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The whole reason the privacy debate hasn't reached critical mass amongst the general population is because there is no actual impact. It's entire theoretical fo

The whole reason the privacy debate hasn't reached critical mass amongst the general population is because there is no actual impact. It's entire theoretical for almost everyone. 99.99 of people aren't being actually spied on. Despite the fact that the western governments can spy on everything you do. They just don't. They can't spy on all of us. Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners. Sure my emails are probably buffered for a little while. But as long as I don't ride a jet into the Sears tower nobody will actually read them. The people asked themselves: if a tree fell in the woods and nobody heard it, did it make a sound. And our answer is no it didn't. The fact is the biggest intrusion in our lives is Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Google literally exists to spy on you. It's a many many billion dollar industry. The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does.

zo1 11y ago
>"The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does." I don't mean to detract from your mains points about why people aren't in an uproar over these things. But, there is a big difference between what "Google" can do to you, and what a government institution such as the NSA can.
- rhino369 11y ago
  I fear google way more than the NSA or the government. Google can link my name to someone claiming I'm a racist. It can tie me to stupid things I said online 15 years ago. Who knows what it will do in 5 years when Bing reduces their profit margin. In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database. That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    Remember that the NSA can do anything to you that Google can -- they need only deliver a National Security Letter to Google.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    Naive. The NSA already has access to the complete pipe, so they have 100% of what Google has as source material, then they can also issue requests to Google for anything Google has-- they have far more than Google does. The NSA can also refer your information to foreign governments for more analysis, and vice versa. You are already tied to stupid things you said online. They have categorized this information and will sit on it for an indefinite amount of time. There are groups such as JTRIG who will use the stupid things you have said to turn you against people you may be aligned with, if they think it is necessary. Should you ever run for public office or become an inconvenience, you are already in their pocket. It's already "full fascist", you just haven't toed the line of their rules yet.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      There's two very different things. A government that suppresses fringe elements versus one that oppresses the majority. NSA spying programs enable the former, but the majority is rational in not caring about that. Current NSA programs are irrelevant to the latter, because if the government went full fascist and tried to oppress the majority, it wouldn't take them long at all to build their spying apparatus from scratch by just occupying the headquarters of a few key internet and telecom companies.
      - cryoshon 11y ago
        Fringe elements, you say? Such as... the young community organizer Barack Obama when he was running for senator as a nobody? If you recall, he was actually spied on by the NSA then, and likely before that as well. This is a problem, and the majority of people should understand that an attack on a fringe can effect them. Someone could blackmailed the president, or acted as a filter by allowing him to pass with certain conditions. Sounds like that is something to be rationally concerned about. The NSA programs chill speech of the majority, anyway. You always hear people faux-fretting about "being on a list" for what they say. It's a joke when they say it, but it's not a joke in reality. People are reacting to being constantly surveilled, and it's putting a cramp on a lot of discussions.
gglitch 11y ago
The problem as I see it has less to do with the evil being done now than with the potential for the current infrastructure to be abused now or later without the citizenry knowing about it. The safeguards aren't about your emails being read. They're about future stakeholders not being able to abuse their privileges.
- rhino369 11y ago
  The breakout time for a government to go from no spying to spying on all the people is not very long. That goes double for countries where Google and Facebook operate. Just look at how the NSA gets its information right now. Most of it is just delivered by companies who keep the information themselves. You want to find a list of gays in America. Grindr has a database for you, Google too.
nrb 11y ago
The difference is consent. You can't opt-out of government surveillance. Also, eventually the resources will exist to spy on anyone in real time, it is inevitable.
Zirro 11y ago
"The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does." From the leaks we know that they both do the same thing, which is to use their computer resources to sift through all emails they get their hands on, build profiles of people and connect them with each other. Neither could afford to have humans reading all the data coming at them. The difference is that Google uses their conclusions to show you the most profitable ads, while the NSA keeps their conclusions to themselves until the day of your potential arrest. Whether people consider the creation of such a profile to be spying is up to them, but my personal suspicion is that people would strongly object if they understood what was being done with their data.
- rhino369 11y ago
  The NSA doesn't get my email unless it gets a FISA warrant since I'm in the USA. Court records show they get about 3000 warrants a year. I'm pretty confident I'm not one of those. The problem with google though, is that anything Google knows about me can be sought by the NSA with just one of those FISA warrants. Google and Facebook are essentially NSA Reserve Branch. The NSA also isn't charged with making criminal cases. There is a conspiracy theory about "parallel construction" but too much crime is totally unsolved for the NSA to be secretly feeding law enforcement data on a large scale. I also wouldn't be so sure that Google or Facebook won't fuck with your life. Plenty of American companies have done extraordinarily evil things before. Then again so has the government.
  - Zirro 11y ago
    "The NSA doesn't get my email unless it gets a FISA warrant since I'm in the USA. Court records show they get about 3000 warrants a year. I'm pretty confident I'm not one of those." Your implication seems to be that this is supposed to make the practice more acceptable. Well, I'm not from the US or even a Five Eyes-country. I speak from the perspective of the billions of people who don't have these rights under the NSA and similar-minded agencies.
  - idlewords 11y ago
    The FBI can read any email of yours older than six months without a warrant.
pdkl95 11y ago
> 99.99 of people aren't being actually spied on. Complete and utter nonsense. Have you not heard about SQL's "JOIN" feature? Did you miss the numerous advances in machine learning? > nobody will actually read them If you haven't figured out by now that it's not a human that reads them, you're being wilfully blind. Even if you are limiting it to humans, all it would take is you pissing off the right person. With your entire life in front of them, how many different types of revenge do you think they can find?
- rhino369 11y ago
  The Snowden leaks themselves show they have to get access to American email via the FISA system. They buffer pretty much everything for a while so they can backtrack a couple days but that information isn't being filtered through a search algorithm. Your email isn't in their database.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    Since when is this limited to "email"? Why are you ignoring programs like COTRAVELER (which only requires metadata)?
    - rhino369 11y ago
      CoTravler is aimed overseas. https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?authuser=0 https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?authuser=0
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    Nah, you're misunderstanding. The FISA court is only for formal intelligence filings which could be used for active casework. Assuming they play by the rules (they don't, but anyway...) all they'd have to do to get your emails anyway is ask GCHQ for them. GCHQ isn't American, so they didn't break any laws by grabbing the content and metadata for all your communications. GCHQ passes the data to the NSA, and boom, they have your data. Legally, with no FISA warrant. The FISA court is a rubber stamp, anyway-- look at their approval rate.
AlisdairO 11y ago
As long as they're collecting data on everyone, they only need to analyse the data on a few people. Sure, I doubt I'm being actively spied on, but say I were to rise to a position of real influence, how would you feel about government agencies being able to leverage my every secret against me?
- AgentME 11y ago
  Yeah, many people would say they don't mind being in the dragnet surveillance, but knowing it's there has a chilling effect that can help prevent people from trying to make waves (be politically active, etc).
  - AlisdairO 11y ago
    Absolutely. I donated to try to help Snowden's legal defense, but I certainly had pause beforehand, wondering if I would end up on, say, a TSA list.
graeme 11y ago
>Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners. What most people haven't thought of is that the government doesn't NEED to do that to everyone to massively impact society. I lived in Cuba for a while. Almost everyone was left alone to speak as they pleased. But the government had data on what was said, who associated with who, etc. It was collected by neighborhood watch groups. They knew when someone actually became a threat and had the means to make their life difficult. Oppressive systems only need to oppress those who would make waves.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  With respect to your experiences - is it not the actual use as opposed to the potential use. Cuba's administration would jail opponents or I prison or torture on the strength of surveillance. And this was known / publicised. So the knowledge of the surveillance then kept people in line to the extent they feared the amount of retaliation brought. If the UK government was to re-educate everyone who voted libdem then we would all know the extent to which the surveillance would be used - and then adjust our behaviours. So it seems surveillance is always "in potentia", and oppression is enabled by it. I'm not sure where I am going with this other than, don't feel disgust, just violently revolt the minute they over step "the" mark.
  - graeme 11y ago
    Right. But that system of using the day to influence instigators is the logical negative way the data can be used. I don't think people have considered that. It wouldn't be every libdem supporter btw. It would be 300-3000 key actors, or less. That's all you really need to target. Most people stay in line without prompting. I mean that in a statistical, not a critical way.
cryoshon 11y ago
Hm, sounds a lot like Barack Obama's defense of the establishment of surveillance, namely that the concerns are purely paranoia and that the government is responsible and trustworthy. Let's rip these ideas into shreds. First, your claim that we "aren't being actually spied on" is utterly false, given that the NSA has a multitude of programs which explicitly harvest and analyze the "metadata" (telemetry content) and also body content of all American electronic communications. They lied about this, then were refuted-- check the Snowden files online at the Intercept website. They have a dossier on every last one of us. This brings me to your next point, that they can't spy on all of us. It's all automated, idiot. They have enough hardware to do it, and they've spent years making sure it's all done without any hands on from their analysts. This is also in the Snowden files. They don't need to "totally reconstruct your life", they already have it right there, with every shred documented electronically. Sure, they probably haven't integrated all the times you popped up on a CCTV or dashcam, but they have the data from your phone, which is even better. Your emails are stored indefinitely and are in a searchable database, tagged by keyword, topic, you name it. Nobody will actively read them, but it doesn't even matter since the computer system has read them already. They know you aren't up to anything because they automatically checked as soon as the email left your outbox. Your discussion of the tree in the forest is irrelevant; people react differently to events when they know that they are being watched, which is now the case on a societal level. I will say this again because it is critical for the next section: people react differently when they know that they are being monitored. There is actual impact to people because of this aspect of human behavior. Investigative journalism is moribund because sources are afraid to come forward, meaning that the public has one less (of very few) way of understanding what the government (and corporations) is doing in their name. Then there's the problem of the intelligence agencies spying on the political organizations that are supposed to oversee them. They capture all of the political communications too, after all. Remember when Dianne Feinstein publically claimed that the CIA was surveilling her and threatening her as a result of the torture report that was being put together? Think about all of the times that you never even heard about that because the blackmail was successful. Speech has been chilled, with people afraid of saying what they really think for fear of ending up "on a list". Anyone who runs for office is sure to be already on the list, and frankly, if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group. To speak a bit more about JTRIG, I want to emphasize that JTRIG is an active platform out of GCHQ that is currently operating whose mission is to disrupt, degrade, and encourage obedience among nonviolent, legal groups. They likely target public dissenters and protesters. This is not acceptable, and it isn't something that an actual democracy would partake in, but hey, we found it in the NSA's slide decks. Moving on, I agree that Big Brother 2.0 takes a lot of data from the big tech companies-- the difference being that it's optional to participate. You can opt out, and shut out their tracking or spying, if you want. Can't do that with the NSA. In conclusion, the actual impact is invisible to the public, but certainly present. The impact takes the form of things not said, blackmail in private, and disruption via proxies.

zo1 11y ago

>"The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does." I don't mean to detract from your mains points about why people aren't in an uproar over these things. But, there is a big difference between what "Google" can do to you, and what a government institution such as the NSA can.

rhino369 11y ago
I fear google way more than the NSA or the government. Google can link my name to someone claiming I'm a racist. It can tie me to stupid things I said online 15 years ago. Who knows what it will do in 5 years when Bing reduces their profit margin. In order for the NSA to actually hurt me the government would have to essentially go full on fascist. But even in that case, first thing they'd do was to crack open Google's database. That's what the FBI did after 9-11. They went to VISA and Mastercard to find out what the hijackers were up to.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Remember that the NSA can do anything to you that Google can -- they need only deliver a National Security Letter to Google.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Naive. The NSA already has access to the complete pipe, so they have 100% of what Google has as source material, then they can also issue requests to Google for anything Google has-- they have far more than Google does. The NSA can also refer your information to foreign governments for more analysis, and vice versa. You are already tied to stupid things you said online. They have categorized this information and will sit on it for an indefinite amount of time. There are groups such as JTRIG who will use the stupid things you have said to turn you against people you may be aligned with, if they think it is necessary. Should you ever run for public office or become an inconvenience, you are already in their pocket. It's already "full fascist", you just haven't toed the line of their rules yet.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    There's two very different things. A government that suppresses fringe elements versus one that oppresses the majority. NSA spying programs enable the former, but the majority is rational in not caring about that. Current NSA programs are irrelevant to the latter, because if the government went full fascist and tried to oppress the majority, it wouldn't take them long at all to build their spying apparatus from scratch by just occupying the headquarters of a few key internet and telecom companies.
    - cryoshon 11y ago
      Fringe elements, you say? Such as... the young community organizer Barack Obama when he was running for senator as a nobody? If you recall, he was actually spied on by the NSA then, and likely before that as well. This is a problem, and the majority of people should understand that an attack on a fringe can effect them. Someone could blackmailed the president, or acted as a filter by allowing him to pass with certain conditions. Sounds like that is something to be rationally concerned about. The NSA programs chill speech of the majority, anyway. You always hear people faux-fretting about "being on a list" for what they say. It's a joke when they say it, but it's not a joke in reality. People are reacting to being constantly surveilled, and it's putting a cramp on a lot of discussions.

gglitch 11y ago

The problem as I see it has less to do with the evil being done now than with the potential for the current infrastructure to be abused now or later without the citizenry knowing about it. The safeguards aren't about your emails being read. They're about future stakeholders not being able to abuse their privileges.

rhino369 11y ago
The breakout time for a government to go from no spying to spying on all the people is not very long. That goes double for countries where Google and Facebook operate. Just look at how the NSA gets its information right now. Most of it is just delivered by companies who keep the information themselves. You want to find a list of gays in America. Grindr has a database for you, Google too.

nrb 11y ago

The difference is consent. You can't opt-out of government surveillance. Also, eventually the resources will exist to spy on anyone in real time, it is inevitable.

Zirro 11y ago

"The nsa could potentially read my email or track my location. But Google definitely already does." From the leaks we know that they both do the same thing, which is to use their computer resources to sift through all emails they get their hands on, build profiles of people and connect them with each other. Neither could afford to have humans reading all the data coming at them. The difference is that Google uses their conclusions to show you the most profitable ads, while the NSA keeps their conclusions to themselves until the day of your potential arrest. Whether people consider the creation of such a profile to be spying is up to them, but my personal suspicion is that people would strongly object if they understood what was being done with their data.

rhino369 11y ago
The NSA doesn't get my email unless it gets a FISA warrant since I'm in the USA. Court records show they get about 3000 warrants a year. I'm pretty confident I'm not one of those. The problem with google though, is that anything Google knows about me can be sought by the NSA with just one of those FISA warrants. Google and Facebook are essentially NSA Reserve Branch. The NSA also isn't charged with making criminal cases. There is a conspiracy theory about "parallel construction" but too much crime is totally unsolved for the NSA to be secretly feeding law enforcement data on a large scale. I also wouldn't be so sure that Google or Facebook won't fuck with your life. Plenty of American companies have done extraordinarily evil things before. Then again so has the government.
- Zirro 11y ago
  "The NSA doesn't get my email unless it gets a FISA warrant since I'm in the USA. Court records show they get about 3000 warrants a year. I'm pretty confident I'm not one of those." Your implication seems to be that this is supposed to make the practice more acceptable. Well, I'm not from the US or even a Five Eyes-country. I speak from the perspective of the billions of people who don't have these rights under the NSA and similar-minded agencies.
- idlewords 11y ago
  The FBI can read any email of yours older than six months without a warrant.

pdkl95 11y ago

> 99.99 of people aren't being actually spied on. Complete and utter nonsense. Have you not heard about SQL's "JOIN" feature? Did you miss the numerous advances in machine learning? > nobody will actually read them If you haven't figured out by now that it's not a human that reads them, you're being wilfully blind. Even if you are limiting it to humans, all it would take is you pissing off the right person. With your entire life in front of them, how many different types of revenge do you think they can find?

rhino369 11y ago
The Snowden leaks themselves show they have to get access to American email via the FISA system. They buffer pretty much everything for a while so they can backtrack a couple days but that information isn't being filtered through a search algorithm. Your email isn't in their database.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  Since when is this limited to "email"? Why are you ignoring programs like COTRAVELER (which only requires metadata)?
  - rhino369 11y ago
    CoTravler is aimed overseas. https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?authuser=0 https://www.google.com/maps/timeline?authuser=0
- cryoshon 11y ago
  Nah, you're misunderstanding. The FISA court is only for formal intelligence filings which could be used for active casework. Assuming they play by the rules (they don't, but anyway...) all they'd have to do to get your emails anyway is ask GCHQ for them. GCHQ isn't American, so they didn't break any laws by grabbing the content and metadata for all your communications. GCHQ passes the data to the NSA, and boom, they have your data. Legally, with no FISA warrant. The FISA court is a rubber stamp, anyway-- look at their approval rate.

AlisdairO 11y ago

As long as they're collecting data on everyone, they only need to analyse the data on a few people. Sure, I doubt I'm being actively spied on, but say I were to rise to a position of real influence, how would you feel about government agencies being able to leverage my every secret against me?

AgentME 11y ago
Yeah, many people would say they don't mind being in the dragnet surveillance, but knowing it's there has a chilling effect that can help prevent people from trying to make waves (be politically active, etc).
- AlisdairO 11y ago
  Absolutely. I donated to try to help Snowden's legal defense, but I certainly had pause beforehand, wondering if I would end up on, say, a TSA list.

graeme 11y ago

>Sure they can get my info. Or anyone's info. And they could totally reconstruct my life. But they only have the resources of to do this to maybe a couple thousand people. Out of a billion westeRners. What most people haven't thought of is that the government doesn't NEED to do that to everyone to massively impact society. I lived in Cuba for a while. Almost everyone was left alone to speak as they pleased. But the government had data on what was said, who associated with who, etc. It was collected by neighborhood watch groups. They knew when someone actually became a threat and had the means to make their life difficult. Oppressive systems only need to oppress those who would make waves.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
With respect to your experiences - is it not the actual use as opposed to the potential use. Cuba's administration would jail opponents or I prison or torture on the strength of surveillance. And this was known / publicised. So the knowledge of the surveillance then kept people in line to the extent they feared the amount of retaliation brought. If the UK government was to re-educate everyone who voted libdem then we would all know the extent to which the surveillance would be used - and then adjust our behaviours. So it seems surveillance is always "in potentia", and oppression is enabled by it. I'm not sure where I am going with this other than, don't feel disgust, just violently revolt the minute they over step "the" mark.
- graeme 11y ago
  Right. But that system of using the day to influence instigators is the logical negative way the data can be used. I don't think people have considered that. It wouldn't be every libdem supporter btw. It would be 300-3000 key actors, or less. That's all you really need to target. Most people stay in line without prompting. I mean that in a statistical, not a critical way.

cryoshon 11y ago

Hm, sounds a lot like Barack Obama's defense of the establishment of surveillance, namely that the concerns are purely paranoia and that the government is responsible and trustworthy. Let's rip these ideas into shreds. First, your claim that we "aren't being actually spied on" is utterly false, given that the NSA has a multitude of programs which explicitly harvest and analyze the "metadata" (telemetry content) and also body content of all American electronic communications. They lied about this, then were refuted-- check the Snowden files online at the Intercept website. They have a dossier on every last one of us. This brings me to your next point, that they can't spy on all of us. It's all automated, idiot. They have enough hardware to do it, and they've spent years making sure it's all done without any hands on from their analysts. This is also in the Snowden files. They don't need to "totally reconstruct your life", they already have it right there, with every shred documented electronically. Sure, they probably haven't integrated all the times you popped up on a CCTV or dashcam, but they have the data from your phone, which is even better. Your emails are stored indefinitely and are in a searchable database, tagged by keyword, topic, you name it. Nobody will actively read them, but it doesn't even matter since the computer system has read them already. They know you aren't up to anything because they automatically checked as soon as the email left your outbox. Your discussion of the tree in the forest is irrelevant; people react differently to events when they know that they are being watched, which is now the case on a societal level. I will say this again because it is critical for the next section: people react differently when they know that they are being monitored. There is actual impact to people because of this aspect of human behavior. Investigative journalism is moribund because sources are afraid to come forward, meaning that the public has one less (of very few) way of understanding what the government (and corporations) is doing in their name. Then there's the problem of the intelligence agencies spying on the political organizations that are supposed to oversee them. They capture all of the political communications too, after all. Remember when Dianne Feinstein publically claimed that the CIA was surveilling her and threatening her as a result of the torture report that was being put together? Think about all of the times that you never even heard about that because the blackmail was successful. Speech has been chilled, with people afraid of saying what they really think for fear of ending up "on a list". Anyone who runs for office is sure to be already on the list, and frankly, if they're running on a left wing platform, may have already been targeted for disruption via JTRIG or an equivalent US group. To speak a bit more about JTRIG, I want to emphasize that JTRIG is an active platform out of GCHQ that is currently operating whose mission is to disrupt, degrade, and encourage obedience among nonviolent, legal groups. They likely target public dissenters and protesters. This is not acceptable, and it isn't something that an actual democracy would partake in, but hey, we found it in the NSA's slide decks. Moving on, I agree that Big Brother 2.0 takes a lot of data from the big tech companies-- the difference being that it's optional to participate. You can opt out, and shut out their tracking or spying, if you want. Can't do that with the NSA. In conclusion, the actual impact is invisible to the public, but certainly present. The impact takes the form of things not said, blackmail in private, and disruption via proxies.