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I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch m

I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different case. Instead of police having to go in and ask nicely for customer logs and security footage, the owner happens to have meticulous notes that he keeps and sells to randos around town. Creepy... but it's largely the same data that they could have gotten by asking nicely enough anyway. If there is no law against the proprietor bundling up his customer data and selling it, it doesn't seem like there is a strong legal case against police using it. Obviously, this is a MUCH bigger problem on the internet than in real life - just in the huge difference in scale in the amount of data and the ability to parse it.

luckettpat 3y ago
I think it comes down to quantitative differences resulting in qualitative differences. It's not unreasonable for anyone (public or police) to notice when I am out in public, and what I do in public. But at some point an accumulation of these OK interaction becomes not OK, in the same way we already recognize that an individual simply seeing somebody in public is a protected right but stalking is not. When the technology exists to track everything I do in the public sphere, catalog, summarize it, and sell it for profit, we are dealing with a qualitatively different animal that has entirely different implications morally and with respect to our rights as individuals.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Smart = spy. Smart devices are spy devices, part of the governance control infrastructure.
mu53 3y ago
I think this gets down to a fundamental problem with tech that society is ignoring like a pink elephant in the room. Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today. The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder. Firecrackers are sold without license, small amount of gunpowder. Dynamite and other explosives with larger amounts of gunpowder are heavily restricted because of the damage that can be done. Today, there are laws against re-packaging explosives to protect people. I believe the damage that these datasets are doing to society are covert and second-order effects that are hard to track. Most datasets like what the NSA are doing are kept secret precisely because they don't want transparency. If there was transparency, the damage would become obvious that regulations would swiftly come.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  software is naturally authoritarian.
  - MR4D 3y ago
    Is is though? Maybe that's just a reflection of the organizations that have created said software.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      yes, because it allows centralized control and that control is absolute. Whether an organization decides to lock things down or not is a different discussion, but software itself is absolutely authoritarian in nature. And the scary part is that it's absolute. If you have employees who shouldn't be doing a thing you make it company policy, but with software you flat out enforce it.
      - colinng 3y ago
        Software has its absolutes - and those are often good things. Security, ability for backup, redundancy, scalability. We value these things. Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users. And over time we may have started with systems that are centralized because our abilities were young at the time, but distributed systems are very popular and often the goal. One example is version control systems: all the systems prior to Git/Mercurial and those after. With social networks, the network effects are dominant, but I am hopeful that distributed systems will eventually dominate.
        PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        > Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users. That they can be applied at all makes software authoritarian in nature. software enables something we've never truly had, which is automated, effective force at a distance.
jjtheblunt 3y ago
You're talking about police, but the NSA has a charter and in that charter is supposed to (for SIGINT : signals intelligence, i.e., gathering) be doing signals gathering outside the US on at least one end of conversations. Perhaps something changed over the last 20 years. But perhaps the rule still applies (or is supposed to apply) and that's the implied misbehavior.
- jdougan 3y ago
  They aren't allowed to collect the data directly...so they have the other UKUSA/5eyes do it for them with what used to be call ECHELON. There are supposed to be restrictions on that but it is hard to tell from the outside.
- crimmin 3y ago
  You aren't wrong but the misuse is within the bounds of what you are saying. They only need to make a reasonable effort to avoid directly surveilling conversations between two Americans if there's evidence available they are both Americans. They collect until they realize both parties are American and from what I understand those communications after the realization are not purged. Additionally if you are speaking with foreigners they are also authorized to collect. The idea is that they can only use it for intelligence purposes but those data sets including domestic communications which were collected 'by accident' are exposed to the FBI for counter intelligence reasons. The problem is that the FBI has notoriously abused this and run searches against the database for domestic individuals for reasons other than counter intelligence. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-show-how-little-fbi-did-correct-misuse-section-702-databases https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-sho...
- pjc50 3y ago
  Regardless of their formal categorization, they're a subset of "cop", which means they're not held accountable for misbehavior.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    Furthermore, their misbehaviour couldn’t even be tried in a normal courtroom, even if there was mass public and political support for such an action. They’d have to be tried in a secret FISA Court.
austin-cheney 3y ago
The bigger issue that people always miss is that NSA is not law enforcement so they do not need a warrant. The Census Bureau does not need a warrant to gather information on Americans either, but for some weird reason people find the NSA controversial but not the census.
- Minor49er 3y ago
  "Some weird reason" being that the Census Bureau hasn't engaged in cyber attacks such as Stuxnet
  - austin-cheney 3y ago
    I think you are unexpectedly proving my point. The answer is bias.
- bonton89 3y ago
  I've actually known a few people that had a real problem with the census.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I don't know why you think them not being law enforcement changes anything? Constitutional prohibitions generally apply to all governmental bodies, i.e. a school is limited in its ability to constrain your freedom of speech or religion.
  - austin-cheney 3y ago
    The difference there is that the first amendment applies to actions of the individual but the fourth amendment applies to actions of the government. That difference in scope of application thus determines not just whom is protected but also to whom is limited. These first ten amendments exist explicitly to provide individuals lawful rights and when these rights are not violated these laws thus do not apply. For an example see the exclusionary rule. Thus the 4th amendment’s application does not apply all functions of government equally and no law or prior practice says otherwise.
pjc50 3y ago
Well, yes. American discourse has got backed into this corner: - "the government" (broadly defined) is not supposed to be able to spy on people - there is no general privacy law, only narrowly defined bits for e.g. video rental records and libraries - corporations spying on people is completely normalized - reporting the results of your spying to other people is free speech > If there is no law against the proprietor bundling up his customer data and selling it, it doesn't seem like there is a strong legal case against police using it. So long as there's a strong "corporations good, government bad" faction this is going to continue to be a problem. (Weirdly, the "government bad" faction don't seem to be concerned with police accountability at all, except in very narrow cases where one of their own is arrested for blatent crimes)
- salawat 3y ago
  Technically, if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; many acts of regulation that would be impractical to implement directly through the government are farmed out as the responsibility of corporations as a pre-req of doing business), many surveillance capitalism patterns would become fraught by default. The "corporations aren't government entities" defies logic. As without government recognition, they aren't even a thing.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; I'm not sure that even the Chinese legal system does that. It makes a nonsense of "part of".
    - salawat 3y ago
      It does not. If you're a legal fiction, at some level your existential DNA is entwined with your political system's existence. It doesn't make a nonsense of "part-of" at all; unless you don't want to inherit government centric probibitions to deal with in calculating your business model.
bell-cot 3y ago
> a MUCH bigger problem on the internet than in real life THIS, sadly. And a large-enough quantitative difference becomes a serious qualitative difference.
rightbyte 3y ago
Technology automates the spying so there is no upper limit on the amount compared to in person spying. Some Google servers can do stuff that Stasi could not even dream about. The upper limit of Stasi was that all DDR citizens were to be Stasi employees or informants. Google can do it no-hands. E.g. I am all for the Police ticketing speeders, but I don't want some automated spy network tracking me instead. At least the Police should have to work for getting me if I speed ...
smogcutter 3y ago
> The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Just to clarify a possible misunderstanding: an officer testifying that they saw you go into a store is direct evidence that you were in that store. Likewise, a cashier testifying to what they saw you buy is also direct evidence. It’s eyewitness testimony. On the other hand, for example, a receipt found in your wallet is circumstantial evidence. There are many possible explanations, some more plausible than others. Circumstantial doesn’t mean weak—-all forensic evidence is circumstantial.
qingcharles 3y ago
The US Supreme Court has already shown its reluctance to allow wide-spread, but otherwise legal, data gathering. In US v Jones, a GPS tracking case, the minority opinions were basically concerned with the fact that the GPS monitoring continued over a wide period of time, covering a wide area: In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote with respect to privacy: "short-term monitoring of a person's movements on public streets accords with expectations of privacy" but "the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)

luckettpat 3y ago

I think it comes down to quantitative differences resulting in qualitative differences. It's not unreasonable for anyone (public or police) to notice when I am out in public, and what I do in public. But at some point an accumulation of these OK interaction becomes not OK, in the same way we already recognize that an individual simply seeing somebody in public is a protected right but stalking is not. When the technology exists to track everything I do in the public sphere, catalog, summarize it, and sell it for profit, we are dealing with a qualitatively different animal that has entirely different implications morally and with respect to our rights as individuals.

verisimi 3y ago
Smart = spy. Smart devices are spy devices, part of the governance control infrastructure.

mu53 3y ago

I think this gets down to a fundamental problem with tech that society is ignoring like a pink elephant in the room. Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today. The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder. Firecrackers are sold without license, small amount of gunpowder. Dynamite and other explosives with larger amounts of gunpowder are heavily restricted because of the damage that can be done. Today, there are laws against re-packaging explosives to protect people. I believe the damage that these datasets are doing to society are covert and second-order effects that are hard to track. Most datasets like what the NSA are doing are kept secret precisely because they don't want transparency. If there was transparency, the damage would become obvious that regulations would swiftly come.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
software is naturally authoritarian.
- MR4D 3y ago
  Is is though? Maybe that's just a reflection of the organizations that have created said software.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    yes, because it allows centralized control and that control is absolute. Whether an organization decides to lock things down or not is a different discussion, but software itself is absolutely authoritarian in nature. And the scary part is that it's absolute. If you have employees who shouldn't be doing a thing you make it company policy, but with software you flat out enforce it.
    - colinng 3y ago
      Software has its absolutes - and those are often good things. Security, ability for backup, redundancy, scalability. We value these things. Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users. And over time we may have started with systems that are centralized because our abilities were young at the time, but distributed systems are very popular and often the goal. One example is version control systems: all the systems prior to Git/Mercurial and those after. With social networks, the network effects are dominant, but I am hopeful that distributed systems will eventually dominate.
      - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        > Whether those attributes are applied toward authoritarianism or freedom is largely up to the developer and the backers and users. That they can be applied at all makes software authoritarian in nature. software enables something we've never truly had, which is automated, effective force at a distance.

jjtheblunt 3y ago

You're talking about police, but the NSA has a charter and in that charter is supposed to (for SIGINT : signals intelligence, i.e., gathering) be doing signals gathering outside the US on at least one end of conversations. Perhaps something changed over the last 20 years. But perhaps the rule still applies (or is supposed to apply) and that's the implied misbehavior.

jdougan 3y ago
They aren't allowed to collect the data directly...so they have the other UKUSA/5eyes do it for them with what used to be call ECHELON. There are supposed to be restrictions on that but it is hard to tell from the outside.
crimmin 3y ago
You aren't wrong but the misuse is within the bounds of what you are saying. They only need to make a reasonable effort to avoid directly surveilling conversations between two Americans if there's evidence available they are both Americans. They collect until they realize both parties are American and from what I understand those communications after the realization are not purged. Additionally if you are speaking with foreigners they are also authorized to collect. The idea is that they can only use it for intelligence purposes but those data sets including domestic communications which were collected 'by accident' are exposed to the FBI for counter intelligence reasons. The problem is that the FBI has notoriously abused this and run searches against the database for domestic individuals for reasons other than counter intelligence. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-show-how-little-fbi-did-correct-misuse-section-702-databases https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-sho...
pjc50 3y ago
Regardless of their formal categorization, they're a subset of "cop", which means they're not held accountable for misbehavior.
- sgjohnson 3y ago
  Furthermore, their misbehaviour couldn’t even be tried in a normal courtroom, even if there was mass public and political support for such an action. They’d have to be tried in a secret FISA Court.

austin-cheney 3y ago

The bigger issue that people always miss is that NSA is not law enforcement so they do not need a warrant. The Census Bureau does not need a warrant to gather information on Americans either, but for some weird reason people find the NSA controversial but not the census.

Minor49er 3y ago
"Some weird reason" being that the Census Bureau hasn't engaged in cyber attacks such as Stuxnet
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  I think you are unexpectedly proving my point. The answer is bias.
bonton89 3y ago
I've actually known a few people that had a real problem with the census.
qingcharles 3y ago
I don't know why you think them not being law enforcement changes anything? Constitutional prohibitions generally apply to all governmental bodies, i.e. a school is limited in its ability to constrain your freedom of speech or religion.
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  The difference there is that the first amendment applies to actions of the individual but the fourth amendment applies to actions of the government. That difference in scope of application thus determines not just whom is protected but also to whom is limited. These first ten amendments exist explicitly to provide individuals lawful rights and when these rights are not violated these laws thus do not apply. For an example see the exclusionary rule. Thus the 4th amendment’s application does not apply all functions of government equally and no law or prior practice says otherwise.

pjc50 3y ago

Well, yes. American discourse has got backed into this corner: - "the government" (broadly defined) is not supposed to be able to spy on people - there is no general privacy law, only narrowly defined bits for e.g. video rental records and libraries - corporations spying on people is completely normalized - reporting the results of your spying to other people is free speech > If there is no law against the proprietor bundling up his customer data and selling it, it doesn't seem like there is a strong legal case against police using it. So long as there's a strong "corporations good, government bad" faction this is going to continue to be a problem. (Weirdly, the "government bad" faction don't seem to be concerned with police accountability at all, except in very narrow cases where one of their own is arrested for blatent crimes)

salawat 3y ago
Technically, if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; many acts of regulation that would be impractical to implement directly through the government are farmed out as the responsibility of corporations as a pre-req of doing business), many surveillance capitalism patterns would become fraught by default. The "corporations aren't government entities" defies logic. As without government recognition, they aren't even a thing.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; I'm not sure that even the Chinese legal system does that. It makes a nonsense of "part of".
  - salawat 3y ago
    It does not. If you're a legal fiction, at some level your existential DNA is entwined with your political system's existence. It doesn't make a nonsense of "part-of" at all; unless you don't want to inherit government centric probibitions to deal with in calculating your business model.

bell-cot 3y ago

> a MUCH bigger problem on the internet than in real life THIS, sadly. And a large-enough quantitative difference becomes a serious qualitative difference.

rightbyte 3y ago

Technology automates the spying so there is no upper limit on the amount compared to in person spying. Some Google servers can do stuff that Stasi could not even dream about. The upper limit of Stasi was that all DDR citizens were to be Stasi employees or informants. Google can do it no-hands. E.g. I am all for the Police ticketing speeders, but I don't want some automated spy network tracking me instead. At least the Police should have to work for getting me if I speed ...

smogcutter 3y ago

> The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Just to clarify a possible misunderstanding: an officer testifying that they saw you go into a store is direct evidence that you were in that store. Likewise, a cashier testifying to what they saw you buy is also direct evidence. It’s eyewitness testimony. On the other hand, for example, a receipt found in your wallet is circumstantial evidence. There are many possible explanations, some more plausible than others. Circumstantial doesn’t mean weak—-all forensic evidence is circumstantial.

qingcharles 3y ago

The US Supreme Court has already shown its reluctance to allow wide-spread, but otherwise legal, data gathering. In US v Jones, a GPS tracking case, the minority opinions were basically concerned with the fact that the GPS monitoring continued over a wide period of time, covering a wide area: In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote with respect to privacy: "short-term monitoring of a person's movements on public streets accords with expectations of privacy" but "the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012)