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Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance
holy_calamity writes "U.S. citizens have historically been protected from government surveillance by technical limits, not legal ones, writes independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani at MIT Tech Review. He claims that recent leaks show that technical limits are loosening, fast, with data storage and analysis cheap and large Internet services taking care of data collection for free. 'Spying no longer requires following people or planting bugs, but rather filling out forms to demand access to an existing trove of information,' writes Soltani."
CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs.
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You're correct, but it's gotten way, way worse in the past decade.
The truly Orwellian thing about this nightmare isn't even so much the surveillance, but the wholesale redefinition of language. Plain English no longer means what plain English means, and we have traded rule of law for rule of lawyer.
It's not torture, it's "extraordinary rendition for enhanced interrogation techniques."
And of course you still have due process, it's "a process that is due, but not necessarily judicial."
And you're not being jailed without trial. You're being "indefinitely detained."
I would say we need a Constitutional Amendment that Congress shall make no law infringing upon your right to privacy, but without another amendment that says "no really, plain English means plain English" it wouldn't matter much. And they'd just twist that to mean "plain English in the context of this amendment means English which, plainly, means what we want it to mean."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The fourth amendment seems pretty clear to me.
Unfortunately it's not when it comes to electronic communications.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A phone call isn't clearly covered, and SCOTUS explicitly decided it wasn't in 1928, then reversed itself in 1967. That's also when they came up with the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test, which I always thought was reasonable. Of course 1967 was an era when the court thought its job was to defend the Bill of Rights, rather than play nitpicking legal games to create as many loopholes as possible.
Don't bother trying to convince me that email, etc, should be covered by the 4th, as you'll be preaching to the choir. I don't give a damn what kind of legal games they play about you not owning the servers or storage medium. That's like saying that the 4th doesn't apply if you rent rather than own your home. My only point was that SCOTUS is free to play lots of games. My favorite is their recent Catch-22 nonsense, that you can't sue the government for a secret program violating your rights because you can't be sure they've been violated (of course not, it's a secret!). Maybe Snowden will release info on who has unlawfully been a surveillance target so they can sue.
In any of the cases, we don't actually have anything to worry about.
Quite the opposite really; it means the ONLY thing this apparatus is effective at is selectively abusing people.
In other words it won't stop any crimes, but will be used to perpetrate them.
I wonder if you could sue the feds for spying on you, and use the lawsuit to get a subpoena against the federal agency in question. When the subpoena is inevitably challenged on grounds of national security, rebut that with the fact that your constitutional rights are provided by the constitution which supercedes any laws that make the information secret in the first place (supremacy clause).
Of course, this is doomed to failure since the feds have shown they'll do whatever the hell they want to anyway.
We BELIEVED there was privacy, because the Government told us about the protection, and the media supported them. The olde-tyme radio cops got away with what society thought was fair.. today, Law and Order:(n) or CSI:(m) would at least make a 'big deal' about a sketchy search without PC, or when handling a suspect who hasn't been properly Mirandized.
...10 business days, lady..."; she received a letter from an attorney - with a copy of the accident report, asking if she needed any legal advice or representation.
Also, NJ State law about "Red Light Cameras" requires that the footage recorded is destroyed within 60 days - if nothing is illegal, or no charges filed; and within 90 days after the matter is settled ( if you are charged, and just pay the ticket) . Another case of nobody watching.. search YouTube and find at least 5, probably a dozen NJ Red Light Cam videos.. posted as marketing from the camera company! Big brother ( d/b/a private contractor) is watching, recording, and had their fingers crossed when they promised to destroy the footage.
Until relatively recent credit card legislation, citizens had no expectation of privacy against data collection ( selective surveillance) by non-government agencies. This surveillance has been happening since before most of us were even born. It is not new.. but the media has ignited the flames of FUD, and the methods for collecting, analyzing , and distributing information have grown exponentially as a result of computers and the changes they bring to society.
In 1897 or so, S&H Green stamps started a " marketing loyalty program". Your grocer ( gas station, Sears & Roebuck) could influence your purchases by adjusting the 'bonus levels' of green stamps you received in return for a purchase. When they chose to, they could also watch meta-trends, or even specific consumer behavior changes, because all the stamps were serial-numbered. S&H, when they received the redeemed booklets, could measure the effectiveness.. which retailers were distributing more, which customers were collecting & returning more, how many just got lost or never filled a book? The company changed over time.. and never really returned to the giant stature they had after the 1970's inflation/stagflation.. but they still exist, and offer web-based purchase premiums.
Around 1920, Al Neilsen got tired with his day job, and decided to create A.C. Neilsen ; to rate how well radio advertisers were doing. The company is still around today, trying to measure DVR and Netflix data, too. This was probably one of the original "crowdsourced" industries.. I mean, if you get "selected" today, they only pay you a dollar a week - if your data is on-time.
Criminal records, property records, articles of incorporation, lawsuits.. all were considered public record at one level or another. I was taught how to search all that paper at my local County Courthouse back in the mid- 1980s. At the time, only criminal records actually required that you produce ID and a legitimate reason to ask.
My sister was in an auto accident last summer. Before the local police were ready with a report "
It was around 1902-1904 that the Northeast's major Life & Medical insurers got together and built what we now call the MIB ( Medical Information Bureau). Any insurer.. and lots of other "qualified participants" ( =$ ?) can add, edit, or search these records about every one of us. Every time an insurance company paid a claim (or messed up a claim) medically, that info was added to the collection. Today, we just call this a database.
Again.. no protection here. Last time I checked, the MIB was voluntarily adopting a model similar to credit reporting agencies.. they would provide an individual with a personal report ( minus trade-secrets and scoring), and give the individual some righ
They'd never call it "Patriot talk." Remember, "Patriots" are the brave men and women who spy on everything you do to keep this great nation and its people safe.
Other awful problem of the state of the language: we've pre-Godwined ourselves. We're so ingrained with the idea that comparing something to nazi germany means that you have lost perspective and your argument has devolved into flinging hyperbolic insults, and you have therefore lost. People do not understand the literal definition of Fascism anymore, and as Orwell said in Politics and the English Language (relinked from a response to my original post by a fine poster), "The word fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'"
In fact, "Italian Fascism promotes a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in corporative associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy."
Doesn't that sound like someplace we know? Where through "regulatory capture" (a fancy way of saying "industry writes government regulation to their benefit"), and "campaign contributions" (i.e., "bribes") the government and industry are basically one in the same?
Yes, that's America. But you can't say it! Because if you do, you lose. "Well that's ridiculous! I don't see any dictator marching Jews into ovens!"
You can't even criticize the system of our government, because the word that properly describes our system of government is no longer allowed in public debate. Orwell would be...not proud...sadly resigned?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"They'd never call it "Patriot talk." Remember, "Patriots" are the brave men and women who spy on everything you do to keep this great nation and its people safe."
A friend recently linked me to an article about this very thing. For a change this is not Godwin's Law; this is actually relevant.
The reason it was possible for Hitler and the Nazis to rise to power, was because the populace mistakenly believed "patriotism" was not loyalty to The People or their country, but to their government. Big Mistake.
Patriotism is loyalty to your family and your neighbors, not to Barack Obama.