Uncle Sam is Watching You

[Opsa]

Aggie and I have been having a discussion in Afterglow's comic thread that I think should have its own thread.

This was prompted by a comic that showed Nixon and Obama with wiretapping-style headphones on.

I started with this:

"That's an awesome graphic.

I don't agree with the sentiment, though. Anyone in this country who thinks they are not being monitored to some extent are a bit naive, IMHO. I have always operated on the impression that someone can listen in if they feel I'm a threat. I'm just not a threat. Nothing to hide, no problem. However, if they can cancel any terrorist behavior, then they have my blessings to go in and investigate.

I think that people are afraid that someone will shake their finger at them for looking at porn online, or having an extramarital affair or something. That's not the kind of activity the security people are concerned about. People's naughtiness are of no concern to them unless it involves serious transactions about harmful elements.

Most of us would be extremely boring to them, no matter how thrilling we may think we are. "

Aggie replied:
"The normalization of electronic monitoring is perhaps as or more worrying than the monitoring itself. While major threats are held up as the rationale for monitoring, the technological realities are such that broadscale electronic monitoring is/will be possible.

If you raise a red flag by stringing together a number of words that the computer red-flags as suspicious, how much monitoring are you OK with in order to let them find out that you're not a threat? Phone, text and email tapping? How would you feel if a couple of men in a plain vehicle park on your street and watch your family's daily routine? (the latter is me scaremongering, because I doubt they have the resources for that sort of thing without significant cause) If you're not a terrorist but might be bending other areas of the law, should they be allowed to pass info on to other agencies even if the infractions have nothing to do with the original red flag?

IMHO, this kind of monitoring has more to do with technological abilities and the general political climate more than any particular figurehead.  However, if the powers that be have this kind of a mentality:
(photo of Joe McCarthy)
then the implications of widespread monitoring are disturbing indeed."

I reply to Aggie now:
Aggie- if the gubmint has to park on my street and watch us go to work, school, and the store, so be it. I will wave at them. As long as I know that they are paying as much attention to someone who might be truly dangerous. Maybe it's because I'm sick of things like the Boston marathon bombing, and all that carp. It's so dreadfully chronic. What the heck else are we to do? I'm watching the news and seeing that another school was threatened today in Newtown. I would like people to stop this.

Don't worry, I haven't gone conservative, but I have been trying to consider these problems.

Any replies welcome.

[Aggie]

I suppose I agree to the degree that I think law enforcement is worthwhile to protect from these sorts of things; I am not anti-police or anti-law.

I suppose part of my reluctance regarding widespread surveillance is from living in a town where the police force often appears to operate on the principle of Suspect Until Proven Innocent and lays a beady eye on everyone they pass. Being young(ish) and male is enough to make one feel like a suspect.  The police force here is augmented by mobile civilian Safe Community Units and private security forces to a level that I've not experienced in bigger cities. IMHO, if they were allowed to power-scan texts, emails and phone conversations looking for red flags, they would jump at the chance to confirm their suspicions.

When law enforcement views the local populace as a bunch of criminals, I do not agree with giving them casual access to electronic surveillance methods. AFAIK, the laws here do not make it easy at the moment.  IMHO, the fact that a certain percentage of the population engages in illegal activity makes it tempting for law enforcement (if allowed) to use scanning methods to catch otherwise unidentifiable law-breakers simply by widespread random or systemic monitoring. I'm not against targeted surveillance where there is already reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, but as the technology improves it will be cost-effective and demonstrably effective (in terms of making arrests) to monitor everyone.  The nature of the internet and communications equipment means that electronic monitoring can plausibly monitor the majority of human-human interaction.

The part that frightens me is the industrialization of the justice system into a profitable way to build infrastructure and create prison jobs.  For this to be a growth industry, it requires a growing number of criminal convictions.  The temptation to expand beyond potential mass-destruction events and into petty crime in order to keep sending lawbreakers to jail is worrying.

We haven't had the same amount of major events up here, so while I understand your perspective, it's harder to accept the tradeoff between surveillance and security.

-----

Aside from the law enforcement aspect, undoubtedly social scientists could make great leaps in their knowledge base from access to complete (anonymous) communications records.  Would you consent to monitoring for the betterment of human knowledge? How about for marketing purposes?

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One point that I was trying to make but may not have been clear enough is that I'm not sure the graphic's implication that Obama is directing/encouraging surveillance is quite accurate. I think that any US president would be under extensive pressure to expand the use of available technology. Prime Ministers may be another matter, as Harper seems quite keen on explicit surveillance of his MPs; there are published lists of Those Who Must Be Watched available to the media.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

One interesting individual not that long ago said: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
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Surveillance -seems to me- reeks of desperation that some one will be crazy enough to kill indiscriminately and the public can only fall prey on their own terror. There has to be a way to stop the crazies and if that implies that my privacy is compromised, it may be more tolerable than the fear that the crazy touch me or the ones I love.

Personally, coming from a place with a recognized civil war lasting half a century (at least the current one...) where at times guerrillas took unsuspecting towns killing, bombing and robbing, the idea of some sort of eye in the sky seemed preferable to the alternative, and had my country the means to do so, millions would agree to be observed at every moment to prevent the alternative, myself included, for a while.

But the eye in the sky, the ear on our calls, the spook logging our every communications does much, much less to prevent the crazies from acting, and much, much more to transform us into hostages of our own good intentions. The reasons for terror have little to do with our everyday actions and more with making statements about real and/or perceived injustices, and logging our actions will do little to find the crazies, or stop their intentions, as they are determined in their madness to do their deeds, without regard for the lives of others or their own, and only the most stupid and incompetent will leave enough crumbs to follow, provided that an almost omniscient system is able to recognize them.

The phone data, the web logs, and the cameras didn't stop the crazies at Boston (the data gathering has been ongoing for years), and our only consolation is that those may've helped catching the perpetrators sooner, but it was private CCV tapes what gave the best clues of the perpetrators, and obviously didn't stopped them from doing anything.

There will always be crazy people trying to make a point at the expense of the rest of us, but instead we cower in fear and ask for Big Brother to take charge of them while we as a society comfortably ignore the root causes that got them there in the first place.

The day surveillance is able to stop the crazies is the day surveillance can stop any of us doing something that someone behind the monitors may consider improper regardless if it really is a threat to society or to anybody else. How can I be comfortable if someone has the power to flag me because I read so and so and say so and so? It sounds fantastic when the flagged isn't me, right? Heck, wasn't that the whole deal about stripsearch every middle eastern looking person going into a plane? Hey, I'm not middle eastern so, yeah, do a cavity search because who knows what he has up his @$$! All good until it is our own @$$ in the line, or the happy TSA guys ogling every person going into a plane, fine by me, but not so fine if it's my wife, or my sisters, or my mother or any daughters, nieces, cousins, girlfriends, etc. Yes something has to be done, because the crazies will try, but how? I'm sure that if we all had to go stark naked into a plane the crazies would find a way, so what is accomplished? How long until we fear expressing our dislike with the government action because we can be branded subversive or terrorist?

Nope, I'm not fine with it, I don't think it is the right tool, and I don't think it accomplishes anything but to make us fearful of our government instead of the other way around as it should be.

And now I will step down from my soap box.

[Aggie]

*rumble*

[pieces o nine]

Both Aggie and Zono have expressed my reservations very well.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
When I was a kid watching Star Trek I noticed many sociological things (although I didn't have that term then). One was that whenever someone was accused of something, an *incredibly* detailed video log could be called up from the ship's records. This was just footage from previous episodes, but the multiple camera angles and zoom-in close-ups for sensitive conversations was taken for granted by the crew and people watching the episode. As other variations of this series and its eventual franchising were produced I noticed the omniscience of the surveillance growing. Of all the hot-button sociological questions explored, I don't remember institutionalized elimination of privacy being among them.

By the time TNG came along and most of my peers had internet access, CCTV in businesses and large cities was old news. I wondered then if the normalization of perpetual, total surveillance for a whole new 'generation' was an intentional or unintentional element of popular fiction. Not enough to put me off computers and the net, or SciFi films and television, obviously, but I wondered. I still do.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

As Alan Moore wrote, Who Watches the Watchers?  The Edward J. Snowden case captures this perfectly. He was neither a member of the government proper, nor a member of the military proper; he was a GED-diploma'd employee of a government contractor. In other words, a corporation. He claimed, "Any analyst at any time could target anyone, any selector, anywhere. ...  I, sitting my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even a president if I had a personal email."

Chris Hayes captured it perfectly when he responded, "There's a 29-year-old working for a private contractor, not even particularly high up in Top Secret America, who could do what he says he could do. How many disgruntled, abusive ex-boyfriends are there inside this massive apparatus. ..."

We had a joke in Catholic school about everything we did going into our PERMANENT RECORD. For the generation living their entire lives in the era of Facebook and the *admitted* business and government surveillance, that is no longer a joke.

There is no procedure for dialing back power grabs, especially in politically charged times. Now there is a glut of detailed personal information filling up huge servers, just 'going to waste'...  As part of our populace worships the privatization and selling of EVERYTHING, should a summary of a person's entire email, texting, posts in the HOT, and phone history be marketed  to potential employers looking for a way around anti-discrimination laws for their own biases in religion, political affiliation, or "purity"? Or to insurance companies as another way to deny coverage or treatment? How about an enterprising hacker acquiring and selling every email, text, or phone call you've ever made (with questionable accuracy  -- consider the known, unfixed glitches with some airline passengers constantly selected for extra special care because their name is similar to someone on the sekrit list) for a "do-it-yourself" background-checker/stalker-enabler/ID-theft-helper on the net? Would we still feel "safer" and secure in the knowledge that we haven't done anything wrong?

I don't think such questions in this context are tinfoil hat worthy. The concept that the best response to threats of 'terrists who hate our freedoms' is to voluntarily surrender all rights and privacy lets them ... win. What does it mean to be a 'free citizen' complicit with an atmosphere of perpetual, comprehensive surveillance?

[Griffin NoName]

I go with Aggie's comment about how snooping becomes normalised.

[Opsa]

I see all your points, and agree with them in some respects.

I think that my defensiveness is coming from a place that feels that Obama is being shot at by the Tea Party types over this issue. The Tea Party seems to me to be a paranoid bunch, ready to freak everybody out if it means they can make the liberals look bad.

I have to wonder if a Tea-Party approved president would have backed this sort of surveillance.

I have to wonder if the Tea Partiers would have jumped all over the liberals for not being more vigilant if this had not come to light.

I am sure that there must be a better preventative plan. What might work?

[Griffin NoName]

I am sure that there must be a better preventative plan. What might work?

Self-reporting?

< "I give permission for my data content to be snooped on" >  (I don't )

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Actually with the exception of Rand Paul and Glenn Beck, the right has been between rage at the leaker and mum. In fact you can say that the establishment, regardless of their supposed leaning is for snooping and outraged at the leaks while civil libertarians and some right-wing libertarians are against snooping.

Regarding Obama I must say that I strongly believe that, on matters of the so-called "national security", has been unwilling to control the CIA, the Pentagon and evidently, the NSA, perhaps persuaded of their hawkish views (he used to be against this kind of thing), or he is a wimp and is fearful any possible backlash if he takes a stand and is branded a "softie". Either way I'm deeply disappointed in him on this, and it simply confirms my view that the Democratic party is simply Republican lite, because the full flavor is too fascist to openly endorse.

I don't think there is malice on the administration on the issue, but clearly no one is able or willing to articulate what the problems of such policy bring, and until that moment arrives we are moving closer to a police state, when a next president decides to use the full power at their disposal.

[Opsa]

Way too scary. What can we do?

[Griffin NoName]

Apparently sales of "1984" have rocketed.

Switch off the screen in the corner of the room, if you can

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Apparently sales of "1984" have rocketed.

Switch off the screen in the corner of the room, if you can

Indeed.  We already have a the Ministry of Truth.... we call it Fox News.

[pieces o nine]

Apparently sales of "1984" have rocketed.

Switch off the screen in the corner of the room, if you can

Indeed.  We already have a the Ministry of Truth.... we call it Fox News.

Indeed.  Fox News has inculcated the GOP Base with Two Minutes Hate Two Minutes Not Hating every day, and Hate Week occurring every time the non-Base attempts anything.

[Opsa]

I keep getting that confused with Shark Week.

[Aggie]

One point that I was trying to make but may not have been clear enough is that I'm not sure the graphic's implication that Obama is directing/encouraging surveillance is quite accurate. I think that any US president would be under extensive pressure to expand the use of available technology. Prime Ministers may be another matter, as Harper seems quite keen on explicit surveillance of his MPs; there are published lists of Those Who Must Be Watched available to the media.

I partially recant this part of my previous post.  I'm not informed enough to know what role Obama is playing in this. I heard a few sound bites recently (from Obama, can't remember specifics) that highlighted that fact.  I do stand by the opinion that it's a reflection of the times rather than a personal agenda.

I purposefully minimize my exposure to the news, so I should probably be careful about opening my mouth about current events.