8 ms·

American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression

133 points by kushti 11y ago

cubano 11y ago
Mencken once said that many Americans, due to their Puritan roots, live in "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This surveillance and its informants, such as are discussed in this article, seem to me to be the embodiment of this fear. Many people, for whatever reasons I will never be able to fathom, seem to get some sort of thrill on snitching on the activities of others whom I guess they feel are enjoying themselves too much. Maybe its envy...maybe its some authoritarian streak... I don't know, but it sure exists and many of my old friends have been bitten by its ugly bite.
- the_crispr 11y ago
  The business about the puritans is a cute intellectual toy based on trivia and truly ancient history. There is no relationship between a centuries-old minority subculture, and the bestial, militarized nuclear power that projects power into orbit, throughout the skies and across oceans today. There's enough porn on the internet (mostly originating from the United State) to prove that with an accidental twiddle of your fingers into any search engine.
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    You misunderstand puritanism, it has many tentacles that have stretched to many corners of american culture. It still has a strong presence in our standards of media "decency" where abominable violence is fine but naked bodies, eroticism, or rough language is clamped down on to an extreme degree. It also has lots of little weird echoes and side-effects. Consider, for example, the way that overly happy, "bubblegum" pop music is denigrated, especially by those who think that valuing "sophisticated" and "mature" music (whether it's classical, prog rock, speed metal, or what-have-you) is important. Or look at the legal prohibitions against drug use and sex work. Or look at the modern trend, especially online, of ironic detachment. There's very much an undercurrent of looking at pure, unfiltered exuberance, enthusiasm, and enjoyment through a skeptical, dour, or peevish lens. The fact that people enjoy looking at porn in private doesn't change that.
    - irixusr 11y ago
      I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
      - InclinedPlane 11y ago
        Well, pretending you don't, and especially being critical of others when their private habits are revealed, sure.
      - tomc1985 11y ago
        So the rest of the world group masturbates? Certainly haven't encountered any of that in my travels...
    - irixusr 11y ago
      I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
    - irixusr 11y ago
      I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
  - mesofile 11y ago
    While I'd agree that the modern espionage-industrial complex is not motivated by old-fashioned Puritanism in the historical sense, it certainly does have roots in the sort of naive moral authoritarianism (which we call small-p puritanism) that political and religious figures have exploited to great effect in American society since Anthony Comstock and before. The creation of US security services like the FBI and CIA and the cultures they engendered owe a great deal to people like J Edgar Hoover who had a keen sense of this kind of puritanism, and accumulated a great deal of power by leveraging it.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Does "Puritanism" here reflect more a parochial understanding? The English have their own espionage-industrial complex, including one CCTV camera for about every 10 people, and a native author, Orwell, who famously wrote about near universal surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's also the Five Eyes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, wherein an espionage agency in one country can route around laws which restrict surveillance of citizens by simply asking a foreign agency to get the information and share it with the former. This might be based on a 'naive moral authoritarianism', which in the US might include 'puritanism', but I don't think puritanism captures the basis for the multi-national, espionage-industrial complex, any more than attributing it to some sort of 'Anglo-Saxonism' might.
tedks 11y ago
Trust a Cato article/infographic/whatever to totally ignore the red scare and rightist motivation for virtually all political surveillance and repression.
- lsy 11y ago
  Look, I'm as left-leaning as anyone, but check the link. The timeline is chock full of stuff on oppression of leftists.
- magicGLASSman 11y ago
  This is a false dichotomy, you can be right or left leaning and also be libertarian or authoritarian[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass
  - zahmahkibo 11y ago
    1. The political compass is oversimplified and not taken seriously by political scientists 2. This has nothing to do with his argument. In the US, surveillance is largely the product of moral panics, primarily 1. The red scare 2. The race scare 3. The drug scare, which itself is really just a synthesis of 1 and 2; the drug war was essentially invented to attack black and Latino communities as well as anti government "subversives." Maybe that's not true in EVERY state that has used mass surveillance, but it is true in the specific case of the US.
- gozur88 11y ago
  You might try reading before criticizing.
- nateabele 11y ago
  And what of the countless civil liberties erosions of progressive hero FDR?
yuhong 11y ago
I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where eg police departments compete for resources basically to make their own department bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far as Ron Paul suggests, but....
- coldtea 11y ago
  The main cultural problem in the US is the acceptance, but the white majority at least, that police behaving like they do is part of the job and acceptable. I refer to the fact that you can be tased, shot, beat, arrested, held down by 4 policemen, beaten etc 10 times more easily than you can in Western Europe -- and people think that's OK, or what "the police is supposed to do". Even the fact that getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop (something totally OK in 99% of the world) means you can be shot in the US...
  - yuhong 11y ago
    That is not good either, but I was thinking of for example the drug war.
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      A lot of police militarization, at least before 9/11, was driven by Drug War mythology. Now there's a badder bogie man.
  - adventured 11y ago
    I don't think the white majority finds that behavior acceptable either. Twice as many white people are killed by cops every year as black people for example (and yes, I understand the population ratios, my point is it's still a lot of white people also being killed by cops). I think it's primarily a question of: how to stop it, what reforms to make, where to start?
    - coldtea 11y ago
unclebucknasty 11y ago
Whenever I pause to think about surveillance and other activity of the sort that is aimed at stifling peaceful, ideological movements and groups it gives me a chill. At those points it becomes clear that the predomimant interests that we are serving are not those of "the people", as it is the people who are being targeted. This leads to the obvious question "whose interests are we serving and at what cost?"
- themartorana 11y ago
  "...peaceful, ideological movements and groups..." Just in case, I suppose. I guess those that have power are also quite sensitive to losing it. But yeah, Burning Man?
- Umn44 11y ago
  "Whenever I pause to think about surveillance and other activity of the sort that is aimed at stifling peaceful, ideological movements and groups it gives me a chill." They fear the political awakening of the masses of the world. Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY Brezinski at a press conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g Major powers, and imposing control over the awakened masses. https://youtu.be/4usbR_kKCDs?t=397 https://youtu.be/4usbR_kKCDs?t=397 Important: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137
nickbauman 11y ago
There's a lot of truth to the information in the posting, but remember this is from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, which has ties to Koch industries. They often like to use examples of bad government for justification to roll back government programs that help the average citizen in favor of corporate rule, not just the bad ones that hurt everyone.
- adventured 11y ago
  You mean the Koch brothers, the same ones in favor of: ending police militarization, ending mass-incarceration, ending our military adventurism, and are in favor of gay marriage? Sounds pretty great to me.
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    I'm not sure how that addresses OP's comment, others at the opposite end of the political spectrum also share these views.
dbpokorny 11y ago
Sexual surveillance and repression goes back to the dawn of civilization and the origin of language. Everybody wants to know who is having sex with who. This is, I fear, the ultimate question of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. It is difficult for a human being to resist the temptation to ask who is having sex with who, especially after spending decades building a system that is designed to answer exactly that question (a.k.a "artificial intelligence" or perhaps "artificial gossip" would be a better term). > Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates — it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.[51] In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming' — vocal grooming. To keep your allies happy, you now needed only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language — initially in the form of 'gossip.'[51] Dunbar’s hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.[52] > Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal grooming' — the fact that words are so cheap — would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.[53] A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming — the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds — to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_and_grooming_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_...
- mattlutze 11y ago
  A: 42 Q: How many people that have been a part of my life are having sex at this moment? A bit disappointing if so, but it would at least satisfy those mice's desire for a salacious topic to tour the galaxy's talk show circuit. To the second part, it doesn't seem like that theory of vocal grooming would need to be the genesis of syntactic speech. Complex verbal communication could have come about for completely other reasons, and, as we standardized around words and sentences and the like, vocal grooming likewise could have grown from simple noises to these similar more-complex mechanisms.

133 points by kushti 11y ago

Mencken once said that many Americans, due to their Puritan roots, live in "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." This surveillance and its informants, such as are discussed in this article, seem to me to be the embodiment of this fear. Many people, for whatever reasons I will never be able to fathom, seem to get some sort of thrill on snitching on the activities of others whom I guess they feel are enjoying themselves too much. Maybe its envy...maybe its some authoritarian streak... I don't know, but it sure exists and many of my old friends have been bitten by its ugly bite.

the_crispr 11y ago
The business about the puritans is a cute intellectual toy based on trivia and truly ancient history. There is no relationship between a centuries-old minority subculture, and the bestial, militarized nuclear power that projects power into orbit, throughout the skies and across oceans today. There's enough porn on the internet (mostly originating from the United State) to prove that with an accidental twiddle of your fingers into any search engine.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  You misunderstand puritanism, it has many tentacles that have stretched to many corners of american culture. It still has a strong presence in our standards of media "decency" where abominable violence is fine but naked bodies, eroticism, or rough language is clamped down on to an extreme degree. It also has lots of little weird echoes and side-effects. Consider, for example, the way that overly happy, "bubblegum" pop music is denigrated, especially by those who think that valuing "sophisticated" and "mature" music (whether it's classical, prog rock, speed metal, or what-have-you) is important. Or look at the legal prohibitions against drug use and sex work. Or look at the modern trend, especially online, of ironic detachment. There's very much an undercurrent of looking at pure, unfiltered exuberance, enthusiasm, and enjoyment through a skeptical, dour, or peevish lens. The fact that people enjoy looking at porn in private doesn't change that.
  - irixusr 11y ago
    I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
    - InclinedPlane 11y ago
      Well, pretending you don't, and especially being critical of others when their private habits are revealed, sure.
    - tomc1985 11y ago
      So the rest of the world group masturbates? Certainly haven't encountered any of that in my travels...
  - irixusr 11y ago
    I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
  - irixusr 11y ago
    I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.
- mesofile 11y ago
  While I'd agree that the modern espionage-industrial complex is not motivated by old-fashioned Puritanism in the historical sense, it certainly does have roots in the sort of naive moral authoritarianism (which we call small-p puritanism) that political and religious figures have exploited to great effect in American society since Anthony Comstock and before. The creation of US security services like the FBI and CIA and the cultures they engendered owe a great deal to people like J Edgar Hoover who had a keen sense of this kind of puritanism, and accumulated a great deal of power by leveraging it.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Does "Puritanism" here reflect more a parochial understanding? The English have their own espionage-industrial complex, including one CCTV camera for about every 10 people, and a native author, Orwell, who famously wrote about near universal surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's also the Five Eyes of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, wherein an espionage agency in one country can route around laws which restrict surveillance of citizens by simply asking a foreign agency to get the information and share it with the former. This might be based on a 'naive moral authoritarianism', which in the US might include 'puritanism', but I don't think puritanism captures the basis for the multi-national, espionage-industrial complex, any more than attributing it to some sort of 'Anglo-Saxonism' might.

tedks 11y ago

Trust a Cato article/infographic/whatever to totally ignore the red scare and rightist motivation for virtually all political surveillance and repression.

lsy 11y ago
Look, I'm as left-leaning as anyone, but check the link. The timeline is chock full of stuff on oppression of leftists.
magicGLASSman 11y ago
This is a false dichotomy, you can be right or left leaning and also be libertarian or authoritarian[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass
- zahmahkibo 11y ago
  1. The political compass is oversimplified and not taken seriously by political scientists 2. This has nothing to do with his argument. In the US, surveillance is largely the product of moral panics, primarily 1. The red scare 2. The race scare 3. The drug scare, which itself is really just a synthesis of 1 and 2; the drug war was essentially invented to attack black and Latino communities as well as anti government "subversives." Maybe that's not true in EVERY state that has used mass surveillance, but it is true in the specific case of the US.
gozur88 11y ago
You might try reading before criticizing.
nateabele 11y ago
And what of the countless civil liberties erosions of progressive hero FDR?

yuhong 11y ago

I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where eg police departments compete for resources basically to make their own department bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far as Ron Paul suggests, but....

coldtea 11y ago
The main cultural problem in the US is the acceptance, but the white majority at least, that police behaving like they do is part of the job and acceptable. I refer to the fact that you can be tased, shot, beat, arrested, held down by 4 policemen, beaten etc 10 times more easily than you can in Western Europe -- and people think that's OK, or what "the police is supposed to do". Even the fact that getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop (something totally OK in 99% of the world) means you can be shot in the US...
- yuhong 11y ago
  That is not good either, but I was thinking of for example the drug war.
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    A lot of police militarization, at least before 9/11, was driven by Drug War mythology. Now there's a badder bogie man.
- adventured 11y ago
  I don't think the white majority finds that behavior acceptable either. Twice as many white people are killed by cops every year as black people for example (and yes, I understand the population ratios, my point is it's still a lot of white people also being killed by cops). I think it's primarily a question of: how to stop it, what reforms to make, where to start?
  - coldtea 11y ago

unclebucknasty 11y ago

Whenever I pause to think about surveillance and other activity of the sort that is aimed at stifling peaceful, ideological movements and groups it gives me a chill. At those points it becomes clear that the predomimant interests that we are serving are not those of "the people", as it is the people who are being targeted. This leads to the obvious question "whose interests are we serving and at what cost?"

themartorana 11y ago
"...peaceful, ideological movements and groups..." Just in case, I suppose. I guess those that have power are also quite sensitive to losing it. But yeah, Burning Man?
Umn44 11y ago
"Whenever I pause to think about surveillance and other activity of the sort that is aimed at stifling peaceful, ideological movements and groups it gives me a chill." They fear the political awakening of the masses of the world. Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY Brezinski at a press conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g Major powers, and imposing control over the awakened masses. https://youtu.be/4usbR_kKCDs?t=397 https://youtu.be/4usbR_kKCDs?t=397 Important: http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137 http://williamblum.org/aer/read/137

nickbauman 11y ago

There's a lot of truth to the information in the posting, but remember this is from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, which has ties to Koch industries. They often like to use examples of bad government for justification to roll back government programs that help the average citizen in favor of corporate rule, not just the bad ones that hurt everyone.

adventured 11y ago
You mean the Koch brothers, the same ones in favor of: ending police militarization, ending mass-incarceration, ending our military adventurism, and are in favor of gay marriage? Sounds pretty great to me.
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  I'm not sure how that addresses OP's comment, others at the opposite end of the political spectrum also share these views.

dbpokorny 11y ago

Sexual surveillance and repression goes back to the dawn of civilization and the origin of language. Everybody wants to know who is having sex with who. This is, I fear, the ultimate question of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy. It is difficult for a human being to resist the temptation to ask who is having sex with who, especially after spending decades building a system that is designed to answer exactly that question (a.k.a "artificial intelligence" or perhaps "artificial gossip" would be a better term). > Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates — it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.[51] In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming' — vocal grooming. To keep your allies happy, you now needed only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language — initially in the form of 'gossip.'[51] Dunbar’s hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.[52] > Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal grooming' — the fact that words are so cheap — would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.[53] A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming — the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds — to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_and_grooming_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_...

mattlutze 11y ago
A: 42 Q: How many people that have been a part of my life are having sex at this moment? A bit disappointing if so, but it would at least satisfy those mice's desire for a salacious topic to tour the galaxy's talk show circuit. To the second part, it doesn't seem like that theory of vocal grooming would need to be the genesis of syntactic speech. Complex verbal communication could have come about for completely other reasons, and, as we standardized around words and sentences and the like, vocal grooming likewise could have grown from simple noises to these similar more-complex mechanisms.