NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

The NSA charter restricts directly targeting Americans unless related to an international threat. i.e. FISA warrants ("Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act").

Instances of parallel construction emerge when evidence potentially useful for a domestic investigation is incidentally uncovered. Were it to be directly targeted when the individual has had no foreign communication, it would exceed the (very broad) scope of the NSA.

So it hasn't been "blown wide open". It is just that many people don't seem to particularly care about the nuances of either the NSA's charter or "Parallel construction" and throw terms around.

I do think that our government took a serious wrong turn after 9/11, and that our collective self-image ("beacon of democracy" and all that jazz) is increasingly at odds with our behavior. More and more the US government seems to be driven by non-human motives. Non-human in that even the people at the very top seem cognitively overwhelmed and more as if they were being acted upon by unseen forces whose existence can be inferred by the traces they leave behind; but whose intent and motivation are obscure.

What that has to do with anything, god only knows, unless you meant something like '100 miles away from the border', and even then I'm at a loss.

Go visit a flyover state sometime. Most of the country's very different than SV/the northeast corridor/other modern urbanized area, and I wouldn't live there if you paid me.

So actually 19%, yes.

One of the biggest is the destruction of creativity. When people know that their actions are under constant surveillance it creates an enormous cognitive load. They have to constantly evaluate everything they do as to how it might appear to a critical observer. The end result is that people will simply stop doing anything that might have a social risk associated with it.

A panopticon society will be a dull, stagnant and repressed society. Think of every little backwards town where everybody knows everybody's business and anyone who steps out of line is ostracized. That is what our entire society will turn into with total surveillance.

When you have the opportunity to show someone an ad-free, single page, uncluttered version of a piece of literature, do it. Please. Always.

  <!-- yes, I know...wanna fight about it? -->

I don't think it's really that big of a deal. If it was a subscription service we were all bypassing without paying that's one thing, but this is just another page on their public website like anything else.

If you don't want people to see it, don't publish it online.

Everyone should promise to buy whatever product is being advertised or at least convince themselves that their brain patterns have been changed so that they are more likely to buy the product in the future.

It's only fair to WaPo.

The federal government has been exceeding its authority since its inception, hell, if not before. James Madison, as president, couldn't figure out how to reconcile his responsibility to build a system of highways (which he thought was a fantastic idea) with the constraints on the federal government imposed by the Constitution.

Since that time, we've gone well beyond highways; We've implemented social security, medicare, medicaid, Obamacare. We've ratified the Constitution to allow for a federal income tax to support it all. We've banned alcohol, pissed everybody off, and unbanned it again. We've attempted to curtail the first, second, fourth, fifth amendments, etc.

We've got a nation full of people who voted in the last guy largely because they thought he'd give them affordable health care, ignoring that, at least in my interpretation of a limited federal government and separation of powers, our government should never have been allowed to grow large enough to be that way.

We've demanded that the government fix this thing, that thing, the other thing; clean our waters, enforce minimum wages, keep us safe from drug companies, fight our wars -- then we wonder how we've gotten to exist in a nanny state?

As a parent, it's always been hard to reconcile the notion of freedom with parenthood. In an ideal world, my child would be free to take drugs recreationally, sacrifice education for an early entry to the work force (or vice versa), prostitute herself for pay (literally, not figuratively)... but as her parent, I want none of those things for her, so I disallow them. In that same vain, if we treat our government like the father whose duty it is to protect us, it should not surprise us that the father bans us from potentially harmful activities, reads our diary, looks through our phones and follows us around in his car -- to keep us safe.

These are the things parents do. I don't know of a time it's occurred specifically, but I'm sure that I've unjustly grounded my child at least once. I'm sure that I've disallowed her from doing something that I would cheer on if done by an adult peer. I'm sure that I've invaded her privacy, and if she were an adult, possibly even violated her civil liberties. On three occasions in her 12 years of life, I've assaulted her by spanking.

Make no mistake -- I'm not advocating the government's actions, or excusing them... not in any way. I am very dumbstruck that so many share my condemnation of these actions, because so many people are those that voted for health care, for social security, for national defense, for the EPA, the FCC, the TSA, etc., for the safety that only a government all-father can provide. We've allowed this to go on for decades, perhaps most of the time we've been a nation, really. Our founding fathers warned us (well, most of them) that this would happen if we weren't vigilantly watching our government, and it has happened, precisely because we weren't vigilantly watching our government.

Or perhaps it's always been this way, with approximately half of our electorate desperately wishing our government would do far more, with the other half desperately wishing our government would do far less.

Either way, fixing it may be too far gone. As near as I've mapped back to, the idea of federal constraint hasn't really existed since the mid-30s, possibly even earlier than that. I try to vote Libertarian, but at a federal level, that's hard to do, and comes with its own baggage. Rand Paul, whom I agree with on a great many issues, has some views that perplex me, as did his father. I'm also not convinced that he isn't a consummate politician.

I disagree with many of Obama's political choices, but I did sincerely believe that he would try to live up to more of his election promises, promises that now seem like nothing more than the pre-election fodder that we get from every politician in recent memory. I worry that Rand Paul is no better, or that if there are forces controlling Obama's hand, that they won't similarly control his.

What's even worse than that is that I don't even know if our country can exist under the style of government that I want for it. It might well be that we're all better off in a socialist nation, where the government is indeed the caretaker for all, and that in order to have a nation that works, we should just succumb to that. It's not Constitutional, and I would pray that if we were in fact headed that direction, we'd at least try to ratify the Constitution, or abolish it altogether in lieu of its replacement.

Surely, the minarchist type of federal government the Constitution prescribes would lead to a far harsher nation with fewer large infrastructure problems, fewer social programs... but with it, we would indeed get far more freedom. And at least for me, sitting in the comfort of my living room, typing on the DARPA supplied internet, on the Macbook borne of foreign labor, paid for with the government's wage protections, fair and equitable treatment, and contract enforcement, that price is worth paying... but I fear it would be too high for too many, and the end result is a loop back around to exactly where we are.

Anyway, apologies for the rant. I don't intend to make a point, or convert anyone's political beliefs, or even elucidate anyone to my own political beliefs, which I have little confidence in at the moment -- but your reply resonated with me, and I felt it deserved a sincere response, even if it amounts to very little.

When the "THEY" of tomorrow are handed the keys to this vast panopticon that they didn't have to build themselves, how will "THEY" behave. No one can be sure.

Consider the men that inherited the ash heap of Europe after WWI. What did those men do?

They started WWII.

Under the NDAA, the president has the authority to enshrine anyone he wishes, subject to zero oversight, to a similar fate.

Under the PATRIOT Act, we've bombed American Citizens suspected of possibly committing a crime in the future without the benefit of oversight, due process, or any of the Constitutional protections ordinarily afforded to American citizens.

Aside from that, there are far more instances throughout history, but those are the (IMO) most egregious offenses under the current administration at least.

And then you still would have to trust this Airplane Mode.

Honestly, I have absolutely no idea what is happening in my phone. Is it maybe still collecting data while it is in Airplane Mode and sending it somewhere once it is set back to regular mode? Or is it even sending data all the time, because the NSA knows that never a single plane has crashed because of active cellphones? Probably some smart people out there are checking their phone's internals and activities more than I do...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._Maryland

I don't know whether you're aware of this or not, but you just described a famous experiment which essentially arrived at the same conclusion. It's worth a read for those not familiar with it.

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

Perhaps the difference is if the doctors/nurses/vendors think that they can get away with it, not attracting the public's attention.

Now if we could get some prominent figures in tech with some authority to get more involved in these matters, but no - they're all a bit too comfortable in their well-paid, US-based jobs to risk anything.

Evil like in the movies doesn't exist. In the real-world evil is simply a lack of perspective (some would call it empathy instead).

No one ever wakes up and decides they want to be a villain. They always have some sort of logic that rationalizes their actions as being reasonable if not outright good. The more they act on that lack of perspective the greater the evil they perpetrate.

I would add that I think much of the material Ed Snowden released, to the extent that it shows personal expressions, to me points more to these people viewing the Intelligence organization as the new "we", and /everybody/ outside, US citizen or not, as a bit less than fully human. That cheeky smiley on the sketches detailing how they broke Google's SSL? "TOR Stinks" and similar flippant expressions in the documents about attacking the integrity of TOR? And so on. To me that isn't the look of someone who thinks they're making difficult, serious choices to protect the greater good. It's the look of someone who thinks they're better than everyone else out there and they can do whatever they want, including having "a little fun" toying with those other inferior creatures, because they think no one can touch them. That, I think, is the general mindset we're dealing with. Allow for a fair deal of individual variation of course.

You don't need an ethical guidebook to consider the implications of the work you're doing. I don't think lack of explicit instructions is an excuse. I don't want to invoke Godwin just yet...but suffice to say, a lot of bad things have been done in the name of good. And there were people in the loop who had the ability to see what was going on.

And so they walk a famously paved road.

1.7 Respect the privacy of others. ..

User data observed during the normal duties of system operation and maintenance must be treated with strictest confidentiality, except in cases where it is evidence for the violation of law, organizational regulations, or this Code. In these cases, the nature or contents of that information must be disclosed only to proper authorities.

That specifically allows the kind of work done by PRISM.

By creating an infrastructure in which the data are collected, centralized, individually identified, unencrypted, and specifically associated with vast trails of other nominally unassociated online information (search history, logins to other sites, analytics on other sites, etc.).

This is in the sense of Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. The architectures of Facebook, Google, and other social networks, advertising networks, mobile phone systems, phone apps, PC-based snooping (inclusive of Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and other systems), etc., etc.

These systems are designed in ways which maximize their utility to a national surveillance network, despite alternative architectures being available. As an example of alternatives, Twitter and Reddit, at the very least, don't demand / promote "real names", or (mostly) track information across third-party sites, at least not to the extent Facebook and Google are doing.

It's a big government.

I'm pretty sure it is...

At face value, yes. But with the news that companies are tracking web users via browser fingerprints and other methods (even when users have "do not track" enabled), it seems that it is difficult to avoid being secretly tracked by corporations.