People Freak Out About Privacy On Facebook, But Ignore Government Surveillance
techdirt.com
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The upside of government surveillance is that the government gains power by keeping your secrets secret, and when it comes down to it, the vast majority of people are simply uninteresting to the spooks and both parties know it. The odds of being extra-judicially executed for being a YouTube troll are nonzero, but statistically close enough that it's not worth worrying about unless you meet a very narrow profile.
Facebook, on the other hand, seems to have as a primary business model finding out everything about everyone, and then telling everyone else. It's this latter part that people worry about. They don't want their life broadcast to every potential employer, client, lender, local xenophobe, landlord, insurance company, lover, violent ex-lover, nosy neighbor, obsessive stalker etc. that they deal with in their life. The odds there are a lot more grim--You're about 1000 times more likely to be killed by your ex or soon to be ex than the President.
However the existence of at least one government associated plan to kill US Citizens on US territory was surfaced in the media last week http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/12/31/fbi-report-mentions-p...
And while I cannot provide evidence that there have been others; it is a fact that the US government has been training death squads at Fort Benning and elsewhere for more than 40 years (vide: Guatemala, Nicaragua, Paraguay and many other countries whose paramilitary/police were trained by the US and went on targeted campaigns of killing civilians); although most of the openly acknowledged trainees were not US citizens, but Police and Military from client governments, mostly in South and Central America. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_fo...
And given that Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder is on the record as saying """ “Due process” and “judicial process” are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. """
It's not impossible that everyone who reads this thread is being assessed for their suitability to be judged a "threat to national security" and thus worth the cost of elimination.
As for the quote "due process and judicial process are not one and the same," it's a completely accurate and uncontroversial statement of the law. The phrase "due process" means exactly what it sounds like. People are entitled to the "process" that is "due" given the context. The process due is not necessarily judicial process, and in many contexts might be much less than that.
That the FBI knew of a plot to murder American citizens and did nothing to warn the potential targets of such a plot; and furthermore since no one has, so far as we know been indicted, fired, reprimanded or otherwise held accountable for what is on the face of it a very serious crime... the obvious implication is that it was either some element of the government itself, or one of those monstrous public/private partnerships (like Xi/Blackwater/Triple Canopy/etc.) that is a "deniable violence provider" in the current global security context.
Now we can argue forever in the absence of further facts; but given the evidence we do have, it certainly suggests that we are looking at the very least, at a contingency plan to kill American Citizens on American Soil, for nothing more than exercising their rights under the 1st amendment.
The common understanding of Due Process as mentioned in the Bill of Rights specifically refers to the "due process of law"; and as such, the government deciding to kill American Citizens would seem to require a capital trial. In a court of law, before a judge with the usual 5th amendment rights to know the charges against one, and to hear and challenge the evidence on which the determination of their fate will be made; that is clearly not happening here.
We are clearly not living in the moral universe that we're taught about in civics class anymore. And while it's always been the case that some people "become cops to break heads", what we are seeing evidence of in the last few years is the emergence of an elite consensus that state violence of lethal intensity could be legitimately employed against unarmed civilians domestically as easily and as casually as it's deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Today.
You're submitting the same story twice?
However, no matter what you think, Government Surveillance is better than private surveillance. It's a democracy for crying out loud.
But the preamble, is that the breach of privacy is bad in any use case scenario. Realistically however, surveillance is always going to exist. Either covertly or legally. Nothing much can be done.
There are two types of power within a group: exit and voice. The power to change a community, and the power to leave it.
I am not at all confident in the power of my voice to affect the policies of the US government on surveillance/privacy issues. In fact, although my voice has almost no impact on Facebook's policies on privacy, I'd say that I'm almost as likely to influence Facebook's privacy policies by complaining as to influence US Government policies by voting.
Meanwhile, leaving the US is impractical or difficult, and even (especially!) non-US-citizens are subject to the US government's intrusions on privacy, surveillance, as well as the possibility of being killed or abducted without trial. Opting out of Facebook is relatively easy.
- The government is accountable to the people, but who is Facebook accountable to? Shareholders.
- Government surveillance has at least some oversight, with a long history of regulation.
- Allowing government spooks to note your alcoholism is less worrysome, to most, than having drunk pics appear on the public Internet, for mom+boss to see.
Facebook is accountable to shareholders, true, but no one is holding you hostage, making you share information on Facebook. You could change your privacy settings, go to another social network(s), or stop sharing altogether.
If their board decided they could increase profit by x% by deleting all privacy controls tomorrow then all privacy controls could be removed tomorrow.
In theory at least a democratic government has no particular interest in sharing your data with anybody apart from maybe a few intelligence and law enforcement officials who want to check that you're not actually trying to kill anyone. They also have to vote on any major legislation changes, enough unfavourable bills and they risk getting thrown out at the next election.
Facebook can only sell you on privacy changes by trying to convince you of a better service/more convenience.
The U.S. Intelligence Community and Congress can sell you on surveillance by trying to convince you that such measures are essential in preventing American deaths.
It isn't that people don't care the government is spying on us, it is that the government has a much more compelling argument to do so.