Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers
firstlook.org
firstlook.org
How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?
I don't think the founders [US-centric post, but I think this applies to most technologically-advanced nations] envisioned this type of surveillance, and thus offered little protection against it. As the technology to employ this type of capability becomes simpler and cheaper, potential resistance in the form of court processes and public opinion will be comparitively slow to form. This will get a lot worse before it gets better.
this is a fine question - the DHS has proposed a project with the City of Oakland to prototype just such a thing, described as a combination of NSA surveillance and stop & frisk, which they call the Domain Awareness Center. Originally targeted at the port post 9/11, it has grown to be a prototype of a citywide surveillance system that ties local and national authorities together closer than ever before.
It's not in place yet, and stopping it in Oakland, where all politics are driven by law enforcement / public safety policy, despite decades of data that show pouring money into the police department has not reduced crime, may be a good way to at least delay this across the country.
While I share your dislike of the program, it's important to look at the overall scope rather just the government one. After all, you could build a pretty good automatic photo identification system on top of Facebook.
There's very little utility in identifying people in pictures that were uploaded intentionally by people who knew who the people in the pictures were before they uploaded them.
Check out TrapWire: http://www.zdnet.com/wikileaks-uncovers-trapwire-surveillanc...
The way I see it, these issues aren't about what someone 250(?) years ago wanted, but what the people who are alive today want. If their views outweigh those of the electorate today, is it even still a democracy?
Disclaimer: not an American.
Not to mention, there have been amendments to the constitution as I understand it - or are those only additions rather than contradictions/supercededants?
There are only 27, the first 10 of which was kind of a "Constitution out of beta" thing that all happened at once, so you can kind of consider there to be 17 changes to the underlying values. That way when one occurs it's a BIG DEAL and can't sneak past the people as easily as say, the Patriot act or the NDAA, both of which are pretty easy to make a case against that they go against the core values but were voted on quickly at times no one was looking.
Also we have a separation of powers where Congress creates laws, the President acts as a leader and can also prevent Congress from creating laws in some cases, and the Supreme Court can challenge legality of laws. The idea is that the Supreme Court challenges laws against Constitution + Amendments, so they can strike down a law as being unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court does not have the power to strike down an Amendment as it by definition is the constitution.
If Congress creates bad laws, it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to point it out. However they are only legally allowed to do that when a case is put before them. Imagine being legally restrained from refactoring unless a customer files a bug report. Part of the reason the US is having some trouble with laws as I understand it is Congress + some organizations are working to prevent laws from going to the Supreme Court on technicalities. Such as person X tries to take law Y to the court with evidence Z, but evidence Z is "classified" so they are legally not supposed to know the evidence and cannot legally present it in court.
A similar problem our country is facing is that the lack of refactorization is catching up to us so our legal system has become an insane mess that only highly trained specialists (lawyers) can even attempt to navigate. Then people learn how to abuse the system and can try to attack people on all the un-refactored points of the law. This is how patent trolls work, the addition of the law (patent) is a relatively easy process and the removal of bad laws (bad patents) can only be done by challenging it in court. This causes thousands of bad patents to exist because no one can challenge them until it is used against someone.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/29/if_george_w...
But one good thing is (and I've said this before in relation to the whistleblowers) is that it will encourage more whistleblowers.
One of the apparent requirements for working at many of these 3 letter agencies is patriotism. If you show patriotism, you are a good candidate. They will spend money training you technical things, but they can't train you to be a patriot and love your country. The "problem" with such patriots is that they actually take to heart things like "Constitution", "Privacy", "Freedom" and so on. The hope of the agency is that with enough brainwashing and threats of loss of job, imprisonment, etc., these values would move to the background.
The "pragmatics" on top understand that those concepts are just there for propaganda. It is the sys admins and other mid-level analysts that might actually believe, and might just pull a Snowden so to speak once in a while.
NSA understood this and immediately went into self-preservation mode. They probably never even thought along the lines of "OMG we have let the public down, we have screwed up, etc etc.", rather they saw it as, we are not threatening and controlling our employees enough. So instead of spying less on our own citizens, we should institute "no-lone-zones" (like nuclear silos have), so you are together with an accountabil-a-buddy who is supposed to snitch on you if you do something silly.
Not really convinced about that. What's important/exciting should be what we do about it, not how many messengers we have. We really have enough information by now to know what's at stake. Meanwhile, if you remember a couple of months back, the NSA sent out an internal memo stating that they simply intend to "winter the storm", and that seems to be what's happening until now (besides a few more or less symbolical proposals from the gov't).
> [...] it will encourage more whistleblowers.
Not convinced either. Again, we already know that deep changes would be needed. Also, whistleblowers, in this case, are obviously ready to die for their cause. There are not many people like that. And the World's support for people like Snowden has been completely absent or at least appallingly weak. And then, there's the fact that the NSA is currently in a huge lock-down process, which makes me think we won't see another Snowden, when this is done. That's why I believe, either there is change now or pretty much never.
I suspect in a decade or so that we will also have a similar chart as this post [2].
[0] - http://www.zdnet.com/abbott-brings-on-mandatory-data-retenti...
[1] - http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...
[2] - Only an order of magnitude smaller due to our population difference.
Our 'democracy' has become non-representational. I'm honestly considering quitting my job, returning to Australia and joining the Wikileaks party.
Hmmm, this seems like a pretty obvious vulnerability. When's the last time the CIA actually did something "secretly"? (Oooh, how would we know? Actually the last time they did something un-secretly was like a month ago, so there's a bound of sorts.) So if you do something to piss off the spooks in e.g. Russia or Israel, expect to be entered into their troll-the-CIA database, soon thereafter to be Hydra-ed into Obama's special uncategorizable tracking system.