Major government surveillance revelations fail to make a big splash | Hacker News Reader

Major government surveillance revelations fail to make a big splash

thehill.com

199 pointsbaskethead83 comments

> “Facebook can try to sell you products, but Facebook can't put you in jail,” Goitein explained. “Ideological prosecution or suppression isn’t in the monetary interest of these companies.”

This is dangerously naive and less than half true. While Facebook cannot arrest you, it can cause you to be arrested for something that is absolutely not a crime. It can also financially and socially ruin you.

And it is most certainly in their financial and ideological interests to do so in many occasions.

Very much so. A (in)famous authoritarian government prosecuted (successfully) a citizen of the country (while he was overseas in both instances) for publishing a private post on his Facebook (which was critical of the government).

Source pls

IMHO, the problem with spying on citizens is that it's a double edged sword. We'd be nuts not to gather useful info on serious violations of law to improve national security (FBI) or local safety (local police). But abuse of such inherently secret info is difficult to oversee and harder still to effectively regulate.

On one hand, oversight of spying programs always reveals some details about what nfo was gathered, either as dutiful proof of its proper use to the public, or in court cases as part of the chain of evidence. But doing this inevitably reveals something about what info was gathered and how, thereby weakening the future value of that source as people (or perps) learn to mistrust it and take greater pains to protect their sensitive info.

On the other hand, NOT revealing data that was gathered invites its abuse, especially by orgs with minimal oversight (and scruples). Too often, law enforcement sees oversight of their practices as being equally as inimical as the perpetrators they pursue.

I suspect the only way to sustainably manage this dance of mistrust is to change the role of police so that oversight is built into their culture, where they know someone is always watching their back — both in offering support to help them do a sometimes impossible job, as well as in demanding that they not abuse the special authority their job demands. In terms of their access to sensitive info, this must include enforcable strictures on their special access to info that should NOT be shared with others, like the client-servant privacy privileges demanded of lawyers or doctors.

Your opinion feels a lot like "I don't have anything to hide" kind of argument. We should just not be spying on people without express probable cause. We already have built in tracking for cells phones that people don't seem to realize or care. The other point is that we've seen nothing but continued confirmation that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The police (et al) have shown that they can't be trusted with this power.

The poster's point is that even lawfully collected info is sensitive, and the forces that collect it should be structured so that spilling or misusing it would be curbed by checks and balances.

There hasn't been a check after the illegal surveillance was made public though, so it doesn't exist in reality and it is unlikely to change.

> We already have built in tracking for cells phones that people don't seem to realize or care.

It's in most cars, too.

How do you get probable cause (say, for a potential terrorist attack) without spying? People organizing mass violence tend to hide their tracks pretty well.

Personally, I think the risk of terrorist attacks is pretty low compared to other risks. But, at a certain point it needs to be addressed.

That's what "parallel construction" achieves!!

In the case of Jan 6th, people were overtly organizing it on Facebook, and this is gradually showing up in indictments.

There's a real problem that nonspecific calls for violence are both free speech and an increasingly normal part of political discourse - "someone should do something about those guys" isn't specific enough to be an actionable threat, but enough of them and they'll get turned into a stochastic terrorism event, where the mass shooter leaves a binder full of "someone should do something about those guys" messages which were his rationale.

I suspect the Fourth Amendment debate got sniped by the Defund the Police movement. They have overlap in their bases. But the latter is more radical. That turned the public away from regulating police powers.

That seems reasonable, and invites the question of whether it was deliberately planted to relieve the pressure that was building up around the Fourth, because "Defund the Police" is obviously stupid and unsustainable on its face and any reasonable person will realize this eventually.

Without an avenue of recourse, people tune out.

Eliminate choice and you eliminate thought.

Honestly, it has been this way in US politics for a long time. The government is always doing crazy scandalous things, but most people are busy with the day to day and don't know how to act on such information anyway. We are also, as Vidal said, a nation of amnesia. Most people have the attention span of a goldfish. I'm sure most people lack the historical knowledge to contextualize these government actions. They don't know that an antagonistic relationship exists between the people and government. The numerous historical and contemporary betrayals of governments against their peoples isn't in their mind. Plus, most people think they are living in some fantasy world where nothing bad can happen to them.

It's pretty dark. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

It's absolutely horrible and almost unthinkable, the scandalous and nefarious things the people in power get up to, and they remain above reproach!

The good news: This is a basic feature of civilization, and it's been like this since the dawn of humanity, and it's better now than it's ever been if you use the metric of "how happy, free, and empowered the average individual human is". [0]

At the end of the day, that metric (IMO) is the one to care about.

Yes, governments will continue to be shitty, but they're less shitty than ever before, and you as an individual will probably do better than ever before, statistically.

[0] Hans Rosling - The Best Stats You've Ever Seen https://ed.ted.com/lessons/hans-rosling-shows-the-best-stats...

edited to add source

Have you ever read "Brave New World?" Happiness and all the sundry delusions you mentioned are not good metrics. The fact of the matter is that most people have less control over their lives than ever before. Gigantic entities have seized control over most sectors of human activity.

In the short term, this corporate domination appears like a good thing. The mom and pop stores fell to Amazon and the Walmarts of the world, and consequently things got cheaper. That's a good thing...right? Cheaper goods = better lives...no?

The low cost of goods and immediate boon to our material quality of life came at a structural cost. More and more of us are being converted from independent businesses owners to employees or contractors of large corporations. Nowhere is this more evident than in the agricultural industry. "If you don't go big, you go out," a former AG secretary said of the monopolizing currents in that industry.

Prices for food went down as corporations seized more and more territory from independent farmers, but again...this came at a structural cost. In time, corporate monopolies will own all of food production.

All this translates to power and wealth being concentrated into the hands of the very few.

This means the dream of democracy is over. The average person will not have a say in his government when he is just a cog in a machine owned by the corporate caste.

Sure, the corporate caste will probably usher in a BNW type of society, and most people will be as happy as can be...but they won't really be full human beings. They will be satisfied slaves who love their servitude.

Unfortunately, this is what the common man wants...he just wants to be happy and have a full belly. He doesn't care about having the power to shape his own destiny, nor does he believe in anything higher than himself that would warrant self-sacrifice and prolonged misery.

And so we may have the society you desire--the society of the last man. Almost everyone will be happy, but some men will remain wandering and crying out in the wilderness.

Edit:

I'd also like to add an example from history which demonstrates the misuse of statistics.

Consider the period when Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Nazi regime ushered in what is called the "Economic Miracle." If you looked at the raw statistics of Germany during that period, you would think Hitler was God's gift from heaven. Not only was the economy booming, but many people bought into Hitler's magical rhetoric and became fervently hopeful for their future. It was a period of tremendous optimism and strength. The statistics show this, but they don't show the monsters lurking in the depths beneath.

In order to know the monsters of today, we need to look beyond statistics. We need to look into ourselves, into human nature, and think about what happens when so few control so much.

Maybe I can be the first to speak to the actual Wyden–Heinrich letter [1].

I hope I don't sound like a spook when I say: there's been no splash because there's no (public) substance. Having read the 70-page PCLOB report [2], I can summarize it as:

- the CIA has EO 12333 authority to perform bulk surveillance

- they use it to [redacted], including financial transactions

- they have a [redacted] internal process to review its use which potentially has some gaps and vagueness

Sens. Wyden and Heinrich probably have more shocking secret info too. But yeah, I'd expect people to not react to these vague disclosures the same way they did 2013's detailed leaks.

[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HainesBurns_Wyden...

[2] https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...

Everyone, living and dead, within the Pax Americana sphere is tracked in near real time. Including everyone's economic activity, movements, communications, relationships, interests, and affinities.

These additional disclosures merely confirm additional pieces of overall panopticon are in fact operational.

(I don't know the current state of medical record sharing. Back when I worked in healthcare IT, mid 2000s, we had datafeeds to the CDC and others for public health stuff, deaths, births. No matter; What isn't explicit can largely be inferred from other datasets.)

One darkly humorous aspect is that we're still arguing about stuff like census, gun licenses, voter registration databases, etc. Those tasks could be done with straightforward queries, with almost no errors, no drama necessary.

If the census, gun licenses, and voter registration were done as you suggest then you would simply move the drama to those other databases.

There are powerful people who can legally attempt to increase their power by introducing errors into the census. Same with voter registration. The errors and subsequent drama are purposeful!

Ever since EHR, medical insurers have been passing around historicals like hot cakes. So I'd assume if you are getting insured by an employer, every insurer has a cached copy of your medical history that can be dove either as a byproduct of their RFP process or otherwise.

Hell, I was just thinking the last couple years that if you've got a regular prescription, medical insurance is basically a leash that can be yanked in as a control mechanism.

This article reminded me of how many damn agencies we have spying on us. People regularly talk about the FBI, CIA, and NSA but there are like ten other US intelligence agencies.

The US Intelligence Community contains 17 organizations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com... and that's not counting any state or local organizations that Blueleaks showed are doing similar things. Sure Google is making it seem normal to give up our information, but it's also hard to continue being angry when you hear that the DIA and DHS are also spying on us.

While it is plausible for any of those agencies to spy on the domestic population, and it may definitely be possible that some of them need to be combined or removed, you must realize that any country will have such agencies as they have important roles, particularly for the military and law enforcement. It would be rather unwise if the FBI didn't have an intelligence branch because there's plenty of analysis to be gained from there, for example how drug cartels operate. Similarly, the DIA has an important job of accurately finding out the military capabilities of other countries. Whether they do bad/illegal things or not they are a necessary part of any government.

You're not making a great case by saying we need to stop the drug cartels that exist because of prohibition and keep track of the military capabilities of countries we probably sold arms to.

Neither of those things seem worth empowering a group to have the capability of spying on the domestic population.

How are you using the word spying here? Are you using it synonymously with the word surveillance? If the FBI conducts an investigation that may require surveillance do you consider that spying and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to do it?

Any surveillance should require specific warrants, with such requests automatically becoming public at some point. Basically follow the Fourth Amendment.

This is very wrong. Before mass communication no such thing existed and such surveillance will always end in the same way. You cannot build any sensible opposition anymore, you are already captured in a technocratic nightmare. Why would any power not research any possible opposition and dig up dirt. Even if it is faced with an opponent like Trump, where you wouldn't even need it, the establishment produced faked dossiers to discredit its opposition. You will never come back from this.

The threat from drug cartels cannot justify this and not only government intelligence knows who the stakeholders in this business are. A political solution could very well end cartels very effectively if desired.

> Another factor is that many Americans may now assume that their privacy is already shot.

This is it for me, or the apathetic part of me. After a few revelations you can infer the not yet revealed.

Hey, information wants to be free, right?

It's been going on for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

What's going to happen if there is a "big splash". Nothing. Has anyone in intelligence ever been arrested or punished for violating the law? These people are above the law.

whoa- a reference to Church, and then say "These people are above the law" without caveat.. what an awful lead up to complete compliance without complaining.. count me out

Which individuals faced any material consequences from the Church Committee? Or subsequent exposés?

you have answered yourself with the phrase "material consequences" ?

On a recent senate committee hearing about authoritarianism the US said Russia is more synchronized in their message of using propaganda and that the US needs to figure out how we can do the same.

In calling out authoritarianism their response is in order to fix it we should be more like them. The US could in the same sentence tell you why it is not okay to start war but it is okay if they do it.

Generally speaking nobody cares.

Given the modern echo chamber, unless people actively spread news/information to those who aren't usually exposed to it, it simply won't ever reach them.

That, of course, is no guarantee. There's tons of people who solely believe the mass media.

The biggest problem is, though, that apparently everyone keeps believing them again and again and again, whenever the topic switches. From one crisis to the next people literally forget that they can not and should not trust both their governments and mass media.

Fascinating, isn't it?

I'm inclined to use the word "terrifying." Some people I know call me "crazy" every time I take a position which contradicts MSM. They fully believe that the T.V. is giving them the unadulterated truth of all matters that should concern them.

I suspect the MSM engaging in coordinated lying on behalf of the powerful has been going on for at least half a century if not longer. The rise of the internet has allowed us, the audience, to independently falsify their accounts and listen to alternate perspectives, but I find it endlessly baffling that large numbers of people still just... allow their reality to be exactly what the MSM pundits tell them it is.

I suspect it's easier and comforting to not think about the terrible reality of our world, and to have an 'official' perspective is to be able to move on with your life.

There are essentially two mentalities I've observed in people around me.

1. The Optimist. Believes they live in "the best of all worlds" and everything always works out for the best--Voltare satirizes this idealism in Candide.

2. The Broken Nihilist. Believes everything is bull shit. Everyone is a liar, civilization is a scam, and all human interaction is a power struggle.

The optimist doesn't feel the need to worry about anything because they believe some magic force will make everything right for them. They thus are more susceptible to deception because they believe there can be no bad consequences of their actions...they are living a magical life in the best of all worlds...nothing can go wrong.

The nihilist, as we may suspect, is naturally immune to deception within the bounds of his reasoning capacity. This gives him an advantage over the optimist...and he always looks down upon the optimist as an idiot.

On my experience these "optimists" you describe are often raging pessimists when it comes to progressive human endeavors. And as a nihilist myself, I retreat into a study of institutions, trying to discover ways to alleviate human suffering. I do look down in disgust on these "optimists" but for very different reasons. They are the enablers of continued human suffering.

Pessimists in the sense of complacency? Like, "Oh, things are great as they are. We don't need to change anything. Everything should stay precisely as it is because the status quo os the image of right."?

Look harder. There are people acting to make the world better, optimistic at times because of the effects of taking action on ones sense of the world, and yet aware of the gap between reality and the description, aware that even self deception is possible. the middle path, so to speak

> Fascinating, isn't it?

Yes. From a human psychology POV it's absolutely fascinating (in the sense of being an open puzzle that compels one to ask deep questions).

It concerns much more than illegal mass surveillance. What is truly astonishing is the distance between the stories we tell ourselves and the reality we inhabit. It's the same denial and rationalisation that means we can cope with climate emergency.

Our age is the spectacle of the chasm. There's an enormous gulf between our mythology - what we tell ourselves about our rational civilisation, our empowerment by technology, our omniscient knowledge, our social contract, our freedom... etc - and the reality - that we have almost no basis for reason (except within narrow confines of science), are dominated by our technology, live in ignorance and fear, have torn up social contracts and become slaves to 19th century ideologies.

This is the interregnum in which you can have revelations on the scale of Snowden exposing colossal constitutional violations, and have people shrug.

>> to have an 'official' perspective is to be able to move on with your life

Except people don't. They pretend to. In reality they move on with a shadow of what approximates to life under the conditions of extraordinary dissonance. They become docile, domesticated shells of real people for whom cultural, educational, economic and spiritual life dimensions are crippled. The awareness of dominance doesn't magically vanish, it is sublimated into broad cynicism, sarcasm, duplicity and inability to trust or believe in anything.

Don't mistake tolerance for the effects being rendered harmless by wilful ignorance.

Excellent description of what's happening.

Just look at all the mentally crippled people who resort to psychoactive drugs in order to quell the raging dissonance within them. They know something is wrong, but they've been conditioned to accept the system...so the only remaining culprit is themselves...and the psychiatric machinery is there to convince them they are sick.

When I was struggling to confront our harsh reality, I just thought I was depressed. Those around me convinced me to go to the doctor and they played along. This scenario is playing out everywhere. People are being told they are sick when it's our society that is sick.

Plenty of people are also sick.

> From a human psychology POV it's absolutely fascinating (in the sense of being an open puzzle that compels one to ask deep questions).

That's exactly what I mean! :D

Some other poster pointed out it's "terrifying" too ... and he's not wrong either. lol

Great post! Thank you!

I know people at family events who will complain about Facebook spying on them and then almost immediately after the event post pictures of the family event on Facebook.

It is even more than not caring. People are willful accomplices in spying on themselves and do so compulsively. That to me is so fascinating.

It's very chilly in here.

Too afraid to discuss?

As the article says, there's little to discuss:

> First, details about the programs exposed recently are scarce. ... Snowden's disclosures, in contrast, included weeks of reporting on specific programs backed by leaked documents, making it easier for media and the public to latch onto the story.

Yeah, but once we had the proof we realized that the conspiracy theorists around the world wouldn't recognize a real conspiracy it it hit them on the head.

Why do you think the UFO and Area-51 conspiracy theories peaked around that time? Because it was always about keeping your head in the sand, while believing you are enlightened.

honestly the opposite, personally I tend to avoid these topics nowadays because I feel the discussion is very one sided and I usually just get a lot of flak when I argue that people fail to make a material case against surveillance.

I think the average person unlike a lot of active internet users values safety much higher than privacy and a lot of people fail to see any negative consequences of these programs in their day to day life. Opposition tends to be very ideological which is why it fails to make a splash as the article claims.

> taking advantage of a loophole in the Fourth Amendment

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 loophole? Also, any President may rescind any other President's executive orders. It's not like were stuck forever with President Reagan's demented privacy policies. (Don't you just love Republican cognitive dissonance? They want government to be just small enough to fit in a vagina.)

While true, the other party heavily used intelligence assets to generate fake political dossiers to discredit its opposition. That is in no way better than having a fundamentalist preacher governing your country.

The crises have piled up too high to count. We're on track to lose entire countries to rising sea levels. There's a war in the Baltic states. The pandemic is only just subsiding (again), and only in first world regions. Food insecurity is rising. Even more people are forced to migrate. We already knew the gubmint was spying on us. Just one more thing on the pile.

Efforts to make governments behave are pretty hopeless. Besides, it's not just the US that is spying on everybody. If you want privacy, you need to change your behavior and your tooling, using technology to create privacy.

MDM.. so would advertiser bs fall under any of these?

The most significant aspect of “government” surveillance is that whoever controls the surveillance also controls the government. It was clear that Trump was not in control of the surveillance state: it was working against him. Biden does not seem to have this problem, but he seems deeply compromised, https://www.foxnews.com/media/hunter-biden-scandal-cnn-msnbc..., and, because of his mental condition, it’s clear he’s not the real executive who’s running the country.

> It was clear that Trump was not in control of the surveillance state: it was working against him

> because of his [Biden's] mental condition

Can you please expand on these?

> It was clear that Trump was not in control of the surveillance state: it was working against him

The Russian collusion narrative comes to mind. There was so much momentum behind it that at the time I assumed it was true, as well. I naively believed there was a class of patriotic, more or less selfless bureaucrats in the IC and DOJ (Comey, Clapper, etc.) that was more intent on preserving the democratic system and the stated principles of their organizations than pursuing any political agenda.

The results of the Mueller investigation and subsequent disclosures have thoroughly disabused me of that notion. I didn't realize just how stacked the deck was against Trump until watching them successfully bury the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election [0] where they astonishingly managed to discredit and bury a massive news story without ever denying any of the contents were true by saying nothing more than "it seems like something Russia would do".

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-... "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say"

The fact that the US intelligence services were undermining Trump was obvious to anyone paying attention to headlines. Here is a specific example: the FBI submitted a false affidavit to the FISA court so that they could spy on Carter Page, https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/12/17/politics/fisa-court-slams..., and through Page probably the President, since a wiretap allows listening on other people up to two hops away. https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/485072-was-president...

Biden’s mental decline is obvious. See for example https://nypost.com/2021/12/03/joe-bidens-made-up-stories-and..., https://youtu.be/9ssNav3MnBg.

The biggest power the media has isn't even to make you believe an active lie. It's the power to bury a story by simply neglecting it, and filling the media space with their own choices.

The media is actively on the side of you living under heavy government surveillance.

Act accordingly.

Consume even more Soma?

No its not, the larger media is the original "for pay algorithm" that shows you what ever makes you engage with their platform more (subscription & ad supported). There is no conspiracy or man behind the curtain.

Simply put, complex stories resonate deeply with a small group and not at all with the majority. What you get from that is the current media landscape. Surveillance is a very complicated technical and moral story that only the smallest group cares about.

> the larger media is the original

Concentration of media ownership has not been a constant factor over the past several decades and several laws have been changed to alter this reality in that time frame. As the purveyors of news get bought up and consolidated, it has almost certainly made this "information control" problem worse.

> Surveillance is a very complicated technical

"The government is spying on you" is not exceptionally complicated or technical. The fourth amendment is widely known and understood.

The media's willful ignorance the Epstein case implies otherwise. This was a vast criminal conspiracy involving sex, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates and Harvard University, the kind of juicy gossip that the average person goes crazy over, and the mainstream media knew about it for years, but chose not to report it.

The media was complicit in the coverup until it could be ignored no longer. They did the opposite of what an honest news media is supposed to do, and helped suppress one of the decades biggest news stories. That certainly implies something, and directly contradicts the "media just gives people what they want" meme/excuse.

There's plenty of sex related scandals that go on all the time that are 'open secrets' so to speak, another famous one being Harvey Weinstein. On one hand you can go in the conspiracy direction and say everyone was colluding to keep it secret, but on the other hand you can think about how little strong evidence there was and how these kinds of people would be very eager to sue for defamation if you accused them of anything.

Not to mention disappearances, suicides, heart attacks and plane crashes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Casolaro]

Which creates a world where powerful people can get away with crimes and the victims are ignored even after they come forward. That means actual criminal conspiracies with powerful men pulling the strings.

Also, if you think there was "little strong evidence" of what Epstein was up to, I have some good reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Legal_proceedi...

Well yes, in capitalist countries generally rich people can get away with a lot of things others can't, in fact you can broaden that to any country or organization really. I'm well aware of what went on with Epstein, and if anything that goes against the idea that he's all powerful and can get away with anything, otherwise why would there have been any case against him in the first place?

It's not Epstein that got away with it, it's all his clients, many of whom were far more wealthy and powerful than he was.

Agreed. And if you don't toe the line:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

That's fucked up.

Elon Musk has certainly done worse.

As said, people don't care. They will only push click bait because it is vastly more profitable. There is no such thing as news anymore, it is infotainment. Sowing faux outrage for profit is all.

<sarcasm> Yes, the "media" is to blame. The media that did report on the spying. </sarcasm>

Blaming "The Media" is really a cop-out. Anyone who reads anything beyond entertainment news knows about the degradation of our civil liberties, rights, and privacy over the last 20 years. It's not a secret, and "The Media" isn't covering it up.

The sad, depressing, truth is that very few people overall care. Or they only care enough to say the disagree then go about ignoring it.

Personally, I've tried to bring awareness, I've donated money to the EFF and ACLU, among other things. At this point it seems inevitable to get worse. I just wish the government would offer access or insights into the data the collect.

If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all my data. They might as well turn it into a searchable service: "I know I email bob 20 years ago, I wish I could find that recipe I gave him". Maybe, they could email me with helpful things like "Y% of people in your area who google'd X, Y and Z had prostate cancer. You should talk to your doctor".

> If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all my data. They might as well turn it into a searchable service: "I know I email bob 20 years ago, I wish I could find that recipe I gave him". Maybe, they could email me with helpful things like "Y% of people in your area who google'd X, Y and Z had prostate cancer. You should talk to your doctor".

Yeah, exactly this!! If you must know all my financial transactions, can't you at least do my taxes for me? If you already know who I am all the time, why do I need like three forms of ID to get a updated driver's license? If you can track all the phones, do you really need to ask for name and phone number when I call 911?

It's just bizarre how much data they collect and then... ignore? It didn't catch terrorists, it didn't stop the capitol storming, it doesn't stop school shootings... what exactly do they do with it all? It's like a pointless subsidy for hard drive manufacturers, where personal information goes to die.

At least Google provides useful services in exchange for all the tracking. Even Facebook has the decency to let you connect with people you might know, and help you remember what you did 10 years ago. If the government just offered useful services in exchange, millions would willingly surrender their privacy. Most of us just aren't very interesting.

This data is being collected. And stories about that are being leaked, so that people feel (slightly) watched. Nobody in any (halfway intelligent) government wants a Nazi like Gestapo or SS patrols.

They know that offensively acting against dissent would actually drive dissent. So they take a book out of Bentham's Panopticon [0] and translate it into modern society.

You know you are being watched. And you know that there is a possibility that the government can construct something out of all that data. And if there is no data about you that is even more suspicious.

So on a subliminal level the subduing effects are there. The status quo is being kept stable for the elites at least.

People listen to entertainment news, see the next villain that we are shown and are happy the government protected us from whatever danger is the new fad (either Chinese imports, Muslim terrorists, socialists or whatever floats their boat).

Media? Media is there to make money. Whatever drives advertising dollars wins.

This data collection is there to subdue society at large. Not stop any single crime. If there were no crime/school shooting/act of terrorism nobody would buy the next surveillance bill and re-elect our masters.

It's really tough, I think people care but most feel completely overwhelmed by the scope of it and have just become jaded. Every time I try bringing it up with a friend, they all say some version of "yeah I know, it's really messed up but I can't do anything about it."

I do think some of the blame lies with the media. In my lifetime they seem to have become little more than spokesmen for power. They're too scared to lose access to their meal ticket, the government sources who they regularly introduce in their reporting/propaganda with "according to government sources...", followed by some bit of strategically leaked information. It's increasingly rare for reporters to ask hard questions about much of anything, let alone pressing for answers or making a big stink about issues like this that actually matter. And when they do, the PR spokesman on the other end of the question just dodges it with a certain bullshit acuity that's rather horrifying.

> If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all my data.

The article also mentions "a defense agency buying consumer data from a third-party broker" which I somehow find even more odious, if that's possible!

Is it really the media's fault when they've reported at length about Snowden and Assange and Manning and in the end... nobody cared? Investigative journalism was THRIVING in the last few years. Trump, Kavanaugh, Epstein... can't even keep track of the scandals anymore. Did anyone care? Half the country kept voting red as before, the other half blue.

Nothing really changed, and nobody was held accountable for anything of note. The media has been reporting a LOT, people are just... outta fucks to give? It's like a mix of compassion fatigue and learned helplessness... not really sure what normal people can do when there's a class of people unaccountable to the law, the media, or anything really. Their cronies are all in business and government together, with no checks and balances. It's not the media's fault we have zero accountability for our elites.

>degradation of our civil liberties, rights...I've donated money to the EFF and ACLU

The tough part is that it's hard to find find organizations that still defend the core principles without caveats. The ACLU used to be a neutral defender of free speech, but now they seem to have lost that.

"The Times reports that at a recent ACLU event, “A law professor argued that the free-speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the ACLU. … [And] an ACLU official said it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.”

Every organization seems to get more polarized and, with that, principles may get sidelined.

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/558433-the-aclus-ci... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html

They defended free speech when free speech, as a whole, served to advance their political goals, even if specific instances of it didn't (e.g. KKK rallies).

Now that their politics are the norm, the effects of free speech are less clear, and so is the ACLU's defense of it.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles. - Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

Hypothetical: If you had a law enforcement agency spying/harassing you, what would you do? If they would make it hard to prove?

Make a web series out of it and livestream it? Have your viewers vote on what kind of donuts to send? Silly, but probably a better choice than becoming the next Ted Kaczynski.

As someone who experienced something along these lines through some kind of sloppy guilt by association (frequently computed from a cafe a drug dealer operated out of when he got busted), I don't even have to answer hypothetically.

Ignored it, made sure my ducks were in a row, and basically waited for them to lose interest - budgets for such individual surveillance are presumably finite. Eventually the most visible manned surveillance ceased occurring, IIRC it lasted at least a few months. It was a very annoying experience.

But the population-wide omnipresent automated surveillance is a different beast entirely. When it involves manpower actually watching and following someone it can't last forever.

I'm sure people are regularly being caught up in mass location and communications metadata surveillance nets thanks to their phones being in the vicinity of criminal activity like whore houses and/or illegal drug dens. The cost is so low for sustaining that kind of thing it's basically an honor system from where I'm sitting that they ever stop.

One way to make it less likely to get caught up in a mass-location harvesting case is to disable GPS on phone, especially on a non-de-googled Android phone. I'd also recommend paying with cash whenever that is an option. Another biggie is not to vote for politicians supporting public surveillance laws, and to cast an abstention vote when no anti-public-surveillance candidate is available. The abstention sends a signal to other prospective candidates that the election-winning politicians are not un-defeatable by a candidate better aligned with the voters who abstained.

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