The Perverse Power Dynamic of the NSA and Congress

I tend to agree with you on this.

 

I'm for tearing it ALL down. If I could volunteer my own life to be the one that gets hit in a future terrorist attack because Big Brother wasn't watching, I'd happily volunteer in order to live in a free society and so that others could do so.

 

I believe we are past the point of no return. I am not suggesting we are heading towards a police state or dictatorship or that our government needs to be brought down. The reality is the fourth amendment has been pretty much washed away. In the past few years, I think many people have been living in a state of denial, that our government is not capable or willing to do this wide spread of surveillance. I believe the people are finally waking up to realize that this does not just stop at brown skinned people in the middle east.

 

I am not sure if I agree. It runs deeper than a few rogue terrorists. The systems built are designed to monitor everything. If we do not continue to improve and maintain our intelligence, then we run risks of other nations getting the upper hand. We don't live in a time where we send hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the front lines. Its much more efficient to collapse a country from within. You can't do this w/out intelligence. How many regimes have we seen fall in the last couple years from within?

 

I fully support the idea that watching email data of US citizens or actions within USA.

I am against the spying, attacking, hacking on foreign countries' personals, companies, schools, banks... declare war first.

 

Upper hand at what? Reading people's private correspondence and violating their right to privacy? The Soviet Union was way better at it and didn't help them.

I think intelligence is necessary, but the surveillance state with technology like PRISM scares the crap out of me. Any state that needs to go to those kinds of extremes to protect itself from it's own people begs the question of whether it is a state that deserves being protected at all.

Living in Israel is bad enough, but as Snowden has shown us, it's actually worse in the UK and US now. Israel is a borderline OECD country in a permanent state of war with a lot of traditions that are, shall we say, less than democratic. People accept it, but I would expect more from the land of the free.

 

Obama and his cronies are nothing but liars

and now today they got busted spying on the EU. I thought Obama was supposed to make the Europeans LIKE Americans again. oops

yet another fail from Obama. He has been a complete joke of a president

 

Oddly, China advocates the same policy for the United States while they spy and steal everything possible.

 

I think Obama is a liar. That's for certain. Take a listen...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RQvKQGzcoc

regarding wiretapping the EU, well I suppose that you'll get the required public outrage from politicians, but let's be honest -- who didn't suspect that was going on? Is it right to spy on your friends? Probably not. Does it happen? Yep. By the way -- many EU countries have pockets of terrorism brewing within them, so some of this wiretapping could actually be beneficial, but on the whole, yes I agree that is not good for the US to be doing this behind their backs.

 

I've bolded the parts that I think most important. I meet and talk with various members of the Houston community whether working class or wealthy. Here's what I've observed.

With the exception of friends who are libertarians/anarchists/philosophy majors, no one seems to care that they are being monitored. Since most folks aren't that prominent, what's to worry, they say. Yes, they claim it bothers them. Yet, it doesn't inspire them to take to the streets or take decisive action against this metastasizing surveillance society. In general, most people don't care about politics so they don't think and ponder these issues like you do.

The internet has changed everything. In the early and mid 90s, it was relatively free and a no man's land. Now, people have accepted the new normal. They willing use Facebook, data mining browsers like Chrome, or iPhones with tracking turned on. The notion of privacy has fundamentally changed. I have friends who moved to London and Shanghai for work. The number of cameras in London or China's Golden Firewall didn't faze either of them. Focus on work and having fun, they say. No time for Debbie downer discussions on this issue.

Having worked for the government and a policy think-tank, having friends who are lobbyists/PR/marketing and running political campaigns, and having attended political fundraisers, I don't believe in the idealistic notion of "government of, for, and by the people" anymore. I compare the feeling to knowing how hot dogs are made which are then sold in ball park arenas for a lot more.

You're right though. It's very dark and it's rotting away America's core. Deep down, I feel we are headed for a diluted version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World rather than Orwell's 1984. I see a collapse in patriotism, spirituality, and nuclear families amongst my peers and an obsession with materialism. Political apathy is a byproduct of this consumerist insouciance. Most are ignorant of how 16th-20th century philosophy shaped our country's democracy. They shrug when I hint that it's slowly been unraveling for the last 30 years.

One hope I see are places like Reddit where I've read truly inspiring and informed political discussions. If Internet has partially been responsible for a Big Data society, then it may help counter it. I've also noticed that people in the IT field, engineers, military vets, and thespians are more sensitive to these topics than other groups.

 

That's extremely troubling to me. I would think Americans would be more sensitive to this.

What I encounter is more of "Why should I worry? I'm not a terrorist," kind of response, especially from the Brits when I ask them if they find CCTV troubling.

I DO work in marketing (sometimes political). I've been paid to appeal to the uninformed in order to manufacture dissent in more than three different country's election cycles. If I listed the kinds of keywords that worked best for either party, no one would believe me, at least not publicly.

I can say for certain that people in general are far shallower and bigoted than they admit in public, a fact that keeps my Facebook ad campaign profitable. If you are an over 40 British woman on Facebook that "likes" any UKIP or BNP related anti-immigration or other far-right nonsense, you have a strong likelihood of playing the online bingo game I am peddling. It's my goto demographic. I call it "Bingo Nazis."

If you are an over 30 woman living in an urban setting in a blue state and you "like" certain brands of organic food, bottled water, yogurt, hybrid cars or overpriced electronic products, I can get you to "like" any product with a "green" image even if you don't own it. I call that demographic "Green to be seen." Those ladies paid my rent for a year.

You don't even want to know what worked best for GOP related fundraisers...

Poltics (at least from my point of view) are ALL about appealing to two groups: Rich people to contribute to your PAC or party, so that you can afford to bombard low information voters to be scared ****less into turning out and spreading the "message" on social media. The more partisan, the dirtier the rhetoric, the less informed the voters, the higher the ROI for advertisers. It's not hard to figure out.

THAT I'm not so sure of. Appeals to patriotism and religion are good sellers for me in most places. Every place and every product, just has their niche. The places where this isn't true...is Germany (but only outside Bavaria), and to some extent, Australia and New Zealand. They just don't click on ads and are very skeptical in general, but appeals to religion and patriotism are especially useless.

It has. I'm allowed to do things that would be absolutely illegal 40 years ago (and should be). When I worked as a creative director for a large agency in the past, my bosses were horrified by the ads I made and how well they worked. I would say "This is how sausage is made, man." It's not even a case so much of me (or any other advertiser) being evil as much as it is that to not do these things means you will lose money.

I also have understood by trial and error as an advertiser that people have this innate idea that the things they buy define them, even morally. It's especially true in the US. I could probably tell a person's political religious views just by looking at consumer products and companies they "like."

You have been quantified.

 

It was also, just a hell of a lot more fun. When I started using the Internet in 1992, it was mostly scientists, US Air Force people and students, mostly in something scientific and tech-related. The signal-to-noise ratio was much higher and there was a better than fair chance than anyone you interacted with was educated and literate.

 

This has been long brewing since before the internet became popular. It was probably tinfoil-hat-ism 15 years ago, but because of Moores Law and cheap storage, what was once expensive and difficult is the opposite.

The thing to consider is that privacy has always been as strong as the lock used to guard against it. Would I risk opening a door to someone's privacy if I had the authority to do so? If it doesn't hurt me, then why not?

Now if I had a hundred doors to go through, then a simple lock would take more time and effort to rummage through. And this was the case for a long time as even local police could access your history, such as medical, credit and public, through a score of paper trails and a mix of unconstitutionality on their part... So law enforcement needed an entire support structure of archivists, secretaries and lawyers to get what they wanted out of an individual or group.

Computing opens everyone's doors because of indexing and profile matching. It categorizes your privacy into something digital and statistically insignificant. Instead of 2 weeks and a lot of man hours to dig dirt on one person, that same amount of dirt can be obtained with keystrokes and a night's sleep.

A response you can give is that you have your whole life history logged in one of many hidden databases accessible by anyone with a flash drive. And should you be anyone important or crucial in life (who wouldn't want to be?) that information can be used against you any time by anyone with enough access and enough money.

Do you trust the government to keep that information?

Do you trust the government to maintain it safely enough that it won't fall into the hands of people who aren't supposed to see it with good reason?

So as long as you're not a terrorist and are going to be a boring wasted potential for human society, then you have nothing to worry about.

 

Too much information is the same as no information. The NSA will have to shrink the mass down with analysis algorithms that will render unrelated personal information about as private as it is now. And frankly, I don't know how anybody can put anything into an accessible data base with any expectation of privacy. All your medical data is in your insurance files, all you banking data is stored, your Facebook social associations, phone call records, car GPS, your fingerprints are stored at the DMV etc. If that bothers you you probably need to get off the grid.

Secondly, I think people discount the the value of being ahead and on the cutting edge of covert information. Spying has always been the root of power and the SOP for governments, corporations and powerful people since before Sun Tzu. Having real information gives real advantages and saves real lives (Enigma and the Japanese Naval codes for instance). And like it or not, the world has always been and will always be "at war". It may not be a shooting war but countries and groups are always maneuvering for strategic and economic advantage. You better believe every other nation on Earth is doing all they can too.

So don't forget, the people in this week's "crisis" are our people, our side. The system is designed and run by our neighbors, voted on and overseen by our elected officials. The first charge of our government is the security of the people and the lessons of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 dictated the course.

I don't care if they look at my monkey sex browser history, just don't care.

 

This is how its done now. I am not worried about some bored analysis looking over my file and saying, "LOLZ, look at this guy!".

For those who inspire to be more than an everyday white collar worker, this could be troublesome. Currently its contained to the NSA and some of those other three letter acronym agencies. What happens when the lower tier agencies start using this information? Or the private sector starts buying favors to get this mined data on specific people? Im not worried about the NSA.

 

It can be used selectively to smear anyone seeking public office.

NOBODY's browsing history will be completely "clean", I am pretty sure. Any guy at least will have looked at a p*rn site or whatever.

Whoever has access to this data can blackmail and shoot down any candidate they want.

 

Out of context postings, extrapolated proclivities, and geolocated patterns.

Your personal...uhhh metadata contains powerful information that reveals insights that you might not even realize yourself.

It's already been established that Elliot Spitzer was caught in the prostitution scandal not from word of mouth or an informed tip but from passive tracking algorithms the nsa uses on the country's own public servants.

No kidding it's warfare. I just don't want to invest in the bigger missile.

 

Frightening, indeed.

I don't want to see or even know about some of the Japanese p*rn sites that Northside Storm visits, that's for sure.