
Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area - randomname2
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/13/hidden-microphones-exposed-as-part-of-government-surveillance-program-in-the-bay-area/
======
maxxxxx
If that's true we are moving into a scary world pretty much like 1984 where
everything you do is monitored all the time. Add voice, face recognition,
surveillance drones, cheap data storage and AI to the mix it seems pretty soon
everything you do in a public place will be recorded and analyzed. And all
this can be done fully automated.

I hope people will recognize that some laws need to change. Surveillance makes
sense in some cases but it should be hard and expensive to do.

~~~
imaginenore
You can't have an expectation of privacy in public places.

Facial recognition can be beat by a hat + sunglasses (which is the hugest plot
hole in Person of Interest, the characters never even attempt to disguise
themselves).

~~~
bitL
Your walking style identifies you better than face. Are you going to walk
differently once you put a hat and sunglasses on?

~~~
imaginenore
Do you have a database of walking styles? Does anybody?

They definitely have access to most people's photos - driver's licenses,
passports.

I personally don't care if they know where I go in public. They can just tail
me if they really want to know.

~~~
gopalv
> Do you have a database of walking styles? Does anybody?

I nearly always walk around with a 3-d accelerometer which can indeed "phone"
home.

Here's the ML extraction mechanism as explained by a Samsung engineer -
[http://www.slideshare.net/satnam74/the-fifth-
elephant-2013-t...](http://www.slideshare.net/satnam74/the-fifth-
elephant-2013-talk-smart-ana/8)

~~~
imaginenore
Yeah but if they have access to your phone, they already know where you are,
no need for the overcomplicated accelerometer method.

~~~
darpa_escapee
If it's in a database, then people without access to your phone can still
identify you.

------
s_q_b
Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a very misleading headline.

The article contains no evidence of a government-operated network of listening
microphones in the Bay area. It deals with one incident using a specific piece
of surveillance gear.

What we actually _know_ is this:

An FBI agent was attempting to bust two individuals suspected of a bid-fixing
scheme.

This FBI agent then placed two recording devices in a light fixture and
another at the bus stop nearest the courthouse.

After the surveillance recorded enough incriminating evidence, the FBI/DOJ
sought to introduce the recordings at trial.

All else was rank speculation by a former FBI employee named Jeff Harp.

He also stated, "If you’re going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the
privacy of your own home... that was the original intention of the Fourth
Amendment," which makes me question his grasp of the constitution, and thus
his reliability as an expert.

~~~
jflatow
No, it's far more than two devices, and it went on for 10 months. They placed
surveillance all around the 2 courthouses: light fixtures, a bus stop, bushes,
poles, the steps, and inside several vehicles. And there's another similar
case from last year with >200 hours of recordings in San Mateo.

[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2016/05/11/...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2016/05/11/fbi-
hid-surveillance-devices-around-alameda-county-courthouse)

~~~
Supi-lee
Wonder what the RoI on all this is, and how they allocate resources to each
ongoing investigation.

Seems like it would cost a heck of a lot. I mean, you would need trained
people sitting around listening to all those recordings.

~~~
ddalex
Or maybe you just need to feed it into a voice to text engine, and then grep
through the output for interesting bits. I'm quite sure that the NSA
capabilities in this regard are quite beyond what is publicly available.

~~~
Supi-lee
I have seen such systems in use by medical transcription companies. The key is
you need to know what you are looking for. If not someone has to actually sit
and listen to all those hours of recordings. Which translates to a high
operational cost.

Audio\Speech mining they call it, but it has a ways to go. Even with just one
speaker in a noise less environment, there are all kinds of issues with
transcription accuracy. I can imagine it being much worse in the kind of
conditions the FBI needs it to work in. Ofcourse high end equipment can make
things better but it all adds to the cost.

------
Mendenhall
Hmm I wonder how this would work considering its all things openly available
to be recorded.

Follow a federal agent home from work and film them and their house. Film
their children going to school and post pictures locations and times online,
also taking photos of other relatives, friends etc and where they live and
their phone numbers and post it all online.

Have your friends join in and keep posting every detail and picture you can
get of federal agents and their families etc and compile it into a website.

Then let me know how that works out.

Edit: Does anyone know of any USA law that stands against such activity?

~~~
rayiner
I don't see how that's relevant. The whole point of the government is for it
to have a monopoly on law enforcement. They're _supposed_ to be able to do
stuff you and I can't do.

~~~
srtjstjsj
That's not the whole point of government, that is a radical statist
perspective.

See, for example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles)

> the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police
> being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to
> duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community
> welfare and existence.

~~~
rayiner
It's a statist perspective, but hardly radically-so.

From your link:

> The Home Office has explained this approach as "the power of the police
> coming from the common consent of the public, as opposed to the power of the
> state. It does not mean the consent of an individual. No individual can
> choose to withdraw his or her consent from the police, or from a law."

That's the difference between the police and private citizens. Interactions
between private citizens must be consensual. Policing, at some level, must
necessarily be coercive.

~~~
srtjstjsj
BTW, is it really your opinion that the state has a legitimate claim to nigh-
unlimited rule over the public? The Constitution and Bill of Rights was a
best-effort attempt to prevent tyranny, not an effort to draw a line for
rulers to toe and reach over as far as they can.

~~~
rayiner
You're reading "unlimited rule" into my comment. All I said was that the
police are, by design, empowered to do some things ordinary people are not
empowered to do.

------
bobhaigler
It's not the best reporting, but from what I can tell, the FBI is collecting
evidence against auction bidders who allegedly conspire to pay less for
foreclosed real-estate. The auctions take place on the courthouse steps, and
the bidders have been accused of working together to keep prices low by
intimidating some bidders and conspiring with others. I'd love to see the
auctions moved to a website marketplace. Maybe a good startup idea?

~~~
x5n1
You mean like [http://www.auction.com](http://www.auction.com) Real Estate
Auction for Homes and Commercial Real Estate? Yes they definitely should do
that... ;)

------
alva
The frequency response of most microphones (before DSP filtering) does not
perfectly cut-off above 20 khz. I suppose if you were really paranoid you
could walk around blasting exceptionally loud noise around and above this freq
for privacy ;). Although your local dogs might not be too happy

~~~
napoleond
I realize I'm being a stereotypical message board nerd about what was
presumably a joke, but: I don't understand what you're proposing. Surely the
extraneous frequencies could just be filtered out at playback? Or ignored
entirely, since--as you imply--human ears filter that out anyway.

~~~
simcop2387
If they've got any kind of dynamic gain going on so that they can capture the
quietest stuff when nothing's going on but not clip everything when it's
louder then they might not be able to do that. Once it's recorded only the
information they sampled will be there. So if you play something really loud
that's not hearable by a human but is by the recorder and it changes the gain
so that it can record it properly then it can miss anything quieter than the
noise. White noise above 20kHz would be perfect for this since it would also
alias down to lower frequencies with a badly designed setup.

------
mike_hock
> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your
> own home.

> __That was the original intention of the 4th amendment. __

Wat.

The intention of the 4th amendment was to enable criminal activity, but
confine it to private property?

Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable
cause?

The intent was to prevent the executive branch from indiscriminately
"searching" (and hidden microphones are a form of search) innocent people
without any cross-check from the judicial branch. The fact that you can
"conduct criminal activity in the privacy of your own home" is a side effect,
not a design goal, of the principle that a free society is worth the risk of
letting a few criminals slip through the cracks.

~~~
pessimizer
And why pretend that the privacy of your home is so special? The only thing
keeping laser microphones from being aimed at all of our windows is a 5-4
decision in Kylio v. US, and Scalia is dead, and Clinton is going to be
appointing the next Supreme Court justice. Clinton (DLC) Democrats love
surveillance even more than Bushes.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States)

edit: If you downvote, I'd appreciate you telling me why what I said is
incorrect, instead of possibly reflexively reacting to the fact that Scalia is
being mentioned in a positive way and Clinton in a negative way.

~~~
woodman
> The only thing keeping laser microphones...

The legality has nothing to do with it, as it has been demonstrated over and
over that law enforcement will employ methods that can charitably be described
as "legally questionable" and then attempt to hide it (see stingray). What is
stopping them is limitations imposed by the physical world - both in number of
windows and the fact that laser mics don't work the way they're portrayed on
television. This is the reason why digital key escrow is infinitely more
dangerous than physical key escrow (like fire department lockboxes).

~~~
pessimizer
Laser mics can get better, and I've got a window in every room but the
closets.

~~~
woodman
I was pointing more to the fact that angle of incidence needs to be carefully
figured into the placement of both the emitter and receiver - for every
window. Better laser mics won't change laser physics or the logistical
challenges.

------
tempodox
> ...if you’re going to conduct criminal activity...

The actual scandal here is not the potential danger to criminal enterprises
but that we're all being made suspects beforehand 24/7.

------
swayvil
How much do you suppose these microphones are worth?

Also, what's an easy way to locate them?

------
bitL
Now I am finally convinced that Internet of Things is going to be the next big
thing - Internet of Real-time Microphones...

------
dSnapApjw
Many of us, in the Bay area Veterans community so agree with the topics and in
one brand new book just released at www.barryeisler.com; civil liberties; rule
of law, my community my neighbors, Please permit me to suggest his latest,
just release book; "A God's Eye View." I for one like the one sentence in
Chapter 47, "When you collect it all ;when you monitor everyone, you
understand nothing." And a suggestion for the President's Blue Ribbon Panel
for a position titled: " public interest advocate" is making more sense daily.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/civillib...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/civillibertarians-
need-to-infiltrate-the-nsa/383932/)

I like the review Chelsea Manning gave of Barry, "Creepy. This story is much
more plausible than I expected or care to admit." Salutes all too you for
keeping me educated. As we said in my old army unit; "heart-faith-skill, the
only way to win in a battle advocacy" (we borrowed it from Sean Connery as
Ramirez in The Highlander Movie) peace..j.

------
srtjstjsj
The quotes from the former FBI agent, showing complete disregard for the 4th
Amendment, send a clear message about how deep illegal behavior runs in the
FBI.

------
solutron
This is a more informative article around the topic IMO:

[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2016/05/11/...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/SevenDays/archives/2016/05/11/fbi-
hid-surveillance-devices-around-alameda-county-courthouse)

------
srtjstjsj
Previously covered on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10582392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10582392)

Defense Claims Courthouse Was Illegally Bugged (therecorder.com) 171 points by
morninj 179 days ago | 100 comments

------
fosco
So what is going to be done about it? with each revelation that has no riot it
looks more and more like the average person is silenced into submission to
just 'deal with it' rather then correct it.

------
bunkydoo
If I really gave a damn, had 1000 bucks to blow, and had no life I could go
plant hidden microphones, pinhole video cameras, and more in just about every
conceivable public place too. If anyone argued or brought me to court - I
could demonstrate how this is absolutely no different than everyone
"secondhand recording" me in their little snap stories and instagrams which do
go online forever. My point is, this is some small potatoes 1980's style shit
that is nothing compared to NSA Echelon (which I find to be actually a
fascinating technology if it weren't so malleable to abuse by human nature) If
Echelon were an independently operating AI system that had algorithms that
identified criminal activity, then used soft paternalism in the form coercing
unaware law enforcement personnel into making "chance" encounters with would-
be criminals (random traffic stop, or passing them by on the street), the
psychology of the criminal would be to stop doing whatever their doing because
they feel more watched when they are doing said crime; although the law
enforcement agent may never be directly aware of the criminals communications
or conduct. I can deal with surveillance all day, no sweat. Totalitarian
censorship is my problem, and that doesn't appear to be happening stateside.

~~~
alva
> My point is, this is some small potatoes 1980's style shit that is nothing
> compared to NSA Echelon

Absolutely. The "creep" factor of this however is more tangible to the general
public so I imagine they will come under significantly more (relative to
population size) pressure to answer for this.

Microphones hidden under rocks are much easier to understand and perceive as
an intrusion and threat, compared to the nature of Echelon

~~~
jflatow
It's also eerily reminiscent of the Stasi era. Just take a trip to the Stasi
museum next time you are Berlin and perhaps you'll freak out a little too.

[https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/03/lessons-
from-...](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/03/lessons-from-the-
stasi/)

------
Zigurd
He is supposedly the manager of Autodesk's "Global threat management program."
Do their "global threats" amount to more than watching over the cars in the
parking lot at night?

~~~
Ilijlmnuvw
Long ago I worked at Autodesk, and they would regularly publish threat reports
on their intranet, mainly covering news from their competitors, identifying
emerging or disruptive technologies, and economic threats. No doubt threat
management also included morale, stagnation, theft and subterfuge, external
attacks on IT infrastructure, legal and intellectual property issues, etc.

------
cs2818
To me this goes back to the issue of having a reasonable expectation of
privacy.

As others have pointed out, if I am in a public place and someone snaps a
photo of me or a surveillance camera records my actions, I generally can't
argue this was an unreasonable invasion.

I'm certain legal scholars are well-versed in the technicalities of
expectations of privacy, but I do wonder if we will face new challenges in
this area as the number of pervasively connected and recording devices
increases.

------
sdrinf
Do we have secondary sources confirming this, specifically, lawyers in the
case confirming this being brought up as evidence? If so, where is the public
record of that?

What are CBSLocal's incentives? Can they push fearmongering without
repercussions?

If this story is not true, where should we put the "flag" threshold? What are
operational voting with money against stories like this ever, ever making HN
frontpage again, and for the "news" industry to structurally reduce unfounded
fearmongering?

~~~
ipsin
See the linked PDFs on this story:
[http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyers_say_feds_bugg...](http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyers_say_feds_bugged_grounds_of_3_california_courthouses_without_warrant/)

------
nxzero
When will people say enough is enough?

~~~
jrcii
I've become increasingly convinced that western society will accept anything
so long as it's fed, housed, and safe. If that's true, as a society we have a
lot of rights that we're not willing to fight for but which the government is
highly intent on restricting - an equation for inevitably losing them.

~~~
nxzero
What troubles me most is that I don't know what to say or do, but feel people
know this is wrong, yet do nothing.

------
em3rgent0rdr
Even if judges prohibit such evidence on the grounds of it being illegally
obtained, you will still find that prosecutors will use that evidence to find
other evidence and for constructing a case that doesn't use that illegally
obtained evidence.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction)

------
peter303
Snowden suggests that the microphones and cameras on your cell, landline,
desktop can be remotely activated any time by the government or hackers.

------
bogomipz
You don't even need to be clandestine about it though. Why hasn't this story
hasn't gotten more traction? Where's the outcry?

[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/big-brother-
is-...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/big-brother-is-listening-
on-nj-transit.html)

------
dredmorbius
Correlated story: Google's Parsey McParseface.

------
FollowSteph3
If this were true then how do you explain all the crime that still happens.
Even high profile cases. It would be a lot easier to manager bigger crimes.
But since we still see them struggling with even big profile cases, where not
having an arrest is embarrassing, it's extremely hard to imagine this being
true.

------
matthudson
Call to action: Machine learners, you'd better start tuning your sarcasm
classifiers.

------
Gratsby
Haven't you guys ever seen The Wire? Is this seriously a surprise to anyone?

~~~
srtjstjsj
Cops in The Wire made an extreme point of getting warrants for limited
targeted surveillance

~~~
Gratsby
You forget when Herc went and grabbed the portable mic from the spy store and
stuck it in a tennis ball. Or when they stuck the video camera in the park and
got it stolen.

It's pretty much the same thing that happened here. They knew the discussions
were happening, they knew where the discussions were happening, and since it
was in a public space they didn't need a warrant. It's not like they are
running around town putting microphones in all the bus stops hoping to catch
anybody saying something. They were looking for a specific type of criminal
activity and they placed the mics accordingly.

------
peterwwillis
This sort of public spying has been documented since at least 1959.

This _particular_ public spying was reported at least since 2012.

[http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/02/eavesdropping-in-
the...](http://post45.research.yale.edu/2016/02/eavesdropping-in-the-age-of-
the-eavesdroppers-or-the-bug-in-the-martini-olive/)

 _" In July 1956, the Pennsylvania Bar Association Endowment (PBAE)
commissioned a comprehensive study of "wiretapping practices, laws, devices,
and techniques" in the United States. [..] The man appointed to direct the
study was Samuel Dash, a prominent Philadelphia prosecutor [..] The result of
Dash's efforts was The Eavesdroppers, a 483-page report [..] The book
uncovered a wide range of privacy infringements on the part of state
authorities and private citizens [..]

While law enforcement agencies were tapping lines in flagrant violation of
state and federal statutes, phone companies were deliberately underreporting
wiretap statistics to maintain public confidence in their services. While
American businesses were stockpiling equipment to spy on employees and gather
competitive intelligence, private investigators were using frightening new
tools to listen in on wayward lovers and loose-lipped politicians."_

[http://www.infowars.com/spy-grid-can-now-record-your-
convers...](http://www.infowars.com/spy-grid-can-now-record-your-
conversations-in-real-time/) (2013)

 _" The Washington Post recently published a feature length article on gunshot
detectors, known as ShotSpotter, which detailed how in Washington DC there are
now, “at least 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city,”
microphones wrapped in a weather-proof shell that can detect the location of a
sound down to a few yards and analyze the audio using a computer program.

𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐚𝐬 “𝐠𝐮𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐭 𝐝𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐬,” 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐘𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬
𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟏𝟐, 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟕𝟎
𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐨
𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬. "_

\--

This quote from the 1959 report sums up everything nicely:

 _" As Dash told members of Congress on the eve of the book's release, the
American public's longstanding disregard for threats to communications privacy
had only served to exacerbate these developments. [..]

'Each generation seems to forget the problems of the past and considers this
their own unique problem.' \- Samuel Dash"_

------
xufi
As this seems to come up more and more. I can't fathom why most people can't
get what's being fed to them by our media sources.
[http://craigbhulet.com/10%20Mega-
Corporations.jpg](http://craigbhulet.com/10%20Mega-Corporations.jpg) This
chart albeit a bit big of a image demonstrates which media entities are
owned/connected to whom. Pretty interesting

~~~
yahelc
Perhaps I've been reading the wrong newspapers, but I can't recall Kraft, Coca
Cola, Nestle, P&G, Coca Cola, et al ever being considered media companies.

------
kabdib
I'd love to find a sample -- how do they communicate? Wirelessly? Betcha they
can be fingerprinted

------
enlightenedfool
So, can they just associate a voice to a person legally with those random
recordings?

------
yunesj
KPIX5's Jackie Ward said it's legal, so the defense can withdraw the motion.

------
justifier
huh? but ca and sf is two party consent?

[http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-
sect-632.html](http://codes.findlaw.com/ca/penal-code/pen-sect-632.html)

~~~
csandreasen
From your link:

(c) The term “confidential communication” includes any communication carried
on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the
communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto, but excludes a
communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial,
executive or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other
circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect
that the communication may be overheard or recorded.

~~~
justifier
'public gathering' is perhaps intentionally ambiguous

the other disjunct: in any legislative, judicial, executive or administrative
proceeding open to the public; led me to interpret 'public gathering' as
bagley-keene(o) does

> 11122.5. (a) As used in this article, “meeting” includes any congregation of
> a majority of the members of a state body at the same time and place to
> hear, discuss, or deliberate upon any item that is within the subject matter
> jurisdiction of the state body to which it pertains.

stead of just anyone standing at a bus stop

(o)
[http://ag.ca.gov/publications/bagleykeene2004_ada.pdf](http://ag.ca.gov/publications/bagleykeene2004_ada.pdf)

------
daveheq
This clickbait article is going to cause people to think the government was
just spying on everyone everywhere for no other reason than just to spy on
you. Another "distrust the damn government" article that further divides
people against others.

~~~
__s
Clickbait title wouldn't specify it as only being in the Bay area. The title
makes no claims not held up by the article

------
pteredactyl
I really did not need to read this right now...

------
joantune
it might come a time in the future where we think that wearing a tin foil hat
might be the reasonable thing to do :D

------
MaSk3d
Just support each other. ;)

------
dude3
And what are WE going to do to stop it...?

They aren't going to be listening to the comment sections of websites.

------
carapace
"Total Surveillance is the Perfection of Democracy"

(This is an old blog post I wrote that seems relevant to this. Please forgive
me for reposting it whole here but I really REALLY want to hear what HN
readers think. (And no one sees it on my blog. heh heh))

For once I disagree with RMS, re:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-
democracy.htm...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-
democracy.html)

I believe that it is fundamentally not possible to "roll back" the degree of
surveillance in our [global] society in an effective way. Our technology is
already converging to a near-total degree of surveillance all on its own. The
article itself gives many examples. The end limit will be Vinge's "locator
dust" or perhaps something even more ubiquitous and ephemeral. RMS advocates
several "band-aid" fixes but seems to miss the logical structure of the
paradox of inescapable total surveillance.

Let me attempt to illustrate this paradox. Take this quote from the article:

    
    
        "If whistleblowers don't dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions."
    

(First of all we should reject the underlying premise that "our government and
institutions" are only held in check by the fear of the discovery of their
"crimes and lies". We can, and should, and must, hold ourselves and our
government to a standard of not committing crimes, not telling lies. It is
this Procrustean bed of good character that our technology is binding us to,
not some dystopian nightmare.)

Certainly the criminally-minded who have inveigled their way into the halls of
power should not be permitted to sleep peacefully at night, without concern
for discovery. But why assume that ubiquitous surveillance would not touch
them? Why would the sensor/processor nets and deep analysis not be useful, and
used, for detecting and combating treachery? What "crimes and lies" would be
revealed by a whistleblower that would not show up on the intel-feeds?

Or this quote:

    
    
        "Everyone must be free to post photos and video recordings occasionally, but the systematic accumulation of such data on the Internet must be limited."
    

How will this limiting be done? What authority will decide who gets to post
what and when? And (like any profanity filter) won't this authority need to
see the content to be able to decide whether it gets posted publicly?

In effect, doesn't this idea imply some sort of ubiquitous surveillance system
to ensure that people are obeying the rules for preventing a ubiquitous
surveillance system?

Let's say we set up some rules like the ones RMS is advocating, how do we
determine that everyone is following those rules? After all, there is a very
good incentive for trying to get a privileged position vis-a-vis these rules.
Whoever has the inside edge, whether official spooks, enemy agents, or just
criminals, gains an enormous competitive advantage over everyone else.

Someone is going to have that edge, because it's a technological thing, you
can't make it go away simply because you don't like it. If the "good guys" tie
their own hands (by handicapping their surveillance networks) then we are just
handing control to the people who are willing to do what it takes to take it.

You can't unilaterally declare that we (all humanity) will use the kid-
friendly "lite" version of the surveillance network because we cannot be sure
that everyone is playing by those rules unless we have a "full" version of the
surveillance network to check up on everybody!

We can't (I believe) prevent total surveillance but we can certainly control
how the data are used, and we can certainly set up systems that allow the data
to be used without being abused. The system must be recursive. Whatever form
the system takes, it shall necessarily have to be able to detect and correct
its own self-abuses.

Total surveillance is the perfection of democracy, not its antithesis.

The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for
once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we
shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will not
involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing power
but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in
effect, the real shape of human society.

------
awqrre
godgod, your comments are being hidden and I am not able to upvote or reply to
it ...

~~~
DanBC
Click the timestamp of the comment. Click [vouch]. I think you only do that if
the comment deserves to be unhidden. I'm not sure whether you're supposed to
look through that person's post history.

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neat159
can't believe it

------
godgod
Have we not had enough yet? I hate how this is acceptable. We are either free
people or we are not. What's it gonna take for our criminal government to stop
seeing us as the enemy?

------
ccarter84
My phone keeps getting unavoidable pop-ups, I'm sure it's a great story
though.

------
jondubois
Ok, so these facts are true:

#1. The government is monitoring us.

#2. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and many other huge corporations are also
monitoring us... And they are sharing our personal data with each other.

Why are so many news articles about issue #1 and so few are about issue #2.
The government is a negligible threat compared to corporations. It seems like
tech companies are manipulating the media to turn people against the
government and divert attention away from themselves.

~~~
nostrademons
Big corporations don't generally share data with each other. It's more like
the government, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and
numerous black hat spyware vendors are all monitoring you, and none of them
trust anybody else. People inside Google were fucking pissed when the NSA
spying practices were revealed, people inside Apple regularly block Google's
apps for privacy concerns, people inside Google are regularly battling against
spyware, people inside Facebook try to get you to share everything about you
and your friends voluntarily while Google tries to provide alternatives that
don't involve giving Facebook the keys to your life (but do involve giving
them to Google), people inside Microsoft copy & scrape Google to try and grab
whatever data Google happens to have, people inside the government are spying
on all of the above.

Believing that everybody is out to get you is a sign of paranoia. Believing
that people and organization act in their own self-interest is generally a
pretty accurate model.

~~~
jondubois
I don't think everybody is out to get everybody else in a homogeneous manner.
There is obviously a higher degree of collaboration between similar entities.

I think it's pretty obvious that we have the government on one side and
corporations on the other.

We need to make sure that a healthy equilibrium stays in place between the
two. Right now I just feel that corporations are winning.

~~~
nostrademons
That's not actually true, at all. The tightest bonds of collaboration are
usually within a team, and the next tightest are between a product team and
its users. It's not unusual for a department to take its users' side _against
the rest of the same corporation_ , like for example when Google Search levied
an SEO penalty against Google Chrome, or how Google PageSpeed marks many
Google sites as slow.

It's also not unusual for organizations to collaborate on one aspect and
compete on another. On one hand, Google is in fairly tight with the Obama
administration, with the HealthCare.gov rescue & USDS being largely led by ex-
Google and ex-Twitter engineers on temporary leave. On the other, all the tech
companies banded together to encrypt everything when they found out the NSA
was snooping on their wire links.

I used to believe as you did, dividing big entities up into "government" and
"corporations", but then personal experience in a big corporation and a lot of
friends in government showed me that this is not at all how the world
operates. Ultimately it's a lot more chaotic, and the default state in most
relationships is "frenemy".

