- because administrations aren't forever. - because laws aren't universal. - because the most perfect digital surveillance serves the most imperfect analog humans. - because what you're doing here and now should never become a weapon against you there and then. IT'S THIS FUCKING SIMPLE There was a time when purchasing alcohol was illegal. Drinking it wasn't; unless you were black, of course. Back then we had The Black Chamber and it sure wasn't an NSA but if we had the NSA back then, you can be damn skippy it would have been used against blacks, the same way the DEA is using NSA wiretaps. So let's suppose my friend Ekaterina, who is a naturopathic doctor in Washington State, knuckled under to demands of her boss to prescribe marijuana in 2010. It's legal now in Washington - no prescription necessary. But do you think the DEA was using NSA wiretaps to monitor people prescribing marijuana in Washington just in case that shit became handy at some point in the future? You're naive if you think otherwise. Now let's suppose the US and Russia get into a pissing match over, say, anything. Oksana's mother, who lives with her, heads back to St. Petersburg to see family. Only now when she comes home, she's stopped at the gate because according to the DEA, her mother is a known drug trafficker. The TSA strip searches Oksana's mom, all 70 years old of her, then bounces her back to Russia. Oksana is doing what her boss says and isn't in any violation of state law - but the grist mill between state and federal statutes just chewed up her family. Now let's say my buddy Assam, who is a Ph.D candidate at Georgetown in Islamic History, answers a question of mine about beheading via email. He doesn't endorse it, but he does say "The Koran is unequivocal about the punishment of infidels, as indicated by Surat 47.4." Thanks to Semantic Forest, the words "beheading" "punishment" "infidels" and "Koran" rocket up in A-space to the counterterrorism branch of the CIA, who run Assam's records and discover he's a Moroccan national. Yeah, he's lived in the US for 15 years but doesn't that just make him worse? So now he's investigated by the FBI. Maybe they even set him up for a sting because the FBI really does suck this hard at this. In the meantime, they discover his wife is an Iranian and they're already on the terror watch list. So they sweep her up. They'd leave her two kids with her parents but OH SHIT THEY'RE IRANIANS TOO and despite the fact that they've been practicing medicine in Stockton CA for 30 years, they get vanned, too. All because I asked HIM a question over email. * * * Couldn't happen here, right? Couldn't happen now? Wait for the wind to shift. I had a Pakistani friend who had to stop running at lunch in 2003 because the longshoremen would line up to spit on him as he went by. Why? "He looked Iraqi." Privacy is tantamount because no matter how warm'n'fuzzy you feel about the Obama administration, its needs are served by committed, hard-core Republican Conservative twats who have been stepping on civil liberties their entire careers. Worse, you're either dealing with the lifers who are too stupid or lackluster to bounce out to SAIC, KBR or any of the other Alphabet Soups that do the heavy lifting, or you're dealing with the Alphabet Soup full of talented, shiftless kids looking for a reason to do something else. Edward Snowden bounced because he thought the violation of civil liberties was too much. he went to the Guardian. Christopher Boyce bounced because he didn't like the idea of us influencing elections in Australia to end up with a CIA-friendly government. He went to the Soviets by way of a drug-dealer childhood friend who wandered down with him to Mexico City. This shit is too important to trust to the judgement of bureaucrats. If a vacuuming of data can destroy my life, that vacuuming of data will be performed in accordance with the laws of the United States, including the Fourth Fucking Amendment. "If you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to worry about." Tell that to the Protestants under Bloody Mary. Or the Catholics under Henry VIII. Or the blacks under Hoover, or my buddy Assam and his wife, who already can't fly anywhere, under this lovely, progressive, Democratic administration run by a scholarly black man. You should care because if you're on the ins this time, you'll be on the outs next time. Honesty has fuckall to do with it.
I can't help but hark back to a thread I saw on r/austin once. We have a pretty big problem with bikers getting killed in hit and runs by drunks on late weekends. The anti-surveillance argument went like this: "These bikers know the risks of biking at night on the weekend, and maybe they should stop doing it." The pro-surveillance argument was: "Let's use existing data sets and patterns to identify the most dangerous intersections in downtown Austin, where this most frequently happens, and stick some cameras at license plate angles." The anti-surveillance counterargument was: "It won't stop there." Bikers were dying in the present tense, and civil liberties were being threatened in the future tense. Everywhere I encounter the surveillance discussion, that's where it goes. Every time. Present safety weighed against the threat against future privacy*. Now, I agree with you. Our civil liberties are what make America a good place to live; they're our national treasure without a doubt. But "privacy" and "liberty" are dangerous catch-all rebuttals that grab attention and make headlines. It doesn't, for example, make sense to restrict your friends' flight abilities. It does, however, make sense to use cameras to stop hit and run car accidents. Unfortunately, the same principle is argued in both cases, with detrimental effects in the long term to both. *I'm not sure it's possible to objectively make this call.
You aren't making an argument. You're using a non-equivalent parable and attempting to illustrate that there are two sides to the coin. You are wrong on many fronts, allow me to list them for you. 1) Putting a camera up in a public place is not at all equivalent to snooping in someone's email. There is no right to privacy in a public place. This is why people are allowed to take photos there. This is why traffic cams exist. This is why we have the freedom to peacefully assemble. Comparing a traffic camera to NSA surveillance is sophistry. 2) Observing a hit and run is not going to prevent a hit and run. It's going to aid in the prosecution of a hit and run after it has happened. The argument is "we need cameras so we can catch the people who are running over bicyclists." You've turned it into "we need cameras so we can prevent hit and runs." They are not the same. More sophistry. 3) Further, an argument put forth for the cameras is probable cause - "people are being skeeshed, we need cameras up so we can catch the culprits." The argument for surveillance bypasses probable cause - "we need to put cameras up in case something bad happens." I think this was a mistake on your part, but you know better. 4) Finally, you're obliquely attempting to make a point that not only attempts to undermine my own, you're ignoring the very argument I'm making. Simply put, for your future quoting fun, Surveillance against law-abiding citizens is bad because laws can change and those who enforce them are imperfect, putting the citizen in danger of future criminalization for current non-criminal acts. Your argument boils down to "but if they have nothing to worry about now, then they have nothing to worry about NOW." Your defense of this argument is "but people who have stuff to worry about now should be surveilled in public." Which nobody is talking about. Your "anti-surveillance" argument is not, in fact, anti-surveillance. It's pragmatic. It says "perhaps we shouldn't spend tens of thousands of dollars and put the civil liberties of every citizen in Austin in jeopardy in exchange for marginally-improved prosecutorial tools against people who are already breaking the law." The amendment to it is "maybe we should park a police car at those intersections at closing time and nobody has to worry about a fucking thing." See how easy that was? See how non-theoretical and clear-cut?
Well, you're sort of angry about this, which is good I guess. If there's anything in the US to be angry about right now it's this stuff. But anyway, you misunderstand. I'm not making an argument, like you said several times, and certainly not offering my post as a counter to what you said. I actually originally typed it up as a reply to the OP, but felt it made a bit more sense added on to your post. I'm just adding something to the discussion, and that is this: we often end up having to weigh immediate safety (and yes, that's what the NSA will say they're giving you by pinging emails for 'bomb'; if anyone actually believes that is inconsequential to them) versus a future loss of privacy. Or, especially, we end up being told that's what is happening. I'm saying that's a very hard concept to explain to people, and that dichotomy is difficult to assess if you're Obama, or his NSC, etc. "Privacy" has become a buzzword, an excuse, and I think that's wrong, precisely because it leads to the same argument being made in the cases of two wildly different things -- in this instance the NSA's snooping and streetcorner surveillance. This inevitably weakens the argument. (Also -- a) it's good to put someone in jail who is morally okay with driving drunk and then leaving the scene of a crime, and b) cameras prevent crime, theoretically***. If we had never had streetlights, muggings would be more frequent, and adding streetlights may not stop a mugging that's already happened, but it sure does prevent new ones.)
I think the essence of your argument is that this technology allows for targeted oppression and that is bad. I agree that targeted oppression is bad. I do not agree that perfect surveillance is inherently a bad thing, as seems to be the opinion in all of these privacy debates. Perfect surveillance could be amazing for society. Here are my hypothetical situations which are more or else as likely as yours. Let's go for dramatic impact first. There's a depressed kid in Bumfuck, Texas. Let's call him Ben. He hates it there. No one listens to the music he likes and he's bullied daily because he's fat. He's on 4chan a lot and they get him, unlike his school counselor or his parents, but he's forced to go to school 7 hours a day. Scotty at the NSA, he's in charge of depressed fat kid analytics for the state of Texas. Scotty is a psychology grad who specialized in childhood and adolescent development. He sets up filters that identify potentially suicidal teens for his region. At this point Ben is just another teen. But then Ben starts researching .38 caliber revolvers. His search history doesn't indicate any prior interest in guns, so this triggers an alert. Scotty sees the alert and decides to monitor Ben for a while. Ben continues to researching the .38 and only the .38. At this point Scotty runs a search on Ben's family's gun registry and finds out that Ben's dad owns a .38 for home defense. At this point, Scotty knows what's up and gives Ben's school a call. He talks to the counselor and tells Ben's story. The counselor didn't know about the bullying, so she calls Ben out of class one day. She tells him that she's heard he was being bullied and Ben tells her who it is. The two begin weekly sessions to help Ben recover. At the same time the counselor asks Scotty about the bully. Scotty runs some searches and he informs her that it seems the bully has spent an inordinate amount of time reading about alcoholism. She begins sessions to help the bully address his issues at home. She also rearranges Ben's schedule to help him avoid the bully. In the days of digital privacy, the bully catches a bullet along with six other innocents. This hypothetical assumes a lot of things, much like yours. I assume a good school counselor (though maybe one who can't monitor the internal thoughts and feelings of 800 kids). I assume an NSA employee with proper training. I assume a government that cares more about curbing school shootings than about setting up stings on Muslims. The possibilities for a perfect digital surveillance in a decent society are endlessly beneficial, especially in the realm of identifying mental health disorders early. Fuck, any medical condition. Let's say for a month I've got headaches, but I don't go to the doctor because I don't feel like waiting in a waiting room and my health insurance deductible is too high. I look up headaches on WebMD. The headaches go away, but a few months later I notice that my toes are just constantly numb. I google it and assume it's just the cold weather. Unknown to me I've just moved from the "headache googlers" list which contains pretty much everybody, to the "headache + numb toes within a few months of each other" list. These lists and filters are of course created by some of the foremost doctors in the country (I'm assuming for this hypo). At this point I get a friendly call from my doctor that I should come in for an MRI, because it has become likely that I have a brain tumor. Without surveillance, I die, because by the time I go in because my nose is bleeding every night, the cancer has spread throughout my body. (All this medical stuff isn't accurate at all, for all those wondering). You get my point. I just don't want to see this type of technology written off as inherently evil. Can it be used for evil purposes? Yes. Is atomic energy inherently evil? No. Can it be used for evil? Yes. And yet you're not writing a multi-paragraph essay on the potential HUGE devastation of nuclear weapons and calling for immediate disarmament. There is no rally in DC soon that will attract hundreds of Redditors calling for Obama to dump the nukes in the ocean. If you want to talk about ending racial profiling, let's address how to stop it. If you want to talk about drug reform, let's do it. The government has all the power they need to oppress already. It's by actually taking the time to change the political tide on issues like these that will decide whether we end up in your hypothetical dystopia or in a better one. Whether or not the NSA spies on people won't.
Wow. Okay, for starters, all of my hypotheticals aren't hypotheticals. They're REAL. The names have been changed, but I do have a couple of friends who are Moroccan and Iranian, and he is an Islamic scholar at Georgetown. I didn't email him about Koran questions last time because he is on the no-fly list just for being from Morocco. I do have a Russian friend who has to keep her nose clean because her mother does fly back and forth from the US and Russia (and Uzbekistan, which is another can of worms - I mean, Russia's one thing but Uzbekistan is one of the places we practice Extraordinary Rendition). For another thing, you have Scotty the NSA agent saving Ben the depressed kid because his parents, his teachers, his guidance counselor, his friends and Ben are all incapable of doing so. I'd send you an article, but I'll just link to the intro to make a point of how ridiculous this is. our world is not full of friendly childhood counselors who work for the NSA, and it never will be - remember, the NSA has no domestic charter. They can't legally spy on Americans using American communication channels (but they do). Meanwhile, the practical effect of your Ben'n'Scotty chestnut is that Scotty works for the Division of Thoughtcrime and Ben just practiced a conscribed search. And now, in a zero-tolerance universe, he's expelled. For looking up a gun. That his father owns. So - you've spun Orwell into a Rockwell and I'm reporting real things that my real friends deal with in the real world. Tell me where the equivalency is? Let's take another step back and point out the elephant you're sweeping under the rug - CONSENT. Suppose Ben's dad wants to monitor his son's web searches. He can. Suppose Ben's school wants to monitor Ben's facebook account. They can. Suppose Ben's counselor wants to track Ben's web usage while at school. She can. Hey - suppose Ben's school wants to give Ben a free laptop to do his work on - they can monitor his fucking face while he masturbates. All this shit is available NOW and it happens. But somewhere in there, somebody said "yes, check up on my kid" even if it was a EULA for using the school computer. The above is called "monitoring" and it's an opt in. The discussion at hand is called SURVEILLANCE and it's performed on hostiles. I don't get your point. The entire argument is about intent, and your argument is "sometimes people are altruistic." Altruistic people ask permission. I think you need to bone up on what "informed consent" "surveillance" and "monitoring" mean. Because we're not talking about WebMD keeping tabs on your aspirin supply, we're talking about an autonomous organization that reports only to the executive who spies on girlfriends, spouses and friends so much they have an acronym for it.
Yes, your statements are hypotheticals when you tack the word "suppose" onto a brief description of one of your friends and then describe civil rights violations that have not occurred. And the fact that you can poke tons of holes in my Ben and Scotty hypo is because it is an unlikely event, but in my mind, it's about as likely as the world where a Russia-US "pissing contest" sends innocent citizens away at the airport because of "crimes" their RELATIVE didn't even get a trial for. It's also about as likely as an entire family getting "vanned" just for their nationality and e-mails that are clearly not threatening to anyone who takes the three seconds to read them.
Once more with feeling: Ekaterina hasn't had these problems because she has actively chosen to disobey her employer. You think people can get onto planes no problem? The guy who directed Donnie Darko got turned away from a flight to Cannes because he has the same name as a suspected terrorist. Assam is not running into trouble because I'm keeping him out of it. Remember - he's already on the no-fly list. He hasn't seen his family in fifteen years. His dad died last year and Assam didn't even get to attend the funeral. I don't give a shit about "your mind" because in your Town Called Perfect Scotty the Spook is an altruistic busybody who is only performing blanket searches on everyone so that he can help save kids from turning a web search into Columbine. "Your mind" presumes that information will only ever be used for good, and discounts the fact that the consequences of it being used for evil are absolute. I suspect you don't know any immigrants. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: America is much easier if you're a white citizen. And while I know you will continue to live in your "it can't happen here" bubble, allow me to state once more, before I set you to ignore, that it is happening here every day. I have a friend whose band had to cancel their showcase at SXSW because his name is in the TSA list as being an alias for someone who is on the list. He drove for two years, everywhere he needed to go... then he legally changed his name. Now he's the same as every other citizen. There's your ideal surveillance state. Too disconnected to know that a programmer from Seattle isn't a grudge-holding Tamil... and too clueless to care when the formerly-indicted skates because he changed his name. Bye bye.
"You've spun Orwell into a Rockwell" is a fantastic quotable. Also, the link in your original post about the Semantic Forest was eye-opening, seeing references to Julian Assange in 1999. Probably my naivete combined with the fact that I was 12 at that time, I had only really considered the NSA issues to be at least (relatively) new.
Issues of spying go way back. Here's one from 40 years ago.
Knowing that you could be watched at any time means you might as well be being watched all the time. Consider what that means when you're Billy in Texas and develop an interest in politics; having heard what the people of good people of Bumfuck say about insufficiently right-wing right-wing nutjobs, you fear being observed researching anything else. Maybe you question your religion, but because you've heard what the good people of Bumfuck say about atheists, you don't want to be observed researching atheism. Maybe you think you might be gay... Power doesn't have to be abused to be oppressive.