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

Yes!

[Mitreya]

Yes he will
But so would have Clinton.

Re:Yes!

[markdavis]

+1 exactly.

This is why so many of us are upset about the process. WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH CHOICE. We end up having to elect people based on conflicting single issues. But when both candidates share the same negatives, and surveillance is just one, you lose, regardless.

There is ZERO doubt that Hilary Clinton would bring more surveillance. Same with Trump. She would have been all sneaky about it and probably lie about it too. He will more likely be loud and annoying about it.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump likes digging up dirt on people and threatened to put his political rival in jail (let's see if he was lying). This is exactly what people were warning about.

I guess that's why people are sitting in US military prisons for doing less than Hillary right. Never mind that team Obama and the IRS actually went after people for not having the right viewpoint. Or that in multiple states that democrats and AG's wanted to prosecute people for daring to have a point of view contrary to the orthodoxy on global warming.

Re:Yes!

[breech1]

Trump is a totally different matter. Democrats and most of the media will never support anything he proposes even if it was a democrat issue, and many Republicans don't support him either. If he does anything out of the ordinary he will be impeached faster than the news media can say "Trump is Grand Wizard Adolf Stalin."

I've seen that line of thinking before and I think it's wishful thinking. The Republicans that were against Trump did so only because they thought he was damaging their election chances. But Trump won. And now Republicans will line up behind him to support whatever he wants. There might be some intraparty squabbling, but that will only be over the scale of an idea. As for impeachment, that'll never happen. Democrats won't have a majority in the House anytime soon to force the issue and Republicans won't impeach one of their one.

Funny how that works

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

>>...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..

When Obama got into power, I assumed he'd be the typical liberal. Little did I know he'd get very friendly with the expansion of the police state. He's enjoyed using the presidential powers at whim. Now that he's leaving, someone else gets to pick up the parts he so willingly put into place and use them.

Should have thought of that before you put it into law eh there mr. president?

Re:Funny how that works

[haruchai]

>>...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..

When Obama got into power, I assumed he'd be the typical liberal. Little did I know he'd get very friendly with the expansion of the police state. He's enjoyed using the presidential powers at whim. Now that he's leaving, someone else gets to pick up the parts he so willingly put into place and use them.

Should have thought of that before you put it into law eh there mr. president?

The only way Obama could have been considered a liberal is if he was being compared to hardline conservative. Just because the GOP loudmouths were labeling him a socialist for months before he was elected didn't make it true.

Losing their minds

[sycodon]

Will a Trump Presidency cause Slashdot editors to lose their minds and post story after story on how a Trump Presidency will affect (insert pet cause here)

Re:Losing their minds

[seven of five]

Slashdot has editors????

junk-science

[PopeRatzo]

I'm taking the Climate Change denier position on the surveillance state.

1. There's no real proof that there is ubiquitous surveillance.

2. If if there was real proof of ubiquitous surveillance, there's no real proof that it's a bad thing.

3. Anyway, it's too late to stop ubiquitous surveillance, so there's no point in trying.

4, Ubiquitous surveillance might actually be good for us.

5. All the privacy advocates are just in it for the money.

Re:Without a doubt

[Kohath]

Plus, they are one state away from having enough power to add or delete amendments to the Constitution.

It takes 38 (3/4ths of 50) states to ratify an amendment. Republicans don't control 37 state legislatures. It's 33.

Hopefully we can get a balanced budget amendment anyway.

Clinton

[JBMcB]

Clinton voted to invade Afghanistan and we wrecked that country - even more so than it was before, which is quite a feat.
She voted to invade Iraq and we wrecked that country - killing hundreds of thousands of civilians directly and indirectly.
She recommended invading Libya and we ruined that country.

Her next step would be military intervention in Syria. Because we have had such a good track record over there.

What's your definition of psychopathy?

Can we even speculate?

[fyngyrz]

Clinton is of the same party, and has made a number of statements that align her closely with President Obama.

President Obama (re)imposed the (un)PATRIOT(ic) act on the US; if that doesn't give you a guiding sense of where the party is, and very likely where Mrs. Clinton is in terms of invasive surveillance, imposition on personal liberty, and constitutional malfeasance, I don't know what would.

Not to say President-elect Trump is likely to be any better, but inasmuch as his campaign was riddled with trivially disproved falsehoods, and in just the few days since the election, we've seen (at least) these radical pivots from him and/or his team...

o Not getting rid of pre-existing conditions or the ACA as a whole;
o Not dumping the banksters (met with them already to kill Dodd–Frank consumer protections)
o Not cleaning house (already hiring the most in- of the in-movers and shakers and lobbyists, for his team)
o Not actually building a wall, that was just figurative;
o No special prosecutor for Clinton ("what a great campaign she ran!");
o Making nice with President Obama after explicitly claiming he was the worst president ever;
o The whole "no-ties with Russia" thing, oops, lots of ties, plus wikileaks admitted by the Russians now;
o Going from "ultra-vet all Muslims at the border" to "we will not allow people in from terrorist regions"

...I don't see any way to associate his previously asserted goals with his actual intent. So I can't say he'd be any worse, either. The man is a policy cypher. A misogynist, xenophobic, sexist, rude, compulsive, racist, and frankly, none-too-bright policy-cypher with a grade school vocabulary and the rhetorical (lack of) skills of (at best) a 7th grader. Who knows what the heck he will do if the EC lets this farce come to fruition?

What a weird set of circumstances.

Nobody really knows what he'll do.

[hey!]

Because he doesn't consider himself bound by his prior statements, and his supporters don't hold him to them.

There are some things we know he won't do: build a border wall and make the Mexicans pay for it. There are other things we can be pretty sure he will do: lower taxes on the wealthiest people. But everything else will depend on how he feels that day.

There's a reason both liberal AND conservatives don't like him, because he's basically unprincipled. But similar conversations are going on on both sides to the effect: maybe we can exploit some of this situation to our advantage.