The article is also empty of any reason WHY mass surveillance would not be the way forward, or even why it should not be.
This is a particularly useless article.
>The public learned about the NSA’s “PRISM” and “Upstream” programs, which involve [...] warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications on a massive scale.
The US executive branch engineered an automated, massive breach of the constitutional rights of US citizens and the rights of people abroad.
> The executive branch’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ call records had produced “little unique value”[.]
These programs have yielded almost no positive results in actually increasing security, which was their stated purpose. How much does this cost? What do we get in return? What is the chilling effect on society?
>The human toll of government surveillance is undeniable. It can have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives — particularly for communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance.
Mass surveillance programs have been adapted to routine policing matters and have served to dramatically enhance existing biases in policing against marginalized communities. Over 75% of warrantless searches conducted by US police under the auspices of the Patriot Act were for drug related offenses [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/surveillance-s...
The broader point here is that there are arguments against mass surveillance on principle, the ACLU just doesn't find them convincing.
Anyway, we have a mass surveillance program because people thought it would work. Perhaps we could have avoided the program if we had more people in that room who had effectively argued that, even if it worked, it was not to be pursued for reasons that have nothing to do with its efficacy. Sometimes principles come in handy.
Here's an example: Article 20 of The French Military Programming Law, which entered into force on 1 January 2015 against heavy criticism from civil liberties groups, gave the state full access to all unencrypted telecommunications, including SMS.
11 months later, Paris was attacked by a wave of terrorism, coordinated by... unencrypted SMS.
In response, the government... pushed through even more intrusive surveillance legislation, and coordinated a public relations push to implicate encrypted messaging providers as "complicit".
A broad society that has rendered itself completely nonthreatening to its ruling class?
A place where certain forms free expression can result in imprisonment, torture, or execution? [1]
Mass surveillance serving as the infrastructure of religious, ethnic, and political persecution, including genocide? [2]
[1] https://organharvestinvestigation.net/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide#Use_of_biometr...
Then there's this entire paragraph:
> The human toll of government surveillance is undeniable. It can have far-reaching consequences for people’s lives — particularly for communities of color, who are wrongly and disproportionately subject to surveillance. The people who feel the impact the most are Muslims, Black and Brown people, people of Asian descent, and others who have long been subject to wrongful profiling and discrimination in the name of national security. Routine surveillance is corrosive, making us feel like we are always being watched, and it chills the very kind of speech and association on which democracy depends. This spying is especially harmful because it is often feeds into a national security apparatus that puts people on watchlists, subjects them to unwarranted scrutiny by law enforcement, and allows the government to upend lives on the basis of vague, secret claims.
They don't actually come out an explicitly state it, but the idea they're getting at is that we shouldn't oppress people, particularly people who are already disadvantaged, without cause for suspicion. That would seem to be a second principle we can apply here. You can also combine this with the general ineffectiveness of said mass surveillance and use utilitarian principles to reach the same conclusion.
"We should oppose surveillance because we have privacy rights". Sounds like a tautology. It raises the question: why should we have privacy rights?
The long passage you quoted enumerates negative consequences of surveillance. We should have privacy because democracy depends on it, we should have privacy because surveillance doesn't work, surveillance is racist (how trendy), etc. What's missing, in my opinion, is an assertion that people have a fundamental right to privacy solely based on their being human. That's a natural rights perspective, I think it's indispensible, and I think it's unfortunate that we (not just the ACLU) no longer find it convincing.
As long as we justify our rights based on contingent circumstances they will always be up for debate.
Consider this: if you have rights simply because you are human, then there must be something different about humans that gives them those rights, which chimps and bonobos don't have. What is that?
I agree with you that this is linked to a distinction between humans and animals. The fact that we no longer find that distinction convincing is linked to the fact that we no longer find natural rights convincing.
Uhm consciousness?
Basically, the perpetrators were already known - there basically was already (close to) enough information to foresee serious problems (in hindsight * ), just no one connecting the dots. Adding mass surveillance to this doesn't make things easier: signals were already swamped under, that's not going to improve just by getting more data. Rather the opposite.
I don't know how this argumentation squares with the facts. But if the intelligence problem was "failure to connect dots", getting more "dots" is not a solution.
* also, hindsight is 20/20.
If you haven't already, I'd say it's definitely time to find a new defender of these sorts of issues.
They're staying silent because they agree with the policies - and you may too - but there is no denying that in terms of invasion of personal freedom it's very great and they're turning a blind eye to it.
https://www.eff.org/ for example may better fit your personal beliefs.
They are not what they used to be.
If you have fundamental disagreements around these issues you really can’t blame the organization for not doing enough. Them doing more or less isn’t the problem, them having other priorities is.
The GP is not arguing against your political positions, but pointing out that an organization which use to focus & care about one position no longer seems to.
The real change has been mostly how individuals say things that the organization may disagree with. Still, I am concerned US politics has become so divisive that the right wing is viewed how the Nazis where back in the 70’s.
As to my politics, I don’t support the ACLU. Requiring locations to host rallies they disagree with isn’t a free speech issue anymore than allowing protesters to block a freeway in rush hour would be. Protests at government buildings are different, but rallies don’t need to be allowed to block public streets.
Civil disobedience is not a bad thing.
For example on the topic of employment discrimination, one could stay silent and thus not be advocating against the right to earn a living nor the right of free association. Furthermore, one can advocate for freedom from the employment treadmill that makes most everyone need continuous centralized-flow employment in the first place (this would be necessary for the negative rights construction to have good results).
Can cops lie to suspects is another tricky one. At one end is a flat no, at the other is misrepresent themselves as the defendants lawyer or pretend to offer immunity in exchange for turning on other suspects.
For cops lying to suspects, I have a hard time seeing how that is an exercise in liberty. They're working as agents of the state, and thus need to perform the specified job - if they wish to lie, then they can quit their job. For sure there is a tradeoff involving their effectiveness versus the liberty of individuals, but that isn't a tradeoff of liberty versus liberty. For this topic, the ACLU should be in the "flat no" camp regardless of where we might want the practical boundary.
“In August 2017, officials in Charlottesville, Va., rescinded a permit for far-right groups to rally downtown in support of a statue to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Officials instead relocated the demonstration to outside the city’s core. The A.C.L.U. of Virginia argued that this violated the free speech rights of the far-right groups and won, preserving the right for the group to parade downtown.“
So while it’s scope has increased over time which has created increased internal tension, that’s always been the case. “The A.C.L.U. has in fact often gloried in its internal contentions. It split over decisions to represent the Nazis in the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s, and the Nazis in the 1970s.”
Frankly the organization has never been filled 100% with defenders of free speech the Twitter age combined with a wider scope has brought this internal tension to the general public. The important work they do is generally in the courtroom which is far more focused.