
Mass Surveillance in the United States - akeck
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_States
======
apo
> Contemporary mass surveillance relies upon annual presidential executive
> orders declaring a continued State of National Emergency, first signed by
> George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 and then continued on an annual basis
> by President Barack Obama,[3] and upon several subsequent national security
> Acts including the USA PATRIOT Act and FISA Amendment Act's PRISM
> surveillance program.

Mass surveillance is a bipartisan effort. Electing a Democrat to the White
House is very unlikely to change this situation. The Obama administration went
above and beyond any prior presidency in its aggressive prosecution of
whistleblowers to these unconstitutional activities.

FWIW, the language in Fourth Amendment is pretty clear:

> 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.

What's happening now is the very antithesis of probably cause. And everyone is
the target.

The worst part of all is that zero credible evidence has been presented that a
single terrorist attack has been prevented by mass surveillance.

~~~
parliament32
Regarding the national emergencies, here's the best part: You can't really
declare a military national emergency without a declared war going on. But
since the US wants to keep it's emergency-surveillance powers, and it can't
choose random countries to go to war with constantly... they declared a "War
on Terror", which (while sounding like a campaign slogan) satisfies the
requirement for "the country is at war so we can take wartime measures". The
best part is "Terror" isn't something that can legally ever lose/surrender (or
win, for that matter), so this "war" (and the associated national emergencies)
will go on for as long as the US government wants.

It's all very clever, really.

~~~
lisper
"Clever" is not exactly the word I would choose to describe the situation.

------
sambull
"By 2020, about 30,000 unmanned drones are expected to be deployed in the
United States for the purpose of surveillance and law enforcement"

~~~
ASalazarMX
Given the direction it's going, USA will likely want face recognition in the
streets in the near future. I wonder how will the government convince their
citizens it's for their own good. Maybe it will start in troublesome
neighborhoods, show some benefits, and slowly expand everywhere.

~~~
tachyonbeam
The same way they used 9/11 to sell mass surveillance: using fear. Home
invasions, muggings, child predators, think of the children. Maybe have news
networks report more about certain type of crimes. Make sure to report on the
few instances that installed cameras did help solve. If street cameras do stop
some crimes, it will be difficult to argue against them, because you can't
really have an expectation of privacy in the street.

~~~
oil25
The great irony is Americans (and most of the Western world) are now living in
the safest, lowest-crime periods in history. It's truly double-speak to fear
monger about gun violence, terrorism, muggings, etc. when statistically one's
odds of dying or becoming sick from bad diet, bad water, air pollution, car
accidents, even hospital visits, are an order of magnitude more likely.

------
AlexandrB
We're heading into a world where privacy is obsolete. Slowly eroded "from the
bottom" by the slow creep of the Overton window of what's acceptable by tech
companies and "from the top" by advances in military surveillance tech and
increasing willingness by western government to use this tech on their own
citizens.

In this environment will meaningful[1] political action even be possible?

[1] Meaningful as in: outside of what the government deems "permissible".

~~~
lisper
> In this environment will meaningful[1] political action even be possible?

No.

Anything else you want to know?

------
carapace
Item: Auto-autos (self-driving cars) and the accompanying infrastructure will
be a defacto ubiquitous surveillance system.

(Triangulation of gunshots in realtime, etc.)

On the one hand we eliminate privacy, on the other we can eliminate crime.

I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle.

\- - - -

As a pulled-in-the-wool tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoiac the sad thing about
Snowden was that the poor kid had to flush his life down the toilet to get
people to understand what we (the tinfoil hat crowd) knew goddamned well was
already going on. _Of course_ the NSA is slurping up all available data
everywhere because _that 's what I would do._

We are _not_ going to rollback surveillance. The folks that _want_ to roll it
back are so naive that _they_ must be monitored by the rest of us for their
own safety and ours. I wish it weren't so but there it is.

The question is do we want to become a world of Morlocks and Eloi? Or do we
want to go for some sort of Star Trek future, where the sensors and computers
and world-destroying weapons are governed by a strict but flexible _humane_
and open government?

If you are a citizen of the US you have an _awesome_ government that is open
to participation at all levels, g'wan and get involved! Happy Fourth of July!

~~~
kragen
My friend was raped by the police, in the police station. Giving all the power
to the police does not eliminate crime; it just changes who commits the
crimes.

~~~
carapace
Dude that's horrible.

Let me try to be delicate.

Those "police" should fear ubiquitous surveillance, not you.

We have to exercise our democratic power to make sure that e.g. Internal
Affairs can find and deal with criminals who have infiltrated police.

~~~
kragen
ⓐ if the police have access to ubiquitous surveillance of everyone, you aren't
going to have any democratic power. In fact my friend didn't either; we had a
dictatorship. But in large part because we didn't have ubiquitous
surveillance, opposing it was possible, and we eventually restored democracy,
despite the US's support for the dictatorship.

ⓑ they weren't "infiltrating" the police. They _were_ the police. If you give
people unlimited power to fuck others up, they will abuse it. If you think
Internal Affairs is a solution to this, look up Serpico, and consider how many
cops came before him and kept their mouths shut.

~~~
carapace
In that situation, you're already in the Morlocks (corrupt power) and Eloi
(helpless victims) scenario. _It 's too late._

FWIW, I'm sorry we supported your dictatorship.

Here in SF our police can't steal fajitas and get away with it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fajitagate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fajitagate)

I apologize for the tasteless humor. We have had problems:

> Plaintiffs alleged mistreatment at the hands of four veteran officers, known
> as the "Riders", who were alleged to have kidnapped, planted evidence, and
> beaten citizens. Plaintiffs also alleged that the Oakland Police Department
> (OPD) turned a blind eye to police misconduct.

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

Oakland PD has been under a federal babysitter ever since.

But the civil culture is still pretty messed up. Some Oakland police "rescued"
a minor from her pimp and then passed her around:

> According to interviews with the victim, elected officials, and sources
> close to OPD, in addition to documents obtained by the Express, at least
> fourteen Oakland Police officers, three Richmond Police officers, and four
> Alameda County Sheriff's deputies had sex with the girl who goes by the name
> Celeste Guap.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20160612121948/http://www.eastba...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160612121948/http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-
real-reason-why-oakland-fired-its-police-chief/Content?oid=4826701)

And then there was the jailhouse "Fight Club" in SF:

> The San Francisco district attorney’s office dropped all criminal charges
> Friday against three sheriff’s deputies accused of forcing city jail inmates
> to fight each other in gladiator-style battles more than three years ago.

> The decision to dismiss the inmate “fight club” case comes after prosecutors
> said they learned the Sheriff’s Department mishandled the investigation into
> deputies Scott Neu, Eugene Jones and Clifford Chiba by destroying evidence
> and improperly conducting joint administrative and criminal investigations.

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-drops-
charges-i...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/DA-drops-charges-in-
SF-jail-fight-club-case-13580636.php)

The common theme here is that cops are people, they do wrong sometimes, and we
have systems to try to correct that when it happens. Those systems are flawed
and sometimes fail completely. Rule of law takes effort. Automation should be
deployed used to reduce that effort, not reinforce dictatorships. That's what
I'm saying: we can't _escape_ techno-totalitarianism so it behooves us to do
the work to make it humane.

------
insickness
This may be an unpopular opinion but I'm not against more surveillance cameras
in public places. As a photographer, I have the right, and should continue to
have the right, to film in any public place. Private businesses and the
government should do it too. Put cameras on all police officers and as many
public employees as possible. As long as fair access is maintained to the
footage, the more the better.

~~~
imglorp
I feel like this is a popular misconception, a sort of strawman argument. It
kind of goes like "you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, so
taking some pictures in public is okay." It could even be extended to say the
footage could be reviewed later if a crime were committed, that helps public
safety.

But that's not what's happening here, it's not just a camera. It's a vast data
aggregation network that ties together time series, high resolution photos of
a large area, along with software that can follow an individual from source to
destination, and then follow whoever that individual met, roll back in time
and find out where they came from and went and met with, etc.

Of course this can be tied to cell, wifi, credit card purchases, face rec,
internet activity and thousands of other inputs. Once that's done, it's a
microscopically thin line from local cops solving crimes in the past to an
oppressive government rounding up dissenters for re-education.

This is not sci fi, it's the road to global authoritarian surveillance state,
and we're paving it here.

So I support police accountability body cams and people's rights to take
pictures, but not the state or corporation using it for data ingest against
us.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes. You are correct.

Taking a picture is fine. I can take pictures in public places constantly,
pick out the top dozen or so every month and publish an art book.

The mass collection of data assigned to individuals is not. Putting a 10TB hi-
res camera in a balloon and taking constant pictures of a city, tagging each
person as they walk around? That is insanity.

We never had to worry about the second scenario because it was deemed
impossible. It would be like a traffic cop who was able to remember every car
that passed him, who was riding in it, for decades at a time. No laws had to
be made for the same reason we don't outlaw flying while wearing a cape.

The collection and storage of data assigned to an individual should be under
the total control of that individual, on a case-by-case, line-item individual
approval process. This would allow public photography to continue the way it
always has.

------
stanski
If things go bad, they'll go bad real quick.

Maybe that's the handmaid's tale talking but sometimes things aren't as
inconceivable as we'd think.

------
quaquaqua1
"a communication can be retained by CIA for longer than 5 years if it is
enciphered"

nice, so basically all communications through popular chat apps these days.

no wonder they are asking for "backdoors" :)

what happens when quantum computing decrypts these all? if it's 15 years from
now, do they just throw us all in prison retroactively for something we said
15 years ago?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>what happens when quantum computing decrypts these all? if it's 15 years from
now, do they just throw us all in prison retroactively for something we said
15 years ago?

They're only gonna decrypt your messages if they want to throw you in prison.
Welcome to arbitrary enforcement.

~~~
isoprophlex
Everyone will be guilty of some arbitrary crime. But, as per the linked
article, there's already a mechanism for prosecution without a just trial in
place:

> According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters, information obtained
> in this way is subsequently funnelled to authorities across the nation to
> help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.[168] Federal agents
> are then instructed to "recreate" the investigative trail in order to "cover
> up" where the information originated,[168] known as parallel construction.

We're all fucked and we're already in William Gibson's cyberpunk dystopia.
Minus the cool drugs.

~~~
quaquaqua1
>minus the cool drugs

instead we have a very arbitrary channel to decide who gets to receive drugs
our society produces, with all of their nasty side effects

For me, any psychoactive substance a doctor prescribes is like pharmaceutical
grade krokodil

------
oil25
One way we can begin to address, or at least help recognize, mass surveillance
is to use the same tools of surveillance the oppressors use on us. A recent
phenomenon I have observed on YouTube is the rise in "First Amendment audit"
videos, where somebody stands in the public space and awkwardly films police,
politicians and other elected officials (our servants) going about their day
and duties. The videos often escalate into a ridiculous display of ego and
threat of force, even though no crime is being committed, which I think is a
healthy reminder of how uncomfortable it is to be "watched" by someone. It may
already be too late - we may be seriously "out-gunned" by state and corporate
surveillance for meaningful resistance - but these video reminders may be a
gateway into awakening collective consciousness on some level to bring about
actual change.

------
OrgNet
I'm surprised that Apple is mentioned only once in this article...

~~~
jakelazaroff
Why?

~~~
OrgNet
I guess that I was wrong, because they also mention IPhones in a different
paragraph... but they talk about IPhones 3 & 4, so we're due for a new leak
that includes the latest versions...

For Comparison, Google is mentioned 3 times and they probably are part of all
the same programs.

------
educationdata
How many are arrested because of mass surveillance captures the person
criticizing Trump / Obama, Or the Republican / Democratic party?

~~~
UI_at_80x24
That's not how the way the US Government behaves. Publicly criticizing is OK.

If you want clues to who they really are insidious look at Cointelpro and how
the police will incite peaceful gatherings into mobs to justify shutting them
down and killing people.

You can stand on a soapbox and criticize until you are blue in the face, but
try to make an active difference and you will be murdered like the Black
Panthers.

~~~
ASalazarMX
This is not exclusive to USA. Since democracies can't indiscriminately arrest
dissidents without appearing totalitarian, their workaround is disrupting
those movements to criminalize them.

In Mexico, gasoline prices became unregulated in 2017. Historically,
governments have made oil a very sensitive national issue, so strong nation-
wide opposition was expected. Except it didn't happen. The strategy was
simple:

1\. Organized looting began almost immediately. Looters were organized by
Whatsapp, being told the time and place of the next looting.

2\. Police stayed put, and some even participated in looting.

3\. The press equated the looters with gasoline price hike protestors. In
their narrative, looters were protestors, and vice-versa.

4\. Public opinion disapproved of looting, and consequently disapproved of
protestors.

5\. Profit!

------
sbhn
Its for your security for gods sake, stop complaining. If it saves just one
life, n all that

~~~
pstuart
Let's not forget: "Think of the children!"

~~~
devoply
Is a rapist or predator lurking in your neighbourhood? Now we have a drone
watching him 24/7! Also it's watching you and your children to make sure
everyone is safe. Coming to an Amazon delivery near you!

