8 ms·

The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation

280 points by r0h1n 13y ago

ianstormtaylor 13y ago
This is extremely scary, and it also seems like a better way of phrasing the argument for the general populace to realize what mass surveillance is capable of. I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying, evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed. Hopefully this kind of tack will be used more and more to get these stories to resonate with the average non-techie person and get them worked up enough to care.
- protomyth 13y ago
  "I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying, evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed." You might want to review a timeline of events for Watergate. Nixon won re-election after the initial reporting and stayed in office until Aug of 74.
  - ianstormtaylor 13y ago
    Definitely should review them then haha. Looking at it now "shortly" was the wrong word to use. He got re-elected after the initial story leaked, but more things started leaking, like the 18-minute gap in the tapes, and other things started to unravel. Although, I think the fact that the cover up was so grand is pretty good evidence that the general populace is against that type of behavior once they become aware of it's magnitude.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      I hope the general populace is against it, but there are so many cases of worse stuff that I have come to doubt it. It seems like if you look good on TV the populace gives you a rather large pass.
- crassus 13y ago
  If your political system depends on convincing your average non-techie person to believe sensible things, then your political system has a design flaw.
  - ianstormtaylor 13y ago
    Sounds like a slippery slope to dictatorship to me.
    - crassus 13y ago
      Only in the age of degenerate democracy would people imagine that the only alternative to mob rule is dictatorship, and fantasize that the two are opposites.
spoiledtechie 13y ago
As much as you might think this is out there, I have a hunch, however stupid it might be that leaks about candidates could in fact come out this way. it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama. I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with. Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA agent.
- pstuart 13y ago
  Or let them get elected and blackmail them to toe the line...
  - junto 13y ago
    This is my suspicion too. Tail wagging the dog. Obama flip-flopped on FISA [1]. He was blatantly aware of the risks it imposed. The question is why? Did someone pay him a little visit? Did some man in a black suit and dark glasses show him a little manila envelope with unknown contents, that caused him to change his mind? One year ago I would have said this was an insane proposition. Now after Snowden, I'm not that sure. That is what is really scary about the surveillance state. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ [2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/obamas-wiretapping-flip-flop-yes/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/...
    - philwelch 13y ago
      Who was the last president to try to stand up against these agencies and what happened to him?
  - mtgx 13y ago
    Feinstein comes to mind. Although she's probably doing it for the heck of it. She almost seems to enjoy supporting the surveillance state.
zarify 13y ago
To be honest I don't know how much scarier this is than the current overt clout wielded by entities like the gun lobby.
Desposible 13y ago
Monitoring sub-atomic particles for science, sure.
shitlord 13y ago
The government probably watches over everyone in a position of power, regardless of their political opinions. It wants to make sure that the people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated. I'm pretty sure President Obama explicitly mentioned that in one of his statements. I think this "theory" of election manipulation is tenuous at best. Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have. I'm not saying it's impossible to pull off, but the risk (potential political blowback) would certainly outweigh the reward.
- fleitz 13y ago
  The only problem being that if they are corrupt you now have the corrupt watching over the honest. You know... kinda like J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
- grey-area 13y ago
  Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have. There is strong evidence this has been done in the recent past on a massive scale, in the US, by the intelligence agencies and president - see Nixon's plumbers, and J Edgar Hoover, and that was before these capabilities were available. Your assumption about a conspiracy being required is completely unfounded [1]. That is not a theory, that is fact, and it is in no way tenuous, so it lends serious credibility to the idea that in the present new tools are being used in similar ways. The other point which lends this credibility is the evidence we have seen of use of these powers for all sorts of industrial and political espionage abroad - they are doing exactly this sort of activity abroad (e.g. bugging Merkel before she was leader, Petrobras, Belgacom) - I find it highly likely they are also using these powers at home, at the very least to stymie investigations into their power. Note how obedient to the wishes of the spying agencies almost every politician is. it wants to make sure that people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated You seem to trust the current admin, even though they have been shown to lie repeatedly (Clapper, Obama [2]). Why do you trust that if given power they would use it in your best interests and to clean up politics, doesn't that strike you as somewhat naive given the huge compromises every politician has to make just to get elected president? [1] http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee [2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-surveillance-comments-dishonesty-isnt-only-problem http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-surveillance...
001sky 13y ago
I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too? There is an argument[1] that this may have been what took out General Patreaus. It was no coincedence he was removed from the Army and put into the CIA post just prior to catching Bin Laden [2,3]. Patreus would have received all of the credit, not Obama. But we know that the prep work for Bin Laden involved building a replicate of the abbatobad compound in the US, etc. so was well underway under the leadership of Patreus, not Panetta. Obama was very wary of Patreus entereing the 2012 elections, and would have been a much more credible candidate than any republican. In the end, Patreus was of course done in by someone snooping through his gmail. Wether or not he was also the victim of a parallel construction, in how that came about, we'll never know. [1] ie, Informal line of resoning or logic. In this case, circumstantial. [2] edit: The move was orchestrated and announced earlier in the spring. viz: On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. [3] Bin Laden: Died May 2, 2011 (aged 54) Abbottabad, Pakistan 34°10′9″N 73°14′33″E
- dinkumthinkum 13y ago
  Providing citations for the coordinates of Bin Laden's death ... really?
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    I actually quite like that; it's a nice touch.
- griffordson 13y ago
  It has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt since there is no documentation and no named sources, but in July Jack Murphy reported that his sources in the CIA told him that the "seventh floor" at CIA wanted Petraeus out and used his affair to do it. And that Clapper and Petraeus had a heated meeting where Petraeus was informed that he would be resigning. http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_killing_of_ambassador http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_kil... The fact that we can't be sure that he wasn't being blackmailed with something even more scandalous demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is no reason to believe that he was, but you can't say it is impossible now that we have documentation proving their capabilities. That is why this sort of dragnet mass surveillance is so dangerous to a democracy. It undermines the legitimacy of the political process.
AsymetricCom 13y ago
Hahaha, that's a good one. Lets just upload our votes to the net. Then we can outsource our voting machines to Diebold and neglect any sort of actual engineering for hardware tamper resistance. At this point, I'm wondering who hasn't cheated voters yet. What a fucking stupid article.
frank_boyd 13y ago
> Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished. That's the thing. It can not be "fixed", it will not (although our representatives will offer all kinds of PR actions/"legislations" to try to calm us down and "accept it"). This kind of power is already strong enough to defend itself. Rather, it's going to become stronger (also because it is being attacked). It will take some sort of serious revolution for this sort of cancer to be undone. And for that to happen, we're going to have to feel some serious pain, first. That's our nature.
- joeshevland 13y ago
  Moving the marker from apathy to critical thought, in the masses, is the thing I think. That, and fixing the central banking cartel and the military industrial complex, I suppose.
Amadou 13y ago
Julian Sanchez identified this precise problem back in 2008 (and I'm sure he wasn't the first either). Sanchez cites examples of Truman using an FBI wiretap on a potential supreme court nominee and Johnson wiretapping Martin Luther King and indirectly wiretapping presidential candidate Richard Nixon (ironic given how crazy Nixon went with wiretapping once he got into office). http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16
MRSallee 13y ago
Why is the author so sure this hasn't already happened? He gives the current (and past) administration a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt. "To be clear, I don't think it's happened yet." "Obama was probably as surprised as we were." "But what about a future, less scrupulous president?" (Paraphrasing.)
- Snoptic 13y ago
  The author is being coy.
- josephlord 13y ago
  Well for one thing is you make a specific allegation it can be denied and the story becomes did they/didn't they story and breaks down readers along partisan lines rather than being about the really key issue which is could they.
- rlpb 13y ago
  He is showing how his argument stands whether or not the reader believes that this has already happened. His stance only strengthens his argument, since he makes it clear that his argument doesn't rely on a conspiracy theory.
  - drjesusphd 13y ago
    How is it not "conspiracy theory"? Because it's in the future?
ojbyrne 13y ago
"Did the Obama Administration ever spy on Mitt Romney during the recent presidential contest?" It's interesting, in hindsight, that probably the seminal event in Mitt Romney's loss was via an unidentified person making an unapproved recording: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html There was no real need for top down NSA surveillance here. All you needed was someone sympathetic to your cause ("an operative") who could infiltrate the oppositions meetings, with a cell phone.
- chalst 13y ago
  The source of the recording has been exposed: it was a bartender, Scott Prouty, employed for that function. See http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-prouty-47-percent-video http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-prouty-47-...
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Incidentally, the prospect of government agencies messing with US elections has already happened. It was just the IRS, not the NSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation So this isn't hypothetical.
- spoiledtechie 13y ago
  Great Point.
ck2 13y ago
Superpacs are far more dangerous. Not just out of state but out of country sources can pour millions into any campaign, no matter how big or small, and there will be zero paper trail. Yet no-one seems to care. It's mind-boggling.
joeshevland 13y ago
To me its bloody frustrating to look at a problem, and see it wallow around in all its greedy and obese glory. Its really frustrating to think the mechanisms for changing the problem are co-opted. Makes you feel a bit impotent. This overreach, and the general military-industrial complex, to me, are sickening. I don't understand how it survives the light of day.
w_t_payne 13y ago
These allegations are very dangerous: they undermine confidence in the democratic system. What will happen next? Will they start calling for violent revolution? We must stop these irresponsible journalists before it is too late.
codex 13y ago
Abuse of state apparatus has been a risk throughout history. The Internet has now joined the informant, undercover agent, letter, telegram, phone, microphone and video camera as technologies of surveillance. The state has had these older options available for a long, long time and democracy has survived so far. In fact, technology allows us to implement safeguards which are more infallible than a mere human. A blacklist of current and candidate politicians, for example, would be easy to implement in software. However, the main defense against abuse has always been a system of checks and balances combined with the rule of law.
pvnick 13y ago
I liked the point about "Bizarro Edward Snowden" acting on conscience to spy on and take down nsa threats as a sort of lone gunman of information. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those conspiracy theorists who believes there's a piece of bureaucracy somewhere that's a little more formal which serves that purpose, but the idea certainly makes the whole conspiracy a little more approachable.
walshemj 13y ago
There is far more risk from local machines and blatant gerrymandering of districts and selective targeting of minorities to deny them the vote.
w_t_payne 13y ago
Can insights gained from surveillance lead to increased effectiveness of lobbying activities due to better targeting of persuasion techniques? I suspect that the preponderance of the evidence leans a rational decision maker towards an answer to that question with affirmative qualities.
phryk 13y ago
Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished. What does he think he is, some sort of time-traveler?
transfire 13y ago
Puts them at risk? If you were really paying attention you would know they are already being manipulated.
ksherlock 13y ago
Previous NSA whistle blower Russ Tice [1] has stated that the NSA targeted Barack Obama (in 2004), Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, David Petraeus, Colin Powell, and Supreme Court nominees. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice
pasbesoin 13y ago
In the state of Wisconsin, numerous stories point to Governor Walker's staff vetting hires based on their political activity. For example, withdrawing a candidate they proposed for a governance position with the University of Wisconsin because they subsequently learned he had signed the recall position (for the sake of a family member and their job; the candidate is actually a staunch Walker supporter, himself). (This being my and many others' determination based upon detailed accounting of the story, despite subsequent PR spin to the contrary.) It's widely suspected that Governor Walker has ambitions for a 2016 run for the Presidency. Or maybe 2020. One has to wonder what such an Administration might get up to with respect to surveillance results feeding bias. "Conservative" or "Liberal". I don't want that power in either hands.

280 points by r0h1n 13y ago

This is extremely scary, and it also seems like a better way of phrasing the argument for the general populace to realize what mass surveillance is capable of. I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying, evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed. Hopefully this kind of tack will be used more and more to get these stories to resonate with the average non-techie person and get them worked up enough to care.

protomyth 13y ago
"I don't think most people would argue in favor of Watergate type spying, evidenced by how Nixon resigned shortly after it was revealed." You might want to review a timeline of events for Watergate. Nixon won re-election after the initial reporting and stayed in office until Aug of 74.
- ianstormtaylor 13y ago
  Definitely should review them then haha. Looking at it now "shortly" was the wrong word to use. He got re-elected after the initial story leaked, but more things started leaking, like the 18-minute gap in the tapes, and other things started to unravel. Although, I think the fact that the cover up was so grand is pretty good evidence that the general populace is against that type of behavior once they become aware of it's magnitude.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    I hope the general populace is against it, but there are so many cases of worse stuff that I have come to doubt it. It seems like if you look good on TV the populace gives you a rather large pass.
crassus 13y ago
If your political system depends on convincing your average non-techie person to believe sensible things, then your political system has a design flaw.
- ianstormtaylor 13y ago
  Sounds like a slippery slope to dictatorship to me.
  - crassus 13y ago
    Only in the age of degenerate democracy would people imagine that the only alternative to mob rule is dictatorship, and fantasize that the two are opposites.

spoiledtechie 13y ago

As much as you might think this is out there, I have a hunch, however stupid it might be that leaks about candidates could in fact come out this way. it might not even be Obamas team leaking. Lets sat a partisan person who works for the NSA wants to destroy a candidate. They could in fact do all the research themselves rather than anyone even close to Obama. I look at one direct example of Herman Cain. How did the press ever get ahold of the fact that he was paying women out? Literally, you could say the women spoke up, but with the NSA, you could say someone who works at the NSA leaked the information just because they didn't like Herman Cain to begin with. Now that's scary. Someone's reputation could be destroyed just by a rogue NSA agent.

pstuart 13y ago
Or let them get elected and blackmail them to toe the line...
- junto 13y ago
  This is my suspicion too. Tail wagging the dog. Obama flip-flopped on FISA [1]. He was blatantly aware of the risks it imposed. The question is why? Did someone pay him a little visit? Did some man in a black suit and dark glasses show him a little manila envelope with unknown contents, that caused him to change his mind? One year ago I would have said this was an insane proposition. Now after Snowden, I'm not that sure. That is what is really scary about the surveillance state. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/07/netroots-activi/ [2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/obamas-wiretapping-flip-flop-yes/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/...
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Who was the last president to try to stand up against these agencies and what happened to him?
- mtgx 13y ago
  Feinstein comes to mind. Although she's probably doing it for the heck of it. She almost seems to enjoy supporting the surveillance state.

zarify 13y ago

To be honest I don't know how much scarier this is than the current overt clout wielded by entities like the gun lobby.

Desposible 13y ago

Monitoring sub-atomic particles for science, sure.

shitlord 13y ago

The government probably watches over everyone in a position of power, regardless of their political opinions. It wants to make sure that the people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated. I'm pretty sure President Obama explicitly mentioned that in one of his statements. I think this "theory" of election manipulation is tenuous at best. Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have. I'm not saying it's impossible to pull off, but the risk (potential political blowback) would certainly outweigh the reward.

fleitz 13y ago
The only problem being that if they are corrupt you now have the corrupt watching over the honest. You know... kinda like J Edgar Hoover's FBI.
grey-area 13y ago
Pull off election manipulation would take a lot of balls, a lot of secrecy, and a lot of collaboration... three things an organization as diverse as the government does not have. There is strong evidence this has been done in the recent past on a massive scale, in the US, by the intelligence agencies and president - see Nixon's plumbers, and J Edgar Hoover, and that was before these capabilities were available. Your assumption about a conspiracy being required is completely unfounded [1]. That is not a theory, that is fact, and it is in no way tenuous, so it lends serious credibility to the idea that in the present new tools are being used in similar ways. The other point which lends this credibility is the evidence we have seen of use of these powers for all sorts of industrial and political espionage abroad - they are doing exactly this sort of activity abroad (e.g. bugging Merkel before she was leader, Petrobras, Belgacom) - I find it highly likely they are also using these powers at home, at the very least to stymie investigations into their power. Note how obedient to the wishes of the spying agencies almost every politician is. it wants to make sure that people in power aren't corrupt and aren't being manipulated You seem to trust the current admin, even though they have been shown to lie repeatedly (Clapper, Obama [2]). Why do you trust that if given power they would use it in your best interests and to clean up politics, doesn't that strike you as somewhat naive given the huge compromises every politician has to make just to get elected president? [1] http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Church_Committee [2] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-surveillance-comments-dishonesty-isnt-only-problem http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114276/obama-surveillance...

001sky 13y ago

I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too? There is an argument[1] that this may have been what took out General Patreaus. It was no coincedence he was removed from the Army and put into the CIA post just prior to catching Bin Laden [2,3]. Patreus would have received all of the credit, not Obama. But we know that the prep work for Bin Laden involved building a replicate of the abbatobad compound in the US, etc. so was well underway under the leadership of Patreus, not Panetta. Obama was very wary of Patreus entereing the 2012 elections, and would have been a much more credible candidate than any republican. In the end, Patreus was of course done in by someone snooping through his gmail. Wether or not he was also the victim of a parallel construction, in how that came about, we'll never know. [1] ie, Informal line of resoning or logic. In this case, circumstantial. [2] edit: The move was orchestrated and announced earlier in the spring. viz: On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. [3] Bin Laden: Died May 2, 2011 (aged 54) Abbottabad, Pakistan 34°10′9″N 73°14′33″E

dinkumthinkum 13y ago
Providing citations for the coordinates of Bin Laden's death ... really?
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  I actually quite like that; it's a nice touch.
griffordson 13y ago
It has to be taken with a very large pinch of salt since there is no documentation and no named sources, but in July Jack Murphy reported that his sources in the CIA told him that the "seventh floor" at CIA wanted Petraeus out and used his affair to do it. And that Clapper and Petraeus had a heated meeting where Petraeus was informed that he would be resigning. http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_killing_of_ambassador http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/1/was_deadly_benghazi_kil... The fact that we can't be sure that he wasn't being blackmailed with something even more scandalous demonstrates the problem perfectly. There is no reason to believe that he was, but you can't say it is impossible now that we have documentation proving their capabilities. That is why this sort of dragnet mass surveillance is so dangerous to a democracy. It undermines the legitimacy of the political process.

AsymetricCom 13y ago

Hahaha, that's a good one. Lets just upload our votes to the net. Then we can outsource our voting machines to Diebold and neglect any sort of actual engineering for hardware tamper resistance. At this point, I'm wondering who hasn't cheated voters yet. What a fucking stupid article.

frank_boyd 13y ago

> Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished. That's the thing. It can not be "fixed", it will not (although our representatives will offer all kinds of PR actions/"legislations" to try to calm us down and "accept it"). This kind of power is already strong enough to defend itself. Rather, it's going to become stronger (also because it is being attacked). It will take some sort of serious revolution for this sort of cancer to be undone. And for that to happen, we're going to have to feel some serious pain, first. That's our nature.

joeshevland 13y ago
Moving the marker from apathy to critical thought, in the masses, is the thing I think. That, and fixing the central banking cartel and the military industrial complex, I suppose.

Amadou 13y ago

Julian Sanchez identified this precise problem back in 2008 (and I'm sure he wasn't the first either). Sanchez cites examples of Truman using an FBI wiretap on a potential supreme court nominee and Johnson wiretapping Martin Luther King and indirectly wiretapping presidential candidate Richard Nixon (ironic given how crazy Nixon went with wiretapping once he got into office). http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16 http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/16/opinion/op-sanchez16

MRSallee 13y ago

Why is the author so sure this hasn't already happened? He gives the current (and past) administration a lot of benefit-of-the-doubt. "To be clear, I don't think it's happened yet." "Obama was probably as surprised as we were." "But what about a future, less scrupulous president?" (Paraphrasing.)

Snoptic 13y ago
The author is being coy.
josephlord 13y ago
Well for one thing is you make a specific allegation it can be denied and the story becomes did they/didn't they story and breaks down readers along partisan lines rather than being about the really key issue which is could they.
rlpb 13y ago
He is showing how his argument stands whether or not the reader believes that this has already happened. His stance only strengthens his argument, since he makes it clear that his argument doesn't rely on a conspiracy theory.
- drjesusphd 13y ago
  How is it not "conspiracy theory"? Because it's in the future?

ojbyrne 13y ago

"Did the Obama Administration ever spy on Mitt Romney during the recent presidential contest?" It's interesting, in hindsight, that probably the seminal event in Mitt Romney's loss was via an unidentified person making an unapproved recording: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81346.html There was no real need for top down NSA surveillance here. All you needed was someone sympathetic to your cause ("an operative") who could infiltrate the oppositions meetings, with a cell phone.

chalst 13y ago
The source of the recording has been exposed: it was a bartender, Scott Prouty, employed for that function. See http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-prouty-47-percent-video http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/scott-prouty-47-...

yummyfajitas 13y ago

Incidentally, the prospect of government agencies messing with US elections has already happened. It was just the IRS, not the NSA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Tea_Party_investigation So this isn't hypothetical.

spoiledtechie 13y ago
Great Point.

ck2 13y ago

Superpacs are far more dangerous. Not just out of state but out of country sources can pour millions into any campaign, no matter how big or small, and there will be zero paper trail. Yet no-one seems to care. It's mind-boggling.

joeshevland 13y ago

To me its bloody frustrating to look at a problem, and see it wallow around in all its greedy and obese glory. Its really frustrating to think the mechanisms for changing the problem are co-opted. Makes you feel a bit impotent. This overreach, and the general military-industrial complex, to me, are sickening. I don't understand how it survives the light of day.

w_t_payne 13y ago

These allegations are very dangerous: they undermine confidence in the democratic system. What will happen next? Will they start calling for violent revolution? We must stop these irresponsible journalists before it is too late.

codex 13y ago

Abuse of state apparatus has been a risk throughout history. The Internet has now joined the informant, undercover agent, letter, telegram, phone, microphone and video camera as technologies of surveillance. The state has had these older options available for a long, long time and democracy has survived so far. In fact, technology allows us to implement safeguards which are more infallible than a mere human. A blacklist of current and candidate politicians, for example, would be easy to implement in software. However, the main defense against abuse has always been a system of checks and balances combined with the rule of law.

pvnick 13y ago

I liked the point about "Bizarro Edward Snowden" acting on conscience to spy on and take down nsa threats as a sort of lone gunman of information. Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those conspiracy theorists who believes there's a piece of bureaucracy somewhere that's a little more formal which serves that purpose, but the idea certainly makes the whole conspiracy a little more approachable.

walshemj 13y ago

There is far more risk from local machines and blatant gerrymandering of districts and selective targeting of minorities to deny them the vote.

w_t_payne 13y ago

Can insights gained from surveillance lead to increased effectiveness of lobbying activities due to better targeting of persuasion techniques? I suspect that the preponderance of the evidence leans a rational decision maker towards an answer to that question with affirmative qualities.

phryk 13y ago

Let's fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished. What does he think he is, some sort of time-traveler?

transfire 13y ago

Puts them at risk? If you were really paying attention you would know they are already being manipulated.

ksherlock 13y ago

Previous NSA whistle blower Russ Tice [1] has stated that the NSA targeted Barack Obama (in 2004), Diane Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, David Petraeus, Colin Powell, and Supreme Court nominees. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice

pasbesoin 13y ago

In the state of Wisconsin, numerous stories point to Governor Walker's staff vetting hires based on their political activity. For example, withdrawing a candidate they proposed for a governance position with the University of Wisconsin because they subsequently learned he had signed the recall position (for the sake of a family member and their job; the candidate is actually a staunch Walker supporter, himself). (This being my and many others' determination based upon detailed accounting of the story, despite subsequent PR spin to the contrary.) It's widely suspected that Governor Walker has ambitions for a 2016 run for the Presidency. Or maybe 2020. One has to wonder what such an Administration might get up to with respect to surveillance results feeding bias. "Conservative" or "Liberal". I don't want that power in either hands.