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Comment by cobrausn | Hacker News Reader

So, theoretical surveillance state nightmare for an average citizen:

You violate some law online (knowingly or unknowingly, doesn't matter), and the NSA records it and flags it for later review based on some pattern matching. Upon review, it gets forwarded (at the discretion of an agent who will make his determination with little oversight) to an embedded CIA agent in your local PD. Forbidden from operating against you themselves by federal law, they inform the local PD of the problem and you get a SWAT team at your house at 2am.

I don't think we are there yet, but I'm actually not convinced that the average American will see this as a problem - after all, they have nothing to hide.

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You left out the part where you go to some protest (OWS, anti-gmo, anti-KeystoneXL, anything that opposes the corporate interests that run the government). That's what makes this whole surveillance thing scary is that it can easily be used to quelch opposition, not just to the government, but to the corporations whose interests are protected by the government.

The real divide is really between progressives who want less corporate involvment in government and more real government regulations, and those who benefit from regulatory capture. In the middle are those who don't know what to believe. For example, GMOs. The corporate interests want them permitted and unlabeled as much as possible. Progressives make noise about how they (or the associated pesticides/herbicides) could be dangerous to people and/or the environment. Government run by corporate interests doesn't want the information to spread to the less informed, they don't want people thinking about those things.

Protests and information campaigns are essential to a working democratic republic, and they will be the first targeted by the surveillance information.

Yeah. One reason why it's much safer if surveillance is restricted to foreign sources, is that, unlike foreign surveillance, domestic surveillance is combined with the legal power to fine, imprison, and execute. Citizens of foreign countries, on the other hand, are presumably protected from this by their own governments.

Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place? If their raid is based on illegal info, then it's not legal.

Turning secret inadmissible evidence into legal admissible evidence seems tricky.

The only game plan I can see is this: You find out someone is up to something illegal; then you just happen have have a police officer walking by the coffee shop when you're discussing it with an associate.

Or walk down the street from the precinct and use the payphone to anonymously phone in a tip. Or launder the info through an existing CI. Or gin up an unrelated minor excuse for a home visit and leverage that to find probable cause and then just "happen" to find the evidence with your warrant.

> Wouldn't the PD need to show in court why they suspected you in the first place?

No, not really. They have to show e.g. probable cause but they can happily use secret information to create serendipity: "We happened to be parked outside the suspect's location at just the right time to wittiness them talking to a known communist sympathizer."

Its not unusual for information from paid informants to get washed in this way in order to conceal their identity and prolong their usefulness.

Yeah, but that's often hard to pull off.

For instance in the original example you're violating an internet law. It's not exactly something the PD can just pretend to stumble upon unless you're really careless and do it in a public place.

"National security"

Even your crimes are secrets to be withheld from you.

Fundamental problem with this: Military (NSA) and civilian (CIA) agencies don't like each other and don't work well together.

The FBI, CIA and military intelligence agencies are known for hiding information from each other.

Not anymore. All of the members of the "Intelligence Community"[1] now report up to the DNI, and sharing and coordination are a core mission.

1. Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, CIA, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, DoE, DHS, State Department, Treasury, DEA, FBI, Marine Corps Intelligence, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, NSA, Navy Intelligence

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