Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?
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At least in turn, we could get a level of insight into how much these warrants are used, and keep those in power accountable.
Bar charts for events the surveillance program helped with:
y = count of terrorist plots stopped, x = time bucket
y = cost of surveillance programs, x = time bucket
y = count of petty crimes caught, x = time bucket
y = count of total analyst caught abusing power, x = time bucket
y = count of total Americans profiles, x = time bucket
y = count of total world wide profiles, x = time bucket
y = count of illegal immigration caught, x = time bucket
After all, the big enshittification of internet which is popular topic here is based on metrics of ad networks effectiveness.
Fictional, but it makes a poignant point about needing to deeply understand how metrics are collected and recorded to be confident in the conclusions drawn from them.
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw>
The statistics discussion begins at about 8 minutes, and continues for much of the discussion and Q&A.
I'd seen that long before watching The Wire itself, and in fact the lecture was a large part of the reason I wanted to watch the series.
(Poor quality audio and a very distracting speaking manner. Still very much worth listening to.)
So, no. Please don’t give me BS charts and graphs to make it easier for fed-apologists to point and play security theater.
Their metrics generating and promoting departments will have field day with this. Endless reports, case studies etc, a whole industry will pop up gorging on tax payer dollars for this "metrics" task.
The surveillance complex has been pretty good at using secrecy, and perhaps even good internal controls, to limit everyday impact.
How can we find real harms to win this fight? Or how can we get people to care?
While I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, one should be clear about the tradeoff. One of the government's primary duties is to keep citizens secure, from crime, terrorism, etc. That is the argument that is used to justify the legal authority to surveil. It's not enough to just say "protect our rights"--the whole point is that there is a tradeoff of rights. Protecting you against crime and terrorism is also protecting your rights--your right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, if nothing else. So one can't just say "no surveillance" and leave it at that; one has to make a case for why the existing tradeoff of rights is the wrong one and should be changed.
Also on the subject of rights, the US Bill Rights recognizes the need for things like surveillance, searches, seizures, etc. That's why the Fourth Amendment doesn't say "no surveillance, period". It just requires that there is a warrant that specifies particular information. So if the proper tradeoff is what the Fourth Amendment describes, that's not "no surveillance". It's just stopping the abuses of the warrant process.
The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public without requesting a warrant with clear details on what they're looking for and where they can look.
Personally I have a much higher bar than most and think view the tradeoffs of privacy invasion rarely worth it, though I also don't expect our government to protect me in any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow citizens for that instead. There's a whole discussion there related to the surveillance and military state we live in today, but that probably veers way to far off topic.
Yes, if we restrict discussion to warrantless surveillance then I think the restrictions ought to be much tighter.
> I also don't expect our government to protect me in any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow citizens for that instead.
In some respects this is already part of our legal framework: for example, there have been multiple court rulings at multiple levels that the police do not have a duty to protect individual citizens from crime.
However, the public policies adopted by the government regarding crime can have a huge effect on overall crime rates, which in turn affects how much you need* a means of protection other than the government's overall police powers. This is more a matter of state and local governments than federal, but even here federal policies have an effect.
Also, I didn't limit government protection to police vs. ordinary crime. Government also has responsibility for national defense, border control, gathering intelligence abroad, preventing terrorism, etc.
Sounds like we largely agree on the earlier points, this where it gets to my admittedly less common/popular opinions. I don't agree with standing militaries, if we're under direct threat and our people are willing to fight then the government's role should be to coordinate and supply this effort.
I also don't agree with most border controls, before enforcing solid borders we should have melted down the Statue of Liberty and sent it back to France (who ironically also doesn't believe in sending them your hungry, poor, or weak anymore). We continue to chase our tails attempting to close borders but never seriously consider the motivations leading to mass migration. If we can't feasibly close our borders we need to reconsider whether entitlement programs are worth the tradeoff and sustainable when someone can walk across the border and add to those budgets. I really don't mean to say I have the answer on what we should do, only that there's a fundamental challenge between wanting to ensure access to what we deem as core necessities when all it takes is physically being here and we can't effectively control borders.
With regards to terrorism, I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means. Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions. If we only learned one lesson from two decades of war in Afghanistan it should be that, when it comes to non-state actors, cutting off one head does in fact lead to multiple new heads popping up.
The libertarian in me doesn't either. The realist in me isn't sure we can just stand them down in our current world.
> I also don't agree with most border controls
The libertarian in me would agree with this too, but only in the libertarian version of the US where we don't have a welfare state (which, historically, was the condition under which all previous immigrants to the US came here). You appear to have a similar view.
> I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means.
I don't think this is true. What is true that, to defeat terrorism militarily, you have to be willing to let your military do whatever is necessary to accomplish that mission, rather than hamstringing it with completely unrealistic rules of engagement. The French, for example, had no trouble defeating terrorism in Algeria militarily. They did it by, for example, not caring about how much civilian collateral damage was caused when the terrorists used civilians as human shields.
The obstacles to, for example, doing in Afghanistan what the French did in Algeria are political, not military.
> Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions.
Yes, and also by convincing the population, most of whom are not terrorists, that the terrorists are going to lose. If your military gets excoriated in the press every time a civilian is killed as collateral damage, then not just the terrorists, but the civilian population in their country, will understand that the terrorists are not going to lose--because you don't have the political will to defeat them.
Once issue is that people have to understand that even if you have nothing to hide, it doesn't matter. This level of surveillance is all about parallel construction. It's not meant to catch you in the act of doing something illegal, it's meant to give the government the tools they need to build (fabricate, even) a case against anyone they decide to target.
Another issue is the media, and how they will pretty much always toe the government line when it comes to law enforcement. Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers are way too easily painted an enemy of the state.
In general, people won't care until it affects them, and in all honesty, this likely won't.
Btw we also have similar problems with normal police officers misusing records to spy on spouses and whatnot and occasionally we find out about and the department promises stricter controls and reforms and round we go the merry go round.
This is why, despite the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, no coordinated prosecution targeting the subprime mortgage fraudsters who brought down the economy in 2008-2009 was conducted - instead, they were all bailed out with taxpayer dollars in a coordinated Republican-Democrat left-right operation. In contrast, little Iceland put 39 of its top bankers in jail for their role in that event.
It's true that an entity like the FBI is needed to police white-collar crime, because otherwise corporate conflicts over market share etc. would soon escalate into violent conflict (e.g. Mexican drug cartels, Prohibition-era alcohol distribution gangs, etc.), but they've become an organization that does more to protect the extremely wealthy white-collar criminals from prosecution than to gather evidence that would put them in jail. The fact that top-tier FBI officials so often 'retire' to lucrative private positions in Wall Street firms should serve as solid evidence that the organization is corrupt.
As far as why they want to retain warrantless surveillance powers that don't require them to go before a judge and leave any kind of evidenciary record in support of that surveillance, well, would STASI have wanted to do that in East Germany, either?
Of course, if they're traveling to the US, it's much more likely that they're communicating with Americans (e.g. visiting friends). Which means that scrutiny of Americans' conversations, swept up en masse, will dramatically increase.
If that passes, tell your friends not to visit America. Because if they do, then all your conversations with them are totally fair game for secret government review.
No wait, you’re serious?
Did you not watch the senate testimony? They have illegally spied on millions upon millions of Americans. For things as petty as “I think this girl likes me” or “I’ll show my father in law!”. No punishments much less termination or what you or I would face: jail.
So yeah, that link is a joke. There are no protections against corrupt law enforcement.
there is no non-corrupt agency
They have “legal” cover by some secret document. It’s easier to fool someone than tell them they were fooled.
Hint:
No.
"Can this headline be answered by the word 'no'?"
That's a textbook case of "lol. lmao even", if I've ever seen one.
Like another commenter said, many people were probably unconstitutionally charged via parallel construction thanks to this crap.
We no longer have a Government subservient to the people, we have a people subservient to an unelected bureaucracy.
Free Speech is the next target and it is well on it way to erroding that last freedom using code words of "mis Information", "Hate Speech", "Authoritative sources" and the like
We cannot have unprotected, open borders for decades, and then expect to identify and track foreign internal threats AND not provide the USGOV the means to detect and surveil.
We cannot assume that because we're an HN regular who thinks power corrupts (it certainly does) the cost of that corruption is greater than what we pay if/when a foreign adversary acts against the US.
We simply cannot fulfill our obligations to our citizens or our allies if we cannot protect our home.
We cannot have it all. Welcome to the ugly real world.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/number-pe...
Given that there are 600,000 who were observed entering but got away in 2023 alone, and more were likely crossing unobserved, there's very good odds that they are already here.
Pathetic.
Nihilistic dismissal of the right to vote is lazy.
Nobody said upholding your rights was going to be easy. Organization, affiliation, communication all take work.
Get involved in primaries, for either party! Fewer voters and even more power there.
Yard signs are cheap. Make your own. Make this an issue.
Or, if you need to hear it in Tom Hanks' voice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_ctZ4lUCk
You would need some counter-elite faction that already has foothold on power to oppose current power structure. Revolutions (and that's what is necessary to change current policies) never come from the bottom up.
Actually, the idea that being an exception to the rules and having the ability to make an exception to the rules are the same, or one implies the other, is pretty interesting and might be worth elaborating on.
Important Americans are protected from being tried for war crimes. We have the Hague invasion act. We said out loud "we will kill you if you try to hold us accountable for our actions." If the United States was a moral country that would not do war crimes on purpose, this law wouldn't exist.
It used to just be x-ray and a bag scan. Now it is a backscatter plus a pat-down if required plus a bag scan. If you get flagged on either, your hands get swabbed down as well. The tech and number of searches is only going to increase over time as more contracts get in on the TSA grift.
I have zero doubts at some point they will also begin domestic device scans ("just plug the handy USB-C into your device and hang tight for a few while we ~~download all its contents~~ search for terrorism!) like they already apparently do for international flights under the guise of national security and making sure you aren't plotting something.
The self-service TSA booths are to save money on their minimum wage security staff, not to relax security. It increases the amount of surveillance they can pack in by putting you individually through a chokepoint.
Think of what you could do if you could lock people into a booth by themselves as they do tasks to be let out. I am being a bit hyperbolic but singling out a person in a potentially enclosed box opens the door massively to techniques such as strip searches (you don't even have to move rooms, how convenient, thanks TSA!) and illegal searches (ugh, really, just let us do it. It'll take 3 minutes and besides, no one will ever believe you that we asked because it's just us here), etc.
Then you get into the fun tech that is opened up by having a person isolated such as bomb detection through analyzing residue in the air, far more cameras that can be analyzed by AI/ML ("your left eye twitched 27% more than average: TERRORIST") and analysts at scale, mandatory facial recognition and other biometrics collection (a big issue with facial rec is making sure no one interferes, it's very easy to detect a face when there is only one in the room and you can have the perfect solid color background)
Hey kids, welcome to the TSA escape room! Can you solve our puzzles before you miss your flight?
I am aware I am mildly dumb. Metal detector! Hah!
Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
s/regularly/rarely
It's a generalization, there's always occasional exceptions to the rule.
The point is it’s not a rule. It’s a meme that results from misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics and power competition.
It’s incredibly wrong to say this. More modern states fail due to gridlock and fragility than violent coercion.
Individual actors rarely give up power without coercion. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole doesn’t ebb and flow as interests diverge and align.
* Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV-- reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions
* Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps on emissions
* Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999
* Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 70s
* the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963
If I searched my memory for five minutes a day I'd have a list of hundreds by the end of a week.
I get that domain expertise doesn't magically apply outside a domain. But how is HN this special level of asinine when it comes to the simple history of legislation in the U.S.?
Reading the thread with your interlocutor is like reading someone claim that C only has global scope. What could they possibly have read to convince them of such a thing?
FISA is an example of what you are arguing against, unless you are arguing that is a net increase in power because the restrictions on government power came packaged with a government power to prosecute government agents who violated the new limits, which is kind of silly.
(You may be confusing the 1978 act with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the War on Terror act undercutting the FISA limits, which is kind of like confusing the 18th and 21st Amendments.)
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b...
The only time it slowed has been during brief gov shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty of non rules and administrative stuff and does count repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules imposed on civilians/business. It's rarely ever reducing the scale of gov.
And to repeat another post I made recently, the staffing and funding for US federal regulatory agencies has grown near exponentially since the 1970s (edit: or more accurately a consistent upward trendline)
https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...
More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy.
Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas.
[0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
I would much rather see people participate in their own governance and take back control of the government peacefully before it is intolerable. However, history makes me fearful of a possible violent upheaval.
> If the government breaks their end of the deal all bets are off. etc etc
Those are all explicitly extra constitutional and the ones I euphemistically referred to. The methods for changing the constitution systematically within it's own rules are through Convention or Amendment.
> If ruled constitutionality is different than the people's understanding of the Constitution it creates a sense of tyranny
I'd be more charitable to the devolution of powers if the expressed preferred outcomes of that devolution of power didn't so often tend towards the repression of various groups. There's the OG slavery, segregation, voting rights, and the modern day antitrans/gay panics and to gut things like the voting rights act to prop up gerrymandered governments... but now we're tending towards topics that wind up [dead] due to flame wars.
If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so that the already well off aren’t the only ones who can afford to do it.
Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice president and writing books / speaking. And he was a senator for multiple decades!
Being a federal senator is a middle class salary: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187...
Presidents make ~$400k.
And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.
That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state’s actual power.
That doesn’t make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems from it being easier for politicians to create blocking bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don’t like.
You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes.
Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.
You do get governments willing to give up power if you elect progressive democrats or libertarians. Republicans lie hardcore about wanting to do this though. Republicans used to be the party of federalism, now they’re the party of “unitary executive theory”
Anyone with the idea that governments never give up power is so pathetically unobservant that I honestly don’t want them voting in our elections.
I’ll pick a negative one: antitrust. Government retreated from its enforcement duty and powers for a few decades. In the vacuum, private interests asserted themselves.
This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half of them were forced to join by a bloody war.
In the South, do they generally consider themselves as forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been forcefully prevented from leaving?
I don't think it is revisionism and maybe I am wrong on this, but wasn't it the Confederacy who attacked the Union at Fort Sumter which kicked off the US Civil War?
It's my understanding the Union was more or less ambivalent to the Confederacy and figured they'd let things lie then the Confederacy attacked.
I don't know enough history to say whether the Confederacy was forced to re-join or whether the states asked to rejoin in light of their government collapsing (Davis fleeing Richmond, etc). My guess would be that it was more of a failed state situation where the US had dibs on propping it back up.
The "government" isn't a unified mind. It's a group of individuals looking to further their career and (rarely) pursue a cause they care about. If two governments merge their law-sets into one, they aren't losing anything - the people involved are simply being promoted and gaining a broader peer influence with more vertical growth opportunities.
A few times this year in the US at the federal level, for starters.
One could argue that every peaceful transition of power is the current government giving up power to the next government.
Even Roe v. Wade was a “giving up” of power by the federal government to guarantee a right to abortion nationally.
The power isnt the limitation. It's the ability to implement or remove a limitation. They havnt given that up.
Weed legalization (NYS doesn't count)
Gun laws
Also, the gun stuff is a huge win for reduction in state power.
We have a whole category for it in the US and one of the two major parties devoted to it: Deregulation.
To your point, I have no doubt that some deregulation has been spin for regulatory capture and/or anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately, perhaps especially for the environment, that’s not an accurate summary of all deregulation, nor of the US conservative party’s official stance on regulation.
And the original poster remains correct about power. Power is never willingly given up by an institution (it can, however, be given up by individuals, when they decide that there is something more important than power). That is why we (assuming USA, here) have divided government, so power cannot ever be concentrated in any one branch. In this case, the hearing on 702 is being held by one branch, congress, to decide whether to limit or expand the power of another branch, the executive. It’s an important distinction; without that separation there really would be no hope to restore basic privacy.
If you're living in the West then you're in American jurisdiction for all intents and purposes - if they are interested in you - they will get you. And you have no rights or protections whatsoever. Your own government won't protect you.
My country has extradited our own citizens to the USA before and will do that again.
It really sucks that there's no second democratic pole. The only alternative to this is to live in an authoritarian country like Russia or China where you have even fewer rights and freedoms.