Slashdot Mirror
Human Rights and Echelon
Anonymous Coward writes "Proposals for a new definition of human rights now before the European Parliament, writes Duncan Campbell in Telepolis, would ban ECHELON and update data protection rules to latest developments in telecommunications technology." Compare and contrast to the United States, where the only legislative proposals before Congress are to increase government spying on the citizenry. Hey, the FBI says "If there's going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI." What more is there to say?
What the guy was saying is that out of all the government agencies, the FBI is the one that has the resources and can legally investigate US citizens. The CIA can't do that, at least not legally.
What he was not saying is that the FBI does spy on people. He's only saying that the opportunity is there, but if you read the article, he goes on to say that there are strict laws regarding what the FBI can and cannot do, and those laws are in place for a reason.
Okay, so the FBI can go outside of the law. So what? So could Bill Gates. So could anyone with enough money. It's even more likely that a private company would be acting as big brother -- because there are fewer people watching the backs of private companies. No one is scared of a medium- or large-sized corporations, because they are all over the place. They are part of everyday life. But they are where the danger lies.
I think the intelligent half of Slashdotters could put together a better system than the FBI is today. As computer geeks and scientists, we're familiar with the extreme benefits of peer review. It is the only way to get exactly what you are looking for, whether it is a piece of software, an accurate scientific theory, or a fair and just policing force.
You cannot run a democracy in the middle of a shroud of secrecy. Every American needs to know exactly what its government is doing, otherwise democracy falls apart because we can't make any informed decisions. Since the days of JFK we've been voting for a pretty face and a smooth talker. The reason we're resorting to superficial means is that we really don't know what our leaders and agencies are doing. If we knew what decisions our president made behind closed doors, we might not have reelected Clinton, maybe not even Reagan.
It's easy to argue that a degree of secrecy is required to run a government, that we have to keep secrets from other nations, but I think this arguement falls apart under close scrutiny. The method of government by secrecy is no different from the concept of security-by-obscurity that has been ripped to shreds so many times by computer security experts. It simply is not the best way to do it.
We are entering an era where we need to start acting like a planet rather than a huge tribe trying to make sure the other tribes don't step on our land. The internet has done some wonderful things for international communication, and it's just getting started. Once the communication infrastructure is in place, it starts to redefine the way people think. Within the next 50 years, nationalism will fall apart. People will not define themselves as Americans, British, French, or Japanese, but as people. Boundaries between people can only exist so long as boundaries to communication exists.
When people start thinking as one, the governments must follow suit and stop trying to function by isolation. The U.S. has traditionally been the slowest to notice this. We have blatantly stupid crypto laws because our government thinks for some reasons that only American programmers can write good crypto software, and if we isolate them from the rest of the world, the rest of the world won't get crypto. Yeah, maybe America used to be the software center of the world, but as the internet boomed, suddenly the shift focused. Everyone was shocked when no U.S. universities scored in the top ten at the ACM World Programming Finals. I would have been more shocked if we had maintained dominance.
There have been talks on here before about getting some sort of geek political action committee. We need way more than that, we need to get our ideas and philosophies, the wisdoms we take for granted, and apply them to our system of government in a practical way. The concepts we consider obvious aren't just for world domination of our operating systems, they can actually improve the world. The FBI could learn a lot from slashdotters if we could only teach it how to effectively apply what we know.
More directly, the poster also says:
First, I happen not to feel it's a small sacrifice at all. I recognize your right to feel differently and I respect your exercise of that rightSecond, if these hypothetical terrorists are stupid enough to transmit in plaintext over unsecured routes, then they're so inept that the FBI would capture them without the email surveillance. Let's face it -- the proposed measures won't be effective against true, dedicated opponents. But they'd be perfect against the large, undereducated, unmotivated public.
Existing laws on surveillance, wiretapping, etc., have been (easily) extended to cyberspace. They protect, nominally at least, the rights of citizens. Although the FBI guy intended the oppositie, he's right: These things must be balanced. What worries me is that many (upper) law enforcement officials seem to place no value on citizens' privacy at all. They don't seem clued in as to why people get edgy about this.
Until the government does understand that privacy is a valuable right, I'd rather it not get any more powers to poke around my life.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach