
Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System, by the Numbers - couchand
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/08/05/watch-commander/
======
infinotize
The article indicates many states are beginning to supply federal agencies
with biometric data including driver's license photographs. It also states a
local police force (the NYPD) was a customer of a facial recognition system.

How long until central databases are collecting datapoints on our whereabouts
at all times, not only from mobile devices, but just the image of our faces?

I don't think the founders [US-centric post, but I think this applies to most
technologically-advanced nations] envisioned this type of surveillance, and
thus offered little protection against it. As the technology to employ this
type of capability becomes simpler and cheaper, potential resistance in the
form of court processes and public opinion will be comparitively slow to form.
This will get a lot worse before it gets better.

~~~
Ntrails
Slightly off topic, but I am curious and don't understand, why do you care
what the founders did or did not envision? You live in a democracy, where you
elect people to govern the country in a way that suits the majority of the
population.

The way I see it, these issues aren't about what someone 250(?) years ago
wanted, but _what the people who are alive today want_. If their views
outweigh those of the electorate today, is it even still a democracy?

~~~
dalek_cannes
Because democracy without an underlying system of values is indistinguishable
from a tyranny by the majority (in other words, it cannot be two foxes and a
hen voting on what's for dinner). That underlying system of values, as I
understand, is the constitution. A law can be unconstitutional even if the
entirety of congress votes in favor. While specific needs of American society
have changed, I don't believe the values espoused by the US founders have
changed a great deal over the past two centuries.

Disclaimer: not an American.

~~~
Ntrails
Is it not similarly "tyrannical" to be bound by the views of people who lived
a few hundred years ago. I believe that the constitution specifically forbade
the vote to certain segments of society by race/gender? Which is one example
where values have changed significantly.

Not to mention, there have been amendments to the constitution as I understand
it - or are those only additions rather than contradictions/supercededants?

~~~
tobiasSoftware
American here, what Dalek_Cannes said was correct, but to add to that, we have
a system to change the underlying views. These are called Amendments, and that
is how we changed the underlying view to allow everyone to vote. The
difference between an Amendment and ordinary laws is that Amendments are
really, really, really big deals that have the authority to redefine those
value systems instead of working within the definition as ordinary laws can.

There are only 27, the first 10 of which was kind of a "Constitution out of
beta" thing that all happened at once, so you can kind of consider there to be
17 changes to the underlying values. That way when one occurs it's a BIG DEAL
and can't sneak past the people as easily as say, the Patriot act or the NDAA,
both of which are pretty easy to make a case against that they go against the
core values but were voted on quickly at times no one was looking.

Also we have a separation of powers where Congress creates laws, the President
acts as a leader and can also prevent Congress from creating laws in some
cases, and the Supreme Court can challenge legality of laws. The idea is that
the Supreme Court challenges laws against Constitution + Amendments, so they
can strike down a law as being unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court does
not have the power to strike down an Amendment as it by definition is the
constitution.

If Congress creates bad laws, it is the Supreme Court's responsibility to
point it out. However they are only legally allowed to do that when a case is
put before them. Imagine being legally restrained from refactoring unless a
customer files a bug report. Part of the reason the US is having some trouble
with laws as I understand it is Congress + some organizations are working to
prevent laws from going to the Supreme Court on technicalities. Such as person
X tries to take law Y to the court with evidence Z, but evidence Z is
"classified" so they are legally not supposed to know the evidence and cannot
legally present it in court.

A similar problem our country is facing is that the lack of refactorization is
catching up to us so our legal system has become an insane mess that only
highly trained specialists (lawyers) can even attempt to navigate. Then people
learn how to abuse the system and can try to attack people on all the un-
refactored points of the law. This is how patent trolls work, the addition of
the law (patent) is a relatively easy process and the removal of bad laws (bad
patents) can only be done by challenging it in court. This causes thousands of
bad patents to exist because no one can challenge them until it is used
against someone.

------
frede
These revelations are too new to be from Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and
Bruce Schneier suspect a second leaker.

[https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/485081861119832064](https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/485081861119832064)

~~~
rdtsc
Yap. This is exciting. Just like one bad thing about Snowden (and Binney) was
that if public was not outraged enough, it would actually make things worse.
As those who administer these programs will just get bolder and expand them.
It it a little too early to decide if this effect it taking place.

But one good thing is (and I've said this before in relation to the
whistleblowers) is that it will encourage more whistleblowers.

One of the apparent requirements for working at many of these 3 letter
agencies is patriotism. If you show patriotism, you are a good candidate. They
will spend money training you technical things, but they can't train you to be
a patriot and love your country. The "problem" with such patriots is that they
actually take to heart things like "Constitution", "Privacy", "Freedom" and so
on. The hope of the agency is that with enough brainwashing and threats of
loss of job, imprisonment, etc., these values would move to the background.

The "pragmatics" on top understand that those concepts are just there for
propaganda. It is the sys admins and other mid-level analysts that might
actually believe, and might just pull a Snowden so to speak once in a while.

NSA understood this and immediately went into self-preservation mode. They
probably never even thought along the lines of "OMG we have let the public
down, we have screwed up, etc etc.", rather they saw it as, we are not
threatening and controlling our employees enough. So instead of spying less on
our own citizens, we should institute "no-lone-zones" (like nuclear silos
have), so you are together with an accountabil-a-buddy who is supposed to
snitch on you if you do something silly.

~~~
dan_bk
> This is exciting.

Not really convinced about that. What's important/exciting should be what we
_do_ about it, not how many messengers we have. We really have enough
information by now to know what's at stake. Meanwhile, if you remember a
couple of months back, the NSA sent out an internal memo stating that they
simply intend to "winter the storm", and that seems to be what's happening
until now (besides a few more or less symbolical proposals from the gov't).

> [...] it will encourage more whistleblowers.

Not convinced either. Again, we already know that deep changes would be
needed. Also, whistleblowers, in this case, are obviously ready to die for
their cause. There are not many people like that. And the World's support for
people like Snowden has been completely absent or at least appallingly weak.
And then, there's the fact that the NSA is currently in a huge lock-down
process, which makes me think we won't see another Snowden, when this is done.
That's why I believe, either there is change now or pretty much never.

------
pvnick
I just love the label they used for the No Recognized Terrorist Group
Affiliation on that graph.

~~~
cranklin
UTF-8 art

------
pserwylo
And yesterday Australia announced that it will be pushing ahead with an ISP
level data retention scheme in the name of fighting terrorism [0]. This is
after last year explicitly asking for feedback on the proposal to retain
Australian's internet history, and receiving countless concerned letters from
the community (along with security agencies who were pushing for data
retention) [1].

I suspect in a decade or so that we will also have a similar chart as this
post [2].

[0] - [http://www.zdnet.com/abbott-brings-on-mandatory-data-
retenti...](http://www.zdnet.com/abbott-brings-on-mandatory-data-retention-in-
australia-7000032324/)

[1] -
[http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Hous...](http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=pjcis/nsl2012/report.htm)

[2] - Only an order of magnitude smaller due to our population difference.

~~~
contingencies
Yes. Results of the poll on the Sydney Morning Herland article
[http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-
news/data-s...](http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/data-
storage-could-be-used-to-fight-general-crime-tony-abbott-
says-20140806-3d78h.html#poll) visible at
[http://imgur.com/u71Keqs](http://imgur.com/u71Keqs) \- 97% oppose mass
surveillance.

Our 'democracy' has become non-representational. I'm honestly considering
quitting my job, returning to Australia and joining the Wikileaks party.

------
jessaustin
_The CIA uses a previously unknown program, code-named Hydra, to secretly
access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract data to add to
the watchlists._

Hmmm, this seems like a pretty obvious vulnerability. When's the last time the
CIA actually did something "secretly"? (Oooh, how would we know? Actually the
last time they did something un-secretly was like a month ago, so there's a
bound of sorts.) So if you do something to piss off the spooks in e.g. Russia
or Israel, expect to be entered into their troll-the-CIA database, soon
thereafter to be Hydra-ed into Obama's special uncategorizable tracking
system.

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diafygi
[https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-
uploads/sites/1/20...](https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-
uploads/sites/1/2014/08/shrug_chart_final1.jpg)

¯\\(ツ)/¯

------
padobson
Well this is no big deal, I'll just vote for a guy in the next election who
will dismantle this system... oh wait.

------
colinbartlett
"Directorate of Terrorist Identities (DTI)" sounds like something right out of
a dystopian novel.

~~~
chopin
Like "Ministry of Truth"?

~~~
chiph
Minitrue prevents crimethink.

------
rickisen
They called the system Hydra? Really? Seams like some agents read too much
Marvell comics

~~~
TeMPOraL
At least they're showing us their true faces.

------
undata
How depressing.

------
angersock
thanks obama

