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Mass Surveillance in the United States
- sambull 7y ago"By 2020, about 30,000 unmanned drones are expected to be deployed in the United States for the purpose of surveillance and law enforcement"
- Barrin92 7y agohttps://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night-the-way-the-gorgon-stare-did/ https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night... I read this article a few days ago about WAMI technology, and I wasn't remotely aware of how advanced drone surveillance tech is.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoGiven 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 7y agoThe 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 7y agoThe 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.
- stebann 7y agoDictatorship
- sbhn 7y agoIts for your security for gods sake, stop complaining. If it saves just one life, n all that
- pstuart 7y agoLet's not forget: "Think of the children!"
- devoply 7y agoIs 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!
- OrgNet 7y agoThe police kills more people in the USA then all terrorists combined (about 1000/year).
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoMore people die from choking on food every year in the USA than die from terrorism AND police.
- educationdata 7y agoThis is a silly comparison. Terrorist can kill 30 people in one attack or even break down a whole building with a bomb. When did 30 people choke by one piece of food? And we don't have another 911 may because of mass surveillance. Shall we try removing the surveillance to see whether terrorist attack increases?
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoSo it's worth it to you to spend 100's of billions to stop 30 hypothetical deaths? Ok. You're allowed to have that opinion. I'll vote against it every chance I get.
- OrgNet 7y agoI'm surprised that Apple is mentioned only once in this article...
- jakelazaroff 7y agoWhy?
- OrgNet 7y agoI 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.
- quaquaqua1 7y ago"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 7y ago>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.
- quaquaqua1 7y agoI have a sneaking suspicion you are right. They will decrypt all communications, maybe, but go after the average citizen and not the senator or large donor.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoThey will go after the people they want to put away, and find a reason to get them.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoAnd the easier it gets the lower the bar becomes.
- isoprophlex 7y agoEveryone 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.
- stanski 7y agoIf 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.
- educationdata 7y agoHow many are arrested because of mass surveillance captures the person criticizing Trump / Obama, Or the Republican / Democratic party?
- UI_at_80x24 7y agoThat'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.
- sroussey 7y agoTrump has wanted to change that. Like his friends in Russia, China, and North Korea. I knew of the program you mentioned but not it’s name. Thanks for that! Submitted it HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356021
- ASalazarMX 7y agoThis 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!
- apo 7y ago> 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.
- marak830 7y agoThis is purely from an outside perspective btw, but from what myself and friends have conversed about, the us doesn't seem to have a left. At least not a particularly powerful political left.
- tehjoker 7y agoAs a US leftist, this is our analysis as well. Unfortunately, after Students for a Democratic Society broke up and the anti-war movement dissipated after the Vietnam War the Regan/Thacher revolution crushed what remained and we live in the aftermath of unchecked corporate and imperial power. In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. While it was far from perfect, it ideologically at least forced the American system to at least make comparisons and perform token gestures towards a more just society. That's all gone now. The current crop of leftists is a combination of older people who became politically conscious before the 1980s (i.e. 50+ years old like Bernie Sanders), people burned by 2008, and people who were deeply shocked by Trump's election and started reading about the economic and political underpinnings of it, and some representatives of minorities that consistently feel the boot of oppression. Fortunately, there is some rising consciousness, but who knows where everything will go. We're in for a wild ride...
- AlexandrB 7y agoWe'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 7y ago> In this environment will meaningful[1] political action even be possible? No. Anything else you want to know?
- aaron-santos 7y agoIf facial identification tech becomes commoditized, someone is going to figure out that combination of realtime identification and block lists enable the boycotting of individuals based on political affiliation, their employer (think fossil fuel industry), or any other non-protected class. Guerilla surveillance could serve as a check against individuals deciding to work for a business if it hurts their ability to go about their daily lives. But let's face it, something like this would go down like modern day Muscadins.
- insickness 7y agoThis 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.
- sroussey 7y agoPolice officers often go into private homes. Should the video be made public? What about freedom of information act?
- insickness 7y agoNo. I'm referring to public property. But the police should still be wearing body cameras if they go into a private home and the video should be available to the homeowner if he/she wants to contest something.
- sroussey 7y agoSure, but it’s unlawful to keep such video from anyone who asks.
- imglorp 7y agoI 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.
- carapace 7y agoItem: 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 7y agoMy 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.
- geggam 7y agoThis, congress and the entire us political infrastructure is morally bankrupt. If the leaders of the community are corrupt the community is corrupt.
- carapace 7y agoDude 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.
- 7y ago
- oil25 7y agoOne 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.
- faceblob2 7y agoWe can rise up together and physically dismantle the infrastructure they have erected. We can move to encrypted communications and/or ditch our phones altogether. But that requires a concerted effort by large swaths of people, and as far as I can see, there is no collective mentality toward this end. Most people are hooked to their phones, and therefore are hooked to the surveillance state, and they would hardly dream of getting rid of the device that embodies their choicest addiction.