, which this pandemic and economic crises has clearly demonstrated to have failed in every conceivable metric. There are outliers, but they tend to be more city-states, which I'm not entirely averse to but can also have the very same entrenched power traps that the nation state model has.
If anyone has the time I highly recommend Snowden s recent talk with Naomi Kilne on Vice [2] discussing the path forward to circumvent the Surveillance State/Economy that has been created by the Tech Industry that has only been incredibly sped up in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic and the protest against police violence/crime.
At the end the people talent, many of whom hang out here, are the one's that build this tech not the corrupt politician(s), nor the VC big wig. Having them re-evaluate their positions is critical moving forward, as both conclude that this much needed detour will simply not occur from the Leadership.
1: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Hong-Kongers-erase-digital-...
Are you referencing something specific?
> This occurred in HK prior to the passing of the NSL, people were essentially trying to scrub their online presence for fear of retroactive punishment from the CCP
Not saying we should take their word for it but the letter of the law says it's not retroactive. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3089166.... Do you have primary sources demonstrating otherwise?
Take your pick [1], (Li Zehua is worth noting) but they all stem from the same intimidation factor from the CCP, explicit documented details of the Mainlander examples are harder to track down using basic google searches, but they're out there if you look for it. I recommended a documentary called 'High Tech, Low Life' for first hand accounts of these in citizen journalism as they're being harrased by police, and one even has his passport revoked prior to boarding a plane to speak about censorship in the media in China.
I saw a few of those first hand videos they make re-posted as gifs of mainlander women who denounced the CCP/Xi on social media in the past and are often simply reading from a script lambasting themselves as 'selfish' and an 'unruly, ungrateful child' of China. Are you seriously not aware that something as simple as being a follower of Falun gong was cause to be sent to the supposed 300+ re-education camps [2] for this 'crime.'
The 'education' system in the mainland re-enforces that, as well. Compliance is not a choice, its demanded of you.
> Do you have primary sources demonstrating otherwise?
This specific case: where hired triads were not prosecuted but high profile Hongkongers are is a blatant example that it is in fact retro-active [3]. Lam Cheuk Ting, and 16 others have been arrested for their 'involvement' (which is to say recording others on the train being beaten on by unmasked assailants who went unpunished) in last year's 721 attack.
1: https://www.google.com/search?q=Chinese+citizens+forced+publ...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_through_labor
3: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/world/asia/hongkong-arres...
Sidenote: I may be arguing with a wumao, but I wrote this mainly for the benefit of anyone doubting this occurs at the hands of the CCP, as this poster has clearly tried to argue his pro CCP stance in his post history, in the hope that some of you FAANG workers come to realize what the implications of what you're building can look like in the hands of tyrannical governments. The US is far from innocent on the abuses of power throughout domestically and areound the World, but at least redress is a possible, albeit mainly from a lengthy and costly process that entails a significant and risky undertaking.
This removes the asymmetry and it also makes surveillance less attractive in the first place, because those responsible for the surveillance would be forced to expose surveillance records about themselves.
I'm fairly sure they already are. Any records of interest get some sort of classified label preventing their release until long past when they matter.
I would agree that a person ought to be able to see whatever surveillance records exist on themselves.
However, allowing any member of the public to see all surveillance records, on anyone, strikes me as just compounding the problem--now my private information isn't just seen by the government, it's seen by everybody.
Right, but that's why no reasonable congressman would want your information, because that would also make his/hers available just like yours. The result would be that sensitive personal information would be very unlikely to be collected.
I don't think so; I think the result would be that people who had the power would simply bend the rules behind the scenes to make sure any information they didn't want revealed wasn't revealed, much as they do now.
You're welcome to let all of your private information out for everyone to see if that's what you believe. But people like me who do not want to do that should not be forced to.
> The sooner we adapt with the life where all surveillance records is public the better.
I strongly disagree.
I don't necessarily want to, I'm just being realistic and pragmatic.
>But people like me who do not want to do that should not be forced to.
No one is forced to but the inconvenience and the cost of keeping thing private will go up and up.
Being realistic and pragmatic doesn't need to mean being defeatist.
> the inconvenience and the cost of keeping thing private will go up and up
Only if citizens let governments continue to increase their surveillance activities with no oversight and no pushback.
Whether its done through less privacy or more privacy doesn't really matter.
>Only if citizens let governments continue to increase their surveillance activities with no oversight and no pushback
I would rather push for more openness and transparency, open up the surveillance for everyone to reduce the information asymmetries.
Or pushing for technology that enable citizen to survilance the government.
Does it though? I mean, I feel that trite little saying misses the point. Even in normal society we have obfuscation, camouflage, deception, data dumping, signalling.
Plus data isn't just something one generates and consumes ad infinitum. It takes resources, those resources generate additional layers of data, and then the reciever/ interpreter requires both different levels of sophistication, sensitivity and mutually exclusive risk/reward trade offs in how to access, use and interpret said data.
Already there is more information available on most people than any individual can access or consume. I don't think having "even more" is going to solve any problem...
perhaps it's more accurate to say information is like water. Its generally leaky and gets everywhere, but that doesn't mean that lakes and rivers don't form. And while it's notionally plentiful, that doesn't mean it's equally accessible or utilised by everyone or that different players don't have equal levels of ability to exploit it.
It is possible that power does not corrupt. If you generally agree with the forbes most powerful people list [0], it has people like the Pope, Bill Gates and Antonio Guterres as well.
>> If anything, history proves that, on average, those with more money are _less_ethical_
This would also include a lot of HNers who work in FAANGs of the world since they are the people with more money than at least 80% of the world. The giving pledge[1] is also evidence to the contrary. Can you cite some sources to support your claims?
There are many uses of intelligence and not all of it benefits the rich and powerful. To pretend that the intelligence world exists solely to provide tips to the well connected is ridiculous. It's not that it doesn't, it's just not that black and white.
The world is far more nuanced compared to your abstracted sweeping examples.
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www.privacytools.io. 1395 IN A 135.181.7.217We often hear a lot of 'information' (bordering propaganda), about China being an "authoritarian surveillance state". I don't mean to sound absurd, but is the US that much better in terms of authoritarianism or surveillance? If so, why?
China is in another league. They are using deep packet inspection to block services they don’t allow access to, they force some people to install apps on their phone that track them. The great firewall of China is far more visible and impactful than the real Great Wall of China.
There are three somewhat current reports on there. One comes from the US State department, one from an organization started by Eleanor Roosevelt with strong US ties, and one lists both China and the US as "enemies of the internet."
> The fact that if a piece of evidence is acquired against you in an unlawful way it cannot be used against you in court as a US citizen
The US has repeatedly manufactured and framed political dissidents when it has felt politically threatened historically. Those rights you're talking about were useless to them.
You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc.
> What good does the right to free speech do you if your speech is inconsequential?
Speech is never inconsequential. Even a one on one conversation can have a profound impact on another person. It's up to you to get your ideas out there and to compete in a diverse marketplace of ideas. That's the way it works.
> The US has repeatedly manufactured and framed political dissidents when it has felt politically threatened historically. Those rights you're talking about were useless to them.
Not generally, no. But sure, there are corrupt people in Government, no doubt. And that corruption has even been levied against a duly elected president of the United States (Trump vs the Obama FBI/CIA spygate). The existence of imperfection in the system is not proof of the system's uselessness.
"n December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them."
"In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence."
Look I'm no fan of drone strikes in general, but if you leave the United States to go join a terrorist organization and incite violence against the U.S. and other innocent people in other countries like Somalia..you clearly have lost Constitutional protection. We don't give trials for foreign terrorists or armies, that's a given.
So if I accuse you of a bad enough crime due process doesn't matter? Seems like a pretty easy loophole to exploit. And even if you can justify stripping al-Awlaki of his rights, it's pretty hard to justify killing his US citizen 16 year old son.
Without a trial this can only be considered an accusation. The US government claims this, many other people claim he was never part of a terrorist group. Living in Yemen is not a crime.
>incite acts of terrorism against America and other civilians in Yemen and Somalia, yes, it doesn't fucking matter.
Not only are the claims that he "incited terrorism" overblown, his right to free speech allows him to make such declarations.
Who knows? The last guy who touched upon it had to hide in freedom-loving Russia afterwards.
The PRC has it easy. They don't have to hide their actions behind contortions of "national security", which makes it difficult to compare the extent and pervasiveness of US and PRC surveillance.
On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also available in China?
This is only as I understand it, but technically, yes.
People like to think that the Chinese Communist Party is a single body with a single well-defined set of ideas.
It's not.
It's perfectly possible for academics and even party politicians to utter criticism of the current party direction. They can, for example, advocate the return of fundamental Maoism, or advocate free market mechanisms. As long as you can argue a point of view that lies within the party's tenets, there is usually no problem.
It's different when:
- you are a person of influence.
and
- you argue against the stability of the country (where, conveniently, the CCP is seen as the most important stabilising force in mainland China (by the CCP)).
I don't know if a Chinese Chomsky exists. I have the impression that if he would exist, he would be marginalised by the media, or some of his ideas would be adopted and used in some splintered minority faction of the CCP and hailed as a great but impractical thinker, and mostly ignored.
Secondly and much more fundamentally, even if they made such arguments, at no point could they get away with simply advocating for the full removal of the CCP's monopoly on political power.
That's a no-go and it's also something that defines a huge difference between China and, say, the U.S, where an academic or media personality or pretty much anyone can freely advocate all kinds of stuff against the political system without having to phrase it in any particularly careful way.
This includes being able to state that the Republican/Democrat duopoloy is a piece of ineffective garbage and needs to be removed. They might face some social backlash from fans of opposing views but they won't have their legal, financial or human standing destroyed by the government through literal punishments.
Reaction to criticism and dissidence not really a principled stand in the eyes of a state. The way the US clamped down hard on leftist political groups and organizations during the Cold War is rather the actions of a country believing itself to be threatened by instability and unrest. Political figures who fronted harsh criticisms against the government have routinely been assassinated or framed and arrested. COINTELPRO is a program which shows how political repression works the US when it feels politically vulnerable.
It is also unlikely they even know what happens in china to a good extent because china itself is not very communicative; they still report the same covid stats since march, for example, and their government websites are full of broken links. It is hard for me to get accurate info on china even from news sites, I wouldn't trust what most people say.
All that said I think China is worse, but Americans would have you believe the difference is gigantic.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort
Foreign spy agencies, even of friendly countries, are our enemies due to their continual mission of attacking us with surveillance. But rather than working to defend the people against these attacks, NSA has chosen to conspire with the attackers!
in the Snowden leaks, there was a GCHQ document about their policies for targetting US Persons using data shared with them from NSA. GCHQ is not allowed to indiscriminantly spy on US Persons. the document, marked classified as STRAP1, clearly orders GCHQ to apply US laws when targetting US Persons. which means "reasonable, articulable suspicion" before firing up XKEYSCORE and searching for everything a US Person has done in their life.
sadly, the reverse is not the same, since the UK has very weak privacy laws compared to the US. NSA can search for anything about any UK citizen without needing some form of probable cause. the Official Secrets Act and RIPA makes the UK into a quasi-dictatorship IMHO, which explains why we see the native population of the UK being so heavily subjugated by their Lords and Royals.
part of the SIGINT sharing agreement between NSA and GCHQ is that data will only be shared as long as these rules are enforced. so the myth that the FVEYS is a backdoor to circumvent the law and allow foreign intel to mutually spy on each other's domestic populations is a myth.
however, this assumes the FVEYS actually obey the rules in this document. how would we know if they dont? impossible for us uncleared civilians. for all we know, there are more layers of secret laws that allow FVEYS to ignore any and all of the checks and balances intended to limit their abuse of the SIGINT system.
that's the problem with secret laws. once you have them, nobody can trust anything about your entire legal system and you become a tyranny.
https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/uku...
it has bothered me deeply that the UKUSA agreement itself was only declassified in 2013, most likely because of Snowden. keeping the existence of the FVEYS secret for 69 years does seem to me like an attempt to cover up treason.
pre-Snowden, when we talked about a Deep State existing at all, and when we quoted Rockefeller saying the world will be run by a supra-international clique of wealthy and politically powerful elites who transcend nations--the "Globalists", we were mocked as tinfoil hat wearing Conspiracy Theorists.
"Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." -- K, Men In Black
that leaves only one option.
acceleration.
i have slowly become convinced that the only solution to mass surveillance is to expand it as fast and as large as possible, in order to trigger a "Sum of All Fears" scale event, a spying scandal that eclipses all prior scandals, and which outrages hundreds of millions of people like never before. faith in govt and Democracy itself will be shaken and may not survive. that is merely the cost of restoring equillibrium and justice.
Yep. I've spent most of my life searching for solutions that don't require that level of excess, but the problem is, it is a feature of human cognition that we don't learn until we are forced to (more precisely, we do not fix social, economic and political problems until something so extreme comes along that we can't ignore them anymore, usually due to some version of a threat to survival). E.g. - consequences.
The alternative is the boiled frog, and yet another feature of human cognition is the ability to normalize our conditions. If something goes on long enough, it'll simply become "the way things are" and go unchallenged. You avoid this by flashing quickly to the worst outcome so people realize that it exists.
This is a long way of saying "Humans perceive consequences on short timescales, not long ones" and it really, really sucks.
I think us in the EU are due for a Snowden moment at some point here - the public is pretty in the dark on the level of surveillance pervading EU countries. I think it would be better if it was more transparent because we could actually have these discussions and work to prevent abuses.
No, I don't think we should just "realize" that. By all means, let's have a discussion; but to accept a priori that some form of surveillance is acceptable reeks of an outlook that has already given up. We should not be fearful and dependent, but rather willing to accept danger as the price of no one looking over our shoulders.
I am specifically arguing that we do not (should not) accept a priori the premise that surveillance is not necessarily bad.
To do so is to capitulate the entire argument against surveillance, and reduce our fight for privacy to nothing more than weighing lesser evils.
If you are interested in negotiating for minor concessions with entities who have demonstrated a willingness to work outside the law (and write new laws where needed), then your pragmatism will boil you slowly.
Is it? Please demonstrate it by listing terrorist incidents prevented or active terrorists caught due to surveillance other than narrowly-targeted police investigation, or military action in an active combat zone.
To qualify, the use of broad surveillance should be a necessary component of the investigation, i.e. the investigation would not have started or reached the conclusion it did without it. If some of these exist but they're all classified, that's problematic from the perspective of democracy because it prevents the public from making an informed decision about their merit.
"It's too secret to tell the public in broad terms a decade after the investigation is over" strikes me as incompatible with democracy. Questionably-legal surveillance also strikes me as incompatible with democracy outside of short-term use in exceptional emergency conditions, which should be disclosed to the public once the emergency is over.
It is if you're not going to accept a priori the claim that surveillance can be justified. If you need to have it demonstrated that surveillance can be justified, the only possible grounds for such a demonstration is to show the people the benefits--the actual harms that surveillance has prevented. If we the people can't see those benefits, how can we possibly judge whether or not surveillance can be justified?
In other words, the government of any free society is in a kind of Catch-22 position with regard to surveillance: it can't be justified to the people without revealing that it's happening and what it's discovering, but revealing those things destroys the usefulness of the surveillance. The only choices are to not permit the surveillance at all, or to accept an unavoidable loss of freedom--as a citizen, you will never be able to know whether the surveillance your government is conducting is justified. You just have to accept it.
Fill in the blank, masters. Maximize our security.
There are likely forms of eugenics that have the same cost/benefit characteristics as the forms of surveillance to which we've alluded. We know that the legalization of abortion has the long-term effect of reducing crime, so what about laws that make abortions easier to access when the fetus has certain genetic characteristics associated with disabilities? Or with psychopathy? "NO!" is the resounding response. "THAT'S EVIL!" And a good thing too, because it's probably the only reliably way to hold the line against policies that really are murderously bad. We don't debate practical eugenics. We muse about it in fiction and hypothetical scenarios, but we don't debate it in politics. We reject it because it's wrong. It's wrong because it is.
Surveillance policy should be met with this same sort of rallied opposing force. Write books about it, discuss it in an academic space, try to imagine ways in which it could do more good than bad; fine. But propose surveillance policy in the real world, and the response should be: "NO! THAT'S EVIL!"
You won't find a more powerful force than moral outrage. It doesn't need to be worked around, it needs to be channeled. On the one side, you will have people channeling their outrage towards criminals and terrorists. On the other side, you must have people channeling their outrage towards the idea of using espionage against civilians. A compromise involving "only the good kinds" of surveillance is unacceptable, because it allows the side that's rallying against criminals and terrorists to continue using moral arguments, while the side opposing them is neutered and can only make comparatively weak arguments. It's nearly impossible to successfully argue that something is morally wrong if it's already the status quo. Why is it so easy to say slavery is wrong now when it was so hotly debated in the 17th century? Same question applies to eugenics, once a topic of much political discussion. We're in that boat with surveillance right now. It feels normal to be spied on, and the uncompromising argument that surveillance is totally morally abhorrent in all its forms sounds extreme, and you'd never hear it made by a sitting politician.
Also it is not about crime, is about control, for whatever agenda they have now or later. And the lack of Snowden level leaks in 7 years hints at which point they have control now.
Take a look at the past 20 years. Your argument is hollow. Ladens don't keep diaries on Facebook, and foreign spooks don't use email, no, they don't use computers as such.
With the amount of silly foreign policy blunders in between the EU, and the US shows more than anything that US doesn't seem to benefit at all from wiretapping governments of their allies.
That whole premise is invalid.