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Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running
wildfrontiersman writes "NY Times article, Many Tools of Big Brother Are Up and Running, quote: 'Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, A.T.M. systems, cellphone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals.' This is too scary. I am now ready for a little less convenience and a little more privacy. How about you?"
Why should I worry about surveillance on my online activities? It's not like I'm doing anything illegal.
Who doesn't have any subscriptions to anywhere except for my driver's license, bank cards (one credit, one debit) and Social insurance number?
People who become peons of Big Brother do so because they want big brother to nurture their lazieness... It's almost like selling your soul to the devil in exchange of comfort.
I could travel to an arab country and back (from Canada - with a canadian passport), and nobody would know.
Wake up people - it's not that hard.
So George Orwell was off by 20 years.
Hey Democrats. Looking for an issue? How about dropping the "Tax cuts for the Rich" and the "It's the Economy Stupid" Garbage and adopt a platform based on the Protection of civil liberities? With all of this "Homeland Security" running out the wazoo and back, and our freedoms going out the door one by one, maybe you would get people listening to what you have to say if you start informing people that their freedom is at risk.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
... posting your driver's license and Socialist Insecurity (or your country's equivalent thereof) numbers here in the thread you started.
Only boring people don't need the right to privacy.
A few hundred web sites devoted to tracking the mundane habits of the guy who wants to do the same to you seems rather appropriate.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
>
> I feel the same way about Big Brother. I don't consider them to be a threat about what they might intentionally find out about me or my friends/family. I fear what they might "think" they found in a fit of total incompetence.
Amen to that. I heard the swordsman comment phrased a little less elegantly:
"Evil has to sleep at night. Stupidity is 24/7."
At least Big Brother as depicted in Orwell's 1984 was competent - it was staffed by dedicated bellyfeeling Party members who were capable of doing a pretty good job of hunting down and exterminating those who presented a threat to the Party, while leaving the proles alone.
A Big Brother staffed by the cluel^H^H^H^H^H fucknoz^H^H^H^H^H^H^H twit^H^H^H^H individuals presently working at INS, or even your local DMV, scares me far more than the one in 1984.
But compared to either of those alternatives, I'll take a Big Brother staffed by NSA and CIA any day. Heck, I'll even give the FBI a shot at joining in and redeem itself.
Short of spending trillions to achieve the 1984 total security state, the way you achieve the optimum balance between freedom and security is that you have your police force be just a little bit stupid, and just a little bit slow.
We got hit on 9/11 because we went for very slow and very stupid. Bureaucratic stonewalling (no information sharing between FBI, CIA, and NSA) was part of it, as were politically-motivated fuckups like diverting FBI resources away from the Islamokazi whackjob terrorist threat to investigate the domestic militia whackjob terrorist threat. As for stupidity, it doesn't get much dumber than giving visa confirmations to the 9/11 hijackers six months after all hell broke loose - only the INS could pull something like that. And only in the INS could Ashcroft himself not fire those responsible.
IMNSHO, the proposed Big Brother composed of our intelligence agencies (NSA, CIA, post-9/11 FBI design goal) has the potential to achieve the right degree of stupidity and slowness for the job -- and I don't mean that as an insult. Any stupider and slower (pre-9/11 FBI, current INS), and we'd have another 9/11. Any smarter and faster (Stasi, KGB, Gestapo), and it'd be 1984.
The issue is not whether we should be afraid they may find something, it is that they will.
For years, the NRA has been fighting gun registration. Guess what, they just lost and it did not even require a vote. If I can record every electronic transaction, then the legal purchase you just made at Walmart was recorded and we know who bought the gun, where you live, etc... Now before you hit reply with "maybe we should know.." maybe we should. But, it should be explained to people that way, no usurped.
Working in the travel business, specifically hotel systems, we try to have a "no spook" policy. We do not tie anything about your stay together. We don't send a "thank you for staying" note to you and your spouse just because two stayed in the room. We also don't comment on things you did there. (Porn channel, liter of scotch, etc.). This makes people uncomfortable, because they learn they are being tracked to an incredible detail. (when you entered and left your room, what you ate, drank and purchased in the hotel shop)
The Information Awareness Office(IAO) is going the opposite route. They will be tying all this type of information together with your financial, banking, medical and police records. Consider what Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich would have been willing to do, to avoid having their "indescretions" revealed? Simply tying Newt's calendar to the hotel registrations in the area to the credit card paying for it...
The problem with this information is we cannot trust people not to abuse it. The IAO is currently being run by John Poindexter a person convicted of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing the congressional inquiry. He thought he knew the best course of action for the country. Now given the information that would influence where we might go, that beats dollars any day.
So if you don't do anything wrong why do you care? Because people in power will do something wrong and this makes Hoover's files first grade stuff.
We are sold the fact that in order to get more convience we must give up our rights to privacy. This isn't true, most systems that grant convience and save time can be implemented in a way that will grant the user MORE privacy than they would have had otherwise. The problem is that most people are willing to give up anything for convience, being lazy asses, and the companies that implement the solutions to grant more convience, implement them in a way that the user trades off private information that the corporation can use for profit, or the government can use to fight dead beat dads, terrorists, drug dealers and those people who rip mattress tags off.
For those of you who always bring up 1984 and Brave New World, read Brave New World Revisited, it is a collection of excellent essays by Huxley written towards the end of his life describing nearly exactly the society we are living in today and where we are going. Read about the roots of propaganda and marketing and it's rise in the 20th century. Noam Chomsky has a great book on that called Manufacturing Consent.
Time to lower the antenna and crawl back down into my lead shielded underground vault at an undisclosed location (Cheney and I had the same realtor).
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Sounds logical, but it is quite naive.
;-)
You forget that monitoring someone by someone else is entirely different then monitoring millions of people at once.
Currently, it's not a big thread yet, but eventually (near future), governments will be able to data mine on data/voice/images you send over the internet reall-time. At that point, the government will start to use this technique to track possible criminals and possibly arresting them.
Another argument against your reasoning is that most people have no clue at all about the technology governments use and will be using in the near future. So even if they care allot about their privacy, they will not be able to judge wether their actions are monitorable or not.
Things are not that simple and we need to keep an eye on these things. I myself love the internet, will never want to part from it. But keeping an eye on the ones that are able to misuse it is very important.
A Big Brother society in which noone is able to do anything wrong is not a myth but can very well be a future prospect. And trust me, you would not like to live in such society (apart from your own opinion that you don't care what people know about you).
Just imagine a world in which you get fined automatically whenever you (accidentically?) drop an empty beer can on the street. Sounds far fetched, but it can become quite realistic nevertheless.
Ps. I work at a data mining company. Working against my principals? Yah, I guess, but the colleagues are great
When Nixon was President the FBI and CIA were actively engaged in suppressing expressions of political ideas that didn't conform to the Republican party line. Their activities included character assasination, IRS audits, getting people fired and ruining their careers, even blackmail and extortion.
Later, under Reagan, you could be investigated if you participated in organizations (don't try to be smart here - this included Catholic Church activities) trying to stop the wars in Nicaragua or El Salvadore, and these investigations involved agents coming to your workplace and making you look like a criminal in front of your employer.
Now the current administration is hiring people convicted of previous political crimes to run various agencies, including the Total Information Awareness initiative, which involves collecting ALL data about you, including now intercepting e-mail and phone conversations! This agency is run by a man convicted of using his job to engage in political activities any engaging in a cover-up so that Congress wouldn't find out. THIS is who is running this operation, and this should tell you all you need to know about the Administration's intentions!
This will be a political spying operation.
You know, something like 911 is exactly what the price of freedom is. If you want to live in the land of the free, you have to accept that sometimes these things happen; you'll just have to make sure that you don't piss off the rest of the world.
/with your active consent!/! It's real scary to me how Bush got his Reichtag and is using it in nearly exactly the same bloody way as Hitler did. Don't you learn from history?
And don't you think it's odd that the only thing which could have prevented 911 (installing locked, iron doors to the cockpit) hasn't happened yet? And at the same time, your privacy has been taken away,
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?