Ask Slashdot: What Will It Take To End Mass Surveillance?

Nicola Hahn writes: Both the White House and the U.S. Intelligence Community have recently announced reforms to surveillance programs sanctioned under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But do these reforms represent significant restructuring or are they just bureaucratic gestures intended to create the perception that officials are responding to public pressure?

The Executive's own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has written up an assessment (PDF) of reform measures implemented by the government. For those who want a quick summary the Board published a fact sheet (PDF) which includes a table listing recommendations made by the board almost a year ago and corresponding reforms. The fact sheet reveals that the Board's mandate to "end the NSA's bulk telephone records program" has not been implemented.

In other words, the physical infrastructure of the NSA's global panopticon is still in place. In fact, it's growing larger (PDF). So despite all of the press statements and associated media buzz very little has changed. There are people who view this as an unsettling indication of where society is headed. Ed Snowden claimed that he wanted to "trigger" a debate, but is that really enough? What will it take to tear down Big Brother?

Comments

3/5 clause

[Shakrai]

The Constitution and Bill of Rights is in my opinion beautifully written with the exception of claiming some people are not full people.

*sigh*

Did you know that the northern states wanted the slaves counted at 0% while the southern states wanted them counted at 100%? Seems backwards doesn't it? 60% was a compromise, like a lot of things in those days; what it did was accelerate the end of slavery by moving up the day of reckoning when the agrarian south would no longer be able to outvote the populous north in the United States Congress. Not to roam too far off topic here but the 3/5th's clause has got to be the most misunderstood part of the Constitution. Uninformed people parrot that line as though it enshrined "less than equal" into the law when what it actually did was reduce the power of the slave-holding states and so accelerate the demise of that abominable institution.

I'm not certain what else the people of the day could have done about it. I suppose they could have fought the Civil War right then and there, immediately after kicking the British out, but that doesn't seem terribly likely to have ended well for anybody, slave or freedman. If there was a better way to thread that needle the smartest men of the day couldn't figure it out. Frankly I've never heard anybody of our generation figure it out either and we've got 20/20 hindsight to work with.

Re:3/5 clause

[Shakrai]

Had this been done at the time of the civil war, it would have cost considerably less than the cost of the war.

What makes you think the South would have gone along with that? Or that Lincoln and his Cabinet (the smartest men of their time, just as the framers of the Constitution were) didn't think of it? All Lincoln cared about was preserving the Union. If it was as simple as writing a check do you not think that he would have tried it? The South revolted because they saw the long term demographic writing on the wall. Nothing Lincoln could have offered them would have changed that. Recall that he didn't even make slavery an issue until after Antietam.

That is how they did it in Britain, Washington D.C. and basically the rest of the world.

Britain's economy was never dependent upon slavery in the manner of the plantation states of the south. It's more than compensating owners for their "property"; you're effectively destroying an entire economic system. The effects were felt far and wide and extended well beyond the monied interests of the plantation owners. You can't implement a massive economic and societal change simply by writing a check. It took the bloodiest war in American history to effect that change, followed by a generation of reconstruction, and the effects of the resulting economic dislocation were being felt well into the 20th Century.

When writing the US Constitution, there was another option -- abolish it in the future.

Then the Southern States refuse to ratify the Constitution. Now you've got two (likely more than two, since if you're not willing to compromise on this issue what other issues go unresolved?) weaker countries on the global stage. A stage they're sharing with a massive pissed off empire they just fought an eight year war against. No, there was a reason why principled men on both sides were willing to compromise on issues as dear as slavery. It's a shame that our modern "leaders" can't look back to that example, for the issues we face today are nothing like the issues those men faced. Can you imagine the current crop of "leaders" in Washington sitting down to draft a new Constitution? Those idiots would spend the next five years arguing over who was going to take the minutes of the first meeting.

Re:Seriously? Look at History

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the "War on Terrorism" is just creating more targets every day it persists, right? That if we actually grew a pair and cut Israel off from all the aid we give them (in spite of the horrific things they've done to the Palestinians) and stopped invading countries for our own benefit and not theirs we'd have a lot less international terrorism and could focus on the domestic terrorism (gangs, whacko militias and such) that really needs to get cleaned up in our own house.

The only people to blame for all this mess is ourselves because we're the ones that elected these idiots that created the Patriot Act and all these spy programs to begin with. Stop voting for these a-holes that want this to continue.