Why there is no reason fo fear the Surveillance state

[Eddie Hardon]

"Who guards the guardians?" is the thought that comes to Mind.

HUAC. Consider McCarthy and Cohn. Consider what they really were and contrast with their behaviour re HUAC.

Nixon. Wow. "When the President does something, it's legal"...and him a trained lawyer.

I'll have to get the Pentagon Paper out of the office library just to refresh and learn.

Just my 2 bob.

[tgace]

There is no disconnect with complaining about excessive surveillance and the failure of said surveillance to apprehend criminals. People don't like being snooped on, but are sold a preposterous idea that in exchange for invasive surveillance they will gain security, then when said surveillance fails to predict some criminal action, they quite rightly ask "WTF, I thought you said in exchange for snooping, you would prevent this from happening?"

The fact of the matter is that we can't even predict the weather, and that is much a much easier task. You can gather all the data you want, but you won't predict what's going to happen for an entire population of people. The only thing the data is good for, is fucking over individuals within that population. So if there is data being gathered on you, you'd better hope that no one involved in that collection process ever decides to fuck you over, and that no one from outside the process breaks into that nice big collection of info and uses it to do something you don't like.

True...while my experience is with LE Surveillance and not NSA/CIA type stuff, I have found that data is far more useful for finding the bad guys after the fact than it is catching them before they act. It's also useful in tracking, locating and building patterns of people you are already investigating vs finding people WORTH investigating if you catch my drift.

[Devil]

Blood. Of. Patriots. And. Tyrants.

[CrackFox]

I have found that data is far more useful for finding the bad guys after the fact than it is catching them before they act.

The kind of people this surveillance is supposed to be targeting don't give a shit about being caught after their goal has been carried out. They usually want to be caught and be famous or die in the act.

[Rivington]

There's also the issue that more data can mean more purely correlational relationships, and thus more errors. Trying to collect data from every Verizon subscriber, for example, can lead to lots of false leads:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02...errors-people/

[tgace]

I have heard the saying that all this does is buld a "bigger haystack"..making finding the needle more difficult. What we need are people better at finding needles vs people to pile on more hay.

[It is Fake]

Similar to DNA...there's an outrage over collecting DNA at arrest like fingerprints but there's also an outrage when we don't catch a murderer within a week like on TV by using DNA.

I am going to disagree this is not a good example. People do not trust law enforcement or the government to keep DNA safe. That's an image problem, that keeps popping up, every time a DNA lab is tainted, police department is busted for falsifying evidence and don't get me started on alphabet soup conspiracies.

It is much harder to fake fingerprints yet, we hear of cross contamination of DNA yearly.

[patfromlogan]

This was reported in 2006.
http://yahoo.usatoday.com/news/washi...5-10-nsa_x.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/de...ed.theobserver

[OwlMatt]

Now even Jim Sesenbrenner is speaking out!
"Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

"As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.�s interpretation of this legislation," he said in a statement. "While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses." He added: "Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American." Sensenbrenner also asked: "How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation?"

Sensenbrenner is right, of course, but this is a classic example of the naivete that was the problem with the Patriot Act in the first place. He complains about the federal government's interpretation of the Patriot Act now, but while he was getting it passed he dismissed warnings that it might be interpreted this very way and used for this very purpose. He even admits to having been worried that the Patriot Act could be abused in this way; then why the hell did he write it and work so hard to get it passed?

All along, the argument for the Patriot Act has been that it won't be abused, not that it can't. And in light of history, that's a really, really stupid argument. Abuse of power is the natural result of power. You don't give government a power unless you are prepared for the eventuality of that power being abused.

[patfromlogan]

Today's report on Democracy Now! gets in depth with interviews with Snowden and the others: http://www.democracynow.org/ MONDAY, JUNE 10, 2013

[faixabranca]

If idiots have this kind of power, shouldn't I be just as afraid if not more so?

[Bneterasedmynam]

I remember Pen&Teller did a good bullshit episode about big brother. The point was that the government is still ran by humans, and humans can't be trusted. If I remember correctly two of the three people they hired to use a camera van decided to tape the people fucking next door to their target, even though they were told in advance that they only had the legal right to tape the target. The government is like any organization there are some bad apples, just as with any large group of people. You also must consider that power regardless of its intent will always corrupt. There needs to be a balance more than just the current "trust us" mentality.

[Eddie Hardon]

The kind of people this surveillance is supposed to be targeting don't give a shit about being caught after their goal has been carried out. They usually want to be caught and be famous or die in the act.

Minor points.
Woolwich Murder of Drummer Rigby (off-duty). The 2 murderers waited until the Police arrived and then attacked them. I infer that they were seeking 'martyrdom' or as you say, "suicide by cop".

This seems to be the trend here in the UK by these extremist Muslim groups. The initial bombing of our Underground trains, included the suicides of the bombers, including one on the bus - who had become separated from the others.

The second (unrelated) group sought to do precisely the same on 7/7 but their home made explosives proved faulty. Oddly when the police tracked them down at home, they elected to surrender...

The Madrid group when surrounded by the Spanish police, committed suicide by detonating their explosives - probably with the hope of taking innocents with them.

On the topic of Intelligence, simply put, there is probably too much of it hence the use of keywords to filter. Even then, there are probably insufficient analysts.

[Phrost]

Here's why this is a bad thing, in idiotically simple terms.

In the 1960's, the FBI conducted surveillance on Martin Luther King Jr., who they considered to be a dissident and communist sympathizer, to discredit him. They broke into and staked out his hotel rooms, they wiretapped his phones, and they did everything they could to dig up dirt on him.

Once they had the dirt, they attempted to use the dirt (his extra-marital affairs) to pressure him to kill himself, or at least, be silent.

King did not. He persisted. He helped achieve civil rights for an entire race of people.

Think that's only in the 60's?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3381167.html

That brought down the head of the CIA who'd been a vocal opponent of some people in the national security infrastructure.

Unlike in the past, when it was prohibitively expensive to conduct surveillance on individuals, it's ridiculously easy and relatively cheap to do it on everyone. This information is being gathered on all Americans. How likely are you to stand up to the pressure, vs. how likely are you to just keep your head down and limit your participation in the democratic process?