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Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created

174 points by 001sky 12y ago

smoyer 12y ago
Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House" The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?
- throwawayaway 12y ago
  In 2005 he did, but he's pretty duplicitous in retrospect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylVOdriEyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylVOdriEyA So he's no longer the perfect person to do so.
- rayiner 12y ago
  You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value. The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy. The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended to keep the government from searching your property. A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker? The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet. In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.
  - alexeisadeski3 12y ago
    "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
    - mpyne 12y ago
      Why does everyone simply quote the Fourth Amendment as if that answers the question about privacy, especially privacy as applied to electronic communications? Let me quote the Supreme Court decision establishing a right to privacy [1] (which was not previously considered present!): "Secondly, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional 'right to privacy.'" That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all." The decision goes further to note: "But the protection of a person's general right to privacy -- his right to be let alone by other people -- is, like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States". In other words, one may have statute protection, but not blanket Constitutional protection. And that opens up the possibility of the ones writing the statutes carving out "foreign intelligence" exceptions. And this is all in accordance with the decision to invent the "reasonable expectation of privacy", it's not even going into later decisions like Smith v. Maryland which tended to expand government search ability. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/389/347 http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/389/347
      - alexeisadeski3 12y ago
        The Supreme Court has long ago abandoned any interest in protecting the rights defined by the Constitution.
    - rayiner 12y ago
      Key word: "their." The lynchpin or a lot of the surveillance efforts is accessing information that doesn't belong to the target of the surveillance. Phone call metadata is generated by the phone company, stored in the phone company's computers, and is used for the phone company's business purposes. Its the phone company's data, not yours. Same thing with the data Google and Facebook collect about where you go on the internet. You didn't generate it and you can't even access it. How can you say its "yours?" Its "about you" but that's totally different. If your neighbor keeps a diary tracking your comings and goings, you can't assert 4th amendment protection over that data. Privacy advocates talk about "metadata is data" as if the government's lawyers don't understand that bits are just bits. What privacy advocates don't understand is that the "metadata" distinction is about generation, ownership, and control, which are implicated in the 4th amendment by the word "their."
- beerbajay 12y ago
  > agrees with our constitution's precepts The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted. The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) pot, but that is how it has been interpreted by the supreme court. No normal person would say that corporations are people, but according to the court they are. etc etc etc. Reading the constitution, I get a clear picture of a federation of independent states. But this idea died after the Civil War, if not before.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Commerce clause says that the federal government shall be able to regulate interstate commerce. Pot is something traded in intestate commerce. Its not as ridiculous as you make it seem. The framers might have used narrower language if they could foresee that one day, everything would be a part of interstate commerce. That certainly wasn't true during the time of the framing, when goods were produced locally or even primarily by the individuals using them on family farms. But they used broad language with the intent of giving the federal government the power to regulate large scale commerce as it existed then. The Supreme Court didn't say that corporations are people. It said that people don't lose their first amendment rights because they assemble themselves into a corporation. Falls naturally out of the first amendments rights to free speech and assembly. You can't ignore the civil war. The 13, 14, and 15 amendments were a renegotiation of the Constitution at the point of a sword. The idea of a federation of independent states is called into doubt by the supremacy clause and commerce clause, which was in the original, and the 14 amendment, which allows Congress to legislate directly against the states to enforce the amendment. Moreover, looking at original intent, the federalist faction of framers wanted a strong central government. They didn't give states autonomy because they wanted to, they did it because they had to, and they set the stage for states becoming secondary powers.
    - beerbajay 12y ago
      > Pot is something traded in intestate commerce Sorry, I should have specified that I meant "grown for private consumption". Obviously if it crosses state borders it fits with what the commerce clause was designed to regulate.
twobits 12y ago
Has already been.
- iamwithnail 12y ago
  I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling. What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that. The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.
  - Zigurd 12y ago
    Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.
    - iamwithnail 12y ago
      There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.
      - DanBC 12y ago
Theodores 12y ago
> A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract. This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.
netcan 12y ago
It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent." From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions. The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy. A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis. Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation. We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it. The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone. The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy. As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital. Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants. In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay. That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.
ianstallings 12y ago
I wouldn't say it's beyond imagination. Science-fiction authors have been predicting this for years.
- hga 12y ago
  Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four, was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines, edited by Robert Silverberg).
  - atmosx 12y ago
    I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon
    - igravious 12y ago
      Second 'Darkness at Noon'. A very powerful read. By Arthur Koestler 1940. Orwell's 1984 was published in 1948, wasn't it?
      - atmosx 12y ago
        Well yeah, wikipedia says 1949 but 6 months up or down doesn't change much.. About DaN[1]: 'In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon at number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.' Although the depth of thought and analysis of the 'soviet regime' was impressive, I had no idea it was that highly praised novel. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - 12y ago
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.) Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground. On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook. So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.
- mikeash 12y ago
  I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.
  - BugBrother 12y ago
EGreg 12y ago
Guys I would invite you to read my perspective on what we can do about this: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 And please, put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this petition: http://wh.gov/lsuFw http://wh.gov/lsuFw Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%! http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_that_cops_wear_on_body_cameras http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha... http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-police-use-force http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-po... "The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment." All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital. You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.
jostmey 12y ago
Here's a crazy idea. Why not open source surveillance to the world?
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  Total surveillance does not return us to a no- or low- surveillance ground state. Nor does it put us in an "everyone has dirt on everyone" state. It just makes it easier for everyone to identify who is more than N standard deviations away from standard/accepted behaviors.
OliverM 12y ago
Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.
bernardlunn 12y ago
Great line: It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.

174 points by 001sky 12y ago

Describing Obama: "the constitutional lawyer in the White House" The question that this brings to mind is whether Obama agrees with our constitution's precepts. Wouldn't a constitutional lawyer be the perfect person to circumvent or destroy its intent? In much the same way a person that understands the internal workings of a lock is the best one to pick it?

throwawayaway 12y ago
In 2005 he did, but he's pretty duplicitous in retrospect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylVOdriEyA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ylVOdriEyA So he's no longer the perfect person to do so.
rayiner 12y ago
You can agree with the precepts of the Constitution and justify certain kinds of surveillance. Even if you think the NSA surveillance is unconstitutional, you have to concede that "privacy" is not a well-defined constitutional value. The framers spent many pages in the Federalist talking about the ins and outs of various voting systems, but never articulated a broader concept of privacy. The 4th amendment is based fundamentally on a "property rights" view: intended to keep the government from searching your property. A perfect example is the recent case in Jones. Is it unconstitutional because putting a GPS tracker in a car enables 24/7 surveillance, or because it requires the police to physically trespass on the car to place the tracker? The protection of "privacy" in the constitution has been extended to reach things birth control and abortion based on the "penumbras" of the rights that are actually in the text. This is fuzzy ground! You can believe that those penumbras exist yet still not believe they cover recording information people put out into the public internet. In short, its not so much that Obama is well-placed to know how to work around the Constitution, its that he knows that digital privacy is on unsure Constitutional footing in the first place and is positioned to take advantage of where the lines are drawn.
- alexeisadeski3 12y ago
  "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
  - mpyne 12y ago
    Why does everyone simply quote the Fourth Amendment as if that answers the question about privacy, especially privacy as applied to electronic communications? Let me quote the Supreme Court decision establishing a right to privacy [1] (which was not previously considered present!): "Secondly, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional 'right to privacy.'" That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all." The decision goes further to note: "But the protection of a person's general right to privacy -- his right to be let alone by other people -- is, like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States". In other words, one may have statute protection, but not blanket Constitutional protection. And that opens up the possibility of the ones writing the statutes carving out "foreign intelligence" exceptions. And this is all in accordance with the decision to invent the "reasonable expectation of privacy", it's not even going into later decisions like Smith v. Maryland which tended to expand government search ability. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/389/347 http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/389/347
    - alexeisadeski3 12y ago
      The Supreme Court has long ago abandoned any interest in protecting the rights defined by the Constitution.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    Key word: "their." The lynchpin or a lot of the surveillance efforts is accessing information that doesn't belong to the target of the surveillance. Phone call metadata is generated by the phone company, stored in the phone company's computers, and is used for the phone company's business purposes. Its the phone company's data, not yours. Same thing with the data Google and Facebook collect about where you go on the internet. You didn't generate it and you can't even access it. How can you say its "yours?" Its "about you" but that's totally different. If your neighbor keeps a diary tracking your comings and goings, you can't assert 4th amendment protection over that data. Privacy advocates talk about "metadata is data" as if the government's lawyers don't understand that bits are just bits. What privacy advocates don't understand is that the "metadata" distinction is about generation, ownership, and control, which are implicated in the 4th amendment by the word "their."
beerbajay 12y ago
> agrees with our constitution's precepts The problem is that not even the members of the Supreme Court can agree on what these are or how they should be interpreted. The everyday understanding of constitutional law is not the same as the legal understanding, which is part of the problem. The commerce clause, as read by any normal individual would not allow the Federal government to have anything to do with (e.g.) pot, but that is how it has been interpreted by the supreme court. No normal person would say that corporations are people, but according to the court they are. etc etc etc. Reading the constitution, I get a clear picture of a federation of independent states. But this idea died after the Civil War, if not before.
- rayiner 12y ago
  Commerce clause says that the federal government shall be able to regulate interstate commerce. Pot is something traded in intestate commerce. Its not as ridiculous as you make it seem. The framers might have used narrower language if they could foresee that one day, everything would be a part of interstate commerce. That certainly wasn't true during the time of the framing, when goods were produced locally or even primarily by the individuals using them on family farms. But they used broad language with the intent of giving the federal government the power to regulate large scale commerce as it existed then. The Supreme Court didn't say that corporations are people. It said that people don't lose their first amendment rights because they assemble themselves into a corporation. Falls naturally out of the first amendments rights to free speech and assembly. You can't ignore the civil war. The 13, 14, and 15 amendments were a renegotiation of the Constitution at the point of a sword. The idea of a federation of independent states is called into doubt by the supremacy clause and commerce clause, which was in the original, and the 14 amendment, which allows Congress to legislate directly against the states to enforce the amendment. Moreover, looking at original intent, the federalist faction of framers wanted a strong central government. They didn't give states autonomy because they wanted to, they did it because they had to, and they set the stage for states becoming secondary powers.
  - beerbajay 12y ago
    > Pot is something traded in intestate commerce Sorry, I should have specified that I meant "grown for private consumption". Obviously if it crosses state borders it fits with what the commerce clause was designed to regulate.

twobits 12y ago

Has already been.

iamwithnail 12y ago
I disagree quite strongly. The surveillance STATE doesn't exist - yet. That the end result might look and feel a lot like a surveillance state is irrelevant - the mechanisms and operations of an actual surveillance state are quite different, and far more troubling. What we have right now (both in the US and the UK) is a set of overlapping (and sometimes conflicted) machineries of surveillance - in some/most instances, created without the oversight of 'democratic' mechanisms. There hasn't been a centralised move by those nation states to operate that. The surveillance state that's being created seeks to remove the divisions between different components of those assemblages. The increasing normalisation of surveillance that's happened over the last 20 years will gather even more pace, and be justified on a number of spurious 'security' grounds, then 'efficiency' grounds.
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Parallel construction is just a fig leaf. The data the NSA collects already winds up on the screen in police cruisers, and has bypassed all that consent manufacturing bother.
  - iamwithnail 12y ago
    There's no evidence of that, quite the opposite. In fact, there's been significant pushes in both countries for intelligence-collected information to be made available to routine law enforcement. This is sort of my point about overlapping but not necessarily connected assemblages of surveillance. Although it seems believable, the mechanisms just aren't there (again, yet.) - police CAN request information from the NSA/GCHQ, but it's a torturous and slow process at the moment, and is largely paper based. The forthcoming surveillance state WILL make that available, but it's not happened yet.
    - DanBC 12y ago

Theodores 12y ago

> A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Has Been Created There is nothing new in this article! I find it strange that the legend of Manufacturing Consent fame that is Noam Chomsky has nothing significant to add to the discussion. Although people aren't exactly clamouring for leadership out of this mess, no leadership has really came forward to unite people in taking a stance against the government and renegotiating the social contract. This spying thing is not going to be stopped, interest in the story is going to whither and die, spying is going to be accepted in the same way that people accept CCTV everywhere and, for the big telco businesses it is just how they will do business - big pipe to NSA/GCHQ, get on with it.

netcan 12y ago

It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent." From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions. The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy. A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis. Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation. We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it. The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone. The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy. As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital. Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants. In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay. That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.

ianstallings 12y ago

I wouldn't say it's beyond imagination. Science-fiction authors have been predicting this for years.

hga 12y ago
Decades. The first pervasive surveillance state story I can remember reading, of the sort that's nominally free, we're not talking Nineteen Eighty Four, was "The Hunting Lodge", a 1954 short story by Randall Garrett (collected in the great 1968 Men and Machines, edited by Robert Silverberg).
- atmosx 12y ago
  I've read 'Darkness at noon'[1] at year ago or two. It's one of the books Orwell was heavily influenced by. It's about Stalin's Russia and it's amazing. Same topic, total gov control. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon
  - igravious 12y ago
    Second 'Darkness at Noon'. A very powerful read. By Arthur Koestler 1940. Orwell's 1984 was published in 1948, wasn't it?
    - atmosx 12y ago
      Well yeah, wikipedia says 1949 but 6 months up or down doesn't change much.. About DaN[1]: 'In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon at number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.' Although the depth of thought and analysis of the 'soviet regime' was impressive, I had no idea it was that highly praised novel. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_noon
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- 12y ago

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.) Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground. On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook. So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.

mikeash 12y ago
I strongly disagree that the NSA is a good guy. Yes, foreign intelligence organizations no doubt get up to the same stuff. But they're basically supposed to. The NSA, however, is supposed to defend this country, and to me an inherent part of that is preserving freedom. Instead they are doing the opposite, destroying American freedom in the name of American national security, essentially the national equivalent of smashing all your household possessions to deter burglars.
- BugBrother 12y ago

EGreg 12y ago

Guys I would invite you to read my perspective on what we can do about this: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 And please, put the new video camera technology to good use and sign this petition: http://wh.gov/lsuFw http://wh.gov/lsuFw Every study that has been conducted on this has shown that body cameras worn by police on duty helps massively to decrease violence and complaints -- sometimes by 80%! http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_that_cops_wear_on_body_cameras http://wamu.org/news/14/05/09/dc_police_board_recommends_tha... http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-police-use-force http://www.policefoundation.org/content/body-worn-cameras-po... "The findings suggest more than a 50% reduction in the total number of incidents of use-of-force compared to control-conditions, and nearly ten times more citizens’ complaints in the 12-months prior to the experiment." All the studies that have been conducted on this show that body cameras decrease complaints and violence by 80%. This is one of the things that is very clearly helpful, and would go a long way to helping a lot of people. Well, this is something tangible you can do that will improve the situation around the country. And the videos would only be produced to actually establish what happened, and only in court cases where it was relevant and could keep someone from serving a 10 year sentence for "assaulting" a police officer who landed them in the hospital. You can do your part -- sign the petition, and tell your friends.

jostmey 12y ago

Here's a crazy idea. Why not open source surveillance to the world?

forgottenpass 12y ago
Total surveillance does not return us to a no- or low- surveillance ground state. Nor does it put us in an "everyone has dirt on everyone" state. It just makes it easier for everyone to identify who is more than N standard deviations away from standard/accepted behaviors.

OliverM 12y ago

Slightly ironic to see (for me) a Google Adwords voucher being advertised in the corner of the webpage this anti-surveillance tech article is presented on.

bernardlunn 12y ago

Great line: It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.