17 ms·

How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

208 points by broodbucket 13y ago

JanezStupar 13y ago
Does anyone remember the old days when Stallman was an over the top tin foil hat crackpot?
- Ygg2 13y ago
  He wasn't a crackpot. We were just more gullible :P
- chatman 13y ago
  That is extremely disrespectful towards a legend as RMS is.
  - JanezStupar 13y ago
    You should try irony sometimes. Its pretty fun. I would never make fun of RMS, however his detractors I find very much a fair game. As they say: "Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not After You "
  - broodbucket 13y ago
    I didn't realise how important free software was until I started using an ARM laptop for day-to-day work. Absolutely tiny userbase, barely any binary packages, but I could clone and make my way to everything I needed. Without RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near where it is now.
    - yeukhon 13y ago
      How does GNU and free software justifies his claim that we can be in control of our software? I think RMS doesn't like Linux but being an open source software it still can be injected with potential backdoors. What makes him think his software won't? We still review code but your average Joe cannot code and he won't code. So he's going to use a software someone packaged. How can you tell if no one will ever inject a backdoor? edit This is a major point he always makes about security. I am not buying his total obsession with GNU because that can't be prevented.
      - yeukhon 13y ago
        I don't appreciate downvoting without debating. This is not how we advance. Thank you for the downvote.
      - oftenwrong 13y ago
        Obviously open source is not a guaranteed defence against backdoors, but it gives us the opportunity to look for them. Closed source software does not even allow us that, so it is inherently untrustworthy.
    - rimantas 13y ago
      > Without RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near > where it is now. How do you know that?
      - broodbucket 13y ago
        I'm not claiming this to be a priori knowledge; that's how causality works, I don't know that Barack Obama was elected because I chose not to eat a cheeseburger in 1999. RMS laid the foundations for the free software movement, growing the open culture and creating a good licence. I think it's hard to debate that what RMS has done hasn't improved the free software landscape today.
      - reginaldjcooper 13y ago
        It's obviously impossible to know that, so instead of nitpicking, let's graciously interpret it as acknowledging that he (et al) did contribute a great deal to the foundations of free software we have today.
  - eksith 13y ago
    This is sarcasm, I'm guessing. The suggestion being RMS wasn't a crackpot at all. We were (well, most of us were) just naïve and didn't think much of his advice back then.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    No its not. Its saying "we" treated him like a nut job foil hat man, but were wrong. Its basically an apology.
chatman 13y ago
Brilliant piece from Stallman! Written with a paranoid, skeptic mindset with firm dose of realism and full of practical advice.
cromwellian 13y ago
In the 80s, I got my first access to the internet after reading Steven Levy's book "Hackers". In the chapter on RMS, he mentioned that RMS didn't use passwords and didn't believe in security. I found the dialup number to the MIT media lab, and tried logging in as 'RMS' and viola, no password, and I had my first shell account on an internet-connected Unix machine, although I was only a teenager, and didn't attend MIT. RMS's act of charity benefited me greatly, I was relatively poor growing up in inner city Baltimore, and his account was a life line to a new world of the internet and away from the crackhouse infested streets. I find it interesting that he has changed his standpoint from one of radical transparency to techno-privacy. Remember, RMS is the guy who hacked LCS's computer lab password file, decrypted all the passwords, and emailed everyone suggesting they change their password to empty string. Now, I get that what he really wanted was to allow anyone to have access to LCS resources, and that would have been better served by just allowing anyone to create an account. But some early GNU accounts nevertheless did not have passwords, and I could read their email, shell histories, etc. I think there is an interesting question is to the extremes of privacy and transparency in a democracy. If for example, it was not possible to discriminate against people, and if the government could not abuse any information gained on someone, then it might be the case that society would better off if there was very little privacy, because private distributed abuse amongst non-state actors would then be the biggest danger. If on the other hand, the state is far more abusive, then the fraud and violence perpetrated by small actors uncaught by surveillance is dwarfed by the damage done by the state having this information. The question is, is it black and white, or is there some level of justifiable dragnet surveillance? Can democracy also tolerate Cryptoanarchy?
- eksith 13y ago
  One could argue he hasn't changed at all. On the contrary, it's the obligation of the actor to act transparently toward those acted upon. In your case, you were the actor dropping in on RMS so the obligation was on you to be transparent about it. I'm guessing you weren't, since it wasn't very polite to peek at their email ;) And therein lies the dilemma. Those with power will observe yet must be transparent about said observation. However they aren't transparent for fear of tipping their hand to what is essentially the proverbial "boogey man" that is terror.
alan_cx 13y ago
Oh, way more that I wanted to type and a bit ranty. You're warned!!!! Very sadly, he is completely wrong. This is the beginning: "How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use." Not true. Not even slightly true. Its so tragic. In principle, I could not agree with him more, but that does not appear to be a reality the vast majority can be bothered with. Why? The vast majority simply do not care. Worse still a huge chunk of society, on a daily basis, give up more personal information than any government can possibly hope to ask for. We in the UK groan when the census comes up, every 10 years. But the average facebook profile contains more personal information than any census has ever asked for. And many many people up date FB daily. Imagine a government asked us to document our lives daily? I could go on, but that's the general thrust. So, how much surveillance can society withstand? Loads more. Is it incompatible with human rights? Well, humans don't seem over bothered, in fact they offer up more information that the government could ever ask for. Hence the NSA/GCHQ slurping. Because the government will only ever use the data in a small targeted way, it will never ever negatively effect the vast majority of people. So they will never be inconvenienced by it. Only "those" people will be effected, and "they" are guilty evil doers. So, there will never be an uprising or revolt, because most people are unaffected. See, even people most out raged by this agree that its good if they can round up terrorists, pedophiles or who ever the current bogyman is. Well, while we accept that, we accept the method, and there for that "evil" must exist. When it exists, it can be easily and silently abused. The expectations are the gaps through which evil seeps. This is why we are or try to be absolute about torture, chemical or biological weapons, racism, and so on. We know if we allow it in any way, mission creep will happen. Of course, the real hypocrisy of people is that when something bad happens, we blame government for not having enough control over circumstances. We immediately say, "why didn't they do this that or the other. They failed." What if all this slurping of data could have prevented 9/11? But in the end, from what I have seen, society can easily with stand a hell of a lot more surveillance. We allow it, government moderates it's use such that most never see the down side, government loves control, and we expect government to have that control. Truth is, really, people want more surveillance so that they can live nice risk free lives. Frankly, I'm not sure people really want real freedom at all. They want a freedom, or their freedom, one that suits their daily lives. But are only too happy to deny freedom to others as long as their freedoms are preserved. If this slurping is really that evil and unacceptable, incompatibly with human rights, why haven't millions of people descended on Washington and London, rioting in the streets, bringing down our respective governments? Or are all these out raged people trusting democracy and the ballot box will sort it out? Or, is it that really they don't care?
lucb1e 13y ago
> You have exceeded the allowed page load frequency. Like, I just loaded the page. Is it down for other people, or does this trigger just for me? Edit: Oh nevermind, this website thinks x-forwarded-for is my real IP-address. I set it to '"\ which occasionally triggers database errors on php or asp.net websites, highly amusing :P Edit2: Also interesting is when hackernews crashes just after I re-enabled my header modifier and try to save the previous edit.
ohwp 13y ago
"Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is prohibited." This stood out for me in the article. And I think this applies to all forms of data.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  It does, and it worries me that people seem to not understand how obvious and true this is. There is only one real limit of what we can do - laws of physics. Anything not explicitly prohibited by them can be done. There is also one practical limit - economics, i.e. whether or not we have resources to do something. And that's it. Laws, customs, etc. are arbitrary limits we voluntarily impose on ourselves, and they can and will be broken whenever it's convenient. So basically here's a rule of thumb: whatever can be done will be done. It also suggests the possible course of action. We can't fight laws of physics, so if we want something not to happen, we need to influence the softer, economic side. Make things we don't like prohibitively expensive. That's why I think any solution to surveillance problem will need to be technical in a big part.
pjc50 13y ago
We're used to thinking of places either as "free country", like the idealised America that appears in films, or "police state" where vast numbers of people are rounded up into gulags and dissent is impossible. The current situation is neither of those. It's a large expensive system of state oppression .. that acts on remarkably few people(+). There is a gulag archipelago, Guantanamo, but it contains only 46 prisoners now. Outside it, hundreds of millions of people live pretty free lives in the western world. So there's little public appetite for doing anything about it. If you're not reading about it in the news you can ignore it entirely. Perhaps the main output of the surveillance program is the targeting information for drone strikes. This results in thousands dead .. but they are a long way away, in a part of the world that has its own problems with violence. Your actual chances of being victimised by the surveillance state for engaging in nonviolent leftwing politics are very small. But perhaps its worth noting that radical leftwing groups seem more likely to be investigated by law enforcement than radical rightwing groups that advocate all kinds of crazy things, including actual violence against the government (second amendment supporters). (+) (note that I'm talking about just surveillance here, as distinct from the War on Drugs, the horrifyingly high American prison population, racism in the police, or heavy-handed public order policing) (note 2: I'm from the UK, which has its own problems with official support for surveillance, occasional brutal policing, and particularly the state's role in violence in Northern Ireland has not been properly dealt with nor atoned for).
- bediger4000 13y ago
  Probably quite a few more "black sites" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#Suspected_black_sites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#Suspected_black_site...) should be counted as part of the US Gulag. The Wikipedia article is actually pretty charitable to the US in how it counts black sites. There's rumors about a lot more.
- angersock 13y ago
  You've overlooked the hundreds of thousands incarcerated in some way due to, for example, the war on drugs--itself enabled by this electronic surveillance. The problem is quite a bit worse, erring towards police state, when you take into account that.
miguelrochefort 13y ago
Democracy is silly and won't withstand transparency. That said, society can withstand 100% surveillance, total transparency. But that surveillance has to be done by the people and be publicly shared.
- Sagat 13y ago
  You would want to be filmed at all times, and have that footage available to everyone? That's insane and I suggest reading Dave Egger's "The Circle".
  - bloat 13y ago
    That seems like a natural progression, technologically speaking. Millions of microscopic camera drones everywhere. The only thing to hope for in that case is that the footage is available to everyone, and that the powerful are filmed as much as anyone else.
    - Sagat 13y ago
      That's what scared me the most about that book: it's so plausible it's almost inevitable. Maybe in the future, true power will be the ability to escape monitoring?
    - miguelrochefort 13y ago
      I'm glad to see that some people still use their common sense. You are exactly right. This is what we should strive for, this is what the future will be like. Too many people think that privacy is inherently good, but they fail to see how unsustainable and selfish it is. Knowledge is good, and trying to keep it for yourself slows down innovation. The future will be transparent, and people of the future will laugh at how ridiculous we were for worshipping privacy. Fighting for privacy is stupid. What we should really fight for is transparency. And transparency can only be achieved by leaking all the data, both from citizens and people on the top. WikiLeaks is a good start, but thinking that transparency only apply to the government and corporations is silly. The same thing should be done to all of us. I never could understoud why people that support WikiLeaks are those who support privacy the most. What is even more surprising is that these people, that are inherently selfish, think they're some kinds of socialists and fool everybody else in thinking they're some kind of heros. Humans are weird.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nvk 13y ago
Not this much.
coldcode 13y ago
About as we currently know about. But it depends on whether the surveillance is acted on. Having everything I do and say in a database is not the same as my vanishing one night into a police van never to be seen again.
camus2 13y ago
Define Democracy first , this is not a state , this is an ideal to acheive, no country is fully democratic , but some are more than others. That's why one cannot call a country a democracy, but compared to North Korea , most countries are "democratic". Compared to Switzerland most are not.
- dreamdu5t 13y ago
  While we're at it, let's define privacy. It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other people (such as Facebook).
  - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
    >It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other people (such as Facebook). They are inexorably linked together, but we must speak precisely. If the gov't convinced Facebook to sell its archive of data to the NSA for $1, would it be okay? Because the law as it exists says, yes, FB is free to sell its corporate intellectual property to anyone including the NSA. Ditto Mastercard. Ditto AT&T. etc. etc. We have no guarantee of privacy simply because nowhere is it written that we any legal right to privacy. Maybe the problem is not solvable. But trying to solve this as simply a gov't that needs a better kind of leash is surely a doomed effort.
    - dreamdu5t 13y ago
      Yes it would be okay because I could choose a company that didn't sell the information to the NSA, but that's not possible because government surveillance is forced on everyone. The government is preventing market solutions to privacy.
rarw 13y ago
Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance; (2) dangers of an internet (or other communications networks) which law enforcement or government cannot access at all; (3) the problems with arguing that government (or anyone for that matter) should be banned from collecting and reading data sent across the web. I understand the concern. As someone who has advocated for stronger electronic privacy regulation, no one likes someone having the ability to look through their stuff. However, the answer is more likely a balance than a denunciation of all surveillance in any form. Surveillance with restriction is fine and probably a good thing. It helps prevent crime and can help catch criminals once crimes happen. Just as it's easy to argue that a government with information will misuse it, bad people with a closed communication network will use it to commit crime. Sure not everyone is going to plan a terrorist strike, or organize a gang online but some will. Is it worth enabling that kind of behavior? Also what should and should not be private also has to do with where/when the information is collected. If the government were hacking into all of our computers and keeping back ups of our hard drives that's very different from collecting things that are sent on the internet. Legally there is currently a big debate about how to treat something that is taken from a stored medium - like a hard drive - vs one that is captured in transmission - like an email being sent. As it currently stands the government would have a hard time justifying accessing your computer remotely without a warrant but an easy time reading emails once they left your computer. Why? Because the sent email is akin to yelling something in a public place. Once it leaves your computer, it's not private while its being transmitted. If this sounds like a stupid distinction, that's because it is.
- tjr 13y ago
  Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance; From the article: For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary.
  - 13y ago
inversesquare 13y ago
Surveillance was never the problem. Asymmetric information is.
lttlrck 13y ago
"If whistleblowers don't dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions." Isn't there something very wrong with this line of thinking? Are whistleblowers really the last bastions of democracy? Voters, protestors and guns be damned, when all is lost we can depend on the whistleblowers? Are you kidding me?
- mlinksva 13y ago
  That was precisely my reaction when reading the article as published in Wired recently. It has some good ideas for increasing privacy. Too bad they are made to turn on an extremely weak claim.
- dwaltrip 13y ago
  Guns? Are you kidding me? You think it is more reasonanble forming militias to hold the government in line, if voting and protesting are ineffective?
- nooneelse 13y ago
  If information from the inside is never whistle-blown, how will the people know to be upset about something, and who/what to vote, protest, bear arms for/against?
robotys 13y ago
I believe it is hard to change government. You can ask them anything (reduce surveilance) just expect them to do nothing. Democracy is not even well understood by half of us, citizen of world. what WE can do is follow the 'do nice to others' to the extreme. Outward thinking instead of inward thinking. Then collectively, the world will be better.

208 points by broodbucket 13y ago

JanezStupar 13y ago

Does anyone remember the old days when Stallman was an over the top tin foil hat crackpot?

Ygg2 13y ago
He wasn't a crackpot. We were just more gullible :P
chatman 13y ago
That is extremely disrespectful towards a legend as RMS is.
- JanezStupar 13y ago
  You should try irony sometimes. Its pretty fun. I would never make fun of RMS, however his detractors I find very much a fair game. As they say: "Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not After You "
- broodbucket 13y ago
  I didn't realise how important free software was until I started using an ARM laptop for day-to-day work. Absolutely tiny userbase, barely any binary packages, but I could clone and make my way to everything I needed. Without RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near where it is now.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    How does GNU and free software justifies his claim that we can be in control of our software? I think RMS doesn't like Linux but being an open source software it still can be injected with potential backdoors. What makes him think his software won't? We still review code but your average Joe cannot code and he won't code. So he's going to use a software someone packaged. How can you tell if no one will ever inject a backdoor? edit This is a major point he always makes about security. I am not buying his total obsession with GNU because that can't be prevented.
    - yeukhon 13y ago
      I don't appreciate downvoting without debating. This is not how we advance. Thank you for the downvote.
    - oftenwrong 13y ago
      Obviously open source is not a guaranteed defence against backdoors, but it gives us the opportunity to look for them. Closed source software does not even allow us that, so it is inherently untrustworthy.
  - rimantas 13y ago
    > Without RMS and GNU, free software would be nowhere near > where it is now. How do you know that?
    - broodbucket 13y ago
      I'm not claiming this to be a priori knowledge; that's how causality works, I don't know that Barack Obama was elected because I chose not to eat a cheeseburger in 1999. RMS laid the foundations for the free software movement, growing the open culture and creating a good licence. I think it's hard to debate that what RMS has done hasn't improved the free software landscape today.
    - reginaldjcooper 13y ago
      It's obviously impossible to know that, so instead of nitpicking, let's graciously interpret it as acknowledging that he (et al) did contribute a great deal to the foundations of free software we have today.
- eksith 13y ago
  This is sarcasm, I'm guessing. The suggestion being RMS wasn't a crackpot at all. We were (well, most of us were) just naïve and didn't think much of his advice back then.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  No its not. Its saying "we" treated him like a nut job foil hat man, but were wrong. Its basically an apology.

chatman 13y ago

Brilliant piece from Stallman! Written with a paranoid, skeptic mindset with firm dose of realism and full of practical advice.

cromwellian 13y ago

In the 80s, I got my first access to the internet after reading Steven Levy's book "Hackers". In the chapter on RMS, he mentioned that RMS didn't use passwords and didn't believe in security. I found the dialup number to the MIT media lab, and tried logging in as 'RMS' and viola, no password, and I had my first shell account on an internet-connected Unix machine, although I was only a teenager, and didn't attend MIT. RMS's act of charity benefited me greatly, I was relatively poor growing up in inner city Baltimore, and his account was a life line to a new world of the internet and away from the crackhouse infested streets. I find it interesting that he has changed his standpoint from one of radical transparency to techno-privacy. Remember, RMS is the guy who hacked LCS's computer lab password file, decrypted all the passwords, and emailed everyone suggesting they change their password to empty string. Now, I get that what he really wanted was to allow anyone to have access to LCS resources, and that would have been better served by just allowing anyone to create an account. But some early GNU accounts nevertheless did not have passwords, and I could read their email, shell histories, etc. I think there is an interesting question is to the extremes of privacy and transparency in a democracy. If for example, it was not possible to discriminate against people, and if the government could not abuse any information gained on someone, then it might be the case that society would better off if there was very little privacy, because private distributed abuse amongst non-state actors would then be the biggest danger. If on the other hand, the state is far more abusive, then the fraud and violence perpetrated by small actors uncaught by surveillance is dwarfed by the damage done by the state having this information. The question is, is it black and white, or is there some level of justifiable dragnet surveillance? Can democracy also tolerate Cryptoanarchy?

eksith 13y ago
One could argue he hasn't changed at all. On the contrary, it's the obligation of the actor to act transparently toward those acted upon. In your case, you were the actor dropping in on RMS so the obligation was on you to be transparent about it. I'm guessing you weren't, since it wasn't very polite to peek at their email ;) And therein lies the dilemma. Those with power will observe yet must be transparent about said observation. However they aren't transparent for fear of tipping their hand to what is essentially the proverbial "boogey man" that is terror.

alan_cx 13y ago

Oh, way more that I wanted to type and a bit ranty. You're warned!!!! Very sadly, he is completely wrong. This is the beginning: "How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use." Not true. Not even slightly true. Its so tragic. In principle, I could not agree with him more, but that does not appear to be a reality the vast majority can be bothered with. Why? The vast majority simply do not care. Worse still a huge chunk of society, on a daily basis, give up more personal information than any government can possibly hope to ask for. We in the UK groan when the census comes up, every 10 years. But the average facebook profile contains more personal information than any census has ever asked for. And many many people up date FB daily. Imagine a government asked us to document our lives daily? I could go on, but that's the general thrust. So, how much surveillance can society withstand? Loads more. Is it incompatible with human rights? Well, humans don't seem over bothered, in fact they offer up more information that the government could ever ask for. Hence the NSA/GCHQ slurping. Because the government will only ever use the data in a small targeted way, it will never ever negatively effect the vast majority of people. So they will never be inconvenienced by it. Only "those" people will be effected, and "they" are guilty evil doers. So, there will never be an uprising or revolt, because most people are unaffected. See, even people most out raged by this agree that its good if they can round up terrorists, pedophiles or who ever the current bogyman is. Well, while we accept that, we accept the method, and there for that "evil" must exist. When it exists, it can be easily and silently abused. The expectations are the gaps through which evil seeps. This is why we are or try to be absolute about torture, chemical or biological weapons, racism, and so on. We know if we allow it in any way, mission creep will happen. Of course, the real hypocrisy of people is that when something bad happens, we blame government for not having enough control over circumstances. We immediately say, "why didn't they do this that or the other. They failed." What if all this slurping of data could have prevented 9/11? But in the end, from what I have seen, society can easily with stand a hell of a lot more surveillance. We allow it, government moderates it's use such that most never see the down side, government loves control, and we expect government to have that control. Truth is, really, people want more surveillance so that they can live nice risk free lives. Frankly, I'm not sure people really want real freedom at all. They want a freedom, or their freedom, one that suits their daily lives. But are only too happy to deny freedom to others as long as their freedoms are preserved. If this slurping is really that evil and unacceptable, incompatibly with human rights, why haven't millions of people descended on Washington and London, rioting in the streets, bringing down our respective governments? Or are all these out raged people trusting democracy and the ballot box will sort it out? Or, is it that really they don't care?

lucb1e 13y ago

> You have exceeded the allowed page load frequency. Like, I just loaded the page. Is it down for other people, or does this trigger just for me? Edit: Oh nevermind, this website thinks x-forwarded-for is my real IP-address. I set it to '"\ which occasionally triggers database errors on php or asp.net websites, highly amusing :P Edit2: Also interesting is when hackernews crashes just after I re-enabled my header modifier and try to save the previous edit.

ohwp 13y ago

"Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this is prohibited." This stood out for me in the article. And I think this applies to all forms of data.

TeMPOraL 13y ago
It does, and it worries me that people seem to not understand how obvious and true this is. There is only one real limit of what we can do - laws of physics. Anything not explicitly prohibited by them can be done. There is also one practical limit - economics, i.e. whether or not we have resources to do something. And that's it. Laws, customs, etc. are arbitrary limits we voluntarily impose on ourselves, and they can and will be broken whenever it's convenient. So basically here's a rule of thumb: whatever can be done will be done. It also suggests the possible course of action. We can't fight laws of physics, so if we want something not to happen, we need to influence the softer, economic side. Make things we don't like prohibitively expensive. That's why I think any solution to surveillance problem will need to be technical in a big part.

pjc50 13y ago

We're used to thinking of places either as "free country", like the idealised America that appears in films, or "police state" where vast numbers of people are rounded up into gulags and dissent is impossible. The current situation is neither of those. It's a large expensive system of state oppression .. that acts on remarkably few people(+). There is a gulag archipelago, Guantanamo, but it contains only 46 prisoners now. Outside it, hundreds of millions of people live pretty free lives in the western world. So there's little public appetite for doing anything about it. If you're not reading about it in the news you can ignore it entirely. Perhaps the main output of the surveillance program is the targeting information for drone strikes. This results in thousands dead .. but they are a long way away, in a part of the world that has its own problems with violence. Your actual chances of being victimised by the surveillance state for engaging in nonviolent leftwing politics are very small. But perhaps its worth noting that radical leftwing groups seem more likely to be investigated by law enforcement than radical rightwing groups that advocate all kinds of crazy things, including actual violence against the government (second amendment supporters). (+) (note that I'm talking about just surveillance here, as distinct from the War on Drugs, the horrifyingly high American prison population, racism in the police, or heavy-handed public order policing) (note 2: I'm from the UK, which has its own problems with official support for surveillance, occasional brutal policing, and particularly the state's role in violence in Northern Ireland has not been properly dealt with nor atoned for).

bediger4000 13y ago
Probably quite a few more "black sites" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#Suspected_black_sites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site#Suspected_black_site...) should be counted as part of the US Gulag. The Wikipedia article is actually pretty charitable to the US in how it counts black sites. There's rumors about a lot more.
angersock 13y ago
You've overlooked the hundreds of thousands incarcerated in some way due to, for example, the war on drugs--itself enabled by this electronic surveillance. The problem is quite a bit worse, erring towards police state, when you take into account that.

miguelrochefort 13y ago

Democracy is silly and won't withstand transparency. That said, society can withstand 100% surveillance, total transparency. But that surveillance has to be done by the people and be publicly shared.

Sagat 13y ago
You would want to be filmed at all times, and have that footage available to everyone? That's insane and I suggest reading Dave Egger's "The Circle".
- bloat 13y ago
  That seems like a natural progression, technologically speaking. Millions of microscopic camera drones everywhere. The only thing to hope for in that case is that the footage is available to everyone, and that the powerful are filmed as much as anyone else.
  - Sagat 13y ago
    That's what scared me the most about that book: it's so plausible it's almost inevitable. Maybe in the future, true power will be the ability to escape monitoring?
  - miguelrochefort 13y ago
    I'm glad to see that some people still use their common sense. You are exactly right. This is what we should strive for, this is what the future will be like. Too many people think that privacy is inherently good, but they fail to see how unsustainable and selfish it is. Knowledge is good, and trying to keep it for yourself slows down innovation. The future will be transparent, and people of the future will laugh at how ridiculous we were for worshipping privacy. Fighting for privacy is stupid. What we should really fight for is transparency. And transparency can only be achieved by leaking all the data, both from citizens and people on the top. WikiLeaks is a good start, but thinking that transparency only apply to the government and corporations is silly. The same thing should be done to all of us. I never could understoud why people that support WikiLeaks are those who support privacy the most. What is even more surprising is that these people, that are inherently selfish, think they're some kinds of socialists and fool everybody else in thinking they're some kind of heros. Humans are weird.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

nvk 13y ago

Not this much.

coldcode 13y ago

About as we currently know about. But it depends on whether the surveillance is acted on. Having everything I do and say in a database is not the same as my vanishing one night into a police van never to be seen again.

camus2 13y ago

Define Democracy first , this is not a state , this is an ideal to acheive, no country is fully democratic , but some are more than others. That's why one cannot call a country a democracy, but compared to North Korea , most countries are "democratic". Compared to Switzerland most are not.

dreamdu5t 13y ago
While we're at it, let's define privacy. It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other people (such as Facebook).
- comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
  >It seems to me that these kinds of discussions tend to conflate forced government surveillence with voluntarily giving your information to other people (such as Facebook). They are inexorably linked together, but we must speak precisely. If the gov't convinced Facebook to sell its archive of data to the NSA for $1, would it be okay? Because the law as it exists says, yes, FB is free to sell its corporate intellectual property to anyone including the NSA. Ditto Mastercard. Ditto AT&T. etc. etc. We have no guarantee of privacy simply because nowhere is it written that we any legal right to privacy. Maybe the problem is not solvable. But trying to solve this as simply a gov't that needs a better kind of leash is surely a doomed effort.
  - dreamdu5t 13y ago
    Yes it would be okay because I could choose a company that didn't sell the information to the NSA, but that's not possible because government surveillance is forced on everyone. The government is preventing market solutions to privacy.

rarw 13y ago

Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance; (2) dangers of an internet (or other communications networks) which law enforcement or government cannot access at all; (3) the problems with arguing that government (or anyone for that matter) should be banned from collecting and reading data sent across the web. I understand the concern. As someone who has advocated for stronger electronic privacy regulation, no one likes someone having the ability to look through their stuff. However, the answer is more likely a balance than a denunciation of all surveillance in any form. Surveillance with restriction is fine and probably a good thing. It helps prevent crime and can help catch criminals once crimes happen. Just as it's easy to argue that a government with information will misuse it, bad people with a closed communication network will use it to commit crime. Sure not everyone is going to plan a terrorist strike, or organize a gang online but some will. Is it worth enabling that kind of behavior? Also what should and should not be private also has to do with where/when the information is collected. If the government were hacking into all of our computers and keeping back ups of our hard drives that's very different from collecting things that are sent on the internet. Legally there is currently a big debate about how to treat something that is taken from a stored medium - like a hard drive - vs one that is captured in transmission - like an email being sent. As it currently stands the government would have a hard time justifying accessing your computer remotely without a warrant but an easy time reading emails once they left your computer. Why? Because the sent email is akin to yelling something in a public place. Once it leaves your computer, it's not private while its being transmitted. If this sounds like a stupid distinction, that's because it is.

tjr 13y ago
Articles like this pop up all the time. The problem is that they never address (1) the legitimate need for surveillance; From the article: For the state to find criminals, it needs to be able to investigate specific crimes, or specific suspected planned crimes, under a court order. With the Internet, the power to tap phone conversations would naturally extend to the power to tap Internet connections. This power is easy to abuse for political reasons, but it is also necessary.
- 13y ago

inversesquare 13y ago

Surveillance was never the problem. Asymmetric information is.

lttlrck 13y ago

"If whistleblowers don't dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions." Isn't there something very wrong with this line of thinking? Are whistleblowers really the last bastions of democracy? Voters, protestors and guns be damned, when all is lost we can depend on the whistleblowers? Are you kidding me?

mlinksva 13y ago
That was precisely my reaction when reading the article as published in Wired recently. It has some good ideas for increasing privacy. Too bad they are made to turn on an extremely weak claim.
dwaltrip 13y ago
Guns? Are you kidding me? You think it is more reasonanble forming militias to hold the government in line, if voting and protesting are ineffective?
nooneelse 13y ago
If information from the inside is never whistle-blown, how will the people know to be upset about something, and who/what to vote, protest, bear arms for/against?

robotys 13y ago

I believe it is hard to change government. You can ask them anything (reduce surveilance) just expect them to do nothing. Democracy is not even well understood by half of us, citizen of world. what WE can do is follow the 'do nice to others' to the extreme. Outward thinking instead of inward thinking. Then collectively, the world will be better.