[HN Gopher] Major government surveillance revelations fail to ma...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Major government surveillance revelations fail to make a big splash
        
       Author : baskethead
       Score  : 154 points
       Date   : 2022-03-20 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thehill.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thehill.com)
        
       | dbtc wrote:
       | > Another factor is that many Americans may now assume that their
       | privacy is already shot.
       | 
       | This is it for me, or the apathetic part of me. After a few
       | revelations you can infer the not yet revealed.
       | 
       | Hey, information wants to be free, right?
        
       | natsup123490 wrote:
       | Efforts to make governments behave are pretty hopeless. Besides,
       | it's not just the US that is spying on everybody. If you want
       | privacy, you need to change your behavior and your tooling, using
       | technology to create privacy.
        
       | qiskit wrote:
       | It's been going on for decades.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
       | 
       | What's going to happen if there is a "big splash". Nothing. Has
       | anyone in intelligence ever been arrested or punished for
       | violating the law? These people are above the law.
        
         | mistrial9 wrote:
         | whoa- a reference to Church, and then say "These people are
         | above the law" without caveat.. what an awful lead up to
         | complete compliance without complaining.. count me out
        
       | archhn wrote:
       | Without an avenue of recourse, people tune out.
       | 
       | Eliminate choice and you eliminate thought.
       | 
       | Honestly, it has been this way in US politics for a long time.
       | The government is always doing crazy scandalous things, but most
       | people are busy with the day to day and don't know how to act on
       | such information anyway. We are also, as Vidal said, a nation of
       | amnesia. Most people have the attention span of a goldfish. I'm
       | sure most people lack the historical knowledge to contextualize
       | these government actions. They don't know that an antagonistic
       | relationship exists between the people and government. The
       | numerous historical and contemporary betrayals of governments
       | against their peoples isn't in their mind. Plus, most people
       | think they are living in some fantasy world where nothing bad can
       | happen to them.
       | 
       | It's pretty dark. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
        
       | jerf wrote:
       | The biggest power the media has isn't even to make you believe an
       | active lie. It's the power to bury a story by simply neglecting
       | it, and filling the media space with their own choices.
       | 
       | The media is actively on the side of _you_ living under heavy
       | government surveillance.
       | 
       | Act accordingly.
        
         | snarf21 wrote:
         | As said, people don't care. They will only push click bait
         | because it is vastly more profitable. There is no such thing as
         | news anymore, it is infotainment. Sowing faux outrage for
         | profit is all.
        
         | CerealFounder wrote:
         | No its not, the larger media is the original "for pay
         | algorithm" that shows you what ever makes you engage with their
         | platform more (subscription & ad supported). There is no
         | conspiracy or man behind the curtain.
         | 
         | Simply put, complex stories resonate deeply with a small group
         | and not at all with the majority. What you get from that is the
         | current media landscape. Surveillance is a very complicated
         | technical and moral story that only the smallest group cares
         | about.
        
           | calibas wrote:
           | The media's willful ignorance the Epstein case implies
           | otherwise. This was a vast criminal conspiracy involving sex,
           | Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates and
           | Harvard University, the kind of juicy gossip that the average
           | person goes crazy over, and the mainstream media knew about
           | it for years, but chose not to report it.
           | 
           | The media was complicit in the coverup until it could be
           | ignored no longer. They did the opposite of what an honest
           | news media is supposed to do, and helped suppress one of the
           | decades biggest news stories. That certainly implies
           | something, and directly contradicts the "media just gives
           | people what they want" meme/excuse.
        
             | mjreacher wrote:
             | There's plenty of sex related scandals that go on all the
             | time that are 'open secrets' so to speak, another famous
             | one being Harvey Weinstein. On one hand you can go in the
             | conspiracy direction and say everyone was colluding to keep
             | it secret, but on the other hand you can think about how
             | little strong evidence there was and how these kinds of
             | people would be very eager to sue for defamation if you
             | accused them of anything.
        
               | 8bitsrule wrote:
               | Not to mention disappearances, suicides, heart attacks
               | and plane crashes.
               | [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Casolaro]
        
               | calibas wrote:
               | Which creates a world where powerful people can get away
               | with crimes and the victims are ignored even after they
               | come forward. That means actual criminal conspiracies
               | with powerful men pulling the strings.
               | 
               | Also, if you think there was "little strong evidence" of
               | what Epstein was up to, I have some good reading for you:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Legal_proce
               | edi...
        
               | mjreacher wrote:
               | Well yes, in capitalist countries generally rich people
               | can get away with a lot of things others can't, in fact
               | you can broaden that to any country or organization
               | really. I'm well aware of what went on with Epstein, and
               | if anything that goes against the idea that he's all
               | powerful and can get away with anything, otherwise why
               | would there have been any case against him in the first
               | place?
        
           | akira2501 wrote:
           | > the larger media is the original
           | 
           | Concentration of media ownership has not been a constant
           | factor over the past several decades and several laws have
           | been changed to alter this reality in that time frame. As the
           | purveyors of news get bought up and consolidated, it has
           | almost certainly made this "information control" problem
           | worse.
           | 
           | > Surveillance is a very complicated technical
           | 
           | "The government is spying on you" is not exceptionally
           | complicated or technical. The fourth amendment is widely
           | known and understood.
        
         | late2part wrote:
         | Agreed. And if you don't toe the line:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
        
           | encryptluks2 wrote:
           | Elon Musk has certainly done worse.
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | That's fucked up.
        
         | mmh0000 wrote:
         | <sarcasm> Yes, the "media" is to blame. The media that did
         | report on the spying. </sarcasm>
         | 
         | Blaming "The Media" is really a cop-out. Anyone who reads
         | anything beyond entertainment news knows about the degradation
         | of our civil liberties, rights, and privacy over the last 20
         | years. It's not a secret, and "The Media" isn't covering it up.
         | 
         | The sad, depressing, truth is that very few people overall
         | care. Or they only care enough to say the disagree then go
         | about ignoring it.
         | 
         | Personally, I've tried to bring awareness, I've donated money
         | to the EFF and ACLU, among other things. At this point it seems
         | inevitable to get worse. I just wish the government would offer
         | access or insights into the data the collect.
         | 
         | If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all my
         | data. They might as well turn it into a searchable service: "I
         | know I email bob 20 years ago, I wish I could find that recipe
         | I gave him". Maybe, they could email me with helpful things
         | like "Y% of people in your area who google'd X, Y and Z had
         | prostate cancer. You should talk to your doctor".
        
           | technobabbler wrote:
           | > If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all
           | my data. They might as well turn it into a searchable
           | service: "I know I email bob 20 years ago, I wish I could
           | find that recipe I gave him". Maybe, they could email me with
           | helpful things like "Y% of people in your area who google'd
           | X, Y and Z had prostate cancer. You should talk to your
           | doctor".
           | 
           | Yeah, exactly this!! If you must know all my financial
           | transactions, can't you at least do my taxes for me? If you
           | already know who I am all the time, why do I need like three
           | forms of ID to get a updated driver's license? If you can
           | track all the phones, do you really need to ask for name and
           | phone number when I call 911?
           | 
           | It's just bizarre how much data they collect and then...
           | ignore? It didn't catch terrorists, it didn't stop the
           | capitol storming, it doesn't stop school shootings... what
           | exactly do they do with it all? It's like a pointless subsidy
           | for hard drive manufacturers, where personal information goes
           | to die.
           | 
           | At least Google provides useful services in exchange for all
           | the tracking. Even Facebook has the decency to let you
           | connect with people you might know, and help you remember
           | what you did 10 years ago. If the government just offered
           | useful services in exchange, millions would willingly
           | surrender their privacy. Most of us just aren't very
           | interesting.
        
             | sdoering wrote:
             | This data is being collected. And stories about that are
             | being leaked, so that people feel (slightly) watched.
             | Nobody in any (halfway intelligent) government wants a Nazi
             | like Gestapo or SS patrols.
             | 
             | They know that offensively acting against dissent would
             | actually drive dissent. So they take a book out of
             | Bentham's Panopticon [0] and translate it into modern
             | society.
             | 
             | You know you are being watched. And you know that there is
             | a possibility that the government can construct something
             | out of all that data. And if there is no data about you
             | that is even more suspicious.
             | 
             | So on a subliminal level the subduing effects are there.
             | The status quo is being kept stable for the elites at
             | least.
             | 
             | People listen to entertainment news, see the next villain
             | that we are shown and are happy the government protected us
             | from whatever danger is the new fad (either Chinese
             | imports, Muslim terrorists, socialists or whatever floats
             | their boat).
             | 
             | Media? Media is there to make money. Whatever drives
             | advertising dollars wins.
             | 
             | This data collection is there to subdue society at large.
             | Not stop any single crime. If there were no crime/school
             | shooting/act of terrorism nobody would buy the next
             | surveillance bill and re-elect our masters.
             | 
             | /s
        
           | xanaxagoras wrote:
           | It's really tough, I think people care but most feel
           | completely overwhelmed by the scope of it and have just
           | become jaded. Every time I try bringing it up with a friend,
           | they all say some version of "yeah I know, it's really messed
           | up but I can't do anything about it."
           | 
           | I do think some of the blame lies with the media. In my
           | lifetime they seem to have become little more than spokesmen
           | for power. They're too scared to lose access to their meal
           | ticket, the government sources who they regularly introduce
           | in their reporting/propaganda with "according to government
           | sources...", followed by some bit of strategically leaked
           | information. It's increasingly rare for reporters to ask hard
           | questions about much of anything, let alone pressing for
           | answers or making a big stink about issues like this that
           | actually matter. And when they do, the PR spokesman on the
           | other end of the question just dodges it with a certain
           | bullshit acuity that's rather horrifying.
           | 
           | > If the government going to use tax dollars to collect all
           | my data.
           | 
           | The article also mentions "a defense agency buying consumer
           | data from a third-party broker" which I somehow find even
           | more odious, if that's possible!
        
             | technobabbler wrote:
             | Is it really the media's fault when they've reported at
             | length about Snowden and Assange and Manning and in the
             | end... nobody cared? Investigative journalism was THRIVING
             | in the last few years. Trump, Kavanaugh, Epstein... can't
             | even keep track of the scandals anymore. Did anyone care?
             | Half the country kept voting red as before, the other half
             | blue.
             | 
             | Nothing really changed, and nobody was held accountable for
             | anything of note. The media has been reporting a LOT,
             | people are just... outta fucks to give? It's like a mix of
             | compassion fatigue and learned helplessness... not really
             | sure what normal people can do when there's a class of
             | people unaccountable to the law, the media, or anything
             | really. Their cronies are all in business and government
             | together, with no checks and balances. It's not the media's
             | fault we have zero accountability for our elites.
        
           | bumby wrote:
           | > _degradation of our civil liberties, rights...I 've donated
           | money to the EFF and ACLU_
           | 
           | The tough part is that it's hard to find find organizations
           | that still defend the core principles without caveats. The
           | ACLU used to be a neutral defender of free speech, but now
           | they seem to have lost that.
           | 
           |  _" The Times reports that at a recent ACLU event, "A law
           | professor argued that the free-speech rights of the far right
           | were not worthy of defense by the ACLU. ... [And] an ACLU
           | official said it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to
           | decline to defend hate speech."_
           | 
           | Every organization seems to get more polarized and, with
           | that, principles may get sidelined.
           | 
           | https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/558433-the-aclus-
           | ci... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-
           | speech.html
        
             | car_analogy wrote:
             | They defended free speech when free speech, as a whole,
             | served to advance their political goals, even if specific
             | instances of it didn't (e.g. KKK rallies).
             | 
             | Now that their politics are the norm, the effects of free
             | speech are less clear, and so is the ACLU's defense of it.
             | 
             |  _When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because
             | that is according to your principles; when I am stronger
             | than you, I take away your freedom because that is
             | according to my principles._ - Frank Herbert, Children of
             | Dune
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | gmuslera wrote:
         | Consume even more Soma?
        
       | boomboomsubban wrote:
       | This article reminded me of how many damn agencies we have spying
       | on us. People regularly talk about the FBI, CIA, and NSA but
       | there are like ten other US intelligence agencies.
       | 
       | The US Intelligence Community contains 17 organizations,
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com...
       | and that's not counting any state or local organizations that
       | Blueleaks showed are doing similar things. Sure Google is making
       | it seem normal to give up our information, but it's also hard to
       | continue being angry when you hear that the DIA and DHS are also
       | spying on us.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | mjreacher wrote:
         | While it is plausible for any of those agencies to spy on the
         | domestic population, and it may definitely be possible that
         | some of them need to be combined or removed, you must realize
         | that any country will have such agencies as they have important
         | roles, particularly for the military and law enforcement. It
         | would be rather unwise if the FBI didn't have an intelligence
         | branch because there's plenty of analysis to be gained from
         | there, for example how drug cartels operate. Similarly, the DIA
         | has an important job of accurately finding out the military
         | capabilities of other countries. Whether they do bad/illegal
         | things or not they are a necessary part of any government.
        
           | boomboomsubban wrote:
           | You're not making a great case by saying we need to stop the
           | drug cartels that exist because of prohibition and keep track
           | of the military capabilities of countries we probably sold
           | arms to.
           | 
           | Neither of those things seem worth empowering a group to have
           | the capability of spying on the domestic population.
        
       | zaroth wrote:
       | > _"Facebook can try to sell you products, but Facebook can 't
       | put you in jail," Goitein explained. "Ideological prosecution or
       | suppression isn't in the monetary interest of these companies."_
       | 
       | This is dangerously naive and less than half true. While Facebook
       | cannot arrest you, it can cause you to be arrested for something
       | that is absolutely not a crime. It can also financially and
       | socially ruin you.
       | 
       | And it is most certainly in their financial and ideological
       | interests to do so in many occasions.
        
       | holidayacct wrote:
        
       | TrispusAttucks wrote:
       | It's very chilly in here.
       | 
       | Too afraid to discuss?
        
         | lizardactivist wrote:
        
         | SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
         | As the article says, there's little _to_ discuss:
         | 
         | > First, details about the programs exposed recently are
         | scarce. ... Snowden's disclosures, in contrast, included weeks
         | of reporting on specific programs backed by leaked documents,
         | making it easier for media and the public to latch onto the
         | story.
        
           | zibzab wrote:
           | Yeah, but once we had the proof we realized that the
           | conspiracy theorists around the world wouldn't recognize a
           | real conspiracy it it hit them on the head.
           | 
           | Why do you think the UFO and Area-51 conspiracy theories
           | peaked around that time? Because it was always about keeping
           | your head in the sand, while believing you are enlightened.
        
       | tormock wrote:
       | Hypothetical: If you had a law enforcement agency
       | spying/harassing you, what would you do? If they would make it
       | hard to prove?
        
         | technobabbler wrote:
         | Make a web series out of it and livestream it? Have your
         | viewers vote on what kind of donuts to send? Silly, but
         | probably a better choice than becoming the next Ted Kaczynski.
        
         | pengaru wrote:
         | As someone who experienced something along these lines through
         | some kind of sloppy guilt by association (frequently computed
         | from a cafe a drug dealer operated out of when he got busted),
         | I don't even have to answer hypothetically.
         | 
         | Ignored it, made sure my ducks were in a row, and basically
         | waited for them to lose interest - budgets for such individual
         | surveillance are presumably finite. Eventually the most visible
         | manned surveillance ceased occurring, IIRC it lasted at least a
         | few months. It was a very annoying experience.
         | 
         | But the population-wide omnipresent automated surveillance is a
         | different beast entirely. When it involves manpower actually
         | watching and following someone it can't last forever.
         | 
         | I'm sure people are regularly being caught up in mass location
         | and communications metadata surveillance nets thanks to their
         | phones being in the vicinity of criminal activity like whore
         | houses and/or illegal drug dens. The cost is so low for
         | sustaining that kind of thing it's basically an honor system
         | from where I'm sitting that they ever stop.
        
           | 2xpress wrote:
           | One way to make it less likely to get caught up in a mass-
           | location harvesting case is to disable GPS on phone,
           | especially on a non-de-googled Android phone. I'd also
           | recommend paying with cash whenever that is an option.
           | Another biggie is not to vote for politicians supporting
           | public surveillance laws, and to cast an abstention vote when
           | no anti-public-surveillance candidate is available. The
           | abstention sends a signal to other prospective candidates
           | that the election-winning politicians are not un-defeatable
           | by a candidate better aligned with the voters who abstained.
        
       | specialist wrote:
       | Everyone, living and dead, within the Pax Americana sphere is
       | tracked in near real time. Including everyone's economic
       | activity, movements, communications, relationships, interests,
       | and affinities.
       | 
       | These additional disclosures merely confirm additional pieces of
       | overall panopticon are in fact operational.
       | 
       | (I don't know the current state of medical record sharing. Back
       | when I worked in healthcare IT, mid 2000s, we had datafeeds to
       | the CDC and others for public health stuff, deaths, births. No
       | matter; What isn't explicit can largely be inferred from other
       | datasets.)
       | 
       | One darkly humorous aspect is that we're still arguing about
       | stuff like census, gun licenses, voter registration databases,
       | etc. Those tasks could be done with straightforward queries, with
       | almost no errors, no drama necessary.
        
         | Atheros wrote:
         | If the census, gun licenses, and voter registration were done
         | as you suggest then you would simply move the drama to those
         | other databases.
         | 
         | There are powerful people who can legally attempt to increase
         | their power by introducing errors into the census. Same with
         | voter registration. The errors and subsequent drama are
         | purposeful!
        
       | MrYellowP wrote:
       | Generally speaking nobody cares.
       | 
       | Given the modern echo chamber, unless people actively spread
       | news/information to those who aren't usually exposed to it, it
       | simply won't ever reach them.
       | 
       | That, of course, is no guarantee. There's tons of people who
       | solely believe the mass media.
       | 
       | The biggest problem is, though, that apparently _everyone_ keeps
       | believing them again and again and again, whenever the topic
       | switches. From one crisis to the next people literally forget
       | that they can not and should not trust both their governments and
       | mass media.
       | 
       | Fascinating, isn't it?
        
         | archhn wrote:
         | I'm inclined to use the word "terrifying." Some people I know
         | call me "crazy" every time I take a position which contradicts
         | MSM. They fully believe that the T.V. is giving them the
         | unadulterated truth of all matters that should concern them.
        
           | rendall wrote:
           | I suspect the MSM engaging in coordinated lying on behalf of
           | the powerful has been going on for at least half a century if
           | not longer. The rise of the internet has allowed us, the
           | audience, to independently falsify their accounts and listen
           | to alternate perspectives, but I find it endlessly baffling
           | that large numbers of people still just... allow their
           | reality to be exactly what the MSM pundits tell them it is.
        
             | westmeal wrote:
             | I suspect it's easier and comforting to not think about the
             | terrible reality of our world, and to have an 'official'
             | perspective is to be able to move on with your life.
        
               | archhn wrote:
               | There are essentially two mentalities I've observed in
               | people around me.
               | 
               | 1. The Optimist. Believes they live in "the best of all
               | worlds" and everything always works out for the best--
               | Voltare satirizes this idealism in Candide.
               | 
               | 2. The Broken Nihilist. Believes everything is bull shit.
               | Everyone is a liar, civilization is a scam, and all human
               | interaction is a power struggle.
               | 
               | The optimist doesn't feel the need to worry about
               | anything because they believe some magic force will make
               | everything right for them. They thus are more susceptible
               | to deception because they believe there can be no bad
               | consequences of their actions...they are living a magical
               | life in the best of all worlds...nothing can go wrong.
               | 
               | The nihilist, as we may suspect, is naturally immune to
               | deception within the bounds of his reasoning capacity.
               | This gives him an advantage over the optimist...and he
               | always looks down upon the optimist as an idiot.
        
               | nonrandomstring wrote:
               | > Fascinating, isn't it?
               | 
               | Yes. From a human psychology POV it's absolutely
               | fascinating (in the sense of being an open puzzle that
               | compels one to ask deep questions).
               | 
               | It concerns much more than illegal mass surveillance.
               | What is truly astonishing is the distance between the
               | stories we tell ourselves and the reality we inhabit.
               | It's the same denial and rationalisation that means we
               | can cope with climate emergency.
               | 
               | Our age is the spectacle of the chasm. There's an
               | enormous gulf between our mythology - what we tell
               | ourselves about our rational civilisation, our
               | empowerment by technology, our omniscient knowledge, our
               | social contract, our freedom... etc - and the reality -
               | that we have almost no basis for reason (except within
               | narrow confines of science), are dominated by our
               | technology, live in ignorance and fear, have torn up
               | social contracts and become slaves to 19th century
               | ideologies.
               | 
               | This is the interregnum in which you can have revelations
               | on the scale of Snowden exposing colossal constitutional
               | violations, and have people shrug.
               | 
               | >> to have an 'official' perspective is to be able to
               | move on with your life
               | 
               | Except people don't. They pretend to. In reality they
               | move on with a shadow of what approximates to life under
               | the conditions of extraordinary dissonance. They become
               | docile, domesticated shells of real people for whom
               | cultural, educational, economic and spiritual life
               | dimensions are crippled. The awareness of dominance
               | doesn't magically vanish, it is sublimated into broad
               | cynicism, sarcasm, duplicity and inability to trust or
               | believe in anything.
               | 
               | Don't mistake tolerance for the effects being rendered
               | harmless by wilful ignorance.
        
               | archhn wrote:
               | Excellent description of what's happening.
               | 
               | Just look at all the mentally crippled people who resort
               | to psychoactive drugs in order to quell the raging
               | dissonance within them. They know something is wrong, but
               | they've been conditioned to accept the system...so the
               | only remaining culprit is themselves...and the
               | psychiatric machinery is there to convince them they are
               | sick.
               | 
               | When I was struggling to confront our harsh reality, I
               | just thought I was depressed. Those around me convinced
               | me to go to the doctor and they played along. This
               | scenario is playing out everywhere. People are being told
               | they are sick when it's our society that is sick.
        
               | ncmncm wrote:
               | Plenty of people are also sick.
        
       | randcraw wrote:
       | IMHO, the problem with spying on citizens is that it's a double
       | edged sword. We'd be nuts not to gather useful info on serious
       | violations of law to improve national security (FBI) or local
       | safety (local police). But abuse of such inherently secret info
       | is difficult to oversee and harder still to effectively regulate.
       | 
       | On one hand, oversight of spying programs always reveals some
       | details about what nfo was gathered, either as dutiful proof of
       | its proper use to the public, or in court cases as part of the
       | chain of evidence. But doing this inevitably reveals something
       | about _what_ info was gathered and _how_ , thereby weakening the
       | future value of that source as people (or perps) learn to
       | mistrust it and take greater pains to protect their sensitive
       | info.
       | 
       | On the other hand, NOT revealing data that was gathered invites
       | its abuse, especially by orgs with minimal oversight (and
       | scruples). Too often, law enforcement sees oversight of their
       | practices as being equally as inimical as the perpetrators they
       | pursue.
       | 
       | I suspect the only way to sustainably manage this dance of
       | mistrust is to change the role of police so that oversight is
       | built into their culture, where they know someone is always
       | watching their back -- both in offering support to help them do a
       | sometimes impossible job, as well as in demanding that they not
       | abuse the special authority their job demands. In terms of their
       | access to sensitive info, this must include enforcable strictures
       | on their special access to info that should NOT be shared with
       | others, like the client-servant privacy privileges demanded of
       | lawyers or doctors.
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | I suspect the Fourth Amendment debate got sniped by the Defund
         | the Police movement. They have overlap in their bases. But the
         | latter is more radical. That turned the public away from
         | regulating police powers.
        
           | infogulch wrote:
           | That seems reasonable, and invites the question of whether it
           | was deliberately planted to relieve the pressure that was
           | building up around the Fourth, because "Defund the Police" is
           | obviously stupid and unsustainable on its face and any
           | reasonable person will realize this eventually.
        
         | snarf21 wrote:
         | Your opinion feels a lot like "I don't have anything to hide"
         | kind of argument. We should just not be spying on people
         | without express probable cause. We already have built in
         | tracking for cells phones that people don't seem to realize or
         | care. The other point is that we've seen nothing but continued
         | confirmation that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The
         | police (et al) have shown that they can't be trusted with this
         | power.
        
           | afpx wrote:
           | How do you get probable cause (say, for a potential terrorist
           | attack) without spying? People organizing mass violence tend
           | to hide their tracks pretty well.
           | 
           | Personally, I think the risk of terrorist attacks is pretty
           | low compared to other risks. But, at a certain point it needs
           | to be addressed.
        
             | perfecthjrjth wrote:
             | That's what "parallel construction" achieves!!
        
           | nine_k wrote:
           | The poster's point is that even _lawfully_ collected info is
           | sensitive, and the forces that collect it should be
           | structured so that spilling or misusing it would be curbed by
           | checks and balances.
        
           | xanaxagoras wrote:
           | > We already have built in tracking for cells phones that
           | people don't seem to realize or care.
           | 
           | It's in most cars, too.
        
       | encryptluks2 wrote:
       | On a recent senate committee hearing about authoritarianism the
       | US said Russia is more synchronized in their message of using
       | propaganda and that the US needs to figure out how we can do the
       | same.
       | 
       | In calling out authoritarianism their response is in order to fix
       | it we should be more like them. The US could in the same sentence
       | tell you why it is not okay to start war but it is okay if they
       | do it.
        
       | glasshug wrote:
       | Maybe I can be the first to speak to the actual Wyden-Heinrich
       | letter [1].
       | 
       | I hope I don't sound like a spook when I say: there's been no
       | splash because there's no (public) substance. Having read the
       | 70-page PCLOB report [2], I can summarize it as:
       | 
       | - the CIA has EO 12333 authority to perform bulk surveillance
       | 
       | - they use it to [redacted], including financial transactions
       | 
       | - they have a [redacted] internal process to review its use which
       | potentially has some gaps and vagueness
       | 
       | Sens. Wyden and Heinrich probably have more shocking secret info
       | too. But yeah, I'd expect people to not react to these vague
       | disclosures the same way they did 2013's detailed leaks.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HainesBurns_Wyden...
       | 
       | [2]
       | https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...
        
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