> A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created
There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.
This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.
Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House"
The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?
You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value. The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy. The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended to keep the government from searching your property.
A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker?
The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet.
In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.
The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted.
The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) pot, but that is how it has been interpreted by the supreme court. No normal person would say that corporations are people, but according to the court they are. etc etc etc.
Reading the constitution, I get a clear picture of a federation of independent states. But this idea died after the Civil War, if not before.
It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent."
From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.
The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy.
A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.
Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.
We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.
The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone.
The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.
As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.
Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.
In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.
That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.
terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future
To put it into perspective, more people die walking across roads in the US every year than died from terrorism in 2001. Most years other than 2001, the difference between them is staggering. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that we should take drastic measures to curtail the freedom of car drivers because of the pedestrian deaths.
How little people care about the deaths of 4000+ people a year: most drivers that kill a pedestrian are not punished at all. The Freakonomics guys even did a podcast on how to commit the perfect murder, where the method was killing the person with a car.
I think such a defeatist attitude will inevitably lead to a scenario where those in power are not subject to surveillance, and those without having every detail of their lives recorded.
In so far as I can tell, if you use noscript, you don't show up on google analytics, encryption isn't broken and your analogy of disney with no money trying to shut down bittorrent is completely incorrect given that the cost of computing, communication and encryption is tending towards zero over time.
I can envisage a scenario where for the vast majority of low bandwidth communications, even the endpoints aren't known to be in contact to a third party.
The will to dominate others is as old as human kind. The idea that computers have changed anything is just historical blindness of the part of people who fail to realize how totalitarian all states were until the French revolution, where you had a literal thought police going after you and huge parts of the population spying on everyone else.
Like it has always been the case any algorithm good enough to catch even a minority of people with behaviour X the government of the time doesn't like will have so many false positives that it will be useless.
The fact that after 7 million years of human evolution people can still lie to others when the cost for this was often survival makes me skeptical anyone will ever be able to make sense of the mess of ideas in someones head by the very limited number of actions they can observe in the real world.
> The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city.
Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally considerably more worried about incompetence, ill conceived reactionary policies and unintended consequences than the potential control technology would have if it was optimally exploited by those in power.
Those of us against surveillance seem to be making the same mistake that has been made in the DRM arena. One that Chomsky is not making. Surveillance is surely bad because of technological reasons and because it violates fundamental human rights.
However the surveillance state exists not because it's creators feel it is sound technology and does not violate humans right but because strong economic and political forces want to become even stronger. To defeat the surveillance state the economic and political powers must be attacked, not their arguments.
Technology enlarges the consequences of moral choices, but it does not carry an inherent morality. Whatever values you carry into the technology landscape are what you get out of it. Digitisation is not the cause of the surveillance state, it's the enabler.
The problem is that we're trying to use 18th century values and moral systems to deal with 21st century technology. We need to develop a system of morality adequate for the job, because unless society tears itself apart technology is only going to expand, and the gap between our moral toolbox and the job we need it for is only going to grow.
The worst part is that they collect everything to make a case against you, but you still have to wait one hour in line at Boston airport to cross the border. They don't do anything to streamline your interactions with the governement or to defend you when you're accused.
Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four, was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines, edited by Robert Silverberg).
Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%!
"The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."
All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital.
You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.
Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.
Total surveillance does not return us to a no- or low- surveillance ground state. Nor does it put us in an "everyone has dirt on everyone" state. It just makes it easier for everyone to identify who is more than N standard deviations away from standard/accepted behaviors.
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling.
What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.
The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.
I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.)
Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.
On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.
So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.
I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.
[+] [-] Theodores|11 years ago|reply
A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created
There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.
This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.
[+] [-] smoyer|11 years ago|reply
The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker?
The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet.
In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.
[+] [-] beerbajay|11 years ago|reply
The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted.
The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) pot, but that is how it has been interpreted by the supreme court. No normal person would say that corporations are people, but according to the court they are. etc etc etc.
Reading the constitution, I get a clear picture of a federation of independent states. But this idea died after the Civil War, if not before.
[+] [-] throwawayaway|11 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylVOdriEyA
So he's no longer the perfect person to do so.
[+] [-] netcan|11 years ago|reply
From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.
The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy.
A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.
Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.
We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.
The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone.
The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.
As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.
Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.
In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.
That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.
[+] [-] e40|11 years ago|reply
To put it into perspective, more people die walking across roads in the US every year than died from terrorism in 2001. Most years other than 2001, the difference between them is staggering. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that we should take drastic measures to curtail the freedom of car drivers because of the pedestrian deaths.
How little people care about the deaths of 4000+ people a year: most drivers that kill a pedestrian are not punished at all. The Freakonomics guys even did a podcast on how to commit the perfect murder, where the method was killing the person with a car.
[+] [-] throwawayaway|11 years ago|reply
I can envisage a scenario where for the vast majority of low bandwidth communications, even the endpoints aren't known to be in contact to a third party.
[+] [-] monochr|11 years ago|reply
Like it has always been the case any algorithm good enough to catch even a minority of people with behaviour X the government of the time doesn't like will have so many false positives that it will be useless.
The fact that after 7 million years of human evolution people can still lie to others when the cost for this was often survival makes me skeptical anyone will ever be able to make sense of the mess of ideas in someones head by the very limited number of actions they can observe in the real world.
[+] [-] kokey|11 years ago|reply
Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally considerably more worried about incompetence, ill conceived reactionary policies and unintended consequences than the potential control technology would have if it was optimally exploited by those in power.
[+] [-] abdullahkhalids|11 years ago|reply
However the surveillance state exists not because it's creators feel it is sound technology and does not violate humans right but because strong economic and political forces want to become even stronger. To defeat the surveillance state the economic and political powers must be attacked, not their arguments.
[+] [-] Joeri|11 years ago|reply
The problem is that we're trying to use 18th century values and moral systems to deal with 21st century technology. We need to develop a system of morality adequate for the job, because unless society tears itself apart technology is only going to expand, and the gap between our moral toolbox and the job we need it for is only going to grow.
[+] [-] nraynaud|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianstallings|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|11 years ago|reply
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
And please, put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this petition:
http://wh.gov/lsuFw
Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%!
http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha...
http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-po...
"The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."
All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital.
You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.
[+] [-] bernardlunn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OliverM|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jostmey|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgottenpass|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twobits|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamwithnail|11 years ago|reply
What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.
The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.
On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.
So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.
[+] [-] vidarh|11 years ago|reply
Really. From my perspective they are criminal scum. Then again, I'm not American.
> So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon.
Chomsky has been "on the bandwagon" for decades.
[+] [-] mikeash|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarqux|11 years ago|reply