Will Trump's Presidency Bring More Surveillance To The US? (scmagazine.com)

An anonymous reader reports that Donald Trump's upcoming presidency raises a few concerns for the security industry: "Some of his statements that industry professionals find troubling are his calls for 'closing parts of the Internet', his support for mass surveillance, and demands that Apple should have helped the FBI break the encrypted communications of the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone," writes SC Magazine. One digital rights activist even used Trump's surprise victory as an opportunity to suggest President Obama begin "declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government's unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can -- before Trump is the one running it... he has made it very clear exactly how he would use such powers: to target Muslims, immigrant families, marginalized communities, political dissidents, and journalists."

Edward Snowden's lawyer says "I think many Americans are waking up to the fact we have created a presidency that is too powerful," and the Verge adds that Pinboard CEO Maciej Ceglowski is now urging tech sites to stop collecting so much data. "According to Ceglowski, the only sane response to a Trump presidency was to get rid of as much stored user data as possible. 'If you work at Google or Facebook,' he wrote on Pinboard's Twitter account, 'please start a meaningful internal conversation about giving people tools to scrub their behavioral data.'"
Could a Trump presidency ultimately lead to a massive public backlash against government surveillance?

Comments

Who would Trump being spying for?

[Required Snark]

When the Trump administration begins spying on Americans, will they be doing it for Trump or for Putin?

1. The email leaks from Wikileaks went through Russian hands.

2. The email leaks from the Clinton campaign were from Russian hackers.

3. There is strong evidence that a Trump owned server was in communication via email with a server in Russia at a bank close to the Putin regime.

4. The Kremlin announced that they had been (illegally) in contact with the Trump campaign before the election. Trump surrogates deny this. However given point 3 the Russian statement appears true.

5. Trump has said on multiple occasions that he admires Putin.

Given the above, what are the chances that some of Trump's people have been compromised by Russian intelligence? The Russians have obviously had a lot of opportunities. The blackmail potential alone is enormous. There are a lot of Trump cronies who are desperate to join the new administration, and some of them may suddenly find that really damaging information exists on their contacts with Russia before the election.

Consider Christie. He comes from the Spiro Agnew school of governance: corrupt to the bone. If he is in the Trump administration and he faces a credibility problem he will throw anyone he can under the bus to save himself. He already did that with his convicted aides and Bridgegate.

And what about Trump himself. If at a critical moment the Russians can credibly show they interfered in the election and helped Trump, the legitimacy of the administration could be called into questions. At that point it makes no difference if Trump was in the loop or not. He can't avoid a crisis if that were to happen.

So welcome to a world where an incompetent mentally unstable "leader of the Free World" may be at risk of blackmail from a resurgent Russian Empire. And it's been less then two weeks since the election. What other muck could ooze out between now and the inauguration?