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It's wrong to portray this as a trade-off between more risk or less risk. In reality it's a trade-off between two kinds of risk. Without the NSA snooping there

by Joeri 13y ago

It's wrong to portray this as a trade-off between more risk or less risk. In reality it's a trade-off between two kinds of risk. Without the NSA snooping there is a higher risk of terrorist attacks, but with the NSA snooping there is more risk of attacks on democracy. Imagine j. edgar hoover or richard nixon able to use all that NSA data for illegitimate purposes. How easy would it have been to supress dissenting political opinion? The NSA database is a time bomb of political abuse just waiting to explode. Its very existence is a threat to democracy.

pyrocat 13y ago
Yeah but "higher risk of terrorist attacks" is like, what, an increase from 0.000001% to 0.0000011%?
- 001sky 13y ago
  That's the thing with Fear. It makes you stupid.
pnathan 13y ago
That's a fair point. There are an array of risks that less (or more) intelligence shifts the balance around on. N.b., I don't really like to frame it as "attacks on democracy". That is (1) hyperbolic and (2) not obviously true. Words must be chosen very carefully in this debate (and it is a debate!) in order to not mislead or scare people away. I would argue that TLA snooping leads to the "Chilling effects" idea, where debate and discussion are chilled from freedom due to awareness of snooping. Obviously there are follow-on and side effects as well, as well as long-term risk of political persecution. But let's focus on the visible problem today without speculating on the worse potential problems. Further point with respect to word choice and bringing the mainstream awareness up: tinfoil hatters do not speak for me, and they don't speak for the mainstream. They poison discourse by being radical and not bothering to look at conventional reality. Same for conspiracy theorists. Reasonable and respectable people can move the needle, infowars/alex jones/coast to coast types really are no ally in the effort to make this a real issue.
- angusangus 13y ago
  I'm interested in this distinction. It seems to me fairly self-evident that actions which chill debate or discussion limit political expression and an informed electorate, thereby fundamentally impinging on democracy. Why then distinguish between 'chilling effects' and an attack on democracy?
  - n09n 13y ago
    It may feel self-evident to you but I don't think the evidence supports that position. The US is not exactly known for its engaged electorate or educated voters. I would need to see a lot of evidence in order to convince me that things would get any worse in a surveillance state. The UK is probably farther down that road than the US at the moment and I haven't heard that they have exhibited any of the problems you are worried about.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    So a dictionary defines chilling effects as the inhibition or discouragement of the exercise of your rights. Let me frame the thought by giving an example: if I am talking with someone, I might not say a few things because, hey, the TLA might care enough to pull the record and listen in. Or we take care to communicate with GPG or something. It inhibits what we do. We can still vote; our vote actually has meaning; our votes actually change the elected officials, etc. We still can run a socialist candidate (c.f. Kshama Sawant 2013 in Seattle) and they aren't shut down via police action or other hardcore discrimination. This is in contrast against what it could do: it could be always used to harass and discriminate against those dissenting from the Two Parties and the State. Anyone who said anything would be looked at and actions taken to shut them up and limit the expression and formation of dissent. While the database of communication could be used against people to significantly disrupt everyone who speaks out, it is not, and in my opinion, it will take a few emergencies like 9/11 to actually alter the mindset of the US to make that acceptable. Of course, people are harassed; some people are okay with that. It doesn't mean there's general acceptance of that, and it doesn't mean everyone is harassed. Thus I draw the distinction: people self-censoring vs. the heavy hand of an apparatchik forcing change. The first is very immediate and to-hand; it's reality today. The other is possible, possibly even probable given certain courses of events, but fear-mongering is not the best way to go; let's deal with the clear and present threat at hand- chilling of free speech, chilling of dissent, chilling of the business interests of United States citizens, (frankly, these all apply outside the US as well, and hopefully the debate within the US around privacy and data capture also places the operations of TLAs on non-US citizens & non-US soil within the public purview of the United States citizenry via their elected representatives). Fear does work as a campaign tactic, but the reality is, fear is not something people want to work for. People are willing to work for hope (didn't we all see that in 2008?), and I really would prefer the pro-privacy, pro-4th amendment activists focus on the positives and hope of what we can do rather than performing the traditional stick of the Republicans & Democrats (vote the other way and the free work and the US will END!!!11!oneoneone). It is in hope of being not being tracked against my will, not being monitored in every phone conversation, not being advertised at without my consent that I advocate for these changes to come to pass. It is in hope that I can say thoughts and perform actions online and offline and feel the liberty of not having peeping government Toms and raucous advertisers know anything about me. So there's my distinction and my spiel. :-)
XorNot 13y ago
I don't know. What do you think they would've done to suppress dissenting political opinion? Which is where this whole conversation goes to hell - the trailed off sentences where people assume they actually have a clue what dangers they're talking about. Because if your problem is "oh, someone might find out about someone's mistress and tell the media..." well - the problem begins and ends with the fact that their voters turn out not to be ok with that. But they're still voters who's votes matter.
- jerf 13y ago
  "What do you think they would've done to suppress dissenting political opinion?" Easy. You use government power on them. You "coincidentally" hit them with an IRS audit, one that's incredibly hostile and refuses to resolve itself. You hit their business with every inspection possible, held to the most stringent of standards. Even if, and perhaps especially if, they don't own it, and you find a way to sufficiently hint to the business why exactly they're having these troubles. You have a cop follow them and nail them with every petty infraction in the book. Any government program they may be on, you inspect their compliance to the n-th degree. Layer heavy bureaucratic red tape on at every opportunity. Find ways to make them need a lawyer. Find a petty excuse to claim you suspect them of drug trafficking and inspect everything they own, which basically allows you to take everything they own, and effectively destroy or hold on to everything for years. And that's if you have a goal of staying plausibly legal. If the mask is off for some reason, there's even more you can do. And these are just examples; if one truly took a survey of what the government could do to you without even stretching the law, I think we could produce a very thick and scary book. Unfortunately, I don't think the capabilities of the NSA are bounded by your imagination.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    So again, you just listed a big list of things which don't actually require a covert surveillance program to implement because the whole point of suppressing people is to be rather overt about doing it. You then postulate the US government just ignoring the law altogether. You see the pattern right? All these are things where the US government does some questionably legal, pretty highly visible stuff to you. It's not unintrusive electronic surveillance. Or to put it another way: the Soviet government didn't start out surveilling their citizens before they just murdered all the ones who were considered dissidents. They started doing it after they needed to get better at murdering the dissidents. But the real problem, was the fact the government was willing to murder dissidents. Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?
samstave 13y ago
>Without the NSA snooping there is a higher risk of terrorist attacks, but with the NSA snooping there is more risk of attacks on democracy. Bullshit! This is the exact thing we have been demanding proof of. There is none. Not a single event has been proven to be thwarted by these activities. Boston? Sandy hook? Aurora? Lax? Mall? All actual attacks, he'll they took days to ID Boston guys and even then couldn't do a decent job in tracking locating them after they found them out! The NSA is a criminal organization. Period. Tyre is no grey or legal area here. They need to be shut down.
- billforsternz 13y ago
  Don't understand why you list unthwarted attacks. The real question is how many attacks were thwarted. That is the point of disagreement.
- pnathan 13y ago
  All of those but possibly Boston are essentially mentally ill people who went nuts - domestic attacks. The NSA is usually tasked with dealing with foreign threats. So your complaint is, by and large, mistaken. Your complaint is better directed at local police and mental health facilities. It's almost certain that the TLAs generally tries to keep within the law as they see it, and push the boundaries as far as they can - this is the trend of the executive branch. I would expect them to have batteries of lawyers hired to find out exactly what is permissible, and then to do all of it. It'a also entirely disingenuous to say that the TLAs have no purpose. To riff off of @leashless from Twitter - they are a reaction - an immune response - to some entities which do and did some very bad things covertly, and are now being an autoimmune disease on the host state. The truth is, 9/11 gave a rather large blank check to the industrial/ security/intelligence companies and agencies in the US, and most people were not in the mood to worry about civil liberties too much at the time. "Never again" was the refrain, and that sort of perspective removes all ability to do a cost-benefit analysis. So they expanded with that attitude and that check... then, like beauracracies do, they entrenched and began to expand power and capabilities. This is not new behavior in any bureaucracy. This sort of eventuality was, as I recall, predicted quite loudly after the Patriot Act was passed.
peterashford 13y ago
One thing that needs to be taken into account is that terrorism is responsible for very few deaths at all. Guns and cars both cause more deaths. I'd love the US to do something about guns, but are you guys having a crisis about cars? The response is utterly disproportionate to the risk.

by Joeri 13y ago

pyrocat 13y ago

Yeah but "higher risk of terrorist attacks" is like, what, an increase from 0.000001% to 0.0000011%?

001sky 13y ago
That's the thing with Fear. It makes you stupid.

pnathan 13y ago

That's a fair point. There are an array of risks that less (or more) intelligence shifts the balance around on. N.b., I don't really like to frame it as "attacks on democracy". That is (1) hyperbolic and (2) not obviously true. Words must be chosen very carefully in this debate (and it is a debate!) in order to not mislead or scare people away. I would argue that TLA snooping leads to the "Chilling effects" idea, where debate and discussion are chilled from freedom due to awareness of snooping. Obviously there are follow-on and side effects as well, as well as long-term risk of political persecution. But let's focus on the visible problem today without speculating on the worse potential problems. Further point with respect to word choice and bringing the mainstream awareness up: tinfoil hatters do not speak for me, and they don't speak for the mainstream. They poison discourse by being radical and not bothering to look at conventional reality. Same for conspiracy theorists. Reasonable and respectable people can move the needle, infowars/alex jones/coast to coast types really are no ally in the effort to make this a real issue.

angusangus 13y ago
I'm interested in this distinction. It seems to me fairly self-evident that actions which chill debate or discussion limit political expression and an informed electorate, thereby fundamentally impinging on democracy. Why then distinguish between 'chilling effects' and an attack on democracy?
- n09n 13y ago
  It may feel self-evident to you but I don't think the evidence supports that position. The US is not exactly known for its engaged electorate or educated voters. I would need to see a lot of evidence in order to convince me that things would get any worse in a surveillance state. The UK is probably farther down that road than the US at the moment and I haven't heard that they have exhibited any of the problems you are worried about.
- pnathan 13y ago
  So a dictionary defines chilling effects as the inhibition or discouragement of the exercise of your rights. Let me frame the thought by giving an example: if I am talking with someone, I might not say a few things because, hey, the TLA might care enough to pull the record and listen in. Or we take care to communicate with GPG or something. It inhibits what we do. We can still vote; our vote actually has meaning; our votes actually change the elected officials, etc. We still can run a socialist candidate (c.f. Kshama Sawant 2013 in Seattle) and they aren't shut down via police action or other hardcore discrimination. This is in contrast against what it could do: it could be always used to harass and discriminate against those dissenting from the Two Parties and the State. Anyone who said anything would be looked at and actions taken to shut them up and limit the expression and formation of dissent. While the database of communication could be used against people to significantly disrupt everyone who speaks out, it is not, and in my opinion, it will take a few emergencies like 9/11 to actually alter the mindset of the US to make that acceptable. Of course, people are harassed; some people are okay with that. It doesn't mean there's general acceptance of that, and it doesn't mean everyone is harassed. Thus I draw the distinction: people self-censoring vs. the heavy hand of an apparatchik forcing change. The first is very immediate and to-hand; it's reality today. The other is possible, possibly even probable given certain courses of events, but fear-mongering is not the best way to go; let's deal with the clear and present threat at hand- chilling of free speech, chilling of dissent, chilling of the business interests of United States citizens, (frankly, these all apply outside the US as well, and hopefully the debate within the US around privacy and data capture also places the operations of TLAs on non-US citizens & non-US soil within the public purview of the United States citizenry via their elected representatives). Fear does work as a campaign tactic, but the reality is, fear is not something people want to work for. People are willing to work for hope (didn't we all see that in 2008?), and I really would prefer the pro-privacy, pro-4th amendment activists focus on the positives and hope of what we can do rather than performing the traditional stick of the Republicans & Democrats (vote the other way and the free work and the US will END!!!11!oneoneone). It is in hope of being not being tracked against my will, not being monitored in every phone conversation, not being advertised at without my consent that I advocate for these changes to come to pass. It is in hope that I can say thoughts and perform actions online and offline and feel the liberty of not having peeping government Toms and raucous advertisers know anything about me. So there's my distinction and my spiel. :-)

XorNot 13y ago

I don't know. What do you think they would've done to suppress dissenting political opinion? Which is where this whole conversation goes to hell - the trailed off sentences where people assume they actually have a clue what dangers they're talking about. Because if your problem is "oh, someone might find out about someone's mistress and tell the media..." well - the problem begins and ends with the fact that their voters turn out not to be ok with that. But they're still voters who's votes matter.

jerf 13y ago
"What do you think they would've done to suppress dissenting political opinion?" Easy. You use government power on them. You "coincidentally" hit them with an IRS audit, one that's incredibly hostile and refuses to resolve itself. You hit their business with every inspection possible, held to the most stringent of standards. Even if, and perhaps especially if, they don't own it, and you find a way to sufficiently hint to the business why exactly they're having these troubles. You have a cop follow them and nail them with every petty infraction in the book. Any government program they may be on, you inspect their compliance to the n-th degree. Layer heavy bureaucratic red tape on at every opportunity. Find ways to make them need a lawyer. Find a petty excuse to claim you suspect them of drug trafficking and inspect everything they own, which basically allows you to take everything they own, and effectively destroy or hold on to everything for years. And that's if you have a goal of staying plausibly legal. If the mask is off for some reason, there's even more you can do. And these are just examples; if one truly took a survey of what the government could do to you without even stretching the law, I think we could produce a very thick and scary book. Unfortunately, I don't think the capabilities of the NSA are bounded by your imagination.
- XorNot 13y ago
  So again, you just listed a big list of things which don't actually require a covert surveillance program to implement because the whole point of suppressing people is to be rather overt about doing it. You then postulate the US government just ignoring the law altogether. You see the pattern right? All these are things where the US government does some questionably legal, pretty highly visible stuff to you. It's not unintrusive electronic surveillance. Or to put it another way: the Soviet government didn't start out surveilling their citizens before they just murdered all the ones who were considered dissidents. They started doing it after they needed to get better at murdering the dissidents. But the real problem, was the fact the government was willing to murder dissidents. Has the US government killed a bunch of your neighbors? Disappeared them?

samstave 13y ago

>Without the NSA snooping there is a higher risk of terrorist attacks, but with the NSA snooping there is more risk of attacks on democracy. Bullshit! This is the exact thing we have been demanding proof of. There is none. Not a single event has been proven to be thwarted by these activities. Boston? Sandy hook? Aurora? Lax? Mall? All actual attacks, he'll they took days to ID Boston guys and even then couldn't do a decent job in tracking locating them after they found them out! The NSA is a criminal organization. Period. Tyre is no grey or legal area here. They need to be shut down.

billforsternz 13y ago
Don't understand why you list unthwarted attacks. The real question is how many attacks were thwarted. That is the point of disagreement.
pnathan 13y ago
All of those but possibly Boston are essentially mentally ill people who went nuts - domestic attacks. The NSA is usually tasked with dealing with foreign threats. So your complaint is, by and large, mistaken. Your complaint is better directed at local police and mental health facilities. It's almost certain that the TLAs generally tries to keep within the law as they see it, and push the boundaries as far as they can - this is the trend of the executive branch. I would expect them to have batteries of lawyers hired to find out exactly what is permissible, and then to do all of it. It'a also entirely disingenuous to say that the TLAs have no purpose. To riff off of @leashless from Twitter - they are a reaction - an immune response - to some entities which do and did some very bad things covertly, and are now being an autoimmune disease on the host state. The truth is, 9/11 gave a rather large blank check to the industrial/ security/intelligence companies and agencies in the US, and most people were not in the mood to worry about civil liberties too much at the time. "Never again" was the refrain, and that sort of perspective removes all ability to do a cost-benefit analysis. So they expanded with that attitude and that check... then, like beauracracies do, they entrenched and began to expand power and capabilities. This is not new behavior in any bureaucracy. This sort of eventuality was, as I recall, predicted quite loudly after the Patriot Act was passed.

peterashford 13y ago

One thing that needs to be taken into account is that terrorism is responsible for very few deaths at all. Guns and cars both cause more deaths. I'd love the US to do something about guns, but are you guys having a crisis about cars? The response is utterly disproportionate to the risk.