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Surveillance Update
Several things occurred within the past few days on the privacy/surveillance frontier. First, the EU Parliament decision we mentioned yesterday is being widely reported as an assault on privacy (the European press barely mentions the spam angle we covered yesterday). As far as I can tell, this decision will loosen the EU's protections against surveillance, but does not implement any spying itself - national governments are free to NOT spy on their citizens, in the (perhaps unlikely) event that they don't want to do so. In the U.S., the FBI will be increasing their general surveillance - that is, they'll be doing more surveillance unrelated to any suspected crime, using commercial databases, etc. We can expect the Bureau to be used for more overtly political uses in the future - spying on the not-in-power political parties is no longer prohibited and will, therefore, occur. The NYT has an interesting analysis. Finally, the Washington Post reports that banks will be creating a massive financial database/blacklist of terrorists, wife-beaters, anti-globalization protesters, etc.
This sounds like the RIP (Regulation of Investigatory Powers) Act we've been subjected to in the UK. We were informed that the Government had these rights, but no amount of correspondance with politicians would get us a concrete answer as to what exactly 'necessary' and 'appropriate' were defined as in the Government's eyes. It might be 'necessary' to violate our privacy to monitor all of our communications to safeguard National Security, for instance. And the less said about Echelon the better.
Officials said they believe that terrorists unknown to the FBI have taken advantage of such policies by meeting in mosques or Internet chat rooms where agents were unlikely to be watching. That was the case with most of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers, officials said.
But the NY Times article only says they were meeting in mosques, and I've heard no other proof of Internet chat rooms being a contributer to 9/11.
So that justifies placing agents in chat rooms for the sole purpose of developing leads?
In addition, from NY Times:
Among other changes, the new guidelines let agents search Web sites and online chat rooms for evidence of terrorists' planning or other criminal activities.
It's that "other criminal activities" that has me worried. If someone is talking about drugs (regardless of whether or not they actually use them), does Uncle Sam track 'em down and start a file? And "terrorist activities"...seems that they could possibly keep pushing that one until anything that criticizes "Our Great Country" could lead to an investigation.
Seems to me the Thought Police can't be far behind.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Time to wake up, boys n girls. The legacy philosophies we've suckled on for so long have finally been whipped out from under us like some magician's tablecloth. No more the unharrassed, laissez-faire, self-regulated, sensical approach. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy for letting it go.
And yet all is not lost. This is the net, a place driven by evolution and change and progress. It evolved from one organisation's needs to an unpredictable beast that panders to the needs of anyone and everyone, a panacaea for a sick society dependent on simple variety. And now it's being tamed.
Look around. Netspace has grown stale and bloated. Development, the slave of investment and capital, galumphs towards stationary anguish, a victim of its own success, the energy required to organise its own grotesque matter turning it into a turgid lump feeding off the ideas and technologies that made it so successful all those years ago.
But all is not lost. Much as the limitations and restrictions imposed upon content distribution begat the rise of distributed systems, just as the advances of surveillance gave birth to fresh, simpler waves of viruses, so the need now is for infrastructures that take back what was previously reigned by an absence of crumbling politics. The technology means anything's possible, the forces driving us towards necessity are gathering and rumbling. Time to change the net again.
Worse, the proles seem to think it's a great idea: to them, Big Brother is nothing more than a TV concept. Watch any vox pops show on the subject and all you hear are variations of lines like "Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear". It's the one thing Orwell missed: that the proles would be manipulated to actively welcome 1984.
Of course, this message will soon be placed in my thought-crime file....
-- And when Justice is gone, there is always... Force. --Laurie Anderson, "Oh Superman"
Ahem. Just to introduce some complication here, there was just a news release about this where the (Libertarian) Cato Institute has "no serious problems":
(this is not false, it's honest-to-god what they said)
There's been quite a trend about this generally, with many hardcore, cap-L Libertarian pundits. saying similar things overall. It's been almost amusing to watch. No atheists in foxholes, and no paens to personal responsibility in the face of suicide terrorists (not all have had "foxhole conversions", but quite a few).
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Mary Culnan, a business professor and information technology specialist, said she believes the database will eventually mistakenly identify people who have similar names, or prompt financial services officials to incorrectly spurn some customers.
The current system mistakenly identifys people!
I'm in the process of getting a mortgage, so I got a copy of my credit report. I was so supprised to find out that about 40% of the accounts on the report are not my own. Most are my fathers, we have the same name, I'm a Jr. Anyway the information on there is so badly maintained it is scarry.
For example there is somthing on the report from '78, I was born in '77. Aparently I was buying diapers for my self with a VISA. In '89 there was a credit card opend with a limit of $11K, I was in 6th grade at the time, I bought lots of candy for my friends with that Mastercard!
All joking aside. The system is broken now, the new system will be just as broken. I'm guessing that it will be "more broken" because it will be in the name of finding the terrorists to protect the children, or some such crap! This war on terror is now way out of hand in the political arena, our poloticians are using it to accumulate power.
The day "Emergency Powers" are granted to the president of the USA is the day I head for the hills. I fear that day is soon approaching!
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
I tried for FIVE years to get them to unmerge our credit records, without success. And, thanks to the protections congress has given the credit bureaus (that is, it seems I can't sue them for defamation) I have no recourse other than bad credit since my credit report shows all my mother's bad debts.
Wonder how long it will be before they decide that I'm really the well-known russian terrorist Ivan Narkinsky.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Post-September 11th American concerns about liberty and safety are very different from the pre-September 11th concerns. I see a lot of arguments here that do not take this into account. A lot people here are talking about liberty first, safety later. You are not talking to the converted, folks, you are talking to a mob scared about covering their respective asses. So to them, the vast majority of the American public, y'all sound a little hollow, hear?
I'm sure Slashdot would love to be an esoteric forum of quaint thoughts about the exciting rarefied air of liberty for its own sake. I'm sure Slashdot would love it even more if the words that are spoken here had more to do with the common man and woman. TO do that, some of you have to get your heads out of your Ivory Towers and talk about the real world rather than some grand libertarian utopia we should really be living in. I'm glad it sounds like cotton candy. So can you talk about your concerns in a way that the folks living in Paramus, New Jersey and Pasadena, California can relate to? They are SCARED.
A herd of buffalo, once it starts charging, has no intelligence, and will trample the fields that feed it just because somebody fired a few rounds by their flanks. Many decades hence, if we remove a lot of our own rights, there may be a lot of regret about our reaction to September 11th, but right now, we are in the thick of it. People are afraid.
So what am I saying? Y'all sound rather hollow, ok? Because you offer no protection from the kind of folks who committed September 11th. You invoke theories and possibilities of a police state, but the democratic tradition in this country is strong and deep, and the terrorists are REAL and in our midst, plotting our doom. You stand in the way of a herd of trampling buffalo, and you shout slogans that mean nothing to the mob before you, running over their own rights.
Folks, if you want to protect our freedoms, you have to find new arguments, and here is the kicker- you have to invoke those arguments that address the real problem: not our freedom, but our safety! I am with y'all, but I'm just saying: NO ONE IS LISTENING TO YOU. YOU SOUND TIRED AND SHRILL. I agree with you that our rights are in jeopardy, and they need to be saved, but you are doing nothing to appease the approaching mob who will trample our freedom in the name of our safety, get it? THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR FREEDOM THEY CARE ABOUT THEIR SAFETY. YOU MUST ADDRESS THIS.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Benjamin Franklin, 1759
Gee what a wonderful quote. Any volunteers to write this on a big banner and hold it up in front of a herd of charging buffalo? I didn't think so.
People are scared. They are covering their asses, they are not listening with their ears wide open and their minds in full-tilt. They are scared. You must invoke arguments that include their safety, because none of you do, and safety is what the herd of buffalo is worried most about right now.
Hear me now or regret it later when you are really out of touch with a reality we all dislike, when we REALLY get our rights bitten into. Fight the good fight but fight it with your feet on the ground and your eyes on the mud in front of you, not the glorious utopian fantasies of a world where liberty exists for liberty's sake with no concern at all for real world problems. The world needs the good fight for liberty, but ain't nobody gonna care about liberty if their DEAD.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
All of these companies except Citigroup are under SEC and 30 state investigation for fraud and insider trading. Merrill Lynch just bought their way out of a crime. This is current news from the last two weeks.
Are these companies going to add their names to the database of criminials and suspicious activity?
This conclusion is even more baffling in light of Colleen Rowler's memo and the now infamous "Pheonix" memo. It seems to me that the information gathering was rather effective, just poorly coordinated. The connections leading to 9/11 could have been made if the FBI had merely Googled their own information!
Those irrelevant e-mails weren't captured by mistake - they are captured with every instance of carnivore.. in other words, it's a feature, not a bug.
;)
What happened this time, and how it hit the news, was that the agent in charge of sorting through the information was new to the carnivore system, and was shocked to see that carnivore was designed to commit such a crime. In an applaudable (and rare-to-the-FBI) response of disgust and dismay, he destroyed all the data, preferring to destroy evidence with it rather than letting some of an innocent person's private data slip through.
The bureau was embarrased when the agent brought this to our attention, embarrased that he had noticed, embarrased that we'd posted a conscientious agent to that operation, embarrased that we had no real defense other than to play dumb and call it a program glitch. Yet, we had to come up with SOME excuse, because in a situation like that, the incident was GONNA leak.
So, here's our excuse, looks like most people bought it - well of course, it's on MSNBC, it's gotta be the truth.
All criminals/badthinkers won't be on that database. Somehow I don't think that white collar scum like Kenny-Boy Lay and all the other Enron and Anderson thieves will ever be blacklisted. Steal ten dollars, and you go on the list. Steal ten million, and you'll be invited to join the board of directors.
Seriously now. This is without a doubt the worst news I've heard all year, and I've heard a lot. This database will be a tool of very powerful and opinionated people to destroy the financial lives of people that disagree with them. And let's not even think about how Nixonian politicians or well-connected cults will manipulate that database to brand people "terrorists".
That word, "terrorist", mark me here, is the shiboleth of the 21st century. It will be used by very motivated political interests to annihilate "enemies", i.e. anyone who opposes their policies. And opposition will be forever muted, because people will learn not to make waves, else be spied on by the world cops, and marked "verboten" for financial dealings by the financial world.
Paranoid, you say? [bang head on wall].
It's already happening. Democratic party members are already terrified of speaking out because they WILL be branded traitors and terrorist sympathizers. The WTO protesters are already being labelled premptively as violent criminals wherever they show up -- and you can bet that is because of the influence wielded by the those they oppose. Oh, and did you know that protestors against Bush are not allowed within miles of the Great Man? They are bussed to cordoned-off "First Amendment Zones" miles away, and penned there by local cops until the Leader is gone, free of protestor taint. Of course, pro-Bush people are allowed to swarm the Bush -- this is democracy???
And to forestall any more "paranoia" strikes -- the use of lists and secret monitoring against political adversaries was used extensively by Nixon -- and a lot of the same moral-free characters than ran his culture war in their youth are now happily and ruthlessly slamming around the Constitution in pursuit of money for their peers and political control for themselves. I've never seen a press corps so utterly whipped.