
Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created - 001sky
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-surveillance-state-beyond-imagination-being-created-one-freest
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Theodores
> A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

 _A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created_

There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of
Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add
to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership
out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in
taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract.

This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going
to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people
accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they
will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.

------
smoyer
Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House"

The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our
constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect
person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that
understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?

~~~
rayiner
You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds
of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional,
you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value.
The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs
of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy.
The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended
to keep the government from searching your property.

A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because
putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it
requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker?

The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach
things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that
are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those
penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people
put out into the public internet.

In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around
the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure
Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage
of where the lines are drawn.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized."

~~~
rayiner
Key word: "their." The lynchpin or a lot of the surveillance efforts is
accessing information that doesn't belong to the target of the surveillance.
Phone call metadata is generated by the phone company, stored in the phone
company's computers, and is used for the phone company's business purposes.
Its the phone company's data, not yours. Same thing with the data Google and
Facebook collect about where you go on the internet. You didn't generate it
and you can't even access it. How can you say its "yours?" Its "about you" but
that's totally different. If your neighbor keeps a diary tracking your comings
and goings, you can't assert 4th amendment protection over that data.

Privacy advocates talk about "metadata is data" as if the government's lawyers
don't understand that bits are just bits. What privacy advocates don't
understand is that the "metadata" distinction is about generation, ownership,
and control, which are implicated in the 4th amendment by the word "their."

~~~
foobarqux
Putting aside what the law and constitution currently say, do you think mass
surveillance of metadata, URL tracking and search history should be fair game?

~~~
rayiner
I'm pretty apathetic to the whole issue. I'm a lot more worked up about the
fact that these things are already fair game when it comes to private
corporations. As someone who isn't hoping for some libertarian, trans-national
world order based on the internet, I'm a lot more worried about how private
companies can abuse that data than how the government can do so. Yes, the
government can throw me in jail and private companies can't, but the
government has little reason to want me in jail. Meanwhile, private companies
have a lot of incentive to access that data and screw me over.

I think the libertarianness of the whole digital privacy movement is losing a
lot of potential supporters. If the restrictions on government surveillance
were bundled together with restrictions on corporate surveillance with a
consumer protection angle, I think you'd get a lot more people on board.

~~~
foobarqux
> but the government has little reason to want me in jail

It has plenty of reason to want dissidents in jail which you may care about
for various reasons both practical and ideological. Though I think jail is
outmoded: with (near) total surveillance there are more effective deterrents.

I do think you are right about the lack of emphasis on corporate surveillance.

------
netcan
It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years
go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role
democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky
ideas about "Manufacturing Consent."

From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously
obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the
counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary
totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the
continent to prevent deer-car collisions.

The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and
the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by
democracy.

A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable
consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been
on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping,
intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM.
This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part
that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.

Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world,
especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital
surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.

We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and
foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.

The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face
recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look
screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras
placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely
available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for
the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall,
walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan
drone.

The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means
everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to
storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.

As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a
consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be
aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.

Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get
"power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.

In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think
of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a
lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.

That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of
surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't
have any money.

~~~
kokey
> The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face
> recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they
> look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic
> cameras placed strategically around a city.

Yet the UK government still doesn't have anything in place to know a thing
about the vast majority of people leaving the country. I'm personally
considerably more worried about incompetence, ill conceived reactionary
policies and unintended consequences than the potential control technology
would have if it was optimally exploited by those in power.

~~~
iamwithnail
You probably wouldn't station them in the city, too easy to obfuscate avoid if
the locations are fixed - something like this will be forthcoming from the
Met's Open Source Intelligence Unit fairly soon, I imagine.

[http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20130524.asp...](http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htecm/articles/20130524.aspx)

------
ianstallings
I wouldn't say it's beyond imagination. Science-fiction authors have been
predicting this for years.

~~~
hga
Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading,
of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking _Nineteen Eighty Four_ ,
was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in
the great 1968 _Men and Machines_ , edited by Robert Silverberg).

~~~
atmosx
I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books
Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing.
Same topic, total gov control.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon)

~~~
igravious
Second 'Darkness at Noon'. A very powerful read. By Arthur Koestler 1940.
Orwell's 1984 was published in 1948, wasn't it?

~~~
atmosx
Well yeah, wikipedia says 1949 but 6 months up or down doesn't change much..

About DaN[1]: 'In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon at number
eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th
century.'

Although the depth of thought and analysis of the 'soviet regime' was
impressive, I had no idea it was that highly praised novel.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon)

------
EGreg
Guys I would invite you to read my perspective on what we can do about this:

[http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169)

And _please_ , put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this
petition:

[http://wh.gov/lsuFw](http://wh.gov/lsuFw)

Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn
by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints --
sometimes by 80%!

[http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha...](http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_that_cops_wear_on_body_cameras)

[http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-
po...](http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-police-use-
force)

 _" The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of
incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times
more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment."_

All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras
decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is
very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people.
Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation
around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually
establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and
could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police
officer who landed them in the hospital.

You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.

------
bernardlunn
Great line: It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent
to prevent deer-car collisions.

------
OliverM
Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in
the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.

------
jostmey
Here's a crazy idea. Why not open source surveillance to the world?

~~~
forgottenpass
Total surveillance does not return us to a no- or low- surveillance ground
state. Nor does it put us in an "everyone has dirt on everyone" state. It just
makes it easier for everyone to identify who is more than N standard
deviations away from standard/accepted behaviors.

------
twobits
Has already been.

~~~
iamwithnail
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That
the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is
irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are
quite different, and far more troubling.

What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping
(and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most
instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There
hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that.

The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions
between different components of those assemblages. The increasing
normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will
gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security'
grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.

~~~
Zigurd
Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already
winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent
manufacturing bother.

~~~
iamwithnail
There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been
significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to
be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about
overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance.
Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) -
police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and
slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming
surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.

~~~
DanBC
GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court
cases because it would need to be tested in open court.

They haven't said anything about intelligence provided to law enforcement.

~~~
mpyne
> GCHQ is quite strongly against allowing some evidence to be used in court
> cases because it would need to be tested in open court.

Yep. And that's the whole reason 'parallel construction' exists at all in the
U.S.... even when NSA has solid evidence of actual crimes being conducted,
they will not burn intelligence sources & methods to allow for a court
prosecution of the same.

So LE has to either find a way to independently arrive at the evidence that
they _know_ is there, or go without prosecuting criminals they _know_ to be on
the street.

Parallel construction is definitely distasteful but nor is it planting
evidence.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning
of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of
the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally --
the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in
the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why
the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back
to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured
this out, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the
population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and
mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be
suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being
done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to
have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this
discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of
technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to
be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public
to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.

On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's
happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The _NSA is the good
guys_. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or
what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google,
Amazon, or Facebook.

So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But
let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we
need to be laser clear on what "it" means.

~~~
mikeash
I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence
organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically
supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to _defend_ this country, and to me
an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the
opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national
security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household
possessions to deter burglars.

~~~
BugBrother
This is a minor problem now, but it will get much worse if you consider
technical development.

Every individual gets more and more power and capabilities with time. In not
too many decades, hackers will be able to design bacteria for hobby at home,
even if they probably will send for a lab to synthesize the DNA etc. Now, it
is still quite expensive to make artificial life.

Consider North Korea and the possibility of a biological analogue to the
Stuxnet virus...

Without a 1984 surveillance state, you need some form of immune handling --
everyone as their own bubble boy or intelligent analysis of bacteria/viruses
(and hoping that Stuxnet vectors are only oriented towards military
installations).

At that time, NSA surveillance like today will literally be trying to stop
something as bad as terrorist nuclear weapons. You can't argue analogues about
how much liberty costs, since there might not be anyone left to enjoy liberty,
if NSA of the 2030s-2040s fail...

I have no clue how to solve this.

~~~
tritium
How can we be sure that someone on the other side of the apparatus won't use
their position as a means towards necessary training and equipment, and as an
opportunity to act with authority above suspicion, to engineer this supposed
killer virus that destroys us all?

What if they become the problem we tasked them with preventing?

